The World's Fair held in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. in 1923 has slipped into historical obscurity. Visual references are hard to come by on the internet, but this exposition is another story . . .
The Motion Picture Exposition and Monroe Doctrine Centennial at Exposition Park, Los Angeles, was instigated by the Hollywood based film industry in the early 1920's as a public relations exercise to ameliorate the effects of the bad publicity, relating to various salacious scandals covered in the newspapers, and falling audience numbers. Film censorship had been intoduced as a way of rehabilitating the industry, but what was needed was a positive initiative, and a World's Fair seemed, at the time, to represent a strategic opportunity to simultaneously celebrate the vitality of the Hollywood film industry and the thriving metropolis of Los Angeles.
The inspiration for this project was the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, held in San Francisco.
The US had formally taken control of the canal property in newly, and nominally independent, secessionist state of Panama on May 4, 1904, inheriting from the French a depleted workforce and a vast jumble of buildings, infrastructure, and equipment, much of it in poor condition. A US government commission, the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC), was established to oversee construction; it was given control of the Panama Canal Zone, over which the United States exercised sovereignty.[36] The commission reported directly to Secretary of War William Howard Taft and was directed to avoid the inefficiency and corruption that had plagued the French 15 years earlier.
On May 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed John Findley Wallace, formerly chief engineer and finally general manager of the Illinois Central Railroad, as chief engineer of the Panama Canal Project. Overwhelmed by the disease-plagued country and forced to use often dilapidated French infrastructure and equipment, as well as being frustrated by the overly bureaucratic ICC, Wallace resigned abruptly in June 1905. He was succeeded by John Frank Stevens, a self-educated engineer who had built the Great Northern Railroad. Stevens was not a member of the ICC; he increasingly viewed its bureaucracy as a serious hindrance, bypassing the commission and sending requests and demands directly to the Roosevelt administration in Washington, DC.
One of Stevens' first achievements in Panama was in building and rebuilding the housing, cafeterias, hotels, water systems, repair shops, warehouses, and other infrastructure needed by the thousands of incoming workers. Stevens began the recruitment effort to entice thousands of workers from the United States and other areas to come to the Canal Zone to work, and tried to provide accommodation in which the incoming workers could work and live in reasonable safety and comfort. He also re-established and enlarged the railway, which was to prove crucial in transporting millions of tons of soil from the cut through the mountains to the dam across the Chagres River.
Construction work on the Gaillard Cut is shown in this photograph from 1907.
Colonel William C. Gorgas had been appointed chief sanitation officer of the canal construction project in 1904. Gorgas implemented a range of measures to minimize the spread of deadly diseases, particularly yellow fever and malaria, which had recently been shown to be mosquito-borne following the work of Dr. Carlos Finlay and Dr. Walter Reed. Investment was made in extensive sanitation projects, including city water systems, fumigation of buildings, spraying of insect-breeding areas with oil and larvicide, installation of mosquito netting and window screens, and elimination of stagnant water. Despite opposition from the commission (one member said his ideas were barmy), Gorgas persisted, and when Stevens arrived, he threw his weight behind the project. After two years of extensive work, the mosquito-spread diseases were nearly eliminated. Even after all that effort, about 5,600 workers died of disease and accidents during the US construction phase of the canal.
The United States spent almost $500,000,000 (roughly equivalent to $9,169,650,000 now) to finish the project. This was by far the largest American engineering project to date. The canal was formally opened on August 15, 1914, with the passage of the cargo ship SS Ancon.
Themes of the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, included the historical achievement of the Panama Canal, it also framed Indian culture as a topic of interest during the nine-month-long exposition with multiple attractions dedicated to Indian life.
These ideas were presented in plays, known as pageants, where Native Americans played small roles such as in “Catalonian dragoons, muleteers, and a tribe of Carmel Indians.”
