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a normal city there is no one on the side of ‘us.’ At
Expo, the ultimate authority is concerned with ‘our’
environment. Total environment presupposes a ‘total’
system.
Jeremy Baker, “Expo and the Future City”
Understandably,
it [Expo 67] confounds those who expect to see only quantitative
boasts of industrial strength, military power, scientific progress,
and cultural ascendance.
The Architectural Record, 1967
As
the Expo carillon chimed “Deep in the Heart of Texas,”
Commissioner General Pierre Dupuy, getting in a plug for Expo’s
theme, told Lyndon Johnson that “to million people, you are
Man and his World.’ In French, he added, “The U.S. is
a giant, but we have no intention of playing David” (“The
Times” June 2, 1967).
In the spring of 1967, Canadians celebrated the one hundredth anniversary
of the founding of the Canadian Federation with a class one world
international exhibition held in Montreal, Quebec. Inspired by the
rhetoric of the French writer Antoin de Saint-Exupery’s book
Terre des Hommes, the organizers of Expo ’67 were determined
to supply a theme that would be appropriate for an era extolling
the virtues of Progress and the “end of ideology.” The
decision to emphasize Saint-Exupery’s la condition humaine
resulted in the theme, Man and His World, which paradoxically united
an optimistic vision of universal humanism with an upsurge in Canadian
nationalism to highlight the independence and maturing of Canada
as a nation state after 300 years of colonial rule by the French
and British Empires.
Canadians, ironically, constructed their celebration of national
identity on the porous foundations of a post-national ecumenism
led by the United States that sought to render the nation-state
obsolete while at the same time rigorously defending American national
interests and representing an image of modernity to the world that
would recoup national pride from the propaganda defeats of the 1950s
to enable the free world to defeat the Soviet Union in a symbolic
struggle for global hegemony. The parameters of this struggle at
Expo ’67 were waged beyond the simple flexing of corporate
or technological muscle and extended to include the way the world
was being oriented spatially, or “disciplined” as Michel
Foucault would argue, into the spectacle of the “world as
exhibition.” Expo ’67 crystallized, for a moment, a
unified pragmatic liberal vision of universal humanism wedded to
corporate capitalism that avoided stumbling over the celebrations
of consumerism and a corporate ethos, which had undermined the American
exhibition strategies of the 1950s and early 1960s, or ideological
conflict with conservatives bent on revisiting exhibition strategies
of the 1930s.
World’s Fairs have traditionally functioned as “symbolic
universes” which, the sociologists Peter L. Burger and Thomas
Luckman have noted are themselves social products with a history.
The function of these “symbolic universes” have been
to create an ordering system for embracing marginal ‘situations’
of modernity within the apparent social reality of everyday life.
They serve to provide a crucial ingredient in the naturalization
and legitimating of social order and “by their very nature,
present themselves as full-blown and inevitable totalities.”1
As such, world's fairs have since their inception functioned as
the consummate physical embodiment of “symbolic universes.”
World’s Fairs have subsequently served as integral instruments
of the hegemonic control and promotion of modernity precisely because,
as the historian Robert Rydell argues, “they propagated the
ideas and values of the country’s political, financial, corporate
and intellectual leaders and offer these ideas as the hegemonic
interpretation of social and political reality.”2 By the middle
decades of the twentieth century, as the geographer Derek Gregory
notes, an even more ominous development was unfolding with the systematic
connecting of the knowledge of spatial science to disciplinary power.3
We can see the emerging of this new synthesis of space, surveillance,
discipline, and world’s fairs in the first two decades of
the Cold War, culminating, I would argue, in the most important
World’s Fair of the post-war era: Expo ’67.
After World War Two, the United States and the Soviet Union extended
the Cold War competition between them into the sphere of international
exhibitions. World’s fairs were seen by propagandists for
both societies as presenting the ideal forum in which to compete
for the mantle of the leadership in “human progress.”
