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.
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. |
