DURANTI - Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at The NYWF 1939-1940

Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 41(4), 663–683. ISSN 0022–0094.

DOI: 10.1177/0022009406067749
Marco Duranti
Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at the
1939–40 New York World’s Fair
A World’s Fair and a World War, in the same compartment of time, somehow do not
harmonize. A visit to the former, with one’s mind numbed by the latter, makes of one a bad
Fairgoer. A conflict is set up: one sees more, and one sees less, of the Fair than otherwise one
would. Gazing at the massed fountains, you think of the flamethrowers. Looking at the
death’s head of the Peruvian mummy, you recall the unburied, helmeted dead of the battle-
fields. As you make your way down the ‘Court of Peace,’ you balk at the nomenclature,
instead of, as you should, appreciating the good intentions.1
Wyndham Lewis penned these observations in 1940, including them in a

satirical snapshot of American society published that same year. The British
novelist had recently travelled to the USA for a lecture tour, only to find him-
self stranded there upon the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. As ever greater
numbers descended into the maelstrom of armed conflict, the New York
World’s Fair provided increasingly fertile ground for Lewis’s ironic sensibility.
The Fair had originally opened in the spring of 1939 as the World of
Tomorrow, projecting a not-so-distant future where modern technologies
would beget a harmonious, planned society. By 1940, the exposition was in its
second season and rededicated to Peace and Freedom. Billing itself as a folksy
country fair, it offered fairgoers a nostalgic escape from events abroad. For
Lewis, however, an event rejoicing in the promise of peaceful construction
instead conjured images of wartime destruction.
This article will explore the shift from the utopian theme of the 1939 New
York World’s Fair to the nostalgic theme of the 1940 New York World’s Fair.
It argues that both seasons offered narratives intended to neutralize the dis-
turbing implications of the European war. The World of Tomorrow theme,
conceived in the mid-1930s, represented an attempt to reconstitute a national
narrative of progress shattered by a traumatic past experience (the Great War),
an unstable present (the Great Depression), and uncertain expectations for the
future (the spectre of ascendant totalitarian ideologies and another world
war). The abandonment of the World of Tomorrow in 1940 suggests the fail-
ure of this attempt to resurrect a coherent narrative of progress in the face of
renewed violence in Europe.
Existing literature on the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair has largely
treated the exposition as a static phenomenon, neglecting how the structure
and meaning of its exhibits changed over time. Scholars have either described
1 Wyndham Lewis, America, I Presume (New York 1940), 285–6.
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664 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 41 No 4
specific foreign pavilions in isolation from the rest of the exposition2 or

