World's Fairs in the Cold War: Science, Technology, and the Culture of Progress

by Arthur P. Molella (Editor), Scott Gabriel Knowles (Editor)

The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it. This volume illustrates the cultural change and strain spurred by the Cold War, a disruptive period of scientific and technological progress that ignited growing concern over the impact of such progress on the environment and humanistic and spiritual values. Through the lens of world’s fairs, contributors across disciplines offer an integrated exploration of the US–USSR rivalry from a global perspective and in the context of broader social and cultural phenomena—faith and religion, gender and family relations, urbanization and urban planning, fashion, modernization, and national identity—all of which were fundamentally reshaped by tensions and anxieties of the Atomic Age.

302 pages, Hardcover

Published September 24, 2019

About the author

Arthur P. Molella is Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center. He is the co-editor (with Joyce Bedi) of Inventing for the Environment (2003, MIT Press).

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why one would even want to have a world's fair in the first place, and why did the Olympics seem to transcend the "universal exhibitions" as a thing were questions that I had in picking up this collection of essays. That one has a lively "culture of progress" does seem to be a big part of the explanation. Whatever else these events are about you need to have an ideological and commercial vision to sell (no need to pretend that the great exhibitions are not glorified trade shows), a group of city fathers on a mission of development, and a national government that has a diplomatic agenda that is congruent with these other two trends. The contributors then examine the various fairs for what they were trying to accomplish and how successful the relevant parties were in their self-assigned mission; the mosaic approach of the editors actually works quite well.

Less good is the single chapter that specifically deals with the issue of how the Olympics managed to transcend the great world exhibitions. Written by one Luca Massidda, their suggestion is that, post-Osaka, the increasingly prevalence of television undercut the fairs as educational and participatory happenings; at least as far as I can tell from the sludge of media-studies jargon that Massidda offers. Since I actually DO remember the 1970s, I would dryly note that the economics of the time were bad, the great industrial cities were thought to be dying, and the higher authorities that held the purse-strings (particularly in the US), were animated by an anti-urban vision (informed by raw racism), the politics of reactionary nostalgia, and a supreme indifference to engaging with the wider world.

The actual surprise is that, after a generation of stagnation, the 1990s onward saw something of a renaissance of world exhibitions; it just wasn't that obvious from the perspective of the United States. Again, you need the combination of ambitious city fathers, a national government with an image it wants to sell, and a positive sense of engagement with the future. All in all, a worthwhile book. At least in the United States this book is readily available from assorted library services if one doesn't want to make the monetary investment.