Latest / Man in America Podcast / Erased History: Why They Destroyed the White city

Transcript

Erased History: Why They Destroyed the White city · Man in America Podcast

• 0:13
  Speaker 1: They built a city, 1,200 acres, nearly 1,500 buildings. Domed palaces bigger than any Americans had ever set foot in. Electric light blazing at a scale our country had never seen before. The first Olympic games ever held on American soil took place right here on these very grounds. 20,000,000 people came to see it.
• 0:36
  Imagine that. 20,000,000 people. In nineteen o four when the entire population of The US was about 76,000,000. And then, when it was all over, they tore it all down. Within a few years of the fair closing, the great exhibition buildings were demolished and all the materials were sold off for scrap.
• 1:00
  This vast fairground city, the palaces, the domes, the boulevards, almost all of it was gone. Now here's the question I can't get out of my head. Why would you build something that magnificent just to destroy it? And I've been thinking about that question for quite some time now. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized it's not just about one fare.
• 1:23
  There's a pattern here that runs through American history, and nobody in mainstream history class ever thought to ask why. But today, we're gonna do that. We're asking why. Welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Hulghouse.
• 1:47
  This is the first episode of my hidden history series, a series where we go back documented record as great nation and ask the questions that somehow never made it into our textbooks. Each episode, we're gonna take something hiding in plain sight, something you can look up, people and places and photos and records, things you can see with your own eyes. And I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm here to make sure that you've got the information you need to think for yourself. Because we know that we've been lied to about too many things, and it's time to start asking the right questions.
• 2:24
  So let's get into it. The world's fairs. Most people know the name, but they don't really know what these things were or how extraordinary they actually were. So let me give you the facts first because the facts alone are stunning. Before we even start asking the harder questions, the World's Fair movement ran from roughly 1851 to 1915.
• 2:45
  There were major fairs in London, Paris, Chicago, Saint Louis, and San Francisco. Each one was supposed to be this showcase for the progress of human civilization. Countries from around the world would send their best technology, their best art, their best culture, and display it all in one place. The eighteen ninety three Chicago World's Fair, you may have heard it called the White City, drew about 27,000,000 visitors in six months. That's roughly half the population of The United States at that time, passing through the gates of one exhibition.
• 3:18
  Then comes Saint Louis in nineteen o four, twenty million visitors, 1,200 acres, nearly 1,500 buildings. They also hosted the Olympic Games there that year, the first time the Olympics were ever even on American soil. The fair was so big and so ambitious that it actually opened late because the construction couldn't keep up with the scale. Then San Francisco in 1915, the Panama Pacific International Exposition, built nine years after the nineteen o six earthquake that nearly destroyed the entire city. So three extraordinary events, three cities, tens of millions of people, but almost all of it entirely demolished.
• 3:57
  So the largest public exhibitions in American history, events that by any measure should be considered among the most important things ever built on this continent, and we tore them down. Why? Now the mainstream explanation, and I wanna give it to you fairly, is that the buildings were never meant to be permanent. They were temporary exhibition halls. They were constructed from this material called staff, which was basically a mixture of powdered gypsum, cement, and fiber.
• 4:29
  So it was invented in France. It was first used at the Paris Expositions. You could treat it and paint it so it even looked like marble or stone even though that it wasn't. So the official story is that these temporary buildings are built for a temporary event. Right?
• 4:45
  Built to impress, torn down because they were never meant to last. The explanation isn't necessarily crazy. It makes a certain kind of sense. But here's where it starts to get really interesting. Look at the photographs.
• 4:58
  These aren't beach pavilions. These aren't tents with a coat of paint. These are colonnaded palaces with massive domed roofs, ornamental facades, reflecting pools, fountains, grand staircases, and electric lighting that was on a scale that most Americans had never seen in their entire lives. The Manufacturers And Liberal Arts Building at the eighteen ninety three Chicago Fair was one of the largest buildings on Earth at that time. One building covered from end to end in this so called temporary material.