analysed the Fair’s presentation of science and technology in isolation from its
international context.3 Only cursory attention has been paid to the impact of
war on the Fair. Most importantly, the research has failed to focus adequately
on how the outcome of the fair deviated from the intentions of the Fair orga-
nizers.
Accordingly, studies of the New York World’s Fair have overlooked how
the outbreak of war across the Atlantic disrupted the Fair Corporation’s well-
wrought plans, challenging the promise of wholeness, continuity and coher-
ence offered by both utopian trajectories and nostalgic returns. When the 1939
season opened, Fair officials contrasted a fractious Europe with a harmonious
USA; the former represented the darker aspects of modernity, while the latter
embodied modernity’s promise. Fair planners had intended the World of
Tomorrow to be firmly anchored in the lessons of the past and the potential
of the present. As the war broke out and entire nations disappeared off the
map of Europe, however, the Fair’s theme exhibits appeared increasingly as
halcyon dreamworlds disconnected from the realities of the bloody conflict
abroad.
This article aims to contribute to a broader understanding of how utopian
and nostalgic yearnings developed in response to the destabilizing effects of
industrialization. Utopias captured the popular imagination in part because
they allayed widespread concerns over the dangers of social dislocation, eco-
nomic crisis and mechanized murder. ‘Utopias make the world tolerable for
us’, observed Lewis Mumford, the celebrated cultural critic and urban planner
who would inspire the theme of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Humans
only became aware of the utopian ideals driving their psyches when ‘there is a
breach between the world of affairs and the overworld of utopia’, Mumford
noted.4 Nineteenth-century narratives of progress had assumed that the world
of tomorrow would emerge from the experiences of yesterday and the condi-
tions of today. Yet, the unprecedented violence of the Great War and the har-
rowing effects of the Great Depression upset this reassuring sense of temporal
2 Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Overture to an Alliance: British Propaganda at the New York World’s Fair,
1939–1940’, Journal of British Studies, 26 (July 1997), 325–54; David E. Nye, ‘European Self-
Representations at the New York World’s Fair of 1939’ in R. Kroes, R.W. Rydell and D.F.J.
Bosscher (eds), Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe
(Amsterdam 1993); Anthony Swift, ‘The Soviet World of Tomorrow at the New York World’s
Fair, 1939’, The Russian Review, 57 (July 1998), 364–79.
3 See Christina Cogdell, ‘The Futurama Recontextualized: Norman Bel Geddes’s Eugenic
“World of Tomorrow”’, American Quarterly, 52, 2 (June 2000); Joseph P. Cusker, The World of
Tomorrow: The 1939 New York World’s Fair, unpublished dissertation (New Brunswick, NJ
1990); Peter J. Kuznick, ‘Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle Over the Presentation of
Science at the 1939 New York World’s Fair’, American Quarterly, 46, 3 (September 1994),
341–73; Robert Rydell, ‘The Fan Dance of Science: American World’s Fairs in the Great
Depression’, Isis, 76, 4 (December 1985), 525–42; Robert Rydell, World of Fairs. The Century-of-
Progress Expositions (Chicago 1993).
4 Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York 1962; last edn 1922), 11.
Duranti: Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at the New York World’s Fair 665
continuity between past, present and future. New utopian visions were needed
to cope with unfamiliar experiences and shattered expectations.5
The aftermath of the first world war witnessed a surge of interest in utopian
thinking in the USA. While progressives promoted democratic collectivism and
rational planning as solutions to society’s ills, the disciples of Fredrick Taylor
and Henry Ford promised that scientific management and expanding pro-
ductivity would foster a society free of class conflict. Few would admit to
being outright utopians, of course. The appeal of the American technocratic
model was that it was the ideology to end all ideologies, a pragmatic and
apolitical alternative to both laissez-faire capitalism and orthodox Marxism. It
was also universalist, consciously drawing on European liberal, socialist and
corporatist thought, while announcing itself as a new paradigm that could
bring stability and prosperity to the rest of the world.6
Nostalgia, like utopia, was a response to both modern conceptions of
progress and modern practices of warfare. Nostalgia represented ‘a mourning
for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world
with clear borders and values’. It afflicted those who shared the liberal
assumption that time was linear, unrepeatable and irreversible. Yet it emerged
most vividly during wars, first diagnosed in the USA as a medical condition
afflicting soldiers fighting in the Civil War.7
The unsettling effects of economic hardship provoked Americans to turn their
gaze to earlier periods of US history for inspiration in adverse times. Alfred
Kazin famously noted, ‘Where the generation of the twenties wanted to revenge
themselves on their fathers, the generation of the thirties needed the comfort of
their grandfathers.’ The 1930s witnessed a significant revival in the search for a
‘usable past’, with a renewed interest in nineteenth-century pioneer life and
historical novels such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936). The
backward-looking vogue of the Depression era coincided with efforts to forge a
unique American cultural identity distinct from that of Europe. If utopianism
favoured the ecumenical, nostalgia sought out the particular.8
* * *
5 Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom. Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (New
Haven, CT 2006), Introduction.
6 Charles Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of
Industrial Productivity in the 1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 2 (April 1970), 29–34;
Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA 1998),
chap. 9, 367–408.
7 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York 2001), 8.
8 Alfred Kazin, ‘What Have the 30’s Done to Our Literature?’, New York Herald Tribune, 31
December 1939, cited in Alfred Haworth Jones, ‘The Search for a Usable American Past in the
New Deal Era’, American Quarterly, 23, 5 (December 1971), 719–20; Michael Kammen, Mystic
Chords of Memory. The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York 1991),
300–4; Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture. Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public
Art and Theater (Washington DC 1991), 33–52.
The directors of the 1939 New York World’s Fair Corporation had initially
proposed that their exposition be retrospective in character. The Fair was to
be held on the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration (30
April 1939) and celebrate 150 years of American accomplishments in all fields
of human endeavour. No doubt this choice of theme was largely a question of
fortuitous timing. Perhaps, as Karal Ann Marling has suggested in her analysis
of the 1876 Philadelphia centennial exposition, George Washington was also
to serve as a reassuring symbol of national unity during a period of social dis-
integration, a comfortable colonial counterpoint to the anxieties of modern
life.9
The point soon became moot after proponents of a forward-looking exposi-
tion seized control of the Fair’s theme at a ‘Progressives in the Arts’ dinner
held at the City Club of New York in early December 1935. Various local
notables weighed in with their ideas for the Fair, but Lewis Mumford won the
day. Describing previous expositions as museums and graveyards, Mumford
declared that they had been content to celebrate past technological achieve-
ments while ignoring the social implications of industrialization. It was not
enough simply to stage an encomium to industrial progress, he cautioned,
because the new technologies ‘are ready to make hell on earth and destroy our
civilization unless the forces which are working in the other direction, on the
side of a different order of society, become victorious’.10 The 1939 New York
World’s Fair could point the way towards salvation, but only if it enabled
Americans to imagine a future society where rational planning curbed the
destructive potential of modernity. Thus ‘The World of Tomorrow’ was born.
The utopianism of the Fair’s theme was not in itself novel. Rational plan-
ning was a time-worn progressive mantra given a fresh lease of life with the
New Deal.11 The apocalyptic overtones of the World of Tomorrow promo-
tional campaign were striking, however. ‘The world is in chaos struggling to
master its own inventions. We are in danger of being annihilated by forces
which we ourselves have set up’, noted one Fair Corporation publicity manual.
‘Unless we do so, civilization, top-heavy with its precocity, will fall and crush
us all.’12 This chiliastic language found its affirmation in the redemptive poten-
tial of the Fair itself. The principal Theme Exhibit of the 1939 Fair lay housed
within a gigantic white sphere eight stories tall and two hundred feet in
diameter, dubbed the ‘Perisphere’. Fairgoers gazed down upon a model of
‘Democracity’, the ‘perfectly integrated garden city of tomorrow’, as they were
treated to an audio-visual presentation that culminated in images of farmers,
9 Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here. Colonial Revivals and American Culture
(Cambridge 1988), vii.
10 Lewis Mumford, ‘Address by Mr Lewis Mumford at the Dinner Meeting of Progressives in
the Arts’, 11 December 1935, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New
York World’s Fair 1939–40 Records (hereafter NYPL), Box 307.
11 Rodgers, op. cit., ch. 10, 409–84.
12 Michael M. Hare, ‘Basic Speeches on World’s Fair with Relation to Theme and Archi-
tecture’, 22 December 1936, NYPL, Box 307.
FIGURE 1
Source: Yonker’s Daily Times, 6 September 1938.
industrial workers, engineers, bankers and professionals holding hands and

bursting into song. ‘Except for war itself, it is the greatest imaginable get-
together, a superb expression of common interest and social consciousness’,
declared Gerald Wendt, director of the Fair Corporation’s Department of
Science and Education. The ability of Americans of differing geographic,
socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds to come together would contrast with
‘the present chaos in Europe where people of the same races and with no
greater diversity than we have are arrayed in a dozen hostile camps’.13
Fair officials were determined that the troubling developments across the
Atlantic would not undermine the utopian premise of the World of Tomorrow.
They expressed a particular lack of enthusiasm for Fair structures that could
serve as reminders of the Great War.14 More significantly, the Fair Corporation
broke with precedent by relegating foreign exhibitors to the periphery of the
fairgrounds. Whereas past expositions had been constructed around national
pavilions, the 1939 New York World’s Fair formulated its zoning plan with
corporate structures in mind. Fair officials divided the fairgrounds into a series
of thematic zones, with private exhibitors clustered in concentric circles around
‘focal exhibits’ constructed by the Fair Corporation itself. Foreign exhibitors,
by contrast, were confined to the Government Area, an awkward appendage to
the centralized schema of the fair’s design, physically segregated from the rest
of the fairgrounds by a river and an immense ‘Lagoon of Nations’. The Fair
Corporation went as far as to rouse the ire of the Bureau International des
Expositions for presenting foreign governments with contractual clauses that
were supposed to be applicable only to private exhibitors.15
Robert Rydell has argued that world’s fairs of the 1930s were ‘calculated
responses’ to the social instability engendered by the Great Depression, ‘ideo-
logical constructs . . . designed to restore popular faith in the vitality of the
nation’s economic and political system’.16 As the threat of renewed conflict in
Europe grew, the Fair Corporation resorted to less subtle methods of encour-
aging collective amnesia. ‘Forget 1938 with its bewildering succession of dis-
turbing world events’, Fair Corporation President Grover Whalen declared at
the end of that troublesome year. ‘Forget that philosophy of doubt, depres-
sion, and defeat which has hung like a pall over the nation. The year 1939 will
be a GOOD Year!’17
The Fair’s planners, perceiving a collective desire to overcome memories of the

