The Lure of Tomorrow: Making Consumers Modern

Isenstadt, Sandy

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The Lure of Tomorrow: Making Consumers Modern

Sandy Isenstadt

Description: A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery,...

A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery, 1920–1950

During the second quarter of the twentieth century, when modernism started to attract attention in the decorative arts and a new design profession emerged centered on industrial products, there was no shortage of talent, ambition, and innovation among the producers of these objects. What was scarce was a modern consumer. Following World War I, with the industrial infrastructure of Europe in ruins, American corporations had ramped up production as well as funneled profits into mergers that …

Author

Sandy Isenstadt

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.1-8

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00002.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15202

The Lure of Tomorrow: Making Consumers Modern

Sandy Isenstadt

During the second quarter of the twentieth century, when modernism started to attract attention in the decorative arts and a new design profession emerged centered on industrial products, there was no shortage of talent, ambition, and innovation among the producers of these objects. What was scarce was a modern consumer. Following World War I, with the industrial infrastructure of Europe in ruins, American corporations had ramped up production as well as funneled profits into mergers that generated larger pools of capital and fueled further expansion of productive capacity. In fact, overproduction itself became a problem during the 1920s, contributing to several recessions during the decade. Manufacturers ignited the advertising industry, competing with one another to sell goods, while retailers lured customers with installment purchase programs and easy access to credit. They sought new sorts of customers, too, and began to segment the larger market, making special appeals to young adults, to the newly minted “teenager,” and to the youthful heart of older customers. As Samuel Strauss scathingly wrote in 1925, “The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers.”1 Strauss, writing in 1925 in the Atlantic Monthly, is cited and discussed in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 266–68. For contemporaneous sources, see Paul Terry Cherington, The Consumer Looks at Advertising (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928); George R. Cain, The Consumer of Today and Tomorrow (New York: American Management Association, 1929); Elizabeth E. Hoyt, The Consumption of Wealth (New York: Macmillan Company, 1928); and Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York: Business Bourse, 1929). For a concise overview of changes in consumerism during this period, see Susan Strasser, “Customer to Consumer: The New Consumption in the Progressive Era,” Magazine of History 13, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 10–14. A number of concerned citizens joined Strauss to warn consumers of the perils shadowing the promises of accelerated consumption.

The warnings came too late. Americans bought more goods with every passing year. Although income disparities increased during this time, some portion of national wealth found its way into the hands of the broader population and, just as quickly it seemed, out of their hands and into those of the retailers. Cars were perhaps the biggest item for consumption, with production more than tripling during the 1920s.2 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1930), table 414. In turn, cars sped up competition based on price: consumers could rove the countryside in search of bargains; retailers moved to roadsides to exploit low rents and attract driving buyers with low prices; and national chains formed to leverage buying power. Electricity, too, augmented consumption by extending shopping hours and by powering a wide range of new appliances, often merchandised by power companies themselves as a way to build up load on their dynamos. A sense of abundance, created by an expanding marketplace and leavened by easy credit, gave rise to an optimistic mood and firmly installed consumption as not only an essential element of prosperity but also a national trait. As Merle Curti, a prominent social and intellectual historian, put it in 1943, “The old virtues of thrift and saving now largely gave way to the idea that spending is a virtue, even the highest of all economic virtues.”3 Merle Curti, Growth of American Thought (1943; New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 678. Mass consumption was for many Americans precisely what mass prosperity looked like, and was already the subject of Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’s savage parody from 1922 of commercial constructs of selfhood. Certainly, by the end of the decade, that fixture of economic and imaginative life—the American consumer—had arrived.

