Feasting on the Future: Food at the New York World's Fair, 1939-1940 Eve Jochnowitz Mr Grover Whalen N.Y. World's Fair New York City Dear Mr. Whalen:- I just must take the time out and let you know how happy I am because you selected such a typical American as Kate Smith to sing at the opening of THE FAIR, and I only wish that finances would permit my being there. I do not think you could have found a more AMERICAN person than Kate Smith - after all this is AMERICA the fair emblematic of what AMERICANS CAN DO, and Kate Smith emphasizes AMERICA in her song, praise of the country, its products, its art and music - in fact is she not THE MOST TYPICAL PUBLIC AMERICAN ENTERTAINER? She has the seriousness that is needed, and I only wish that we had more "Kate Smiths" in America - people who would talk their country, pat it on the back, as well as our American made products - from soil to tapestries. It would even be a good idea if some of our monied people would think that American Home Furnishings, American investments, American Scenery, etc. were BETTER than that of Foreign Lands, or makes. I certainly take my hat off to you for your selection, and also to Kate Smith for her PERSONIFICATION of American Ideals. Much success for a 1940 Fair and I only wish I could be there for the opening. Yours for a successful season, CC to Kate Smith Mrs. A. Freeland Rock Island, IL (New York World's Fair 1939-1940 collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of the New York Public Library: Box 253. Emphases and punctuation are in the original.1) Trylon and Perisphere, the gleaming spire and globe that became symbols of the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 and appeared on countless World's Fair souvenirs, served as constant reminders of the fair's message of optimism, hope for the future, and valorization of the "typical American." Perisphere, "the largest globe ever made by man," symbolized the world we live in (with all its typicality), and Trylon, a slender three-sided tower 700 feet tall, symbolized our aspirations for the future.2 The food-related exhibits of the New York World's Fair pressed the fair's official aim to present an optimistic view of the future and its unofficial practice of honoring all that was typically American. I will argue that in the process, the fair's diverse exhibits created a feminized vision of the future--a future in which women, in their many roles as food providers, would shape their families into typical American consumers and make the country safe for American manufacturers. This paper will examine the food exhibits at the New York World's Fair in relation to these themes. Part I explores the role of food in defining "future" and "typical." Part II examines exhibits of food production--the farm and the factory- -in which futuristic technology would produce more "typical" results. Part III, the heart of the paper, moves into the kitchen, where the typical and the future meet in the typical American housewife, the unsung heroine of the whole fair, who harnesses the technology of the future to do her bidding. Part IV discusses the exhibits devoted to manners and deportment, which made the American table a site where Americans of all kinds could become more typical by correcting their behaviour. The New York World's Fair Corporation, headed by the dashing Grover Whelan,3 selected the forward-looking theme of "Building the World of Tomorrow" to be the fair's unifying narrative, and made the celebration of the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration the putative occasion of the fair. The layout of the fairgrounds, which were located at the Corona Dumps4 in Flushing Queens, followed the model of the Great Mall in Washington, D. C. The New York City Hall Pavilion anchored the west end of the mall, and the Court of Peace, crowned by the United States Federal Government Pavilion, was the anchor at the east end. In the center, and visible from almost anywhere in the 1200 acre fairgrounds, Trylon and Perisphere rose shimmering over their reflecting pool. Seven zones, all of which had some food-related exhibits, were arranged around the themes of government, community interests, food, communications, medicine, production and distribution, and amusement. The Federal Government Pavilion was in the Government Zone5(see map), which included the pavilions of the states and the foreign countries exhibiting at the fair. Many of the foreign government pavilions offered as their main attraction restaurants serving dishes representing their national cuisines. In the Community Interest Zone, whose centerpiece was the "Town of Tomorrow," home-related exhibits such as gas, furnishings, and radio shared space with the Temple of Religion and the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. Exhibits in the Community Interest Zone displayed technological and social advances in kitchen work, kitchen design, and deportment intended to improve cooking at home and dining at home in the future. Cafe Tel Aviv, serving "Palestine type dishes," was part of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. Immediately to the south stood the Food Zone, where the pavilions for Borden, Swift, Heinz and other industrial food exhibitors held their exhibits and performances. To the west were zones for communication, medicine, and transportation, and production and distribution, where exhibits for Con Edison, Westinghouse, U. S. Steel, and General Electric, among others, showed the wonders that electrically powered kitchen equipment and modern kitchen materials would bring to food preparation in the factory and the home. A large Amusement Zone, with many restaurants of its own, flanked the fair to the south, but had no place on the Constitution Mall. A "focal exhibit" in each zone related that particular zone to the World of Tomorrow. The focal exhibits were designed by the Fair Corporation, while other buildings were the responsibility private exhibitors. The broad and didactic focal exhibits were unpopular, and in the second year of the fair, all the focal exhibits closed and private exhibits took their place. A World's Fair is a temporary universe. Feasting on the Future will examine the stated and unstated aims of the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 through the most temporary of artefacts, food. Notes 1. Most of the primary material for this paper is from the correspondence and files of the New York World's Fair, courtesy of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York World's Fair Records 1939-40. Material from the Astor, Lenox and Tilden collection will hereafter be identified by the letters NYPL and box number. 2. Trylon and Perisphere were proper names. Contemporaneous sources were inconsistent, many referring to them as "the Trylon" and "the Perisphere." I have used them as names throughout. 3. A history of Grover Whelan's peculiar and often disastrous career as a director of exhibitions is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is necessary to mention the dashing Mr. Whelan's extraordinary animal magnetism, which permeates all accounts. Letters from women and men to the fair, such as the letter I chose as the epigraph to this paper, were frequently addressed to Whelan personally, and filled with the warmest sentiments. Much of the glamour associated with this particular fair was Whelan's own. 4. Mayor LaGuardia had hoped that the fair would allow the city to reclaim the Corona Dumps as a public park. Because of the outbreak of World War II, the city had to postpone plans for the park until another World's Fair, in the years 1964-65, revived the area again. 