During the 1950s, whether at major world’s fairs like the
one held in Brussels in 1958 or at smaller regional type exhibitions,
such as Damascus in 1956, international exhibitions were the new
ideological battlefield for testing the latest in Cold War propaganda
techniques but even more importantly, as representing rival paths
to modernity. This particular form of Cold War rivalry was becoming
increasingly vital as an arena of superpower competition as the
focus of the Cold War began to shift from Europe and increasingly
towards the so-called Third World in the mid to late 1950s. Many
of these societies were either engaged in wars of colonial liberation
or, having succeeded in establishing national independence, were
struggling to modernize their societies in the most rapid and viable
ways possible. Such displays of modernity by the Soviet Union and
the United States at World’s Fairs thus became crucial in
winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of people all over the
world,4 especially as modern communications and mass media such
as television made the global transmission of the exhibition possible.
The decision to hold the first ever class one exhibition in the
history of Canada, was made in 1960 in anticipation of the centenary
celebrations for Canada in 1967. Having never hosted a major world’s
fair before, the Canadian organizing committee was at a loss as
to where to begin the enormous task of organizing the world’s
fair let alone developing a fair strategy. The decision was made
to send a committee to MIT in Boston to consult with American academics,
which had been involved with the formulation of American exhibition
strategy at Brussels in 1958.
MIT, as well as the University of Chicago, was a key institution
in formulating new techniques of Cold War propaganda under the leadership
of scholars studying the relationship between media, technology
and the Third World. Scholars such as Daniel Lerner at MIT and Lucian
W. Pye at the University of Chicago, developed theories of communications
known as “total communications”, that were meant to
address the shortcomings of American propaganda disasters in the
1950s and the failures of the 1958 and 1964 World’s Fair.
In summarizing this new approach Walter Joyce notes that, “It
[this new approach] does not have to resort to lies or ‘black
propaganda’ and it is in fact difficult to do so when he [the
intellectual] represents an open society like ours.”5 The
imperative to develop new techniques of communication and propaganda
was argued by Daniel Lerner in an article entitled “Revolutionary
Elites and World Symbolism,” in which he sketched the outlines
of this new approach to Cold War propaganda:
The
failure to diffuse a persuasive universal symbolism in a political
arena that has become technologically global contains ominous problems
for the future of humanity. (…) To avert these catastrophic
dangers, there is clear and present need for a positive politics
of preventive therapy. This requires a flow of information that
is relevant and reliable – information of the sort that can
be produced by the policy of sciences in the service of democratic
development. Such information, while it is most urgently needed
by policy advisers, cannot be confined to elites. Indeed, such information
can support political therapy of appropriate scope only if it is
diffused on an adequate scale to shape a new global consensus on
the desirable way of the world.6
For
American strategy at Cold War competitions such as world’s
fairs to be successfully integrated into the total propaganda effort,
removal of whatever impediments to effective “white propaganda”
that existed in fair structures and organization was essential.
For Walter Joyce the greatest service America could perform for
communism would be to promote capitalism – “that is
the word, not the economic system.” 7 While the United States
Information Agency did not employ these intellectuals until after
the fiasco of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Lucian Pye was
the first to be hired The Canadians, by going to MIT, were coming
into contact with some of the most up-to-date theories of communications,
Cold War propaganda and counter-insurgency- warfare. Expo ’67
would be the first world’s fair to utilize these advanced
techniques of symbolic warfare in the Cold War, with the United
States Information Agency being employed in the organization of
the American pavilion.
The decision of the Canadian fair organizing committee to consult
with the academics at MIT was the first step towards conceptualizing
a world’s fair philosophy that would decisively reject the
leadership of corporate and business interests, at least on the
surface, an unheard of move in twentieth century world’s fair
history. One of the most important of these academic figures was
John E. Burchard, the Dean of the Institute of Humanities who had
organized a conference entitled, “The American Way of Life,”
designed to address the inadequacies of the American exhibition
strategy at Brussels in 1958. The lessons learned from the propaganda
defeat in Brussels were expressed in the following memorandum released
after the symposium:
The
idea was expressed at the MIT conference that what we are dealing
with is the phenomenon of continuous revolution, that the American
people are dynamic, energetic, impatient, and restless for change;
that because of the vastness of our country, the diversity of our
origins, and the free conditions pertaining to American enterprise,
we are committed to a constant, unremitting search for an improved
way of life (…) Moreover, it is important to emphasize that
the process is more important to Americans than the product, in
other words, that the challenge of creation and achievement is still
of central excitement in the American way of life.