Although distinctly modern in many ways—leashed by mass media to aspirational advertising, delighted with debt financing, incited by installment buying, motivated by mass-produced merchandise, and fashioning possessions into self-portraits—American consumers had not acquired modern tastes. For the most part, they contented themselves with domestic goods formulated in historical styles, following waves of fashion for American colonial, Tudor, Norman, and Italian Renaissance architectural styles, and for whatever best guaranteed charm, romance, and atmosphere in the home.4 David Gebhard discusses the relation of new and traditional styles in his essay, “Traditionalism and Design: Old Models for the New,” in High Styles: Twentieth Century American Design, ed. Lisa Phillips, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985), 48–81. Certainly, some decided to “go modern,” as the phrase went. For the most part, though, American consumers were unmoved, at times even hostile, finding the modern style—a rubric covering a collection of styles drawn from the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Bauhaus influences, early examples of streamlining and industrial design motifs, and so on—foreign or even freakish.

But, precisely what seemed to many to be foreign dominion over modern design spurred a race among designers to define what, exactly, an American modernism would look like, not least among émigrés themselves. The problem, to amend Strauss, was how to produce modern American customers. A brief 1929 polemic on the passing of the “overstuffed period” of design is representative, if waggish, in capturing nebulous but noticeable tensions between contemporary American public taste and modern design. Modern design was itself in a moment of transition, caught between the “strange shapes and use of the stageset”—surely a reference to the theatrical background of several designers, most notably Joseph Urban and Norman Bel Geddes—and a “retiring efficiency and a sound simplicity” that better represented the underlying American character. The “false starts” of modernist experiments would in due course resolve themselves into a more universally satisfying stage of design. Distinctive American traits, which had unselfconsciously resulted in skyscrapers and gigantic machines and factories, would then blend with other trends under the banner of a new internationalism: “The racial or national differences in concept seem less apart as boundaries vanish.”5 G. H., “As the Overstuffed Period Passes,” Christian Science Monitor (November 30, 1929). On the theatrical origins of much modern design, see Christopher Innes, Designing Modern America: Broadway to Main Street (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). In other words, factors presently at odds—the inevitability of modern design, a self-understanding of the “practical modesty” of American character, and the destiny of distinctly American design—were proceeding toward their eventual confluence.

The exact nature of American characteristics varied from author to author, but some version was nearly always put forth in a way that would compel or at least complement modernism. Paul T. Frankl underscored that modernism was itself an expression of “a new spirit manifest in every phase of American life. . . . Speed, compression, directness—these are its attributes. Freedom, frankness, freshness—these are its fruits.” The generation of modern design in Europe was little more than the veneration of American creations: steel-framed skyscrapers, rapid transit, factories, and grain elevators: all instant icons of modernity that Americans were only just beginning to recognize. He exhorted, “We have not been too American—we have not been American enough!” For Frankl, Americans looked for artistic style everywhere except in the mirror of their own mighty works. They reveled in but did not reflect upon the “pressing immediacy” of their present day long enough to witness the expressive patterns that animated their many inventions and proved the principle, repeated ad infinitum, that authentic style expressed the spirit of its time.6 Paul T. Frankl, Form and Re-Form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), 5–7, 21–23.

This particular twofold aesthetic formula—first, that an ageless axiom dictates concentration on the present moment, and second, that Americans will become modernists when they recognize their own modernity—can be seen to underpin nearly every apology for modernism during this period. For example, one of the period’s most prominent polemics was the Machine Art exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1934, which argued that modernism, already vital for technical tools that were the foundation of America’s industrial economy—however much it was presently struggling through the Depression—was equally valid for the decorative arts. Engineering and hospitality traveled the same road, so much so that specialized calipers and precision aeronautical devices were no different from soup spoons.7 Machine Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934). The following year, Ely Jacques Kahn underscored MoMA’s mission to educate the public, writing that the museum “leads public taste” and “exacts an influence over industry,” in Design in Art and Industry (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 61–63. Modern design ought to be as settled a paradigm as modern technology. The profoundly synchronic thesis, a cross section of form-making at the forward edge of time, was itself framed by a quotation from Plato, taken from the Philebus, which MoMA exhibitions would recall several times in coming years. As Alfred H. Barr, Jr., wrote in his foreword to the exhibition catalogue, the ancient Greeks established that the beauty of geometric abstraction was timeless. The use of Plato’s Philebus, rather than only his thoughts on form, guaranteed that categorical immersion in the present moment was not at the same time temporally provincial: the radically synchronic was perpetually valid.

