Robert W. Rydell

In All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, Robert W. Rydell argues, “The web of world’s fairs that stretched across the widening economic fault lines of American society between 1876 and 1916 reflected the efforts by America’s intellectual, political, and business leaders to establish a consensus about their priorities and their vision of progress as racial dominance and economic growth” (pg. 8). To this end, Rydell examines the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, the New Orleans, Atlanta, and Nashville Expositions, the 1898 Omaha Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, the 1904 Saint Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Expositions in Portland and Seattle, and the Expositions in San Francisco and San Diego. Rydell backs up his claims about the fairs’ influence with attendance figures, excerpts from letters and diaries, and promotional materials that circulated around the country.
Of the 1876 Centennial Expo, Rydell writes, “Rather than merely offering an escape from the economic and political uncertainties of the Reconstruction years, the fair was a calculated response to these conditions. Its organizers sought to challenge doubts and restore confidence in the vitality of America’s system of government as well as in the social and economic structure of the country” (pg. 11). He continues, “In the course of planning the exposition, the role of scientists, especially those of the Smithsonian, expanded until, at crucial junctures, the histories of the Centennial and American science became interwoven” (pg. 20). The Smithsonian’s propagation of scientific racism continued through subsequent fairs and helped establish the defense of American imperialism. In this way, Rydell concludes of the Columbian Exposition, “The fair did not merely reflect American racial attitudes, it grounded them on ethnological bedrock” (pg. 55). The southern fairs helped to heal sectional differences lingering after the Civil War, even going so far as to include Civil War reunions. Further, the creation of hierarchical displays of “types” of humanity reinforced existing racism (pg. 101). Rydell writes of them, “In the closing decades of the century, the southern fairs succeeded in reintroducing antebellum imperial dreams to millions of fairgoers” (pg. 104). The Omaha fair, following the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, “provided ideological scaffolding for mass support of the government’s imperial policies” (pg. 108). This continued in Buffalo, where “the colonial exhibit at the exposition, in short, would generate support in the United States for maintaining and extending America’s colonial empire” (pg. 139). Rydell writes, “Inside the exposition, ethnological displays and midway attractions with ethnological attributes gave this historical and utopian narrative a basis in received scientific and pseudoscientific wisdom” (pg. 131). The Saint Louis exposition continued this, where, according to Rydell, lectures from W. J. McGee, an anthropologist, “vindicated American national experience and synthesized the works of leading evolutionary thinkers including Darwin, Powell, and Spencer. The lectures offered a vision of racial progress that made cultural advance synonymous with increased industrial expansion” (pg. 161). This advance appeared in exhibits arranged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that portrayed Native Americans as a once-great civilization now disappearing to make way for industrialism. The Pacific-Northwest expositions “focused national attention on the possibilities for economic growth through the development of trans-Pacific market while providing the region and nation with visions of racial progress” (pg. 185). The California fairs continued this utopian vision, but “at California’s fairs, however, the vision of utopia rested squarely on the application of scientific racial categories to selected white and nonwhite populations alike” (pg. 219). Rydell concludes, “Largely as a result of the expositions, nationalism and racism became crucial parts of the legitimizing ideology offered to a nation torn by class conflict” (pg. 236). Furthermore, “Far from simply reflecting American culture, the expositions were intended to shape that culture. They left an enduring vision of empire” (pg. 237).… (mehr)

