Sesqui! Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926
The Sesqui Sinks. The Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition of 1926, held in South Philadelphia, was meant to be the greatest world’s fair since the 1876 Centennial. Thanks to political corruption, greed, egotism, and the wettest summer on record, it became a crumbling, sodden, bankrupt mess, Philadelphia’s “forgotten fair.” The Sesqui served as a symbol for the city’s monolithic Republican Organization, where one boss (Congressman William S. Vare, the “Duke of South Philadelphia”) could kidnap an entire world’s fair and transfer it from the newly completed Fairmount Parkway to the swamps of South Philly, his congressional district. This talk also explores how the Sesqui became an unwitting battleground for many of the social struggles convulsing America in the 1920s: racism, anti-Semitism, women’s rights, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenics, and Prohibition.
Presented by historian Thomas Keels.