WORLD'S FAIRS

From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, world's fairs, sometimes called international expositions or exhibitions, helped define and change the meaning of leisure and recreation in the United States. Drawing inspiration from London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition and the European fairs that followed in its wake, American fairs blended entertainment with education, fun with high-minded civic engagement, and mass consumption with America's nationalism. After World War II, with the proliferation of theme and amusement parks and with the rise of electronically mediated forms of mass entertainment through movies, television, video games, and the Internet, world's fairs seemingly lost relevance to post-modern life. But if Americans lost their fascination with these spectacles at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is worth noting that people in other nations had not and that major universal expositions were being planned in Japan (2005) and China (2010).

Fairs of the Victorian Period

Anyone with knowledge of Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol can readily imagine the historical context that produced the first world's fair, London's fabled Crystal Palace Exhibition. By the midpoint of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had transformed England into a nation with a far-flung empire. At the same time, industrialization spawned population displacement, gross inequities of wealth, and pressures for social and political change that threatened established power relations. With thoughts in mind of the 1848 political revolutions in Europe and the Chartist movement in England, Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, endorsed the idea of holding an international exposition that would feature the exhibits of the industrialized nations and impress the British public with England's position at the apex of "civilization." Housed in a building that looked like an enormous greenhouse, these displays attracted more than 6 million visitors and helped inspire confidence among England's middle classes in the future of England and its empire.

The success of the Crystal Palace captured the attention of a group of New Yorkers who raised private capital to organize the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853. It tanked. With tensions between the North and South on the increase, New York's exposition backers, who included newspaperman Horace Greeley and showman P. T. Barnum, failed to win backing from the federal government. Whether a federally funded fair in New York might have helped Americans mend their sectional differences is an interesting question to contemplate, but the fact is that the United States went to war with itself between 1861 and 1865, and more than 600,000 Americans lost their lives as a result.

How could and should the American nation be reconstructed? This question led a number of influential politicians, business leaders, and scientists to look overseas for answers. What they saw mushrooming across Europe, in the aftermath of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, was a series of universal expositions that were explicitly intended to inspire national confidence and pride. In the early 1870s, civic leaders in Philadelphia approached Congress for support for an international exposition to be held in that city in 1876 to commemorate the anniversary of the American Revolution. With backing from the White House, Congress agreed to invest federal dollars in the enterprise. The outcome was the largest world's fair organized to date both in terms of acreage and scale of buildings.

Because the backers of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition saw their enterprise as a nation-building effort that would impart lessons about America's progress, civilization, and morality to the millions of visitors who came to the fair, exposition authorities made no room for popular entertainments. Indeed, when popular urban amusements, including inexpensive restaurants and prostitution, began to proliferate outside the fairgrounds, exposition authorities, citing the danger of fire, persuaded the city to destroy many of the buildings that had been given over to popular entertainments. In Philadelphia, the line between "high" and "low" culture was carved in stone.

At the next major American world's fair, the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, thinking about the relationship between "high" and "low" forms of culture underwent an important shift. At the 1893 fair, exposition authorities, instead of expressing overt hostility to popular shows, actually embraced them as part of the exposition's educational mission and organized them along a mile-long avenue called the Midway Plaisance, which ran at a right angle to the main exposition grounds and was where one could find displays dedicated to "civilization."

What led to this change in thinking were several interconnected developments. First, the United States economy was unstable. A major depression in 1873 had triggered nationwide strikes, and these continued through the 1880s and 1890s. By the mid-1880s, a growing number of Americans were wondering aloud if the Civil War had only been the opening volley in a longer war that now seemed to involve not regions, but social classes. If world's fairs were to succeed in continuing the process of America's national reconstruction after a devastating civil war, a way had to be found to increase attendance and to educate visitors about the reasons they should be hopeful about America's future. Popular amusements provided that possibility. Second, Europeans, especially the French, who had been confronting mounting class warfare (the Paris Commune took place in 1871), had created new ways of joining education and entertainment through the medium of the world's fair. Around the base of the Eiffel Tower, which had been constructed for the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, French exposition organizers had arranged a series of outdoor exhibits from French colonies that featured indigenous people from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Presented as "authentic" representations by leading French anthropologists, these living ethnological villages proved enormously popular and seemingly validated the need for the "civilized" nations to control "savages."

This lesson struck home in Chicago. Chicago's world's fair authorities placed the Midway Plaisance under the charge of prominent Harvard ethnologist Frederic W. Putnam. Midway shows featured villages of Africans, Asians, and Middle Easterners living in "authentic" settings in the shadow of the midway's (indeed the fair's) central icon, the enormous revolving wheel designed by engineer George Ferris in response to the tower erected that Gustavus Eiffel had designed for the 1889 Paris fair. Stretched out along the midway, so-called ethnological villages became outdoor demonstration lessons for social Darwinian ideas about the "progress" of human societies as they evolved from "savagery" to "civilization." As one visitor remarked when she passed under the railroad bridge that divided the midway from the main exposition palaces located on the main exposition grounds, "in what seemed like one step, you've passed out o' darkness and into light" (Burnham, p. 201).