However powerful in visual terms, MoMA’s strategy of validating the present day with a timeless precept ran counter to notions of style formation inherited from a prior generation of critics who saw themselves operating within a historical continuum that ran from the nation’s founding to its future. As evolutionary ideas took hold across so many disciplines in the nineteenth century, nearly all seemed to agree that, however chaotic from the contemporaneous view, change followed a larger order, perhaps even a higher purpose, that was invisible to those inevitably immersed in their own time. Only from some future vantage point would the present day have acquired its absolute meaning. Thus, one of the most striking rhetorical tropes of late nineteenth-century American writing, from architecture to politics, is “looking backward,” the title, of course, of Edward Bellamy’s famous book and the premise of countless other judgments. Henry van Brunt, to name only one, trusted that the nineteenth century’s visual cacophony was a skewed portrait—“the distorted and violent perspective of proximity”—that, given time, would resolve itself into coherent form.8 Henry van Brunt, “On the Present Condition and Prospects for Architecture,” Atlantic Monthly 57 (March 1886): 375. To situate themselves, American critics routinely recounted progress up to their own time and then looked into the future to understand the present; they rarely presumed the present had already settled the future.9 Alexis de Tocqueville, himself a product of a profoundly historical era, wrote in 1835 that the penchant for prediction was itself prompted by democracy: “Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Richard Heffner, trans. George Lawrence (1840; New York: Penguin, 2001), 180. Becoming, rather than being—the pursuit of happiness, not its capture—distinguished American arts. In short, the answer to the question of what is American was usually a story of progress up to the present day, followed by speculation about a modern future. Historical styles were part of the narrative even if they were not its denouement.

The expansion of bounty was a crucial element of that narrative of American progress, as was the individual’s freedom to choose from among various and proliferating options. The democratic state was established to guard the right to choose elected officials, to choose where and when to buy property and how to dispose of it, to choose whom to marry or associate with, to choose an occupation, and so on. But, as Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1949, Americans’ “sense of equality” was most intimately experienced less at the voting booth than elsewhere in life.10 Henry Steele Commager, “Portrait of the American,” in Years of the Modern: An American Appraisal, ed. John W. Chase (New York: Longmans, Green, 1949), 27–30. Commager does not mention material goods as such, but in the context of an expanding and culturally influential market economy, the foundational principle of choice was indeed transmuted into consumer terms. Analogous to a common view of the role of the American government, the free market existed to guarantee choice, although it is indifferent to which choices are actually made. To put it archly, the choice of a direction in life enshrined in the nation’s founding was recast in the 1920s for consumer society as the choices made while traveling the market’s aisles.

With choice being as essential an aspect of consumption as credit, most Americans were heedless of modernism’s narrowed definition of legitimate design. The egalitarian aspirations embedded in abstract form were often illegible in relation to established forms signaling, however generically, a genealogy of American democracy. As John Dewey explained, the arts are less an “adornment of culture” than a common language, “the most compelling of the means of communication by which emotions are stirred and opinions formed,” which explained why totalitarian regimes—he was writing in the late 1930s—regulated artistic and popular modes while, in contrast, the strength of American arts lay in their popular origins.11 John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1939), 9–10. On egalitarian abstraction, see Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33–34. The effort on the part of many advocates of modernism to chasten taste required the exclusion of forms that were deemed dishonest to contemporaneity, regardless of their functional merit. Style was the basis for such exclusions, however much partisans protested that modern design “is not a style.” The contradiction at the heart of modernism’s moral economy, then, was to produce and promote objects that, in their aesthetic exploitation of industrial techniques, were forthright about their status as commodities while at the same time positioning those objects as uniquely attuned to the times. In other words, objects produced by modernism were not subject to the exchange of use value with similarly functioning objects, an equivalence that underpins any definition of the commodity. Functional and fungible descend alike from the Latin term for perform.

