3. Brave Face
The Fair hosted daily events featuring the international participants via exhibition, pageant, and programming within the national pavilions and on the surrounding grounds. It seems every aspect of the Fair was inflected with and shadowed by the Nazi invasions encroaching on the homelands of the visiting nations. While neutrality was broadcast (or feigned) by most, the roots of American nationalism and isolationism permeate the archive’s documents, correspondence, and news accounts of 1939.
Women pose with inscription during Luxembourg Participation Day, ‘...forward to a perpetual lease of freedom under God in peace and justice, and here bows to God’s own country the Home of The Brave, The United States’. The two lines below read, ‘We suffer but we exist. We want to remain what we are.’
Today at the Fair welcomes the Royals, Saturday, June 10, 1939; the British Navy blockades the advances of Nazi Germany, September 4, 1939. Today, our strongest ally is challenged from within by populist and isolationist forces not unlike our own in the U.S., with the divisive Brexit looming as a possible outcome.
The Polish and Czech representatives maintained their exhibits and pavilions while events unfolded in their home nations, at that moment under invasion by Nazi Germany.
The League of Nations, an organization formed by the victorious allied powers at the end of World War I to prevent war and ensure international cooperation, was quickly dissolving with the withdrawl of axis powers as WWII became inevitable.
The Jewish-Palestine Building souvenir postcard, with text that characterizes Jewish settlement of the Holy Land in ‘opposition of marauding Arab bands’, reclaiming and transforming ‘swamps and desert wastes’ into farm land.
