World's Fairs

WORLD'S FAIRS

Pastime

One of the most popular American pastimes of the 1930s was attending fairs. A longstanding tradition, especially in rural areas, fairs took various forms. Many were local events, tied to special holidays; some were county fairs, often celebrating a historical occasion; and many states held fairs, usually annual events. A variety of events took place at these fairs: bartering and trade, especially of agricultural products; cooking competitions; prizes for the fattest hog, the largest tomato, or the longest-jumping frog; exhibitions by schools, community groups, and business; rodeos and other sporting contests; daredevil airplane performances featuring parachutists and wing walkers; and carnival rides of various sorts. Such fairs were an opportunity to express civic pride, social occasions welcomed by isolated rural people, and an opportunity for cheap fun, a rare commodity during the Depression.

Large Scale

While fairs were held all over America, the world's fairs got the majority of the press and public attention. World's fairs took place on a scale that dwarfed even the large state fairs. World's fairs usually cost millions of dollars, and financing was often raised by both private investors and governments. Planning for these events took years, and unlike state fairs, which usually ran a few days, the world's fairs lasted for months. Corporations usually fielded exhibits, and most fairs established a unifying theme. Public response was tremendous. Attendance ran in the millions. The world's fairs usually captured the tenor of the times as did few institutions, and exhibits often contributed something permanent to the broader culture. Several previous fairs had been occasions of national pride, such as the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in Saint Louis, and the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. Because the Depression brought civic and national pride to a new low, the world's fairs of the 1930s were especially valued and touted. Many proponents actually believed they might lift the United States out of the Depression.

Chicago

The Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago (1933—1934) is a good example of a world's fair designed to help alleviate the Depression. Although planning for the exhibition began before the Depression, by the time of the fair's opening, 27 May 1933, planners hoped that the tourism generated by the exhibition would spark an economic recovery in Chicago, Although these hopes were not realized, the fair was popular, with 22.5 million tickets sold in 1933 and 16.4 million tickets sold in 1934. Attendees found themselves in a dreamworld of fairyland architecture and futuristic exhibits that contrasted sharply with the unemployment and financial misery of Chicago. The fair's theme of scientific and industrial progress reaffirmed the faith of many in inevitable progress, a faith badly shaken by the Depression. Big businesses used the occasion to repair their tarnished reputation. Visitors viewed operating oil refineries, automobile assembly lines, a radio-controlled tractor and toothpaste tube—packing demonstrations, as though American industry had never been affected by the economic downturn. The Ford Motor Company, suffering from bad publicity due to industrial warfare, built a $5 million, nine-hundred-foot long building with a rotunda displaying a twenty-foot globe of Ford's international operations and featuring an automobile assembly plant as well as re-creations of historic highways. It was the most popular industrial exhibit of the fair, and it did much to rebuild public goodwill for Ford,

Fan Dances and Fanfare

As popular as the industrial exhibits were, the entertainment exhibits in Chicago really drew the crowds. The Sky-Ride, a two-hundred-foot tall transportation system, shuttled visitors around the fair in "rocket cars"; Spoor's Spectaculars featured giant movie screens and 64-mm films; the Odditorium displayed exhibits from Robert Ripley's "Believe It or Not"; and the Midget Village starred sixty midgets in plays and other entertainments. Sally Rand was the greatest headline grabber of the fair, however. Rand was a burlesque dancer who starred in a notorious "fan dance" that featured her nude body, made up to look like an alabaster statue, behind two large, feathery fans. She was arrested twice in 1933 for her risque dance, and the fair directors announced they would suspend her from the exhibition, but in the 1934 season she was back, this time with a dance that featured a five-foot semitransparent bubble. More-highbrow fare could be found in the Chicago Symphony series conducted on the fairgrounds and in the joint exhibit on American art at the Art Institute of Chicago, near the exhibition site. Visitors also enjoyed exhibits from foreign countries, especially a model Belgian village, artifacts from Mayan ruins, and a reproduced Chinese temple. There were also special celebrations, such as the national boys' marbles championship and the celebration of the end of Prohibition, when the fair directors provided the public with free beer and sandwiches, all in the name of what they termed "Personal Responsibility Day." Although attendance was high for the fair, the receipts from the 1933 season were not enough to cover the financing of the project, and thus the fair directors reopened the exhibition in 1934. They managed to eke out a profit with the additional year, but the Depression bit deeply, and plans to make the exhibition a permanent feature were dropped. In the end the Depression proved greater than the ability of the exhibition to cure it.

San Diego

Alleviating the Depression was also the foremost concern of the directors of the California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego (1935-1936). Like Chicago, San Diego had been the site of an earlier world's fair, had built the new fair on the old fairgrounds, and had featured corporate entertainment and foreign exhibits. The most distinctive feature of the San Diego fair was the replica of the Globe Theater, where abbreviated versions of William Shakespeare's plays were performed; it later evolved into one of the nation's most important regional theaters. As in the case of the Century of Progress Exhibition, San Diego fair directors ran the exhibit for two seasons; they too were disappointed in the ultimate profits and discovered the fair did little to lift the Depression.

