A popular explanation of the name 'hot dog' comes from the World's Fair, where amongst the tribes represented in The Philippine Exhibit were the Igorots. Their near nudity, frantic dancing and taste for eating dogs drew huge crowds and it was rumored that the government provided 20 dogs a week for their consumption. The area of Dogtown in modern St. Louis is said to take its name from this period.

The 'world came to St. Louis' in 1904 and exhibits included a German zoo, an Irish village, a Ceylon tea garden, The Land of the Midnight Sun, the streets of Cairo, 'Mysterious Asia' and an extensive reproduction of the Tyrolean Alps, where a paper described 'groups of peasants singing their native songs as they pursue the tack of their daily life'. Roosevelt dined at the St. Louis Inn in the 'Alps', and was entertained by a young lariat-wielding comedian named Will Rogers.

The Fair took six years to build and employed around 200,000 workers. 1,500 buildings sprawled across 1,275 acres of the fairgrounds. There were eight palaces with aisles reaching a total length of 142 miles. Around 52,706 journalists attended 3.5 million publicity events in the first six months of the fair. Nearly 20 million people attended. It cost 15 million dollars to build, the same price paid for the Louisiana Purchase a hundred years before.

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