The exposition, in celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal, but also advances made by the American people, part of which were the conquests of indigenous people by Americans as well as Europeans, foregounded an historical framework reminiscent of the notion of the manifest destiny. The hidden reality of United States hegemony, in the western hemisphere, and global imperialist aspiration, was able to easily accomodate tributes to Francisco Pizarro and Hernán Cortés.
Unfortunately, the Motion Picture Exposition and Monroe Doctrine Centennial proved to be a disaster of epic proportions.
On December 18, 1922, California Congressman Walter Franklin Lineberger introduced a bill to strike a half dollar in commemoration of the centennial of the Monroe Doctrine, with the Los Angeles Clearing House (an association of banks) given the exclusive right to purchase the pieces from the government at face value. Lineberger claimed that Monroe's declaration had kept California, then owned by Mexico, out of the hands of European powers.
The bill was questioned in the House of Representatives by Michigan Congressman Louis Cramton, and in the Senate by Vermont's Frank Greene, who stated, "it seems to me that the question is not one of selling a coin at a particular value or a particular place. The question is whether the United States government is going to go on from year to year submitting its coinage to this—well—harlotry." Despite these objections, the bill was enacted on January 24, 1923; a mintage of 300,000 pieces was authorized.
The exposition was a financial failure.
It became, in the end, Hollywood’s Lost World’s Fair.
The organizers tried to make things interesting. Different historically-themed live shows were featured nightly, such as “Montezuma and the Fall of the Aztecs.” But it turned out nobody cared about the Aztecs. Or history, for that matter. The few attendees who did show up were more interested in seeing movie stars in the flesh than watching a recreation of the Aztecs.
The coins did not sell well, and the bulk of the mintage of over 270,000 was released into circulation. Beach, the artist responsible for the design, faced accusations of plagiarism because of the similarity of the reverse design to a work by Beck, though he and fellow sculptor James Earle Fraser denied any impropriety.
Seal of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. Its designer, Raphael Beck, considered Beach to have plagiarized his work.
The fair organizers had not waited for congressional approval to begin planning the coin. According to Swiatek and Breen, the fair's director general Frank B. Davison came up with the concept for the designs. On December 7, 1922, Commission of Fine Arts chairman Charles Moore wrote to Buffalo nickel designer and sculptor member of the commission James Earle Fraser:
"The Los Angeles people are planning to celebrate the Monroe Doctrine Centennial. They are going to have a 50-cent piece and have decided that on the obverse shall be the heads of President Monroe and John Quincy Adams ... On the reverse will be the western continents from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn with some dots for the West Indies and some indication of the Panama Canal ... It strikes me that the designs having been settled upon, the [plaster] models could be worked out quite readily and that a pretty swell thing could be made."Fraser contacted fellow New York sculptor Chester Beach, who agreed to do the work. On December 27, Moore wrote to Davison, informing him of Beach's hiring, and that Fraser and Beach had decided to change the reverse. Moore quoted Beach's description of the revised design:
Map of North and South America. North America is in the form of a draped figure, with the laurel of Peace [an olive branch], reaching to South America, also a draped figure carrying a Horn of Plenty. Their hands to touch at the Panama Canal. The West Indies are indicated. The current of the oceans are lightly shown. Between the dates 1823–1923 are a scroll and a quill pen, symbolizing the "Treaty".Moore informed Davison that the commission had concurred with the revision, and that Beach had been instructed to complete work as quickly as possible so as to have the coins available at an early date.
On February 24, 1923, commission secretary Hans Caemmerer showed the completed models to Assistant Director of the Mint Mary Margaret O'Reilly, who was pleased with them. O'Reilly suggested that if Beach was certain there would be no further changes, that he send photographs of the models to the commission's offices, to be forwarded with its endorsement to the Bureau of the Mint in Washington. This was done, and the designs were approved by both Mint Director Frank Edgar Scobey and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon on March 8. Moore was enthusiastic about the designs, writing to Davison on March 21 that:
"I feel great exultation over the way the model ... has turned out ... I do not know of a memorial [commemorative] coin which for sheer beauty equals this ..."