Further, the majority of consumers were buying things for domestic use, making the private home primarily a combinatory and affective affair, the showcase for an atmospheric aggregate of acquisitions—the “effects” and “touches” repeatedly valorized in contemporaneous decorating discourse—and thus, by extension, a portrait of the consumer’s mastery of the markets. Contemporaneity was thus in competition with a consumer ideal asserting that each acquisition, regardless of its stylistic register, was an actual step forward toward a future of abundance. This conflict of temporal attitudes—one that recounted historical form to initiate a narrative of progress and the other that jettisoned historical form to consummate progress—helps explain the diffidence most Americans expressed toward their encounters with modernism in the 1920s.

Modernism, of course, was never a monolith, neither in its making nor as it was pitched to a popular audience. Walter Rendell Storey, for example, the antiques and decorative arts columnist for the New York Times from 1926 to 1949, reviewed Frankl’s book and commended him, precisely, for the breadth of his presentation, which encompassed “the theatrical luxuriousness” of Joseph Urban and “the functional austerity” of William Lescaze as two of many “important trends of modern decorative art.” Modernists, Storey noted, had several gods: a law of simplicity, a trait evident in modern architecture but available at a smaller scale through strong horizontals and “the furniture of straight lines and broad, plain surfaces”; the inspiration of new materials and methods of fabrication; functional demands; and “present-day directness.”12 Walter Rendell Storey, “The Decorator’s Art in the New Age,” New York Times (February 23, 1930). In the inventive tumult of the day, determining the relative value of one or another approach was, for many contemporary critics, best left to a future critic, who could look back on the present moment with the perspective of time, just as they themselves looked back in clear-eyed judgment on prior periods. In other words, assessments regarding consumers’ decisions to “go modern” had necessarily to be left until tomorrow.

As the setting for the judgment of consumer taste, “tomorrow” shared in the compressed temporality of modernism without, however, relinquishing a narrative of development since, after all, the present was fast unfolding toward the future. “Tomorrow” was thus a stage in the continuing—rather than completed—story of progress. Mediating the synchronic paradigm of the up-to-date with the diachronic narrative of American character, it was a meeting place for the present-day profile of modernism and the powerful “backward-looking vogue of the Depression era,” as historian Marco Duranti put it.13 Marco Duranti, “Utopia, Nostalgia, and World War at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): 665. Thus, tomorrow could be embraced both by modernists and by antiquarians, evident in the countless statements regarding modern design at this time—the English writer Osbert Sitwell parodied the “Stern-School-of-To-morrow” in a 1935 collection of essays—as well as at Colonial Williamsburg, where the most ambitious antiquarianism of the day was validated in terms of its value to tomorrow: “That the future may learn from the past” was the motto chosen by Nelson Rockefeller after careful consideration of several alternatives. In a sense, “tomorrow” gave a figure to the encounter between progress and nostalgia that often appears in historical accounts of interwar design, and so bears witness both to turbulent changes and to the confidence that change was guided by propitious, if indistinct, principles.

Tomorrow’s two-part conceptual structure was both affirmative and critical. It rested on a postulated commercial self who was not simply one who finds fulfillment in consumption or substitutes relations with other people for relations with things, but a self who was articulated and elaborated by choice.14 As Ely Jacques Kahn put it when describing the aims of MoMA, “The experts themselves were guided not only by their own taste and ideals regarding consumption, but also by the growth of media and advertising during this period and the widening range of goods and retailing innovations to assure continued consumption despite an unsteady economic context.” Kahn, Design in Art and Industry, 65–66. Numerous writers, of course, following figures such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, have disparaged consumer choices as a false freedom: first, such choices are constricted beforehand by calculations of profit; second, they direct buyers’ attention toward variety in individual goods while in actuality their purchases bind them within a fixed economic grid; and, lastly, they proffer commercial latitude as a proxy for political liberty. Others, following Claude Lévi-Strauss’s introduction of the bricoleur, allow that even within a limited field individual choices may lead to creative and unanticipated expressions of selfhood. In this conception, consumers’ eclectic choices alloying historical ornament and modernist simplicity could express individuality by suggesting an idiosyncratic, rather than normative, perspective on the marketplace of goods.