The
combination of “continuous revolution” with creativity
and excitement was a formula for refocusing American propaganda
efforts in the Cold War and as a means of convincing the world that
the leadership of the productive forces of modernity had not been
lost by the United States in the wake of Sputnik. As one committee
member put it, America had to illustrate that “we have done
for our people in practice that which the Communists have claimed
as their goals and which they have not done.” Enthusiasm for
beating the Russians at their own game extended to the suggestion
of including a portrait of Karl Marx in the American pavilion at
Brussels in 1958. Yet, despite the recognition of the need to mobilize
American intellectuals in this propaganda struggle against the Soviet
Union at Brussels, the U.S. effort was a relative failure. As a
confidential USIA report later stated, “the U.S. exhibit at
the Brussels Fair was outranked in audience preference by several
of its competitors and in particular by the presentation of the
Soviet Union.” The Soviets exploited the opportunity to push
their own vision on human progress with displays that conveyed “symbols
of their rapid growth and power.”8 The rival paradigm of modernity
represented by Sputnik was to fundamentally alter the construction
of American identity at international exhibitions. This meant world’s
fairs were too important to be left to corporate strategy and advertising
executives; in particular the liberal intellectuals popularized
by Theodore White as the Action Intellectuals of the Kennedy White
House would, in future, be included in world fair exhibition strategy.
The task of closing the gap between the perception of U.S. decadence
and Soviet technical superiority was handed to intellectuals who
desired to blur the binary distinctions suggested by the confrontation
of capitalism with communism with a universal humanist message that
promoted a capitalist modernity uncluttered by the flotsam and jetsam
of older representations of capitalism.
The theme of creativity was at the core of American advice to the
Canadian visitors seeking guidance on Fair organization and philosophy
and would be a cornerstone of Canadian fair strategy at the first
Canadian planning conference for Expo ’67 held at the Seignury
Club in Montebello, Quebec. As a result, some of the participants
in the Montebello meeting including Alan Jarvis, director of the
National Gallery, novelists Hugh MacLennan and Gabrielle Roy (who
pushed the connection of the Fair’s theme to St. Exupery),
and Claude Robillard, town planner, who argued at the meeting that
“I thought the time was over when we could have world exhibitions
of the latest screwdriver, and that it was time the accent was placed
on man rather than on his inventions.”9 Out of this meeting
came the decision to focus the philosophy of Expo ’67 around
Eupery’s idea of “Man and his World,” especially
since, according to St. Exupery’s exegete S. Beynon John,
Exupery’s models of human behaviour included “the virtues
of creativity.”10 The broad liberal humanism of the theme
was emblematic of how beholden the Canadians were to this change
in American Cold War strategy since the late 1950s. For example,
when the Canadian delegate Jean-Louis Roux noted that the theme
meant “Man, as opposed to corporations” and “Man,
as opposed to nations” he was merely articulating the conclusions
arrived at by the MIT think-tank and other liberal “action
intellectuals” that American success in the Cold War required
a downplaying of traditional corporate interests or national prestige
in favour of a dynamic model of change at whose heart were “creative
people” and not businessmen.