Great War and Great Depression, spent lavish amounts of funds on the con-
struction of utopian structures such as Democracity. The spectre of renewed
world war, however, challenged the thematic unity of the exposition. A
powerful centrifugal force emerged in the pavilions of the so-called ‘orphan
13 Gerald Wendt, ‘Sketch of a Thirty-Minute Address’, NYPL, Box 307, f. PR1.41 ‘Speeches —
Speakers Bureau — Public Relations L-Q’.
14 Maurice Mermey to Fernand Meiller, 7 October 1938, NYPL, Box 183; J. Howard
Randerson to W.B. Trubee, 30 January 1939, NYPL, Box 183; Howard E. Norris to Grover
Whalen, 28 June 1939, NYPL, Box 183; minutes from meeting of Advisory Committee of War
Veterans, 2 April 1937, NYPL, Box 258; Milton Solomon to Thomas Donovan, 1 November
1938, NYPL, Box 358; New York Times, 3 May 1940.
15 Archives Diplomatiques, Paris (hereafter AD), Box 47, memo from Sous-Direction des
Relations Commerciales to M. Charpentier dated 26 January 1939.
16 Rydell, World of Fairs, op. cit., 213, 9.
17 Jo Milward, Radio speech, NYPL, Box 307.
nations’, victims of nazi or Soviet aggression. Events in Europe provoked a

series of dramatic shocks that first afflicted the Czech and Polish delegations.
During the 1939 season, their pavilions revealed the harrowing impact of
total war on their nations through empty spaces and silences rather than direct
representations. The orphan nations relied on archaic, romantic and religious
imagery to mourn their loss. In contrast to the Theme Committee’s linear con-
ception of time, at once continuous and irreversible, the Czech and Polish
prophecies of national resurrection were inspired by a cyclical understanding
of time. The disjointed, pre-modern motifs of the foreign area undermined the
utopian promise of the 1939 Fair’s forward-looking theme.
Recent scholarly literature on trauma and mourning offers a useful herme-
neutic lens for interpreting the pavilions of ‘orphan nations’ at the Fair. As
Cary Caruth has observed, traumatic memory is located within a crisis of rep-
resentation, the inability to translate a ‘wound’ into a ‘voice’. Similarly,
Shoshana Felman argues that trauma is best expressed through fragmented,
often silent, testimonies rather than conventional linear narratives. Such
narratives, according to Felman, are ‘deafening’ for they cover the silences of
victims with their artificial coherence and unity. Jenny Edkins contends,
furthermore, that war memorials are capable of exposing the traumatic
aspects of modern war only by rejecting linear time in favour of a ‘trauma
time’ that ‘encircles’ the traumatic experience rather than directly representing
it. Jay Winter’s study of mourning in the wake of the Great War suggests that
another means of coping with extremes of human loss and suffering is through
the use of older imagery and rituals, especially those that invoke apocalypse
and rebirth.18
Although the Czech delegation had originally planned to showcase their
nation as a model of political and economic modernization, the crippling blow
delivered at the Munich conference in September 1938 and the German annex-
ation of remaining Czech lands in March 1939 brought about an abrupt shift
in their plans. Defying orders from Berlin to withdraw from the exposition,
the Czech delegation enlisted the support of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia,
Czech Americans and local civic groups to raise the funds necessary to com-
plete the construction of their pavilion.19 With many of their exhibits confis-
cated by the nazis, the building was still incomplete at the Fair’s opening day
on 30 April 1939. During the opening ceremonies, observers contrasted the
Fair Corporation’s desire to explain all with the ‘silent speech’ made by
the sombre Czech Pavilion. Its very silence offered a more compelling condem-
nation of militarism than the grandiloquent discourses emanating from the
18 Cary Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD

1996), 4–18; Shoshana Felman, Juridical Unconscious. Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, MA 2002), 14, 159; Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics
(Cambridge 2003), xv, 54; Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. The Great War in
European Cultural History (Cambridge 1995).
19 ‘36,000 Asked for Czech Pavilion’, New York Times, 26 April 1939.
Court of Peace.20 Here the recent trauma of a nation was expressed through
the ineffable.
When the Czech pavilion finally opened to the public on 31 May 1939,
President-in-exile Eduard Benes declared, ‘This pavilion, Ladies and Gentle-
men, is the free and independent Czecho-Slovakia of the near past, and the free
and independent Czecho-Slovakia of the near future.’21 Czechoslovakia no
longer existed on the political map of Europe. The structure now stood for
a nation without a present, a fissure between past experiences and future
expectations.
The stark emptiness of its halls and the traditional strophes expressed in its
minimalist displays violated the unity of theme so desperately sought by the
planners of the 1939 season. One of the few statues in the building was a
figure of a reclining maiden entitled ‘Sleeping Republic’, designed by the Czech
American sculptor Mario Korbel. An inscription above the statue informed
visitors of the original intention of the pavilion’s designers to showcase the
industrial and artistic progress achieved during the nation’s two decades of
independent statehood. In the wake of the Munich Conference and nazi
aggression, however, the Czech delegates had decided to allow the very bare-
ness that greeted the visitor to express Czechoslovakia’s tale of betrayal. ‘More
eloquently than words could express it, the emptiness that surrounds you tells
the story’, the inscription stated.22
The Czechs understood that any attempt to represent the trauma explicitly
would only diminish its rawness and emotive power. ‘The pavilion tells in its
very incompleteness the story of a cowardly and unjustified aggression’, the
New York Times editorialized. ‘It tells it better than any building, finished to
the last touch of varnish and the last exhibit, could have done.’23 This sophisti-
cated appreciation of the Czech pavilion’s use of negative space contrasted
with the Fair Corporation’s earlier refusal to allow the construction of a
Veterans’ Temple of Peace out of fear of remaining with an ‘uncompleted
building’ or ‘vacant ground’ that would result in an ‘unsightly blemish’ on the
exposition site.24
The Czech pavilion challenged the Fair Corporation’s linear narrative of
progress. This narrative was most vividly captured in the Community Interests
Focal Exhibit, which told the story of how technological innovations had
allowed Americans to shift from a sixteen-hour workday in 1789 to an eight-
hour workday a hundred and fifty years later. By contrast, the Czech pavilion’s
new theme was ‘History repeats itself’. Displayed on the Czech Pavilion’s
20 ‘The Silences of the World’s Fair’ (editorial), New York Times, 1 May 1939.
21 Eduard Benes, Address at opening of Czechoslovakian Pavilion, 31 May 1939, NYPL, Box
1032.
22 The Czechoslovak Pavilion [brochure] (1939) Century of Progress International Exposition –
New York World’s Fair Collection, Series II: New York World’s Fair, Manuscripts and Archives,
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University (hereafter SML), Box 51.
23 ‘The Czech Republic Lives’ (editorial), New York Times, 1 June 1939.
24 Unknown author to Milton Solomon, 6 June 1938, NYPL, Box 209.
façade was a prophecy by the seventeenth-century religious leader and scholar

