1930's Fair Culture

The 1930’s were a time when social changes were happening at a much faster pace than in recent years passed. The fair culture of America was also changing. It was sort of evolving into what was to become an unrecognizable creation, both in the physical sense and the ideological sense. The fairs of the 1930’s however, while being the first time in history where we see large additions of amusement without purpose, as in today’s massive regional amusement parks. The old splendor of educational dioramas and panoramas of lands in the four corners of the earth was quickly disappearing. The 1939-1940 World’s Fair, held in Flushing Meadows, was undoubtedly the flagship fair, escorting out the traditions of the past and harmonizing the remaining
ones with a new kind of spectacle that included rides and used nudity abundantly to attract attention. The 1939 fair was not the first to begin incorporating some of the new attractions or building techniques. However, it did take the successes of the previous nine or so years and used them collectively and on a much larger scale than ever before. The first great World’s Fair of the 1930’s was first thought about around 1923 and was officially in the planning since late 1927. It was to be Chicago hosting its second World’s Fair and was given the unconvincing working name, “Chicago’s Second World’s Fair.” A three mile strip of land bordering Lake Michigan, only a quarter of a mile wide, was chosen as the site of the second fair. The fair’s board of directors decided to stray from the traditional historical theme to focus more on man’s recent giant strides in the sciences. This led to the choosing of the much more appealing name “A Century of Progress” in June 1929.
Four months later, in October 1929, the stock market crashed. As the fair was already in its second year of planning, the board of directors took the road of continuing preparations to hold the fair in 1933, Chicago’s one hundred year anniversary. The men on this board of directors were from various parts of society, each one more influential in his field than the next. The chairman of the board was an obscenely wealthy oil tycoon and banker named Rufus Dawes. Not only was he able to help financially, but he also had tremendous political pull by way of his brother. Charles G. Dawes was the vice president under Calvin Coolidge for the first two years of the fair’s planning. The plethora of connections that were available to the fair’s planners because of this greatly helped the fair idea become reality in the face of increasingly deteriorating economic conditions.
However, they did not choose to request any direct government subsidization for fair costs. This allowed the government to dedicate one million dollars to the United States pavilion. The board of directors chose instead to raise money by creating an organization called the “Chicago World’s Fair Legion”, which raised awareness about the fair as well as $634,000 through the sale of memberships. In addition to private fund-raising, the board raised money publicly by issuing $10 million in bonds that were to be paid back with interest. Unfortunately, because of the severity of the economic situation, the relative longevity of the problem, and only modest profits, some of the bonds were never able to be paid. There were also some smaller additions to the fundraising, including the sale of concessionary contracts, which all together amounted to approximately $6 million. This fair was beginning to see an increased corporate presence, something rarer in previous fairs, but becoming more and more common as the decade went on. The New York World’s Fair at the end of the decade was the pinnacle in that sense.
After fundraising, the next task to be conquered was to plan the layout of the fairgrounds. To better accomplish this, the board appointed a team of architects to tackle the challenge of what the fair would look like. One of the major obstacles faced by the architectural commission was planning around a large body of water at the north end. Next, the look of the buildings was to be decided. Although the architectural team was led by son of the Columbian Exposition’s head organizer, he chose to move away from his father’s example. Instead the architects adopted a more modern style, one that had been tried successfully in Europe, to replace the neoclassical architecture of the Columbian Expostion. They decided to design buildings that would represent the scientific progress being celebrated.
There were two very notable structures designed for the Century of Progress Exposition by Daniel H. Burnham Jr. and his architectural team. First was the massive Travel and Transport Building. It followed a pretty straightforward art deco architectural style, until one looked at the roof. To create extra space in the building, the architectural commission of the fair created a roof that was supported from above rather than below, thereby eliminating space-consuming columns and supports. It was held up by a series of two and a half inch thick cables and was able to be raised and lowered by a foot and a half, depending on the weather. Unlike many other products of the progressive minds of the fair planners, the technology was never adopted on a larger scale in the future. The engineers also designed a cable car ride, the Sky Ride, which took fairgoers from one end of the narrow fairgrounds to the other, passing over the pond at the northern end of the fair. It was held up by two, 628 foot tall supports at each end and named Amos and Andy after the characters on a hugely popular, but openly racially stereotypical radio show. The Sky Ride’s success opened the door to future rides at World’s Fairs and helped serve, as the fair itself also did, to be a transitional element in the changing fairs.
