During the long summer of 1968, at a time when a decade of anti-colonial struggle and cultural revolution was coming to its violent crescendo, with rioting in Paris, student massacres in Mexico City, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, San Antonio put on a second-rate world’s fair. The technical name for it was a “second category fair,” a designation given by the Bureau of International Expositions which had overseen a first category fair the year prior in Montreal. San Antonio’s 1968 Hemisfair was literally one tenth as large as Expo ‘67, squeezed into a 92-acre site in downtown San Antonio. The modesty of the event can be explained in part by the city’s ethos of limited local governance, funding construction of the fair through a complex public-private partnership. On top of showcasing the cultures of twenty three different countries and hosting nineteen corporate pavilions, the Hemisfair was also meant to be a moneymaker for the city.
The fair had been years in the making, and so there was no way for anyone to have predicted that it would be opening only two days after the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr.. President and local hero Lyndon B. Johnson had planned to be in attendance for the official opening, but was forced to stay in Washington to deal with the riots breaking out all over the country in response to Dr. King’s murder. 13,600 federal troops were enforcing a 4pm curfew in the capital city while rioting also took place in Chicago, Baltimore and over 100 other U.S. cities. On the very same day as the opening, a deadly shootout would take place between Black Panthers and police in Oakland, California. President Johnson gave a radio address calling for calm in the wake of the King assassination, declaring the following Sunday as a day of mourning, and ordering flags to be flown at half staff.
In his stead, Johnson had sent the First Lady to San Antonio for the opening of the Hemisfair. Ladybird Johnson spoke frankly about recent events, calling for calm and prayerful work in response to the country’s internal strife. Texas Governor John Connally also spoke at the opening ceremony, citing San Antonio’s 250 year history of rich flavors and a myriad of cultures. It was no doubt his effort to rhetorically shoehorn in the fair’s preselected theme into an acknowledgment of racial tensions which had finally boiled over.
“So it is most fitting that today, two and a half centuries later, San Antonio opens its heart and its arms to peoples of every land. We do so with grateful tribute to those before us for the heritage that is ours. We do so with fervent hope that this great world exposition may help point the way to a world of peace and understanding for the generations to come.”
But despite the conciliatory tone of officials, it cannot be assumed that the crowds gathered for the opening day of the Hemisfair were in need of consoling. The New York Times described the awkwardly juxtaposed mood surrounding Mrs. Johnson’s speech.
As thousands of visitors thronged through the “town within a town” under a beaming sun and a cloudless sky, somber words of caution about the country’s internal strife and the need for harmony among all peoples of different races and cultures were heard over the brass of military bands saluting the international exhibition.
It was not only the sun that was beaming. Pictures of the crowd at the entrance turnstiles on inauguration day show a crowd of smiling, white faces. Although remembered universally today as a national tragedy, it is well documented that large parts of the country celebrated the murder of Dr. King in 1968, especially in the South. There are accounts of laughter, the honking of car horns, and a public display of jubilation and glee. In San Antonio, many fairgoers were too excited to catch the water-ski show, held in a tiny lake next to the Lone Star Brewing Co. pavilion, to bother worrying about some impending race war. It had at one point dawned on organizers that the city’s widespread slow walking of racial integration might be a bad look for the host city and efforts had been made to meet with local business owners to go further than the standing policy of “vertical integration” whereby people of color could order a cup of coffee or sandwich as long as they didn’t try to sit down. Like much of the progress made during the Civil Rights Movement, the most successful push to finally get white Americans towards doing the right thing was the spectre of the Cold War and having their racism exposed on the world stage.
The entire six month run of the San Antonio Hemisfair would showcase this same remarkable display of tone deafness. While solidarity between students and workers in Paris threatened to take down de Gaulle’s government in May, the French Pavilion was putting on a marionette show for adults called Les Poupées de Paris. As bishops from all across Latin America met in Medellín for a conference which would lay the foundations for Liberation Theology, the Columbian Pavilion at the Hemisfair would feature an exhibit on coffee. As Air Force bases in Thailand launched sorties of Agent Orange over the skies of Vietnam, the Hemisfair would be the home base for the Thailand pavilion and its small, meditative Buddhist altar, stocked with incense and bouquets of red and pink roses.
Despite attempts by organizers to keep up appearances, San Antonio’s Hemisfair would end up being a showcase for all kinds of politics, both local and international. From the West Side community’s boycott of the fair, to the anti-communist art curations, from America’s toxic effluvia being projected onto a jumbotron, to the 15 brave students who picketed the Vietnam war on opening day with balloons that read “McCarthy for World Peace,” Hemisfair would end up being a miniature fair as well as a microcosm for politics in the late 60s.