The epitome of the hybrid lure of tomorrow was certainly the Town of Tomorrow, the residential showcase opened to view in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair. The fair was initially planned as retrospective in nature, but advocates of modern design infused a progressive spirit into the plans while growing hostilities worldwide, along with fears of American involvement, led to a palpably desperate desire to present a place—tomorrow—that was new and improved as well as familiar and comforting, a place where the approaching wars would already have passed. The Town of Tomorrow featured a set of fifteen houses, most of them traditional in design, some an updated traditional, and two or three clearly modern. The entire assembly stood against a backdrop of looming industrial pavilions that swooped upward in smoothed cliffs of white plaster, with ramps and slots like streamlines come alive. The juxtapositions of modern and traditional forms were apparent to any visitor but not often seen as incongruous. Rather, the whole assembly was pitched as a future settlement that repeated the scale and imagined intimacy of the past, a proleptic projection of a colonial-era village as a marketplace replete with choice among things that were as much handicraft as the result of machine production. Visiting the Town of Tomorrow thus entailed a tour through divergent form worlds, which for the fair’s planners and for many visitors was a higher ideal than stylistic concord. Eleanor Roosevelt’s account of her own visit was representative, with her initial concern for striking a balance between desire and cost and then several short but telling descriptions of prominent features and themes: furniture built by the handicapped, different varieties of wood, a “musical kitchen,” and electrified farm equipment.15 Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day: Another Day at the Fair,” Atlanta Constitution (August 4, 1939). Curious about all rather than committed to one, Roosevelt’s promenade gathered the motley sequence of different designers’ disparate styles into one individual’s coherent experience of the polyphonic promises of plenty. The common ground for visitors was just this serial encounter with objects they might possess imaginatively, similar to ranging along the aisles of a supermarket. “Tomorrow” turned out to look very much like a condensed version of that day’s marketplace, with industrialization and heritage equal forces to float democratic ideals.

By 1940, however, the fair was “wilted like a ‘son of’ movie,” its hopeful concord of contrary trends eclipsed by the realities of war.16 Russell Lynes, “Yesterday’s World of Tomorrow” (1980), in Life in the Slow Lane (New York: Cornelia and Michael Bessie Books, 1991), 246–48. The tomorrow trope itself was later hijacked for Tomorrow!, Philip Wylie’s sci-fi story of a Soviet nuclear attack. In response to flagging attendance, the fair’s directors shifted the theme from Tomorrow to “Peace and Freedom,” and announced a new promotional figure, “Elmer.” Elmer, seen in ads and brochures, in traveling appearances (there was more than one Elmer), as well as walking the fairgrounds, was “a composite of all the people in the country” who might be expected to attend the World’s Fair—and, with his homespun “Hello Folks” welcome, he was intended to warm up the abstract aloofness some visitors had sensed in the pavilions.17 “Synthetic ‘Elmer’ 1940 Fair Greeter,” New York Times (April 13, 1940). But, as an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor noted, to the extent that he seemed affable, “Elmer Americanus” was familiar to fair-goers more in “pictures of a happy purchaser displaying his new automobile or electric refrigerator than in everyday experience.”18 “Elmer Americanus,” Christian Science Monitor (May 17, 1940). See also Sidney M. Shalett, “‘Hello Folks’ Is the Watchword as Elmer Takes Over the Fair,” New York Times (May 12, 1940). Thus, some fifteen years after the 1925 Paris Exposition, the iconic American consumer of 1940, with industrial artifacts at hand, and with an “aw-shucks” manner, average aims, and a mission to deliver the middle class to the world’s largest “country fair” of technical invention and mass-produced goods, was thoroughly modern in habit but still not so in taste.

