Fair History

Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

—Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Ever since Henry Adams's meditation on historical progress, invoked in response to the giant dynamo on display at the 1900 Paris International Exposition, American historians have evoked world's fairs as epochal events. In his 1975 essay, "All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at American Fairs, 1876–1904," for example, cultural historian Neil Harris asserts that "the great fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth century offer unusual opportunities for the study of international communications. In these controlled settings nation-states set out their artistic and industrial achievements before enormous audiences. Reactions varied, of course. But for certain cultures there was special meaning in these international displays" (p. 29). In the almost thirty-five years since Harris's essay first appeared, a variety of historians, curators, novelists, and cultural critics have taken world's fairs and international expositions as a rich topic of study. Noted scholars of American history such as Warren Susman, Robert Rydell, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Michael Kammen have used world's fairs as starting points for exploring the blurring of the lines between education and entertainment, high and low culture, and the complex and often contradictory notions of American identity formation and historical progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The study of fairs has not been limited to historians, however. Folklorist and performance studies professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has written extensively on the exhibition of "others" and the presence of Jews at world's fairs, and she regularly teaches classes on the subject at New York University. Cultural studies scholar Tony Bennett locates his idea of the "exhibitionary complex" within world's fairs and international exhibitions. "The distinctive influence of the exhibitions themselves," he writes, "consisted in their articulation of the rhetoric of progress to the rhetorics of nationalism and imperialism and in producing, via their control over their adjoining popular fairs, an expanded cultural sphere for the deployment of the exhibitionary disciplines" (p. 81). American fairs have also provided the backdrop and subject matter for a number of best-selling books. Lauren Belfer's City of Light (1999) is set amid the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. E. L. Doctorow's World's Fair (1985) takes the 1939 New York Fair as its subject; and Eric Larson's Devil in the White City (2003) provides a fast-paced historical narrative of "Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America," the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. Indeed, an interest in world's fairs reaches across multiple publics, encompassing university scholars, arm-chair historians, and popular reading groups.

Cheryl Ganz's detailed and well-researched examination of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair is a recent contribution to this dialogue. Ganz writes that, "in a significant break with the Columbian Exposition and all earlier fairs, the 1933 exposition reflected the business-military-engineering model fundamental to the professional careers of its primary organizers…. They and their team created a civil-military enterprise a world's fair that reinvented the concept of international expositions" (p. 2). Through rich primary evidence and detailed description, Ganz meticulously lays out the individual players and machinations behind the Century of Progress fair. She joins the chorus of fair boosters when she asserts that:

the story of the 1933 world's Fair is the story of Chicago's pride and its legendary "I Will" spirit to succeed despite adversity. It is the story of a generation of successful business entrepreneurs who had...