By James Pethokoukis and Charles Pappas

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States hosted World’s Fairs to demonstrate its technological ingenuity, economic prowess, and forward-thinking innovatism on the world’s stage. But no American city has hosted a World’s Fair since the 1980s. What happened to World’s Fairs? And will they return to the US? Charles Pappas joined a recent episode of “Political Economy” to answer those questions and more.

Charles is a senior writer at Exhibitor Magazine, where he covers trade shows and World’s Fairs, and the author of Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World’s Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: Are there still World’s Fairs? The US hasn’t hosted one in decades, and Americans don’t seem to know anything about them anymore.

Pappas: Most people sort of assume that attending a World’s Fair is something old people used to do. But a lot of the problem is that the access of World’s Fairs has moved from America and London and Paris over to what was, if you will, the “Third World” — to Shanghai, to Kazakhstan, and now to Dubai. It’s really an exercise in soft power for those countries and all the people who exhibit there, but ever since the debacle of the World’s Fair in 1984 in New Orleans, we have lost sight of them. And we sort of assume that nobody does them anymore.

New Orleans had the dubious distinction of going broke before the fair ended. And that really kind of crystallized the idea that fairs just can’t be run anymore, that there’s no attraction to them, that there’s nothing new they can show the way they used to. But as we’ve seen though, in the last few years, that’s been turned upside down, especially by Shanghai and now Dubai, where in a real way they’re bringing the future to the world.

When did what we would think of as a modern World’s Fair begin?

In 1851, the first real World’s Fair, “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” took place in London. Two British people, Matthew Wyatt and Henry Cole, got the idea that Britain could launch itself on the world’s stage. So they created a vast structure called the Crystal Palace, which was 1,851 feet long, 408 feet wide, and nine stories tall. They invited 14,000 exhibitors, 6,500 of which were from other countries. It created the modern idea of the World’s Fair, not just as a place to show products, but as a place to present the future and, not coincidentally, to exercise soft power nation-building. And ever since then, it’s segued into Paris, into Vienna, into the United States. And now it’s occurring in other parts of the world that want to launch themselves on the world’s stage and to establish themselves through this exhibition of power and ideas, and to communicate with the world what they’re all about.

What sort of impact did these early World’s Fairs have?

So imagine a person in 1851 who may never have traveled more than a few miles outside of their birthplace, who’s seeing a palace of glass and steel rods unlike anything ever done before. The Crystal Palace impressed itself on the consciousness of Britain as this extravagant, almost science-fiction idea of what architecture could be, of what Britain could be at that time. Roughly six million people came, in a time when the population of England itself was about 10 million.

One key point is the idea that everybody could have the benefit of this because of industrialization. So at the next World’s Fair, 1855 in Paris, almost everything you could see had a price tag on it, meaning you could go up and just buy it. And how amazing would that be in an era when so many things relied on craftspeople to make them individually — which has a beauty of its own, obviously, but there’s also a beauty in millions being able to join in and enjoy products that uplift their lives and make their labor a little easier. You start getting this kind of mass consumption of products and ideas that people can now use to make their lives better.

How did the World’s Fairs of the 20th century present the progress of technology and what happened to that techno-optimism?

I think the most important part of the 1939 World’s Fair was Futurama. General Motors created the world’s largest diorama: 36,000 square feet with two million trees of 18 different species; 50,000 miniature, Hot Wheels-sized automobiles, 10,000 of which could work; and thousands of skyscrapers. And what you saw was a gleaming city where many of the cars might be semi-automated. And this is the world you were going to have by 1960, it said. You came out of there with techno-optimism. You thought, “Technology can help meet the future. It can bring us into the future.” And then they almost sextupled the size of the one in ’39 for another Futurama at the 1964 World’s Fair.

Then the environmental movement was starting up and technology seemed to produce more problems than it solved. So by 1974, you have the first real ecologically-minded expo in Spokane where the US pavilion talked about the average waste that a family of four leaves. It was about products, then about progress, and then, if you will, about panic.

For fairs in other countries, will we see more impressive US pavilions in the future? And are we going to see World’s Fairs in the United States again?

We got out of the business more or less formally in the year 2000 after admittedly some economic hanky panky at a couple of the expos with US pavilions. So part of the federal government said, “No, we don’t want to deal with this anymore.” But under the Trump administration, we started to get back into it again in a bipartisan way. Currently, we do have pavilions, but they tend to be corporate funded rather than government funded. So they tend to be heavy on the advertising.

Minneapolis is trying to get one for the year 2027. And if they do, the theme would be based on health. And part of what they want to do, which I think would be a really cool idea, is to have a lot of technologies you will try out, that you can actually test out there, which I think could bring a lot of people and, again, put expos back on the map with something you can’t get just watching a program on YouTube.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Charles Pappas is a senior writer at Exhibitor Magazine and the author of Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World’s Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World.

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