5. I will use the capitalization conventions of the World's Fair Corporation throughout. PART I: Typical Americans: Perfection or Abjection? "Makes you proud of your country" was the slogan of Elmer1, mascot of the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940, and a symbol of the typical American visitor. The source of pride is the fair itself. Almost every exhibit and performance at the Fair, from the pageants led by Mayor LaGuardia and Grover Whelan to the recipe pamphlets, valorized the "typical American." In the second year of the fair, when Europe was at war, typical Americans were themselves on display. Families from each of the forty-eight states entered contests run by their local newspapers to select the most typical representatives of each state. Entrants submitted essays in which they explained why they were typical, and winners came to live at the fair for one week in one of the two model homes set up on the fairgrounds. Each "typical American family" was presented with a one-week lease and keys to their home by Harvey Gibson, the vice- president of the fair. Dad was always handed the lease, Mom, the keys. Each typical American family posed for photographs as they moved in, moved out and raised their state flag. Upon departure, each "typical American boy" received a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth. Each "typical American girl" got a bracelet. A publicity photo from the fair shows Grover Whalen, the president of the fair, and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia greeting the first two typical American families to arrive at the fair. Ironically, Mayor LaGuardia could, in his ceremonial capacity, welcome typical families to the Fair, but his family would never have qualified as typical. No Italian-American families won the contest for the typical American family, nor, for that matter, did any Black or Jewish families. All of the winning families, two from each of the 48 states, were white and had a mother, father and two kids. These mobile and arguably exhibitionist families were families of the future in more ways than the fair's planners could have known.2 Black, Jewish and Italian Americans, excluded from exhibits of typicality, appeared on a "Wall of Fame" for "Notable Americans of Foreign Birth, Negroes and American Indians"(NYPL box 252). The notable Americans who made it onto the wall were sorted by country of origin and field of endeavor. Negroes and American Indians were included in their own categories, but no separate category was created for Jews of foreign birth.3 The Wall of Fame committee was navigating troubled waters. In 1939, with immigration severely restricted and war approaching, very few were going on record to say anything good about Americans of foreign birth. By honoring immigrants, Negroes and American Indians, the Wall of Fame made the case that the diversity of American achievement was no threat to American typicality. The Wall of Fame committee tried to distribute immigrants evenly by country and field, while representing groups proportionally to their population. They also had to make do with whatever actual notables they had to work with. One memo in the Wall of Fame files states regretfully that many German scientists had to be left out because there were simply more than enough Germans represented in the field of science. Not everyone born in a particular country was considered representative of that country, whether in their own eyes or in the eyes of their fellow countrymen. A Mr. Frgosa protested that there were only five Portuguese honored on the Wall of Fame, and that all five of them were Jews. His letter, which the committee forwarded to Father Joseph Carrella of St. Anthony's Welfare Center, dramatizes the problem of grouping immigrants by country. Father Carrella distanced himself and the Portuguese community of New York from the letter writer, a well known "trouble maker." "This man," wrote Father Carrella, "means nothing to the Portuguese. We are satisfied with the names of the Portuguese Jews," he continues, "because the Portuguese Jews and the Portuguese were the first settlers in the city of New York and we are proud of their record" (NYPL box 252). Should Jews have had a separate category? Some members of the Committee for Jewish Palestine felt it was prudent to be restrained about exhibiting Jewish achievement.4 No doubt Jewish fairgoers combed through names on the Wall of Fame as obsessively as did Frgosa to find notable Jews from various countries. While they would not have found a category set aside for Jews, they would have found many Jewish names, as there was apparently no effort to limit their numbers. In addition to comprising the entire Portuguese delegation to the wall, Jews, with one exception, made up the entire Polish delegation as well as most of the pared-down selection of Germans. In contrast to the display of typical Americans at the fair, the Wall of Fame honored well-known individuals, such as Samuel Goldwyn and Albert Einstein, whose fame and extraordinary contributions made them remarkable. To win a place on the Wall of Fame, immigrants had to be outstanding, and their names familiar. To win the Typical Family Contest, the families had to be ordinary. Honored Americans thus fell into the mutually exclusive categories of typical natives and exceptional immigrants. The exceptional achievements of non- natives were thus located in the past, while typical and undistinguished families provided models for the future--if not models in achievement, then models as consumers. However much the fair celebrated the typical American, internal memos of the food committee show that the fair's planners did not think the typical American was all that smart. They planned the food displays accordingly. Larry K. Herzog, who began organizing the fair's food exhibits in 1937, seems to have had two main goals in assembling the food exhibitors: First, to promote American industry in a time of economic depression, and second to advance the education of "The average American," a paradigmatic individual for whom he apparently had no great regard. In a 1937 letter to the editor of Baker's Weekly, Herzog wrote, "I am trying so hard to provide a basis for the food exhibitors to help us in helping themselves as well to push back the mental horizon of consumer understanding as related to food" (NYPL box 150). He complained that the "average housewife" did not know about half of the baked products available in America, and "All the average person thinks about" is the finished food product rather than the process of manufacture. Herzog's goals of education and promotion are inextricably linked to consumption in all the exhibits that ultimately took shape at the fair. The average American, enlightened by the fair's educational exhibits and warmed to American industry would become an ideal consumer. Beatrice Mabry, director of the educational section of the food exhibit, sought to put together suitable instruction for informed consumers of the future. "Does the average individual consume approximately a ton of food a year?" She wrote to Dr. Louis Stanley of the United States Department of Agriculture on March 13, 1937, "if not, what amount? What does the human stomach hold--a pint, a pint and a half or what"(NYPL box 150)? The final result of Mabry's research was a scale model of Manhattan Island in Russell Wright's focal food exhibit with skyscrapers and piles of food showing how much food Americans consumed in a day. The purpose of the model buildings was to convey the enormity of scale. Herzog and Mabry hoped that such simple visual metaphors could educate consumers about food painlessly, but the sight of a pile of food next to a skyscraper turned out not to be as appealing to the public as they might have wished. The same combination of earnest yet wacky didacticism continued throughout the food pavilion. Exhibits in the focal food exhibit used surreal visual metaphors to explain the miracles of futuristic food technology. Wright intended these vivid and colorful images to make the scientific and industrial aspects of food manufacture seem warm and wholesome. Display cases held flying lobsters, an aqueduct squirting roses into the desert, an alligator pear (avocado) with five jewels, an eye winking in a cave, a clock running backward inside a tin can and a cauliflower wearing boxing gloves knocking out a centipede. No labels accompanied the exhibit. A recorded voice, when it was working, explained that the flying lobsters represented the miracle of refrigerated transportation, the roses stood for modern irrigation, the jewels in the avocado symbolized such ordinary things and vitamins and fats, the eye stood for the vitamin cure for night-blindness, the clock in the can showed how canning made time stand still for fresh food and of course the cauliflower protected by pesticides defeated parasitic vermin. Unfortunately, the recorded voice was not always working, causing one student of display to note wryly that "The mystery of those aerial crustaceans was wearing us down" (Cummings 1940, 94). The humor in these whimsical displays made the