New York’s experienced theatrical set designer Joseph Urban was hired by the board to add drama to their architectural creations. The onset of the Great Depression forced the board of directors to cut the original architectural budget substantially, leading to less building materials and smaller buildings. Urban’s expertise was significant in helping hide shrinking in scale of the fair. His background in set design on Broadway and at the New York Metropolitan Opera gave him the knowledge to suggest that the buildings be built in a style that used proportions and lighting to deceive gazing eyes. This technique is something that influenced the building of Disney World’s characteristic castle. The sites zoning laws prohibit structures beyond a certain height, so in order to make the castle look taller, architects adopted the same technique as the planners of the Century of Progress and changed the natural proportions of the spires so that upon gazing skywards, the structures look significantly taller.
Urban brought still more pioneering techniques into the realm of World’s Fairs.
He is one of the most important individuals in the changing nature of World’s Fairs because he was instrumental in bringing techniques from the world of live performance into the fairs. This was one of the first steps of turning the fair experience into a kind of Broadway show with no stage or seats. One in which the visitors became less and less interested in being amazed by new inventions, but would rather see some sort of live performance or be thrilled by the look and sheer size of the thing. As one of the pioneering fairs in this sense, the board used very progressive techniques that would be used again in the next generation of fairs as well as in the present age of amusement parks. They used flat windowless walls, cheap building materials, a wide spectrum of bright colors as well as dramatic lighting in a way that was to reappear time and time again, most notably at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The progress in lighting schemes, especially those used in fountains and on buildings, was another adoption supported by a positive response in Barcelona’s and Seville’s fair in 1929. General Electric and Westinghouse Corporation were collectively responsible for the lighting at the fair. They used colored lighting, as well as indirect lighting effectively to inspire awe among the curious visitors. Going a step beyond the Spanish fairs, the lighting designers used gas-filled tube lighting for the first time. In one ingenious example of cost efficiency, plans for a waterfall were scrapped and replaced with a significantly less expensive waterfall made of green and blue tube lighting that stood fifty-five feet
tall.
Another change pioneered by the Century of Progress was the elimination of a clearly defined amusement area, again a transition to the future amusement-only theme parks. In contrast to previous fairs, while there still officially was a Midway, “amusement attractions” were found throughout the grounds and were in no short supply. One newly modified amusement attraction found at the Century of Progress was the mechanized diorama. Although dioramas and panoramas were characteristic of World’s Fairs, this was the first and surely not the last in which they became mechanized. As per those at the Chicago fair, the New York “animatronics” firm of Messmore and Damon were commissioned to create them. At the 1939 World’s Fair, designers were to go as far as to create a robot that could not only talk and move, but smoke cigarettes as well. While none of this may be impressive to the average person today, in the 1930’s these inventions were seen as revolutionary, inspiring awe and excitement in all those who saw them.
Another huge step in the history of the fairs was the inclusion of a fully nude vaudeville act. In this act, vaudeville dancer Sally Rand completely covered her nude body in white powder and danced provocatively with two large ostrich fans. As a sort of climax to the performance, she lifted the fans above her head, revealing her fully white, and fully nude, figure. This act attracted scores of both men and women and simultaneously outraged others, although the controversy probably only added to the exposure that the act and the fair were receiving. Its popularity encouraged future fairs to include nude shows on a much larger scale, as was the case at the New York World’s Fair, where there was a large effort concentrated on including full and partial nudity. The world’s fairs were broadening their already wide array of choices of attractions, but eventually ended up moving further and further away from the model of the earlier world’s fairs. In the years to come, these choices were to move very far in opposite directions; one towards adult entertainment and another towards entertainment geared towards children and teenagers. A great example was the five-acre playground for young children, in contrast to the vaudeville show going on at the opposite end of the fair.
