CHAPTER 12
The aerial feats of Italo Balbo, Hugo Eckener, and the Piccards riveted the public’s attention on aviation and space exploration. These events were milestones in the course of the World’s Fair—unforgettable spectacles that shaped history. But what was getting the most attention on a daily basis were the “concessions” offering a night in Paris or Old Mexico, replete with music, food, and exotic dancers. At President Roosevelt’s urging, Congress had already revised the laws pertaining to Prohibition* to permit the sale of beer, and the Pabst Brewing Company was quick to erect its own lakeside “Casino” near the entertainments. The fair’s directors, Rufus Dawes and Lenox Lohr, were not above taking the concessionaires’ money in the form of fees, and ultimately this had much to do with why the fair was a financial success. Walt Disney, then a young animation pioneer enjoying his first success with the Mickey Mouse character he had created, visited the fair and was drawn to both the scientific, futuristic halls and their displays, but also to the model cultural exhibits from throughout the world. The “Belgian Village” in particular made a deep impression on Disney.1 He recalled his father regaling him with tales of his days helping build the structures of the great 1893 Fair, and its cultural expositions. The 1893 Fair too featured a sort of quasi-fair (the first “Midway”) filled with amusements, many of them with foreign cultural themes. It was slightly salacious, very popular, and highly profitable. The possibility of combining the uplifting and culturally enriching aspects of exhibits on foreign countries with commercial success appealed to both the idealist and the businessman in Disney.
The Midway. Courtesy of University of Illinois Chicago Special Collections.
The city of Chicago was all in on the fair. That potent elixir of profit mixed with genuine civic-mindedness and enthusiasm lent itself to creative collaboration. Major League Baseball, with two clubs in rival leagues calling Chicago home, decided to get in on the act and stage a “Midsummer Classic” in conjunction with the fair, pitting the top players from the older National League (founded 1876) against the more youthful American League (1901). The 1933 “All Star Game” was the first of its kind, and added a degree of glamour to the sport, the city, and the fair.
The location was Comiskey Park on Chicago’s South Side. The park was home to the “White Sox,” twice winners of the World Series in 1906 and 1917. Chicago’s other professional baseball club were the North Siders (also known as the Cubs) who played their home games at Wrigley Field. They had twice won the World Series as well (1907, 1908). But the club that had dominated the Major Leagues since World War I were the mighty Yankees of New York, led by the great Babe Ruth. Ruth had been the American league’s best pitcher with the Boston Red Sox before shifting his focus to hitting and becoming the greatest slugger in history with the Yankees. In an era when baseball players, boxers, and thoroughbred horses dominated the sports pages,* Babe Ruth was the sports hero of the age. Now on the downside of a career filled with both laurels and dissipation, he was returning to Chicago to headline the big game. The previous October at Wrigley Field, Ruth was reputed to have pointed beyond the center-field fence in a World Series game versus the Cubs and “called his shot” before proceeding to hit a home run exactly where he had pointed. It was the stuff of legend. He arrived in Chicago, needless to say, with great fanfare.
For South Siders, the game’s other great attractions were the starting third-baseman and centerfielder for the American League, Jimmy Dykes and Al Simmons, respectively, of the White Sox. Dykes and Simmons had rose to prominence in the game playing for Connie Mack’s World Series–winning Philadelphia Athletics teams in 1929 and 1930. The White Sox poached Dykes and Simmons from the “A’s” in the hope that their winning ways would rub off on their teammates. The White Sox hadn’t been seriously competitive since the 1920 season, when eight of their players had been suspended from baseball for “throwing” the World Series the previous season, including the great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson—the greatest hitter in the game until Ruth.
An overflow crowd of 49,200 crowded Comiskey Park for the big game on July 6, 1933.2 The North Siders had sent three of their own to play, including one of the National League’s top pitchers, Lon Warnecke, and his catcher, Gabby Hartnett. But Babe Ruth was the star. In the third inning he hit a towering home run into the right-field bleachers off of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bill Hallahan. Then, in the eighth inning of a 4–2 game, with the American League ahead, Chick Hafey of the Cincinnati Reds hit a shot to right field that looked like it was headed for the bleachers. With a runner on base in front of Hafey, a home run would have tied the game. But the aging Ruth had a bead on the ball and gracefully robbed Hafey of a home run by catching the ball in his mitt just as it was going over the fence! This ensured an American League victory, and added to Ruth’s already prestigious legend. It would prove to be his swan song. He would be out of baseball by 1935, finishing his Major League career in a Boston Braves uniform. Ruth would have done better to depart Comiskey Park on July 6, 1933, and never look back. The baseball gods had granted him one last great day; there wouldn’t be another.