case to potential consumers that technological food manufacture was not cold and forbidding, but friendly and inviting. The fair planners felt strongly that visitors needed exactly this kind of gentle instruction to make the country safe for industrial food manufacturers and their internal memos show that there was a wide gulf between what they wished to show typical Americans to be and what the fair's planners thought typical Americans actually were. In spite of drawing better crowds than any of the other focal exhibits, the focal food exhibit received mixed reviews and closed in 1940, as did the other focal exhibits, to make way for the Coca-Cola pavilion. The focal food exhibit's designers were not alone in their urgent desire to improve the unschooled eating practices of average Americans. Not only America's scientists, but also the clergy felt that uninformed eating was a threat not only to health, but to morality, religion, and the nation's future. In "Man's future depends on what he decides to eat," Scientific Monthly concluded that "Not enough of us are making the three- times-a-day decision as wisely as might be" ("Man's future depends" 1938, 374). "The churches are in the midst of an all but losing fight with the restaurants for the souls of men." was the alarmed cry of the Zion Herald: Organ of American Methodism, which argued that a startling number of souls had been "damned by bad food" ("Food and Religion" 1939, 38). The hurried thoughtless eating so typical in America was to the Herald very much a moral issue as well as a health issue. The Organ of American Methodism would not have used the word "damned" lightly. The same urgency felt by their contemporaries the Italian futurists informs the argument of the scientists and the clergy.5 Food corporations that exhibited at the fair took up the fight for better informed eating in the recipe booklets that were distributed free at their pavilions at the fair. The Sealtest recipe pamphlet for the World's Fair includes a short essay by Professor R. B. Stoltz of Ohio State University that manages to address concerns about health and morality in its promotion of milk as a beverage for adults: The typical American, when handed a menu to designate his choice of beverages, usually replies, "I'll take milk." This is true for all seasons of the year. The 130 million people, who live in the United States, do not realize how milk conscious we are. Almost unknowingly we appreciate the food value of milk and its effect upon our physical, mental and moral acts. . . . In most foreign countries milk is not considered a beverage for the adults. Neither do those adults usually have the pep, initiative and enthusiasm that can be found in a group of typical Americans (Sealtest Inc. 1939, 11). A "Professor," a scientific spokesperson for the future, not an old-fashioned chef or a farmer, endorses milk. His arguments in favor of milk are very much in line with the fair's elevation of typical Americans. Because typical Americans do drink milk, Americans should drink milk. The descriptive is prescriptive. Furthermore, foreigners drink less milk than Americans and they are the worse for it physically, mentally, and morally. Sealtest was correct in predicting that with war imminent, their customers would want to approximate the typical American and not the unspecified, lackluster foreigner. Elmer and Mrs. Modern: Two views for the Future Elmer the typical American is a particularly rich, if conflicted, symbol. Elmer is a middle-aged white male. He wears a striped three-piece suit with a watch chain in his vest pocket. His ample build, slightly unfashionable suit and hat, and unflagging joviality point to the out-of-town origins of this small town businessman at this New York fair. "Elmer-- Jolly, average, everyday American--is being immortalized in countless posters this year sounding the keynote of informality and country fair spirit of the World's Fair of 1940" (NYPL box 1496). Elmer is meant to be a typical visitor to the fair, not the typical New Yorker. He is photographed greeting celebrities, eating hot dogs and baking strawberry shortcake, but he usually poses with thumbs in vest sleeves--An American mudra for prosperity and contentment. Elmer was hugely popular, still, no one would want to be like Elmer, whom the Sayre, Pennsylvania Evening Times described in one editorial as "Plump, moist and a bit of a chump" ("We are not a nation of Elmers" 1940, n.p.). The editorial states that Americans are not "gullible" like Elmer. The editors clearly read Elmer's signifiers of typicality as signifiers of gullibility. A river of difference flowed between New York, host city to the fair, and the rest of the country, whence the typical Americans displayed at the fair came. The fair chose to locate Americanness outside of the big city in an attempt to appeal to the whole country. While official literature at the fair ignored the tension, outside sources documented it gleefully. The cartoons in Trylongs and Perisites (O'Leahy 1939) suggest how many New Yorkers must have viewed the swarms of out-of-town visitors descending on the city to visit the fair. Out-of- towners in the cartoons have long, pointed beaks that look like Trylon, and spherical heads that look like Perisphere, the symbols of the fair. Trylongs and Perisites lampoons out-of- town guests and the discomforts of keeping them. A couple eat their breakfast in the nude as an indignant "Perisite" stalks out the door, her provincial prudery used against her, in "How to get rid of a maiden aunt," and a graveyard filled with stones shaped like Trylon and Perisphere contains one with the inscription: "Friends And Relations With Me Would Stay/ To Hail The Dawn of A New Day./ I Had to Steal And Beg And Borrow/ Now I'm In The World of Tomorrow (O'Leahy 1939, n.p.). The editors of the Evening News were not wrong to guess that in spite of the enthusiastic language welcoming visitors and stressing the virtues of all-American small-town typicality, the fair's planners and New Yorkers themselves might have held typical Americans in some disdain. Elmer, the typical American, is clearly marked as an American of the past. There is no one poster persona analogous to Elmer for the American of the future, but all the prototypes for future Americans performed at the fair were gendered female. In 1939, the Community Interest focal exhibit sought to show the interdependence of all modern Americans. "Mrs. Modern," an animated figure, made telephone calls to order all the elements of her house, down to the ingredients for dinner. The act of building the physical house itself, surely a masculine task in the American imagination, became an act of female consumption. The wife became the complete "homemaker" right down to the physical construction of the house. Harvey Gibson acknowledges the supremacy of the female homemaker when he hands the lease of the fair's model home to the Typical American Husband, but hands the keys to the Typical American Wife. The fair's food and home-related exhibits called upon the woman, as the head of consumer choices in her home, to lead homesteading on the next frontier, the technological age. In 1939, the future could not come soon enough. The period between the world wars was a time of great anxiety about the future of the food supply. Even before the Depression, in the prosperous decade of the twenties, the country was seized by fears that either the world was running out of food, or that average Americans simply would not eat what was good for them (Levenstein 1988, 176). The food exhibits at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 reassured fairgoers that in the World of Tomorrow, thanks to the chemist's flask and the housewife's telephone, there would be plenty of food to go around and it would be readily available. Educational exhibits showed Americans how to partake of the food of the future. The technology of tomorrow would make the drudgery of cooking and housework obsolete. The average middle-class housewife, who could no longer depend on servants as she had in the previous century would now have "mechanical servants" to do her bidding (Rydell 1993, 124). Fairgoers would learn how to remake themselves even as they remade America for the future particularly through food, cooking, and eating. Notes to Part I 1. Leslie Oestereicher, a heavy-set man in his mid-forties, posed for most of the Elmer images. 