Comenius: ‘After the Tempest of Wrath Has Past, the Rule of the Country Will
Return to Thee, O Czech People.’25 By depicting Comenius as a ‘Czech refugee
from similar Germanic oppression three centuries ago’, the pavilion subtly con-
flated past and present. Comenius fled his native Bohemia during the Thirty
Years War in order to escape the imposition of Catholicism by Habsburg
Emperor Ferdinand II, hardly what one might call ‘similar Germanic oppres-
sion’. To draw such a historical parallel was to rely on the romantic tropes of
nineteenth-century Czech nationalism. Whereas the Fair Corporation had
sought to replace the past with a future pregnant in the present, Czech victims
of nazi aggression relied on a backwards-looking, cyclical understanding of
time.
After the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, cyclical motifs
and discontinuities emerged in the Polish Pavilion as well. The exposition
organizers had unhappily scheduled Polish National Alliance Day at the Fair
for 2 September. As thousands of Polish Americans flooded the Court of
Peace, Fair Corporation officials nervously ordered armed policemen to stand
guard around the Italian and Soviet Pavilions, though no violent incidents
occurred. With the onset of the war, the Polish Pavilion immediately became
‘an almost morbid center of attraction’.26 Crowds began to gather regularly
around the building to hear a trumpeter sound the Heynal, a thirteenth-
century tune of Polish defiance (played with a broken ending purportedly
because the original trumpeter had his call cut short by an arrow through the
throat). Just as the Czechs equated their plight with that of a Bohemian fleeing
from Catholic Habsburg persecution, the Poles invoked a fanfare directed
against Tartar attacks in the thirteenth century in order to suggest contempo-
rary Polish resistance to the German Wehrmacht.27
As with the Czech Pavilion, images of spiritual and physical rebirth suffused
the Polish site. These were made most explicit at the opening of the Fair’s 1940
season, when Baron Stefan de Ropp, Commissioner General of the Polish
Pavilion, declared Poland a ‘phantom state’ that only existed on ‘the maps of
the future which are not printed by the hands of man’. ‘We are convinced that
Poland is not erased from the face of the earth’, de Ropp asserted. ‘Poland will
live again. We have not lost faith and confidence, for we know that we shall
see the resurrection of my country.’28
The Fair Corporation’s initial response to the escalating tensions abroad was
to promote the exposition as the world’s last and best chance for a peaceful
resolution. From its inception, the Fair Corporation co-ordinated its efforts at
foreign recruitment with the US State Department, which had informed
25 The Czechoslovak Pavilion [brochure] (1939), SML, Box 51.
26 Sidney Shalett, ‘Europe’s Turmoil Reflected at Fair’, New York Times, 2 September 1939.
27 C.O., ‘Around the Fair: Momentary Refuge’, New Yorker, 9 September 1939.
28 ‘Poland’s Outlines Called “Indelible”’, New York Times, 31 May 1940.
FIGURE 2
Source: New York Daily Mirror, 11 May 1940.
Whalen that a strong showing of foreign governments might result in the host-
ing of an international peace conference in 1939 to coincide with the Fair.29
The Fair’s Official Guide Book promoted the exposition as a genuine inter-
national forum, remarking, ‘The presence of sixty foreign participants makes
the Fair a true parliament of the world.’30 The Court of Peace and Federal
Building was designed in such a way that the USA appeared at the end of a
giant ‘conference table’ at which ‘the nations of the world meet in friendly
interchange’.31 As Paul Greenlaugh has observed with regard to the 1937
Exposition Universelle: ‘In retrospect, such passages have a certain sad desper-
ation about them, of hopeful pleas dressed in rhetoric and doomed to fail-
ure.’32
From the outset, the Fair’s rhetoric of peace contained tropes of war.
Whalen wrote in 1938 that he had ‘built a Fair which is bombarding unfriend-
liness and shattering hostility’, claiming that while certain ‘countries are arm-
ing for the war of tomorrow — the Fair is arming for peace in a better World
of Tomorrow’.33 Events staged in the Court of Peace reflected this conflation
of the bellicose and the pacific. The dedication of the Court of Peace on
Armistice Day in 1938 had culminated in the ‘bursting overhead of 500 air
bombs containing miniature flags and the release of 500 white doves from the
ground’.34 Observers remarked how this confusing scene mirrored the split
between the officials chosen to speak that day, who fell into opposing
preparedness and isolationist camps.35 The juxtaposition of the militant and
peaceful reached its apex shortly before the end of the exposition’s first
season, when Fair officials filled the Court of Peace with anti-aircraft batteries
firing blank shells at planes performing mock air raids overhead.36
Fair visitors were increasingly sensitive to the looming possibility that the
USA could be drawn into the European conflict. A survey of a thousand fair-
goers in September 1939 revealed that a majority believed that the USA would
eventually enter the war.37 Just as US participation in the war increasingly
appeared inevitable, so too was the war an increasingly inescapable facet of
the fairgoers’ experience. Crowds now turned from the once-popular futuristic
displays of the Soviet Pavilion to the traditional motifs of the Czech and Polish
pavilions. The New Yorker remarked that visitors did so ‘not ghoulishly but in
29 Minutes from meeting of Advisory Committee of War Veterans, 2 April 1937, NYPL, Box
258.
30 Official Guide Book to the New York World’s Fair, 3rd edn, SML, Box 470, 124–5.
31 United States Government Building (New York World’s Fair 1940), SML, Box 79.
32 Paul Greenlaugh, Ephemeral Vistas. The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and
World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester 1988), 130.
33 Grover Whalen, Pilgrimage to Tomorrow (New York 1938), 17.
34 New York Daily Mirror, 12 November 1938.
35 Ibid.
36 Sidney M. Shalett, ‘Roosevelt to Ask Funds to Continue Fair Exhibit in ’40’, New York
Times, 16 October 1939.
37 Market Analysts, Inc., ‘Second Attendance Survey of the New York World’s Fair 1939
Incorporated’, 7 October 1939, NYPL, Box 1046.
genuine sadness . . . curious to get an idea of what a vanished nation might be