Planning and Construction
The Hemisfair had originally been dreapt up in the late 1950s as a way to celebrate the city’s 250 year anniversary. Anticipating its modesty, planners tried to brand the fair as a “jewel-box fair” and referred to it as being “human scale.” It was to be “less world-of-the-future than here-and-now.” The term ‘Hemisfair’ was chosen in reference to the shared hispanic heritage of San Antonio and the rest of Latin America. The motto chosen for the fair was “the Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas,” and promotional materials promised the flamboyance of a fiesta, the inspiration of man’s art, the marvel of his accomplishments in science and industry, and the fun of a fair.
But hiding immediately behind the earnest and altruistic language used in its promotion was the self-seeking economic and political motivations behind the fair’s planners. The city of San Antonio had lived through several decades of cultural decline as Houston and Dallas had overtaken it as chief economic engines of the state, and Sunbelt-wide demographic shifts towards the suburbs were emptying out San Antonio’s downtown. The Good Government League (GGL), San Antonios’s oligarchic council-manager government, was dead set on using the fair as a way to promote business in the city, specifically to jumpstart the tourism industry, which in the mid-60s was its 2nd biggest industry after the military. With Anglos fleeing the central city for northern suburbs, and the Mexican-American population increasing from 41 to 52 percent between 1960-170, the Hemisfair offered an opportunity for the GGL to try wrestle back racial control over the future of downtown. This helps explain why, despite all of the difficulty in dispossessing and bulldozing a vast tract of land downtown when the city was surrounded on all sides by open countryside, the GGL was dead set on having the Hemisfair built where it was.
There were economic ambitions beyond the downtown economy as well. The Hemisfair corporation chairman and millionaire construction magnate H.B. Zachary imagined the fair as helping to recenter San Antonio as a hub of international commerce with South America. He dreamed of an international trade mart to help American businesses foster economic development in South America, and even lobbied President Johnson to relocate a series of governmental organizations in San Antonio: The InterAmerican Development Bank, the Organization of American States, and all other government offices dealing with the region. President Johnson almost went for it. Hemisfair was meant to jumpstart the tourist economy as well, and help bring the city back to a standing with its richer neighbors down the highway.
Planning meetings for Hemisfair happened much the same way that they were for the GGL: in private. Except for the few token members from the African and Mexican-American population that they had brought in in order to neutralize criticism, the GGL was essentially made up of downtown business owners and managers and a few representatives of the Anglo social elite. But while their mechanizations were private, the Hemisfair planners would nevertheless enlist all sorts of public help when it came time to fund construction of the fair. Much of the money would come by way of the argument that the Hemisfair counted as a project of urban renewal. This included a $12 million grant from the Federal Government for an “urban renewal project” along with a $30 million from a city bond. The San Antonio Urban Renewal Project, begun in 1956, was the local offshoot of a multi-billion dollar program by the federal government in order to rehabilitate or remove “blighted areas” across the country. The area that would become Hemisfair had been identified and named as “Urban Renewal Project 5” by the city: 140 acres on the south side of Commerce street that happened to be home to 2,300 people.
The neighborhood in question, known at the time as Germantown, had once been a relatively affluent section of the city. It was also one of the city’s oldest. While the planners tried their best to argue that the neighborhood was hopelessly dilapidated, according to the city’s own survey of the Project 5 area, only 2% of the structures in the area were considered “blighted.” A full 70% were judged to be merely “deteriorating.” The neighborhood was home to many different ethnicities, and was full of important historical structures and homes from the 19th century, including the Polish community’s St. Michael’s Parish, which had first celebrated mass in the neighborhood in a converted bakery in 1866. The church and its property would be sold to the Hemisfair in 1965 for $370,000 and demolished to make way for the Tower of the Americas. Ella Stumpf, who worked to try to preserve some of the structures in the area, said that Germantown “was not a slum at all. It had 200 houses almost as good as anything in King William.”
There are many stories of those residents who resisted in one form or another to the displacement that eventually came to the neighborhood. At 204 Dunning Avenue there lived Maude Willox, 78, who was wheelchair bound and practically blind. Despite her disabilities, she was staunch in her resistance to displacement. She stated that she would “have to be carried out in a pine box,” if the city ever came to evict her. When they finally did a month later, she lamented that “those with money, power, organization, influence, and propaganda can destroy weak and helpless and objectors and scatter their disoriented life over the countryside.” Her house was replaced with the IH10 and IH37 interchange. The most famous case of resistance came from retired pilot Frank Toudouze. He lived in a house on 123 Wyoming street, next door to his grandmother who had been born on the year that the Civil War ended. Like Willox, Toudouze pledged that the authorities “will have to knock that door down and drag me out” when asked about the plans to dispossess him, adding “I’ll never sell my house. I want to live in peace. HemisFair is illegal. It’s a private concern.”
