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Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair

Department of History at Yale University

This article explores 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 disturbing implications of world war in Europe. 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 failure of this attempt to resurrect a coherent narrative of progress in the face of renewed violence in Europe.

Studies of the New York World's Fair have overlooked how the outbreak of war across the Atlantic fragmented the fairgoers' experience, challenging the promise of wholeness, continuity and coherence 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 representing the dark 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 appeared increasingly a halcyon dreamworld disconnected from the realities of the bloody conflict abroad.

With the effects of war echoing in the empty spaces of the pavilions of 'orphan nations', silences and nostalgic motifs disrupted the original forward-looking theme of the Fair's planners. Towards the end of the Fair's first season, with the war unsettling the utopian premise of the World of Tomorrow, the exposition's organizers increasingly invoked nostalgic themes related to a harmonious pre-industrial past. As the organizers embraced ethnic folk traditions, the particularism characteristic of nostalgia replaced universalist assumptions of progress during the exposition's second season. Similarly, the 1940 Fair organizers rejected the universalistic blurring of ideological distinctions between democratic and totalitarian systems promoted during the first season. The spectre of war cast a growing shadow across the fairgrounds and in the consciousness of fair-goers. War-related discontinuities and anxieties allowed the more troubling aspects of modernity to emerge from the Fair's imaginative cocoon.

Key Words: Cultural History • Europe • International Expositions • Second World War • Trauma • United States

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