Fair Trade
As national centennials go, “sesquis” and “semis” can be a tough sell, if the epic fails of massive fairs intended to celebrate them are any indication. For those of us gray enough at the temples to remember the jubilant bicentennial celebrations of 1976, the collective shrug with which Americans have greeted this year’s semiquincentennial is all the more surprising. The bicentennial hoopla of ’76 worked wonders for a nation desperate to forget the traumas of Watergate and Vietnam. Perhaps the timing is just off for this one.
For anyone long enough in the tooth to remember 1926 and the quixotic attempt to commemorate the nation’s sesquicentennial with a desultory international exposition in Philadelphia that year, watching the tumbleweeds roll across the empty expanse of the National Mall during this summer’s Great American State Fair (along with mercifully brief glimpses of the half-hearted state showrooms) must have felt like déjà vu.
Philadelphia’s forgettable sesquicentennial exposition of 1926 was nominally intended to invoke glorious memories of the city’s Centennial International Exposition of 1876, which drew nearly 10 million visitors—more than 20% of the national population—during its 6-month run. This was a remarkable attendance figure, given that in 1876, as in the next few decades, a city’s viability for hosting a world’s fair was typically evaluated in terms of how many potential paying customers could be realistically expected to attend via a train ride of less than 12 hours.
The 1876 fair offered Americans a chance to tour the right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty; their first glimpses of a working telegraph, telephone, and typewriter; an opportunity to view and experience the awesome power of the Corliss steam engine that would revolutionize American heavy industry and that powered most of the fair’s other running machines; and virtual visits to 37 countries through their pavilions, at a time when international travel was available only to the very wealthy. Like other great world’s fairs, the 1876 exposition not only provided spectacle, excitement, exposure, and education; it also served as the greatest platform imaginable for fashioning and promoting a nation’s image of itself. Historian Fergus Bordewich described Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition as “a phantasmagorical theater of national glory, vaster and grander than anything ever before seen in America.”
Philadelphia’s sesqui, by comparison, presented not so much a vision of future possibilities or epic grandeur than a nod to past glories and a salute to mundanities of Main Street, USA. The fair drew roughly half the attendance of the 1876 fair from a country more than twice as large, and as sesqui chronicler Thomas H. Keels writes, “Perhaps it was lucky that more people didn’t come, because the Sesqui was both a financial and imaginative failure. It was a self-satisfied celebration, designed to delight the Sinclair Lewis protagonist George F. Babbitt, reflecting his petit bourgeois love of patriotic bunting, military bands, and multicolored bathroom fixtures. Yet even the Babbitts were bored by the Sesqui.” Sound familiar?
The Bureau International des Expositions did give the U.S. a mulligan of sorts on the sesqui. The team that conceived the 1939 New York World’s Fair envisioned it as marking the 150th anniversary of the nation’s “real” founding: April 30, 1789, the day of George Washington’s first inauguration at Federal Hall in New York City. Maybe we can follow their lead and revisit America250 and the Great American State Fair concept in 2039 and see if it goes any better.
Though hardly built on a promising foundation (the Flushing Meadows garbage dump F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably dubbed the “valley of ashes”), the 1939 New York World’s Fair emphatically billed itself as the opposite of the ill-fated Philadelphia sesqui. Fair developers chose “The World of Tomorrow” as the expo’s tagline and “boldly, bravely presented a mind-boggling vision of the Future,” according to Twilight at the World of Tomorrow author James Mauro.
Though the heyday of world’s fairs was fading by 1939, along with the imperial age and the invaluable stage for colonial propaganda the fairs provided, New York’s expo delighted and dazzled and packed in the crowds nonetheless. But it also foreshadowed the passing of the era of state-sponsored expositions. When The World of Tomorrow reopened for its second season in 1940, it bore unmistakable earmarks of the war-torn world of its own time, with the pavilions of Nazi-occupied Poland and France draped in black.
What kept the turnstiles turning at Flushing Meadows in 1939–1940 were sizable and enormously popular corporate exhibits like General Motors’ Futurama (a dazzling journey through the futuristic world of 1960), the Westinghouse pavilion with its 7-foot talking and chain-smoking robot Elektro, RCA’s home theater-like Radio Living Room of Tomorrow, and Bell Labs’ Pedro the VODer (Voice Operation Demonstrator), a device that spoke with a synthesized human voice.
New York’s 1964–1965 World’s Fair, also at Flushing Meadows, delivered more of the same, with its acreage almost equally divided between corporate exhibits and Disney-developed marvels like the animatronic Abe Lincoln and It’s a Small World ride, which debuted at the fair.
The latter proved a self-fulfilling prophecy: As the world got smaller and international travel and media provided more immediate means of seeing simulacra of the world than half-day train rides, the exotic appeal of international pavilions lost much of its luster. Disney World and other theme parks replaced the fairs’ popular midways, and Disney’s own EPCOT effectively froze the late-model world’s fair experience in time. Meanwhile, global trade shows stole the international expos’ thunder when it came to showcasing cutting-edge tech.
Even as technology trade shows like IBC, which opens at RAI Amsterdam just as this issue goes to press, atomize those experiences by industry rather than packaging them for popular consumption, they promise “see the world of tomorrow” excitement without the nationalistic and imperialistic baggage associated with it at many of the world’s fairs of the 19th and 20th century. (Amsterdam’s own 1883 world’s fair was not only the first to have “Colonial” in its title, but also inaugurated and normalized the horrifying practice of exhibiting colonial subjects in “human zoos.”)
IBC 2026 carries a “world of tomorrow”-like promise in its tagline “The Future Starts Here.” Moreover, it is sure to feature an array of 21st-century AI-enabled heirs to Pedro the VODer, with one keynote delivered by an AI-generated actor (alongside her creator). Another keynote will look at delivering the “news of tomorrow” with a focus on AI-powered automation banishing more and more humans from the loop, as well as deep-fakery and algorithmic bias that might have seemed less dazzlingly futuristic than terrifyingly dystopian to 20th-century fairgoers.
But at least IBC and other international tech trade shows like NAB continue to aim for more than “sesqui”- or “Great American State Fair”-style Babbittry, and with no national images to fashion or national moods to manifest, the stakes are much lower.
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