I first encountered Dr. Harsanyi in a phone interview, when we were looking to hire a rare book cataloguer in 2005. I remember having been extremely impressed by Niki’s resume and credentials, which only hinted at his impressive linguistic abilities. An ethnic Hungarian from Romania, Dr. Harsanyi had earned both Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Timisoara, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cluj, Romania. He had come to the United States in 1990, first to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as a visiting Fullbright professor of Slavic languages and literature, remained as Institute for Humanities fellow, and then migrated south, serving as a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH, Dr. Harsanyi completed a Master of Science in Library Science graduate degree, afterwards working at Duke University Libraries before becoming administrative director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at UNC. A true Renaissance man, Dr. Harsanyi’s research interests focused on ethnicity and nationalism in Eastern Europe, post-communist transitions, minority literature in Romania, and British Renaissance history plays. His publications include several chapters in edited books, as well as articles in various journals in the U.S., Austria, and Romania. He had delivered lectures at several American universities and presented papers at various professional conferences in Germany, the Netherlands, Malta, and the U.S.
Given the European leanings of The Wolfsonian Library’s collections, we were thrilled that someone fluent in French, German, Romanian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, and Swedish and so experienced and well-versed in the history and culture of Eastern Europe was willing to relocate to South Florida to join our small team of librarians. But as impressive as his resume was and as congenial as he appeared during our brief phone interview, it is difficult to guess whether a job candidate will fit in and work out. And so it was with a great sense of relief that on finally meeting him in person, Dr. Nicolae (“Niki”) Harsanyi showed himself to be not only erudite, but also personable, good-natured, and possessed of a sly, dry wit.
Soon after Niki began working at The Wolf, I invited him to join myself, my wife, and my father—costumed respectively as the Marx brothers Groucho, Harpo and Chico—to attend a farcical Halloween play in Hialeah. Ironically, the performance was in Spanish, one of the few European languages in which he was not fluent. Despite his personal history of opposition to and activism against the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Niki good-heartedly consented to play the part of Karl, the least funny Marx brother!
And it was in that role that Niki first demonstrated what we at The Wolf would all soon enough discover—his quick and biting wit. Even as he stood holding a copy of Das Capital in his hand, he was approached by an inebriated Halloween reveler who pointed at him and pronounced him to be noted theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein. Without a moment’s hesitation, Niki responded with the quip: “Obviously, you’re no Einstein.” Such an auspicious beginning made him a sought-after special Luca-Palacio Halloween guest.
A prolific and detail-oriented rare book cataloger, Niki single-handedly updated thousands of sketchy records of our extensive German language holdings, and also provided original bibliographic records for hundreds of Hungarian and Russian language books, periodicals, and ephemeral items.
From the very start, Niki could be counted on to attend virtually all of the museum’s exhibition openings, convivially interacting with guests and VIP visitors.
He also patiently introduced museum visitors to our library collection at open-house library events.
As part of his duties, Niki also regularly interacted with Florida International University students, receiving high praise from their professors.
Niki excelled at providing historical context and invaluable reference services to visiting researchers and residential fellows.
But it was not only museum visitors, but Niki’s coworkers and colleagues who delighted in his company at work and during lunch and coffee breaks.
After completing twenty years of service at The Wolfsonian Library, Niki announced his retirement in June 2025. His daughter, Anna, flew down to attend his retirement party in the museum’s cafe and gift shop.
This past Monday morning, I was informed by an intimate friend of Niki that he had suffered a mortal heart attack. Niki’s family, friends, and fellow “Wolfies” all mourn his passing and share in that loss.
Board member and long-time library advocate and supporter, Suzi Rudd Cohen once confided to me that soon after moving from New York City, her first positive impressions of Miami Beach were shaped by her coming to The Wolfsonian museum’s book club meetings where she and other attendees were enlightened and entertained by Niki’s insightful commentary and wit. Another long-time Wolfsonian supporter, Thomas Ragan, responded to the news of Niki’s passing with the following note: “Niki befriended me on my very first visits to the Wolfsonian Library and shared his and Frank’s vision of how to build on the core maritime collections of Larry Miller and Mr. Wolfson…. He was always a welcoming presence in subsequent visits and will be sorely missed.”
Earlier this month, more than a dozen Art and Art History students taking FIU Professor Lidu Yi’s Arts of China and Japan course came to The Wolfsonian to peruse our holdings of rare Japanese books, periodicals, and ephemera.
After looking over a variety of historical, silk-tie, and accordion-style bindings, the class focused their attention on a set of prints from One Hundred Pictures of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era (Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue). This portfolio contains colorful wood block prints created by Koizumi Kishio (1893–1945) from the 1920s through the late 1930s.
Having seen the prints online via our digital catalog, the students now had the opportunity to see them up close and in person. As part of the class’s pedagogical method to train them in museum curation, the students have written an introduction to the portfolio and interpretive text for each individual print chosen for display.
The students will be exhibiting fifteen of Kishio’s prints in an installation titled Nature as Healer. The prints will be shown during our Art Week open house on Friday evening with the students on hand to share and discuss the artwork with Art Basel visitors from across the globe. In addition, students are creating three contemporary prints, inspired by and responding to Kishio’s original works for Friday’s event.
As the library is often swamped with Art Basel guests during our open house, we have decided to simultaneously display a sampling of materials from our Japanese holdings in our main reading room. These materials reflect the general concerns and interests of The Wolfsonian and its founder, Mr. Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., but also the generosity of other long-term library supporters such as Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf. In fact, years ago Fred Sharf provided significant support for an exhibition of many of the Kishio prints and the publication of a catalog, Tokyo: The Imperial Capital.
Kishio’s woodblock prints depict the transformation of Tokyo in the wake of the Great Earthquake of 1923 as the capital city was rebuilt in a blend of tradition and modernism.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The materials in The Wolfsonian Library reading room will include books written by Westerners who traveled to Japan in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries; these early tourist were eager to describe the once isolationist island to their countrymen and women at home. Many of these books include beautiful historic bindings and the authors’ claims within as amateur experts on Japanese life and culture.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection
While many of these books reflect the West’s views and visions of Japan, our collection also includes materials produced by and for the Japanese. One such example is an accordion-style binding with images of fashionable Japanese women sporting traditional kimonos in harmony with the changing seasons.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Another accordion-style binding in the collection includes a graphic depiction of the earthquake that shook Japan and devastated Tokyo in September 1923.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Our Japanese holdings also reflect the museum’s collecting interests in modernist art and architecture. One of the buildings to survive the great quake was Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel. The library holds some brochures and other ephemeral items about the hotel, as well as some works by his Japanese acolytes.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loans
Developments in mass transit, travel, and transportation are important themes in our collection. Japan’s embrace of such new technologies in the twentieth century are also evident in children’s books designed to get the younger generation excited about trains, trolleys, automobiles, and early airships and airplanes.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Of course, being located in the cruise line capital of the Eastern seaboard, The Wolfsonian possesses one of the finest collections of printed promotional materials for steamships and ocean liners outside of museums focused exclusively on maritime matters. The Japanese O.S.K. and N.Y.K. lines are well represented in such holdings with advertisements, cutaways, deck plans, and other materials showcasing travel aboard Japanese passenger liners.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The collection also includes magazines and other materials promoting travel and tourism to Japan.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian museum and library collections are also renowned for their holdings of national and international expositions, and we currently have an exhibit open to the public focusing on iconic and utopian structures built for a variety of world’s fairs. We also recently hosted a visiting fellow researching Japan’s participation in national and international expositions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who had the opportunity to see materials from Mr. Wolfson and Mr. Sharf’s donations.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
As a major focus of our museum centers on political propaganda, it is not surprising that we hold some materials documenting the short-lived Communist movement in Japan. While the Japanese Communist Party was founded in 1922, a government crack down and Peace Preservation Law (1925) outlawed the Party and severely repressed the activities of the underground movement through government surveillance of student and intellectual groups, police raids, and the use of torture. The Wolfsonian’s holdings document the small resurgence in Communist activity during the Great Depression in the early 1930s which was quickly and decisively snuffed out by the increasingly militaristic government. Items in our library collection include a run of rare periodicals and an extremely rare book with linoleum or woodcut block prints affixed to Kraft paper pages.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Thanks to our founder and donors like Fred Sharf, we also possess a large collection of works that document Japan’s use of wartime propaganda as the nation expanded its empire and sphere of interest in the East and engaged in conflicts with Russia, China, and the United States in the (anything but) Pacific. Mr. Wolfson had acquired a set of plates with colorful and patriotic designs to be used to make greeting cards in the wake of Japan’s stunning naval success in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Frederick Sharf added original photograph albums and historical bindings about that conflict to our holdings as well.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection
Our holdings also include children’s propaganda books, including this one lionizing Tōgō Heihachirō, the Japanese admiral and hero of the naval victory over the Russians.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Pamela K. Harer
The Wolfsonian also has a fine collection of military propaganda produced by all of the nations fighting in the Second World War, including a set of patriotic Japanese prints designed to be fashioned into fans.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, TheMitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
We hope that our Art Basel visitors on Friday will find some of these items to be as captivating as our students found them to be.
Postscript: Dec. 5, 2025
Just before The Wolfsonian opened it doors to Art Basel guests, the library hosted a visit by the Deputy Consul of Japan. He had come to see Nature as Healer, a special installation for the evening’s festivities focusing on 15 colorful woodblock prints from a portfolio of 100 views of Tokyo by Koizumi Kishio.
The display was curated by students enrolled in FIU Professor Lidu Yi’s Arts of China and Japan course. Two of Professor Yi’s students, Roger Gonzalez and Christine Siulyn, and another FIU graduate student and print maker, Amanda Iannone, also exhibited original artwork in conversation with the historic Kishio prints.
Before the night was over, 538 Art Basel visitors came up to the library floor to see related Japanese materials in the collection as well as to hear the students provide oral descriptions and interpretations the Kishio prints they selected and from which they drew inspiration.
Earlier this month on October 12th, The Wolfsonian hosted a group of World Ship Society visitors preparing to sail on a cruise out of South Florida.
Thomas Ragan, a long-term Wolfsonian Library donor and supporter arranged for a reception for the guests who took the Brightline down from Ft. Lauderdale. After enjoying some drinks and appetizers in our café, the visitors were conducted on a guided tour of the galleries and treated to a behind-the-scenes peek into our newly renovated library stacks.
With the help of our library intern, the tables in our main reading room were laid out with a variety of passenger ship promotional ephemera drawn from the library’s extensive holdings of ocean liner and cruise collection–one of the largest of its kind held in a museum not solely focused on maritime materials.
