The World’s Fairs of the late 19th and early 20th century were mirrors of an emerging mass culture and the increasing (and increasingly brutal) involvement of the West in the fate of other nations and cultures. As scholars have pointed out and Astrid Böger is certain to affirm in “Envisioning the Nation,” their significance extends beyond the reflection of such changes; they were instrumental in the process of enacting these transformations and explaining them to national audiences. Reaching millions of visitors, the expositions helped create common identities and at the same time provoked diverse and ambivalent popular reactions.
Böger, whose current projects include a publication on the James Bond phenomenon, is a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Hamburg. “Envisioning the Nation” is the published version of her Habilitationsschrift or second book. The study provides an immensely valuable overview of the large World’s Fairs held in the United States prior to World War I: New York (1853), Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), St. Louis (1904) and San Francisco (1915).
The author has divided each treatment of the individual expositions into identical subchapters: Site and Architecture, Exhibits and Technology, Fine Arts, Literature. Unquestionably, this approach is extremely beneficial for comparative purposes: A consecutive reading of the Fine Arts chapters, for example, renders an excellent summary of the development of American Art with respect to the European avant-garde. “Envisioning the Nation” is filled with instances of “translatio studii,” through which fair organizers and interpreters measured American progress in relation to the nation’s European peers, repeating manifestations of “high culture” while at the same time aiming for unique expressions of their own. Observing the fairground from an aerial view in a short promotional film1 on the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 – I mention this early movie again below – one cannot help but feel reminded of the skyline of Florence (or baroque cities such as the former Dresden) rather than a modern American city.
Whereas Böger relies on secondary literature and eminent World’s Fairs scholars such as Robert Rydell for the more traditional subchapters, her original research on the literature about the expositions – poems, journals, novels etc. – reveals stunning details about the popular perceptions of the fairs. Appropriately, she is also willing – and as an American Studies scholar more willing than most historians would be – to view these sources as a particularly rich space for interpreting the fairs, “an open discursive field in which new social visions – and the realities frequently contradicting them – are articulated, called into question or openly contested” (p. 20). Especially rewarding is Böger’s analysis of literary sequels covering more than one fair, such as Charles M. Stevens’ “Uncle Jeremiah” and the vernacular “Samantha” series by Marietta Holley, a largely forgotten bestseller writer.
The World’s Fairs in the United States have attracted varying attention by scholars, and Böger’s chapter on the “Crystal Palace” exposition in New York in 1853 prior to the Civil War stands out because it demonstrates that this fair, a follow-up on the original Crystal Palace exposition in London two years earlier, has wrongly been overlooked by earlier studies. The exposition pioneered the P.T. Barnum-inspired entertainment section featured in all subsequent fairs and broke the ground for (not yet industrial) product design as one of the key links between economics and culture in the technological age. Decades before the Exposition Universelle de Paris, it featured the Eiffel-Tower-like Latting Observatory, whose first modern elevator foreshadowed the rise of the skyscraper. The view from 350 feet up high in what is now Midtown Manhattan allowed visitors a glimpse into the 20th century.
Significantly, Böger states, each World’s Fair produced innovations in visualization, both as technological and cultural achievements: “Through new perspectives, literally and figuratively, visitors were in a position to re-imagine their relationship to the surrounding culture thanks to what was widely acknowledged as American genius in engineering.” (p. 33) Through terms such as “panorama,” images and imagery infiltrated the language and converted into discourse, foreshadowing the rise of the spectacle and the visualization of culture – even before new techniques such as photographs and movies would claim dominance. It is this aspect of the World’s Fairs (indicated also in the title, “Envisioning the Nation”) which I consider to be the most innovative of Böger’s book, but it is also one which the author, an expert on visual cultures, could have pursued more fully. In the chapter on the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 – by now a well-worn subject – I had hoped to receive a fresh perspective from Böger’s analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel “Against the Day,” which partly takes place at the fair and also revolves around the motif of visual states such as light, but in her discussion (p. 167-168) she does not venture beyond a quotation from the book jacket – a tongue-in-the-cheek text Pynchon wrote about himself.
Understanding the fairs as “multi-media events” (p. 15), Böger details the use of photographs (and beginning in St. Louis, stereographs) and later films. She pays attention to the overall design of the fairs, culminating in the elaborate “color scheme” with special effects at the San Francisco fair, which apparently resulted in some kind of visual overload. She discusses “Uncle Jeremiah’s” fascinating encounter with General Electric’s Tower of Light in Chicago (p. 160-161), a moment of visual horror emphasizing the overwhelming novelty of much of the fairs’ new technologies. And yet, many of these impressions are addressed in different subchapters, and they sometimes appear fragmentary. The influence of the promotional film created by D. W. Griffith for the San Francisco fair on the evolvement of the medium can probably not be overstated but what should also be mentioned is the seemingly inexplicable success of “Stella,” the simple painting of a nude woman in the entertainment section, which cost an “admission fee” of ten cents (even though paintings of nudes were shown for free at the Palace of Fine Arts) and reportedly took in $75,000 in revenues.2 The commodification of early visual spectacles was not necessarily tied to new media; most certainly, it warrants further study.
In his book on the St. Louis fair, James Gilbert devotes an entire chapter to the discussion of a single photograph3 – a highly readable analysis of the contingency of imperial experiences. While this method seems to represent one extreme of visual interpretation, Böger’s study demonstrates the potential of an opposite approach: this one aimed at synthesis, examining the evolvement of American visual cultures through the lens of the expositions. Such an endeavor was not the purpose of Böger’s book, however, which is much broader in scope and will leave a long-lasting mark in the field of comparative study of World’s Fairs in the United States and beyond.
Notes:
1 <http://www.archive.org/details/StoryofJ1915> (accessed February 18, 2011). The spelling is case-sensitive.
2 See Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, New York 1921, p. 374.
3 See James Gilbert, Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition, Chicago 2009, p. 123-152; see Alexander Missal: Rezension zu: Gilbert, James: Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition. Chicago 2009, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 08.03.2010, <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2010-1-175>.