The Futurama is Now
1939: The Lost World of the Fair.
by David Gelernter.
Free Press. 418 pp. $23.00.
David Gelernter is a polymath: a professor at Yale who specializes in the theory of artificial intelligence, a software designer, a painter, a classical composer, an author. Two summers ago, in the first of these capacities, he was the victim of a letter bomb from the Unabomber that left him with massive eye, hand, and internal injuries from which he is still recovering. Gelernter is also of a religious cast of mind: the grandson of a rabbi, he attended a yeshiva in Manhattan in the late 1970’s, and took his B.A. at Yale in religious studies.
All of Gelernter’s enthusiasms are visible in everything he does and writes, and 1939: The Lost World of the Fair is no exception, being three discrete books braided into one. The first is a history of the 1939 World’s Fair; the second a religious meditation on what separates the optimistic world view of “high-30’s” culture from our own; the third a harrowing semi-fictional love story.
Gelernter has not built his book this way by accident. In The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (1994)—in which he put forward the idea that human creativity stems from “low-focus” states closer to sleep than to concentration—he invoked both the Torah and the English Romantic poets to show how disconnected fragments in a narrative can generate associations and even messages that logic is incapable of expressing. Adducing the seemingly arbitrary sequence of stories in Exodus describing the flight from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea, he observed an “organizing principle at work”: these chapters of Exodus are “a kind of literary solar system, where an ensemble of stories is anchored in place by a key passage.” Similarly, Gelernter has made the 1939 World’s Fair not the subject of his new book but merely the sun of its “literary solar system.”
Of the three strands running through the book, Gelernter’s monographic treatment of the fair itself is intrinsically the least interesting. The fair opened on May 18, 1939 on a dump reclaimed by City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, and ran for two seasons. Dozens of industrial companies and every major country except China and Nazi Germany built their own elaborate pavilions, dioramas, statuary, and amusements. The most famous buildings—the gargantuan obelisk named the Trylon, and the Perisphere that nestled at its base—became futuristic symbols to a generation.
Gelernter’s architectural descriptions of the fair are nearly endless (“The bluish helmet-like structure is lifted off the ground on a sort of colonnade, supported on vast curving steel ribs with holes punched out. . .”), and his attention to minutiae can be deadening. Of greater interest is his exposition of how, during the two seasons the fair was open—while half of Europe fell to the Nazis—Americans took to it in an orgy of optimism. Over 40 million attended, and Gelernter demonstrates what the fuss was about.
The fair saw the birth of television, the first use of a fax machine, the first synthesizer (the “Nova-chord”), and the introduction of nylons and fluorescent lights. A “Futurama,” designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the General Motors Pavilion, showed the world of the 1960’s—and it was a world the fairgoers liked. Inside the Perisphere, they could view “Democracity,” a utopian community of 1960 that eschewed the “planless jumble of slum and chimney” for an urban mass crossed by high-speed freeways—in other words, postwar suburbia.
That fairgoers were more engaged by dishwashers than by the cultural uplift offered in the pavilions of the various nations or by the robots in assembly-line displays has led some later academic historians to view the commercial exhibits as exploitative, and even as the cause of modern suburban materialism. Gelernter finds this ludicrous. “It takes an intellectual to suggest that women had to be brainwashed into wanting electric kitchen appliances,” he writes. “When critics complain about the fair, what really pains them, it seems to me, is the character of American society itself.”
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That character is the subject of Gelernter’s second sub-book. If, for Americans of 1939, the radiant future consisted of suburbia and consumerism, why are we so unhappy now that we have it? His answer is that the country has changed profoundly in the intervening decades: “As we study and contemplate the late-30’s United States, it comes to resemble our own country less and less.”
To Gelernter, the change amounts to this: the America of 1939 was a religious community in a way ours is not. He is speaking here not so much of a church- or synagogue-based religion as of the “American civic religion,” centered on the belief in progress but encompassing an entire view of the world and of how humans ought to behave in it.
In 1939, Gelernter writes, certain distinctions which we properly think of as religious—“between sacred and profane, priest and layman, holy and ordinary day, kosher and trayf, saint and sinner”—had their clear secular analogues—“the way boys were treated versus girls, ladies versus gentlemen, . . . legitimate offspring versus bastards, . . . high culture versus low,” etc. This collection of attitudes formed in turn what Gelernter calls an “ought” culture. Typically, he cites both the ancient rabbinic Ethics of the Fathers and the 1937 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, to the effect that “continual practice of proper behavior on an endless succession of trivial meaningless occasions makes a person at least a bit more apt to act properly when the chips are down.” Thanks to such ingrained habits, America in the late 1930’s was a self-possessed society in which “you could leave a pile of dynamite unguarded in the middle of New York City.” Today, by contrast, when such self-possession has been lost, the result is a passivity so desperate that the city cannot evict violent street people or erect a public toilet.
