Here in these halls of science
Here in these towers of art
We have built the true defiance
And girded the nation's heart.
Not with enduring stone
Or muscles that twist with pain
But with fires that burn
A vision in the brain
A tri-colored flag was cut
For us with subtle sheers.
No doors we open can shut
In a hundred thousand years.

We witness a retreat from the romantic ideal of public life. The Depression and impending war has shaken American notions of community to their core. Arcadian promises of open vistas and peaceful concord between self and society are bypassed as corporate and government planners focus the nation's attention to the "world of tomorrow." Doubts about our ability to construct a better world are silenced; they must be, if the nation can face the adversaries of self-doubt within and totalitarianism abroad. With world's fairs, from the Victorian period through the postwar era, we discover sites of social planning on the grandest scale. However, even as superhighways, nuclear-powered cities, and gleaming appliances promised by the fairs fill our cultural landscape, dystopian fears of totalitarianism have not been crushed with the defeat of Axis powers. The federal government has become a more significant force in public life than ever before. Thousands of suburban gardens bloom, but the subtle machinery of control grows just beneath America's well-manicured lawns.

Readings: Gelernter, Susman, Rydell, and Dikkers

Notes: Gelernter - Fair Theme Center and Futurama

Notes: Susman - Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer Society

Notes: Rydell - African-Americans and the Prewar Fairs

Notes: Middleton Family Film

Supplemental Website: Wood's Images from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair

Supplemental Website: Images from the 1933-34 Century of Progress Fair

Viewing: The Middleton Family at the 1939 World's Fair

Viewing: The World of Tomorrow

Off-campus webpages

The American Studies Group at UVA, Iconography of Hope: The 1939-40 New York World's Fair

Dannysoar, Norman Bel Geddes - images of the flying wing.

Discovery Channel, Future Worlds, 1939

National Public Radio Morning Edition, Our Vision of the Future including an interview with Dr. Andrew Wood

St. Petersburg Times, Tomorrowland - "The future, like just about everything else, is owned and operated by the world's corporate and government power brokers. It's a future filled with products -- a better this, a smaller that, a quicker whatever."

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