The Wolfsonian Library holds approximately 35,000 brochures, deck plans, menus, postcards, and other printed materials promoting and documenting oceanic travel from the mid-nineteenth- through the twentieth century. Today’s post comes to you courtesy of our intern, Astrid Garcia, whose semester-long internship has been generously underwritten by the granddaughter of the Grace Line chair, Elise Holloway, who drove down from West Palm Beach to join the group and who dropped off a few more Grace Line brochures and postcards to add to our collection. Here is Astrid’s report:
The Wolfsonian’s vast collection of ocean liner materials includes a variety of Grace Line ephemera generously donated over the years by Elise Holloway–heiress to the Grace Line legacy. These promotional materials provide an insight into a world dominated by commercial ocean travel. Renowned for its innovative passenger services, the Grace Line ships became a hallmark of maritime travel and luxury by the late 1930s.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Elise Grace Holloway, in memory of her brother, Bill
Originally founded in 1882 by W. R. Grace & Company, Grace Line entered the steamship business with cargo ships exporting fertilizer from Peru to the United States. By the early 20th century, the company expanded into passenger services with five ships sailing from New York to the Caribbean and South America. To comply with U.S. mail contracts, Grace Line acquired four new Santa ships designed by renowned architect, William Francis Gibbs, who had also designed the record-breaking ship, the United States. With these four new vessels, Grace Line extended their passenger ship service between New York and Seattle via the Panama Canal.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gifts of Elise Grace Holloway, in memory of her brother, Bill
Characterized by funnels with a black top, white band, and a solid green lower section, the new liners were known for their comfort, speed, and luxury. The “Four Sisters” were the first American ships to offer all outside staterooms with private baths in which each room was mechanically ventilated. The main dining room on the promenade deck even included a retractable dome that could be rolled back to allow passengers to dine under the stars in good weather. Only the Santa Rosa and Santa Paula would survive the Second World War, and these two ships were replaced in 1958 by sister ships sporting the same name.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Elise Grace Holloway, in memory of her brother, Bill
Nearly identical, these new ships featured aluminum paneling for fire protection, large outdoor swimming pools, and spacious accommodations with all cabins facing outside. The liners sailed from New York every Friday on voyages to the Caribbean and South America. The ships continued their service until 1969 when Grace Line was sold to Prudential Line.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gifts of Elise Grace Holloway, in memory of her brother, Bill
The visitors were also treated to materials drawn from the Vicki Gold Levi Collection, consisting of items documenting U.S. tourist travel to Havana, Cuba between 1919 and 1959. Brochures and other ephemera produced by a variety of steamship companies ferrying American tourists to Cuba painted an idyllic image of the tropical atmosphere of nearly island and the wider Caribbean.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gifts of Vicki Gold Levi
Built for the Munson Steamship Line in 1921, the S.S. Munargo operated between New York, Nassau, Havana, and Miami until it was sold in 1938 and eventually converted into a U.S. troopship.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Vicki Gold Levi
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt launched the “Good Neighbor” policy to promote trade and tourism between the U.S. and Latin American countries. The Moore-McCormack Lines capitalized on U.S. subsidies to create its “Good Neighbor fleet” from passenger liners purchased from the Panama Pacific Line. Moore-McCormack ships were renamed Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina to reflect their new route from New York to the ports of South America. The ships were renovated to include refurbished suites, a swimming pool, and air conditioning throughout the first class cabins and dining room. Offering a wide range of amenities, the fleet became an instant success until the attack on Pearl Harbor brought an end to its passenger service after three years of operation. Library supporter Thomas Ragan donated a large cache of materials documenting the “Good Neighbor Fleet,” some of which were included in a library installation a few years ago and in this display organized for our maritime enthusiasts.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Thomas C. Ragan
Items such as this deck plan of S.S. Uruguay, offers a comprehensive insight into the ship’s overall layout and interior. As the first of the trio to set sail southbound, Uruguay departed New York for ports in Barbados, Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Montevideo, and Bueno Aires. During a return voyage in 1939, Carmen Miranda left Brazil on board the ship to launch her career in the U.S., in where she came to be known as “The Brazilian Bombshell.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Thomas C. Ragan
Across the Atlantic, the Blue Star Line was first launched in 1911 to operate cargo and refrigerated ships between Britain and South America. In addition to transporting frozen meat, the company began offering passenger service with the construction of the “Luxury Five” ships. However, it was not until 1929 that “Star” was added to the name of each vessel regularly employed for pleasure voyages. The Arandora Star became popular amongst the rich and famous for its idyllic destinations.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Upgraded as a luxury cruise liner, the ship carried around 350 first-class passengers to ports in the Northern capitals, the Mediterranean, and the West Indies. Blue Star Line marketed its holiday cruises as a sweet escape from colder climates. Arandora Star featured a Louis XIV style dining room as well as a tennis court and swimming pool on its upper decks. With the white hull and scarlet ribbon, the liner earned the nicknames of the ‘chocolate box’ or ‘wedding cake.’ However, following the outbreak of World War II, the ship was repainted a dull grey and dark blue and placed into service for the British government as a troop carrier. All of Blue Star Line’s “Luxury Five” were sunk by German forces during the war.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Collector and long-term Wolfsonian supporter, Mitchell Mart has recently contributed a variety of steamship materials to the collection. One of the earliest items is a passenger list from the National Steam Ship Company, (also known as the National Line), that was founded in Liverpool in 1863. Built in the same year, the S.S. Greece became the first steamship to transport fresh meat in refrigerated compartments from New York to Europe in 1876. A year later, the same ship was the first to carry live cattle across the Atlantic. Between 1863 and the 1880s, the National Line was instrumental in transporting both cargo and immigrants to the United States. This passenger list from 1883 shows that the ship carried 45 “saloon” travelers from London to New York in addition to the unnamed steerage passengers.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mitchell Mart
Among Mr. Mart’s recent gifts is this postcard of the Lusitania launched in 1907 by the Cunard Line. At the time of her completion, the liner was touted as the world’s largest passenger ship until surpassed by her sister ship, the Mauretania, which measured 3-5 extra feet in length.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mitchell Mart
The Mauretania remained in service until 1934, when the Cunard White Star Line was formed as a merger of two steamship companies. Under the terms of the merger, Cunard contributed 15 vessels while White Star contributed 10 ships. During this time, the house flags of both lines were flown on all their ships, with each vessel flying the flag of its original owner above the other. This baggage tag from the Cunard White Star Line is one of 550+ luggage labels from various ocean liners that Mitchell Mart has generously donated to The Wolfsonian-FIU.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mitchell Mart
Mitchell Mart’s donation also included a view book of the Andrea Doria, named after an Italian admiral whose portrait is portrayed on the cover. In the aftermath of World War II, the Italian Line commissioned two new vessels to restore the nation’s pride. The shipping company held a competition amongst Italy’s best architects to design the public lounges of the ship. The final choice of the Italian Line was to distribute the first class public spaces between all of the participating architects. Once completed, the cruise ship was quickly dubbed a “floating art gallery,” showcasing the country’s artistic achievements with splendid artwork and decor lining the interior of the ship.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mitchell Mart
Launched in 1951, the Andrea Doria featured three separate passenger classes with their own separate public lounges, swimming pools, dining rooms, card rooms, ballrooms, and deck space. These comfortable facilities made the Andrea Doria popular as any traveler could enjoy a high level of luxury regardless of class. Ultimately, the ship became a media sensation after its collision with M.S. Stockholm in 1956. It was the first major maritime disaster to be transmitted live across the world. The remarkable rescue of nearly the entire crew and passengers aboard further solidified the Andrea Doria as one of the best remembered ocean liners in history.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mitchell Mart
Before the start of the Second World War, Lloyd Triestino boasted a total of 85 vessels offering services to East Africa, South Asia, and Australia and making Italy one of the world’s major shipping powers. The M.S. Victoria attracted international attention for its innovative features and modern appearance. It was the first passenger ship to have automatic air conditioning in the first class main lounge and some of its luxury cabins. Despite being smaller than most transatlantic liners, the Victoria was noted for its speed to ports as far as Bombay and Shanghai via the Suez Canal.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
As an outcome of the Mediterranean Conference in 1906, Italian shipping companies obtained a larger share of the passenger traffic to the Americas. Born of this entrepreneurial opportunity, the Lloyd Sabaudo company operated transatlantic routes from Genoa to ports in New York and Buenos Aires. The name “Sabaudo” referred to the House of Savoy–the ruling Italian royal family that had financial ties to the shipping line. Their influence was reflected in the promotional materials used for Lloyd Sabaudo. Of these, the best-known poster was created in 1928 by Giuseppe Riccobaldi to market the four luxury liners of the “Conte” class: the Conte Rosso, Conte Verde, Conte Biancamano, and Conte Grande. As seen in this book, “The Famous Counts” come together to represent the colors of the Italian flag.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Similar to her sister ship Conte Bianacamano that operated the North American route, Lloyd Sabaudo ordered the construction of Conte Grande in 1927 to begin service from Genoa to Naples and New York. Passengers on board the ship enjoyed the luxury of the chinoiserie style, in which the cruise’s public lounges featured an abundance of gilt and white marble. This opulence can be seen in the ship’s vast double-decked dining room and in the interior temperature-regulated swimming pool room.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The fifth installment, Conte di Savoia, was originally ordered for the Lloyd Sabaudo line; however, after a state-enforced merger with Cosulich and Navigazione Generale Italiana, the ship was completed for the newly formed Italia Flotte Riunite. Known internationally as the Italian Line, the shipping company also inherited Rex in 1931 from NGI. Before the merger, both were conceived to compete with each other which led to a great difference in design and decoration. Conte di Savoia was the first major passenger liner to have gyroscopic stabilizers installed, which reduced rolling and ensured a smooth crossing across the Atlantic. The interiors also represented an authentic revolution among other ocean liners as the public lounges were in a modern style rather than a more typical neoclassical decor. However, the designs of Gustavo Pulitzer proved to be too divergent from the traditional, and Adolfo Coppedè was brought in to redesign the Colonna Saloon in an ornate Baroque style.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The interiors of Rex were decorated in classical historical styles while her exterior featured a modern streamlined appearance. The ship offered a wide range of luxury amenities including private verandahs, a spa, two outdoor swimming pools, a gymnasium, and air conditioning in public lounges and select cabins. In 1933, Rex earned the Blue Riband for the fastest westbound voyage from Europe to the United States with a record time of 4 days 13 hours and 58 minutes.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
More than two decades earlier, the Lusitania by the Cunard Line won the Blue Riband for both eastbound and westbound records in 1907 and 1908. In order to propel Lusitania at an unprecedented speed, four steam turbine engines had been installed driving four separate propellers with an additional pair of low-pressure turbines for reverse thrust. While turbines had never been implemented on such scale before, the ship quickly proved to be an engineering triumph.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of …
Although Mauretania surpassed her sister ship in both speed and size, the Lusitania became one of the most infamous ocean liners of the early 20th century. In 1915, a German U-Boat torpedoed the passenger ship causing her to sink in less than 18 minutes, claiming the lives of 1,198 passengers and crew. The death of 128 Americans became a focus of U.S. propaganda which helped shift public opinion away from neutrality and engendered hostility towards the German belligerents and their reckless policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of …
Following the war, Germany had to cede the Hamburg America liners S.S. Bismarck and S.S. Imperator as war reparations to Britain. The ships were later purchased by British shipping companies to replace White Star’s Britannic and Cunard’s Lusitania. Under White Star, the Bismarck was renamed Majestic and modified to run on oil rather than coal. In 1922, the ship became the flagship of the White Star Line and the largest vessel of the world for the next 13 years.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
After her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, the Majestic became one of the most popular ocean liners during her time, carrying more passengers than any other transatlantic cruise with a total of 2,095 travelers. The large vessel was known for its grandeur and elegance due to the architectural designs by Charles Mewès, who had decorated multiple Ritz hotels across Europe. Given the ample space, the public lounges of the ship were vast and most cabin rooms were spacious and comfortable. As seen in this brochure, the first class lounge extended two decks with a height of 26 feet. The walls were paneled in oak and adorned with hand-carved decorations around tall French-style windows. Together with the dome that was filled with crystal panes, the lounge offered plentiful natural light. Located beyond the lounge was the reading and writing room decorated in plaster and painted in white and blue tones. The room featured soft armchairs and large windows with a view out unto the promenade deck.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Since 1875, the NYK Line operated regular services to ports across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Known nationally as the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, the shipping company was founded in the Tokugawa era of Japan and maintained maritime dominance more than a century later. The NYK Line was the first to establish passenger service in Japan and in 1929, the M.V. Asama Maru became Japan’s first diesel-powered passenger ship. The vessel was noted for its speed from Yokohama to San Francisco which took about 15 days. Alongside Asama Maru, two other sister ships were built for the transpacific route from the Far East to the United States, with ports of call in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Honolulu, and Los Angeles.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of …
The interior designs of these vessels were decorated according to different historical British eras. The Asama Maru featured a library and writing room with elegant decorations from the William and Mary period, while the smoking room and bar held a beamed ceiling from the early Tudor style, as seen in this deck plan depicting layer-by-layer cutaway illustrations of the rooms and facilities available.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Another item on display for our visitors was a silver foil covered view book about the Compagnie de Navigation Sud-Atlantique’s S.S. Atlantique. Built in 1931, the cruise ship was the largest and swiftest liner on the South American route. However, in comparison to her contemporaries, the ship was designed with very little sheer and camber, giving her an unusually flat look from the side. Regardless, the liner was in popular demand for its luxurious Art Deco interior. Designed by Paul-Albert Bensard and Pierre Patout–a pioneer of the Art Deco style–L’Atlantique featured a ceramic-studded swimming pool, a shopping mall, and private dining rooms. The furnishings of the public lounges were largely made of glass, marble, and various woods, making for a relaxing but glamorous atmosphere that would later inspire the interiors of the S.S. Normandie.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
In 1933, L’Atlantique caught fire en route to Le Havre for her annual overhaul. After two short years of service, the ship was destroyed and ultimately sold for scrap in 1936. Within a 10 year period, the L’Atlantique became one of five French liners lost to fire. The NGT’s flagship Normandie also caught fire while undergoing conversion to a troopship in New York harbor in 1942; it, too, was later sold for scrap in 1948.
