As San Diego approaches the centennial of the Panama-California Exposition, a noted California historian said the 1915 event romanticized history to thrust a then tiny San Diego into the limelight.
Kevin Starr said the event established San Diego as “the crossroads city of the Spanish Southwest and the Pacific Basin” and paved the way for a military-based economy.
“It still seems the height of chutzpah,” he said, reflecting on the city’s population of 49,000, but San Diego’s civic leaders had “a strong element of visionary ambition.”
Starr, professor of history at the University of Southern California, spoke in the Helen Edison Lecture Series at UC San Diego.
The architecture of the exposition romanticized the Spanish colonial past, he said, and paid homage to myths created by the classic novel Ramona. “There is much history in the dream, and much dream in the history,” he explained.
Planning began in 1909 for an exposition to mark the completion of the Panama Canal. San Francisco almost got the federal nod, but President Woodrow Wilson finally signed a bill making San Diego the host city.
After the attention of the exposition, San Diego leaders successfully persuaded the Navy and Marine Corps to build local installations.
“The San Diego Exposition of 1915 left San Diegans with a question of what next? And that question was answered almost immediately…the Gibraltar of the Pacific.
“The navy brought an idealized industrial presence to San Diego,” he said, opening up a stable path to future development in a city that just two years before the exposition had seen violent union organizing by the Industrial Workers of the World. “Sailors and Marines did not go out on strike,” he noted.
In many ways, San Diego was following the lead of other cities. Chicago, Buffalo, St. Louis and Seattle had all had successful expositions.
“The 19th century loved expositions,” he said. “The United States of America took to this phenomenon with great enthusiasm.”