Toudouze was referring to the claim made by many that the fair was not in fact being planned for the public good, but for the enrichment of the GGL and other wealthy investors and businessmen. Rather than attending to urgent infrastructure repairs like drainage and the sewer system (a city public works employee drowned in the street during a rainstorm) city government officials like Walter McAllister, Jr. (the mayor’s son), 0. J. savings (vice president in the mayor’s savings and loan association) and Arthur Troilo (the urban renewal lawyer who instituted condemnation proceedings) all stood to benefit from HemisFair construction and concessions. Mr. Troilo for one would soon benefit from providing boats that would sail on the very lagoon that would be built over Toudouze’s house.
Toudouze sued the Urban Renewal Agency of San Antonio, but his case was overruled, and so was reduced to plastering over the front of his house with anti-urban renewal messages. In the end, he too was evicted. On April 6, 1965 the sheriff and several deputies smashed the glass of his front door and rushed in to find Frank sitting at this small kitchen table, wearing sunglasses and a felt cowboy hat. Frank continued to sit calmly, next to his cup of coffee as the sheriff served Frank an eviction order, and in a final act of defiance, Frank insisted on playing “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” on his harmonica. As promised, Toudouze refused to move himself and would have to be carried out of his house by several officers.
One of the last residents to leave the neighborhood was Florence Eager Roberts. Roberts was given a slight delay by the courts so that she could celebrate her 100th birthday at home. She was finally vacated in August 1967. Eventually around 1,600 people were displaced from their homes to make way for the fair.
But the GGL and the Hemisfair leadership’s steamrolling, literally, of downtown residents for their pet project did not come without political consequences. One of them was the election of Peter Torres, the first person elected to the city council in the face of opposition of the GGL since 1955. Torres ran in opposition to the GGL (who he referred to as the “Good Gravy League”) and their close association with the Hemisfair, whose image had increasingly soured with the Mexican-American community. Torres was able to hammer home the GGL’s obsession with the fair while “the city starves,” stating on the morning after the drowning of the public works employee that “Here you’ve got the city fathers, we’ve got some real problems in the community, and they’re talking about the color of the goddamned carpets.”
Other community leaders, like Albert A. Peña Jr., urged West Side residents to protest the fair. And picketers showed up. Four months before the fair even opened, at an earlier dedication ceremony of the convention center, a dozen picketers, including women and children, stood outside the event holding signs “Who Died on Hemisfair?” in protest of the seven workmen (all hispanic) who had died up to that point during construction. Others were moved to protest by the painfully ironic fact that a fair ostensibly set up to celebrate Latin America and its cultural and historical ties to the United States has neglected the Hispanic community in its own backyard. “Maybe a little more recognition for the Mexican-American segment of San Antonio and through all of Texas,” suggested West Side resident Genaro Garcia while explaining the reasons why he supported a Mexican-American boycott of the fair. Not only had the fair exploited their labor, endangered their lives, and failed to even acknowledge them as a community, it was also prohibitively expensive for Mexican Americans even to attend. While Governor Connoly jet set around Latin America wooing international sponsors, back home in Texas he was a staunch opponent of a campaign to raise the minimum wage. Flyers passed out by fair protestors read “Save your money. San Antonio must first pay the $1.25 minimum wage, and equal opportunity for all.” Others read “Hemisfair is not for the poor Mexican-American.” Some even picketed the fair’s opening day alongside the anti-war student protests, with signs reading “After Hemisfair Visit West Side San Antonio, Confluence of Poverty.” In response to protests over the racial disparities surrounding the fair, the mayor Walter McCallister and others would, inevitably, claims links between the local Mexican American community and the global communist movement, clearly not the type of globalism fair planners had hoped to promote. The following day in response dozens more would picket his business downtown.
These political protests would affect the international image of the fair as well. As Timothy Palmer says “the squabbles over federal funding, historical preservation, and perceived conflicts of interest deflated public confidence in San Antonio and contributed to flagging interest among industrial exhibitors. And even a Texan in the White House could not provide the muscle power to convince many poor Latin American countries to participate in this fair of the Americas.”
The International Order
Ever since the end of the Second World War, world fairs had been caught in the middle of the Cold War, with fairs becoming “staging grounds for displays of U.S.-Soviet rivalry.” The Soviet Union had skipped out when the fair was held in Seattle, and when New York failed to receive official endorsement by the Bureau of International Expositions, it gave even more of a reason for the Communist bloc to boycott it again. When the fair was held in Montreal in 1967, the Soviets had shown up with bells on. Their pavilion was one of the Expo’s largest, and was visited more than any other. Right in front of the massive modernist building complete with convex roof and glass walls was an enormous bronze bronze monument, shaped like a Hammer and Sickle, covered in pro-communist friezes. It goes without saying, any of that was completely out of the question for San Antonio’s fair. However, planners would soon find themselves without the luxury of being too picky.
