The 1933 World's Fair: A Century of Progress
Book Review by: Timothy B. Spears
For Citation: Business History Review 83 (Autumn 2009)
When it comes to world's fairs, the most popular destination for Americanists is Chicago, namely, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. From the White City to the Midway, scholars have written extensively on the fair's cultural geography, noting by turns the ways in which the Exposition reinforced the nation's dominant ideologies and paved the way to modern urban society. This scholarship also points up the value of multidisciplinary work, since catching the full impact of the Columbian Exposition—or any world's fair for that matter—requires some understanding of urban history, architecture, visual culture, business enterprise, and anthropology. Then there is the question of Chicago, and whether, when examining the remarkable accomplishments of the 1893 fair, one is simply addressing the distinctive features of America’s shock city or something more pervasive. Of course, the answer is both, and as Cheryl Ganz's new book makes clear, forty years after the Columbian Exposition, Chicagoans were still committed to the idea that their city was the best location for representing the world.
Like other historians who have written about world's fairs, Ganz is interested in how fair organizers imagined the future. For her, the 1933 World's Fair is notable for modeling a new concept of progress, based on technological power and cooperation among industrial and business organizations. In this respect, the fair's "greatest legacy" was that it "provided the first showplace in which corporations could vie solely for the consumer's attention rather than industrial prizes" (p. 83). As Ganz shows, creating such a showplace required a high level of coordination and the willingness of business leaders, politicians, military brass, and academics to work toward a unified vision of the future. This was in marked contrast to earlier fairs, where trade exhibiters competed to present the best products or inventions and the most compelling vision of progress. At the 1933 World’s Fair, progress was the product of collective enterprise and corporate image making.
Much of The 1933 Chicago World's Fair is about how fair organizers managed this collective undertaking. With some exceptions, the fair unfolded as a top-down enterprise, led by civic boosters and business leaders, notably banker Rufus C. Dawes, who served as president of the fair and whose brother Charles G. Dawes had been vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. Although the decision to hold a second world’s fair in Chicago took place before the stock market crashed in 1929, Rufus Dawes was committed from the outset, and especially after the Depression set in, to highlighting the credibility, leadership, and civic-mindedness of the nation's—and the city's—business community. In fact, the fair did succeed in boosting Chicago’s economy between 1933 and 1934, a result, Ganz suggests, of the organizational acumen that Dawes and his colleagues brought to the undertaking. In this respect, the most instructive illustration in the book is an organizational chart that fair leaders developed to guide their work. Populated by managers, directors, departments, and assistants, the chart reflects the corporate ethos that pervaded the fair, and suggests how modern business enterprise was able to package the future.
Ganz's account is most compelling when it focuses on the futuristic environment that the fair’s corporate partners helped to create. From a visual perspective, the sleek design—captured in the book by handsome color illustrations—represented the fair’s stylized version of progress: modernist architecture; innovative use of lighting and color; a space-age cable car called the Sky Ride; and fantastic representations of natural phenomena, such as an outdoor astronomical display held at the Hall of Science, which was funded by General Electric and Westinghouse Electric. Although Ganz highlights the level of support that the fair received from the business community, she does not fully address what it meant that corporations like General Motors or AT&T shaped the vision of progress that visitors encountered at the fair. This is a missed opportunity, since the dream world that emerged at the 1933 fair raises important questions about the fair’s capacity to reinforce or reshape cultural attitudes about technology, science, and the future.
Ironically, Ganz suggests at the outset that the fair's most popular attraction may have been more about sexual fantasy than any brave new future. In chapter one, she profiles dancer Sally Rand, whose sensationalized performances drew large crowds, provoked legal authorities, and helped publicize the fair. Her account deliberately evokes the "hootchy-kootchy" shows that fairgoers encountered on the Midway of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. But having made this connection, Ganz does not explain—as historians of the Exposition have done in juxtaposing the Midway and the White City—how such a sexually charged show could coexist with the fair's high-minded vision of technological progress. A similar criticism goes for her concluding chapters on how women, African Americans, and ethnic Americans were—or were not—represented at the fair. Here, and throughout the book, Ganz is more descriptive than analytic, and she stops short of providing a sustained interpretation of the fair's broader cultural significance. On this point, it is worth noting that The 1933 World's Fair includes very little discussion of historiography, which has the effect of insulating the book from the issues and questions that have informed other studies of world’s fairs.
Nonetheless, readers interested in the history of Chicago, the relation between business and culture, and, yes, world's fairs should find The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair a useful addition to the field.