I’ve been
time traveling. I went back to visit the
1939 World’s Fair
in
New York. I tagged along with a couple of locals, both
to New York and 1939, Mark and Hattie. I
was looking forward to it because, like me, Mark studied
engineering
and is attending the fair for the first time.
I wondered how he might react to the visions of future
technology
on display, like the
superhighways
anticipated by
Democracity
and the
Futurama
(which I read about in
The Big Roads by Earls Swift). I grew up in an era of Interstates,
commuting, and electrified kitchens, so the even the visions of the future on
display at the fair are the past to me.
I also time traveled to
1995 to take a look
back at the fair with Hattie. I was
reintroduced to her by a
computer
science professor. (The professor
was
David
Gelernter. This is a review of his
book,
1939: The Lost World of the Fair.) Back then I was starting my
career
in
Kansas
City, so I didn’t worried about running into myself in New York.
I was fascinated by what I saw of the fair. These people had a
vision of the
future. It might seem modest to us, but it was big to
them. They dreamed of the good life in
which many more people owned homes in pleasant suburbs, drove to work in their
own cars on broad roads, had enough to eat, and were relieved from drudgery by
electric appliances. Within a
generation, in spite of the difficulties of a major war, they largely brought
their dream into reality, and we have fitfully enjoyed the results.
Gelernter compares the fairgoers to
Moses looking into
the
Promised
Land (an apropos analogy considering he also writes about what it was like
to be
Jewish
in
America at
the time). Their vision of a land of
milk and honey is very much the time we live in.
This leads to one of the many points of comparison Gelernter draws
between that generation and ours. They
had drive, even a kind of joy, because they had a goal toward which to strive. The cultural angst that began to show in the
1960s is in part a
sign that we had arrived. Our goals were
achieved and we hand no reason to strive, so we lost our way. We perish for lack of vision.
I find Gelernter to be a pretty good
critic
of technology. You might expect a
computer science professor to be enthusiastic about the changes
computers have
wrought. He is more impressed with the
improvements made by that older generation.
He looks at roads and refrigeration and the host of other mid- to late-
Twentieth
Century technologies and sees that they made improvements to human health
and happiness. The differences made by
computers pale in comparison. I can remember that in 1995, I could cut up
documents with a pair of scissor, tape pieces of them together, mark the mess
up by hand and give it to a person in the office we called a clerk. A short time later, the clerk would bring me
back a freshly-printed, neat document, a final version of what was represented
by my taped-together prototype. The
clerk would even do a little copy editing.
When a computer can do that, I’ll be impressed. In other words, I think Gelernter’s critique
holds water even 17 years later.
Gelernter may be glad that I got the sense of time travel for which he
was going. He might be disappointed that
I didn’t like Mark and Hattie much. I
slipped away from them as much as I felt I safely could. I wanted to see the fair, and though it may
seem hardhearted, I had little interest in the ups and downs of their
romance or
their fretfulness over the war in
Europe. I think someone could write a good
novel about
this couple and how the day they got engaged at the fair became a touchstone
for Hattie even decades later. If I had
expected a novel, I might have liked these characters, but I was expecting a
history, and I found them distracting.
Gelernter, David.
1939: The Lost World of the Fair. New York:
Free Press,
1995.