Canadian strategy for Expo `67 began to become more concretized
at an intellectual gathering entitled Seminar `65, a meeting of
the Canadian Conference of the Arts held at Ste. Adele-en-Haut,
Quebec. The Conference was to assess and advise the Canadian government
on the state of the arts in Canada, on the plans for Expo ’67
and how to merge the concerns over the survival of a Canadian cultural
identity with the planning for a world’s fair celebrating
universal humanism. The major recommendation at the Seminar ’65
meeting was that the arts be given the highest possible priority
in conceptualizing the overall Fair design and the Canadian pavilion,
with the final Conference Report noting,
But
if the total culture of a country may be likened to an arch, then
surely the keystone is the arts. A nation reveals itself to posterity
through the arts, for the arts are the apex of culture, the crown
of its total achievement. Until recently the arts in Canada were
unable to assume their rightful place. The new technology of communications
offers the means for a national expression but only the arts can
provide the significant content by which a nation comes to know
itself. 11
The
anti-elitism and pluralistic emphasis within Seminar ’65 augured
a shift in the cultural environment that began with the defeat of
the John G. Diefenbaker government in 1963. Seminar ’65 also
warned that placing faith in modern technology would end up in the
“manufacture of dull uniformity,” which the arts could
alleviate because “the arts contain the diversity of expression
and variation of character, which are fostered by a vigorous and
healthy community.” Advocating new cultural objectives and
increased state participation in the funding of the arts, Seminar
’65 also rationalized that the expansion of the publicly supported
cultural sector would significantly enhance the growth of the economy.
The Commission understood that the traditional reliance on the natural
resources base of the Canadian economy was inadequate to maintain
and further develop the economic expansion demanded by modernization.
Barriers separating culture and business were seen as arbitrary,
paving the way for a new alliance of business and culture, demonstrating
that “Canadians no longer live in a culturally underprivileged
society.”12 Sketching out the future cultural agenda for Expo
’67 Seminar ’65 promoted the theme of creativity as
integral to the idea of Man and his World: “Properly treated,
artists do more than enhance our lives. Like scientists, they illuminate
and enrich it. The time has come in Canada to appreciate that they
serve the highest aspirations of government and the highest aspirations
of Canadian policy: they further human understanding at home and
abroad.” For the first time in Canadian history Canadian artists
formally sat across from a Minister of the Federal Canadian Government,
Secretary of State Maurice Lamontagne, who proposed in accordance
with the new social alliance being forged at present between the
cultural sector, business, and government, “the development
of our artistic life as the major objective of the Centennial observances.”
The objectives of this heightened political awareness of culture
would be to promote the arts as playing a significant role in articulating
the theme of Expo ’67, as the final Report states, “1967,
as well as marking a century of building Confederation, may well
prove to be the year of its true completion; true in the sense that
the modern forces of technology impel us towards unity, and at least
make it possible to share in a common heritage and a common destiny
as we never could before.”13
The design of the Montreal Fair site required a massive manipulation
of nature in the form of two man-made islands and an adjacent peninsula
consisting of over 15 million tons of landfill extracted from the
excavation of the new city subway system. The construction of the
site in the St. Lawrence River across from Montreal created a 1,000-acre
fairground conceived as a symbol of the co-operative relationship
that could be obtained through the marriage of technology and nature.
A complex web of transportation systems and communications tied
the fair to the city, hastening its urban redevelopment and emphasizing
the potential for urban revitalization through technology that reverberated
with the distant dreams and ambitions of Baron Haussmann’s
Paris and the World’s Fairs of 1855 and 1867. The transportation
systems, ranging from subways to moving sidewalks, created a seamless
hierarchy of human circulation that contributed to an overall sense
of coherence and unity that the 1964 Fair in New York had failed
to achieve. By careful manipulation of the environment, from landscaping,
waterways, mass transportation, and a consistent policy in the design
of minor items such as benches, ticket kiosks, Expo ’67 created
a technological totality on the site unequalled by any post World
War Two Fair.
With sixty two participating nations, the theme ‘Man and His
World’ miraculously transformed the sentiments of Saint-Exupery
into a celebration of liberal humanism, appearing to provide a peaceful
forum for the gathering of humanity while not promoting any one
particular ideological system, set of values or national interests.
