Today, we’re going to dig into the topic of optimism through the lens of World’s Fairs, a topic that’s been fascinating to me since I started focusing on optimistic futurism.
It’s 1893. On the south side of Chicago, activist and reformer Jane Addams is running Hull House, a community of university-educated women providing social and educational opportunities for working class people. Children in the surrounding tenements are earning four cents an hour. Immigrants are stacked into buildings. with no sanitation, no heat, no future. And a few miles away, on the lakefront, they’re building what everyone will come to call the White City.
It’s a World’s Fair. 686 acres, 200 buildings, all coated in a gleaming white mixture of plaster and hemp fiber that catches the sun like some kind of city from another planet. And at night, lit by electric light, which at this point most Americans had never seen at this scale, the city glows across the water like something out of a dream. 27 million people will come to see it. That’s 40% of the US population at that time! On one single day, October 9th, designated Chicago Day, 751,000 people show up.
The official name of this gathering is the World’s Columbian Exposition because it marks the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. This name itself contains many layers of irony, of course, but in general, I suppose a celebration with this much arrogance could really have only been named after Columbus.
In other words, the White City was both glorious AND kind of grotesque.
Spoiler alert: as we study optimism, we’re going to see this kind of polarizing side-by-side contrast over and over. The White City gleamed while the actual city nearby rotted.
Jane Addams didn’t boycott the fair, she actually spoke there. But her life’s work, just a few miles away, was a kind of living critique. And yet, the white city did things that were truly good. It lit up the imaginations of millions of Americans who had never seen what a city could be, what a public space could feel like, what shared human achievement looked like when it was made real. It influenced American architecture for decades. It sparked the City Beautiful Movement. The Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park, still standing, one of the best museums in the country, was built for that fair.
The White City illuminates the first thing for us to notice about optimism on our journey through World’s Fairs. Namely: optimism isn’t really a clean, sanitary thing. It doesn’t really get delivered in some kind of hypoallergenic box. Optimism is messy and complex and often arrives just to the left or right of dirt and grit and even corruption. The White City wasn’t an either/or. Jane Addams didn’t choose between the slums or the spectacle, she did both. The fair’s existence didn’t prevent her from fighting for the people living in the 19th Ward.
And in fact, the civic energy the Fair generated — the pride, the sense of shared possibility, the argument that Chicago could be something extraordinary — that energy was arguably part of what made Hull House’s ongoing work possible. I think it’s actually part of what made continuing reform possible in general, because that energy helped people believe change was worth attempting.
In other words, I’m not talking about the inequality itself. I’m talking about a mechanism that can help us make inequality better.
Fast forward three decades and we get to my favorite World’s Fair. 1964, New York City. Flushing Meadows in Queens. In general, this World’s Fair was a mess in a lot of ways. Robert Moses, the controversial autocratic urban planner of New York who ran it, was kind of a disaster of a human being, by many accounts, and the fair ended up $40 million in debt. The Bureau of International Expositions refused to sanction it. because Moses insisted on charging exhibitors rent, and he responded to their objections by calling them a bunch of clowns in Paris. So there’s that.
But this fair too produced good things. Beyond the mid-century artistic styles of the time — and holy crap, do I love the art, posters, furniture, and architecture surrounding this era — this fair also produced the Unisphere.
Standing in the middle of Flushing Meadows Park right now, still there today, is a 140-foot stainless steel globe on a pedestal. Orbital rings around it. Have you seen this? It was commissioned by U.S. Steel. Yes, a steel company paid for a monument to global unity and human progress. To me, this thing is genuinely achingly beautiful. I love it. The theme of the 1964 Fair was “Peace Through Understanding” and the Unisphere was designed to represent that kind of global interdependence. More than 51 million visitors saw this thing over the course of two World’s Fair seasons.
Because of Moses’s design, the Fair was primarily filled with corporate exhibits. GM’s Pavilion alone drew more than 29 million visitors, the most visited single exhibit in World’s Fair history. Ford spent $30 million and hired Walt Disney to design their attraction. Maybe you know this, Disney actually ended up using the fair as an R &D lab for four different exhibits, all paid for by corporate sponsors and the creations landed in Disney parks afterward. Very clever. The corporations got their brands showcased. The rest of us got It’s A Small World stuck in our heads till the end of time. Now that’s a win-win!
Seriously though, Once again, we’ve got a strange juxtaposition. A genuine tyrant of an organizer plus a boatload of corporate money, all side by side with genuine civic meaning and inspiration. It’s both/and, not either/or. But I think this fair teaches us something differently profound about optimism, as well.
In 1964, we were still inside what economists call the post-war consensus. The top marginal individual tax rate was 70%. The corporate tax rate was 48%. Unions represented a third of the workforce. Corporate power did exist, but it existed inside a governance container. The social contract was still very real, so when GM built a pavilion about the City of Tomorrow… yeah, it was a car ad, but it was a car ad made by a company that paid its workers a living wage, contributed to the tax base, and existed inside a society that still broadly believed in shared prosperity.
Compare that to if Exxon or Amazon or Meta built a “city of tomorrow” pavilion today. We wouldn’t believe a word of it! In 2025 alone, 88 major U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax. ZERO. The future used to be funded by the people profiting from it. Now they’ve figured out how to opt out of shared prosperity entirely.
What we see here is the social context matters. I think This World’s Fair teaches us that healthier social governance structures produce a healthier relationship between company and community. That might seem obvious in a way, but at the same time, I don’t think it IS obvious to many of us right now. The slow unraveling of our social contract over the last 40 to 50 years of neoliberalism has left most of us deeply jaded, if not outright cynical, about government being able to do anything positive at all.
