Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s

“Things speak for themselves” and “they speak an unmistakable language” are common expressions that register perhaps a certain nostalgia for a world before mass production and world markets. Yet it seems that these expressions somehow guided the exhibition of American culture abroad in the 1950s: “Mailboxes, outdoor motors, and portable barbecues were allowed to stand as emblems of the culture that produced them without overly determined justifications or explanations” (pp. 154–55), says Robert H. Haddow with regard to the American exhibition at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.

But things are, of course, rarely just “there,” and the wheeling and dealing behind the exhibited things, that they were chosen to “speak” in the first place, and how they should be arranged before being allowed to speak, is what Haddow delves into in this well-written and informative book. Presenting American culture in a limited space within a deadline and budget and with numerous interests to represent, consult, and appease was obviously no easy task. But that the attempt should be made, that “America,” as something to be both celebrated and emulated, should be presented abroad, was hardly disputed here at the height of the cold war.

The 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels stands at the center of Haddow’s narrative. In the American Pavilion, facing that of the USSR on the grounds in Brussels, all the experiences from the Chicago fairs of 1950 and several trade fairs in Europe had to come together. It was here that the responsibility for the pavilion changed from the U.S. Department of Commerce to the State Department, largely because of the exhibition’s overall “cultural” theme, which incidentally also brought out the difficulties of presenting America within a clearly definable ideological framework. In a sense, within this amorphous “cultural” theme, things did end up speaking for themselves.

In Chicago in 1950 “narratives of history as economic progress” (p. 31) had undergirded the fairs, while the story sustaining the world trade fairs’ “people’s capitalism” theme “marked the distance between past and present” (p. 51) as a march toward a classless consumer society. Such “framing” narratives, however, slid much further into the background in Brussels. Narratives imply direction, movement, and “progress.” The number of artistic, ideological, cultural, racial, and gendered interests at stake in the ambitious Brussels fair soon made it clear that agreement on such questions was indeed hard to reach. Unlike the USSR exhibition, which had the “benefit” of a clearly defined ideology, the American Pavilion presented a “soft-sell atmosphere . . . [where visitors were] invited to relax and enjoy themselves, thus subliminally conveying to them that life in the United States was so technically advanced that it was almost effortless” (p. 128). As Haddow points out, this “retreat” into popular culture, downplaying and making invisible the underlying technology, more or less resulted from American concerns about the “missile gap.”

America’s atemporal presentation, which of course to most Europeans clearly signified the future, was further exacerbated by the removal of the “Unfinished Work” exhibit, which, among other things, dealt with race relations. As the name suggests, this display would have acknowledged contemporary U.S. problems and presented them as being addressed. Haddow delivers an interesting story of the events leading up to the closing of this part of the exhibition, which right from the start was tacked on and not part of the “soft-sell” interior of the circular U.S. pavilion in Brussels. This is, however, only one part of Haddow’s account, all of which successfully draws out the competing notions of architecture, art, food, fashion, and so on, at stake in the construction of American representations abroad, as well as how and why the aspect of technology was either highlighted or downplayed in each. Obviously, the process of constructing such representations was intricately linked to differing perceptions of what America was or should be. This is a story that ought to engage anyone...