Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia (review)

In 1876, the United States hosted an exhibition in Philadelphia celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Intended to promote the arts, sciences, and American industry, the Centennial Exhibition was also a nation-building enterprise that sought to give form and substance to a new sense of national identity and unity after America's devastating Civil War. Yet, despite its importance for reconstructing American society and culture, this fair has not received the same amount of scholarly attention as the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Bruno Giberti's Designing the Centennial has pulled the Philadelphia fair back into the limelight it so richly deserves.

Giberti's book opens with an overview of the universal expositions that preceded the Centennial. He follows with two chapters that examine the architecture of the exhibition and the classification systems that guided the installation of exhibits. The final chapters are devoted to different "ways of seeing the Exhibition," to the distinctive award system developed to recognize outstanding exhibits, and to assessing the longer-term impact of the Centennial, especially on Philadelphia's burgeoning commercial and museum culture. There is, in short, more to this book than its title conveys. There is also a bit less.

Drawing on the insights of Michel Foucault, Tony Bennett, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes, Giberti argues that, far from being a closed ideological system, the exhibition was "an indeterminate structure" that "was not always successful at maintaining identities and differences" (pp. 45, 225). This, he tells us, "is what made the exhibition so precarious—even dangerous, in cultural terms—a project." (p. 225). Applying cultural theory to the study of exhibitions is a laudable goal. But cultural theorists will wonder about the absence of attention to the work of anthropologists who have, with great effect, examined world's fairs as cultural hybrids. The work of Penelope Harvey, for instance, would have helped Giberti make his case and also have complicated his understanding of the way world's fairs functioned to both question and reassert existing power relations in the nations that host them.

Then there is the matter of the subtitle, which calls this a history of the Centennial. Giberti has little to say about the struggles of African-Americans to gain representational space at the fair and little to say about the women who found the "order of things" at the fair more pernicious than precarious. There is not much information about the financial interests that supported the fair, about the laboring classes who constructed the fair, or about the responses of visitors to what they saw. The crowds, Giberti assures us, "could not begin to focus on, let alone decipher, a meaningful arrangement of displays." Rather, "people came to the exhibition primarily to see and be seen by other people" (p. 153). Perhaps, but I wonder about the Pennsylvania miners transported to the fair by mining and railroad companies. Is this why workers went to the fair—to be seen?

And what about the desire of fair-goers to learn about the world in which they lived? World's fairs offered people from all social classes the opportunity to see the world and learn from exhibits. Built into this fair from the start was a desire on the part of its organizers, including Francis A. Walker, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to teach Americans lessons in nationalism and progress, both of which were inflected with scientific racism. Were the intentions of the sponsors fully realized? Of course not. But it is a mistake to downplay the seriousness with which exhibition organizers and fair-goers took the educational mission of this and other Victorian-era fairs. For historians interested in material culture, Giberti's book will certainly hold interest, especially his description of the displays. But he pays little attention to...