2. Robert Rydell identifies this and other world's fair exhibits with an ominous eugenicist agenda on the part of the exhibition committees (Rydell 1993, 38-60 and passim). Rydell is correct that racism played a role in the decisions of the selection committee, but he misses the point that the typical American families are a self-selected group whose desire to be typical was their own. 3. While this is not a paper about the display of Jews in particular at the world's fair, it is useful to examine the display issues concerning Jews because of the anomalous category they form. 4. Dr S. Margoshes wrote of those who were uncomfortable with these exhibits, "Still others wondered whether a Jewish exhibit showing the colossal Jewish contributions to America would not have the effect of arousing more "rishus" by affording an opportunity to our enemies to renew their contention that the Jews were in control of the U. S." (NYPL box 211). 5. Discourse at the New York World's Fair and in the contemporary American press on the future of food and eating in America might provide a worthwhile mirror for Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook: The Futurist culinary revolution has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand new food combinations. . . Until now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats or oxen. . . . It is not by chance that this work is published during a world economic crisis, which has clearly inspired a dangerous and depressing panic. . . . We propose as an antidote to this panic a Futurist way of cooking, that is: optimism at the table (Marinetti 1932, 21). Often treated as a joke and its more outrageous recipes quoted out of context, The Futurist Cookbook touches on concerns that made many Americans in the 1930's uneasy about food and eating. Marinetti's image of men feeding themselves like rats or oxen is not so different from the disdain of the New York World's Fair's planning committees toward the average American when it came to food. Part II The Future of Farm and Factory At previous American expositions the privileged site for any food display was the farm. The World Colombian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago featured a Corn Palace, a knight made of prunes, and an elephant made entirely of walnuts (Longone 1994). By 1939, ingenious displays of abundant produce were displaced by dazzling displays farm technology. The focal exhibit on food displayed the benefits of modern irrigation and pesticides (represented by a cauliflower wearing boxing gloves). The Electrified Farm exhibit demonstrated modern farming equipment and techniques. The Electric Light and Power Company's "Olde Dairy Farm" exhibit, showed women in hoop skirts hand-milking cows and toting heavy milk-pails. Such displays demonstrated the kind of farm work that was not to be part of the World of Tomorrow, and provided a contrast to the effortless work of the future. Exhibits of working women set up the same dichotomy between kitchen work of the past and future, as I will show in the next section. Fresh From the Factory The farm, however, was merely a footnote. The food of tomorrow was to come from the American factory. The New York Times predicted in 1938 that an entirely synthetic food supply might soon make the laboratory the primary source of American food ("An entirely synthetic supply" 1938, 16). "Will the Chemist's Flask do the Work of 1000 Farms?" asked a display that showed an agricultural landscape inside a flask. To ask the question was to answer it. The optimistic response this question elicited from the fairgoer was yes. In 1939, the idea that all the food of the future might be synthetic was good news. Most prognostications about the future of food in the 1930s were grim alarms about an approaching famine and possibility of widespread starvation because of uncontrollable population growth. In truth, in the 1930s millions of people in the United States were severely undernourished with no clear relief in sight (Levenstein 1993, 4). Exhibiting mass- production of factory food suited the fair perfectly. The mass production of food in model factories would not only save America from hunger, but would also do so while mirroring the streamlined aesthetics of Futurama and Democracity. National brands such as Wonder Bread produced consistency that made it possible for Americans to eat identical, and typically American, food everywhere. Industrialized food streamlined regional and ethnic differences. The love affair between the fair and industrial food manufacturers began in the very earliest stages of planning, when Larry Herzog wrote to the Chicago Board of Trade: I am particularly interested in getting across to the ultimate consumer visitor the real story behind the static packaged foods on the shelves at the grocer's store. People have no conception of these things; all the average person thinks about is the farm at one end and the grocery store at the other, but the amount of capital, investment, brain, brawn, courage and gamble that lies between these two terminal points is to them a closed book (NYPL box 149). Almost every food exhibit made the process of food manufacture transparent, and emphasized the realness of the process displayed. Just as the "real skeleton" in the Hall of Man drew visitors, and actual fetuses were on display,1 the look through, the look inside, the almost illicit glimpse behind the scenes was an irresistible draw for amusement seekers in 1939- 1940. The Hall of Medicine provided a look inside virtual human bodies, and the industrial food exhibits took visitors inside virtual factories to see the hidden processes of commercial food manufacture. Fairgoers loved to see what was usually unseen, the fair's planners felt that average Americans did not know enough about their food to be informed consumers, and the manufacturers may have felt that fairgoers knew too much. Industrial food manufacturers needed particularly to exhibit themselves on their own terms to dispel consumer uneasiness about the unknown, and to allay consumer concerns about abuse and neglect in industrial food manufacture. Every industrial food exhibit, whether it employed performance, cinema, dioramas, or all three, strove above all to build confidence among potential consumers by emphasizing the cleanliness and safety of food manufacture. Many food corporations felt that the official focal exhibit of the fair did not dwell sufficiently on the processing stage in food. Food Industries magazine referred ominously to unspecified "best sellers" that had dragged food manufacturers through the mud in print (Miller 1939, 59). The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1906 and very well known in 1939, was one of the first and most famous efforts by muckraking journalists to reveal the inner workings of food manufacture. The best answer to these "best sellers," Miller claimed, was full disclosure of "how it's made" and "how it's done." Food manufacturers needed to reveal their own inner workings and to do so on their own terms. If only consumers could visit their factories, they would see how sanitary and responsible they were. Model factories at the fair allowed all who entered to see the hygienic, even sterile, conditions in which workers processed and packaged their products. Beautiful young women dressed in spotless white, like nurses or laboratory technicians, at many of the fair's food pavilions dramatized the cleanliness and wholesomeness of the products they presented. Swift, the meat-packing company that had been Sinclair's primary target, peopled its plant at the fair with young women in white lab coats who demonstrated the wrapping of bacon and other Swift products. These brides of science inspired confidence in the manufacturing process by showing that food handling work was light enough, clean enough and safe enough for women to do. These immaculately dressed young women could hardly be committing the wretched acts of abuse, neglect, and brutality that Sinclair and others had exposed early in the century. By staffing their model factories with women, the industrial food manufacturers, like the fair's focal exhibits, feminized the future. Just as the typical American wife, as the perfect consumer, could build the home of tomorrow using only her telephone, typical young women became the handmaidens of industry