Building bridges on the brink of war: urban planning, Pan-American identity, and the international expositions of 1939

Touted by organizers as the ‘last best chance for peace’, the 1939–40 New York World's Fair and San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition offered foreign governments the opportunity to express alternative, and sometimes competing, world views alongside one another in national pavilions and exhibit halls constructed in of two of America’s most significant port cities. While many historians continue to echo Walter Benjamin’s contemporary criticism of the exposition as a failing medium and disregard the interwar fairs as sites of mere amusement, obfuscation, or commercial exchange, this article contends that the 1939 expositions are best understood in terms of statecraft. It reads these international fora as sites of significant socio-political negotiation and maintains particular focus on the ways in which Washington worked with exposition planners to promote a new sense of civic nationalism through the reimagined built environments of each host city. This paper relies on architectural sketches, blueprints, development plans and budgets to better understand the politically-inflected organization of space that shaped the average fairgoer’s interaction with the representation of governments both foreign and domestic on the eve of war.