World's Fairs and Expositions

World's Fairs and Expositions. The era of modern world's fairs began with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Housed in Joseph Paxton's stunning glass and iron structure, this fair attracted over six million visitors and served as a model for many subsequent fairs. In the United States, New York City hosted its own Crystal Palace exhibition, complete with an iron and glass building, in 1853–1854; President Franklin Pierce attended the opening ceremonies. But attendance was disappointing, and fair managers reported a loss of $300,000.

The New York exposition, as well as more successful fairs in Europe, perpetuated the legacy, however, and in 1876, Philadelphia celebrated the centennial of U.S. independence with an elaborate world's fair called the Centennial International Exhibition. Situated in Fairmount Park, it included several large thematic exhibition halls and many small pavilions. Richard Wagner composed a march for the opening ceremonies. The most spectacular exhibit, the 700‐ton Corliss steam engine, dominated Machinery Hall. The Centennial Exhibition attracted nearly 10 million visitors; garnered much favorable publicity; and although it lost money, spawned more fairs and expositions over the next thirty years. In the South, seven fairs were held in various cities between 1881 and 1907. Initially intended to revitalize the southern economy after the Civil War, these southern fairs eventually returned to the more traditional practice of celebrating anniversaries. Thus the Jamestown (Virginia) Exposition of 1907 commemorated the tercentenary of the first permanent English settlement in North America.

The Philadelphia exhibition also convinced those looking forward to the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage to America that a world's fair should be part of the festivities. The World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, arguably the most influential exposition in American history, featured a lagoon, statuary, electric illumination, and a dazzling display of white‐painted neoclassical architecture. Under Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912), many of the nation's leading architects and architectural firms, including Richard Morris Hunt; McKim, Mead, and White; and Adler and Sullivan, designed a fair that would long influence American city planning and public architecture.

The Chicago fair also featured the first entertainment center, the Midway Plaisance, offering rides (including the world's first Ferris wheel, invented by engineer George Ferris); circus sideshow features; and anthropological exhibits calculated to convince mainly Anglo‐Saxon visitors that they were indeed members of the most advanced race. Following this exposition, the midway became a popular feature at world's fairs. Over 27 million visitors came to Chicago for the fair.

The 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, intended to encourage trade between the United States and Latin America, was an aesthetic success, making good use of color and electric lighting. Its reputation was forever sullied, however, when on 6 September 1901, an anarchist shot President William McKinley during a reception in the Temple of Music.

Three years later, in St. Louis, the Louisiana Purchase International Exposition commemorated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Spread over 1,271 acres in Forest Park, the St. Louis exposition covered nearly twice the area of the 1893 Columbian exposition. It attracted 20 million visitors (some drawn by a popular song of the day, Meet Me in St. Louie, Louie), earned a modest profit, and hosted the 1904 Summer Olympics.

The completion of the Panama Canal and San Francisco's recovery from the 1906 earthquake and fire provided the rationale for the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. This, the largest of several fairs held on the West Coast, featured neoclassical buildings constructed around three courtyards, with the fair's signature building, Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts, situated across a lagoon. Signaling the advent of the automobile, a miniature assembly line in the Palace of Transportation produced eighteen Model T Fords daily.

Post–World War I political isolationism dampened American enthusiasm for world's fairs. Philadelphia's 1926 effort to mark the nation's sesquicentennial with a world's fair was a aesthetic and commercial disappointment. By the late 1920s, however, a committee was planning a gala fair for Chicago's centennial in 1933, and despite the onset of the Great Depression, the Century of Progress Exposition proved a success. Adopting a geometric Art Deco architectural style, the planners minimized construction costs by reliance on bright colors and creative lighting for aesthetic effect. The fair exhibits focused on the progress and promise of science.

The 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, celebrating the sesquicentennial of George Washington's inauguration, offered another wonderland of Art Deco architecture and exhibits of scientific and technological marvels, including television and limited‐access superhighways. Robert Moses, the city's parks commissioner, saw the fair as a way to replace a large ash dump in the Flushing Meadows area with a park. Unfortunately, the fair, caught on the cusp of World War II, failed to earn the profit that Moses had envisioned.

Perhaps because of Cold War tensions, few fairs were held in the years immediately after World War II. The first large postwar fair, in Brussels in 1958, was full of Cold War symbolism. America's first postwar fair was the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle, Washington, in 1962. Prompted by concern over U.S. prestige following the 1957 Soviet Sputnik flight and a desire to promote urban renewal in Seattle, it highlighted the theme of science education and featured a flashy U.S. pavilion funded by the federal government. The signature structure, a 605‐foot Space Needle, continued to dominate Seattle's landscape a generation later. The success of the Seattle fair inspired smaller fairs in San Antonio, Texas (1968), Spokane, Washington (1974), Knoxville, Tennessee (1982), and New Orleans (1984). Each was thematic rather than universal, and each focused on the redevelopment of a neglected part of its host city. While San Antonio and Spokane did well, the Knoxville fair was plagued by corrupt management and the New Orleans fair by financial disaster, leaving a dubious legacy for the future. Indeed, the rise of theme parks like Florida's Walt Disney World (1971) seemed in some ways to have preempted the whole idea of world's fairs.
See also Amusement Parks and Theme Parks; Circuses; Disney, Walt; Popular Culture; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Robert C. Post, ed., 1876: A Centennial Exhibition, 1976.
Burton Benedict et al. , The Anthropology of World's Fairs, 1983.
Robert W. Rydell , All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at America's International Expositions, 1876–1916, 1984.
John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds., Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988, 1990.
Robert W. Rydell , World's Fairs: The Century‐of‐Progress Expositions, 1993.
John E. Findling , Chicago's Great World's Fairs, 1994.
Robert W. Rydell,, John E. Findling,, and and Kimberly D. Pelle , Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States, 2000.

John Findling