Jean Shepherd recalled those days years later in a memoir of his childhood growing up in Hammond, Indiana. His father was a die-hard White Sox fan, and Comiskey Park was conveniently located only about a half-
Jimmy Dykes, “third sacker” for the hometown White Sox. Author’s photo.
hour’s drive in one of a series of old jalopies the “Old Man” drove, from their home in the extreme northwestern corner of Indiana. A selection of Shepherd’s stories of his childhood were eventually made into the film, A Christmas Story, in 1983, fifty years after the fair opened. It’s become an iconic part of holiday season Americana. But Shepherd’s memoir actually is only partly set during the holidays, and it’s not Christmas that becomes the obsession for Shepherd (“Ralph”) and his brother (“Randy”), and their childhood friends—it’s the Great Fair. To a certain extent the anticipation generated by the wondrous fairgrounds being constructed, then the news of its grand opening, exceeded actually visiting the fair itself. Shepherd described those first hints that something truly sensational was coming:
“Yup. They’re building a World’s Fair.” At that time the shore stretched empty and white, with little tufts of grass here and there, almost to Fields Museum and down to the cold water. . . . And, sure enough, a World’s Fair began to grow. It spread outward like a mushroom patch . . . and grew and grew and grew. Month by month, year by year, great blue and yellow and orange buildings right out of the land of Oz blotted out the lake. . . . Mile after mile was covered with this fantasy, this wonderland, this land of real, genuine, absolute magic. . . . The Emerald City had come to the South Side.3
But going to the fair was a financial stretch for many families feeling the tight pinch of Depression era austerity, including Shepherd’s own: “The word was out that we would go ‘when the weather got warmer.’ At least that was the explanation my brother and I got. No one talked to us too much about money. . . . The fair was all that anyone talked about for weeks, and a couple of my cousins had actually been there. It was impossible even to talk to them about it. They were speechless.”4 With admission of 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children, the cost of just attending the fair wasn’t onerous; but the rides cost a bit extra, there were the inevitable taffy apples, soda pop, and hot dogs, and the souvenir of course—a talisman to bring back to the far drearier “real” world to brandish in front of the uninitiated as proof that you had been there, and come back.
One of the most unique aspects of Jean Shepherd’s memoir as it relates to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair is its ability to convey the sense of wonder it held for children. As inspiring, informative, and titillating as the fair could be for adults, the sheer sense of wonder it generated for children must have been exponentially greater. On a scale of one to ten, with one being the least wonder-generating and ten being the most, it would have been an eleven. And these children were going to grow up and, like Shepherd, they would remember what they had seen: a vision not of an idealized past, but of a streamlined, Technicolor future:
I am looking at the flags and I see the Hall of Science. I am a tiny, tiny squirt, but it made a colossal impression on me, the first truly immense impression of my life. . . . The Skyride! The unreal Fantasy World’s Fair architecture. World’s Fair buildings have no relationship to real buildings. It was truly beyond all my expectations, whatever they were.5
Jean Shepherd’s classmate “Flick,” years later over a beer, asks him: “‘Do you remember the robot?’ ‘What robot?’ ‘Well, they had this robot. That smoked cigars. My Old Man took me to see it. That’s the only thing I remember.’ ‘That’s the way it is with fairs. You never know what you’ll remember.’”6
Gene Roddenberry was an eleven-year-old student at Berendo Junior High School in Los Angeles when the fair opened in May 1933, consuming a steady diet of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels. He wouldn’t attend the Chicago World’s Fair, but from a distance, he was fascinated by it. He read everything he could on the new technologies, the great aviators, the odd but strangely moving buildings, and above all, the Piccard brothers (and in particular, Jean)7—those philosopher-princes of the land of science, aiming at no less than human exploration of outer space. It wasn’t quite like that, of course, but that’s the way it is with fairs, you never know what you’ll remember.