Here’s my theory: I think the 1964 Fair didn’t somehow feel more pure “in spite of” its corporateness. I think it WAS relatively pure because the corporations funding it were operating inside a healthier social contract. The inspiration was real because the social agreement behind it was real. I think this is one of the main reasons why we look back at this time in history with such nostalgia.
This means our big lesson from 1964 is that our current lack of optimism today isn’t about corporate greed OR an incompetent government. It’s both. What we learn from this World’s Fair is when we get the balance of those two things right, when we’re able to create a stable governance container to redistribute corporate resources more fairly, it serves our collective imagination in a much more positive way.
After 1964, the World’s Fair situation basically turns into a big bummer. The last world’s fair on US soil was in New Orleans in 1984, and it was a financial disaster. Then, 15 years after New Orleans, Congress passed a law. An actual law…! Might have been the last one they passed! Just kidding. (Probably.) This law basically prohibited federal funds from being spent on a World’s Fair. Seriously. Let’s ponder that a moment. The U.S. didn’t just drift away from collective imagination. We actually legislated ourselves out of it.
In 1999, somewhere near what I think is probably the peak of neoliberal consensus — when we’re still so convinced that markets were going to handle everything and government was the problem — Congress looked at the idea of funding a vision of the future and said, “Not worth our money.”
As our social contract has frayed, as government has forgotten its role in the future, and as the symbiosis of corporation and community slowly morphed into this “parasite-host” relationship, we found ourselves completely incapable of participating in World’s Fairs at all.
I consider myself a fairly global citizen, but I actually didn’t even know World’s Fairs were still happening at all until starting the Hello Tomorrow podcast last fall. But they are. Osaka, Japan just hosted one last October. It posted a profit and served 29 million visitors.
Mina Chow, the filmmaker behind the World’s Fair documentary Face Of A Nation, put it really well, saying, “We’ve stopped participating in one of the biggest soft power exercises there is.” If you’re not familiar, “soft power” — this is the ability to attract and inspire rather than coerce. It’s how a country earns moral authority in the world. It’s influence that doesn’t happen through military strength or trade policy, but through ideas and culture and a vision of what human life could be.
Ostensibly, the U.S. should be shining in these ways. We export so much belief to the world. Why did we abdicate our role here? World’s Fairs were one of our greatest soft power instruments. They said, “Come see what we believe is possible!” And for generations, people came.
I know the U.S. is a… complicated place to love right now. I’m not asking you to forget our sins. I’m asking you to hold two things at once. Maybe WE are both glorious AND grotesque. Maybe all civilizations are. And maybe the goal of citizens who CARE is just to keep doing our best to nudge things toward the glorious.
I’ve spent many episodes describing many huge system challenges we are facing in the U.S. and in many ways across the world. A petrodollar crisis, a massive global debt conundrum, the failings of neoliberalism, the danger A.I. poses to the economic Loop That Holds Up The World. I understand better than I ever have the challenges we face. They are many, but we mustn’t let these things cause us to give up. We must use them to help us believe HARDER.
I would love to tell you I thought business could solve this problem. I’ve devoted the last 20 years of my life to believing that story. I don’t believe it anymore. Almost a decade ago, I gave a TED talk called “How Work Can Heal the World.” Today, I understand that leaders inside the world of work can help and they must help! But just like the World’s Fairs, corporations won’t be able to do this alone. We must also demand a social-governance container that is worthy of the future we want.
To do that, I think we need to understand how important the social- governance container IS. Most weeks, I try to elucidate this idea in a slightly different way. And most weeks, I hear from at least one person who aims to tell me that I’m stupid without exactly saying that they think I’m stupid for thinking government of any kind is worth a damn.
I know you’ve never seen government do anything great! I know this…! And neither have I, honestly. But if we broaden our horizons even a tiny bit, we find our biases quite disproven.
The interstate highway system, which gets you across the country. The internet, which connects you to the world. The moon landing — which happened almost 60 years ago, by the way! The GI Bill, which created the American middle class more than any market force ever did. The National Weather Service, tells you if you should bring an umbrella. The FDA, make sure your aspirin is actually aspirin. Government built a container that made all those things possible.
I’m not saying The Market needs to go away. And I’m not saying the government we have now is doing a good job at ALL. I’m saying the kind of life most of us want — the strong, stable, optimistic world of the 1964 Fair — that world ONLY EXISTS when the market lives inside a box of governance guardrails and isn’t allowed to run the whole show.
World’s fairs aren’t lavish, opulent corporate ads OR inspirational, optimistic, futuristic experiences. They’re BOTH. But like 1964, they work their magic most when they happen inside a social container that provides the kind of stability that we need to believe.
In many ways, the modern history of humanity is largely a battle between two forces, “markets” and “commons.” And I think we have enough historical data at this point to see that while this relationship is always complicated, it never works out well when the market is unfettered.
So let’s go back to where we started: is optimism a luxury we can’t afford? Here’s what I actually think: Optimism isn’t a luxury at all. CYNICISM is the luxury. Cynicism is what we absolutely cannot afford, because it will guarantee the outcome we’re afraid of. Don’t let anyone tell you that the imagining has to wait until after the suffering stops. It never worked that way. The optimism is what helps us end the suffering.
Original post with all source links: https://joshallan.com/2026/05/26/when-the-future-was-a-place-a-worlds-fair-story/
