Today in 1933, A Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, opened in Chicago, celebrating the city's centennial.
…oil tycoon Rufus C. Dawes [who served] as chairman of the exposition board… [in] addition to lending and securing financial and political support for the Century of Progress Exposition… played a pivotal role in giving the fair its thematic direction. In 1928, at the suggestion of several Chicago physicians and scientists, who saw in the fair an opportunity to cement alliances between the business and scientific communities and to rebuild public trust in science after the devastation wreaked by chemical weapons in the First World War, Dawes agreed to turn the fair into an “exposition of science and industrial development.” To give form and substance to this idea, Dawes asked the National Research Council to lend assistance. In exchange for their help in formulating a philosophy of science for the fair, he agreed to scientists' requests for a separate Hall of Science that would give the fair its unofficial motto: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”…
When the Century of Progress Exposition opened, numerous buildings and exhibits drove home the message that cooperation between science, business, and government could pave the way to a better future. With the Hall of Science serving as the cornerstone, nearly two dozen corporations, contrasted with only nine at the 1893 fair, erected their own pavilions and developed displays that insisted that Americans needed to spend money and modernize everything from their houses to their cars. Several model homes, including George Keck's House of Tomorrow, featured synthetic building materials and forecast a future where dishwashers and air conditioning [and a personal helicopter pad] would be commonplace household items…
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was so taken with the power of the fair to stimulate spending on consumer durable goods, and thereby complement the federal government's efforts to jump-start the economy, that he urged Dawes to reopen the fair in 1934, which the exposition corporation agreed to do…
Perhaps the exposition's most lasting bequest was to remind Chicagoans and Americans alike of the distance they had traveled and of the distance they had yet to journey in defining the meaning of progress.