Even though the fair was specifically marketed as a Pan-American celebration, there was a glaring lack of participants from Latin America up until the last moments. Even with the White House directly pressuring countries, with only a month to go there were only four Latin American countries signed up: Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Mexico. Mexico had only recently signed up, requiring diplomatic damage control after the country admitting to considering Hemisfair as an affront to their own international extravaganza: the 1968 Olympics. Fair planners had to change their dates to smooth things over. In the last minute, the White House helped arrange financing for three different additional Latin American entities: a Bolivian Pavilion, a Central American pavilion which crammed together 5 countries in three thousand feet, and the Organization of American States pavilion. The OAS exhibit was perhaps the fair’s most straightforward example of the kind of Monroe-style Pan-Americanism that it had in mind. The art exhibits on display were made up in part by works that had been chosen through the as the Esso Salon of Young Artists in 1964-1965. It was praised by its staunch anti-communist curator José Gómez-Sicre as a singularly import example of capitalistic initiative, claiming “when the history of contemporary art in Latin America is written, the historians will have to distinguish two periods: pre-Esso and post-Esso.” It was claimed that the exhibit sought to combat the politicization of Latin American art, but what that really meant was its overwhelming association with the international left. While the OAS had kicked Cuba out of the organization in 1962 due to the actions of its Marxist government, Gomez-Sicre made sure to still include works by Cuban exiles, including what must certainly have been a completely apolitical sculpture entitled “political prisoner” (preso político) by Roberto Estopiñán.
A neatly curated vision of capitalistic initiative was exclusively what was on offer at the international pavilions. The German pavilion had its front facade handsomely glassed off with floor to ceiling panes, revealing a room overflowing with abstract white orbs. Inside, it offered a few impressions of German life “not unlike a peep show” as the accompanying brochure claimed. The marquee to the booth listed the name of the country in English, Spanish, and German, but the booth itself only represented those parts of the German speaking world not behind the Iron Curtain.
The Federal Republic of Germany has attained new importance in the world and in international markets as a highly developed industrial country that exports half of its gross product… Today’s Germany is not only assessed on the basis of its poets and philosophers but its industrious population and technical inspiration.
Although contributions to the global GDP were the most important point of emphasis, Germany also made sure to emphasize its cultural impact, providing visitors the chance to be “music detectives” with a tape-recording quiz of classical as well as other German compositions. First prize winner would win a one-week round-trip for two to Berlin which remained “free and open despite everything.”
The other post-war economic powerhouse Japan, located on just the other side of the Schultz house, also took advantage of its booth to showcase its contributions to the world capitalist economy. Its brochure includes a series of statistics numbering its Industrial production index, Domestic capital formation, and Consumer durable diffusion per household. One of the main displays in its pavilion was dedicated to the opening of the New Tokaido Super Express, a so-called “Bullet Train” that made the trip between Tokyo and Osake in three hours. Given the contemporary state of intra-city train transportation in the State of Texas, this still comes off as futuristic today.
As mentioned, the remaining international pavilions were encouraged to keep their politics to a minimum. Better a scale model of the Panama Canal than any reference to any of the events that would lead up to its coup d’état in October. And better to display China’s traditional art for visitors than smash it as Red Guards were currently doing in the Cultural Revolution back home. But despite keeping such a tight lid on proceedings, it would end up being the United States whose pavilion would end up making the greatest political statement of the whole fair.
US
The international pavilions at world’s fairs have always been as occasion for hyperreal, over-the-top recreations of the most exotic aspects of home countries. There was a complete recreation of a Belgian village at the 1964 New York fair, complete with cobbled streets, beret-clad accordionists and a Creperie. Inside the USSR pavilion at Montreal, there was a miniature to-scale rotating industrial port, with a little model ship recreating of the atomic icebreaker “Lenin,” and petroleum tanks showing the wonders of communist industry. There were also the less than flattering flattering recreations as well. Egyptians were shocked and dismayed to see the gratuitous grunginess on display at the Cairo street remade for the Paris fair in 1889, complete with dirty walls and imported Egyptian donkeys. This enthusiasm for the theme-park-ification of global culture oftentimes led to pavilion showboating, with some outshining others based on each respective countries investment in their space. In light its own spirit of modesty, the San Antonio Hemisfair had provided strictly regulated booth space, 50×60 feet steel framed buildings with open front facades for participant countries. These little gas station store sized booths, rarely accommodating more than a single room, were all clustered around the intersection of Durango (now Cesar Chavez) Boulevard and S. Alamo Street in the section of the fair called “Plazas del Mundo.”