In World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, Robert W. Rydell argues that, like Victorian world’s fairs, “America’s depression-era world’s fairs similarly became cultural icons for the nation’s hopes and future” (pg. 1). Following the worldwide market crash at the end of the 1920s, world’s fairs offered “millions of people the prospect of salvation from the depression” through exhibits that highlighted how science and capitalism would reshape the world (pg. 6). Rydell concludes, “If America’s Victorian-era fairs represented an effort to make American modern, America’s depression-era fairs represented a drive to modernize America by making it an ever more perfect realization of an imperial dream world of abundance, consumption, and social hierarchy based on the reproduction of existing power relations premised on categories of race and gender” (pg. 9). Rydell draws extensively on Roland Marchand’s work examining the role of advertising in interwar America.
Rydell argues that world’s fairs helped Americans to accept their new imperial role by demonstrating how the resources of empire reflected the organization of a corporation (pg. 18). Furthermore, “World’s fairs accustomed fairgoers to thinking of advertising as integral to the city beautiful” (pg. 26). Those who did not invest heavily in advertising quickly found themselves in debt for their exhibition. Regarding race, Rydell writes, “By the turn of the century, and certainly by the second decade of the century, world’s fairs were well established as one of the most effective vehicles for transmitting ideas of scientific racism from intellectual elites to millions of ordinary Americans” (pg. 39). This they accomplished through well-publicized eugenics projects, including the search for the typical American family and for those that best exemplified the ideal members of the white race. This same idea easily leant itself to the concept of coloniale moderne
Rydell writes, “Rooted in the exotic fascination with the ‘Other’ cultivated at European fairs before the Great War, coloniale moderne – a conjuncture of modernistic architectural styles and representations of imperial policies that stressed the benefits of colonialism to colonizer and colonized alike – developed from the desire by European imperial authorities to decant the old wine of imperialism into new bottles bearing the modernistic designs of the interwar years” (pg. 62). This metaphor notwithstanding, the concept represented a linkage of a nation’s past with its glorious future. Science represented the culmination of this. According to Rydell, “The message that science was modern man’s salvation and that the scientist-engineer was priest, if not savior” dominated many of the exhibitions, especially the Halls of Science (pg. 99). Even the multiple stripteases featured in the exhibitions reaffirmed this vision of a glorious future. Rydell writes, “By suffusing the world of tomorrow with highly charged male sexual fantasies, the century-of-progress exhibitions not only reconfirmed the status of women as object of desire, but represented their bodies as showcases that perfectly complimented displays of futuristic consumer durables everywhere on exhibit at the fairs” (pg. 117). In terms of race, Rydell writes, “The fairs of the 1920s and 1930s had revealed persistent patterns of racial exclusion and discrimination. Barely welcomed as consumers and certainly not as citizens in these futuristic world’s fair cities, African Americans had far less reason than whites to take at face value promises about the ‘dawn of a new day’” (pg. 192). Though the world’s fairs of the interwar years projected an image of a bright future based on the advances of science and business, they closely reflected the ideology of the time in which they occurred.… (mehr)

An extended essay on the rise of American mass culture and how it erupted into the world, the authors present this as the result of nation-girdling technology (the railroad, telegraph, etc.) helping to foment the rise of the corporation, while at the same time the impact of the American Civil War bred the imperative to create a national culture that would hopefully unify the wider population (using racial scapegoating if all else failed), help create social peace, and be profitable. The point then becomes that the resulting product was relatively easy to export to the world, if only because the producers were used to marketing to a heterodox population.

Using such exemplars of the American entertainment industry as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and "The Birth of a Nation" (D.W. Griffith’s paen to the White Republic and the repudiation of Reconstruction), the authors then examine the political import of it all, and the initial impact on the European scene. The ultimate consummation of American Mass Culture as a force to be reckoned is thus seen to arrive with the propaganda apparatus created during the Great War by the Wilson Administration, whereupon the great American entertainment machine is used as one more instrument of state.

If I have a particular problem with this work, which effectively juggles a great many themes, it’s that it seems a little weak on the actual broad response to the arrival of American mass culture in Europe. I enjoy reading about European intellectuals wringing their hands over the pollution of their cultural heritage as much as the next person, but I really would like to know more about how typical people responded to arrival of the new cultural options. Seeing as one of the main points of this book is that Americanization was not simply a side affect of the American hegemony after World War II, there is almost a need for a “pre-history” of the American cultural image in the perception of the European general public.

I would also note that before reading this work you would do yourself a favor by reading Alexander Saxton's "The Rise and Fall of the White Republic," which the authors lean heavily on as a source.… (mehr)