Introduction

We live in the long shadow of the 1930s.  The stage may have shifted somewhat, but the script feels eerily similar.

In the 30s, the radio was the chief propaganda platform. Today, the hands that hoard the world’s wealth now own the megaphones of malice. 

In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, he writes:  “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” In 1935, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here depicted the rise of American fascists and demagogues bent on dismantling democratic institutions, ruling through paramilitary force and intimidation, demonizing the press, and persecuting minorities and immigrants. The parallels to today are stark. 

In February 1939, 20,000 Americans packed Madison Square Garden in New York for the German Bund’s “Pro-American Rally.”  A 30-foot portrait of George Washington was flanked by American flags and swastikas. Stiff-armed salutes accompanied the Pledge of Allegiance. Speeches extolled anti-miscegenation laws, Jewish immigration quotas, and Jim Crow. Donald Trump’s 2024 Madison Square Garden rally spewed equally vicious demagoguery and race hatred.

Planners for the 1939 New York World’s Fair knew they had to finesse their way through three thorny challenges: (1) public suspicion that corporate greed helped trigger the Depression, (2 ) ambivalence about U.S. involvement in “Europe’s” wars, and (3) the rise of fascism at home.  They needed to change the narrative, distract the American people, and transform democracy into consumerism.

The Fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” checked every box.  Europe’s troubles were trivialized or dismissed entirely. The capitalist system was cast as resilient and triumphant.  Visitors were lured into a giddy, utopian snow globe of corporate ingenuity. You could see yourself on television. Watch a cow get milked by machine. Ride a parachute drop. Witness a robot that could smoke and answer questions. Buy a dishwasher on the installment plan. The Fair was less your typical  reverential homage to science and industrial genius and more a cavalcade of product placement. Companies far outnumbered countries.  A giant

cash register tracked daily attendance. A World’s Fair wrapped in an American flag with a bow on top. Much of “The World of Tomorrow,” promoters promised, would arrive by 1960.

Its centerpiece was the Trylon and Perisphere. The Trylon, a 610-foot spire, rose phoenix-like and phallic from those ashes in Queens to evoke a sense of limitless possibility. The Perisphere, a moon-like orb 180 feet wide, housed “Democracity,” a scaled model of a perfect, planned metropolis. As one Gotham Center historian put it: “There was no crime in the city of tomorrow, no slums, and no poverty. Progress was presented as inevitable and uniform.” 

The New York World’s Fair opened just two-and-a-half months after the Nazi rally and exactly 150 years to the day George Washington was inaugurated in New York as America’s first president.  It sat atop 1,200-acres of swampland, putrid urban waste and industrial ash in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.  It has been said that F. Scott Fitzgerald chose the site as an apt metaphor for America’s moral and social decay, the plight of the working class, and the toxic consequences of consumerism depicted as the “Valley of Ashes” in his 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.  

The 1939 World’s Fair encapsulates much of America’s troubling contradictions. It was hollow and deceitful, yet hopeful and irrepressibly entertaining;  a crass manipulation of America’s fragile psyche, yet seductive in its muscular, art-deco grandeur and unapologetic optimism. 

Trylon & Perisphere interrogates America’s naïveté and the assault on our democracy and sense of decency through the lens of two Austrian immigrants, a Puerto Rican activist, and a young boy during the period leading up to the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. 

It wrestles with questions that have always plagued Americans: how much of our identity is bound up in what we sell to ourselves and others?  What do we hold sacred in the face of adversity?  Is our democracy resilient enough to withstand assault after assault to its core values? Why is America perennially torn between a sick longing for its deeply racist past and an impossibly utopian future?  Is it because the present is too much to bear?  How many warnings is enough?