All the World's a Fair

Robert W. Rydell. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.

During the forty year period covered in this study, various cities--led by prominent business leaders and capitalists, with a great deal of support from various Federal government agencies--hosted a series of International Expositions which served to both promote American industrial growth and expansion. Rydell's study analyzes the ways in which these world fairs, held over four decades in every region of the country, were ideologically unified around certain key. Most notably, the use of racial categorizing and racism sanctioned by science and governmental authority to defuse class conflict and qualms about aggressive expansion by industrial capitalism at home and abroad.

The degree to which "scientific racism" underpinned the ongoing project is remarkable--Rydell's study is organized chronologically into a neat chapter-by-chapter recounting of each fair, but there is a great deal of narrative continuity due both to the fact that many of the same "experts" from the worlds of science, public architecture, and eventually popular entertainment were repeatedly called on, but also in the ways the promoters of each fair returned to the same themes of "progress" and racial hierarchy. The "United States" which was posited as taking role on the world stage in these fairs was an explicitly Anglo-Saxon nation, one which was increasingly optimistic and assertive of the necessity and benefit of assuming the "White Man's Burden".

The degree to which the world of popular entertainment was originally shunned (the directors of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition actually called on the city government to remove the outlying district of popular exhibits which sprung up around the official fair in order to cater to the crowds coming and going) only later to be tolerated, and then finally welcomed into the official grounds demonstrates the degree to which fair organizers grew to develop a notion of hegemony and an ability to establish the parameters of acceptable debate and rhetoric. Even as the forces of labor were often co-opted by appeals to white racial loyalty, the public at large was presented with a pageant of national progress and greatness in which racial hierarchies--and the "natural" supremacy and dominance of the White race ("whiteness" itself still being a highly contested and shifting category in the period)--seemed obvious and inarguable. The fairs were entertaining and popular, but they served the ideological ends of their promoters far beyond their limited capacity to earn dividends and profit.