In moving from an “ought” culture to a “want” culture, have we at least gained in sophistication, or tolerance? Not according to Gelernter. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, he points out, campaigned in both his parents’ languages (Italian and Yiddish), and used publicly the four other languages he spoke—a level of sophistication in a political figure that is unthinkable today. In another realm, while public kissing and the wearing of shorts were frowned upon in 1939, soft-core pornography was given its (allotted) place; the fair, Gelernter notes, had a porn show designed by Norman Bel Geddes (“Crystal Lassies”), and another, staged in a diving tank, designed by Salvador Dali (“Dream of Venus”).
Consider, on the other hand, what has been lost. Respect for authority: at sunset on summer nights in the 30’s, bathers at New York’s Jones Beach stepped out of the water and saluted the flag as it was lowered. Straightforwardness: when conscription started for the war, the rejects’ changing room at New York’s draft board was marked Rejects’ Changing Room. The liberalism of La Guardia, Gelernter notes admiringly, was compassionate but demanding—he paid no attention to “political whiners” and would fire on the spot any city workers he saw idling. When it came to racial matters, although blacks were “underrepresented” at the fair, a black composer, William Grant Still, wrote the “Democracity Hymn.” Gelernter comments: “No one lost any sleep worrying about whether he owed the distinction to affirmative action.”
But I do not want to give a false impression. Gelernter, who has described himself to the New York Times as “a Roosevelt Democrat with a conservative streak—‘in other words, a Republican,’” would appear to fit comfortably into at least one recognizable political mode, namely, neoconservatism. Throughout his book, however, he also succumbs repeatedly to the temptation to be blandly evenhanded. Thus:
The Right doesn’t like to acknowledge that the power and authority of government can be a good thing, up to a point, in the hands of a genius. The Left doesn’t like to acknowledge that geniuses are few and far between.
Or again, noting the recent arrest of a Southern woman for child abuse after spanking her child outside a supermarket: “My point is not that these events are bad or good.” Still elsewhere, discussing gender equality in the workplace: “My goal is not to judge, merely to report.” We wind up with the case for authority and straightforwardness being put in the language of relativism and diffidence.
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Gelernter tries to rectify this problem in the third and most successful of the intertwined books that make up 1939. It is the story of Hortense “Hattie” Levine, née Glassman, a woman in her late seventies at the time of writing. Her story is told both through Gelernter’s interviews with her and through quotations from her copious diaries which, he reports, she gave him during the course of an afternoon visit.
As a philosophy student at Hunter College, Hattie Glassman spent all of May 18, 1939 at the fair with Mark Handler, a wisecracking “idealistic engineer” who was clearly the love of her life. Around midday, he proposed marriage and she accepted. Throughout the afternoon the two discussed whether it was right to have children at a time when, to all appearances, fascism was poised to sweep the world. Hattie resolved that they should multiply—“courageously, gallantly, joyfully.”
The progress of this affair is one of the most moving love stories I have ever read. It provides the whole of the book’s motive force, and the shocking twists the story takes are narrated by Gelernter with mastery. Hattie also serves as Gelernter’s alter ego, a mouthpiece for things he himself would clearly like to say about the differences between the late 1930’s and today. On multiculturalism in the schools: “More students know who Harriet Tubman is than Winston Churchill. . . . my Lord, I want to retch.” On self-pity in political discourse: “Don’t know if you’re a whiner or not. But in 1939, poor didn’t mean you had a TV set and a car and clothing and were deprived of, Lord knows, a VCR. It meant you were hungry.”
But—does Hattie Levine exist? An author’s note tells us that 1939 is “a history book, but the characters are made up,” although “the fictional content . . . hugs the ground and mimics the dips and peaks of actual experience faithfully.” So does Hattie’s character mimic the dips and peaks of someone real? For the reader, not knowing the answer to this question presents a huge problem. If Hattie Levine is fictional, is the “David Gelernter” who interviews her fictional, too? And is he or is he not the same Gelernter who elsewhere in the book urges us to respect authority, and to be straightforward in our verbal undertakings?
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Each of the three strands in 1939 makes a worthy book, and Hattie Glassman’s story makes a brilliant one. Unfortunately, the book’s structure—and, in the Hattie Glassman sections, its animating literary conceit—let Gelernter off the hook, permitting him to avoid a head-on confrontation with many of his own strongest points. This is a pity, for his diagnosis of the crisis in American authority since 1939 merits both a more thorough and a more direct treatment. Given his wide reading, his religious training, and his status as a (literal) battle veteran in the cultural wars, Gelernter should be the man for that job.