like’. Rather than represent the World of Tomorrow, the foreign area had
become ‘a sprawling museum of things past’.38
As the summer of 1939 progressed, crowds increasingly shunned the Fair
Corporation’s forward-looking theme exhibits in favour of the nostalgic
‘villages’ of the Amusement Area with names such as ‘Merrie England’ and
‘Old New York’, whose concessionaries had complained of neglect by the Fair
Corporation’s publicists.39 Lewis Mumford became bitterly disappointed with
the outcome of the exposition. In his earlier writings, Mumford had distin-
guished between ‘utopias of reconstruction’ and ‘utopias of escape’.40 The
former constituted a meaningful response to the cataclysm of the Great War,
unveiling new social environments more adapted to human needs than the
present one. He warned against becoming seduced, however, by escapist
utopias, those ephemeral fantasies of perfection that fled the problems of the
present rather than confronting them. Now, upon visiting the fairgrounds,
Mumford concluded that the New York World’s Fair had succeeded ‘not in
interpreting the World of Tomorrow but in desperately running away from
it’.41
Attendance for the first season was far below expectations, less than 26
million instead of the projected 60 million visitors. In response to these dis-
heartening figures, the Fair Corporation’s board of directors appointed
Harvey Gibson as chairman in August of 1939. Gibson, a New York banker
known for his thrift and practical business acumen, effectively divested the
profligate Grover Whalen of his leadership over the exposition (though
Whalen continued to maintain his nominal title as President of the Fair Corpo-
ration).42 By the close of the first season in October 1939, the exposition had
abandoned the World of Tomorrow and begun promoting the ‘carnival spirit’
of the Amusement Area. Now advertised as a giant country fair, the exposition
reopened its gates on 12 May 1940 to a new theme: For Peace and Freedom.
By June 1940, 12 exhibitors would become drawn into the European con-
flict: England, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, Denmark,
Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Luxemburg and Finland. The Fair Corpora-
tion, however, continued in its determination to project an alternative reality
that ignored the unsettling events in Europe. Only this season it would be
nostalgic narratives rather than narratives of progress that would provide fair-
goers with an illusion of harmony and coherence.
The New Yorker suggested that the 1940 Fair be called the ‘World of
Yesterday’, describing the shift in focus to the nostalgic pleasures of the 1940
Fair’s Amusement Area:
38 C.O., ‘The World of Yesterday’, New Yorker, 1 June 1940.

39 Russell Maloney and Eugene Kinkead, ‘Trylon, Trylon Again’, New Yorker, 11 May 1940.
40 Mumford, The Story of Utopias, op. cit., 15.
41 Lewis Mumford, ‘Sky Line in Flushing: West is East’, New Yorker, 17 June 1939.
42 Sidney M. Shalett, ‘Epitaph for the World’s Fair’, Harper’s Magazine, 182 (December 1940).
Three scenes of the Aquacade contemplate past fairs — those of San Francisco, Paris, and
Chicago. In Billy Rose’s new Barbary Coast night club, the scene is San Francisco before the
earthquake, and Fritzi Scheff sings ‘Kiss Me Again’. ‘Streets of Paris’ goes for a tourist-era
type of Frenchiness, and Gypsy Rose Lee chooses to start her strip tease in a shirtwaist and
skirt reminiscent of horsecars and hatpins. The most raucous bar on the grounds, Carrie’s
Do Bust Inn, a part of the village known as Gay New Orleans, is filled late at night with
customers singing old songs, led by a red-faced professor at a tinny piano.43
The biggest new display of the second season was ‘American Jubilee’, which
recounted American history through song and dance routines. The show
peered ‘into the future only for a moment in the finale, and even then daring to
look no further ahead than January, 1941’.44
Local New York journalists observed that the more troublesome the events
in Europe, the greater the forced gaiety of the exposition.45 Fair publicists
strained to emphasize the friendlier atmosphere of the 1940 Fair. ‘Hello,
Folks’ was now projected onto the Perisphere in huge lettering with lights.
Gibson issued a ‘Say It With a Smile’ edict to all uniformed employees.46 The
new symbol of the Fair was Elmer, your ‘typical American fairgoer’. (Ironic-
ally, this ‘beaming, portly, average American’ was played by the same actor
who once portrayed Stalin in a political poster.47) Functioning as living
symbols of nostalgia, Elmer and his wife appropriately travelled around
restaurants of foreign pavilions to ‘kindly ask the waiters and waitresses what
news they have of their folks back home’.48
The 1940 season’s celebration of each fairgoer’s unique ethnic identity
differed, however, from the universal Everyman envisioned by the 1939
Fair’s Theme Committee.49 After the Soviet Union declared that it would not
participate in the 1940 season, the space formerly occupied by the Soviet
Pavilion was renamed the ‘American Common’. In response to criticism in the
past season of the towering height of the Soviet Pavilion, a ‘liberty pole’ was
erected in the Common higher than any other structure in the Fair.50 Each
week, the American Common was dedicated to a different nationality group,
which was encouraged to don native costumes, perform folk dances and play
traditional music.
During the early planning stages of the original exposition, Theme Com-
mittee chair Robert Kohn had openly expressed his dread that exhibitors from
state or national governments would indulge in a nostalgic rendering of their
cultural heritage. If exhibitors were left to their own devices, Kohn told his

