Spectacle and Politics in Buffalo and Philadelphia: The World's Fairs of 1901 and 1926

Long a topic favored primarily by antiquarians and collectors, World's Fairs are at long last receiving their due attention by historians. Robert Rydell inspired a generation of scholars to first interrogate the imperial nature of World's Fairs, and then to offer alternative understandings of these enormous cultural events. But it was Erik Larson's Devil in the White City (2003) that brought fairs to the attention of non-scholarly readers, and two new books seek to follow in the footsteps of Larson's work, albeit without a serial killer at the center, by using lesser-known fairs to explore larger questions about American culture and society for a popular audience. The two books: Margaret Creighton's The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair, and Thomas H. Keel's Sesqui; Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World's Fair of 1926, offer radically different approaches and styles, but both effectively evoke time and place and illuminate the way that lesser-known fairs also served as microcosms of much larger political and social struggles.

The two books share more than a surface similarity: both focus on cities that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but faced significant economic challenges by the mid-twentieth century. Civic leaders in both Buffalo and Philadelphia wanted a fair to highlight their city's cultural and economic progress, and it was the elite of both cities who created and most benefited from the fairs. Both authors situate their books as stories of fairs forgotten to all but local residents, or, in the case of Buffalo, forever linked to a presidential assassination. And both seek to resurrect the glory of the fairs and to tell the stories of the city and people who created them. Finally, rather oddly, both fairs are infamous, rather than famous: Buffalo's 1901 Pan-American Exposition is remembered for McKinley's tragic death, and the 1926 Sesqui, when remembered at all, is described as a colossal failure, both financially and culturally. What, then, is to be learned from these forgotten fairs? It turns out, quite a bit.

Both Creighton and Keels have succeeded in producing books that are marketed toward a popular audience, while also informed by and relevant to the historiography. Rydell forced scholars to take fairs seriously when he insisted on the imperial nature of World's Fairs, arguing that these events reflected white American attempts to both create a national identity and to claim cultural dominance over people of color at home and abroad. While his basic argument continues to ring true for many fairs, recent scholars have complicated his thesis in a host of ways. Some focus on marginalized peoples' efforts to use fairs to their own ends. Mabel Wilson, for instance, in her masterful synthesis of the relationship between African Americans and fairs reveals the way that black leaders and communities used fairs for their own political goals. The works collected by T. J. Boisseau and myself argue for the necessity of considering women and gender in the study of expositions. Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler's careful documentation of the participation of indigenous peoples in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition demonstrates there is much to learn from examining the experience of fair performers. Keels and Creighton each reflect the influence of these works in their books with their attention to issues of race, gender, and public response to the fairs, although few of the above works appear in their bibliographies.

Other scholars insist on the need to situate fairs in their local, as well as national context, and it is to these works that Keels's and Creighton's books align most...