.The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
While post-World War Two developments in aircraft design provided tourists with new options and means of faster travel around the world, the modern cruise line industry has continued to thrive. As evident from our visitors, passenger ships continue to offer a luxurious and more relaxed travel experience.
One hundred years after her birth in the Santos Suárez barrio of Havana, Cuba in October 1925, the “Queen of Salsa,” Celia Cruz lives on in the memories of her devoted fans around the world, in her ever-popular music and in her sonorous catch phrase, “¡Azucar!” Later this month, Florida International University’s Casa Cuba will be opening an installation highlighting Celia’s early career drawing on materials from The Wolfsonian and the Diaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collections.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
Diaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collections, Florida International University
The display will also include a performance dress loaned by Omer Pardillo-Cid, President of the Celia Cruz Foundation dedicated to keeping her music and cultural impact alive. Well before she moved to the United States in 1962, helped popularize salsa, and became a global star, Celia’s distinctive voice and style had already established her reputation as the Queen of Cuban rhythms. From mid-1930s through the 1950s, the versatile singer was renowned for singing everything from sonorous salutes to Afro-Cuban orishas (ancestral deities) to a wide range of popular music including sones, boleros, tangos, and guarachas.
Diaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collections, Florida International University
Celia Cruz was fortunate to grow to maturity in the post-1933 revolution period—a time when Cuban intellectuals searching for a new national identity reappraised previously denigrated Afro-Cuban art, music, and culture and elevated and celebrated its expression. Under the influence of ethnomusicologists Dr. Fernando Ortiz Fernández and Obdulio Morales Ríos, the academies and the nation embraced the movement that came to be known as afrocubanismo.
Dr. Fernando Ortiz Fernández and Mercedes (“Merceditas”) Valdés
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Popular magazines like Carteles and Bohemia began to publish cover art that celebrated and treated African traditions with sensitivity and respect.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
Although raised in a strict Catholic household, Celia overcame her girlish reticence of boisterous Afro-Cuban chanting and drumming, learning to pronounce (if not always understand the sacred meanings of) the Lucumí liturgy from her neighbors. As early as the mid-1930s, Celia began singing popular music and winning radio-sponsored amateur singing competitions; in the following decade, she began to associate with the Santería singer, Merceditas Valdés—a protégé of Dr. Ortiz—and gained an appreciation of sacred Afro-Cuban music. Celia later confessed to a biographer that performances at religious rituals known as toques and bembés provided her with “a beautiful way to express my African roots” and became an “important source of inspiration for my music.”
Merceditas Valdés poses in the front row; Celia Cruz stands behind and left of her raised arm
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Already known for singing popular music broadcast by radio to Cuban audiences, by the mid-to-late 1940s Celia performed with the Mulatas de Fuego dance troupe organized by Roderico (“Rodney”) Neyra, who would become famous in the fifties as the choreographer of the Tropicana nightclub’s cabaret entertainment. Celia also appeared in Rodney’s Afro-Cuban-themed “Sinfonía en Blanco y Negro” theatrical production in Havana. Celia’s first-ever studio recording came in 1947, when she and Merceditas contributed the vocals to accompany the Coro Yoruba musicians and drummers playing the sacred double-headed batá drums in Toques de Santo. This set of three 78s recorded and released for Panart Records in Havana was also the first recording made of sacred Santeria music in Cuba, with Celia’s homage to the African ancestral deities, Changó and Babalú Ayé, first released as a single before being re-released a decade later. Celia continued her association with Afro-Cuban music well into the late 1940s, appearing with Obdulio Morales’s folkloric group on Radio Cadena Suaritos.
Diaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collections, Florida International University
Celia’s voice had become so recognized in Havana at this time that she was invited to headline some of capital city’s most famous cabarets, including the Sans Soucí and Tropicana nightclubs—appearing at the latter venue’s “Under the Stars” stage with Merceditas and an Afro-Cuban ensemble.
Merceditas stands in the center; Celia Cruz to her right
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gifts of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
When Myrta Silva, the beloved lead singer of Sonora Matancera, left the band to return to Puerto Rico in 1950, Celia Cruz was recruited to take her place. Both Celia and Sonora Matancera rose to new heights of popularity in Cuba and the neighboring Latin American countries through which the band toured.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gifts
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
As the lead singer of Sonora Matancera, Celia regularly performed at the Tropicana nightclub throughout the 1950s.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
In addition to frequently performing on Cuban radio and in nightclubs, Celia also began making guest appearances in several Cuban and Mexican musical films. Celia dances in Salón México (1950), and sings “El mambo es así” in Rincón Criollo (1950); “Sandunguéate” with Sonora Matancera and Las Mulatas de Fuego in Una gallega en La Habana (1952); and “Me Voy a Pinar del Río,” in ¡Olé… Cuba! (1957).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
Celia’s first Hollywood debut also came in 1957, when she performed in the gritty film noir, Affair in Havana (1957).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
Celia Cruz had been singing with Sonora Matancera in Mexico when the 1959 Cuban revolution occurred and the Castro regime nationalized the music industry soon after coming to power. Celia faced the heart-rending decision of returning to Cuba or leaving her family and homeland behind as relations between the Castro regime and the United States quickly deteriorated. Celia relocated to New York City in 1962, eventually pursuing a solo career as well as collaborating with other Caribbean musicians such as Tito Puente and Johnny Pacheco.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gifts
Not only did Celia help popularize “salsa” music in the 1970s and 1980s, but she also became a solo artist superstar, winning numerous music awards and accolades, a global fan base, and the love of many generations of music lovers.
This past Friday, more than a dozen people attended The Wolfsonian Book Club, gathering to discuss E. L. Doctorow’s National Book Award winning novel, World’s Fair, published in 1985. Before tackling the point of view, plot, and characters of Doctorow’s fictionalized memoir and coming-of-age story, I led the participants to the library to view a display of rare materials from the exposition that had captured the imagination of the author as a young boy growing up in the Bronx in the 1930s.
In pulling and laying out the books, catalogs, souvenir view books, postcards, leaflets, advertisements, and other ephemeral items from the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair, I focused on those illustrating some of the structures, pavilions, and amusement rides mentioned in the novel.
Since the novel shifts between the early memories and adult recollections of Edgar, the novel’s central protagonist and primary narrator, we began with a look at a children’s book.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
I was surprised when two of the book club attendees began singing from memory the lyrics of Johnny’s So Long at the Fair, Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be? Evidently, the title comes from an old eighteenth-century nursery rhyme and folk ballad of which I had been completely unaware. Like so many of the catalogs and printed items promoting the fair, the book’s cover illustration included an image of the Trylon and Persiphere, the central structures at the New York World’s Fair, and the embodiment of the expo’s slogan: “Building the World of Tomorrow.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Even before the story’s youthful narrator had the opportunity to visit the fair in person, he could not escape the Trylon and Perisphere’s reach as images of the structures were converted into ubiquitous logos used to promote the exposition. As Edgar tells it:
We had not yet been to the World’s Fair, but all around were signs that it was going on. Kazoos and ocarinas in their cards had World’s Fair emblems. Next door was a souvenir shop where Trylon and Perisphere pins were on sale, and banners with pictures of them painted on the cloth. The Trylon was a skyscraping obelisk; the Perisphere was a great globe. They stood side by side at the Fair, and together they represented the World of Tomorrow, which was the fair’s theme…. (193)
While The Wolfsonian does not possess have any World’s Fair kazoos or flutes—(don’t feel bad if you had to look up “ocarinas” to figure that out, too!)—we do have souvenir knickknacks and tchotchkes like a plastic puzzle of the obelisk and globe in its original packaging.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Tim Gleason
We also possess two copies of the Gemloid Corporation’s Pilgrimage to Tomorrow, a combination guide and illustrated souvenir viewbook that also included blank pages for personal photographs and lined pages for keeping a diary. To give the book a futuristic appearance, the publishers eschewed a traditional sewn binding for one made of newly available plastic materials. The binders also used a mechanical engraving technique to incise patterns onto a plate, afterwards molding the cover in a clear thermoplastic to give it a three-dimensional look.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
While it is difficult in retrospect to imagine, fair organizers had not immediately settled on the iconic Trylon and Persiphere as the centerpiece of the exposition. The book club attendees had the opportunity to look at an oversized volume published in 1936, offering a very different—if less compelling—concept for the fair’s theme center. Instead of the iconic triangular obelisk and giant sphere they ultimately settled upon, an earlier proposal envisioned an enormous, if not so distinctly futuristic, rotunda flanked by skyscraper-like towers.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Only in the last four chapters does Doctorow’s novel delve into the fair that inspired the author and its title, instead spending the first 185 pages describing the young Jewish boy’s trials and tribulations growing up during the Great Depression. The fair is first alluded to by the novel’s primary narrator, Edgar, who recalls being hospitalized after suffering a burst appendix. While convalescing in the children’s ward of the hospital, Edgar is visited by his older brother who gives him a small gift:
It was a lapel pin shaped like a pickle. It was very funny. It was a Heinz 57 pickle, which people got for visiting the Heinz Dome at the New York World’s Fair. “When you’re all better,” Donald said to me as I turned the pin over in my fingers, “we’ll all go to the World’s Fair.” “Have you been yet?” I said. “No,” my brother said. “We wouldn’t go without you, you know that. We’ll all go together. Mom and Dad and you and I. The whole family.” (185)
The Wolfsonian not only possesses one of these tiny plastic Heinz pickle pins; it is presently on display in the World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow exhibition on view in our seventh-floor gallery.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Stuart Slieces
For the book club attendees, I had pulled a postcard with a color illustration of the Heinz pavilion, where such souvenirs might be acquired. Designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Archibald M. Brown, it featured a 90-foot-tall dome that became almost as recognizable a landmark as the Trylon and Perisphere structures at the heart of the fair.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Edgar’s first opportunity to visit the exposition comes as an offer from his school friend, Meg, whose mother, we are told, works at the fair in some capacity which allowed her to bring her child and her friend in for free. Although Edgar’s overprotective mother is reluctant to place him in the care of a woman she views with suspicion for raising her daughter in a fatherless household, she finally relents. And thus, Edgar escapes from mundane life in the Depression-era Bronx and is free to enjoy the fair’s festivities—providing the readers with the same vicarious thrills.
