A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World's Fairs by Nathan Cardon (review)

In this well-researched and well-argued book, Nathan Cardon examines two southern world's fairs—the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta and the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Cardon argues in A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World's Fairs that the planners sought to market their region by presenting a "Jim Crow modernity" (p. 3). Conscious of how others viewed them, Southerners used these expositions to prove that they were in fact, modern; however, this modernity was built on a system of racial segregation. Different groups had different expectations, or dreams, for the fairs. For the planners, the exhibitions "were representative of a dream of a New South restored to its economic and military importance." For African Americans, the fairs represented a dream "of a region and nation in which they would be included on the basis of their citizenship, history, and economic contributions." And for white southern women, "the fairs were an opportunity to dream of a region that managed the gendered transformations of urbanization and industrialization while retaining their traditional roles" (p. 17).

Chapter one provides overviews of the two fairs, including their planning. Fair organizers sought to show the South as modern and industrial. Chapter two discusses the ways in which African Americans participated in the fairs. Both the Atlanta and Nashville fairs had designated "Negro Buildings" for African American exhibits. In fact, the small amount of federal funding the Atlanta fair received ($200,000 for a United States government building) was contingent upon having a separate Black exhibition space. While planners might have viewed these Black spaces as proving racial inferiority, African American participants saw them differently. Particularly in Atlanta, African Americans exhibited a sense of "race pride" (p. 47). That feeling was not as evident in Nashville two years later, however, perhaps an indication of the impact of the legal confirmation of white supremacy in Plessy v. Ferguson that came between the two events. In chapter three, Cardon looks at the ways in which southern women contributed to the fairs. For white women, "World's fairs were an opportunity to try on new behaviors, roles, and abilities" (p. 67). As with the issue of race, regardless of what the planners thought about gender, participants had their own ideas of what the fairs might mean. Chapter four focuses on how the two fairs presented visions of empire, noting that planners hoped the fairs would open new markets in Latin America. Finally, the conclusion serves as an epilogue, detailing several twentieth-century fairs and how they were, ultimately, disasters. Throughout, the author uses a rich array of primary sources, including newspapers, printed accounts, and archival material and also grounds his work in New South historiography.

Cardon makes several important contributions—rather than emphasizing exclusion, by looking at the ways African Americans participated in the fairs, he shows their agency and how they made the fairs their own. He also reveals how the South was trying to position itself in a global context—instead of the South being a colony of the North, the South was working to become its own colonial power and export both its products and its racial politics around the globe. Cardon takes issue with other scholars of world's fairs by observing that what planners intended and what participants saw and did were often at odds. The author demonstrates that world's fairs continue to be rich and underutilized avenues of research that tell us much about how Americans perceived themselves and how these fairs both shaped and reflected the eras in which they were held.