In a more ideological arena, the fair organizers at the Century of Progress, as well as at all the other fairs of the decade, racism was not eliminated. The country was still in an era where seeing the white man as superior to the black man was a common way of thought. While there were efforts at some fairs to have, say a “negro day,” or a speech from a prominent African American figure, in all reality there was no tangible progress being made. Blacks were usually not even found working on the construction of the fair, but were only allowed to hold menial positions such as porters and maids. Another job available to blacks at the Century of Progress included working as the person that got dunked into a large water tank at a game called “African Dips” where customers got to throw balls at a target that upon being hit dropped the person into the water. Still another was “Darkest Africa” in which Africans were displayed as barbaric savages. Amid growing division within the African American community and growing unrest from those in opposition to the racism at the Century of Progress, the state government passed not a law, but a resolution that frowned upon racially-driven discrimination. While this caused the fair’s managers to take the complaints more seriously, not much really changed. Similarly, two years later at the Dallas’ Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936, there was to be further racial controversy. After fighting to secure just a portion of what had been originally allocated by the government for designing and building a “Hall of Negro Life,” all that resulted was the construction of an unattractive building that despite what it housed still had “colored” signs adorning the rest room door. After strong protest from the large African American community of Texas, led by the government-appointed manager of the hall Jesse D. Thomas, the signs were removed and they became the only integrated bathrooms at the fair. The shuttle buses used to transport fairgoers about the grounds also were integrated. However, the hall itself was the only building demolished before the end of the year, only to be replaced by the pavilion of Latin American culture. The other American fair before 1939 was the Cleveland Great Lakes Exposition of 1936-1937. This fair never even built a pavilion dedicated to African American progress.
The New York fair of 1939 had many similarities with the other fairs of the decade. Although things as blatantly racial as the “African Dip” were excluded from this fair, there was still very little done in terms of racially discriminatory hiring practices. The lack of jobs available to African American laborers was partially due to the fact that the head of the world’s fair commission was the politically conservative Grover Whalen. However, this attitude’s acceptance is a clear reflection on society’s views on racism at the time. Although Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia intervened, the result was merely a small improvement. Instead of following the example of the Century of Progress and having another “Negro Day,” fair managers agreed on the slightly less menial “Negro Week” at which W.E.B. DuBois made a speech. Other than the musical performances that included one by and all-black women’s chorus, no real progressive steps were taken in this fair either.
At about the same time that the California Pacific International Exhibit of 1935 was getting underway and partially because of the success of the Century of Progress, city leaders in New York began toying with the idea of having another World Fair. They also saw the fair as an opportunity to give the city and economic boost that could possibly be a stepping stone out of the depression that had been plaguing the country for half a dozen years. The fair organizers wanted to, and did, focus on the hope of a positive future during a time of great uncertainty. This idea though can be seen as a precursor to the way that mass media has become a sort of voluntary distraction to everyday citizens. People were beginning to bury their heads in the sands of entertainment to avoid becoming stressed about any sort of national or international crises that may be taking place. This material superficiality has since become something very characteristic of American culture.
Three very influential New Yorkers began to work on planning the fair. George McAneny, head of the Regional Planning Association, Grover Whalen, former police commissioner, and Percy Straus, the president of Macy’s, all were to head the board of directors. They chose 1939 as the year that the fair was to be held because of its historical significance. It was the 150th anniversary of the year that the nation’s first president, George Washington, was inaugurated in the then-capital, New York.
By 1935, made up mostly of influential businessmen, the rest of the large board of directors was formed. They were influenced by the corporate practice of advertisement and, with economic goals in mind, aggressively started a massive public relations campaign. The board was to experience some internal disagreement early on regarding the theme of the fair. On one side were the traditionalists who wanted to keep the fair more historically oriented, while on the other side were the functionalists who were more interested in holding an even more progressive exposition than any other before it. It was agenda of the functionalists led by Michael Meredith Hare, secretary of the Municipal Art League, Harvey Wiley Corbett, an architect on the Century of Progress architectural committee, and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, that would prevail. They wanted to hold a “Fair of the Future” that would glorify the technological past of the future rather than of the past. They also wanted to emphasize how this progress was going to benefit the fairgoers directly in the years to come, as the technology became cheaper and more available.