Edgar remembers being impressed by the actual size of the Trylon and Perisphere, which “up close, seemed to fill the sky.” (251)
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The children’s first stop was to join the long line of visitors queuing up to see the popular “Highways and Horizons” exhibit inside the General Motors pavilion designed by Norman Bel Geddes, but more popularly known as “Futurama” or the “World of Tomorrow.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Once inside the General Motors Building, Edgar, Meg, and her mother sat down on seats attached to a conveyor belt which, in time with a synchronized soundtrack, carried them over an enormous diorama envisioning the plans for cities, suburbs, and connecting highways as they would appear two decades into the future. The experience was akin to peering down at this brave new world from aboard a slow-moving airship.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
As he traversed the fair, our young narrator was constantly surprised at seeing the world alternatively “reduced to tiny size by the cunning and ingenuity of builders and engineers” or else statues and exhibit objects rendered “larger than they ought to have been.” By way of example, the author recalled visiting the Public Health Building and being impressed by “an enormous ear, and nose, with their canals and valves and cellular bone marrow exposed-big pink plastic organs, bigger than I was.” (254)
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Another thrill for Edgar was the Parachute Jump ride in the Midway (or entertainment) section of the exhibition, which the children found both terrifying and exhilarating. In fact, this simulated parachute drop was so popular that when the fair ended, it was dismantled, moved, and reassembled at Coney Island.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The General Electric Building offered further terror and amusement with its “artificial lightning generator” that shot bolts of lightning thirty feet through the air amidst deafening thunderclaps. (255)
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Edgar’s first visit to the New York World’s Fair serves not merely as an escape from the mundane existence of life in the Bronx during the Depression; it also ushers in his transition from child to adolescent. If Futurama and the other fair exhibits expanded his vision of the world, so too were his eyes widened by a revealing Midway show. In the novel, young Edgar is entranced by the unthinkable sight of his friend, Meg’s mother and other mature bathing beauties swimming half nude in a glass aquarium and fending off the lecherous animatronic tentacles of “Oscar the Amorous Octopus.” Here the author has likely taken some artistic license, as scholars have failed to uncover records of such an attraction. In fact, the prudish fair organizers turned down proposals by Sally Rand, the burlesque fan-dance performer who titillated and scandalized audiences at A Century of Progress International Exposition (1933-1934: Chicago, Ill.) and the Golden Gate International Exposition (San Francisco: 1939-1940) with her racy DNude Ranch show.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Doctorow was, however, likely inspired by an actual exhibit at the New York World’s Fair: Salvador Dali’s “Dream of Venus.” This surrealistic peepshow included bare-breasted women playing at mermaids as they swam underwater in a glass tank.
On their drive home from the fair, Edgar is treated to the spectacle of a fireworks display over Fountain Lake from the side and then rear windows of the taxi.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Having won honorable mention in a fair-sponsored essay contest, Edgar is able to treat his entire family to a free VIP visit to the fair. This second visit allows the author to provide an adult perspective of the fair, as Edgar’s father and mother provide their own impressions of the fair exhibits. Edgar’s politically left-leaning father, Dave, is more skeptical than over-awed by General Motors’s Futurama diorama, with its fourteen-lane superhighways and 50,000 radio-controlled vehicles. Dave declares that GM “is telling us what they expect from us: we must build them the highways so they can sell us the cars” (285).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Dave’s cynicism is not unfounded as General Motors’s miniature “World of Tomorrow” exited through an automobile showroom where the visitors could look over their latest models.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Dave is also outraged by the frivolous nature of items included in the Westinghouse exhibit’s Time Capsule, a metal container buried in the grounds and intended to be opened no sooner than 5,000 years in the future.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of the Miami-Dade Public Library
Dave fumes at the inclusion of such random and incongruous items as the Lord’s Prayer printed in 300 languages, some newsreels of war in Asia, a Mickey Mouse plastic cup, a Lilly Daché designed hat, and a copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Much to his family’s embarrassment, Dave loudly and pointedly questions why they failed to include anything about “the great immigrations that had brought Jewish and Italian and Irish people to America or nothing to represent the point of view of the workingman” or things that might indicate that America “has a serious intellectual life, or Indians on reservations or Negroes who suffer from race prejudice.” (284)
Almost immediately after Edgar’s mother, Rose, has tried to quiet her husband, the Depression-weary housewife experiences a similar moment of outrage after walking through the “Town of Tomorrow,” a cul-de-sac collection of innovative model houses.
As her family had recently been forced to move from a spacious to a more modest and cheaper apartment, Rose exclaims: “What’s the point of showing such houses when they cost over ten thousand dollars and no one in the world has the money to buy them?” (284).
I hope our Wolfsonian Book Club members enjoyed E. L. Doctorow’s novel, World’s Fair, as well as the supplemental display of exposition artifacts. South Florida book lovers are invited to join us next time for a discussion of James Joyce’s Dubliners in relation to our Harry Clarke stained glass window.
In the course of researching and co-curating an exhibition about iconic structures built for world’s fairs and international expositions, I had the chance to peruse The Wolfsonian Library’s treasure-trove of rare catalogs, leaflets, puzzles, postcards, and other printed materials on paper. Perhaps the most difficult decisions a curator makes is what items to include as essential to the story, and which items must be cut given the constraints imposed by vitrines and casework. Thanks to the continued generosity of our Founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. and other donors and contributors, The Wolfsonian not only holds one of the premiere collections of world’s fair materials; it is a area of interest that has been growing substantially in the last few years. Today’s post will focus on some of the many recently acquired items that did not end up in our World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow exhibit, but which I thought might still be of interest.
When our founder learned that the museum was putting together an installation of exhibition materials, he was impelled to ferret out, acquire, and send to the museum some exceedingly rare ephemeral items for our consideration. While the Exposition universelle de 1878 (Paris, France) was not one of the fairs we ultimately chose to include in the show, we were thrilled to add an original three-puzzle boxed set to our holdings highlighting some of the foreign and domestic pavilions erected for that event.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
While our World’s Fair exhibition includes significant materials from the Chicago fair of 1933-34, we did not include materials from the city’s World’s Columbian Exposition held in 1893. Long-term world’s fair enthusiasts and collectors, Mark Yates and Boris Dorfman toured the galleries while the exhibition was still being installed, and generously gifted a cache of exposition materials in pristine condition. This ticket to the fair was printed by the American Bank Note Company in New York, and commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of America’s “discovery” with a portrait of Christopher Columbus.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mark L. Yates and Boris Dorfman
While our World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow exhibit begins with the Exposition universelle de 1889 which debuted the Eiffel Tower, it skips over the Exposition universelle (1900 : Paris, France) even though The Wolfsonian Library possesses more than 150 rare catalogs, view books, and all manner of ephemeral print souvenirs produced for the latter fair. This Libby, McNeill, and Libby company brochure promoting the Chicago meat packing industry’s products in the Agricultural Fair Hall was recently added to our holdings.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
Our exhibit also skipped over many smaller fairs, such as the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition (1901-1902 : Charleston, S.C.), though we were nevertheless delighted to add to our holdings this ticket printed by E. A. Wright Bank Note Engraver in Philadelphia.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift
Neither the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904 : St. Louis, Mo.) nor the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition (1905 : Portland, Or.) are featured in our museum installation, though we received a rare Peter Behrens designed catalog for the German pavilion for the former and a brochure promoting Studebaker vehicles for the latter.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Historical Design
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund
The Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (1925 : Paris, France) introduced Art Deco aesthetics and architecture to the world. While it is not represented in the current museum installation, our rich holdings from this fair have continued to expand in recent years.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund
World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow does feature original posters, brochures, and exhibition catalogs from the Exposición Internacional de Barcelona (1929-1930), honing in on the Weimar Republic’s ultramodern exhibition building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Published for the French Section, this newly acquired brochure shows the Spanish skies lit up by brilliant searchlights.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
The Wolfsonian Library has an outstanding collection of books, exhibition catalogs, pamphlets, and all manner of ephemeral print materials produced for the Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris (1931), including more than a thousand vintage postcards purchased by our founder. Mr. Wolfson has continued to add to our holdings for this fair with ephemeral items that demonstrate the darker “educational” aspect of fairs. Many pavilions and exhibits were designed to sell their citizens and the world on imperialism, the economic benefits of colonialism, and the supposed “civilizing” and humanitarian justifications for maintaining overseas empires.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Funds
While the colonial exhibition in Paris was not included in our exhibit focusing on utopian visions, two other international expositions organized in the United States in the 1930s are well represented. The Century of Progress International Exposition (1933-1934 : Chicago, Ill.) was planned to mark the hundred year anniversary of the founding of that city, after President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policies forced the native inhabitants across the Mississippi. In contrast to the World’s Columbian Exposition held forty years earlier in Chicago in 1893, with its whitewashed neoclassical architecture, the 1933-34 fair celebrated the centennial with brightly painted exhibition buildings and pavilions inspired by the Art Deco and Modernist styles first promoted at the Paris exposition in 1925.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
This souvenir photograph album includes nine loosely inserted photographs providing aerial views of the fairgrounds.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
Another photograph album from the fair pictures the popular Sky Ride attraction: two 628-feet observation towers placed 1,850-feet apart, and connected at the 200-foot level by rocket-shaped cable cars. Approximately 4.5 million visitors rode on the attraction before the fair ended and the towers were demolished.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
In addition to thousands of Century of Progress items donated to our institution by James and Martha Sweeny, we have recently received a few more pristine 1930s exposition pieces from some other sources as well.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mark L. Yates and Boris Dorfman
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
The proliferation of international expositions in the 1930s was primarily fueled by the world-wide, decade-long Depression. Hosting a fair provided cities with an opportunity to put architects, engineers, and construction workers back to work building pavilions and structures; provided jobs to citizens once the fairgrounds opened to the public; promised to attract international and domestic tourist dollars to the city, and helped boost the morale of Depression-weary urban dwellers. Our museum founder travels the world hunting down items to add to our world’s fair holdings, like this exhibition catalog for the Exposition universelle et international (1935 : Brussels, Belgium).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift
Many fairs were planned around celebrating events and anniversaries and instilling national and international pride, as in the case of the Empire Exhibition (1936 : Johannesburg, South Africa).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
This almanac produced for the Texas Centennial (1936 : Dallas, Tex.) also used a founding anniversary as an excuse to attract domestic tourist dollars to their state hit hard by Depression and the Dust Bowl.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Although not included in the museum installation, the Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937 : Paris, France) is another fair extraordinarily well represented in The Wolfsonian Library’s collection. Some recent gifts and acquisitions continue to build on strengths and fill in gaps in our holdings.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Funds
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The 150th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington served as the excuse for the New York World’s Fair (1939-1940), though fair organizers were as likely motivated by the desire to provide a boost to the economy and forge an atmosphere of hope for a brighter future as Fascists in Europe and militarists in Asia appeared intent on dragging the world into another bloody conflict. Ignoring the Depression and conflicts of the present, the fair focused on the theme of “building the world of tomorrow.” A giant Democracity diorama erected by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss inside the iconic Perisphere and a Futurama diorama designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the General Motors building promised that peace and democracy and benevolt corporations would prevail. Both visions of the future predicted that the next generation of Americans would enjoy commuting from their green suburban towns in their own automobiles along highways into well-ordered urban centers.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mark L. Yates and Boris Dorfman
To be financially successful, world’s fairs needed to entertain as well as educate visitors, and so a tall Parachute Jump ride was erected to simulate skydiving. The parachute pleasure ride proved so popular that after the fair closed it was moved to and reassembled as a Coney Island attraction.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Mark L. Yates and Boris Dorfman
Ironically, more than thirteen thousand American paratroopers would end up parachuting under far more frightening conditions during the D-Day assault on Nazi-occupied Normandy, France just a few years later in 1944.
