The 1939–40 New York World’s Fair serves as a point of origin, an event in time with objects and documents as its traces. Eighty years later, the Fair’s archive at NYPL serves as a beginning focal point for researching visual and cultural parallels to technological developments and unfolding global events of 2019–20 (Part 1.1). Its visual materials act as a catalyst for considering the Fair’s records, designs, publicity photographs, and other graphic ephemera from 1939–40 as material that reveals some of America’s ‘unfinished business’ with its past representations and ideals.
In reading the archive, we uncover worlds within the World’s Fair. Part 1.2 looks at the Fair’s structures for its main themes of Democracy and Progress. Part 1.3 probes the shadow interests and endeavors of the Fair’s participating industries: the same industries mounting extravagant exhibits of consumer products were at the same time retooling their factories for the coming war, producing and supplying material, even to the Nazis. Global conflict and war persist to define both ‘the world of tomorrow’ and its shadow industries as the world’s ‘unfinished business.’
Part 1.4 introduces the relatively new field of public relations with the Fair as a form of soft power, and shows how planned obsolescence makes its first appearance in introducing new consumer materials.