Alls fair in love and war

Selling a bright future in a dark time....

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The New York Worlds Fair was the paradox of all paradoxes,Harpers magazine wrote in 1940. It proved that Man was noble,then it turned right around and proved that Man could also be a simpleton. The World of Tomorrow,which lasted 18 months in 1939 and 1940,was indeed a wondrous and silly spectacle. Built on a huge rubbish dump in Queens,it sprang from a grand idea. Just when many were hobbled by the Great Depression,the fair envisioned a Utopian,machine-age future that would revive faith in corporations. The biggest exposition ever,it was expected to make a profit.

In fact,the fair was perhaps the most extravagant folly of its age,argues James Mauro. Organisers estimated it would cost around $40m to build and generate some $1 billion in revenue. Expenses reached $150m ($2.3 billion today) and the fair ended in bankruptcy. When ground was broken in 1936,planners hoped to create a world charming enough to persuade foreign dictators of the futility of war. But when it finally opened,several pavilions represented countries that no longer existed,such as Austria and Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union opened one of the biggest and most extravagant pavilions,but backed out the second year.

The most exciting thing about the fair was its plans, lamented the fairs dapper president,Grover Whalen,in 1939. A spendthrift dandy in top hat and spats,Whalen was an ambitious beneficiary of the machine politics of Tammany Hall and the fairs leading visionary. He paid himself a salary of $100,000 and demanded that all officers salute him. He also believed people would buy millions of tickets,despite statistics that found that 90 per cent of American families lived on no more than around $800 per year.

Other characters include Fiorello La Guardia,New Yorks popular,rough-and-tumble mayor,who saw the fair as a good place to heckle Hitler; and Robert Moses,the citys ruthless parks commissioner (with the impossibly large hands of a Michelangelo sculpture),whose vision of a Versailles of America on the same site inspired him to clean up the former dumping ground. Mr Mauro also brings in Albert Einstein,the honorary chairman of the fairs science advisory committee. By 1939,aged 60,Einstein had lost nearly everything,including his home,savings,nationality and wife. Shaken from his pacifism by Hitlers rise,he struggled with his role as an intellectual icon in his adopted country,asking,Why is it that nobody understands me,but everybody likes me? Mr Mauro prefers scene-setting colour to deep analysis,yet this is an entertaining book about big ideas and bad timing.

The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010