44 Ibid.
45 C.O., ‘Around the Fair: Momentary Refuge’, New Yorker, 9 September 1939.
46 ‘“Say It With a Smile” Slogan for the Day at Fair’s Opening’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 May
1940.
47 ‘Synthetic “Elmer” 1940 Fair Greeter’, New York Times, 13 April 1940.
49 Michael M. Hare, ‘Basic Speeches on World’s Fair with Relation to Theme and
Architecture’, 22 December 1936, NYPL, Box 307.
50 Herald Tribune, 8 March 1940.
colleagues in 1936, ‘Kentucky might then merely build an imitation log cabin
and stockade with an exhibit of its biggest ear of corn, biggest pig and
strongest bourbon whiskey (with an imitation Daniel Boone guarding it) while
Sweden would give pictures of its castles and fjords.’51 In a fitting irony it was
Kohn himself, the most outspoken advocate of the exposition’s original
forward-looking theme, who was charged with presiding over ceremonies at
the American Common, dedicated to re-enactments of the nation’s diverse
cultural traditions.
Writing in the New York Times Magazine, R.L. Duffus celebrated the cocoon-
like quality of the 1940 Fair, its defiant refusal to succumb to the trauma of
war. The Fair had ‘hibernated’ during the winter, thereby avoiding the ‘lasting
scar’ of a war that had appropriated its technological achievements for the
purposes of death and destruction.52 A Times editorial speculated that the
continuation of the war in Europe would have a positive effect on attendance
figures for ‘men cannot live without escape’.53
A conflict soon erupted within the Fair Corporation between those who
believed Americans wanted to avoid news of the war and those who believed
that they were avoiding the exposition in order to keep abreast of develop-
ments overseas. Gibson briefly experimented with broadcasting hourly war
bulletins across the Fair’s public address system in mid-May 1940. He sus-
pended these transmissions, however, after deciding that they had a negative
impact on attendance.54 ‘Several members of the Fair staff, who had felt at the
outset that the aspect of “escape” was more the key to a successful Fair season
than anything else, shook their heads at what they considered a basic error of
judgment’, the Times reported.55
The New York World’s Fair was the first and last international exhibition at
which the League of Nations erected an official pavilion of its own. Approach-
ing the nadir of its authority and credibility, this beleaguered delegation
decided to inaugurate the official League of Nations flag there. The small
League of Nations building, shunted off to the periphery of the international
zone, was overshadowed by the Fair Corporation’s obstinate refusal to
renounce its own role as international peacemaker. Flaunting the success of
the Fair Corporation in recruiting foreign participants for the 1940 season,
Robert Kohn declared that ‘the Fair has exceeded even the accomplishments of
the League of Nations in keeping the governments of the world working
together in friendly concert’.56
51 Robert Kohn, ‘Theme of the Fair: A Fair for “The Man on the Street”’, 16 June 1936, NYPL,
Box 9.
52 R.L. Duffus, ‘The Fair Marches — For Peace’, The New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1940.
53 ‘War and the Fair’ (editorial), New York Times, 2 March 1940.
54 ‘Fair to Broadcast Hourly War News’, New York Times, 18 May 1940.
55 ‘War Broadcasts Ended by Fair’, New York Times, 22 May 1940.
56 Robert D. Kohn, ‘World’s Fair for Peace and Freedom’, NYPL, Box 1051.
FIGURE 3
Source: New York Times, 19 May 1940.
Fair officials had not achieved this success, however, by appealing to wide-
spread pacifist sentiment. To secure the participation of European nations for
the second season they had exploited these countries’ wartime propaganda
needs. In August 1939, Director of Foreign Participation Julius Holmes pro-
jected that France and Great Britain would return due to the ‘political advan-
tages’ the exposition offered them. Holmes had fewer reasons to be sure about
Italy’s continuing participation, noting that the Italian Commissioner had a
‘permanent chip on his shoulder, which is understandable in view of official
utterances in Washington and the attitude of the American press’. He con-
cluded, however, that ‘it would be difficult for Italy to stay out of the New
York Fair in 1940 should Great Britain and France decide to stay in’.57 As pre-
57 Julius Holmes to Grover Whalen, 17 August 1939, NYPL, Box 84.
dicted, the French, British and Italians all signed on for an additional season.
The unhappy Italians even purchased additional space for extra exhibits show-
casing their industrial achievements.
The result of these wartime propaganda concerns was that Europeans as a
whole expanded their exhibition space during the 1940 season. This extra-
ordinary increase came despite the official withdrawal from the exposition by
the governments of Albania, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the
Soviet Union, Sweden and Yugoslavia. In an ironic reversal of roles not lost
upon the local media, Poland appropriated the Soviet Union’s own vacated
area in the Hall of Nations for use in the second season.58 Local Greek-,
Norwegian- and Swedish-American groups joined Czech- and Polish-
Americans in sponsoring their national exhibits, utilizing them as sites to raise
funds for war relief and refugees. Finland committed to the 1940 Fair ‘on the
day Russians dropped 70 bombs on Helsinki’. Denmark, expecting to leave,
decided to remain on the day Germany invaded.59 Switzerland, perhaps fearing
that it would be the next on the Axis’s list of broken neutrality agreements,
doubled its space to make room for a display intended to emphasize ‘common
ideals of democracy’ with the USA.60
As the conflict in Europe unfolded, belligerent nations planned new war
exhibits for the 1940 season. The French and British installed militaristic dis-
plays showcasing their weaponry and the travails of the home front, but
avoided ‘horror pictures’ that would have been in ‘bad taste’.61 The Finns, in
contrast, displayed graphic photographs of the carnage wrought by Russian
soldiers and erected a memorial to the fallen.62 The Czechs now presented new
exhibits highlighting the brutality of the German occupation, including the
screening of a smuggled film entitled, ‘The Rape of Czecho-Slovakia’.63 Simi-
larly, the Polish Pavilion displayed photographs of shelled cities, historical
buildings in ruins, refugees streaming over roads, and dead women and chil-
dren.64 At the information booth, Polish émigrés could obtain information
about their homeland and read a list of distinguished Poles who had died in
battle or internment camps.65
From the very first day of the second season, crowds flocked in macabre fas-
cination to the exhibits of warring European nations.66 The Chicago Tribune
noted that the 1940 exposition opened ‘in a military atmosphere which belied
its new slogan, For Peace and Freedom’, having ‘become a sounding board for
58 ‘Poles Take Space of Soviet at Fair’, New York Times, 3 May 1940.
59 New York Post, 11 May 1940.
60 New York Times, 29 February 1940.
61 ‘France in War Shown at Fair’, New York Sun, 7 June 1940.
63 ‘Czech Fair Exhibit to Show Tragedy’, New York Times, 28 April 1940.
64 ‘Exhibits: A World of Wonders’, New York Times, 5 May 1940; ‘Victim Nations Depict
War’s Horror at Fair’, New York Herald Tribune, 16 June 1940.
66 ‘New Gate Mark Predicted as Fair Hits Stride’, Long Island Daily Press, 13 May 1940.
