1492 Vs. 1892 Vs. 1992

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The year 1492 was Spain's annus mirabilis, a year of marvels. A Spanish Pope was elected that year, a Borja from Catalonia. (He was called Borgia in Italy, where the Two Sicilies already had Spanish rulers.) King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who had just united their kingdoms, drove the Moors from the Spanish peninsula by a military victory at Granada. Spain's Jews were expelled in the same year, solidifying the Inquisition's power.

Columbus was part of all this. He would supply the Spanish Pope with information that led to the partition of the New World into Spanish and Portuguese spheres in 1493. He was with his monarchs at Granada to celebrate the Moorish victory, and he saw the last Jews depart from Seville harbors the day before he set out on his first journey west. He viewed this concatenation of events as a sign of the world's fulfillment, and predicted that the gold he brought back would finance an ultimate Crusade to reclaim the Holy Land.

Spain was establishing what historian J.H. Plumb calls "the greatest empire since antiquity." This modern empire was built, as Plumb also notes, on the basis of medieval theology. Yet much of Europe and most of the New World would become the domain of Charles V, and then of Philip III, making the next hundred years the Spanish Century.

The year 1892 was an annus mirabilis in the U.S. The best symbol of that was Chicago, a city leveled by fire as recently as 1871 but subsequently bristling with the continent's first cluster of skyscrapers. For the 1893 World's Fair that became known as the World's Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham and a panel of America's greatest architects created a gleaming new Exposition city on Lake Michigan. Henry Adams, arriving in the private train car of a Pennsylvania Senator, was struck with a vision of a new America; he returned alone to spend two weeks studying the event, "more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent." He consciously imitated Edward Gibbon on the steps of the Expo's Administration Building -- but where Gibbon, sitting on the steps of Rome's Aracoeli church, had a vision of the falling Roman Empire, Adams saw a rising empire. Another visitor to the fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered a famous paper there, saying that the internal frontier was closed; but America would, by the end of the decade, add to its dominion Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa and Wake Island, while occupying Cuba. The American Century had begun.

The Columbus honored in Chicago bore little resemblance to the medieval wizard of Spain's inquisitorial empire. That ancient mariner was now conceived to be a champion of Anglo-Saxon (Protestant) values. The Spaniards had taken guns and the catechism abroad. America, said Mark Twain, took guns and the King James Bible to the Philippines, and President McKinley said he would make the island inhabitants good Christians. For the Chicago fair, sculptor Daniel Chester French, creator of American icons like the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, fashioned a 14-ft. statue of Columbus driving an imperial chariot.