Wisconsin State Fair was last canceled in 1945
The last time the Wisconsin State Fair was canceled, it took a world war to do it. And even then, the fair didn’t go down without a fight.
During World War II, the U.S. Office of Defense Transportation oversaw the nation’s transit resources, including use of the nation’s railroads. Among the office’s priorities were ensuring the movement of troops and war materials, and reining in nonessential travel. (One of the ODT’s slogans during the war: “Is this trip necessary?”)
To the ODT, nonessential travel included state and county fairs, and all the transportation demands they entailed. But despite the office’s urging, the state of Wisconsin held its fair per usual in the summers of 1942, 1943 and 1944.
In 1945, with the final push in Europe and in the Pacific expected to put even greater pressure on rail shipping and transportation, the ODT warned local governments that it might stop urging a ban on all county and state fairs, and start ordering one.
In June, with the war over in Europe (fighting still raged in the Pacific), a delegation of officials from different state fairs, including Wisconsin State Fair Manager William T. Marriott, went to Washington to talk the ODT out of a ban — or, at least, to get it to allow a “local” state fair that would draw from within a smaller travel circle.
(Marriott wasn’t able to complete his mission. On the train back from Washington on June 8, he had a cerebral hemorrhage and died the next day, at age 58.)
Even then, state officials were hopeful the ODT would allow them to hold the 1945 fair at the West Allis fairgrounds Aug. 18-26; they were so sure it would happen, according to official fair histories, they even had program booklets printed up.
But when the federal agency told the state that the fair would have to operate as a county fair, the Department of Agriculture wasn’t interested in a smaller-scale event. And, on June 22, the state pulled the plug on the 1945 Wisconsin State Fair.
The ODT’s ruling “leaves us no choice,” Ira Inman, the department’s chairman, told The Journal in a June 22 story. “Much as we regret to break the long chain of annual state fairs, the needs of the Pacific War must come first.”
As The Journal reported a couple of weeks later, State Fair officials and some Wisconsin legislators had gone to extreme lengths to avoid being shut down, despite the needs of the war effort.
In a July 8 editorial, The Journal reviewed some correspondence about the campaign for a State Fair in 1945. The letters, released by Milton H. Button, director of the state Department of Agriculture, offered an inside look at the scheme to have the Wisconsin fair evade federal travel limitations, a scheme that involved legislators, regulators and, as Button put it, “the countless number of State Fair friends.”
The Journal lambasted such plotting during wartime as “the endeavors of many people to block the efforts of the ODT to clear the trains and other shipping facilities for troop and war goods movements.”
Ironically, the restrictions that had been imposed by the ODT were lifted Aug. 16 — two days before the 1945 Wisconsin State Fair had been scheduled to start.
But Button told The Journal “there is too little time for the great amount of work necessary for putting on the annual event.”
1945 was the fifth time Wisconsin’s State Fair had been canceled. The 1861’63 fairs were casualties of the Civil War, and the 1893 fair wasn’t held because there was a bigger to-do farther down the lakeshore: the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story was published on Aug. 2, 2016.
Contact Chris Foran at chris.foran@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @cforan12.