The Wolfsonian Library has recently acquired more two dozen leaflets produced for distribution at the Brazilian pavilion at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair. Describing the tropical fruits, minerals, and other natural resources of the country, these leaflets aimed to tie the United States and Brazil together in amicable trade relations.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
The Century 21 Exposition (1962 : Seattle, Wash.) erected its iconic Space Needle tower and a monorail as it aimed to attract nearly 10 million visitors and to revitalize its city center. Though not included in our current installation, our library happily added a few pristine first day covers promoting the fair.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gifts of Mark L. Yates and Boris Dorfman
The New York World’s Fair (1964-1965) was established on the same site as its 1939-1940 predecessor, with a giant steel Unisphere erected on the spot where the Trylon and Perisphere once stood. In the troubled atmosphere of a nuclear arms race, civil rights protests, and presidential assassination, fair organizers aimed to allay fears and concerns as it sought to promote “Peace Through Understanding,” using first day issues of stamped envelopes to help spread the message.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gifts of Mark L. Yates and Boris Dorfman
Given that Osaka, Japan is currently hosting Expo 2025, it would have made sense for us to have ended our own exhibition with some materials about its predecessor, Expo (International Exhibitions Bureau) (1970 : Osaka, Japan). Unfortunately, we had little to no materials in our collection about this fair, and these recently donated postcards arrived too late to be considered for inclusion.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
We hope that South Florida visitors and residents will avail themselves of the opportunity to visit World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow to get a glimpse of how futuristic utopias were promoted in past expositions. Not to be missed is Wolfsonian social media manager, Chris Lopez’s video component viewable on three large television screens. Chris stitched together an amazing string of archival and amateur video of the exhibitions from Paris 1889 through Spokane 1974, providing visitors with an “I was there” perspective that complements the experience of perusing the objects on display.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
The Wolfsonian library is renowned for its extensive holdings of rare international exposition materials beginning with the Crystal Palace Exhibition held in Hyde Park, London in 1851. Designed by greenhouse architect Joseph Paxton (British, 1803-1865), the fair’s enormous modular exhibit hall was fashioned with more than 290,000 prefabricated panes of glass supported by a skeletal structure of prefabricated cast-iron columns and girders bolted together to enable the building to be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
This ingenious and economical design set the standard for the many fairs to follow, with hosting cities erecting iconic structures and exhibiting technological marvels to impress fairgoers and outdo their national and corporate competitors. The Eiffel Tower (Paris, 1889), the Ferris Wheel (Chicago, 1893), the Sky Ride (Chicago, 1933-34), the Trylon and Perisphere (New York, 1939-40), and the Atomium (Brussels, 1958) are but a few examples of wondrous feats of engineering making their debut at world’s fairs.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Michele Oka Doner
Even as Osaka, Japan is showing off the wonders of Artificial Intelligence at Expo 2025, The Wolfsonian’s World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow installation highlights some of the futuristic structures and utopian dioramas exhibited at earlier fairs, including Brussel’s Expo 58. Our own exhibition resulted from a dialogue and collaboration with visionary artist Marco Brambilla, who has been using AI technology to re-imagine and reconfigure historic world’s fair structures in a new video installation titled, “After Utopia.”
When he first visited The Wolfsonian Library, Marco had originally focused on materials related to fairs of the later half of the twentieth century. He was particularly interested in Expo 58, and its central structure, the Atomium, which remains a popular tourist attraction even today.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
The first international exposition organized after the Second World War, Expo 58 adopted the official slogan “Bilan du monde, pour un monde plus humain” [Evaluation of the world for a more humane world].” In the wake of the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski in August 1945, fair organizers in Brussels chose to ignore the Cold War nuclear arms race and instead to celebrate the potential for unlimited “clean” power unleashed by the splitting of the atom. The Atomium, a modernist structure built as the fair’s centerpiece, was designed by the engineer André Waterkeyn (Belgian, 1917-2005) and the Belgian architect brothers André (1914-1988) and Jean (1920-2012) Polak.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Their project rose 102 meters above the fairgrounds—(that’s 335 feet for those of us still clinging to the old British Imperial System)—making it the tallest structure in Belgium at that time.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
The Atomium is made up of nine stainless steel spheres (each 59 feet in diameter) linked together by steel tubes in the shape of the atomic structure of an iron crystal. Six of the spheres contained exhibits, while the highest sphere hosted a restaurant offering a panoramic view of Belgium’s capital city.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
Despite the best efforts of the fair organizers to “domesticate” the atom bomb and to create a mood of optimism, the Cold War nonetheless insinuated its way into Expo 58. For this post, I have jokingly pirated the subtitle of director Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, regarding it as a more appropriate description of the fair. While fair organizers attempted to ignore Cold War tensions as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for supremacy in a dangerous nuclear arms and space race, the two superpowers erected pavilions that literally faced off against each other.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
Thanks to a gift by Michele Oka Doner, The Wolfsonian Library possesses not only a postcard of the Atomium, but also an original guide and plan from the Pavilion of the U.S.S.R. published for English-language visitors. Both items are now on display in our exhibition, with the postcard enlarged and printed on vinyl affixed to one wall.
In the ultimate gesture of Cold War one-upmanship, the Soviets included an image of Sputnik on the plan’s cover to remind the world that it was the Communist state that had won the first round of the race to space in launching their orbital satellite. To bring the point home to visitors, the first two Sputnik prototypes were exhibited inside the pavilion along with a model of the Lenin, the first nuclear-powered icebreaker.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Michele Oka Doner
Designed by Y. Abramov, A. Boretski, V. Doubov and A. Polanski, the Soviet pavilion was assembled from steel, aluminum, and glass, and (like the Crystal Palace erected for the first world’s fair), it was designed so that it could be dismantled and reassembled. Taken back to Russia at the fair’s end, it was rebuilt in Moscow with another three stories added to the original structure.
Our museum founder also provided us with funds to acquire other Expo 58 ephemera, including a leaflet extolling the achievements of the “Workers’ Paradise” in terms of electrification, scientific research and development, healthful leisure pursuits provided by the state, the construction of new workers’ housing, and other cultural, educational, and social benefits provided under the Communist system.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
While the Soviet Union boasted of its great leap forward in scientific and social achievements, visitors to the United States pavilion were treated to a glimpse of the American way of life and a dizzying array of consumer goods (such as color television sets) produced by American corporations to better the lives of its citizens and capitalist trading partners. The U.S. pavilion was designed by architect Edward Durell Stone (American, 1902-1978), and was composed of four separate buildings: three drum-like structures and a fourth consisting of joint railroad boxes on stilts. The smallest drum held the Circarama Theatre, a circular cinema that placed the viewer in the center of a colorful motion picture tour of the United States created by Walt Disney. The modernist drum serving as the central exhibition hall was four times larger than the theatre, and was topped by a translucent, cable-tensioned roof negating the need for internal structural columns. Golden metal mesh and transparent acrylic panels created a translucent façade that Pravda critics belittled as a “gilded candy box.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
World’s fairs organized from the late 1960s forward have continued to attract fairgoers by building spectacular structures and organizing exhibitions promising a brighter future through scientific innovation. By necessity, however, they have also had to acknowledge the double-edged sword of industrial and technological advancements which have also alienated humankind from nature and threatened to deplete and pollute natural resources. Osaka 2025 has followed this formula, creating Society 5.0 exhibits in two pavilions which allow visitors to “explore future cities, food, culture, healthcare, and future-oriented initiatives made possible by diverse innovations across both physical and virtual venues” while recognizing the need to “balance economic growth with solutions to social challenges….”
For those residing in or visiting South Florida unable to travel to Osaka, Japan to experience Expo 2025 in person, we invite you to come to The Wolfsonian to experience the iconic structures of past expositions and yesteryear’s visions of the future through vintage objects, artifacts, and archival clips of world’s fairs stitched together by our own Chris Lopez before Marco Brambilla’s “After Utopia” video installation goes live in the fall of 2025.
As Osaka, Japan hosts the latest world’s fair, Expo 2025, The Wolfsonian–Florida International University will be opening an exhibition later this month centered around the iconic and futuristic structures of earlier international expositions. In co-curating World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow with my colleague, Silvia Barisione, we often had to remove items from the original checklist because of considerations of space. In focusing on a limited number of fairs and confining our scope to utopian visions, we left out other materials exploring tangential—if equally interesting—aspects of the expos. This post will provide a glimpse of the Midway (or entertainment section of expositions) and describe some of the exciting rides, shocking amusements, and other venues designed to promote family attendance.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loan
Early in our discussions of organizing the installation, the curatorial team contemplated creating a separate alcove for objects and artifacts intended for younger museum visitors, considering that the museum frequently hosts large groups of Miami-Dade schoolchildren. Ultimately, it was decided that it was better to integrate rather than separate out such materials, which could easily be highlighted or pointed out in guided tours catering to younger audiences. But the question of younger audiences also had me pondering exactly when world’s fairs first began to create educational exhibits and entertainments intended to attract families, especially in an age when common sentiment held that children were to be seen and not heard. In fact, there was a whole genre of children’s books dedicated to promoting juvenile interest in international expositions.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase
My own research into this notion revealed that to succeed financially, world’s fairs had to appeal not only to inquisitive adults but also to entertainment-minded children of all ages. Situated in Hyde Park, London, the first fair was officially titled the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, though it was more popularly known as Crystal Palace because the giant exhibition hall designed by greenhouse architect Sir Joseph Paxton consisted of a prefabricated structure of cast iron rods bolted together to support large panes of glass.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Many detractors and naysayers predicted disaster and argued that it was utter folly to invite “the sightseers of all the world” to London, especially in the wake of widespread democratic uprisings and revolutions across Europe in 1848. But Prince Albert’s vision prevailed; he believed that an exhibition of new scientific discoveries, art, inventions, feats of engineering and technological achievements might reduce social tensions, smooth over the economic dislocations arising from the industrial revolution, and create a mood of optimism for the future. To make the fair an economic and social success, the royal commissioners recognized that it was vital to attract people of all social classes and ages and to provide them with entertaining, educational, and edifying experiences. In the color chromolithograph illustrated Recollections of the Great Exhibition, 1851, published for a wealthier and more genteel clientele, the first two plates emphasized both the international character and sophisticated stature of the visitors. Significantly, young visitors are prominently featured in both illustrations.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Another, more popular publication, 1851, or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to Enjoy Themselves and to See the Great Exhibition was jointly written by Henry Mayhew and the celebrated British caricaturist George Cruikshank as a social satire.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The novel provides a humorous, if positive, view of Crystal Palace, describing it from the perspective of a humble villager, his wife, and their two children traveling from Cumberland to the capital city amidst the throngs of visitors eager to experience the fair.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The inclusion of the children in the illustrations and narratives of these two works indicates that from the start, world’s fair organizers always envisioned producing exhibits that would attract, enlighten, and amuse younger attendees as well as their parents. Six million people visited The Great Exhibition of 1851 during its six-month run, including such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll, and Charles Darwin. So successful was the fair that after its closure, Crystal Palace was purchased and dismantled, redesigned and reassembled in 1854 atop a new public park in Sydenham Hill, South London. The reinstallation of historical art exhibited inside the enormous exhibition hall was complemented on the outside with a series of 15 (not so accurate) cement outdoor sculptures of dinosaurs and other extinct animals to attract the curious and popularize Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase
The success of the first world’s fair inspired imitators across the continent and globe as nations, empires, and corporations played games of one-upmanship in their efforts to outdo the competition. Fair organizers invariably worked to create ever-higher, grander, and more beautiful modern structures and pavilions. When completed in 1889 for the Exposition Universelle, Eiffel’s Tower, at 1,063 feet in height, surpassed the Washington Monument as the tallest man-made structure (though not the tallest building) in the world. That its appeal was not limited to adult visitors is indicated by the fact that the iconic structure was celebrated in both real and acrobatic form in a French children’s book.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
To outdo the sensation caused by Eiffel’s Tower, fair organizers in Chicago commissioned George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. to design and build an engineering marvel to serve as the centerpiece for their Midway entertainment at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in 1893. Modeled on a water- and bicycle-wheel, Ferris’s wheel of structural steel held 36 passenger carriages, each holding as many as 60 passengers, and rotated them 264 feet into the air to provide them with a bird’s eye view of the fairgrounds. Built at a cost of $385,000, the Ferris Wheel was ridden by nearly 1 ½ million paying passengers by the fair’s end, earning $395,000 in profits.
