Cold War and Space Race Context
The fair was originally conceived in 1955 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but it soon became clear that that date was too ambitious. With the Space Race underway and Boeing having "put Seattle on the map" as "an aerospace city", a major theme of the fair was to show that "the United States was not really 'behind' the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space." As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the West."
In June 1960, the International Bureau of Expositions certified Century 21 as a World's Fair. Project manager Ewen Dingwall went to Moscow to request Soviet participation, but was turned down. The Baltic states (then part of the Soviet Union) were not invited, nor was the People's Republic of China, North Vietnam, or North Korea.
As it happened, the Cold War had an additional effect on the fair. President John F. Kennedy was supposed to attend the closing ceremony of the fair on October 21, 1962. He bowed out, pleading a "heavy cold"; it later became public that he was dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The fair's vision of the future displayed a technologically based optimism that did not anticipate any dramatic social change, one rooted in the 1950s rather than in the cultural tides that would emerge in the 1960s. Affluence, automation, consumerism, and American power would grow; social equity would simply take care of itself on a rising tide of abundance; women would still be confined largely to the domestic realm; the human race would master nature through technology rather than view it in terms of ecology. In contrast, 12 years later—even in far more conservative Spokane, Washington—Expo '74 took environmentalism as its central theme.
Read more about this topic: Century 21 Exposition
Famous quotes containing the words cold, war, space, race and/or context:
“Away went the messengers bicycle,
His serpents track went up the hill forever.
And all the time she stood there hot as fever
And cold as any icicle.”
—John Crowe Ransom (18881974)
“Signal smokes, war drums, feathered bonnets against the western sky. New messiahs, young leaders are ready to hurl the finest light cavalry in the world against Fort Stark. In the Kiowa village, the beat of drums echoes in the pulsebeat of the young braves. Fighters under a common banner, old quarrels forgotten, Comanche rides with Arapaho, Apache with Cheyenne. All chant of war. War to drive the white man forever from the red mans hunting ground.”
—Frank S. Nugent (19081965)
“And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time
Wheeling and whispering come,”
—James Elroy Flecker (18841919)
“No person who examines and reflects, can avoid seeing that there is but one race of people on the earth, who differ from each other only according to the soil and the climate in which they live.”
—J.G. (John Gabriel)
“Among the most valuable but least appreciated experiences parenthood can provide are the opportunities it offers for exploring, reliving, and resolving ones own childhood problems in the context of ones relation to ones child.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)