World's Fairs of 1930s Showed Boundless Vision of Prosperity We are not terribly interested in the future these days. We are preoccupied with repairs, restorations, reparations, reformations - attempts to redo or reconceive the past. That is where we look for blame and where we look for promise. The future? Well, who is to say that it will not be more of the same until the past is fixed? Progress is a word best used in scare quotes. Take a look at the new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, "Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s." It surveys six World's Fairs, in Chicago (1933-4), San Diego (1935-6), Dallas (1936), Cleveland (1936-7), San Francisco (1939-40) and New York (1939-40). They were seen by tens of millions of Americans. They offered visions of unalloyed progress, lives of increased ease, an exhilarating future. There would be robotic companions like Elektro (who could walk, talk and smoke a cigarette); there would be soaring spires and sleek cable cars; there would be new materials and new possibilities. And all this was being promised during the Depression's worst years, on the eve of the century's most traumatic global war. That is why, in recent decades, those glossy World's Fair promises tended to be seen as just so much hokum, an ideological magic trick: watch the glittering spectacles and you won't notice what is really going on. Corporations and governments joined in self-promotional alliances. Chicago's exhibition was called "Century of Progress," New York's was "Building the World of Tomorrow." General Motors promised a veritable "Futurama" of progress. The American Can Company, the National Cash Register Company, DuPont, Texaco, Valvoline, Chrysler and Ford all offered inspirational demonstrations of the powers of corporate innovation. It was all a smoke screen, surely. Was there any hint that there were problems that Bakelite toaster handles, automated cow-milkers and air-conditioned coaches could not solve? The real world was kept at bay. Yet at the New York fair, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, the Soviet pavilion was leveled and the "American Commons" took its place, becoming, we learn, "a site for patriotic rallies." So a little skepticism about the commercial utopian promise is necessary, and if you look closely you can find that warning here as well, when we are told that "corporations assumed the mantle of public saviors." There is also a photograph of a ramshackle Jim Crow-style schoolroom from rural Mississippi in which a black teacher is showing her impoverished pupils the New York fair's symbols of technological progress, the Trylon and Perisphere, a jarring image of the ideal's limits. But you can also see something else. This exhibition, an import from the National Building Museum in Washington, where its curators were Laura Schiavo and Deborah Sorensen, has been expanded and altered by Jessica Lautin at the City Museum, putting more weight on New York and drawing on the museum's collection of drawings and materials from the 1939 fair's Board of Design. The result seems to break with the temper of our times: it is essentially celebratory. It takes the promise of progress seriously. And it tells us that in the midst of the "30s - that bleak decade - these fairs foreshadowed the world of postwar America, with images of highways and suburbia, demonstrations of nylon stockings and televisions, and glimpses of a coming era of prosperity. And there isn't a scare quote in sight. The leap from the "30s fairs to postwar America is not all that far. The show points out that industrial designers and architects set the aesthetic tone of these celebrations, including the designer Henry Dreyfuss, whose Democracity diorama in New York was a utopian celebration of a futuristic city divided into specialized districts linked by highways. Dreyfuss also designed the first unified telephone handset in a model used until 1950. New York's Trylon and Perisphere were created by Wallace K. Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux; Harrison later played a key role in designing the United Nations, the Metropolitan Opera House and the Time-Life Building. Examples accumulate: these fairs brought populist modernism into the American vernacular. The exhibition might have put this aesthetic in an international context as the historian Robert W. Rydell does in his contribution to the valuable catalog, but the domestic transformation is clear. You can see it here too in the fairs" imagined homes of the future: individual rooms took on multiple functions, ornament was stripped away, and the lugubrious weight of pre-modern furnishings was lifted, creating economical designs that soon became the standard for postwar suburban developments. At the same time corporate innovation was transforming private life. Automobile companies expanded the possibility of individualized transportation with new luxuries and dramatized the allure of the still-nascent national highway system. Manufacturing was turned into theatrical magic; the General Motors pavilion in Chicago included a working Chevrolet assembly line, observed by a thousand spectators at a time. We also see an excerpt from a film made by Westinghouse for the New York fair, showing a fictional family, the Middletons, making their way through the pavilion. In one scene three generations of Middleton women watch Mrs. Drudge frenziedly washing a sink full of dishes as Mrs. Modern leisurely watches them scrubbed in a new dishwasher; an announcer chronicles the duel in a style later familiar in 1950s game shows. This comes across now as dated and slightly comic, but the accumulation of such small innovations, shrinking the home's time-consuming jobs, helped lead to social transformations we take for granted. And while General Motors was self-interestedly presenting a utopia for cars, potential passengers didn't require unusual convincing about the possibilities. And legacies? The remains of these fairs can still be sampled in San Diego, Dallas and New York, where monumental relics could be sets for old sci-films; they are grand, ambitious, playful. And while Robert Moses did not fully succeed in transforming a Queens waste dump (described as "the valley of ashes" by Fitzgerald in "The Great Gatsby") into what Moses called the Versailles of America - "unique among parks of the world" - Flushing Meadows-Corona Park remains, as does the rest of his landscape: the Grand Central Parkway, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and (from later decades) remnants of the 1964 World's Fair, built on the same site. We learn too that the city's first major airport - later named La Guardia - also has its ties to the 1939 fair. Postwar, there were even hopes that the park would become the United Nations" home. Not all this, the exhibition acknowledges, is to be unambiguously welcomed. And as Robert Bennett's essay in the catalog points out, two generations of city planners and designers rebelled against the fairs and their modernist fantasy (a "dishonest mask of pretended order," Jane Jacobs railed). But those rebellions often show their own prescriptive uniformity. This exhibition could have made an even more compelling case had it been more expansive; its compressed, graphic style crams together images without easy identification. But it makes clear that the fairs had a power that was separate from their aesthetic vision or their notions of the futuristic city. Their power was emotional, spurred by their ambition and aspiration - an excitement at the very idea of what might be possible. After the war, that excitement helped remake American life. Today could such fairs be possible with similar effect? The passions of aspiration seem confined to the realms of technology. But you can't look at this exhibition of exhibitions and not feel nostalgic for the future. Follow Edward Rothstein on Twitter, @EdRothstein "Designing Tomorrow" runs through March 31 at the Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street; (212) 534-1672, mcny.org