once technology had shifted "manpower" away from the male body and onto the machine. Even the streamlined forms of the future were rounded and soft. Rotating Cows and Little Bakers: Performances Produced for the Fair Food exhibitors at the fair had to create a show worth seeing out of subject matter that was frequently of little "visual interest" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991, 386). The Borden company put cows on the "Rotolactor," a merry-go-round on which the cows stood while modern machines did the milking. Cows standing in their stalls for milking may or may not have drawn spectators, but the Rotolactor, even though it was the butt of endless jokes, was a huge success. Five million visitors came to the focal food exhibit, but almost eight million "stopped and ah'ed" at the Borden Rotolactor (Miller 1940, 48). The Rotolactor was "a ten-strike . . . designed not to assist in the milking, but to allow a great number of people to watch the process all at once. Watch they surely did . . . and then not a few marched across the aisle to the salesroom to take part in the drinking" (Cummings 1940, 83). Food Industries magazine cited the Borden exhibit as the best example of the need for performance in a world's fair exhibit. "Almost every foot of Borden's 80,000 sq. ft. exhibit was a show. . . . If any manufacturer failed to obtain ample returns for the investment the blame can only be placed on his act. He did not put on a good show" (Miller 1940, 48). Borden also provided an ice cream factory show, demonstrations of milk being pasteurized, irradiated and bottled, and a pen of twenty calves, "replaced every three weeks to insure their being of a cute age" ("Food Manufacturers' Exhibits" 1939, 255). To guide visitors, Borden hired "15 girl college graduates, selected from more than 100 candidates as information girls for the Borden Company's Dairy World of Tomorrow" (NYPL box 149). The information girls were graduates of Barnard, Smith, Radcliffe, Hunter and Brooklyn College who were trained to answer "all predictable questions from visitors to the Borden Building."2 Borden was especially proud to have among its info girls the triplets Frances, Marguerite and Catherine Kirshner.3 In 1940 Borden added to the above an exhibit called "Elsie in her boudoir," an actual cow standing in a bed shaped stall in a room decorated as a young woman's bedroom. The youth, freshness and cuteness of the calves and the information girls (although there is no mention of how often they had to be replaced) reinforced the message that milk is a fresh and healthful food. They were also part of the show. The use of lovely young women by Borden, Swift and other food companies exhibiting at the fair was not just the same ordinary sexual exploitation indulged in at Aquacade and other amusement zone displays at the fair, but a vision of the feminine form of the future. The George Washington Coffee Refining Company had "comely college girls demonstrating its product" ("Food manufacturer's exhibits" 1939,44). The Junket Folks boasted that their desserts were served by attractively attired attendants. Pretty "info girls" guided visitors through Borden's Dairy World of Tomorrow. Food Industries magazine stated with approval that pretty girls added "drama and action" to the show. In its bid to attract visitors, the Loose-Wiles Sunshine Baking company produced a musical vaudeville show for a company of diminutive bakers. Beech-Nut made a toy circus and circus parade the main part of its exhibit, which also included factory demonstrations. The Heinz company, which introduced the familiar pickle pin at the World's Colombian Exposition in 1893, had a musical revue starring a line of precision dancers and Mr. Tomato Head, a top-hatted robot. "Pep up with Doughnuts" was the theme of the well-attended demonstrations of the Doughnut Company of America. After live performances, color motion pictures drew the most viewers. Nabisco, Coca- Cola, and Planter's all showed movie cartoons for children about their products. Both Coca-Cola's and Nabisco's movies starred Mickey Mouse. Exhibitors also used the fragrance of fresh food to draw the curious and the hungry. Standard Brands attracted visitors to the coffee exhibit with the aroma of coffee freshly roasted at the roasting demonstration. Many fairgoers waited around to buy the fragrant apple pies they had just seen assembled and baked at Mrs. Wagner's baking company. Scent was also used by some of the non-food exhibitors, with varying results. An orange blossom scent filled the entire Florida pavilion. The Coty pavilion, and for some reason the Federal pavilion, both perfumed the air at their exhibits, making them quite disgusting.4 Futuristic Precision: The Lost Matzo Performance of the Fair While matzo might not seem an exemplar of the food of the future, the Department of Industrial Exhibits attempted, without success, to bring a matzo baking performance to the New York World's Fair. In April 1938, Edward Carlin of the Department of Industrial Exhibits sent an enthusiastic letter to Frederick Margareten at Horowitz Brothers and Margareten with his proposal: I think that perhaps a model of your bakery, showing the process by which your various products are made, under the most sanitary and painstaking conditions [emphasis in the original] with regard to both public health and taste would make a most interesting exhibit. Carlin does not specifically mention matzo, but matzo is the product that Horowitz baked. "Sanitary and painstaking" were code words for kosher in this context. A working matzo bakery on the fairgrounds would certainly have provided both the educational value and the fast action the fair organizers desired. Carlin also indicates that he was interested in exhibiting Kashrut, a part of Jewish law that would be in keeping with the values of the World of Tomorrow, including cleanliness, speed, and precision. While not values most fairgoers might associate with Jews, they were important to consumers of the future, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Carlin urged Margareten to consider that "every one of the fifty- million visitors [to the fair] is a potential buyer of your products." Horowitz Brothers and Margareten expressed only lukewarm interest, and there is no record of matzo being present at the fair in any form. Carlin did get his working bakery, though, from the Continental Baking Company, which produced Wonder Bread. Every detail of the baking process was displayed, down to the growing and harvest of the wheat from a wheat field on the fairgrounds. Continental's promotional material proudly emphasized that this was New York City's first wheat field in sixty-eight years. Just as wheat for matzo must be guarded from the time it ripens on the stalk, the wheat for Wonder Bread was never out of public sight. Continental encouraged fairgoers to come back to the fair and look at the wheat during different stages of the growing season. Penelope Shoo, the bosomy "scarecrow of tomorrow" wearing a Hattie Carnegie gown, guarded the Wonder Bread wheat field and gave it a touch of pizzazz. You can spend as little as 20 minutes or as long as an hour in watching the automatic process of baking bread but, in passing through the bakery there is one thought to keep in mind. Each single action you see, manual or mechanical, must be timed exactly so that every loaf of Wonder Bread will go through its 10 1/2 hour career steadily and without interruption (NYPL box 150). The ten and a half hours required to make Wonder Bread may not be the eighteen minutes needed to make matzo but the exactness is what they have in common. A Gigantic Public Service: Selling the Future of Food The combined efforts of the food focal and . . . food companies should convince visitors that food industries are performing a gigantic public service, that food processing is a highly technological and efficient business and that people should pay some attention to nutritional value in food products ("Food at the World's Fair" 1939, 225). At the New York World's Fair, industrial food exhibitors made their case for the future to the public.5 In the World of Tomorrow, foods prepared in the factory would be safer, for a public concerned about sanitation, and more plentiful and reliable, for a public concerned with want ("Death Cannot Poison Food Inspected, Sterilized and Packaged" was the reassuring message of an exhibit about federal inspection). Uninformed average Americans, for whom the displays were designed, would come away from the fair with a new understanding of the value of industrial food processing, while mass produced and processed food would make the basis for a new American cuisine in which all typical Americans could partake. Notes to Part II 1. Fetuses occupied a very different social space in 1939. A contemporary critic said of this exhibit that "If a flag is good, an embryo or two would be sure fire for a big hand" (Cummings 1940, 24). 