The groups on top of the Arches of the Rising and Setting Sun struck the imagination more than any other sculpture at the fair (Todd). They were suggested by Karl Bitter and worked out by Calder, Roth and Lentelli, and the Guide calls them the "distinguished groups" brought "face to face" across the Court of the Universe. Set so high they were "a bit skied," but they showed above the palace roofs and caught the eye of visitors long before they entered the grounds. The critic Eugen Neuhaus thought them "probably the largest groups of the kind ever made."
The Nations of the East moved in a slow, weighty procession: the Spirit of the East on an elephant, with a falconer, warrior, Arab sheik, Egyptian, Mongolian, Muslim and Buddhist lama on horseback, on camels and on foot. Todd read into it a "gloomy grandeur" of servitude supporting "a transient pomp." The Nations of the West answered with a prairie schooner drawn by oxen, pioneers and horsemen, an Alaskan and a displaced American Indian, the Mother of To-morrow riding the wagon tongue, and the Spirit of Enterprise "impossibly poised on top of the wagon sheet." Between them the two groups staged the racial order of their day: an East of servitude, with two Black figures that Barry lists as slaves, facing a West of what Todd calls "aspiring and achieving races," in which the American Indian appears only as displaced.
Both groups were enlarged from small models with pointing machines in the exposition's sculpture shops east of the Machinery Palace, where assistants climbed ladders about the knees of plaster camels. Finished early, the Nations of the East stood in the Machinery Palace during the Ball of All Nations in May 1914, looking down "with a vast and patronizing Asiatic patience" on the dancers.
The Indian Prince, the Mongolian Warrior, the Arab Sheik on his camel, and their attendants and supporters ... bowed to their fate but held to their positions until nearly on the ground.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 5, ch. XXXVII (1921), on the demolition of May 1916