Yet, for example, in the Canadian pavilion alone were represented
over 1200 individual corporations and across the Fair, the international
corporate community was overwhelmingly present but subsumed behind
the veneer of Exupery’s sentiment. Nonetheless, unlike the
New York World’s Fair of 1939 or of 1964, the massive business
presence did not trumpet the triumph of corporate capitalism but
within the overall unity of the Fair site the priority of “Man”
over corporations and nationalism was asserted. The interdependent
global view of humanity was the central entwining myth that precluded
the need for a central symbol for the Fair, such as the Crystal
Palace, the Eiffel Tower at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris
or the Perisphere at the New York Fair in 1939. The lack of a central
symbol belied the underlying unity of Expo ’67, as the Canadian
writer Donald Theall wrote in the journal “Artscanada:”
”Expo has no single symbol, but is itself a symbol as a total
environment, a work of art.”14 The de-centering of the Fair’s
ideological message opened the door for the symbolic re-amalgamation
of the Fair under the leadership of the United States with its synthesis
of creative play and the downplayed pursuit of corporate modernity.
The Canadian pavilion actually aided to solidify the American strategy
of asserting Cold War supremacy over the Soviet Union while presenting
an image of national development conceivably bridging the gap between
the most advanced Western industrialized nations and the Third World.
By presenting an image of national purpose under the umbrella of
transportation and modern communications, Canada manufactured an
important contribution to the fair’s overall ideological coherence,
spread over four acres and costing 21 million dollars. The Canadian
pavilion was dominated by an inverted pyramid nine story high and
entitled ‘Katimivik,’ the Inuit word for “meeting
place.” Behind the main exhibition space were a series of
timber and canvas-covered spaces providing rooms for a two-part
display programme, one focusing on an exhibition of Canadian art
and the other on modern forms of mass entertainment. The exhibits
were intended to present a reassuring image of the compatibility
between the benefits of technology and the creative arts. The formal
arts were presented in a 500-seat theatre as well as in a separate
exhibition space for a display of historical and contemporary Canadian
painting. Popular culture was present throughout the pavilion although
the climax of the displays was a mechanical sea monster named ‘Uki’
which would rise and belch flames, and which threatened at one point
to inadvertently incinerate the completion of the Trans-Canadian
Canoe pageant.
Never before in the history of Canada had Canadians felt so imbued
with pride of nation and convinced that the colonial and provincial
mindsets of the past had been swept aside. The incredible appeal
of Expo ’67 as a successful “symbolic universe”
is best captured in the words of the Canadian historian Pierre Berton,
And
threaded through it all [Expo ‘67] is the constant moral:
that man’s future, clouded and uncertain, rests in his own
hands. ‘Look around you at these marvels’, Expo says,
‘and see how far you’ve come. Do you really want to
louse it up?’ It is a soaring and noble theme, worthy of the
global village we have devised for it; and any Canadian who walks
those captivating streets can be forgiven if he feels momentarily
a moisture in the eye and a certain huskiness in the throat.
Expo
’67 gave Canadians a momentary respite from their collective
colonial pasts by asserting a national cohesion and unity under
the veil of technological developments and a recast liberalism,
illuminated by the political realities of the mid-1960s, including
the Cold War, the threat of Quebec nationalism, and the anxieties
over the pervasiveness of the economic, military, political, and
cultural influence of the United States. The meta-narratives of
progress and humanism, themselves products of the era that gave
birth to the modern nation state, were harnessed to express a modern
world which was rapidly undergoing the transition to an American
post-modernity. The Canadian celebration of national identity belied
the extent to which Canadian society had become embroiled with the
post-war era of American hegemony. Rather than the post-colonial
moment the Fair had tantalizingly suggested, Canadians ironically
had affirmed the post-war neo-colonial relationship with the United
States that had filled the political and psychological vacuum left
by the collapse of the British Empire. As the Canadian political
scientist Arthur Kroker has concluded, “Confronted with an
American Empire, fully expressive of the lead tendencies o f modern
culture (“mechanized communications” and the politics
of spatial domination), the Canadian situation is precarious.”15
This precariousness of the relationship of Canadian society within
the American Empire has accelerated since the Montreal Fair and,
especially since Sept. 11, 2001. Despite the decision of the Canadian
government not to participate in the coalition of the willing during
the invasion of Iraq the US economic and military pressures on Canada
(including restrictions on cross border trade and the pressure to
join the Continental Ballistic Missile Defense system) that have
arisen in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001 dramatically emphasizes
the continuing precariousness of the Canadian position within a
no longer transparent American Empire.
