Tomorrow Is Only a Day Away : WORLD OF FAIRS: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, <i> By Robert W. Rydell (University of Chicago Press: $49.95, cloth; $16.95, paper; 270 pp., illustrated)</i>

The 1930s, in addition to hosting the worst depression in the nation’s history, was a decade of world’s fairs in America. Nearly 100 million people trooped to the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, the 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition and New York World’s Fair and exhibitions of lesser renown in Dallas, Cleveland and San Diego. Every year from 1933 through 1940, except 1938, a world’s fair as in progress somewhere in the United States. They “took the nation by storm,” writes Robert W. Rydell, professor of history at Montana State University, in his scholarly but lively history of American expos between the wars.

At a time when Americans’ faith in the free enterprise system had been badly shaken, the world’s fairs offered an escape into corporate-sponsored consumerist fantasy lands--the on-the-ground equivalent of Busby Berkeley musicals to the tune of “We’re in the Money” (even if--especially if--we’re not). Spectacular and exotic in their architecture, with festive boulevards and imitation Mayan temples and futuristic palladiums, they proclaimed abundance in the depths of hard times. They also provided an eclectic mix of high and low culture: part chautauqua, part trade show and part carnival. Symphony orchestras and swing bands, ballet dancers and strippers, educational displays and freak shows vied for the public’s gaze. Patriotic celebrations of American history mingled with benign visions of better living through technology.

Run by specially chartered corporations and financed largely by stock and bond sales to businesses, banks and wealthy individuals, the fairs’ primary goal was to make a buck for their sponsors, and they emphasized popular entertainment to pull in the crowds. Politicians valued the fairs because they created jobs. To the host cities, the fairs meant an influx of tourists to boost the local economy and an adrenaline rush of civic pride. To the big corporations they represented a chance to advertise their products and a long-term investment in consumer good will. Even if people couldn’t afford a GM car or a GE refrigerator now, they might be seduced into buying one when good times returned.

The biggest booster of the 1930s fairs was President Roosevelt himself, who declared, “I am quite open and unashamed in my liking for expositions,” and gave them federal patronage. Rydell says that F.D.R. regarded the fairs as auxiliary to the goals of the New Deal, which were to put people back to work and stimulate consumer spending.

All this corporate and governmental involvement was harnessed to a common purpose, Rydell contends, drawing on fair committees’ archives. The expos were designed to “restore popular faith in the vitality of the nation’s economic and political system and, more specifically, in the ability of government, business, scientific and intellectual leaders to lead the country out of depression to a new, racially exclusive promised land of material abundance.”

Since the mid-19th Century, international exhibitions in Europe had sung the glories and profits of empire, as well as plugging domestic manufactures. In the fair of the 1930s, the imperial message was still in evidence, although in a somewhat muted form. In the United States, colonial possessions were far less important than overseas markets dominated by American corporations. And so the fairs showed how the “backward” nations, particularly in Latin America, happily supplied raw materials and commodities to the “advanced” peoples, while providing markets for the products of the latter’s factories.

The Chicago 1933 fair featured a “Darkest Africa” exhibit with straw-huts in a jungle setting--complete with a “Congo River” on which visitors traveled in canoes “manned by dusky natives,” in the words of the official brochure. San Francisco’s 1939 extravaganza celebrated the “Empire of the West” and the mutual benefits of trade with of Latin America and the Pacific basin. An honored guest was Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who told his hosts that he did not “share the fear which formerly at least was felt in Latin America against the imperialistic spirit of the Colossus of the North.”

Hand in hand with colonialism went racism, both overt and tacit, with a eugenics subtext. “Fitter family” contests were popular, in which the winners were always white, middle-class Americans of European “stock.” One of Rydell’s most dramatic chapters is devoted to the courageous efforts of African-American groups, such as the NAACP, to break the color line that ringed the fairs. Blacks demanded equal hiring practices and the end of blatant racial discrimination at the exhibits. In Philadelphia African-Americans managed to head off a Ku Klux Klan parade at the 1925 exposition; in Chicago in 1933 they fought for more black faces among fair employees; at the Dallas expo of 1935, they exercised their political clout in Washington to secure funding for a Hall of Negro Life, which displayed blacks’ cultural and economic achievements. These efforts presaged the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

A recurring theme of the ‘30s expos, particularly the big ones in Chicago and New York, was the power of science and technology to create a bountiful world of tomorrow. This sermon reached its apotheosis at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the huge globe known as the Perisphere, visitors conveyed in moving chairs peered down on the city of the future--”Democracity.” The GM pavilion’s “Futurama,” created by theatrical designer Norman Bel Geddes and visited by more than 27 million people, consisted of a landscape over which 50,000 miniature, self-propelled cars swarmed on elevated freeways and expressways. This auto-industry pitch for a national network of superhighways (paid for by the taxpayers, of course), was eventually realized in the 1956 Interstate Highway Act.

Under the prevailing modern aesthetic the sleek, streamlined modern architecture was complemented by displays of the female body. Bel Geddes designed an extravaganza coyly called “Crystal Lassies” or “A Peep Show of Tomorrow,” which featured, in Rydell’s words, nude dancers in “a techno-porn extravaganza that would unfold within a gigantic stainless steel crystal set in a reflecting pool.” The 1935 San Diego fair had nudists cavorting al fresco with a playful “robot.” The most famous of the many ecdysiasts was Sally Rand, who starred at the Chicago fair, and went on to run a “Nude Ranch” in San Francisco and do her famous fan dance in New York. Sex sold tickets, of course but it also meshed with the fairs’ commercial message, Rydell writes, by catering to male “fantasies of dominance and acquisition” with female bodies as “commodities to be purchased and as sites for the ‘pursuit of happiness.’ ”

Rydell concludes with an epilogue on the United States pavilion at the 1958 Brussels world’s fair. At the peak of the Cold War the exhibit became a propaganda organ, supported at the highest levels of government as a U.S. response to the challenge of the Soviet pavilion. Beyond selling the American way of life, it also served as a nerve center for U.S. intelligence agents spying on the Soviet Bloc nations at the fair.

This sour revelation provides a fitting coda to Rydell’s ingeniously researched and trenchantly argued survey of how business and political elites used world’s fairs to sell a self-serving vision of the future. Whether this message swayed the millions of fair-goers in the way it was intended to is more difficult to prove, although Rydell adduces some consumer surveys made at the New York expo to show it did have a positive effect. But the fight of minority groups against the implicit racism embedded in this message shows that in an unruly democratic culture, the propaganda is not total; the have-nots have a say. And corporate utopias are not all that imaginative and compelling; not all that accurate, either, in the long run. GM’s Futurama ended up in smog and a big traffic jam.

“World of Fairs” offers a fresh angle of vision on American history, and I only wish that the publisher had honored it with a more attractive format, instead of the book in hand with its eye-jarring typography, cramped layout and sometimes muddy photographs.