This year the Seville fair is plastered all over the travel sections, and Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition has been memorialized in half a dozen recent books. But Chicago’s Depression-era world’s fair, the Century of Progress, rarely rates a mention. True, it never drew the crowds or dollars the city expected, but it may have played a greater role in shaping national tastes than any fair before or since. Exhibitions in architecture, industrial design, and home fashion played key roles in solidifying trends that continue today.
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A small but significant view of the Century of Progress’s impact on American tastes can be had at the Harold Washington Library’s current exhibition, “Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quilts of the Great Depression Era.” This collection of quilts, most made by rural women in Tennessee in 1920s American colonial-revival styles, may seem an unlikely example of modern popular culture. Nevertheless these quilts, all hand-pieced and most hand-sewn, reflect powerful trends in the 1930s that broke down regional preferences in taste. Yet the emerging nationally popular styles often had regional roots. The Roosevelt administration saw the development of folk arts as a way to rekindle America’s sagging spirit and economy in the 1930s: several New Deal programs were meant to record and display the riches of folk life. The Federal Writers’ Project sent government workers out to collect folktales, and another project collected regional songs. Some of the quilt makers in this show worked in sewing circles connected with the massive works projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Professional designs also influenced women who chose not to buy them or who could not afford them–ten cents was a high price in the depressed rural South. Those formerly devoted to local styles reasoned that if someone like Orr, an outsider, could catch on in their communities, they too could create or adapt a wider variety of patterns.