Stereograph card, The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Midways and metal structural attractions continued to be a winning formula for attracting visitors to world’s fairs in the late nineteenth century, as seen in Snap shots of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska (1898), photographed by the famous railroad photographer, William Henry Jackson.
Not all of the messaging coming out of international expositions was edifying or enlightening, however. World’s fairs served as a type of “discovery channel” in the pre-television age, with visitors being exposed to foreign peoples and their dwellings, customs, handicrafts, and associated flora and fauna displayed in various exhibition halls and pavilions. All too often, the persons recruited as “cultural interpreters” were treated as “exotics” or stereotypical “savages” as evident in this portfolio of souvenir plates from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis in 1904.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift
Worse yet, in the early 20th century, imperial and colonial apologists recognized the importance not only of erecting wondrous technological structures and exhibition buildings, but of juxtaposing and contrasting those modern marvels with simple thatch huts and pavilions peopled by “primitives.” The peoples put on display in these human zoos were used to justify colonialism as an essential part of the “white man’s burden” to civilize the so-called savage races. For the St. Louis exposition of 1904, nearly 1,200 Filipino natives were exhibited in a “Philippine Reservation” section of the fair to stimulate pride in America’s new colonial possessions acquired after victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase
European imperial powers frequently organized entire fairs celebrating their colonial territories. The Exposition coloniale internationale (Paris, 1931), for example, published children’s books and coloring books designed to reinforce the harmful stereotypes perpetuated in the fair.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase
Given the racial prejudices of the era, organizers of the Century of Progress International Exhibition (Chicago, 1933-34) were reluctant to sanction an official Negro Building at the fair highlighting the achievements of African Americans, though they had no qualms about sanctioning a horribly sensationalized Midway display titled “Darkest Africa.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
If human zoos remained controversial features of many world’s fairs, younger visitors were enthralled by more traditional zoos, such as the “Great White Hunter” Frank Buck’s “Jungle Camp” on Chicago’s Midway boardwalk. One can only wonder at the reactions provoked by the Jungle Camp’s publicity stunt of giving away one of the endearing inhabitants of his Monkey Island as a door prize to the sixteenth and last millionth visitor to the fair!
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase
Chicago’s Century of Progress exhibition planners, however, were primarily focused on revitalizing the city’s economy at the nadir of the Great Depression. Some forty years after erecting the “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition with imposing whitewashed buildings in the neoclassical style, fair organizers in 1933 aimed to build colorful modern edifices and structures for its “Rainbow City” to raise spirits and create a mood of optimism for the future. As was typical of international expositions, the Chicago World’s Fair also created a signature steel structure, the Sky Ride, intended to be “to the 1933 Exposition what the Eiffel Tower was to the Paris Exposition of 1889 and the Ferris Wheel to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Standing 2,000 feet apart and 628 feet high, the two steel towers of the Sky Ride were described as being the “tallest man-made structures west of New York.” Visitors could make the ascent to the towers’ top observation platforms in less than a minute in Otis Automatic High-Speed Elevators to get a bird’s-eye view of the fairgrounds.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Eric Dluhosch
Visitors could also stop on the 210-foot level of the towers where they could enter (slow-moving) “rocket cars” that conveyed passengers from one tower to the other, providing unobstructed views of the lagoon and fairgrounds, downtown Chicago, and the lake shore.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
If a fear of heights preempted the faint of heart from buying a ticket on the Sky Ride, there were plenty of attractions on the Midway grounds designed to entertain children and adults. A children’s section, the Enchanted Island, was designed to “provide safe and healthful entertainment under trained supervision…with every precaution for the welfare of the young visitors,” so that parents could slip away for a few hours to explore other Midway attractions. The 5-acre story-book Island included a children’s theater and restaurant, indoor and outdoor rides, games, and spectacles such as a giant 15-foot-high coaster wagon.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca
Adventurous youngsters could take a “boat” or a bridge across a shallow moat in order to climb the 30-foot Magic Mountain, explore the the Fairy Castle at the top, and descend a spiral slide back down to its base.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The mid-nineteenth century obsession with dinosaurs continued at the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition with a whopping 16 million guests visiting the Sinclair Dinosaur Exhibit built by the Sinclair [Oil] Refining Company.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Children and adults gawked at seven life-sized dinosaurs, but the star of the show was a 40-ton, 30-foot-long brontosaurus nicknamed Dino, who was even featured on the cover of the July issue of the Official World’s Fair Weekly.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
Other Century of Progress Midway attractions were intended for more mature audiences.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Fair visitors seeking a more “adult” entertainment experience could enter the Streets of Paris Cafe where the burlesque dancer, Sally Rand, performed her infamous fan-dance. The 29-year-old dancer’s original requests to perform at the fair had been rejected multiple times, but the resourceful self-promoter refused to take no for an answer. Rand crashed a pre-opening party on the fairgrounds, riding on a white horse Lady Godiva-style, and after making bail following her arrest for indecency, signed a contract as headliner at the Cafe.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Rand’s Century of Progress fan dance attraction proved so popular and profitable, that she performed a repertoire of 60 dance compositions for San Diego’s California Pacific International Exposition in 1936. She organized another horseback stunt on February 17, 1939, (wherein women clad only in lingerie rode horseback down Market Street in downtown San Francisco), to promote her Sally Rand Nude Ranch exhibit on the Gayway (Midway) at the Golden Gate International Exhibition (San Francisco, 1939-40).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Depression decade spawned the greatest concentration of world’s fairs in U.S. history as cities like Chicago, San Diego, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco organized expositions in the hopes of bringing in tourist dollars and bolstering their local economies. Midways, with their “world-famed attractions, novel entertainment features and countless alluring amusements for young and old alike” remained an important draw for all of these venues.
The 1939-40 New York World’s Fair turned to tried and true formulas for attracting crowds, building and marketing their exposition with a giant Trylon (obelisk) and Perisphere, but also providing other Midway mechanical attractions.
While the Trylon and Perisphere became the iconic structures associated with the fair, and its “Democracity” display dazzled Depression-weary visitors with a utopian futurescape, many visitors thronged to an attraction that simulated the experience of a Parachute Jump.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Even as Democracity and General Motors’ Futurama gigantic dioramas tried to sell Americans on the notion of a brighter future, other exhibits continued to appeal to fair-goers’ love for the past. Messmore and Damon exhibit designers, for example, marketed an animatronic dinosaur display to New York’s “World of Tomorrow” fair that was engineered to pick up a woman in its mouth and carry her away unharmed!
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund
The prehistoric dinosaur displays and futurescape dioramas proved to be so popular at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair that exhibition planners for the exposition erected on the same site in 1964-65 incorporated both. A petroleum refining company using a brontosaurus for its logo created the Sinclair Dinoland display while General Motors built a space-age version of its earlier Futurama exhibit that had imagined the world twenty-years into the future.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of James and Martha Sweeny
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Exhibition planners for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fairs provided plenty of kid-friendly attractions and specifically published juvenile literature and children’s pop-up and activity books and other marketing materials to let their parent know that their toddlers would be well entertained at these expositions and at home perusing these souvenir publications.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loan
If you happen to be in South Florida between 7:00 and 9:00 PM on May 29, 2025, be sure to RSVP and join us for our World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow VIP Preview Party.
The Wolfsonian–Florida International University recently awarded a Creative Fellowship to L. M. Bogad, Professor of Theatre and Dance at U. C. Davis. Bogad has been working to adapt his screenplay, Orwell’s War, focused on George Orwell’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, into a stage play. He wished to explore The Wolfsonian’s collection of rare posters, postcards, leaflets, and other visual period propaganda materials to inspire and enrich the play’s backgrounds and sets. A committed socialist, in late 1936 Orwell traveled to the war zone, joining thousands of volunteers from around the world eager to defend the newly established Republic and to make Spain “the tomb of Fascism.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift
Orwell’s participation in that bloody conflict, as well as his equally harrowing escape from the violent purges and infighting within the ranks of the loose coalition of anarchists, trade unionists, socialists, and communists, profoundly shaped Orwell’s world view and his celebrated novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a Professor of History focused on the 1930s, I, too, was very interested in the Spanish Civil War, and how American writers like John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway were influenced by their experiences as witnesses, participants, and war correspondents. This post will focus on these three writers and the war that forced each one to reexamine, reaffirm, or reassess their political views and affiliations.
After enduring more than six years of dictatorship under General Miguel Primo de Rivera, and another year of rule by equally odious replacements, Spaniards demanded that their monarch, Alfonso XIII, bend to their demands for municipal elections in April 1931. When Socialists and left-leaning Republicans were swept into office in nearly all of the provinces, the king fled the country and the Second Spanish Republic was declared. Severe urban and rural poverty made worse by the Great Depression, combined with long-simmering resentment against the wealth and landholdings of the Catholic Church to foment general strikes and anticlerical violence.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The perceived unwillingness or inability of the Republic to suppress strikes or punish attacks on religious property emboldened groups like the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) advocating for more radical revolution even as it prompted monarchists and fascist-minded nationalists to plot their own uprising. Between June 1931 and 1936, the Republic teetered between left-leaning reformers favoring land redistribution and work regulations favorable to the poor, and right-wing coalitions intent on reversing such “radical” policies. By 1934, both left and right factions abandoned parliamentary compromise in favor of violent insurrection and plans for a coup d’état. After a Popular Front electoral victory in 1936, a cabal of Spanish generals plotted a military revolt from the Spanish colony of Morocco.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Contemporary views of the Spanish crisis, of course, were colored by the political predilections of the observers, with democratic citizens and left-leaning partisans favoring the embattled Republic, even as conservatives, Catholics, and Fascists cheered on the invading Nationalist military forces. While many nations sympathized with the plight of Spain’s civilian war victims, most politicians were unwilling to pledge more than moral support and issue calls for neutrality. The Fascist and Nazi dictators in Italy and Germany, on the other hand, unflinchingly committed war material, man- and air-power to the insurgent Spanish generals intent on overthrowing the communist and anarchist dominated “Red” Republic.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Writers became important “influencers” of public opinion during the Spanish Civil War. Ernest Hemingway had experienced war firsthand after he volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War. In the post-war period, Hemingway landed a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star newspaper and took up residence in Paris. There he mingled with other American expatriate writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and avant-garde European artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Luis Quintanilla. Visits to Spain for hunting and fishing trips, bullfights and the running of the bulls at the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, served as inspiration for Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises written in 1925 and published in 1926. In these same years, Hemingway had an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, (working in Paris for Vogue magazine), divorced his first wife, and married his mistress. Although the newlyweds moved to Key West, Florida, Hemingway’s interest in Spain never slackened. Nor did his conversion to Catholicism―a step taken to appease Pauline’s parents―sour him towards the Republican cause despite anti-religious atrocities publicized by the regime’s enemies.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
After the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Hemingway rallied to the loyalist Republican cause, even donating money to the Medical Bureau of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy for the purchase of ambulances and paying for the passage of American volunteers eager to join the International Brigades.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase
Hemingway signed a lucrative contract with the North American Newspaper Alliance to serve as their war correspondent, thrilled at the prospect of returning to Spain and to witness firsthand the struggle of the democratic Republic against its Fascist foes. Hemingway sailed to Europe in March 1937 in the company of another writer, Martha Gellhorn, with whom he would carry on an affair and later marry.
