Swami Vivekananda's speech at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago is often seen as the formal introduction of Hinduism and yoga to the general American public, and Vivekananda himself is largely depicted as a lone missionary figure. But Vivekananda was surrounded by fakirs in Chicago. As part of the wider Columbian Exhibition world's fair that hosted the Parliament, there were fakirs called “Hindoo Jugglers” who performed feats of magic, and the Midway Plaisance park was described as no less than “the paradise of fakirs… this throbbing picture of oriental life” since it was filled with salesmen. The magazine Puck crudely mocked Vivekananda's representation of Hinduism at the Parliament with a cartoon of a dark-skinned man holding a scroll that read “fakir.” The term followed Vivekananda for years, even after his death. Upon the completion of his first visit to the United States, he was nominally described as “Hindoo religious fakir” and also attacked as one of many “arrant” and “erratic” domestic religious “fakirs” in the United States who taught “all sorts of follies.” In 1902, Vivekananda was crudely eulogized by a Florida newspaper as a “fakir” who had “figured in a clever little hoax upon the American people.”