And so it’s not a little ironic that the United States, not bound to its own restrictions, would end up erecting a grandiose pavilion that would serve as a colosseum-sized place to air its own dirty laundry. The pavilion included the 70 foot tall circular “confluence theater”, encased in glass and skinny modernist columns, along with a “Migration Courtyard” where public speeches, cultural events and acrobatic performances were held. Along with Joe Louis’ boxing gloves and Ty Cobb’s bat, the Confluence theater held the world’s largest curvilinear motion picture screen. Viewers would be shuttled into one of three separate auditoriums where they would begin watching a normal 35mm sized film. Film projectors up in the booth would then switch the footage briefly to the early silent film 1.33 format to show a Wright Brothers type of airplane flying towards the audience, at which point the theatre would go dark with only the rumbling noise of the airplane engine. In total darkness, the walls between the theaters were removed and the 35mm screens folded up into the ceiling. When the lights came back on, viewers would be in one large semi-circular room looking at an integrated triptych projected on with 70mm projectors.
But the movie that viewers saw when the lights came back on was not what planners had envisioned. The Department of Commerce had tasked filmmaker Francis Thompson, coming off of his Oscar win in 1965 for best short documentary, with making a film using his pioneering method of multiscreen documentaries. But the film he chose to make for Hemisfair, entitled “US,” would end up causing a firestorm of controversy even before the fair opened. By the time Mrs. Johnson came for opening day, she was being trailed by reporters asking her opinion about the film. “Very artistic, very stirring…” she told the New York Times, “but it lacked the element that is going on today to provide balance—the element of hope.” Other politicians were less diplomatic, promising to boycott the film it saw as besmirching the image of America. William F. Buckley Jr. called the film a “Wagnerian seizure of despair over American’s shortcomings.” Many ordinary fairgoers seemed outraged, and the pavilion received bomb threats in response to the movie.
When President Johnson finally made it to the fair 3 months after the opening for the 4th of July, flanked by dignitaries and eating an ice cream cone, he was asked whether he had liked the film. “No comment,” was his only response.
But what was it about the film that caused so much outrage? As Richard Schickel wrote for Life Magazine,
the content of this work is much more interesting than the technological inventiveness of its presentation…it is one of the few films of any sort sponsored by a government—any government—that dares to criticize the nation whose taxpayers underwrote it.
What was remarkable about the film was that it was honest. After all of the efforts to bulldoze urban blight, to shuttle the Mexican American community out of view, and to paint a picture of a happy-go-lucky capitalist league of nations, Hemisfair ended up giving its most high-profile presentation to a movie that spoke frankly about genocide, slavery, segregation, and ecocide practically by accident. The film begins narrating the history of the traditional story of the first explorers of a “vast, unhumanized, virgin wilderness” but then immediately exposes this as myth. “Empty? No! There were noble savages, indian tribes, tillers and hunters roaming freely through the forests and plains….we wanted their lands, with War and whiskey we worsted them.” The film lauded the immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to build the nation, but also reminded the three separate audiences of “those earlier, luckless millions who were made to come, torn from their African homes by force.” For every optimistic narrative about the nation, the narrator offers the sobering, alternate history.
After the drone of the plane engine, and the darkening of the auditoriums, and the revealing of the curvilinear screen, the audience was treated to a montage of the “sheer ugliness of man-made America and the deeper ugliness of racial prejudice,” with forests being clear cut for lumber, urban ghettos and closeups of the abject poor, black families being gawked at by white neighbors as they try to move in, traffic clogged superhighways, trash filled rivers, clouds of smoke, and other scenes of “irredeemable desolation” as the film put it. As the stream of images flooded past, the narrator continued in his calm, damning voice, decrying that sacred freedom cherished by Americans, that empty freedom “to let poisons befoul the streams till the fish die, discommodate cities, turn smiling fields into junk graveyards and garbage dumps, let noxious effluvia fill the air, polluting our lungs.” Not content with their own rhapsodizing, the filmmakers commission the poet W.H. Auden to contribute his own concluding thoughts about American’s ugliness at the end of the film.
The eyes of the world are upon us
And wonder what we’re worth,
For much they see dishonors
The richest country on earth.
Once the movie was done, shell-shocked moviegoers were escorted by a group of young, attractive ushers down a corridor which led finally to an image of themselves projected on a screen with a sign over it reading “Am I Part of the Problem?” and, a little further down the exit ramp “Am I Part of the Solution?”
A Walk Around the Fair
The only participants who seemed to share the business-friendly vision that fair planners had actually hoped to promote were the corporations themselves. Stationed on the East Side of the fair, they were not limited to small, pre-built boxes, and could be as austentatious as they pleased. Postcards of the I.B.M. Pavilion make it look like a mix between an Orange Julius and an Apple Store. It featured a strange and novel contraption, described as a “machine that looks like a typewriter with a television screen on it.” Once a fairgoer sat at this proto-computer and input the day of their birth, the screen would announce the precise number of years, months, days, minutes and seconds that they had been alive. The gimmick was amazingly prescient in showing off the ways that the computer would one day be used to explore ever greater heights of narcissism. This was not to be confused with the Bell System Pavilion’s “Age-Guesser,” or any of its other technological contraptions such as the Pictophone (available for televised chats with other persons in Chicago, Philadelphia and Disneyland), or the special “ranch” where youngsters were invited to talk to their favorite cartoon characters. Still thoroughly invested in the invention of the internal combustion engine, the Gulf Oil Corporation allowed children to putter around in one of thirty miniature gas-powered convertibles over a model freeway.