Even as Hemingway made his way to Spain, his fellow author, friend and frenemy, John Dos Passos, also booked passage to the Iberian peninsula. Dos Passos planned to provide the narrative for a documentary film about the heroic fight against fascism that he, Hemingway, and other progressive writers were helping to produce. Like Hemingway, John Dos Passos, too, had been drawn to Spain. After graduating from Harvard University, he traveled there to study art and architecture in 1916. Dos Passos, too, had volunteered for the ambulance corps in Italy during the First World War, serving alongside future poets, e. e. cummings and Robert Hillyer, though he only encountered Hemingway in post-war Paris. The two aspiring authors were a study in contrasts. Hemingway was a libertarian libertine: handsome, brash, pragmatic, and spoiling for drink, brawling, and other macho pursuits. Dos Passos was an idealist and pacifist: balding, quiet, and reticent. Dos Passos’s early politics were shaped by his wartime experience in Italy, as he flirted with socialism and included anti-war themes in his first novels, One Man’s Initiation: 1917 and Three Soldiers published respectively in 1920 and 1921. A trip to Russia in 1928 drew him into the Communist orbit, but by 1936 he was becoming disillusioned by Comrade Stalin’s consolidation of power and his purges of Trotsky and other revolutionaries and rivals in what became known as the Moscow “Show Trials.” Despite their political differences and jealousies arising from their rivalry as writers, Dos Passos and Hemingway remained on friendly terms until their visit to war-torn Spain in 1937.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase
Both writers arrived in Spain in full sympathy with the poor civilians, though they quickly became estranged over the actions and methods of the Communist-dominated Republican military command. Dos Passos had arrived in the spring of 1937 expecting to be greeted by his Spanish friend, José Robles. Robles was an aristocrat author whose left-wing views forced him to flee Spain for America in the 1920s; he provided a Spanish translation of Dos Passos’s novel, Manhattan Transfer. Robles had traveled to Spain on vacation when the civil war broke out and Dos Passos anticipated his help with the documentary project. But by the time Dos Passos reached Spain, Robles had disappeared. Dos Passos begged Hemingway to help him find out what had befallen his friend. Hemingway discovered that Robles had been arrested by the Republic’s Russian-dominated counter-espionage service and shot. His execution was variously ascribed to paranoid suspicion based on Robles’s aristocratic origins; rumors that he might be passing information to a relative fighting for the Fascists; or hearsay that he had been overheard indiscreetly discussing military plans in a cafe. Recent research indicates that Robles’s execution might have had something to do with his having served as translator to a Soviet military envoy to Spain, Yan Karlovich Berzin in his exchanges with the head of the Soviet Secret Police, Alexander Orlov, and others. Knowledge of their plans to purge Spanish anarchists, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), and other trade unions and militias deemed hostile to a unified military command structure dominated by Comrade Stalin’s commissars might have resulted in the interpreter being silenced.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Hemingway broke the news to Dos Passos in his typically callous manner. When in a passion of outrage Dos Passos demanded proof and witnesses of Robles’s supposed treason and bemoaned the lack of a trial, Hemingway mocked him for his naïveté and urged him hold his tongue lest he hurt the Republican cause by providing ammunition to Fascist propagandists. But Dos Passos would neither remain silent, nor remain in Spain, his views forever jaded by this experience. He would later write that:
“I have come to think, especially since my trip to Spain, that civil liberties must be protected at every stage. In Spain, I am sure that the introduction of GPU [Russian secret police] methods by the Communists did as much harm as their tank men, pilots, and experienced military men did good.“
When Dos Passos left Spain citing a crisis of conscience, Hemingway uncharitably chocked up his friend’s “fleeing” the front lines to unmanly changeability and cowardice. Their friendship came to an abrupt end. Hemingway himself put the final nails into the coffin of their friendship by including an extremely unsympathetic character in his next novel based on Dos Passos, and instructing his publisher not to soften or change a word unless essential to avoid a libel suit.
With Dos Passos having written himself out of the documentary motion picture, Hemingway took over the project, signing on as director Joris Ivens’s interpreter and guide. The Dutch Communist filmmaker and the American libertarian author lugged the heavy camera equipment around on the front lines, cheating death on several occasions. Working on The Spanish Earth film project afforded Hemingway unfettered access to the action, though, naturally, always from the perspective of the Republican loyalist troops and International Brigades. It also secured him an insider’s introduction to, and interviews with the Republican military command: the shadowy, Russian-trained commissars who determined battle strategies against the Fascist foe on the front lines, and who purged unruly anarchist militiamen from within Republican Army ranks behind the lines.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Hemingway penned his first and only full-length play, The Fifth Column, in this period, creating a semi-autobiographical thriller set in the besieged capital city of Madrid which he hoped to produce at the war’s end. Hemingway served as the model for the play’s fictional protagonist, Philip Rawlings, a scrappy, hard-drinking, fist-fighting American counter-espionage agent working to flush out Fascist spies, snipers, and saboteurs in their midst. The spy catcher in the play works with Antonio, a Comintern security chief based on the career of the notorious “executioner of Madrid,” Pepe Quintanilla. In real life, Pepe was the brother of the famous Republican artist, Luis Quintanilla, one of Hemingway’s closest friends in Spain. Luis would be sent by the Republican government to do murals for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but would find himself stranded in the U.S. when Francisco Franco’s Fascists defeated the Republican forces that same year.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Christopher DeNoon Collection for the Study of New Deal Culture
Although the hero of Hemingway’s drama becomes discouraged and dehumanized by the torture and violence of his job as spy-catcher, in the end he decides to “dump the dame” and her dreams of running off together to some lush tropical island, and to continue instead to fight “the good fight.” In the non-fiction articles he penned for the newspapers, however, Hemingway remained ever the enthusiastic cheerleader of the Republican cause. Readers of his column learned nothing about Soviet manipulation and direction of the war effort and heard only optimistic assessments of the prospects for a Republican victory. For uglier truths, the public would have to look to yet another writer on the front lines: the British anti-capitalist and social democrat, George Orwell. Orwell was not afraid to voice his serious doubts and reservations concerning the measures and methods of the Communist commissars calling the shots from behind the curtains.
Orwell had cut his teeth as an author with the novel, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)―a scathing depression-era tale of two cities―and Burmese Days (1934) an anti-imperialist memoir of his disheartening experiences as a member of the Imperial Police force in colonial India. Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell decided to travel to Spain to join the loose coalition of socialists, anarchists, and trade union militias fighting against the Fascists. Since a special passport was required to enter the war zone, he first approached the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but was rebuffed when he refused to enlist in the Party’s International Brigade. Orwell had better luck when he met with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) leaders, who accredited him as a war correspondent for their weekly newspaper and provided him with a letter of introduction to their representative in Barcelona. Interested more in fighting the fascists than reporting on the conflict, Orwell later noted that he would likely have joined either the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (or CNT), or the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) militias had not his ILP contact steered him towards their Catalan affiliate, the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (POUM), an independent Communist Party opposed to Stalinist-domination.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
While fighting in the POUM militia, Orwell recorded his first-hand impressions of his experiences between December 1936 and the summer of 1937. These were edited and published in his memoir, Homage to Catalonia (1938).
If Orwell’s memoir provides a word picture of his impressions of Spain at war, The Wolfsonian’s collection of Spanish Civil War ephemera provides a visual accompaniment perfectly suited for providing a backdrop and setting for a play about Orwell’s wartime experiences. In his Homage, Orwell noted that:
“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. … The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.”
Materials from the collection confirm this impression.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
While fighting the Fascists on the front lines, Orwell received a wound to the neck that might easily have prematurely ended his life. While recovering from the injury behind the lines, Orwell found his life threatened by elements of the Republic he had come to defend. Not unlike his American counterpart, John Dos Passos, the British writer also felt growing unease as the Stalinist Communist-dominated government forces began disarming, disciplining, purging, and persecuting CNT anarchist and non-conforming POUM Communist militias. As Orwell put it in Homage to Catalonia:
“As time went on, the Communists and the POUM wrote more bitterly about one another than about the Fascists.”
In early May 1937, bitter words escalated into street fighting as CNT workers were expelled from the local Catalan Telephone Exchange building, and POUM militiamen were accused of being Spanish Trotskyist saboteurs and were violently suppressed the following month. The disappearance and presumed execution of several of his POUM comrades, and hints that he might be next on the list caused him to go underground and make plans to leave Spain. His disillusion is apparent in his writings:
“All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that ‘they’ cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.”
While Orwell remained committed to his socialist principles and concerned about the plight of the Spanish civilians, he recognized that Stalin’s Spanish henchmen were as dangerous as their Fascist foes. Orwell’s experiences in Spain would greatly inform his two most famous and influential novels: the allegorical classic, Animal Farm, and the futurist dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both works called into question the blind allegiance that so many on the left and right were willing to pledge to power-mad “Big Brother” leaders and totalitarian regimes that only pretended to have their people’s interests at heart.
Currently on display at The Wolfsonian Library is an installation centered around the career of William Randolph Hearst. Born to one of the wealthiest families in America, Hearst discovered his reason for being while attending college, where he rarely attended classes but gloried in his position as managing editor of the satirical student journal, the Harvard Lampoon. Though he returned to California without a degree, the precocious twenty-three-year-old convinced his father to put him in charge of The San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper supposedly acquired through a gambling debt. Hiring talented writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and cartoonist Homer Davenport, young William used sensationalist headlines and stories of sex, violent crime, and scandal and sold advertising space to increase circulation and transform the sleepy paper into the “monarch of the dailies.” Hearst used his inheritance to acquire newspapers in nearly every major American city, acquired radio stations, and even opened a movie studio to forge the greatest media empire in the United States. By the 1930s, Hearst controlled about a third of the U.S. market. A multimillionaire, Hearst cared less about turning a profit and more about using his media conglomerate to sway public opinion and promote his own political agenda and ambitions. Ironically, the satirical cartoons and caricatures published by his competitors’ papers and magazines proved more persuasive than Hearst’s self-serving editorials, convincing voters that the king of “yellow journalism” ought not be trusted with high public office.
Courtesy of Hearst Caricatures Collection, California State University,
Today’s post will begin with some of the cartoons and caricatures lampooning Hearst but will more broadly focus on American and European magazines in The Wolfsonian Library collection. Many magazines published between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries used satire to heap criticism on politicians, world leaders, and wartime enemies; others poked fun at social mores, conventions, and class inequalities; still others advocated for or against a particular political party or ideology. Collectively, these cartoons demonstrate the power of art to galvanize public opinion and shape history.
Even as Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst used strident headlines and atrocity stories to sell their papers and to persuade their readers of the necessity of American intervention in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain (1895-1898), satirical magazines like Puck published front page editorial cartoons characterizing the publishers as warmongers. One such cartoon depicted Pulitzer with an exaggerated beak of a nose and made Hearst look like a monkey as the two raged and wallowed in a heap of yellow-tinted newspapers. U.S. President McKinley, in contrast, was pictured as calm, collected, and immune to their cries for war.