To better visually signify that this was a forward rather than backward-looking fair, the board of directors chose two of the great architectural minds of the time, Walter Dorwin Teague and Robert Kohn, act as part of the design team. They were to be the ones that would collaborate to come up with the motto “Building the World of Tomorrow,” which clearly and accurately put forward the main idea of the fair. They also combined to come up with the organizational plan separating the site into seven sectors. Each section corresponded to a different part of modern life; government, production and distribution, transportation, communication, food, community interests, and of course amusement. Then in May 1936, the official design board was created. It was made up of seven conservative members that were eventually given substantial leeway in deciding the architectural style of the fair. The board was led by president of the American Institute of Architects, the ultraconservative Stephen F. Voorhees. Also among the notable names on the design board were Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and Henry Dreyfuss. The freedom that they gained by way of Walter Teague’s influence allowed them to make what they designed at the fair as modernistic as they could imagine.
Another person with tremendous influence was the Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. It was his vision of turning Flushing Meadows, an ash and refuse dump at the time, into the site of a glorious World’s Fair to rival even the greatest fairs of Europe. His vision was to develop the site into a 1,216 acre park that would be as great as Central Park and become the second largest World’s Fair site, behind that of Saint Louis. The idea was approved and by March of 1937, the look of the fair was beginning to take shape.
The centerpieces of the fair were to be those two structures most commonly associated with World’s Fairs, the Trylon and the Perisphere. Both were white examples of architectural shapes not found in cities and certainly never seen before at any previous fair. The 180 foot in diameter Perisphere was to hold the theme exhibit called “Democracity.” Henry Dreyfuss created the exhibit, and it turned out to be an even more progressive kind of diorama than the mechanized ones at the Century of Progress. Its interior was supposed to be a Utopian model of an urban space in the year 2039. It was surrounded by a balcony complete with two moving staircases. From here viewers were able to gaze down at a six minute show, full of strong political overtones, during which the sky went from day to night and back again, accompanied by the sound of a thousand marching people and then their picture being projected onto the ceiling. The show was intended to be a symbolic representation of democracy’s eventual emergence from the pains of the Great Slump and the Second World War. An important trend that seemed to emerge here was the use of entertainment to put forward political messages. This is something commonly found in today’s culture with shows like the Colbert Report and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, that use their ability to entertain to spread political views, and whose popularity is still increasing. In an average day, some eight thousand visitors saw the Perisphere every hour. The Trylon was going to be a 610 foot tall, triangular prism-like structure that was connected to the Perisphere by a 950 foot spiral walkway, named the Helicline.
Other architecture at the fair took on an overall theme unlike any of previous fairs. It was dominated by geometric figures and there was a strong emphasis on lines that took art deco to a new level. There were endless examples of attempts to show progress by harmoniously incorporating examples of greatness from antiquity such as domes, pylons, and pyramids, with the success and advancement of modernity. Another architectural technique being used was one pioneered by the great New York architect Walter Dorwin Teague on the Ford Pavilion at the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935. It made use of plain walls, without windows, accentuated by bright colors. They were then illuminated electrically at night in order to make them stand out even more in the darkness. While the new technology allowed the option of using incandescent, fluorescent, indirect and tube lighting, the fair was still a learning experience on how to use light in sync with architecture.
As the presence of large corporations at the fair increased tremendously at this fair, those that wanted to exhibit his to comply with the themes of progress and the future. They had no problem with this though, as it was a publicity opportunity on the largest scale possible, and they simply incorporated their product into the intoxicating picture of the amazing world of the future that was being painted. The best example of this was the largest and most popular exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors’ Futurama, easily the most detailed as well as the largest diorama of any fair. Designed by Norman Bel Geddes as a vision on 1960, it focused mostly on the progress relating to infrastructure development, especially relating to highways and new levels of automobile performance and safety. Geddes believed strongly in his vision that “a free-flowing movement of people and goods across our nation is a requirement of modern living and prosperity.”
The Futurama was ready by the fair’s opening day on April 30th, 1939. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was present at the fair’s opening and during his commencement speech, he said "the eyes of the United States are fixed on the future. Our wagon is hitched to a star. But it is a star of good will, a star of progress for mankind, a star of greater happiness and less hardship, a star of international good will, and above all, a star of peace. May the months to come carry us forward in the rays of that hope." More than thirty thousand people stood in queue for hours to get to experience this prophetic glimpse into the future. Once done waiting in line, sat in chairs with built in speakers that narrated the experience that slowly moved across Geddes’ 35,000 foot vision of the future. The spectacle focused mostly on huge, multilane highways crossing the country. Its popularity is mostly because of the automobile’s recently increased availability and affordability. Also because at the time, there were only a few urban highways with much lower speed limits. The exhibit boasted speeds of 50, 75 and 100 mph in designated and separated lanes as well as effortless turns that required no reduction in speed. There was an emphasis that the city of 1960 would rid itself of large slum areas, to be replaced by huge vertical buildings and large open parks and community recreational centers and civic centers. It was to be a result of careful city planning.