Many of the other Industrial and Institutional Exhibits were far less ambitious. The GE Theaterama offered a twenty-minute show entitled “The Wonderful World of Progress,” the Coca-Cola Company pavilion had a 25-minute puppet play called “Kaleidoskope”, and the Ford Motor Company had a ten minute movie in the round called “The Wide World of Ford.” Kodak at least seemed partially work in the fair’s theme into its branding, claiming in its advertisement for the pavilion that its “displays show how photography is an international language that binds people together in the things they treasure and want to remember.”
Besides the international and industrial pavilions, the fair was stuffed to the brim with a bevvy of strange attractions. The best way to satisfy the imagination of what it was like to walk the fair may be the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, which has an online collection of amateur footage from several families who brought cameras along with them during their visits. The home movie reel from the Ramon Galindo family has an extended clip of a day at the fair, and it’s shot with a realistic intimacy and randomness. You can see bored ladies in pearl necklaces and beehive hairdos, families licking their fingers as they finish lunch in the Goliad Food Plaza, audience members lackadaisically clapping in the summer heat for a mariachi island playing out on a tiny circular island. The Jeske family home video also has a close up of the mariachi show, along with a canal boat slowly chugging past in the background. The Jeske’s also filmed has an extended shot taken from inside of the moving monorail (heart bestill!) and, miraculously, an actual performance of Daredevil Henri LaMothe’s famous diving stunt. This was the same diving stunt that captivated reporter Calvin Trillin when he toured the fair shortly after its opening.
LaMothe stood poised on the platform for several minutes while the announcer spoke ominously of wind direction. Then he dived forward in a swan dive, landing perfectly on his stomach. The crowd cheered.
To watch the stunt in living color on the Jeske’s home movie is something else. LaMothe does actually ascend up a skinny, forty-foot ladder wearing what looks like white pijamas, but his “swan dive” is so gangly and anti-climactic, a little splash of water coming up over the heads of people in the crowd, that it looks on film like an acrobatic clown act.
Calvin Trillin walked around the whole fair soon after it opened for the New Yorker, and after graduating from Yale reporting on integration in the South, was snarkily underwhelmed by the recycled feeling of the fair. The Tower of the Americas looked too similar to the Space Needle and the Unisphere. Some of the exhibits at Hemisfair were recycled. Les Poupés de Paris had been shown before at both Seattle and New York. The Kinoautomat and the Laterna Magika were recycled as well. The one exhibit that Trillin did find unique was the Institute of Texan Cultures.
Announcing that it would use solid history to correct the cliché that all Texans are boors, the Institute has arranged a tasteful and instructive exhibit dominated by historical artifacts of the various ethnic groups that have contributed to the state. Of course, nobody is fooled for a minute. Near the entrance, where it can’t be missed, is a garish display of Texas products dominated by a green-and-white helicopter, a gigantic tire, and stacks of Pioneer Bisquit Mix and Texsun Grapefruit Juice—ad if the designers felt compelled at the last minute to say, “Don’t be put off. It’s just us boars.”
The designers, in fact, had the question of boorishness in mind when designing the institute. Director R. Henderson Shuffler expressed his concern that most Texans had absorbed the phony myths about themselves as being “a bunch of hell-roaring pumpkins in buckskin who came brawling across the frontier, shoved the Indians and Mexicans out, and settled down to shooting each other at high noon in front of the village saloon.” It is fascinating to hear Hemisfair planners speak so frequently about their worries of how Texas would be perceived, expressing a tacit awareness of a World Fair’s magnifying glass-like ability to simultaneously distort and amplify details about any place it represented. The Institute of Texan Cultures was the best effort to counteract hyperbole with an anthropologists’ dignified bearing. All these decades later the Institute of Texas Cultures has remained a plinth-like time capsule to the zeitgeist and visual aesthetic of the better angels of the original fair. While the entrance way and gift shop have been given a facelift (or perhaps several) over the years, the farther you venture back into the penumbral exhibition hall, the more likely you are to run into retro typography, outdated facts, and uncomfortably worded but well-intentioned descriptions of Texas’ many ethnic groups. The ‘Institute’ is now managed by the University of Texas at San Antonio and so the entire museum is rapidly being brought into the 21st century. This is much to the benefit of the state’s efforts at multicultural education (have you ever heard of the Wendish Texans?) and much to the dismay of amateur world’s fair historians.
