WORLD'S FAIRS

WORLD'S FAIRS, sometimes called international expositions, originated with the 1851 London Crystal Palace Exhibition. The success of that venture in trumpeting the causes of industrialism, nationalism, and imperialism to an audience in excess of six million inspired the builders of nation-states in Europe and the United States to follow suit. The first wave of Victorian-era world's fairs concluded with World War I, but the collapse of capitalist economies in the 1920s precipitated a second wave of fairs held during the Great Depression. Following World War II, world's fairs, confronted with growing competition from electronic media and Disney-inspired theme parks, began to recede in number and importance. Projecting the failures of recent expositions back on the past would be anachronistic, however. From their inception in 1851 through the middle of the twentieth century, world's fairs played a primary role in giving form and substance to the modernizing world.

The success of London's Crystal Palace Exhibition, and especially the success of American exhibitors Cyrus McCormick and Samuel Colt in gaining rave reviews from the British press for their displays of reapers and revolvers, inspired a group of New York business leaders, including newspaper editor Horace Greeley and showman P. T. Barnum, to organize their own Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York City in 1853. The New York spectacle ran afoul of mounting sectional tensions in the United States and failed to win much support from the federal government. Before another world's fair would be held on American shores, the United States would undergo a civil war and an industrial depression, and find itself in the throes of growing class conflict between the rich and poor.

Inspired by the urgency of reconstructing the American nation after the Civil War, and by the ongoing parade of world's fairs in England, France, and Austria, Philadelphia civic authorities decided to hold a world's fair to celebrate the centenary of American independence from England. Fueled by concerns that the panic of 1873 would heighten conflict between social classes, the federal government determined to make the Philadelphia fair an instrument for winning over the hearts and minds of Americans to the newly reconstructed American nation-state. When President Ulysses S. Grant opened the fair in May 1876 in Fairmount Park, the fair boasted some of the largest buildings ever constructed, including Machinery Hall, which featured the 700-ton Corliss engine and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. This fair, like most world's fairs, ran for only six months and, again like most others, lost money. There were, however, other ways of measuring success. For example, by the time it closed its gates, nearly ten million people had seen its exhibits and many local businesses had made money from the influx of exposition goers.

As the U.S. national economy continued to ricochet between boom and bust, and as Europeans, especially the French, continued to mount spectacular expositions, capped off by the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition with the Eiffel Tower as its centerpiece, numerous American cities considered hosting world's fairs. Some actually materialized. Louisville inaugurated the Southern Exposition in 1883, which ran annually until 1887, while New Orleans hosted the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884–1885. It was, however, the competition between a dozen cities to hold a world's fair commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's 1492 expedition that most clearly announced the medium's arrival as a mainstay of American cultural life.

In 1890, when Chicago business and financial elites persuaded Congress to award them the prize of organizing the World's Columbian Exposition, they set themselves the task of creating a world's fair that would surpass the one held in Paris the previous year. They targeted 1892as the opening date, but poor weather conditions and labor strikes forced exposition authorities to postpone the formal opening until 1893. Despite the fact that the exposition buildings were still under construction, world's fair officials arranged for dedication ceremonies to take place in October 1892. For that occasion, they organized a nationwide celebration that featured schoolchildren across the country reciting, for the first time, the Pledge of Allegiance, which had been written by Francis J. Bellamy specifically to bring national attention to the fair and the first national Columbus Day holiday.

When the World's Columbian Exposition opened, it featured an inner core of palatial exhibition buildings intended to represent the claim that America represented the apex of the world's civilization. Designed by some of America's leading architectural firms, including Burnham and Root and McKim, Mead, and White, these buildings were dubbed the White City because they were all painted white. For some Americans, however, there was more to the name than the color of the buildings. Led by former abolitionist and African American political leader Frederick Douglass and by antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, African Americans protested the racist policies of the fair that excluded all but a handful of African American exhibits. White, middle-class women also fought for inclusion in the fair and, unlike African Americans, were allowed to create their own building, used by some to advance the cause of women's suffrage. In addition to the White City, the fair also featured the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long entertainment strip that included ethnological villages intended, in part, to apply the lessons of social Darwinism to the struggle for survival between "races" of humanity. Dominated by its towering Ferris Wheel, the Chicago fair's answer to the Eiffel Tower, the World's Columbian Exposition became the defining event for America's fin-de-siècle generation. In a sense, it also became a defining event for America's young historical profession, for it was at a meeting of the American Historical Association organized in conjunction with this fair, that historian Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."

The Chicago fair ignited a world's fair-building craze in the United States. Atlanta (1895), Nashville (1897), Omaha (1898), Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), Portland (1905), Jamestown (1907), Seattle (1909), San Diego (1915–1916), and San Francisco (1915–1916) all held world's fairs that hammered home to tens of millions of Americans the fundamental lesson that America's national reconstruction was on course and that the United States was well on the way toward becoming a global power. President William McKinley, who was assassinated at the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, summed up the central theme of these fairs when he termed them "timekeepers of progress."

