In this section: Intro Vaudeville and Music Hall The First Stars The Challenge of the Air The Picture Palace4 The New York World's Fair
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The pleasures of vacation touring were depicted with even more fulsome praise of the joys of the open road. Every section of the country invited the growing army of motorists to visit it. Chambers of commerce, resort proprietors, and oil companies united in publicizing the attractions of seashore and mountain. New England was a summer vacation land, and Florida a popular winter resort. The national parks and forests, especially those of the West, drew hordes of visitors. In 1910 they had a few hundred thousand; the total in 1935 was thirty-four million. Almost all of them came by automobile. There was an overwhelming response to the slogan See America First as the new generation took to the road.
Streamlining spawned visions of the future, nowhere more so than at the Big Fair - the New York World's Fair which opened in April 1939.
International expositions had occured regularly since 1851 - the Eiffel Tower had been built for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1899 - but "the People's Fair" proclaimed itself "the rnightiest exposition ever conceived and built by man."
Its director, Grover Whalen, declared that "By giving a clear and orderly interpretation of our own age, the fair will project the average man into the World of Tomorrow." Its major exhibits were the work of America's leading industrial designers - brilliant displays of their ideas of the rationally planned and re-ordered world of the near future.
Behind its façade of education and entertainment, the Fair was a gigantic advertisement for American industrial civilization and what was coming to be called the American Way of Life. Life magazine called it "A magnificent monument by and to American business". But most of its 45 million visitors treated it as a amusement park.
There was an irony in the Fair's vision of the future. A pavilion dedicated to "Goodwill and Peace" was planned but never built. The Fairs planners hoped that it would make a "forcible contribution to the cause of peace," but this was little in evidence. Albania and Czechoslovakia flew their national flags at half mast to mark the invasion of their countries by Italy and Germany, and no-one collected the prize for an essay competition: a vacation in "gay, colorful Poland".
In the late 1930's the trailer made its appearance as still another boon for those with migratory instincts. The westerner whose forebears had crossed the prairies in a journey of several months trekked back over the old route, in a fraction of the time, with this twentieth-century equivalent of the covered wagon coupled to his car. The number of these vehicles increased rapidly; enthusiasts saw for them a future comparable to that of the automobile itself. In the bright dawn of trailer camping, about 1936, it was wildly stated that there would be a million of them on the road within a year and that a decade would see half the population on wheels. Such fantasies proved illusory; perhaps one hundred thousand passenger trailers, rather than a million, was the total later estimated by Trailer Travel.
Some seven hundred manufacturers had rushed into the field. Small machine-shops, bicycle manufacturers, out-of-work carpenters, hoped they had discovered the bootstrap to pull them out of the depression. But the boom faded away as annual production sought levels corresponding to the real demand. For, apart from the expense, new obstacles to further expansion sprang up in strict traffic regulations and bans on trailer parking. Municipalities did not take kindly to the home-on-wheels which could escape taxes and defy housing rules. Nevertheless in a more limited field the trailer provided a new means of touring which had wide appeal, becoming throughout the country a familiar symbol of the life of the highway. Trailer camps were established at the grounds of New York's World Fair, at Florida winter resorts, in the national parks of the Far West.
In exhibits by General Motors and American Telegraph & Telephone, the Fair presented communications as central to its vision of the future, but the Fair's managers decided not to broadcast any news of the war in Europe. In the Iate 1930s Allied govemments expected aerial warfare to cause massive devastation. Americans could only imagine the horrors of Total War, conjured up for them most vividly on Halloween 1938, in the panic caused by Orson Welles' radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
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