MEET THE MIDDLETONS: James Lileks devotes a new section of his sprawling Website to an industrial film Westinghouse created in 1939 to advertise its contributions to the World’s Fair in New York. We mentioned last week how immediately after WWII, General Motors promoted Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom — and then in the decades to follow forget all of Hayek’s lessons on its own road to serfdom as Obama’s Government Motors.
Lileks’ new section is subtitled “Or, Go Peddle that Bolshie Booshwah Elsewhere, Pal,” as astonishingly, one of the supporting characters in Westinghouse’s film is played by a bow-tie wearing ferret-faced sneering actor who denounces all of the advancements in science made possible by capitalism, democracy, and free enterprise. (He’s there as the token bad guy to have his comments swatted away by the all-American family he accompanies to the Fair.) One of the pages of Lileks’ site features a large photo of Westinghouse’s site at the World’s Fair contrasting the technological achievements of the first four decades of the 20th century with, as the large sign on the wall of the exhibition reads “YESTERDAY: A WORLD WITHOUT ELECTRICITY.”
Flash-forward to 2007, when on the road to creating conditions favorable for the election of a Democrat the following year, the anchor of the evening news of the network Westinghouse acquired in the previous decade likened global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. That same year, the network owned by General Electric, another powerhouse at the 1939 World’s Fair, actively promoted a world without electricity; turning all the lights off in its studio (other than sponsor Toyota’s large sign of course) during a Sunday Night Football game and advising Americans to do the same. The cable network that GE owned at the time featured an anchor who said on the air in 2010, “Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals, okay?”
Someone like that was the designated cartoon heavy at the 1939 World’s Fair; today, TV shows are built around him. Not to mention presidential candidacies. The 1939 World’s Fair promised a world fundamentally transformed, and after WWII, that transformation certainly arrived. But so did its myriad critics, eager to revolt against the masses — and hard.