• 5:31
  But here's the detail I keep coming back to. At the eighteen ninety three Chicago Fair, there was just one building, just one building that was constructed entirely different from the rest. So during the fair, it was called the Palace Of Fine Arts. It was required to be built with a more fireproof brick core because it was gonna house priceless works of art, and people sending that are insisted on a truly fireproof structure. So that's the one building that survived.
• 5:58
  Every other gleaming palace was gone. The one building that was actually required to be built more solidly than the others is now standing today. So it's now called the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and it still stands strong. So here's a question I want you to hold on to as we go through this. If everything was always meant to be temporary, why does it look so permanent?
• 6:21
  And why is the only survivor the one thing that was required to meet a higher standard? Now let me take you into the nineteen o four Saint Louis Fair for a more in-depth look because this one doesn't get talked about as much in the conversations I've seen about people talking about this topic. And I think it's actually one of the most interesting. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was massive. 1,200 acres of Beaux Arts architecture, nearly 1,500 buildings, a palace of electricity that covered nine acres just by itself.
• 6:56
  So they showed x-ray technology there in nineteen o four. They displayed some of the earliest automobiles to the general public that no one had ever seen in person. The fair incorporated the first Olympic games ever held on American soil. Now Saint Louis only got those games because Chicago was originally scheduled to host them, but the World's Fair took priority, and the Olympics got folded into it with 20,000,000 people coming. But there's a darker thread running through this fair that needs to be talked about in its documented history, and it tells us something important about who was controlling the story of progress at these events.
• 7:30
  The nineteen o four fair included what they called an anthropological exhibit. So in practice, here's what that meant. Roughly a thousand to 1,200 people from The Philippines separated into ethnic groups were brought into The US and displayed on a 47 acre section of the fairgrounds. So fairgoers would walk through and watch them the way that people look at animals in a zoo. The explicit purpose stated by the organizers and the anthropologists was to show a hierarchy of civilizations, to display what the so called savage looked like so the American visitors would feel justified in The United States ruling and civilizing The Philippines, which they had just taken from Spain.
• 8:12
  So it's not speculation or conspiracy. I'm not making that up. That's in the historical record. So think about what was happening at these fairs at the same time. On one side of the grounds, the most advanced technology on Earth, X rays, electricity, automobiles, wireless telegraphy, demonstrations of progress at a scale that no one had ever seen.
• 8:31
  On the other side, people in cages, and the whole thing, both sides, built and then demolished. Now let me take you to San Francisco in 1915. So nine years earlier in nineteen o six, an earthquake had leveled a whole lot of that city. Yet in 1915, San Francisco hosted the Panama Pacific International Exposition, one of the most spectacular fairs of the entire era. Now the centerpiece was called the Tower Of Jewels.
• 9:01
  It stood about 435 feet tall. It was covered in more than 100,000 glass jewels that were hung on the surface so they'd catch the light and spin in the wind, covering the whole structure in this beautiful shimmering, kinda magical moving reflection. Now when the fair closed, the Tower Of Jewels was disassembled and the materials were just sold off. But there was one building at that fair that wasn't demolished, the Palace of Fine Arts. So this was a Roman styled rotunda with a colonnade around a reflecting lagoon.
• 9:32
  The architect, Bernard Maybeck, specifically designed it to look like it was really ancient. He wanted to feel like ruins, something out of a lost civilization. Now that building still stands in San Francisco today. So the 435 foot jeweled tower is gone, and the building designed to look like it was 2,000 years old is preserved. So I don't wanna overstate what that means.
• 9:54
  Maybe it survived because the community loved it, they fought for it. Maybe it was easier to keep this one than the other structures. Those are somewhat plausible explanations. But I also want you to notice the pattern. The thing that looks ancient is the thing that survives, but everything else gets demolished.
• 10:14
  Now I wanna step back and widen the lens a little bit because the fairs didn't exist in isolation. They happened at a really specific moment in American history. And there were other things happening at the same time that I think you need to know about. The first one is the orphan trains. So between 1854 and 1929, somewhere around 200,000 children were transported by train from Eastern cities to rural communities across the country.