the war propagandists and official spokesmen of the fighting nations’.67 The
incongruity was not lost upon the Augusta Chronicle, which remarked: ‘How
ironical that these pavilions representing nations which are now at war should
be clustered around the Court of Peace!’68
During the 1940 Fair’s opening ceremony at the Court of Peace, fighter
planes ‘swept overhead in ominous reminder that 3000 miles to the east other
things than Fair openings were taking place.’ Two sky-writing planes impro-
vised a mock aerial battle.69 In his address, New York Governor Herbert
Lehman argued against complacency in the face of the nazi menace, citing new
technologies of warfare that had eroded the Americans’ safety of isolation and
new communication technologies that made the USA vulnerable to propa-
ganda from across the seas.70 Scientific discoveries that the Fair had once
heralded as tools for a new age of peaceful interdependence had now become
part of a deadly battle between the forces of American democracy and
European tyranny.
Whereas the Theme Committee of the 1939 Fair had presumed that one
could master the future, war made the future unpredictable. Grover Whalen
had declared that the purpose of the 1939 Fair was ‘that the World of
Tomorrow might not catch us unawares’.71 The Fair Corporation had told its
bondholders that it expected to garner significant profits, unless of course
there occurred ‘contingencies now unforeseen’.72 By contrast, in the 1940
Fair season, Italian and Japanese contracts contained so-called ‘war clauses’,
allowing those nations to withdraw from the Fair, if ‘future international
developments’ rendered it advisable.73 Preparedness advocates at the 1940 Fair
emphasized the need to mobilize resources in the face of a dark and unknow-
able future: ‘We shudder to contemplate that which the future holds in store’,
one such speaker proclaimed.74 Some visitors dubbed the 1940 Fair the ‘Fair to
end all Fairs’, a last flickering light of enlightenment amidst the decline of
Western civilization.75 ‘Is This the Last World’s Fair of All Time?’, one com-
mentator asked.76
The opening of the exposition’s second season coincided with Hitler’s
invasion of the Low Countries. Suddenly, the Belgian Pavilion found itself
describing the achievements of a country that no longer existed. As the Wehr-
67 ‘Peace a Slogan, NY Fair Reopens in a Military Air’, Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1940.
68 ‘World’s Fair Opens’ (editorial), Augusta [GA] Chronicle, 13 May 1940.
69 ‘War Plans Offer Aerial Overture’, New York Times, 12 May 1940. ‘Instead of dropping
explosive bombs or parachute troops to wreak death and destruction below, the planes merely
roared past and dipped their wings in salute’, the Times piece noted.
70 Herbert H. Lehman, Address at Rededication Ceremonies, 11 May 1940, NYPL, Box 1032.
71 Grover Whalen, Address at Opening Day Ceremony, 30 April 1939, NYPL, Box 1032.
72 Sidney M. Shalett, ‘Epitaph for the World’s Fair’, Harper’s Magazine, 182 (December 1940).
73 New York Sun, 14 May 1940.
74 ‘Maritime Day at Fair Stresses Preparedness’, New York Herald Tribune, 23 May 1940.
75 Meyer Berger, ‘At the Fair’, New York Times, 9 July 1940.
76 Burns Mantle, ‘Is This the Last World’s Fair of All Time?’, New York Daily News, 14 July
1940.
macht swiftly overran meagre Belgian defences, the war unmoored the
traumatic present of the conquered nation from its past experiences and future
expectations. ‘The contents of the Belgian pavilion now belong to yesterday
and perhaps tomorrow, but not to today’, the New York Post commented.77
The revisitation of German aggression upon Belgium disrupted its pavilion’s
attempt to allocate the horrors of the first world war to a less civilized past. A
film describing the reconstruction of Ypres after 1918 now took on unin-
tended meanings. It depicted tombstones of fallen soldiers — 368 Americans,
12,000 British, 10,000 Germans — with the inscription, ‘Never Again War!’
inscribed on them in many languages. ‘You see and hear a multitude, met in
memory of the dead, chanting that vow, that prayer. But now the Germans
have come again’, the Post observed.78 The cry of ‘Never Again!’ had been a
desperate, idealistic attempt to integrate the trauma of the Great War into the
nineteenth-century narrative of progress — a narrative that appeared increas-
ingly untenable as the spectre of twentieth-century total warfare returned.
The divide between the ‘carnival spirit’ of the Amusement Area and the
gloom of the international area became particularly striking as the events of
May 1940 unfolded.79 Meyer Berger, in one of his daily Times columns on the
Fair, depicted how news of war dampened the joyous mood:
Mr Gibson’s men sadly began to realize that their World of Tomorrow is wed to the un-
happy world outside as one day is knit with another by midnight’s thread. The idea to con-
vert the Meadow into Folksy Fen was a warm, human gesture but yesterday dark shadows
from outside pressed on scattered pilgrims.
The lea was peaceful enough. Apple blossoms silently fell, like snow, from the trees. They
took snowdrift shape at wooden hedgeboards where the wind swirled them. The music was
soothing, the splash of fountains gentle. People, however, seemed dazed.
The international area was sepulchral. Deserted Netherlands was a silent shrine sur-
rounded by lovely gardens. In Poland visitors whispered. We asked the men in charge, ‘What
do people say?’ ‘They say nothing,’ he told us, sadly. ‘There is only pity.’80
Public religious ceremonies were held for the Allied nations in the Czech,
Polish, Norwegian, British, French, Belgian, Canadian, Australian and New
Zealand pavilions. Solemn rites in the international area contrasted with the
shrieks of pleasure from fun-seekers in the amusement zone.81
The 1940 season witnessed an increase in military parades and public enthu-
siasm for daily military exercises.82 ‘Camp George Washington’ on the fair-
grounds housed 736 army troops. In response to a government proposal to set
up recruiting stations at the Fair for the Army, Navy and Marines, Gibson
responded: ‘We had hoped to keep the war atmosphere out of the Fair, but if
77 ‘Belgium’s Bells Ring for Peace — at Fair’, New York Post, 14 May 1940.
78 Ibid.
79 ‘Hoover Opens Belgian Pavilion at Fair, Assails New Nazi Fury’, New York Herald Tribune,
19 May 1940.
80 Meyer Berger, ‘At the Fair’, New York Times, 17 May 1940.
81 ‘Allies at Fair Ask God’s Help in Fight’, New York Times, 27 May 1940.
82 ‘Troops Arrive at Fair’s Camp 10 Weeks Late’, New York Herald Tribune, 12 July 1940.
the Government wants our help, it will be given 100 per cent.’83 A New York
Times journalist commented: ‘We were saddened, even in the dark shell of the
Perisphere’s World of Tomorrow, when one of the young attendants turned
from the future’s City of Peace and Freedom to ask where we thought he might
be most apt to be accepted for immediate war service in Europe.’84
War rhetoric now seeped into even supposedly non-militaristic exhibits.
After Italy’s entrance into the war, formerly innocuous displays assumed an
ominous air as visitors warily eyed a model of ‘the most powerful aero engine
ever built’ and a painting entitled ‘Il Paracadute’ (The Parachute), which
showed ‘a parachutist about to alight in the courtyard of a convent, while six
black-robed nuns run in alarm toward a door’.85 War fever suffused the
amusement zone as well. The 1940 Fair sported twice the number of shooting
galleries with more than twice the patronage of the previous season. Young