The tendency to describe forms as historical or modern, unitary or opposed, runs counter to the alloyed ambitions of interwar American decorative arts, which circulated through these intersecting and interdependent spheres of meaning. More nuanced descriptive terms—ranging from modern to mean the formal fruit of sustained investigation into methods of contemporary machine production, to modernist work inspired by such investigations but seeking to extend their relevance and meaning for a larger audience, to modernistic, a deprecating designation for the application of design motifs to a range of goods without enhancing function or advancing lifestyle—are still, at best, provisional. The shifting registers used to decipher these designs inevitably fall short of the objects themselves, which, however much they stand mute in our belief that only people have the power to weave meaning, are nonetheless invisible without the stories that have been told of them. To understand them, we must practice a “methodological fetishism,” as the cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai once formulated it, and turn to the things themselves to learn what tomorrow was like.19 Arjun Appadurai, introduction to Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

1 Strauss, writing in 1925 in the Atlantic Monthly, is cited and discussed in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 266–68. For contemporaneous sources, see Paul Terry Cherington, The Consumer Looks at Advertising (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928); George R. Cain, The Consumer of Today and Tomorrow (New York: American Management Association, 1929); Elizabeth E. Hoyt, The Consumption of Wealth (New York: Macmillan Company, 1928); and Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York: Business Bourse, 1929). For a concise overview of changes in consumerism during this period, see Susan Strasser, “Customer to Consumer: The New Consumption in the Progressive Era,” Magazine of History 13, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 10–14. »

2 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1930), table 414. »

3 Merle Curti, Growth of American Thought (1943; New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 678. »

4 David Gebhard discusses the relation of new and traditional styles in his essay, “Traditionalism and Design: Old Models for the New,” in High Styles: Twentieth Century American Design, ed. Lisa Phillips, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985), 48–81. »

5 G. H., “As the Overstuffed Period Passes,” Christian Science Monitor (November 30, 1929). On the theatrical origins of much modern design, see Christopher Innes, Designing Modern America: Broadway to Main Street (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). »

6 Paul T. Frankl, Form and Re-Form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), 5–7, 21–23. »

7 Machine Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934). The following year, Ely Jacques Kahn underscored MoMA’s mission to educate the public, writing that the museum “leads public taste” and “exacts an influence over industry,” in Design in Art and Industry (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 61–63. »

8 Henry van Brunt, “On the Present Condition and Prospects for Architecture,” Atlantic Monthly 57 (March 1886): 375. »

9 Alexis de Tocqueville, himself a product of a profoundly historical era, wrote in 1835 that the penchant for prediction was itself prompted by democracy: “Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Richard Heffner, trans. George Lawrence (1840; New York: Penguin, 2001), 180. »

10 Henry Steele Commager, “Portrait of the American,” in Years of the Modern: An American Appraisal, ed. John W. Chase (New York: Longmans, Green, 1949), 27–30. »

11 John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1939), 9–10. On egalitarian abstraction, see Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33–34. »

12 Walter Rendell Storey, “The Decorator’s Art in the New Age,” New York Times (February 23, 1930). »

13 Marco Duranti, “Utopia, Nostalgia, and World War at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): 665. »

14 As Ely Jacques Kahn put it when describing the aims of MoMA, “The experts themselves were guided not only by their own taste and ideals regarding consumption, but also by the growth of media and advertising during this period and the widening range of goods and retailing innovations to assure continued consumption despite an unsteady economic context.” Kahn, Design in Art and Industry, 65–66. »

15 Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day: Another Day at the Fair,” Atlanta Constitution (August 4, 1939). »

16 Russell Lynes, “Yesterday’s World of Tomorrow” (1980), in Life in the Slow Lane (New York: Cornelia and Michael Bessie Books, 1991), 246–48. The tomorrow trope itself was later hijacked for Tomorrow!, Philip Wylie’s sci-fi story of a Soviet nuclear attack. »

17 “Synthetic ‘Elmer’ 1940 Fair Greeter,” New York Times (April 13, 1940). »

18 “Elmer Americanus,” Christian Science Monitor (May 17, 1940). See also Sidney M. Shalett, “‘Hello Folks’ Is the Watchword as Elmer Takes Over the Fair,” New York Times (May 12, 1940). »

19 Arjun Appadurai, introduction to Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). »

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