• 10:41
  Now this isn't a theory. This is a documented history. It's taught in schools. The movement was started by Charles Loring Brace in the Children's Aid Society. The stated goal was to rescue orphaned and homeless children from the dangerous overcrowded cities on the East and give them new lives out in the country.
• 10:58
  So that's the official explanation, and some of it is genuinely true. But here's what that explanation leaves out. Many of those children weren't actually orphans. A significant number came from immigrant families, especially Irish Catholic families whose parents were still alive. The parents were poor and struggling, but they were alive.
• 11:19
  Legal and historical analysis of the program point out that it often worked against the rights of those children and their biological families. So children were just taken and put on these trains and sent West. And in many cases, the parents never saw them again. The scale is hard to overstate. So roughly 200,000 children over 75 years.
• 11:38
  That's one child every few hours for three quarters of a century removed from Eastern cities and families and sent far, far away. Now I'm not gonna tell you what to believe about that. The mainstream explanation is that child welfare and social reform took place. But a hundred years later, our child welfare system still has so many problems, so I doubt it was perfect back then. It looks like a progressive era answer to a real poverty crisis.
• 12:05
  Now I want you to notice something and see the pattern. These orphan trains were happening at the very same time that the world's fairs were being built and then demolished, And it was happening at the very same time another important thing happened to our records. The 1890 United States Census was the one that would have given us precise population data for exactly the era when the fairs were happening, and it was almost entirely destroyed. So a fire at the Commerce Building in Washington DC on 01/10/1921 took out most of the eighteen ninety ninety population schedules, and an earlier incident in 1896 had already damaged some of those records ahead of time. The result is that we've got almost no population level documentation for The US at the peak of the World's Fair era.
• 12:58
  We've got the 1880 census, and then a gap, and then the 1900 census. Now I wanna be really clear here. I'm not saying someone burned those records on purpose. I don't have evidence of that. The official explanation is that a poor fire safety and bad storage and bureaucratic management led to this, and maybe that's all it was.
• 13:18
  But when you go looking for precise records from that decade, they're harder to find than you'd expect. And when you're trying to understand what was happening in America in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, when you're looking at the world's fairs and in the orphan trains, population numbers are really important, and that gap matters. Now let me talk about what the buildings themselves look like because this is where things start to feel really strange. Look at the old photographs of Washington DC. Look at Chicago.
• 13:49
  You can see the scale, enormous columns the size of redwood trees, facades that tower over everything around them, including the people standing on the sidewalk. These horse carts that look like toys in front of these structures. This architecture didn't stay confined to the fairs. The Chicago White City directly inspired what became known as the city beautiful movement in American urban planning. The architects went home and started building in that style everywhere.
• 14:15
  The federal government adopted Beaux Arts architecture as a standard for federal buildings, which is why courthouses, post office, and capital buildings all across America look like pieces from the same set. It isn't just an American story. That same architectural language, the domes, the columns, the proportions, the grand civic symbolism appears all over the world. Look at the capital buildings in Europe, in Latin America, in Asia. Look at the star shaped forts you see in satellite photos across multiple continents.
• 14:44
  These are geometrically precise repeating everywhere. Now there's two broad ways to look at this. The mainstream explanation is a single school of architecture. The Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris trained generations of architects, and they carried that visual language with them as they worked around the world. That's a real school that really did happen.
• 15:06
  However, the alternative explanation is that the reason the same architectural grammar appears everywhere all at once is that it was already there. That many of these buildings weren't created from scratch in the late eighteen hundreds, that they were inherited by architects and builders from the past. Both explanations result in the same visual fact, the same domes, the same columns, the same proportions appearing across the world in the same century. The only difference is the story that we're told about where they came from. Now I can't tell you I know for sure which explanation is right.
• 15:45
  I don't know. But I think that you deserve to know that both explanations exist. And as we find out more and more, the textbook narratives that we've been given on such so much of our history is fundamentally flawed and sometimes intentionally misleading. Now we need to talk about Nikola Tesla because you can't tell the story of the World's Fairs without him. In 1893, Tesla's alternating current electrical system was paid for by George Westinghouse, who won the contract to light the Chicago World's Fair.