The unapologetically boorish Id to the Institute of Texan Culture’s ego was the Lone Star Brewing Company’s Pavilion. A perfect encapsulation of the fair’s conflicted relationship with scale, the pavilion was a 20,000 square foot star-shaped shrine to the national beer of Texas, overlooking the water-ski lagoon and built for a cost “in excess of half a million dollars.” It had refreshments, entertainment, and history all contained within its deceptively small structure. The best bar at the whole fair must have been Lone Star’s “Refreshment Center,” with a 126-foot counter on the first floor, a 60-foot counter on the second floor, and a veranda where one could watch the Waterski show while sipping their Lone Star or root beer. Accompanying their cold steins (40c for light beer, 50c for dark beer) the pavilion offered an assortment of dishes including chop’t steak and mashed potatoes, Los Nochitos (“so very Mexicana”) or the Baron of Beef. The specialty of the house was the “Poteet Popsickle”: a Kolbase sausage topped with hot jalapeno peppers, and pickles (60c). But the real entertainment was provided by the series of branded exhibits held within the pavilion. The Lone Star Hall of Horns and the Lone Star Hall of Fins provided a world class collection of hunting trophies hung up under old saloon style chandeliers hanging from the raftered ceilings. If taxidermy wasn’t your thing, the Lone Star Hall of Wildlife and Ecology featured a series of wildlife and ecology dioramas, set in relief by the museum’s dark wood panelling. For the ladies, the pavilion featured the Lone Star Hall of Coronation Robes featuring handmade coronation robes from former Fiesta queens and princesses. But the piece de resistance was the Lone Star Hall of Texas History, a series of 15 dioramas made especially for the fair by the artist Emilie Toepperwein and her Texas historian husband Fritz. Using hundreds of items of real memorabilia and antiques, they fabricated live-size figures utilizing “unusual electronic methods [to] provide maximum realism and heightened dramatic effect” to stage scenes from Texas history. The wax Davey Crocket was festooned with a real coonskin cap, and Jean Lafitte’s pirate ship was stocked with a miniature cannon. In a picture featured in the “Bru-It” company magazine published right before the opening of the fair, Mrs. Toepperwein can be looking adoringly at Davey Crocket’s dismembered head of as she pulls it out of a cardboard box.
Although the Lone Star pavilion is no more, the priceless collection housed briefly under the roof of the Lone Star Pavilion can still be seen in various pieces around the city. Many of the wildlife and ecology tableaus were transported in toto to the Witte Museum where you’ll still be able to see a mountain lion disgorging a deer in the 3D Chisos Mountains. And much of the taxidermy and dioramas from the Hall of Texas History can now be found at the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum, where a waxy Stephen F. Austin will continue to issue land grants to anglos in tophats into the foreseeable future.
What Remains of the Fair Today?
Even though it is quite easy to overlay one of the many souvenir maps of the ‘68 Hemisfair over the same 92 acres of downtown today and approximate the site of each pavilion, it is still somehow seems hard to imagine that such a hapless, kitchy wonderland occupied the site. Even though several of the buildings, like the Eastman Kodak Pavilion and the United States Confluence Theater are still in use and retain their basic, dated shape, it is still seems impossible that this quiet downtown park was once busy with monorails and skyrides, flying indians and flamenco dancers; incomprehensible that the flat, hot park was once crisscrossed by canals and lagoons, floated by gondolas, dining barges, flower boats and other members of the “Hemisfair Armada.” The souvenirs and memorabilia from the fair are incredible distillations of the 1960s aesthetic, from the modernist optimism of its brochures to the technicolor palette of the Pavilion guidewomen’s uniforms, seen perched on the seats of gondolas and holding open pavilion doors on postcards. The mood of the fair seemed to perfectly encapsulate the waning days of a certain American earnestness, underwritten by sweeping so much politics under the rug. The clumsy melancholy of the whole spectacle is so entrancing that souvenirs and relics of the event have become a small industry.
From an economic point of view, the fair was a failure. City taxpayers ended up having to pay much more than the “thin dime” they were promised by fair planners. Ticket sales slumped far below projections, the fair way plagued with mechanical problems like a blackout at the Tower of the Americas and a monorail crash that left one dead. One of the best outcomes for the city was actually the effect that the failure of the fair had on delegitimizing the oligarchic rule of the GGL, whose monopoly on power was initially broken by bad press over the fair and which would eventually complete crumble by the end of the next decade. For almost twenty years after the event, most of the fairgrounds would be themselves a scene of urban blight on the city, with graffitied sculptures, condemned buildings, and a chain-link fence put up around the whole mess. The city has spent decades reimagining the site, with efforts continuing to the present day. Only now, more than 50 years after the original fair, is the space beginning to in any way resemble what preservationists had initially imagined. Famous local architect O’Neil Ford, whose enthusiasm for vernacular architecture and historical preservation was only matched by fair organizers’ gusto for ready made structures and indiscriminate bulldozing, had once imagined clusters of old homes encircled with landscaped plazas. “I thought a fair should be like a park…The pattern of flow ought to be absolutely different from a street pattern. It was to be rhythmic, soft circles, so that the public flowed around things.” Nowadays the Hemisfair site is finally coming to take on the “human scale” promised by overzealous bureaucrats back in the early 1960s. Cafes, playscapes, and art exhibits are coming alive as the park becomes a place San Antonians would actually like to spend time in.
