The Midway Plaisance offered enticing games and exhibitions presented by private vendors, removed from the more conservative Beaux-Arts splendor of the official exposition and arranged around its "Court of Honor".

Bloom's role in helping to develop the fair had been at the behest of Mayor Carter Harrison III, who was assassinated only days before the exposition closed.

Bloom then rose in stature in Chicago's tough first ward among the Democratic party's bosses "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and "Hinky Dink" Kenna.

In 1897 he married Evelyn Hechheimer and settled in a fashionable district on South Prairie Avenue, billing himself as "Sol Bloom, the Music Man".

Age 73.In Congress Bloom oversaw celebration of the George Washington Bicentennial (1932) and presided over the U.S. Constitution Sesquicentennial Exposition (1937).

In the run-up to World War II, he took charge of high-priority foreign-policy legislation for the Roosevelt Administration, including authorization for Lend Lease in 1940.

In Fall 1943 he initiated a Congressional hearing investigating Kook and his group's rescue oriented actions and their demand that America do something meaningful to protect the Jews of Europe.

Right before Yom Kippur 1943 Bloom tried to dissuade a group of about 400 Orthodox rabbis from marching to Washington and try to appeal to President Franklin D Roosevelt asking that America help in some meaningful manner to save remnants of the abandoned Jews of Europe.

Hillel Kook said that one of the main reasons why his group's rescue activity was intensely obstructed was that he wanted to save Jews from the Nazis to any possible place of refuge and not only to Palestine.

In spite of the obstruction Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board (WRB)in January 1944 due to persistent pressure, publicity and lobbying by the Bergson Group and demand from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and his team.

One of the WRB's known achievements was convincing Swedish noble Raoul Wallenberg to go to Budapest, where he saved large number of Jews from the Hungarian Fascists and the Nazis.

His wife Evelyn (died 1941) was a composer and singer,[11] and their daughter Vera was an author and lyricist who provided words to the tango "Jalousie".