World War I, which erupted while world's fairs were in full swing in San Diego and San Francisco, called into doubt the meanings of both progress and civilization. At the conclusion of the war, however, Europeans quickly returned to the world's fair medium to rebuild their devastated economies and to shore up sagging faith in their imperial enterprises. The French had already led the way with an international colonial exposition in Marseilles in 1916, and were followed, in due course, by the British, who held a massive colonial exposition on the outskirts of London in 1924–1925. Not wanting to be left behind, a group of corporate capitalists and civic authorities in Philadelphia determined that the United States should hold a world's fair as well. Perhaps because America's economic prosperity left no need for reassurance and uplift, the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition was a total flop. Its financial losses and poor attendance led many observers to proclaim the end of the world's fair era.

They were wrong. Even before the 1929 stock market crash, several of Chicago's leading corporate capitalists were launching plans for a world's fair to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of Chicago and the fortieth anniversary of the 1893 fair. When the depression hit, they redoubled their efforts and, in 1933–1934, held the Century of Progress Exposition. Chief among its modernistic buildings was the Hall of Science, which distilled the exposition's central theme: "Science Finds; Industry Applies; Man Conforms." At least one performer at the fair refused to conform, however. Sally Rand amazed countless numbers of fairgoers with her notorious fan dance and gave the fair abundant publicity with her multiple arrests. Indeed, so successful was the 1933 fair in rekindling popular faith in the American economic and political systems that President Franklin Roosevelt personally urged exposition authorities to reopen it in 1934. By the time it closed, the Century of Progress Exposition

had jump-started the stalled American world's fair movement.

In the wake of the Chicago fair, San Diego (1935– 1936), Dallas (1936), Cleveland (1936–1937), San Francisco (1939–1940), and New York (1939–1940) held world's fairs that, in total, attracted some 100 million visitors. The fairs put thousands of people to work and held out the promise that America's best years lay in the future. Nowhere was this theme more in evidence than at the 1939 New York fair, which took as its theme "The World of Tomorrow." With exhibits created by some of the world's leading industrial designers, including Norman Bel Geddes (who designed the General Motors' Futurama show) and Henry Dreyfus (who designed Democracity), this fair gave visible form to the meaning of modernity and held out the promise that America, in the very near future, would escape from the ravages of the depression and become a consumerist paradise. This fair, like its immediate predecessors, also advocated the use of eugenics to solve America's social problems.

The fairs of the 1930s do not deserve credit for saving the United States from the depression. But, like the generation of Victorian-era fairs that mushroomed across the country between 1876 and 1916 in the midst of increasing class violence and mounting economic anxiety, the fairs of the Great Depression certainly helped restore middle-class confidence in U.S. political and economic institutions.

In the decade and a half following World War II, with the economy seemingly living up to the predictions of previous world's fair promoters, no world's fair was held in the United States. That situation changed when, in response to the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the man-made satellite Sputnik, the federal government supported a bid by Seattle to host a world's fair dedicated to allaying national concerns about the United States lagging behind the Soviet Union in the race for control of outer space. With its "space gothic" architecture that featured the Space Needle, the Century 21 Exposition announced the preparedness of the United States to take on the Soviets in space. The next U.S. fair, the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair, with its Hall of Free Enterprise, announced the readiness of the United States to take up the Soviet challenge on this planet. Smaller fairs ensued, including the 1968 San Antonio HemisFair and Expo '74 held in Spokane. The Spokane fair, following the lead of Expo '67 in Montreal, put a new emphasis on environmentalism and helped prepare the way for the 1982 Knoxville International Energy Exposition and the 1984 New Orleans World Exposition. Both of the last-named fairs had severe financial problems and these contributed to the decision by Chicago civic authorities not to host a world's fair in 1992 to commemorate the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival in the New World.

World's fairs have been among the most formative influences in shaping the tone and texture of modern times. They have filled museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, with their exhibits and they have left vast urban parks, among them Chicago's Jackson Park, in their wake. They have introduced millions of Americans to technologies that range from the telephone and television to the airplane and computer. Because of their overt racism, they have met with resistance, especially from African Americans who successfully converted many fairs into laboratories of civil rights protest and litigation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, especially in the wake of the billion-dollar loss sustained by the 2000 Hannover Exposition, many critics have suggested that, since world's fairs can no longer compete in a world dominated by television, theme parks, and the Internet, the end of the era of world's fairs is once again in sight. If, however, the primary function of world's fairs has been to provide cultural safety nets during times of economic and political crises brought on by the globalization of capitalism, it is doubtful that so powerful a medium will simply fade away.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Findling, John E., and Kimberly D. Pelle. Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Standard reference source.

Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World's Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988.

Rydell, Robert W. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

———. World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Rydell, Robert W., John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle. Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Youngs, J. William T. The Fair and the Falls: Spokane's Expo '74: Transforming an American Environment. Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press, 1996.

Robert W.Rydell

See alsoCentennial Exhibition ; Ferris Wheel .

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,

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

world's fair see exposition .