World Fairs usually leave behind at least one grandiose structure to remember them by. You can still get a sense of the majesty of the White City when you visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, or feel the retro excitement in the brutalist detritus left behind in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park by the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Sometimes, as is the case with the Eiffel Tower, the monuments reach a level of fame that far outshines the fairs they were originally built for. Other times, when no longer surrounded by an exuberant, futurist carnival, some of these monuments stick out like awkward, over eager orphans. For the 1968 Hemisfair, this structure is the Tower of the Americas. Planners of the fair had spent years fighting over the funding, placement, and construction of the tower, and all of that after finally deciding, by attrition, that the grandiose structure would be yet another tower, even though one had already been constructed many times before for fairs and expositions. It was meant to be the centerpiece of the Hemisfair, and to serve as a landmark for the city moving forward.
It is no doubt iconic, recreated everywhere in the city today, from basketball jerseys to taco wrappers to cable company vans. Standing at 750 feet in a relatively flat city without much gusto for skyscraper building, it’s visible from practically anywhere inside Loop 1604. But the building itself has never garnered much praise for its aesthetic value. With its alternating brown spandrel panels and glass serving as its only ornament, the observation deck’s truncated cone looks like an unglazed bundt cake. The structures elevation is provided by a vertically ribbed tower, resembling a large churro made out of concrete. The whole thing together looks particularly graceless since the deck is perched incongruously on top without any transition between the two parts. Whereas the Space Needle has a Jetsons-like sleekness to it, and Berlin’s Fernsehturm has at least a sense of proportion to its ugliness, the Tower of Americas looks haphazard, like a small town bank branch plunked down on top of an oversized highway overpass beam. Back when it was built, H.B. Zachry called it “ugly as a mud fence.” While it was still under construction, trade magazines tried not to draw attention to its aesthetics, and opted instead to focus on its sheer height. It would soon tower above other more modestly constructed obelisks, “52 feet taller than San Jacinto Monument and 67 feet higher than the Washington Monument,” neither of which would soon be hope to a doughnut-shaped revolving restaurant at their 550-foot level.
In 2014, an intern at Trinity University uncovered architectural designs for an alternative design of the tower, made by O’Neil Ford himself. In them, the base and deck of the tower are merged into a streamlined whole, creating a far more satisfying and unified silhouette. But the gawkish structure that was actually built functions as a much better symbol of the forces behind it: design by committee. And a cost-conscious and nepotistic one at that. In 1966 one of the Hemisfair executive committee members, D.J. Rheiner, had won the contract to build the tower before many other firms even know that the project was up for bids. Eventually Henry B. Gonzalez got involved, forcing the committee to drop the bid, which only put the question of financing for the tower in doubt. Eventually San Antonio taxpayers approved a general revenue bond and the construction contract was given to another company. In order to save costs on construction, the tower would be built using slip-form construction, with an observation deck that could be built on the ground and then shimmied up into place. It turns out it isn’t for nothing that the upper deck looks clumsily hoisted up there.
If you make a pilgrimage to the fairgrounds today, or merely walk through it on your way to pilgrimage the Tower of the Americas, you will walk past a plaza made up of pyramidal water features and semi-tropical landscaping. In an unassuming shallow pond nearby stands a series of columns supporting long concrete crossbeams. This piece of public art, which would normally be about as inspiring as a corporate plaza installation, is called the Mini-Monorail Monument because it is supposedly constructed out of remnants of the original transportation system that used to encircle the fair. It is reassuring that the fair’s goofiest and least practical showpiece has been preserved for posterity. Other hidden artifact can be found throughout the site. A few homesteads were preserved from the original Germantown, like the Halff House which hosted an 1890s nostalgia bar and an Oompah band during the fair; or the American Pavilion, now converted into a courthouse. The beautifully modernist Women’s Pavilion, once heralded as a place to showcase ““the other half” with all her faults, foibles, fun and fantasy,” is finally being renovated to serve as an indoor event space. It makes one hope that as the Hemisfair park continues to be redeveloped into the future, that the city will find ways to be respectful of what occupied the site before it, in a way that the original fair never did.