2. The description of the information girls, with its emphasis on their being a very select group of recent college graduates is almost identical to descriptions of the tour guides at the United Nations (Tatomirovic 1985) and the famous Harvey Girls. The fair was not alone in employing the irresistible combination of tourism, food and beautiful women. For more on the touristic use of uniformed lovelies, see Tatomirovich 1985, Jochnowitz 1997, and Haber 1997. 3. The Kirshner Triplets, along with all visitors to the Borden who chose to volunteer, were fingerprinted by the New York City Police Department. Assured that their fingerprints would be filed separately from those of criminals, many agreed to try out the new experience of fingerprinting. Borden's visitors were at once consumers of spectacle and objects of surveillance. 4. Professor Michael Coe, personal correspondence. 5. The committee for industrial exhibits chose not to include proposed exhibits which did not further their agenda of linking factory produced food and the future. George Kern of Iowa did not receive space to display his "World Famous Petrified Ham." Part III Freedom for Mrs. 1939: Cooking in the Kitchen of Tomorrow The World of Tomorrow will seem less utopian and more practical to the women than perhaps it does to the men. It fits into the dreams and wishful thinking in which women, particularly mothers of families, have indulged for more than a generation. . . . The fair hopes to prove it isn't enough to install a mechanical refrigerator in one's home. It will show how to get the best use out of that refrigerator for cheaper, better, food and a happier and more leisurely family life. It will even suggest cultural and recreational programs for the employment of the leisure time (NYPL box 209). Exhibits that portrayed the future of the American home situated the typical American housewife right in the World of Tomorrow. Like previous American fairs, the 1939 New York World's Fair had planned to set aside a Women's Pavilion. A committee headed by Mrs. Vincent Astor took on the job of sifting through the diverse submissions for such a pavilion. Ultimately the committee on Women's Exhibits decided it was better not to segregate women in their own pavilion, partly because any such pavilion would necessarily emphasize achievements of the past and not the contribution of women to the World of Tomorrow. As it happened, women were more visible at this fair, and more active behind the scenes, than at any previous American fair, and certainly more so than at the subsequent 1964 World's Fair in New York. Robert Moses, who presided over the 1964 exposition, was harshly critical of Grover Whalen's attention to women's issues in the planning of the 1939 fair. A contemporary remembers Moses complaining that Whelan always had "a bunch of cuties around him and how one would say, 'Grover, we ought to have a dress shop' and there'd be a dress shop at the fair. Moses said something about how he didn't want 'no goddamn babes around me'" (Caro 1974, 815). It is worth noting that the New York World's Fair of 1939 may have been the only American Exposition that did have a men's building. Man, His Clothes, His Parts was a pavilion devoted to men's fashion and leisure, subjects that previously had been set aside for women only. The new American woman would require a new kind of American man. Fairgoers could consider some of the possible roles for this new American woman in an exhibit entitled "Factory Preparation Frees Mrs. 1939," which introduced the focal food exhibit. The exhibit showed a well-dressed young woman surrounded by tiny icons representing sports equipment, playing cards, programs from concerts and a charity bazaar, a psychoanalysis text and a ballot. The focal food exhibit echoed the assertion of the industrial exhibits that the homemaker of tomorrow would be an energetic and sophisticated young woman who played sports, attended concerts, and did good works. She would show psychological insight and civic responsibility. She would not be an overworked unattractive drudge. Factory preparation of food, by freeing women from drudgery, could benefit all of society. The gradual elimination of home cooking was to be good news for the American wife, for the American family, and for the country itself The Potato People Have a Job to Do: Recipes Descriptive and Prescriptive The general housewife does not know how to prepare and cook mushrooms properly. With the large amount of mushrooms now being grown, it is essential that the housewife be educated as to how to prepare them and serve them and with this in mind, the mushroom people contemplate cooking and roasting their product [at the fair] before the public. The artichoke people in California know they must educate the general public to use artichokes. The avocado people are in the same boat and, strange as it may seem, the potato people have a job to do. --Letter from Joseph Sicker to B. S. Pickett of the American Pomological Society. Feb. 28 1940 ( NYPL box 148) None of the shiny new equipment of the future, none of the safe hygienic packaged foods displayed by manufacturers, none of the American produce shown at the fair would do the American family much good if no one knew how to use them, the prerequisite to buying them. The director of fruit and vegetable exhibits, who came on board in 1940, complained that typical Americans, personified again as the "general housewife," do not even know how to cook a potato, let alone such exotic produce as artichokes and avocados. Industrial exhibitors' lively cooking demonstrations and colorful promotional recipe pamphlets included both corporate iconography and images from the fair in their design. Recipes in the pamphlets fulfilled their stated aim of instructing typical American cooks in the use of their products and their underlying mission to increase consumption of those products. The presence of recipes greatly increased the chances that visitors would keep the pamphlets. In these recipes, prepared products, such as dressings and spice combinations, stand in for raw ingredients. They challenge the cook to show her ingenuity in using prepared foods rather than her skill in cooking from scratch. In the Durkee Famous Foods Recipes for a Century of Progress booklet, the "sandwich loaf" is dressed up as a frosted layer cake. I quote this recipe in its entirety to convey the full force of its genius and ghastliness. Sandwich Loaf Remove crust from loaf of sandwich bread and slice legnthwise into four layers. spread slices of bread with Troco or Dinner Bell Margarine, then spread with desired fillings. Here are some suggestions: RED FILLING . . . Ham finely ground, mixed with chopped pimiento and Durkee's mayonnaise. Salmon may be used instead of ham. YELLOW FILLING: Yolks of hard-boiled eggs, grated and mixed with Durkee's Mayonnaise. GREEN FILLING: Sweet pickles, watercress or parsley, olives and nuts, chopped and mixed with Durkee's mayonnaise. WHITE FILLING: Cream cheese, grated cucumber mixed with Durkee's mayonnaise. Tuna fish or chicken may also be used. Put the layers together then wrap loaf tightly in damp cloth or wax paper and chill thoroughly in refrigerator. When ready to serve, cover the loaf with the following mixture: Two packages of cream cheese softened with 8 oz. jar of Durkee's Salad Aid and one teaspoon Durkee's Worcestershire Sauce. Spread on outside of loaf as you would ice a cake. Garnish with slices of stuffed olives, tomatoes, lemon and sprays of parsley. Cut loaf into slices 3/4 inch thick and serve. If desired, two kinds of bread may be used, alternating white and whole wheat (DFF Inc. 1933). This is a recipe for a special occasion. While the ingredients--white bread, margarine, mayonnaise and cream cheese--may themselves be unremarkable, the "layer cake" is. What a cook performs when she prepares this sandwich loaf or any of the many cleverly disguised recipes of this type is not technical skill at cooking--that is merely a mechanical skill better done by machines. Rather, she is performing creativity and playfulness, now that she is liberated from the drudgery of making fresh mayonnaise. The resulting sandwich-cake would be pretty. It would also be a sodden, greasy mess. The recipe is brilliant in its masquerade as a cake, but inconcerned with the flavor or texture of the dish. Similarly, the Sealtest company offered new ideas for that familiar standby, macaroni and cheese. The Macaroni Croquettes recipe instructed the cook to form the cooked macaroni and cheese into balls, roll in beaten eggs and dry crumbs, and deep-fry. Futuristic macaroni would not be served in a shapeless pile on a plate, but in a smooth seamless space-age sphere that recalled the architecture of the Sealtest pavilion and Perisphere itself. The World's Fair also authorized a cookbook of its own, the New York World's Fair Cook Book by Crosby Gaige. The book sweeps over the country twice, once by region and once again by state. "The New York World's Fair Cookbook celebrated regional differences that The World of Tomorrow sought for the most part to erase. Futurama and Democracity were completely a-regional locations. The New York World's Fair Cookbook is one of only a few indicators that becoming typical Americans did not have to mean becoming identical Americans. States' Evidence presents typical menus chosen by home economists at their respective state universities. The menus are emphatically regional in choice and combination of ingredients, as well as in names for dishes. The menu from South Carolina, composed by Mrs. John Hargrove calls for: Berkeley County tomato juice Southern fried chicken Charleston rice Cream Gravy Monetta buttered asparagus Lake City string beans with salt pork Fort Motte artichoke relish Whole wheat biscuit Beaufort lettuce hearts Ambrosia Mother's pound cake Coffee Orangeburg salted pecans (Gaige 1939, 263) The main course of fried chicken with cream gravy is notably southern, and the rice typical of the coastal Carolinas. Lake City string beans may not be different from other string beans, but the practice of seasoning string beans with salt pork is regional. The Wisconsin menu includes "Cheesets," toasted croutons which are midwestern in style and in makeup. Cut day-old bread into slices two inches thick. Cut each slice into four cubes. Dredge in melted Wisconsin Butter, roll in grated Wisconsin hard nippy cheese and bake in preheated oven (300 F.) until puffy and slightly browned. (ten to fifteen minutes). Serve with soup, salad, or at teatime (277). The dishes in the Wisconsin menu promote the state by promoting consumption of the state's major food products--butter and cheese. The attention paid in the New York World's Fair Cookbook to regional differences was only just becoming fashionable in American cookbooks in the 1930's (Levenstein 1993, 37-39; Mendelson 1996, 230). The cookbook was ahead of its time as well in its acknowledgement of "Native American Cookery": The cooks of America ought to raise their best stirring spoons in salute to this friendly standby, [corn] our gift from the first Americans. Thank you Oquagas, Narragansetts, Penobscots, Senecas, Seminoles, Chocktaws, Algonquins, Iroquois, Shoshones, Navahos, Cherokees and all the others (ix)! In 1939 the term "Native American" was more commonly used to distinguish longer established European Americans from recent immigrants than to refer to American Indians.1 When Washday was Sloshday: Re-imagining the Future of Housework Ladies, when you're feeling especially sorry for yourselves, go to FORWARD MARCH AMERICA, the Electric Light and Power Company's exhibit at the New York World's Fair. See how your mothers and grandmothers had to keep house with no more equipment than a crank's stove, broom, washtub and washboard, plus a sad iron. Then push buttons in your own house and see how easy your housekeeping is with Electricity to help you (NYPL box 1435). "When Washday was Sloshday" was one of the many vivid tableaux vivants at the Electric Light and Power Company's exhibit at the fair. A weary woman wearing layers of rags scrubbed clothes on an iron washboard. Exhibitors at the fair, and the numerous women's magazines in which they advertized, repeatedly and strenuously assured women who work in the home that their work was easier than household work had been in the past, and that they themselves were lovelier than their mothers and grandmothers had been. They had never had it better, according to American Cookery: New products for the month! First, brewed coffee put up in cans, all ready to be served hot or cold. Second, paper tea balls, using perforated paper that is waterproof. Life gets easier and easier, doesn't it girls (Ford 1939, 497)? The kitchen of the past was not a nostalgic hearth, but a domestic chamber of horrors from which all American women should be thankful to have escaped. Indeed, the complete absence of any nostalgia for the past distinguishes the World of Tomorrow (Rydell 115; Cusker 117).2 This section examines how various exhibits at the fair presented what was wrong with the American kitchen of the past and how it could be fixed for the future. Cooking would be quicker, easier, and more hygienic. Quicker cooking, this argument ran, would free the American woman to pursue various activities outside the home even though in 1939 housewives in their electrified kitchens may well have been busier than ever (Cowan 1983, 99). The Forward March America exhibit was clearly aimed at women. They were most directly affected by the electrical revolution in the kitchen, and were probably responsible for their families' purchases of equipment. The tone of the Forward March America exhibits was harsh because it was meant to disabuse young American women of any fond illusions about the past. The Electrical Light and Power Company was depending on the women of the future to become educated and enthusiastic consumers of electrical power. Forward March America drove home the point that it was especially women they called to march into forward to the future by pairing their tableau on kitchen work with one on hairdressing. The Electric Light and Power Company abjected the fashions of the past as well as the kitchen technology of the past in a tableau entitled Beauty and the Least: Not only did ladies burden themselves with hair too long for comfort and convenience, but said hair had to be dried slowly with the doubtful help of a palm leaf fan. Next time you girls glibly order a shampoo and finger wave, think of the girls who spent all day getting ready for a date (NYPL box 1435). Westinghouse also made explicit the link between the futures of feminine spheres of kitchen work and grooming when they staged "The Battle of the Centuries," a dishwashing contest between two pretty young women, "Mrs. Drudge," who washed dishes by hand, and "Mrs. Modern," who used a Westinghouse dishwasher. The battle was performed every day in the Westinghouse pavilion, and always pulled a crowd. Mrs. Drudge, with loose shoulder length hair, raced to wash dishes over a steaming sink, while Mrs. Modern, with short styled hair, stood calmly beside her dishwasher. A male narrator gave rapid, ringside commentary, which, along with Mrs. Drudge's pratfalls, elicited appreciative laughter from the audience. At the end, he judged Mrs. Drudge and Mrs. Modern based on speed, cleanliness of the dishes, and appearance of the contestants. The disgusted Mrs. Drudge literally threw in her towel, especially disappointed to have failed in the last category. General Electric's egg-frying demonstration starred four beauties in their bathing suits frying one egg in a bowl hovering over a magnetic core. All these performances showed lovely, composed women, dressed for leisure or play, effortlessly performing the ease that American industry would bring to housework of the future. A woman who became a consumer of their products could complete her household duties without surrendering her female sex-appeal. Popular fiction and advertising from the early 20th century stress that a homemaker must be lovely and serene as well as skilled and devoted (Shapiro 1986, 25). "Make your kitchen a beauty parlor for pots