For his part, after serving as an aviator himself in World War II, Roddenberry would go on to become a screenwriter and producer for television (another medium first introduced at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair). His signature work was the Star Trek series and its sequel, Star Trek: Next Generation. The original series, which aired for three seasons on NBC in the 1960s, was groundbreaking science fiction. Set in the twenty-third century, the starship Enterprise “seeks out new life and new civilizations” and goes “boldly where no man has gone before.” Its multiracial cast set the tone for a progressive treatment of mankind’s place in the cosmos, and our ability to use science to live up to our noble heritage. The futuristic sets and in particular the depictions of twenty-third-century architecture call to mind the buildings at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Then, over seven seasons in the 1980s and 1990s, Roddenberry continued the story into the twenty-fourth century with a new Enterprise under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Next Generation. These shows’ influence on popular culture, public perceptions of science and space travel, and racial tolerance (whether
Official promotional poster for the 1933 Fair, featuring the U.S. Government Building.
through depicting interracial relationships or by introducing alien characters in important roles) has been enormous. Gene Roddenberry was a man ahead of his time, but it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that he was also an adolescent of his time in the 1930s. The Great Fair’s reach was wide. Who knows how many young people it touched, who never even visited the actual fair? Roddenberry is only the most famous.
Star Trek, as a reflection of Gene Roddenberry’s own views, saw the future as a place where racial equality would be achieved, must be achieved. In an interview given later in his life Roddenberry explained his rationale: “if we don’t have blacks and whites living together by the time our civilization catches up to the time frame our series is set in, there won’t be any people.”8 He had a point. Roddenberry peopled his fictional Enterprise with blacks, whites, Asians, Russians (quite controversial at the height of the Cold War), and aliens (including the series’ most memorable character—a Vulcan named Spock). He credited the context of his own education in 1930s Los Angeles—and the use of reason—for arriving at this view of humanity:
It did not seem strange to me that I would use different races on the ship. Perhaps I received too good an education in the 1930s schools I went to, because I knew what proportion of people and races the world consisted of . . . I guess I owe a great part of this to my parents. They never taught me that one race or color was superior. I remember in school seeking out Chinese students and Mexican students because the idea of different cultures fascinated me. So, having not been taught that there is a pecking order of people, a superiority of race or culture, it was natural that my writing went that way.9
The contrast of Roddenberry’s view of mankind, informed by the vision of the World’s Fair, his family, and his own education, stood in stark contrast to the Hitler Youth. His contemporaries in Germany at the time were being fed—and eagerly consuming—the flattering lie that they were a superior “Aryan” race who would inevitably inherit a future where they would dominate the inferior and weak.
Gene Roddenberry also would pioneer, and advocate for, gender equality in his television series. He was aware of Jeannette Piccard’s leading role in the 1934 stratospheric launch. She had proved herself to be both brave and resourceful. That women would eventually be considered for command of airliners and military aircraft seemed to Roddenberry simply a matter of time. As he said in an interview, “Those things strike me as so logical.”10 He even cast his future wife, Majel Barrett, in the role of second-in-command of the Enterprise in the original Star Trek pilot in 1964. Barrett later changed her hair color, and was recast as “Nurse Chapel” for the rest of the series. Roddenberry later admitted that featuring a Jeannette Piccard–type character in 1964 America was still too far ahead of its time: “The network killed that. The network brass at the time could not handle a woman being second-in-command of a spaceship. In those days it was such a monstrous thought to so many people. I realized that I had to get rid of her character or else I wouldn’t get my series on the air.”11
Two steps forward, one step backward—or some variant on that proportion—was the rule in mid-twentieth-century America. The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair provided ample evidence of this.
For African Americans, even though the city of Chicago itself was a seething cauldron of racial unrest, the great 1933 World’s Fair was for the most part fairly progressive-minded. The performance of Florence Price’s Symphony no. 1 in 1933 was complemented by a historical exhibit featuring a replica of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s original trading post that formed the basis for what eventually became Chicago,12 and artist Charles Dawson’s mural depicting the experience of those involved in the Great Migration—which had brought Florence Price to Chicago—was installed in the fair’s Hall of Social Science. But on the Midway, blacks were more often than not depicted in a derogatory or ridiculous manner. Exhibits such as “Darkest Africa” only confirmed white fairgoers’ worst prejudices about people of color. And black fairgoers were often made to feel unwelcome on the Midway. The “Streets of Paris” were officially open to all, but in reality looked to cater to an exclusively white clientele.13 After a vigorous effort on the part of community leaders, a “Negro Day” was proclaimed at the fair. Talented artists such as Hubie Blake contributed to a musical “pageant” celebrating African American culture and history at Soldier Field. Two steps forward, one step back. The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair would become known as the “City of Tomorrow” for its forward-looking technology and architecture, but for many, including African Americans, the moniker served as a frustrating reminder that in society at large, it was still the “City of Today.”