This fair had a fairly original, 280 acre “Amusement Zone” that was to be renamed the “Great White Way” in 1940. Among the previously seen idea was a freak show called “We Humans” that didn’t return for a run in the fair’s second season. Erotic attractions were of course present as well, the most famous of which was the Living Magazine Covers exhibit. Among the newly conceived fair attractions was the immensely popular “Aquacade” starring two former Olympic swimmers and a synchronized swimming team, which along with the tethered parachute jump returned for a second season in 1940.
Despite the war in Europe and a 23.7 million dollar loss, fair managers decided to reopen the fair for a second season. They took the Keynesian approach of reducing admission from seventy five cents to fifty cents in order to stimulate attendance. However, the war in Europe forced many nations to shut down their pavilions that year and the international side of what was supposed to be a “world’s” fair vanished. Instead, visitors were encouraged to “travel America” at the fair. Denmark and Norway both withdrew their exhibits, the former being replaced by Iraq, a non belligerent, while the latter was maintained by the American organization, Friends of Norway. The new theme, “For Peace and Freedom” was adopted because of the circumstances as an early example of the American corporate attitude of exploiting tragic events to make a profit.
However, the second season saw attendance go down, and despite nineteen million visitors and five million dollars profit, the overwhelming losses of the first season heavily outweighed the small profit. There ended up being no money left over to follow through with Robert Moses’ planned improvements to Flushing Meadows Park. Soon after closing day, the metal salvaged after the buildings and monuments were taken apart were donated to be used as war materials.
On the physical side, the fair was torn down, however, the Westinghouse Corp. took on the task of creating a time capsule to capture and preserve the essence of American life in 1939. This is an example of how the people of the time were aware that their lifestyles were going to change significantly in the years to come. The time capsule was built with an alloy made of copper, chromium and silver called “Cupaloy” and shaped like an elongated bullet, seven feet six inches in length and eight and three eighths inches in diameter. It was meant to be retrieved five thousand years in the future and the contents were sealed in an airtight glass container. They were divided into five main categories of items; small articles of common use, textiles and materials, miscellaneous items, an essay in microfilm including contemporary art, literature, and lastly, a newsreel.
Three thousand “Books of Record” were produced on permanent paper with special ink in 1938 and were given to libraries, museums and monasteries throughout the world. The book contains an ingenious key to the English language to aid anyone who finds it in the future to locate the capsule, in case the English language is lost. The book has clues to find the capsules, as well as the latitude and longitude of the burial place and instructions for making and using instruments to locate the capsules electromagnetically. Along with clues, the book has requests such as a request for the book to be translated into new languages as they take prevalence over old ones. The fair did, however, become a huge boost to the newly forming idea of mass consumerism. It proved to be the last step in an era when the world’s fair served the masses as an inexpensive and all inclusive form of amusement. From here, world’s fairs continued to change, constantly straying away from the original purpose of educating the public about people different from themselves by way of fairly accurate, although many times ethnocentric means. The problem was an increasingly educated public and an increase in the power of corporations, mostly attributed to the economic growth they experienced during the wartime economy and thereafter. The fairs began to target more specific audiences. This was evident in the 1939 fair as it was one of the fairs of the 1930’s that made up this unique era in world’s fair history. It was a transitionary period that began to incorporate the traditional themes of the fair with the more modern, consumer-focused attitude that grew simultaneously with the renewal of strength experienced by capitalism during and after WWII. The idea of a World’s Fair became more closely associated with large corporate exhibits promoting their products of the future to possible consumers, as well as an increase of “gentlemanly” oriented shows. This use of nudity was one of the first examples of using sex appeal and sexuality to draw more attention, usually through controversy, and subsequently more profit. The exhibits became more polarized as an increased attention was paid to child amusement, which is what the 1964 fair can be very closely associated with.

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7) World of Tomorrow. DVD. Direct Cinema Limited, 2006