The breakthrough that occurred at the 1893 fair was the growing realization by the fair's political, economic, and intellectual underwriters that lofty educational goals (introducing millions of people to racialized, social Darwinian ideas about the meaning of progress) could be fun and profitable. Because exposition managers had to worry about the fair's profitability, they appointed entrepreneur Sol Bloom as Putnam's assistant to oversee the moneymaking side of the midway. Bloom parlayed his success with shows that included risqué belly dancers and various mechanical amusements into a career that led him to Broadway and to a career in the U.S. Congress, where he contributed to founding the United Nations. Because of his and Putnam's efforts, never again would it be possible to imagine a world's fair without a midway. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that the layout of the Chicago fair, with the midway shows segregated from the main exposition palaces, still reflected some ambivalence about the relationship between culture and entertainment.

That ambivalence rapidly disappeared. At the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, midway amusements, including ethnological shows, became part of the main exposition grounds. When the last of the Victorianera fairs was held in San Francisco in 1915 to 1916, midway pleasures, including a heroic painting of a scantily clad woman with a mechanically driven rotating navel, had helped undermine many of the more repressive values of the American Victorians. Indeed, the commercialized amusements of the midways inspired the creation of amusement parks, many of which featured mechanical rides that had first been introduced at world's fairs.

America's Depression-Era Fairs

Significantly, after World War I, many pundits declared world's fairs to be hopelessly out of date, believing that motion pictures and theme parks had rendered international expositions cultural dinosaurs. But just as America's Victorian fairs had been organized in response to the economic and political upheavals of its era, so America's fairs of the 1930s represented cultural responses to economic collapse, political tumult, and despair about the future.

With their modernistic and streamlined designs, Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition (1933–1934),San Diego's California Pacific International Exposition (1935–1936), Dallas's Texas Centennial Exposition (1936), Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition (1936), San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition (1939–1940), and New York's World's Fair (1939–1940) emphasized science and technology and mass consumption as solutions to depression-plagued America. Entertainment at the fairs, especially Sally Rand's famous fan dance at the Chicago exposition and numerous striptease shows at subsequent fairs, placed a "modern" stamp on these expositions and made the Victorian era seem a distant memory.

Three points need to be made about the entertainment and recreational possibilities of these fairs. First, the main pavilions dedicated to science, technology, and productive industries tried to make their exhibits fun. For instance, the Westinghouse exhibit featured a talking robot, while the General Motors Futurama exhibit included moving chairs that transported visitors into scenes that depicted an imaginary America in 1960. Second, as the depression continued, the fairs gave greater attention to becoming tourist destinations that would attract visitors from far distances and encourage them to spend their money, thus stimulating economic recovery. Third, like their Victorian forbears, the modernistic fairs of the 1930s still featured entertainments that explicitly demeaned different ethnic groups, especially African Americans, and people with physical disabilities, who were exhibited as "freaks."

American Fairs of the Space Age

World War II catapulted the United States out of the depression and into a decade of economic prosperity. The postwar years, however, were not without their share of anxieties about nuclear war and ecological disaster. In 1962, in response to the Soviet Union's successes in the space race, the U.S. government lent its support to a world's fair in Seattle that featured a Space Needle, a new monorail system, abundant science exhibits, and an adult show called Planet Eve that showcased topless women seducing men dressed as astronauts.

In 1964 to 1965, New York held another world's fair that celebrated the triumph of mass consumption and the potential of American mass culture to dominate the world. Like earlier fairs, the New York World's Fair relied heavily on corporate exhibitors, but the heavy involvement of the Walt Disney Corporation in planning exhibits reflected the prominence of theme parks in American life and hinted at a major challenge to the world's fair medium, namely how world's fairs, if they were seen primarily as sources of entertainment and leisure, could compete with Disney and Disney-esque theme parks. It is ironic, to say the least, that Walt Disney's father had worked as a laborer at the 1893 Chicago fair and that this same fair had fired the imaginations of the entrepreneurs who made Coney Island America's first modern theme and amusement park—the very institution that would, by the middle of the twentieth century, threaten to render the world's fair medium obsolete.

The 1964 to 1965 New York World's Fair was the last major world's fair held in the United States. Smaller fairs in Fairbanks, Alaska (1967), San Antonio, Texas (1968), and Spokane, Washington (1974) sometimes had profound impacts on local economies, but never reached the scale of previous world's fairs. In the 1980s, fairs in Knoxville, Tennessee(1982), and New Orleans, Louisiana (1984), encountered serious financial problems. Then, when Chicago abandoned plans to host a fair in 1992 to celebrate Columbus's quincentennial, it seemed the world's fair bubble had burst—at least in the United States.

Predictions about the demise of the world's fairs, however, are nothing new. And, if the United States seems ambivalent about the medium, other nations continue to tumble over one another in the effort to secure recognition from the Bureau of International Expositions to hold world-class expositions. In 2005, Japan is hosting a major international exposition, and China is planning a universal-class exposition for 2010 that may either leave Americans smug about having abandoned their tradition of fairs or leave them wondering how to get back in the game.

Legacies

World's fairs are remembered as architectural laboratories (Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building at the 1893 Chicago fair), as showcases for inventions (television was introduced at the 1939 fair), and as supply lines for major museums (many of the Smithsonian Institution's artifacts are derived from world's fairs). However, they were also engines of mass culture and mass entertainment that helped make both central to America's national identity.

See also: City Parks; National Parks; Park Movements; State Parks; Theme and Amusement Parks; Urbanization of Leisure

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Julie K. Contesting Images: Photography at the World's Columbian Exposition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.

Burnham, Clara Louisa. Sweet Clover. Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1893.

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

Gilbert, James. Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

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

Haddow, Robert H. Pavilions of Plenty. Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Hoffenberg, Peter H. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australia Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

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

Robert W. Rydell