Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/802

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786 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

pictorial magazines established in Chicago during the Fair decade showed the effect of this impression.

Finally, for a season the World's Fair transformed Chicago the inland center into Chicago the cosmopolitan center. This city, being far from a seaport, normally cannot have in it a kaleidoscopic company of transients from all the world, such as assembles daily in New York, London, and Paris. But for the one brief summer the down-town streets and the wide ways at the Fair grounds were thronged with visitors, not merely from many localities of the United States, but from all countries. On the Midway Plaisance, a boulevard of the nations and races, bordered for a mile by groups of the natives of Europe and of the Orient in settings from their distant towns and villages, thou- sands of men and women from everywhere touched shoulders in one common interest. Not one of the seventy periodicals of aesthetic character undertaken in Chicago during the decade of this cosmopolitan gathering contained the word "western" in its title. In every period before this there had been "western" literary journals attempted at Chicago. But the World's Fair made for a breadth of view which repressed the western spirit. All types of literary and artistic periodicals became more cosmo- politan in their outlook, and in some of the general literary maga- zines of the decade unique efforts at the world-wide character were made. During the thirteen years since the exposition was a reality, the tradition of it has had a vital influence on Chicago. But, as with reading a novel, the effects are most vivid while one is going through its pages and just after the book is closed, so the enlarging influence of the World's Fair was felt most forcibly by Chicago publishers during the year of the Fair and immediately after the closing of its gates.

Illustrated journals, in form though not in periodicity like Harper's Weekly, were the most conspicuous of the mushroom periodicals at Chicago in the first few years of the World's Fair decade. In most publications illustrations are used to supplement literary features. In these journals material in printed form designed to give literary entertainment was used as an auxiliary