(Roughly) Daily

Scheduling note: as tomorrow is July 4, (Roughly) Daily will be off. Regular service will resume on July 5… and should continue uninterrupted for awhile. Meantime…

The “Great American State Fair,” ostensibly celebrating the 250th birthday of the U.S., is having a rocky run. After the talent for what was presented to them as a bi-partisan event largely withdrew, the Fair’s champion, President Trump, converted the opening into an unabashed “Trump Rally.” Thereafter, sparse attendance, equipment issues, high prices, and other embarassments.

As it happens, President Trump has some historical company. 100 years ago, in Philadelphia, dicey politicians hoped to replicate the success of the 1876 Centennial Exposition with a celebration of America’s 150th birthday. Instead, the 1926 “world’s fair” lost millions of dollars, hobbling the city’s finances on the eve of the Great Depression. Meilan Solly reports…

A century ago, the first visitors to Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial International Exposition—held to mark the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding—waded through mud and wandered along unpaved sidewalks to reach the heart of the fairgrounds, only to find carpenters still at work on half-finished exhibition halls and gaping holes marking the spots where attractions had yet to be built.

Dining and shopping options were limited, and some of the few exhibits on view stretched the very definition of “entertainment.” One was a model Post Office where “you could go send yourself a letter and watch it get canceled,” says historian Thomas H. Keels, author of Sesqui! Greed, Graft and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926. “That was it.”

The 200,000-plus Shriners in town for their fraternal organization’s national convention realized that their parades and rallies were the main events planned for these early days of the fair. Many went home disappointed, telling family and friends that the exposition wasn’t worth visiting…

Held in Philadelphia between May 31 and December 31, 1926, the fair—referred to as the Sesqui—celebrated the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding. Little remembered today, the event was a financial failure that Varietydeemed “America’s greatest flop.” Exact figures are hard to come by, but Keels suggests that the fair lost the equivalent of more than $410 million in today’s dollars, effectively bankrupting the city of Philadelphia.

The exposition was America’s main celebration of the sesquicentennial. Congress authorized the fair and provided limited funding for it, in addition to issuing commemorative coins and encouraging local celebrations, but the scale of federal participation paled in comparison with that of the 1976 bicentennial and this year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Attendance at the Sesquicentennial Exposition also failed to match the numbers of Philadelphia’s 1876 centennial celebration, which attracted roughly 20 percent of the country’s population in an era when planes, cars and luxury liners had yet to make long-distance travel more accessible. Organizers predicted that 30 million people would visit the 1926 fair; ultimately, fewer than five million paid to attend. [For comparison, more than 44 million people visited the “World of Tomorrow” at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. Two and a half decades later, 51 million visitors flocked to the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.]

What doomed the sesquicentennial? Poor planning and lukewarm reviews by the fair’s early visitors contributed to the disastrous outcome. So, too, did the streak of bad weather that plagued Philadelphia during the exposition’s run, with rain falling on more than half of the days the fair was open to the public.

Although some observers considered the lackluster public response a sign that the golden age of world’s fairs had come to an end, Chicago’s 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition proved this prediction wrong, drawing more visitors than any of its predecessors. Overall, Keels attributes the 1926 fair’s failure to its “association with what was being viewed as an increasingly corrupt political machine,” headed by Pennsylvania Republican William Scott Vare.

After the fair incurred “nationwide ridicule,” Keels tells Smithsonian magazine, Vare and other local politicians were eager to move on from the endeavor, selling off leftover structures piecemeal “for pennies on the hundreds of dollars.” This push to forget the sesquicentennial has reverberated into the present: Just one building constructed for the 1926 fair stands in Philadelphia today…

More of the macabre story: “America’s 150th Birthday Celebration Was Deemed the Nation’s ‘Greatest Flop.’ What Went Wrong With the Sesquicentennial?” from @smithsonianmag.bsky.social.

Apposite: “America Is Trapped in the Grossest Pool Party of All Time.”

* John Steinbeck

###

As we rethink recreation, we might celebrate one of the great “public parties” of all time, recalling that it was on this date in 1970 that the Second Atlanta International Pop Festival opened in a soybean field adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia. Running officially through the 5th (but actually ending around dawn on the 6th), 500-600,000 folks attended a festival designed to foster a sense of community that transcended race, region, and social class. And while the weather was boiling (local farmers brought watermelons and cantaloupes to help attendees), and there were reports of occasional nudity and recreational drug use, the three days were essentially trouble free… and a blast.

Performers included The Allman Brothers Band, the Chambers Brothers, Richie Havens, Grand Funk Railroad, It’s a Beautiful Day, B.B. King, Lee Michaels, Mott the Hoople, Mountain, Poco, Procol Harum, Rare Earth, John Sebastian, the Bob Seger System, Spirit, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter– and the Jimi Hendrix Experience who, at midnight on this date in 1970, played his rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” for nearly 500,000 people—the largest crowd of Hendrix’s career.

Georgia’s “colorful” governor at the time, Lester Maddox, who had tried repeatedly to prevent the festival from taking place, vowed that he would do whatever it took to block any similar event in the future. The state legislature willingly complied and enacted sufficient restrictions to make it much more difficult for anyone to organize another rock festival in the state. A third Atlanta Pop Festival never took place.

Georgia’s loss. As “Abraham Lincoln” said (in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), “Be excellent to each other. And… PARTY ON, DUDES!”

source