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Let’s Meet Again in 50 Years:
The 50-year anniversaries of America’s birth have often coincided with moments of profound social and political change

Review by Amanda Brickell Bellows, Wall Street Journal

When Americans prepared to commemorate the nation’s centennial in 1876, the nation had begun to come to terms with its complicated history, and many saw reason to celebrate its mere continued existence. Fifteen years earlier, civil war had broken out when 11 states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in the conflict that followed, but the Union’s victory ensured reunification and slavery’s abolition nationwide. The contentious presidential election of 1876, however, threatened to shatter a fragile peace.

In his compelling Centennial, the historian Fergus Bordewich makes the stakes of the moment clear.

America “stood at what a later era would call a racial inflection point,” he writes, as “the fate of Reconstruction and of the four million Black Americans also hung precariously in the balance.”

Citizens knew that a Republican loss in the election would likely result in a retreat from the Reconstruction-era laws that had expanded black rights.

While presidential candidates campaigned around the country, organizers prepared to open Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition, the first such World’s Fair in America. More than a spectacle, the event was meant to serve as what Mr. Bordewich calls a “grand theater of national harmony where Americans could come together again in a performance of patriotic self-affirmation.” Congress lent $1.5 million alongside other subscribers to create a World’s Fair that would generate revenue, showcase American progress and promote national unity. “Centennial” brings the reader into the heart of the exhibition, which 10 million Americans, or 20% of the 1876 population, attended. Within the fair’s 200 buildings, they were dazzled by inventions including an enormous Corliss steam engine, the first typing machine featuring a qwerty keyboard and a working model of a steamship. Visitors departed the exhibition with a sense of awe at American industrial progress.

But this “vision of a glittering consumerist future,” Mr. Bordewich concludes, papered over increasing trends of class conflict and racial violence. Gen. George Armstrong Custer lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn six weeks after the exhibition opened, but the government’s Indian wars went on. Merely three days before the fair closed, the presidential election produced contested results that would not be resolved until the following year and the so-called Compromise of 1877.