Innocence and Hope

...La Guardia made a cross-country tour, characteristically flamboyant in style, to drum up trade...

...The fair was extraordinary in the artistic genius it enlisted...

...He comes to his descriptions and his evocations of emotion from many angles, sometimes seeing through the eyes of a marveling young person, sometimes using the perspective of a more worldly beholder...

...and it evokes in those who visited it an affection and pride that has never quite dimmed...

...Visitors found several of the foreign pavilions closed or closing...

...Several of these men were unknown at the time...

...At intervals along these highways of tomorrow watchmen in towers gazed upon the speeding cars below, ready to flash signals if emergencies arose or help was needed...

...The following month groundbreaking ceremonies took place...

...The optimism of the period intrigues him...

...One of them was Grover Whalen, a figure easily caricatured because as Gotham's unpaid official greeter he appeared often in striped pants and morning coat...

...Moses is often presumed to have been the fair's begetter...

...Each lent enthusiastic support to the exposition...

...The small private plane, in effect an automobile moving in another dimension, attracted far more attention than dreams of jet engines and speeds exceeding that of sound...

...Roosevelt, wherever he passed, inspired the feelings of optimism that unite a people and ready it for great tasks...

...On the whole Gelernter proves a stimulating guide, a thought-provoking fellow traveler through vanished years...

...I found this last approach somewhat annoying and often repetitive...

...Shall we everagain enjoy such a national mood of innocence and hope...

...The Aviation Building, small in comparison to those of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, gave little hint of how flying would transform the future, both of peace and war...

...And then, of course, there was Robert Moses, the city's Parks Commissioner...

...He saw, too, an opportunity to display his unique skills as a many-sided, multi-tongued man, and welcomed the representatives of foreign pavilions (including the King and Queen of England) in ways that delighted them...

...Oddly, aviation was downplayed at the fair...

...Primarily the work of Bel Geddes, it revealed a wonderland of superhighways, of vast cloverleafs and overpasses previously unimagined by the general public...

...But the fair had its troubles, which he tends to minimize...

...The fair capitalized on these benign illusions...

...Scarcely an element of America's mass culture escapes discussion, from housekeeping to sex, and all of these he sees reflected in the displays and entertainments at Flushing Meadows...

...Partly this is because of its particular place in time...

...Its designers and architects included Wallace Harrison (whose trylon and perisphere set a new level for symbolic structures), Albert Kahn and Norman Bel Geddes...

...Roosevelt had made New York a touchstone for many of the New Deal reforms and was pleased to have the fair set a crown upon his experiments...

...David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, takes us with flair through the various scientific and technological exhibitions, but he does not neglect the other side of the fair—the commercial displays that lured the consumer with images of household convenience or personal enrichment...

...La Guardia saw in it the realization of his own vision of New York as a center of art, culture, innovation, public enjoyment...

...Reviewed by August Heckscher Author, "Woodrow Wilson "; former New York City Commissioner of Parks MENTION "The World's Fair" to anyone over the age of 60 and the assumption will be that you are talking about the fair held in New York in 1939-40...

...That is not true, but he performed miracles substantial enough...

...Men of dazzlingpolitical gifts—themselves magicians of a sort—held sway in Washington and New York...

...In fact, Whalen possessed considerable abilities and in May 1936 became president of the World's Fair Corporation...

...among the sculptors, painters and muralists were Fernand Leger, Willem de Kooning, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and Rockwell Kent...

...And when his description seems to require heightening, he resorts to fiction...

...it may be said, indeed, that the fair was nowhere more prescient than in its capacity to foretell artistic achievement...

...Other fairs have left their mark, particularly the Chicago Fair of 1876, which shaped ideas of the City Beautiful for at least two generations...

...In that brief interlude it was possible both to forget the grim years of the immediate past and to envision—despite the distant rantings of Hitler—a bright future...

...For the people who waited in long lines to view the major exhibitions, though, nothing was so wonderful as the prophecy of an automobile-dominated civilization embodied in the Futurama at the General Motors Building...

...At least as much as the physical aspects of the fair, Gelernter is interested in the ideological and psychological factors that gave birth to it and underlay its success...

...My tour," he say s of his trip backward in time, "aims to make it possible, however dimly, to see the sights, smell the smells, hear the sounds, eavesdrop on the conversations, try on the anxieties and exultations...

...What was to be known as the Second World War hung on the horizon, yet no one really believed it would descend very soon...

...Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia generated excitement and a new confidence in the city's fate...

...Still, it had been a grand show...

...was a New York Senator and Herbert H. Lehman was the Governor, the quality of the era's political leadership is underscored...

...It opened with 60 national flags flying (of the larger countries, only Germany and China did not participate), and with a vast public prepared to revel in its spectacles and extravaganzas...

...After a second year was somewhat hesitantly decided on, the spectacle reopened in the spring of 1940 along with the outbreak of full-scale war...

...In 1939 the aftermath of the Great Depression still lingered, but under Franklin D. Roosevelt its worst effects seemed to have been overcome...

...The event itself was actually conceived by a group of enlightened businessmen and bankers in 1934...

...Nor does he neglect the element of pure entertainment, from the daringly costumed performers at the Aquacade to the thrill of descending from the tallest tower on the grounds by parachute...

...Attendance was below expectations at first and a drastic reorganization of financing and leadership was required...

...To revisit the fair now, when our national purposes seem confused and our vision of the future is clouded, makes good reading but leaves a bittersweet taste...

...In a remarkably short time he converted what had been a rat-infested garbage dump in Flushing Meadows, Queens, into a fairground—and afterward into an immense park—served by a whole new system of parkways...

...Television was the merest infant in 1939, and although the technology amazed those who visited the RCA Building, the extent of its impact throughout the world—in politics, the arts, mass culture—was still unglimpsed...

...But the 1939 fair had a special clamor, a special sense of hope...

...On April 30, 1939, the gates opened...

...These exhibits had imparted to the fair much of its glamour (and a disproportionate share of its culinary delights...

...Alas, like the idealized suburbs, this feature of the automobile civilization never became a reality—as motorists stranded on the shoulders of today's superhighways, or caught in impenetrable traffic jams, can attest...

...Moreover, their darkened halls spoke of what was to come in all the Western countries...

...When one adds that Robert F. Wagner Sr...

...The situation abroad grew increasingly ominous...