Notes:
1. Berger, L. Peter and Luckman, Thomas, The Social Construction
of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. (New York:
Doubleday and Company, 1966), 90.
2. Rydell, W. Robert, World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Exhibitions.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5.
3. Foucault,Michael, Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison.
(London: Penguin Books, 1977), 217.
4. Counter-revolutionary theorist Walt W. Rostow, an adviser to
President Kennedy, stated in an address to the Green Berets in 1961
that the changes in the superpower conflict necessitated new strategies
of winning the Cold War, “Throughtout the world, old societies
were trying to change to gain a position in the modern world and
to take advantage of the benefits of technology. This was ‘the
revolution of modernization.” Quoted in Louise Fitzimmons,
The Kennedy Doctrine. (New York: London House, 1972), 8. According
to Rostow, Communism could be out-maneuvered by depicting America
and its technology as holding the keys to modernization and social
progress and by convincing the Third World that the Soviet Union
was archaic in its conception of modernity for its own development,
let alone that of the Third World.
5. Joyce, Walter, The Propaganda Gap. (New York: Harper and Row,
1963), 51.
6. Lerner, Daniel, “Revolutionary Elites and World Symbolism,”
in Harold P. Laswell (ed.) Propaganda and Communication in World
History. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), 392.
7. Joyce, Walter, The Propaganda Gap, 82.
8. The conference “The American Way of Life” as well
as the role of MIT intellectuals in formulating U.S. Cold War policy
at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair is discussed in Robert Rydell,
World of Fairs , 197-199.
9. Berton, Pierre, 1967: The Last Good Year (Toronto: Doubleday
Canada, Ltd.), 258.
10. Beynon, S. John, “Saint-Exupery’s Pilote de Guerre:
Testimony, Art and Ideology,” in Roderick Kedward and Roger
Austin, Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology (London:
Crown Helm, 1985), 91-105.
11. Seminar ’65 Canadian Conference of the Arts, 9. The distancing
of government art policy from supporting what was perceived to be
an elitist tradition of modernism is reflected in Seminar ‘65’s
desire to merge the worlds of business and culture as well as bridging
the gap between High and Mass Culture. The following excerpt from
Seminar ’65 is noteworthy for how it describes the growth
of a more relevant national culture (particularly aimed at the middle
class), “No longer must audiences politely ignore the ubiquitous
reminders of last night’s basketball games: in many cities,
they can now enjoy fine performances in comfortable air conditioned
theatres and auditoria, as they soon will be able to do in those
additional facilities being built to commemorate the Centennial.
The gallery goer has a much wider range of museums and art galleries
to satisfy his appetite, and cultural publications have increased
markedly. All these privileges have been appreciated by an ever-increasing
public. The cultural climate has been warmed for the many thousands
of new Canadians, by the spread of higher education, and by the
imminence of the age of leisure. The old charge of Canada’s
indifference to the arts does not apply to the Canada of 1965.”
Seminar ’65, 1.
12. The number of provincial representatives per province at Seminar
’65 revealed the ongoing over centralization of culture in
Central Canada, which gave impetus to the demands for a new regionalism
in the arts. The following is a list of the numbers of representatives
drawn from each province of the country: Newfoundland (0/140), Nova
Scotia (0/140), New Brunswick (1/140), Prince Edward Island, (1/140),
Quebec (52/140), Ontario (72/140), Manitoba (3/140), Alberta (2/140),
Saskatchewan (2/140), British Columbia (6/140).
13. The Canadian Conference on the Arts Supplementary Brief to the
Royal Commission On Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Section 4, 1-4.
14. Theall, Donald, “Expo ’67: A Unique Art Form”,
Artscanada (April 1967), 3.
15. Kroker, Arthur, Technology and the Canadian Mind (Montreal:
New World Perspectives, 1984), 132.
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