For women, the fair also was a generally progressive-minded space where they were able to feature their contributions to society in a formal way. Louise Lentz Woodruff’s series of sculptures and bas reliefs, Science Advancing Mankind, was the centerpiece of the entire fair, in fact. But a proposed “Temple of Womanhood” never materialized, and unlike the earlier 1893 Fair, there was no official women-specific exhibit hall. On the other hand, a highlight of the 1933 Fair was the visit of the dynamic new First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, on “Women’s Day,” October 31, 1933, held six days after the Graf Zeppelin sailed away over Lake Michigan. Her participation was billed as an “epochal event in A Century of Progress” featuring a “mass meeting.”14 Mrs. Roosevelt’s feminist bona fides were impeccable. In rolling out the red carpet for her, Rufus Dawes very publicly demonstrated the fair’s support for a more equal role for women in society.
Leggy starlets on display as car ornaments, 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Notice the featuring of both white and black swimsuit-clad beauties. Progress? It’s in the eye of the beholder. Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.
Chicago and America loved “cheesecake,” beauty pageants, and starlets too. Sally Rand certainly wasn’t a one-off in a fair full of young women aspiring to fame, or at least a paycheck. The lineup ran the full spectrum from snake charmers15 to actual actresses vying for screen tests in Hollywood. The messages were mixed: empower women, yes; objectify women, yes too. Two steps forward, one step back. Or some variant thereof. In this, Chicago and its fair were in no way out of step with the rest of the country. The high-minded and the less high-minded coexisted in a land of contradictions. And as Rufus Dawes no doubt would have concurred, it was all at the fair!
The “City of Tomorrow,” of course, wasn’t meant to be ironic. It was meant as a beacon and an inspiration. Science was going to lead the world to a brighter future, and the fair would show the way. Ultimately, it was technology that defined the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair for most of the millions who attended it. Model modern homes using revolutionary construction materials, an actual General Motors assembly line, and the first glimpse of television at the small, but popular Hudson-Essex exhibit in the Electricity Building were particular favorites. GE caused quite a sensation as well, using “microwave” technology to pop kernels of corn for fairgoers to consume for free. And everywhere one was surrounded by powerful, beautiful, and sometimes disturbing images, illuminated at night to even greater effect. One of the most moving was the two-story-tall relief sculpture of “Knowledge” in the form of a man destroying “Ignorance” in the form of a serpent. This was how the fair saw its role in the world. Whether it was cultural or scientific, the spread of knowledge and the embrace of new ideas and new technologies would free man from the coils of the dim past. No one who saw it was unaffected by it.
The fair was such a success that its organizers authorized a second, slightly shorter season in 1934. This decision wasn’t without precedent. In 1900 the organizers of the Paris World’s Fair added an additional season in 1901. It’s a testament to the 1933 Chicago Fair’s hold on the public imagination that a second season seemed a safe bet from a financial standpoint. To be sure, the exhibits changed to a certain degree, so there was some variety. Different companies competed with each other to stage the most impressive corporate exhibits—as opposed to cooperating with each other on industry-wide exhibits. There was also a noticeable shift to a less colorful fair, literally. As in 1893, white became a predominant color again. It tended to clean up the face of the fair after one busy season, and four months of winter weather had left it looking a bit down in the mouth. And where color was used in the 1934 version, it tended be in slightly more subdued hues than Joseph Urban’s original exuberant vision. The light show at the central fountain still was a centerpiece of the fair experience for evening fairgoers. Millions more came before the gates were shut forever on October 31 of that year. The kaleidoscope of colored electric lights were switched off, and high above, Arcturus burned in the distant heavens.
Footnotes
* In anticipation of the repeal of Prohibition altogether as a result of the Twenty-First Amendment, then well on its way to ratification at the state level.
* The NBA didn’t yet exist, and the NFL was a third-rate league.