Dueling Cultures: Ireland and Irish America at the Chicago World's Fairs of 1933 and 1934

Abstract

Dueling Cultures:Ireland and Irish America at the Chicago World's Fairs of 1933 and 1934 Charles Fanning More than a hundred world's fairs were held between 1880 and 1910; after the hiatus forced by World War I. The events continued on into the years of worldwide depression, a period when they were meant to serve as engines of job creation and heightened morale. The International Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931 started the fairs held in the decade of the 1930s and it was followed by "Centennial" American fairs in San Diego (1935-36), Dallas (1936), Cleveland (1937), San Francisco (1939-40), and New York (1939-40). 1 Chicago's offering, "A Century of Progress," opened on the lakefront just east and south of Soldier Field on May 27, 1933. Attendance at the Chicago fair was impressive. In 1933, 22.3 million people paid fifty cents each to get in. This was enough of a response for the directors to extend the event for a second year, which drew 15.7 million more. All told, these visitors spent more than $61 million and the fair, against the odds, broke even. In 1934, the fair itself employed 6,500 and the independent concessions and exhibits on the grounds employed 27,000 more. 2 As with all such ventures, Chicago's fair provides freeze-frame images of the self-definition and outside perceptions of the countries and cultures that chose to participate. The chair of the exposition's Committee on Coordination of Nationalities organized representatives from two dozen Chicago ethnic groups and exhorted them through his newsletter, Progress, toward participation, declaring "an opportunity for Chicagoans to show that each racial group was a true integral part of the 'Melting Pot' of the Middle West." 3 For Ireland and Irish America, the [End Page 94] occasion was especially timely. Here was the first focused public opportunity to define and display, on American soil, what "Irishness" had come to mean since the Irish Revolution of 1916-1921 and the formation of the Irish Free State. By the early 1930s, three bones of contention had become established be tween the Irish on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In the first place, post-revolutionary Ireland and Irish America were often embarrassed by one another. Many citizens of Ireland's increasingly puritanical Catholic state had been scandalized by the Roaring Twenties, and, in turn, Irish Americans were profoundly disillusioned by the home country revolution's aftermath—Partition and the resulting civil war. Second, there was antagonism between two faces of Irish America: a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial Irishness in the arts and popular culture and the stolid conservatism of a recently established and insecure Irish-American middle class. The latter-day Stage Irishry of vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley and a battering array of ersatz Irish artifacts—greeting cards, clothing, novelties, the celebration of St. Patrick's Day—had flooded the American market since the turn of the twentieth century. Concurrently, Irish Americans were seeing their hard-won economic and social respectability threatened by the Great Depression, and this precarious position made them extremely sensitive to the trivializing green wave of schlock. 4 On a third front, mainstream Anglo-Protestant America remained no more likely to understand or credit Old World cultures than it had in the 1920s, when its legislative gifts to minorities had been Prohibition and immigration restriction. The ethnic Irish were certainly a favored target of WASP condescension and contempt well into the 1930s—and beyond. All of these cultural conflicts flared up at the Century of Progress in Chicago: Ireland versus Irish America, Irish-American popular culture versus the lace-curtain bourgeoisie, and Irish ethnicity versus the American establishment. Further complicating the public face of Irishness at the Century of Progress was the fact that the Irish had two different and uncooperative exhibition sites. The first, aiming to improve international trade and to demonstrate "high culture," was an exhibition of business, science, and the arts officially sponsored by the Irish Free State. The second, aiming above all to make money for its investors, was an "Irish Village," a commercial venture rooted in popular culture, and entirely American in conception and follow-through...