A World’s Fair: Sixty Years of Education In and Around a Former Dump

There was a string of “International Expositions” and “World’s Fairs” throughout the 1930s. They were a source of distraction and hope for people like E. L. Doctorow’s young protagonist caught in the banality and gloom of the Great Depression. A deliberate form of public education too, they promoted faith in technology as palliative for economic dislocation and inoculation against war. “When war and depression are fenced out, we seem to be moving steadily toward a splendid future,” wrote one commentator on the New York’s World Fair, which opened on April 30, 1939.1 Imperfectly, they also promoted intercultural understanding and cooperation—an always difficult educational objective.