men filled galleries newly equipped with fake machine guns; the owners sub-
stituted airplanes for clay birds and parachutes for practice targets.86 Scientific
displays were not spared from the transformative effects of war. The ‘Micro-
vivarium’, a machine in the Westinghouse exhibit that destroyed microbes
with sterilizing rays, was dubbed the ‘Microblitzkrieg’.87 Unintentional slips of
the tongues were common: visitors mistakenly called the ‘Band Shell’ of the
American Common a ‘bomb shell’, according to a frustrated Fair guide.88
On 4 July 1940, in the midst of Independence Day celebrations, British offi-
cials discovered an explosive device in their pavilion. After the building
was evacuated, the bomb detonated, killing two policemen. The nightmarish
violence abroad appeared to have momentarily engulfed the fairgrounds, as
observers compared the incident to the carnage of battle. ‘War Atmosphere
Created by Blast’, screamed the headlines of the New York Times. ‘Witnesses
Liken Scene to Raked Areas of Europe in Miniature — Worker in Restaurant
Says Noise Was Like Canon.’89 News of the bombing intensified the mounting
Fifth Column hysteria of the time. Only two weeks earlier, an unknown
bomber had injured ten people in a building housing the offices of the German
Consulate and the Daily Worker. New York City detectives invaded the
dwellings of known communists, fascists, nazis and Irish Republicans, bring-
ing in 150 ‘extremists’ for questioning. Only one suspect, a member of the
German–American Bund, was arrested on a charge of the illegal possession of
a firearm, but police had no evidence of his involvement in the bombing.90
Though a nazi banner was later found hidden in the British Pavilion, the
mystery of the ‘July Fourth Bombing’ was never solved.
83 ‘Recruiting Stations to be Set Up at Fair’, New York Daily Mirror, 8 June 1940.
84 Meyer Berger, ‘At the Fair’, New York Times, 11 June 1940.
85 ‘Belgium Reopens Her Pavilion’, New York Times, 4 June 1940.
86 Meyer Berger, ‘At the Fair’, New York Times, 11 June 1940.
87 Russell Maloney and Eugene Kinkead, ‘Trylon, Trylon Again’, New Yorker, 11 May 1940.
88 ‘Patience Test for Fair Guide’, New York Sun, 23 May 1940.
89 ‘War Atmosphere Created by Blast’, New York Times, 5 July 1940.
90 ‘Reward of $25,000 Sped in Bomb Hunt; Nab 150 Extremists’, New York Daily News, 5
July 1940.
As the exposition neared its end, the Corporation considered proposals for
turning the fairgrounds into an enormous refugee camp or a military training
facility.91 Robert Moses, the legendary New York City Park Commissioner,
accused Gibson of taking advantage of ‘war hysteria’ in order to avoid paying
for the clean-up of the site.92 A satirical piece in the New York Herald Tribune
described a fictional military blitzkrieg by Moses on the World’s Fair, resulting
in the surrender of Gibson and his staff and the flight of Fiorello La Guardia
and Harold Ickes.93 Ultimately, when the Fair for Peace and Freedom closed its
doors on 27 October 1940, the fairgrounds were renamed Flushing Meadows
Park and the majority of structures used as scrap for the US defence pro-
gramme.94
At the Progressives of the Arts dinner in 1935, Mumford had heaped scorn
upon the elegiac quality of fairs past, warning against the temptation to ‘think
of this memorable occasion as a proper opportunity to plant tombstones
around the landscape’.95
After the closing of the Fair’s second season, by contrast, journalist Sidney
Shalett described the fairgrounds as ‘an empty, sad shell by day; an unbearably
lonely graveyard by night’. The once proud foreign pavilions had come to
represent ‘tragic tombstones on the map of Europe’. The dissonance between
the strife of war and the Fair’s tranquil visions overwhelmed Shalett. ‘Too
many memories!’ he exclaimed, adding, ‘It is best to leave this place for a
while.’96
‘The Fair is a force for peace in the world; for without peace the dream of a
better “World of Tomorrow” is but a cruel and mocking illusion’, the Official
Guidebook of the 1939 New York World’s Fair had proclaimed.97 By the start
of 1941, the Times was expressing relief that ‘the Trylon and Perisphere are
being taken down and not shot down’. Admitting that ‘we have not thought
much about progress during the months since the Fair closed’, the newspaper’s
editors hoped that ‘perhaps there will be another World’s Fair in New York
City some day — to celebrate the return of world peace and the revival of
humanity’s hopes’.98
Such recollections of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair echoed a nostal-
gia for the very idea of progress. Future generations would look back on the
Fair as a final fleeting moment of collective innocence and optimism, a time
91 ‘Hayes Proposes Fair Grounds as Training Camp’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 August 1940.
92 ‘Army, Navy Don’t Want Camp at Fair’, Long Island Daily Press, 26 August 1940.
93 ‘Flushing Blitzkrieg’, New York Herald Tribune, 27 August 1940.
94 Eugene Kinkead, ‘Goodbye Folks!’, New Yorker, 31 May 1941.
95 Lewis Mumford, ‘Address by Mr Lewis Mumford at the Dinner Meeting of Progressives in
the Arts’, 11 December 1935, NYPL, Box 307.
96 Sidney M. Shalett, ‘Memory of “Tomorrow”’, New York Times Magazine, 27 April 1941.
97 Official Guide Book to the New York World’s Fair, 3rd edn, SML, Box 470, 124–5.
98 ‘Sunset in Flushing’ (editorial), New York Times, 31 January 1941.
when our faith in the World of Tomorrow had not yet been shattered. In fact,
however, the exposition’s innocence and optimism were out of step with the
realities of its own day. Its progressive utopias and nostalgic longings were
intentional acts of defiance, calculated to create an imaginative dreamscape
where the traumatic consequences of technological progress could be defused.
Just as memories of the Fair now rest in the shadow of Hiroshima and the
Holocaust, both its utopian 1939 season and the nostalgic 1940 season could
not escape the spectre of world war that descended on its grounds.
Marco Duranti
is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at
Yale University, where he is writing his dissertation on ‘The
Political Culture of Human Rights in Western Europe, 1948–1950’.

DURANTI - Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at The NYWF 1939-1940

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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and

New Delhi, Vol 41(4), 663–683. ISSN 0022–0094.

Wyndham Lewis penned these observations in 1940, including them in a

1 Wyndham Lewis, America, I Presume (New York 1940), 285–6.

specific foreign pavilions in isolation from the rest of the exposition2 or

Source: Yonker’s Daily Times, 6 September 1938.

industrial workers, engineers, bankers and professionals holding hands and

The Fair’s planners, perceiving a collective desire to overcome memories of the

nations’, victims of nazi or Soviet aggression. Events in Europe provoked a

18 Cary Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD

façade was a prophecy by the seventeenth-century religious leader and scholar

Source: New York Daily Mirror, 11 May 1940.

genuine sadness . . . curious to get an idea of what a vanished nation might be

38 C.O., ‘The World of Yesterday’, New Yorker, 1 June 1940.

43 C.O., ‘The World of Yesterday’, New Yorker, 1 June 1940.

Source: New York Times, 19 May 1940.

57 Julius Holmes to Grover Whalen, 17 August 1939, NYPL, Box 84.

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