Cartoon by Udo J. Keppler (American, 1872–1956) for Puck (May 23, 1898)
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
After the U.S. warship, the Maine, exploded in Havana Harbor under mysterious circumstances, however, neither the President nor Congress could resist the yellow journalist publishers’ clamor for war with Spain. After victory was won in a matter of months, cartoonist Udo Keppler heaped ironic praise on the publisher-instigators by imagining statues erected in their honor atop bases plastered with yellow newspapers.
Cartoon by Udo J. Keppler (American, 1872–1956) for Puck, 1898
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Hearst used his newspapers’ editorials to present himself as a progressive social reformer and populist crusader, though it was the corrupt New York political machine that secured him two terms in the House of Representatives where he rarely bothered to attend sessions or vote on bills. Despite the praise and endorsement of his papers, he failed to win over voters in his campaigns for mayor of New York City, governor of New York State, or to secure the nomination for the presidency. Cartoonist William Allen Rogers frequently caricatured Hearst on the covers of Harpers’ Weekly, alternatively picturing the Democratic (and later Independent) candidate as a scarecrow or circus clown. Caricatures such as these helped convince the public that Hearst was unfit for public service, that he had no real interest in passing meaningful legislation, and that he intended merely to use his papers and New York political office as steppingstones to winning the coveted White House.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Other humor magazines, such as Judge, countered Hearst’s well-funded political campaigns with cartoons that reminded their readers of this Don Quixote’s plutocrat origins and his disreputable career as a yellow journalist muckraker and purveyor of salacious, scandalous, and sensationalist “news.”
Cartoon by Emil Flohri (American, 1869–1938) for Judge, May 18, 1907
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Of course, political cartoons in The Wolfsonian Library’s collection of rare American and European periodicals are not limited to lampooning political figures like Hearst; many provide biting social commentary on social mores of the era. With the recent passing of the Valentine’s Day holiday, I thought I’d share a few cartoons from the German theater magazine, Blätter Des Leipziger Schauspielhauses [Sheets of the Leipzig Playhouses] and the French periodicals, Le Rire [Laughter] and L’Assiette au Beurre [The Butter Plate]. The painter and illustrator Thomas Theodor Heine (German, 1867-1948), the artist Auguste Roubille (French, 1872-1955), and George d’Ostoya (French, born Poland, 1872-1941) poked fun at the sexual proclivities of even European royals as they contributed cartoons about May-December relationships.
“From the obituary of a prince”
St. Thomas: “How many have had to touch it to believe it?”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
“His Majesty, the gentleman from Maxim’s Restaurant: the union makes a farce”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift
The French illustrator Chas Laborde (1886-1941) also penned humorous cartoons of love for Le Rire, taking aim at the sexual awakening of adolescents in one cartoon and the silencing power of Cupid in another.
“The Students”
“The minute of silence, or, The interrupted confession”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift
While public figures were often parodied in times of peace, caricatures proved especially powerful in galvanizing patriotism and demonizing enemies in times of war. Founded by Albert Langen in 1896, the Munich-based weekly satirical magazine, Simplicissimus combined biting satire with modern graphics as it fearlessly tweaked the noses of the rigid Prussian militarists and their rigid code of social and class distinctions. A cover illustration from 1905 perfectly captures the arrogance and militaristic ambitions of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
In response to the outbreak of the First world War (1914-1918), magazines deployed cartoonists and caricaturists to lighten the mood, maintain morale, and to heap ridicule on enemy leaders. Paul Iribe (1883-1935) and other French illustrators penned scathing attacks on the German Kaiser in satirical magazines like Le Mot [The Word] and A Coups de Baionnette [At Bayonets].
“The Bad Shepherd” herding hoggish zeppelins
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
All the belligerent nations published satirical magazines during the war years featuring cartoons and caricatures by prominent illustrators. To name but a few, Italian artists Umberto Brunelleschi (1879-1949) and Antonio Rubino (1880-1964) contributed work to La tradotta: giornale settimanale della 3º armata [Translated: The Weekly Newspaper of the Third Army].
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Some of Brunelleschi’s cartoons showing young women taking on work traditionally reserved for men proved so popular with the soldiers serving on the front lines that La Tradotta published a series of “pin-up” style postcards reproducing the illustrations.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The German satirical paper, Lustige Blätter [Comic Pages]—(which began publication in 1885)—redirected their satirical jabs towards enemy leaders during the war years.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Another biting satire printed for the troops, Wachtfeuer: Künstlerblätter zum Krieg [Artists’ sheets on the War] recruited dozens of caricaturists and comic artists to ridicule the enemy as in this clownish cover caricature of John Bull—(the British Empire’s equivalent of Uncle Sam).
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
After the Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the withdrawal of the Russian Army from the war, satirical papers were printed to entertain the Czech troops stranded behind the lines of the Eastern front. The cartoons and caricatures in Houpacky [Swings] emphasized their unique position and potential for tipping the balance between the “white” and “red” forces engaged in a bloody civil war.
White Red: (Left): “Look at our guest and see that he is white.”
(Right): “Are you crazy or blind? He’s as red as a turkey.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Satana Beffa: settimanale di tutti I colori [Satanic mockery: an all-color weekly] was a short-lived Italian publication that expressed an existential disillusionment in the aftermath of the Great War. It included cover art and cartoons illustrated by dozens of Italian illustrators, including Francesco Dal Pozzo (1891-1983), Marcello Dudovich (1878-1962), and many more.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The French periodical, La Charrette [The Cart] also lampooned the gaiety of post-war life in France with caricatures and cartoons by Gus Bofa, Sem (pseudonym of Georges Goursat), and others.
Pensions for the Disabled
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
After lending his artistic talents to create caricatures and cover illustrations for the Cuban magazine, El Figaro, Conrado Walter Massaguer began to edit, publish, and contribute artwork to his own magazines, including: Gráfico (1913-1918), Social (1916-1938) and Carteles (1919-1960). Over the course of a lifetime, Massaguer penned more than a hundred thousand caricatures and achieved international acclaim with his positive and critical parodies of local politicos, world leaders, and celebrities.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised gift
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gifts
Massaguer’s caricatures of Cuban President Gerardo Machado so incurred the wrath of the thin-skinned dictator that his magazines were suppressed and the publisher-artist forced to flee his island homeland for several years.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised gift
Cartoonists and caricaturists of the interwar period used their pens to comment on the rise of the Socialist state in Soviet Russia; to praise or criticize imperialism and colonialism; to bear witness to the monstrous birth and rise of Fascism and Nazism; and to laugh away the blues brought on by the decade-long Depression.
The satire magazine, Krokodil [Crocodile] provided caricaturists in the U.S.S.R. with a venue for plying their trade. Most were savvy enough to tread lightly in criticizing the new regime. While a cartoonist might gently poke fun of some of the difficult transitions to new work methods by the trade union apparatus under the Five-Year Plan, they dared not incur the wrath of Soviet censors.
“Swings With Difficulty”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Unsurprisingly, most of Krokodil‘s cartoonists reserved their most scathing criticism for the enemies of the Russian “Workers’ Paradise”—capitalist oligarchs and mis-leaders like U.S. President Herbert Hoover who deluded themselves and pretended that “Prosperity was just around the corner” at the outset of the ten-year long Depression.
“The Pre-Election Position of American Capitalism: America Is Booming!!!
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Paul Iribe (1883-1935), who penned caricatures during the First World War, edited and illustrated the satirical paper, Le Témoin [The Witness], during the last two years of his life. Iribe’s cartoons courageously condemned corruption in the Socialist government in France, the failed Communist experiment in Russia, and the Italian Fascist and German Nazi militarists threatening the fragile European peace.
Dawn or Dusk?
Arms Control
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Even the Nazis published a weekly satirical magazine, Die Brennessel [The Stinging Nettle], from Munich between 1931 and 1938. The printers used copious quantities of red ink in cartoons such as this one, depicting their desperate Communist enemies jettisoning their values and goals of world revolution to keep their sinking ship of state afloat.
“In Dire Need: Over board with all the socialist junk”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
At least two important Turkish-language satirical magazines, Akbaba [Vulture] (1922-1967) and Karikatür [Caricature] (1936-1948?), were published after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I led to the formation of modern secular Republic of Turkey. While both magazines published shamefully antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish minorities, they also printed cover caricatures attacking Communist and Fascist extremism and criticizing Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini’s military misadventures in Ethiopia.
Modern Nero: “If they did not spare the oil, the view would be brighter.”
Italy brings civilization to Africa
“Salamon, the world is preparing for a struggle between right and left. Which side are you on in such a war?” “I prefer to stay alive.”
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gifts
Back in the U.S. of A., Ballyhoo (1931-1939) began life as a sort of precursor to Mad Magazine, providing humorous cover art and much needed laughs within to lighten the mood during the decade-long Depression.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
The satirical magazine took no quarter, nor spared any public figure on the left or right. Republican President Herbert Hoover was ridiculed for failing to repeal Prohibition.
Courtesy of Francis Xavier Luca, private collection
Hoover’s Democratic successor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was teased for unleashing nightmarish New Deal programs like the National Recovery Administration (or NRA) with its “blue eagle” brand.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was parodied as Dr. Franklinstein for unleashing a dragon-like Thunderbird whose scaly hide is tattooed with the alphabet soup letters of other New Deal programs like the CWA (Civil Works Administration), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and PWA (Public Works Administration).
The irascible head of the NRA, General Hugh Johnson, was also caricatured in a faux ad inserted into the pages of the magazine.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
But neither did Ballyhoo spare the Roosevelt Administration’s opponents, as in this collective caricature of the NRA’s leading detractors: automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, former Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Livingstone Mills, failed presidential candidate Al Smith, and press baron William Hearst.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
In addition to publishing witty articles, cartoons, and caricatures, Ballyhoo also printed spoof ads taking aim at American consumerism and advertising claims.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised gift
Other Depression-era magazines also used cartoons and cover art to criticize public figures. One such issue of New Theatre magazine, (currently on display in the The Wolfsonian Library’s Hearst installation), created an unflattering caricature of arch-conservative newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. The photomontage portrait fashioned from headlines and typeface depicts his gossip columnist, Louella Parsons, and his mistress, Marion Davies, sitting puppet-like on his lap.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The liberal biweekly Ken magazine began publication in March 1938 under the direction of Arnold Gingrich. During its short life, the magazine included articles on domestic politics and world events contributed by left-leaning reporters such as George Seldes, Ernest Hemingway, and John Spivak. It also included cartoons and caricatures penned by Sam Berman, David Low, and Henry Major.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Because of the magazine’s unapologetic support of the embattled “Red” Republic in Spain, its attack on Fascist and Nazi aggressors, and its criticism of crypto fascists at home, the magazine’s editorial staff found themselves under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Bad press and trouble with advertisers contributed to the magazine’s early demise in the summer of 1939.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Once the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, American publications were not only free, but encouraged to contribute cartoons critical of Fascist and Nazi enemies abroad. The February 6, 1943 issue of Collier’s, for example, featured a cover by Antonio Arias Bernal (1913-1960). The Mexican cartoonist had been lured by the U.S. government to Washington, D.C. to work for the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, for whom he contributed cartoons, posters, and even anti-Axis playing cards to promote the Allied war effort in Latin America.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca
Even in countries under Nazi occupation, members of the resistance struggled to print underground publications lampooning their oppressors. The Wolfsonian Library collection includes a rare single issue of the Danish anti-Nazi magazine, 2 aar [Year 2], with its screen-printed caricatures of Der Fuhrer.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
While this post includes numerous examples of some satirical magazines in The Wolfsonian Library collection, the public, academics, and independent researchers interested in such materials can peruse our online library catalog for a more comprehensive description of our holdings.
Wolfsonian-FIU Library 