• 16:20
  Thomas Edison's direct current system DC was the competition. So Westinghouse underbid them and brought Tesla's design to the table. The fairgrounds were lit by these large AC generators driving hundreds of thousands of incandescent bulbs. They called it the city of light. There were tens of thousands of light bulbs glowing on these neoclassical white facades.
• 16:42
  For most Americans walking under those lights, it was an absolute wonder. It was the first time they'd ever seen electric light at that scale. And Tesla had a larger vision. He wanted to transmit energy wirelessly through the earth and through the air without wires at all. He saw energy as a shared field and not a product that you sell by the foot, and he started building the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island to prove it.
• 17:07
  Now JPMorgan was one of his main funders. And when Morgan understood what Tesla was actually trying to build, he reportedly asked a simple question that says everything you need to know about how our system works. He asked, where do we put the meter? If energy is everywhere and it's free, there's nothing to sell. There is no meter.
• 17:27
  There's no bill. There's no monopoly. So Morgan pulled the funding. The tower was never fully completed, and in 1917, it was demolished. And the materials were sold off to help pay for Tesla's debts.
• 17:43
  Now there's another detail from this era that I also think is worth mentioning because it fits into the same strange pattern. At multiple world's fairs, there were exhibits featuring baby incubators. So this guy named Martin Cooney sets up this display where real living premature infants were placed in incubators and cared for in public as a kind of medical sideshow. People would pay to walk through and look at the babies in these glass boxes. Now it sounds grotesque by our standards, but here's the thing.
• 18:16
  Cooney's incubator wards gave premature infants a far better chance of survival than mainstream hospitals at that time. His entire mission was to show that isolating fragile babies in a warm controlled environment could save lives when the standard practice was to do almost nothing. So hospitals wouldn't adopt the technology. They thought it was too experimental and too strange. And for decades, the only place a premature baby had a real chance of surviving was inside of a sideshow exhibit at a fair.
• 18:43
  It sounds kinda crazy, isn't it? But at the nineteen o four Saint Louis fair, there was also an incubator exhibit, and that one ended in tragedy. Babies in that exhibit died because the incubators weren't managed properly. Now whether it was negligence or lack of oversight or something else, I can't find that in the records. But we do know for sure that a technology capable of saving lives was being treated like entertainment and sometimes with deadly results all on public display.
• 19:11
  So I keep coming back to this question, what else was demonstrated at these fairs that we don't have an honest accounting for? And here's the thing that keeps coming up when we start pulling this thread. There are no photographs of these buildings being constructed. For structures this size, supposedly built in just two or three years, that absence is strange. It's opened the door to some of the alternative explanations that are worth knowing about even if we can't prove or disprove them.
• 19:41
  The most well known of these is the Tartaria theory. You may have seen it circulating online. The basic idea is that there was an advanced global civilization, sometimes referred to as Tartaria, that existed well into the eighteen hundreds. It had mastered grand architecture, free wireless energy, and sophisticated infrastructure on a scale that dwarfs what we think of as nineteenth century capability. The theory holds that this civilization was destroyed or reset.
• 20:08
  Its history was scrubbed from the record. So according to that theory, the world's fairs were not new buildings at all. They were the remnants of an older civilization briefly revealed to public, photographed, and then demolished to hide the evidence. Another theory is what researchers call the mudflood. So the idea is that that sometime in the eighteen hundreds, a catastrophic event, whether natural or man made, buried entire cities under layers of sediment.
• 20:38
  If you look at buildings across The United States and Europe where the ground floor windows sit partially below street level, proponents of this theory say that those aren't basements. They say those are the original ground floors. The buildings were already standing before the mud came. Now what we call the nineteenth century was actually a cleanup and repopulation of a world that had already been built. And there's a third line of thinking that focuses on the architectural pattern.