San Francisco

The Golden Gate International Exposition, held in San Francisco in 1939 and 1940, was also motivated by the Depression. Taking stock of the boost to employment the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had given the San Francisco economy, fair planners sought to build an exhibition that would not only attract tourists, but provide jobs for the unemployed. To generate work, they built Treasure Island, a four-hundred-acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Ferries provided access to the site, as did a road connected to nearby Yerba Buena Island, the focal point of the Bay Bridge. The Golden Gate Exposition was notable for its meandering gardens on Treasure Island, providing fine vistas of San Francisco. It also featured magnificent arches and towers, and architecture reminiscent of the Cambodian ruins of Angkor Wat. The exhibits were dominated by Pacifica, an eighty-foot statue by Ralph Stackpole celebrating peace. Like the exhibits in Chicago and San Diego, corporations were well represented, with General Motors displaying a translucent Pontiac and Westinghouse introducing a robot, "Willie Vocalite." Ferris wheels, a roller coaster, and a diving bell provided amusements. Sally Rand broadened her act to make a complete "Nude Ranch." Although the fair entertained seventeen million visitors, it lost money, closing with a $559,423 deficit. The Pacifica and other exhibits were dismantled, and Treasure Island was turned over to the navy during World War II.

RECYCLING WORKERS INTO RECYCLING

The motto of Buffalo Goodwill Industries, Inc., in the state of New York was "Jobs from Junk—Wages from Waste." Founded in 1920, the company, whose trucks collected around forty thousand loads of discarded material in 1930 alone, paid sixty thousand dollars in opportunity wages to one hundred or more daily workers. Skilled carpenters, clerks, and seamstresses as well as the disabled turned attic junk into resalable 1932-styled dresses, shoes, mattresses, or even sofas. A used piano from Goodwill could be obtained for ten dollars plus three dollars for delivery. By 1932 Goodwill Industries had expanded and opened branches in about sixty cities throughout the United States.

Source:

Scientific American (February 1932): 84-85.

New York

The greatest fair of the decade was the New York World's Fair (1939-1940). Like the fairs in Chicago and San Diego, fair directors planned the exhibition in an attempt to improve the Depression-plagued economy of New York City. Designed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration as the first president of the United States, the fair's theme was nonetheless forward-looking: "The World of Tomorrow." With this theme in mind, fair designers built one of the most distinctive icons of the decade, the futuristic Trylon and Perisphere (a triangular tower 610 feet high and a globe 180 feet in diameter). Inside the Perisphere the fair's focal exhibit was displayed: a city of the future, which the planners called, a "Democracity." From there, visitors could appreciate the plan of the exhibition. The site (a former ash dump in Queens) was divided into nine zones—Amusement, Communications and Business Systems, Community Interests, Food, Government, Medicine and Public Health, Production and Distribution, Science and Education, and Transportation. Each of these zones was colored in progressively darker hues as one moved from the pure-white Trylon and Perisphere. Each zone featured exhibits by major corporations, including RCA, American Telephone and Telegraph, Kodak, Firestone, Heinz, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, General Electric, National Cash Register, and the three major automakers.

Futurama

In keeping with the theme of the fair, corporation exhibits specialized in displaying innovative products that awed the crowd. RCA introduced the public to television and broadcast a transmission of President Roosevelt, the first television address by a president. General Motors thrilled the public with its Futurama, an exhibit featuring designer Norman Bel Geddes's model of the world of 1960. As visitors sat in an armchair fixed to a conveyor belt, a speaker in the back of his chair described the American future, a place where automated cars race along superhighways, fueled by liquid air; cancer and polio have been eradicated; and nearly everyone is a high-school graduate. General Electric demonstrated artificial lightning and interred a time capsule, featuring photographs, newsreels, books, speeches, and the Lord's Prayer in three hundred languages, fifty feet into the ground, with orders that it be opened in A.D. 6939. The Bprden company demonstrated its new automatic cow-milking machine, the Rotolactor, The Eastern Railroad's Presidents' Conference offered visitors the biggest model railroad ever built and a stage show demonstrating the development of the streamline locomotive. Westing-house allowed visitors to fire an "electron gun," into gas, producing a luminous streak. There were more-pedestrian thrills in the Amusements zone; Midget Auto Race, Aerial Joy Ride, the Parachute Jump, Nature's Mistakes, and Auto Dodgem. Sally Rand's brand of entertainment was represented by Yvette Dare, who trained a macaw named Einstein to remove her bra to the beat of primitive tom-toms. The most popular attraction was Billy Rose's Aquacade, a water show spectacular featuring "Aqua-femmes" splashing about to waltz music. The fair also featured exhibits by individual states and exhibits by fifty-eight nations, the most spectacular of which was that offered by the Soviet Union, which was removed for the 1940 season due to World War II.

Optimism

Financially, the New York World's Fair was a failure. Despite an incredible publicity blitz, featuring radio advertisements, newsreels, and print and newspaper ads, the fair posted only 25.8 million paid attendees in its first season—-not enough to offset the $67 million cost of the fair. A second season in 1940 did little to help; ultimately the fair lost $18.7 million. As with the other world's fairs of the decade, the New York World's Fair proved to be a victim, and not a cure, of the Depression, Yet, the fair's striking iconography—especially the Trylon and Perisphere—captured the imagination of the public and set the image of the future for the future. The hopes and aspirations of the 1930s were encapsulated in the fair as surely as they were packed into General Electric's time capsule. The optimism toward progress and the future would not survive the Second World War and its barbarities. Neither would the World's Fair. During the war the Trylon and Perisphere were dismantled, and the steel within them was sold for scrap.

Sources:

John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelie, eds., Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, 1851-1988 (Greenwood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990);

David H. Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of The Fair (New York: Free Press, 1995);

Peter Kuznick, "Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle over the Presentation of Science at the 1939 New York World's Fair," American Quarterly, 46 (September 1994): 341-373,