Planners of San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition wanted to present their city as the center of an American empire that stretched from Maine to the Philippines. The fair’s head landscape engineer John McLaren and his team spent three years planning and planting the fairgrounds to reinforce this message. They used plants and flowers from around the world to show off California’s gentle climate, and convey to visitors the idea that the city was at the center of the commercial world. This article details the work that McLaren’s crews undertook, analyzes three sections of the fairgrounds, and discusses the impact the fair’s landscaping made on visitors.

Labor relations during the run up to and duration of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 have been called the “Pax Panama Pacifica” thanks to unwritten agreements between fair planners and key labor unions in San Francisco. Fair planners intended to use the exposition to declare California’s ascendance as an economic stronghold in the Pacific, but the staging of it involved work that was inexorably bound with local, domestic, class, race, and gender conflicts in the Progressive Era. This article looks at why avoiding labor strife was critical to fair organizers’ objectives, and examines in particular the groups for whom the peace did not hold: unskilled workers, women, people of color, and foreign performers.

San Diego vied with San Francisco to host the 1915 World’s Fair. San Francisco won, but San Diego went ahead and staged the International Panama-California Exposition. Planners of both fairs traded on ideas of empire to raise their cities’ profiles and capitalize on increased commercial opportunities promised by the newly opened Panama Canal, but they took very different approaches. In San Diego, city leaders saw themselves as inheritors of Spain’s colonial empire and as the critical link to a new American empire at the intersection of Latin America and the Pacific. They also saw themselves as the pinnacle of human progress and conquest, distinct from a supposedly primitive nonwhite past and a romantic Spanish interlude. The impact of this view of California history can still be seen and still troubles the state today.