• 21:04
  When you see the same domed capital building design appearing in Washington DC, in state capitals across the country, in European cities, in South American cities, all in the same century. One explanation is that a single school of architecture spread that style around the world. But another explanation is that the style was already everywhere because whoever built it originally built it everywhere. And according to this theory, the world's fairs were not exhibitions of American progress. They were the last glimpse of a much older world before it was permanently closed off to the future.
• 21:39
  Now I can't prove any of these theories. Nobody can, at least not yet. But you and I know that the documented history raises questions that the official explanation doesn't fully answer. And when the official explanation has gaps that big, we have to think beyond the textbooks. We inherited extraordinary things, cathedrals, grand civic buildings, the architectural language of domes and columns and sweeping staircases that show up on every continent.
• 22:06
  And then sometime in the last hundred and fifty years, we stopped building that way and started building plain old boxes. Something changed, and I don't think that we have a satisfying answer for what that was. So I wanna hear from you. Who do you think built these buildings? Was it really teams of workers with plaster and jute fiber pulling together the greatest architectural show in human history in under three years with only photos of the end result and none of them in the process, or does something else explain what we're looking at?
• 22:38
  Tell me in the comments. I read every single one. And if you wanna go deeper on Tartaria or on the mudflood theory or any of these other threads in this episode, just tell me below. Honestly, let me know what you want me to cover about this because we live at a time when the official story is treated as the only story you're allowed to ask or know about. And asking the wrong question can get you labeled, censored, or worse.
• 23:01
  The people who built the most sophisticated surveillance and control system the world's ever seen want you to believe there's nothing unusual about the world that we live in. The world fairs are a reminder that people who control what gets built control what gets demolished and what gets recorded, and these people have been shaping the story for a very long time. So that's a reason to keep looking and to keep asking and to keep learning and to build something that doesn't depend on powerful people with agendas that benefit from limiting your knowledge. And actually, that's exactly why I'm building the ARC community because the answer isn't to sit alone in your living room with your questions. The answer is to find people who see what you see, who are asking what you're asking, and to build your ark together to weather any storms on the horizon.
• 23:50
  So if you wanna be part of that, go to buildtheark.com. It's buildtheark,ark,.com. Right now, there are 14,000 people already on the waiting list, waiting for this to open up. People who are preparing, wanting to connect, thinking through exactly the kinds of questions that we talked about today. And please like and share this episode.
• 24:10
  That's how we get around these gatekeepers, by sharing and communicating each other with each other one person at a time. Also, comment below. Let me know what topics you want me to cover next, and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next drop. Thank you for being here. God bless you, and God bless America.
• 24:27
  And I'll see you in the next episode. Did you know that in the last few centuries, over half a million bells have been destroyed? There were literally bell graveyards. Now the textbooks tell us that this was to use the metal, but if you've ever gone down this rabbit hole, you discover that the sounds that these bells made had amazing healing properties. There are even claims that certain regions with lots of these bells, church bells, etcetera, were mostly untouched by the bubonic plague.
• 25:00
  Now your doctor might call you a conspiracy nut for thinking that, but even modern science recognizing the healing power of sound. So check out this study from the NIH. Doctors used sound therapy on chronic back pain, and they found, quote, significant reductions in pain sensation and pain related disability. But here's the best part, you don't need some fancy expensive sound equipment to find relief. So a woman named Linda Bamber Olson created something called the WaveWatch.
• 25:28
  So this little device has over 1,200 frequencies that you can use for everything from joint pain to brain fog, to insomnia. So I've got one, and I've been using it for about six months. This is it right here. And I can tell you honestly that it works. Like, if I'm feeling sickly or have some kind of coming on, it's the first thing that I'll reach for.
• 25:49
  And honestly, I start feeling better within minutes. And that's literally my firsthand experience with it. Even my little kids love wearing it. And here's how much Linda believes in this watch. So if you get one and you don't notice any improvements, you can send it back for a full refund within thirty days.
• 26:04
  No questions asked. So do something for yourself and for your family and get a WaveWatch for yourself today. Just go to wavewatch.com/seth, or just use the promo code seth to save 15% on your purchase. Again, that's wavewatch.com/seth, or you just use promo code Seth to save 15% on your purchase, and those details are in the description below.