and pans" was the copy of a 1939 magazine advertizement for SOS soap pads,3 and indeed, industrial exhibitors brought the glamour, the indulgence, and the leisure of the beauty parlor into the modern American kitchen, in their exhibits as well as in their advertizing. Two models for the kitchen of tomorrow were the Living Kitchen designed for the America at Home exhibit by Allmon Fordyce, and the Kitchen of the Electrified Farm. The Living Kitchen was one of sixteen model interiors meant to display modernity of design as well as function. Fordyce issued a release indicating what the kitchen of the future would need to be: The "Living Kitchen" is a room for the whole family to live in. Fresh in its approach to the new needs of the modern family, it combines the maximum comfort for daily living and the greatest efficiency for cooking and workspace. . . . The chief function of this kitchen is to lighten the burden of work for the woman who is doing the cooking and housekeeping in her own home and to provide an opportunity for her to share the companionship of her family and friends while she is working. . . . Less than one per cent of the population employ servants. . . . By sharing the room with friends, they are not "slaves" to the job (NYPL box 363). By making the Living Kitchen open to the living and dining rooms of the house, Fordyce assured women that what kitchen work remained in the newly efficient facility was not dirty or demeaning or low-class. On the contrary, making the housewife's kitchen activities visible gave value to her efficiency and attractiveness, rather than to her labor, so much so that the kitchen became an extension of the living and dining rooms--a place of sociability rather than burdensome work. In her kitchen, the housewife could show herself performing technology with perfect ease. In the kitchen at the Electrified Farm a woman prepared food in a very large and well-equipped rural kitchen, explaining all the steps of her work to spectators standing outside the house and looking in the windows. A small microphone around her neck broadcast her voice to the audience outside, whom she did not "see" or acknowledge. The kitchen exhibit, like the rest of the Electrified farm, used naturalistic performances to show how modern electrical equipment would be integrated into everyday life. It showed how, in fact, Typical Americans would come into contact with the World of Tomorrow. The World of Tomorrow promised to change the domestic space the housewife occupied by making her work easier and more interesting. The average housewife would become a new kind of Typical American, Mrs. 1939, whose presence in her kitchen would be ornamental. Her performance would make her visible in a way that would distinguish her tasks from those of servants, who perform their work unseen (Barber 1940b). Time-saving foods and labor-saving appliances having liberated her from the drudgery of heavy kitchen work, she could create whimsical conceits such as the sandwich loaf in the form of the frosted cake, an emblem of how to consume industrial food, use up surplus time, and create the visual effect of effort Notes to part III 1. Gaige's particular interest was spices and herbs, and he took the opportunity to include at the back of the New York World's Fair Cookbook a section he called "The spice shelf today." Under sweet basil, for instance, Gaige wrote, "A little known flavor, it well rewards the experimenter." and suggested using it with tomatoes. Andre Simon especially praised the spice list in his review of the book and called it a valuable reference (Simon 1939, 283). 2. The Electric Light and Power Company exhibition included scenes from the bad old days of gaslight New York. While many historians of the world's fair have noted in retrospect that the credulous utopian enthusiasm for the future seems quaint, it is no more quaint than a longing for an imagined past. 3. One place this advertisement appeared was Woman's Day. April, 1940, 47. Part IV The Typical American Table: Americanizing Etiquette In the World of Tomorrow, not only would architecture become smooth and ovoid and kitchen equipment streamlined, but outmoded coarse behavior would also be refined. Factory- prepared foods, modern electric equipment, and a typical American diet were not to be enough for life in the World of Tomorrow. Shoddy manners, uninformed by modern American etiquette, lagged behind the times and also needed futurizing. Social reformers of the first part of the century regarded the Americanizing of table manners to be among the most important adaptations new immigrants needed to make (Levenstein 1988 105). The America at Home Pavilion opened in 1940, replacing the focal exhibit of the Community Interests Zone, where Mrs. Modern had built her house with a telephone. While in other pavilions at the fair the future of manufacturing and technology was on display, America at Home showed how that technology would affect the future of the home, where many of the new products and inventions exhibited elsewhere at the fair would ultimately be put into practice. Not only did the sixteen model interiors show what the inside of the typical American home of the future might look like, but programs and performances showed what appropriate behavior for everyday activities might look like. The America at Home pavilion was inaugurated with the "All American Dinner," prepared and served by Miss Edith Barber in the Living Kitchen. The All American Dinner was followed by a "Cooking Quiz" on the turntable stage which was at the center of the America at Home pavilion. The menu for the All American Dinner was: Dunking Tray (Vegetables and shrimp with horseradish mayonnaise sauce) Fried Chicken Asparagus Hollandaise Baked Potatoes Little Yeast Rolls Old-Fashioned Strawberry Shortcake Coffee All who attended received a complimentary menu with recipes. At the "Cooking Quiz" after dinner, Miss Barber posed and answered many "controversial" questions about the dinner menu, among them the following: Biscuit dough or cake batter for strawberry shortcake? [The recipe indicated biscuit dough.] Must a man dress for dinner if a woman does? May bread be served at dinner? May coffee be served during the meal? The task of defining the role of the housewife of the future also makes it necessary to define masculinity in the World of Tomorrow. Must the husband of tomorrow dress for dinner? No answer is given in the script, but the performances at the America at Home pavilion indicate that he must. Since the end of the nineteenth century, as American society reacted to the absorption of large waves of immigrants, women, and young women in particular, had been the targets of the urban social reformers who sought to Americanize recent immigrants with the refining influence of etiquette. Frequently the immigrant communities themselves made the connection between manners and Americanization (Joselit 1990, 41). Their daughters--and especially new brides--were the targets of the improving exhibits and performances produced at America at Home. Women, motivated to educate themselves, their husbands and their children, were the vectors for new information. In the fall of 1940, shortly before the fair was to close, America at Home sponsored Bride's Day. On September 29, 1940, any bride who had married in 1940 and showed a wedding certificate to prove it was granted free admission to the fair--husbands still had to pay. Some of the furnishings from the America at Home exhibit were awarded to brides as prizes--at the end of the fair, exhibitors needed to dismantle and dispose of their material. Other prizes were blankets, scales, radios and cookbooks. As the Chicago Jewish Sentinel proclaimed in 1935, a good cookbook is as indispensable to a home as a bed (quoted in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1990, 88). The highlight of the America at Home exhibit was the "Live Dinner Party," which was performed on the turntable stage twice a day for a packed house of two hundred visitors. Helen Sprackling produced the "Live Dinner Party" and acted as the narrator. Two couples sat at an elegantly appointed table eating a dinner served by a uniformed maid and conversed comfortably as they rotated in front of their audience. A narrator in a full-length evening gown stood off to the side and called attention to the proper execution of dinner table protocol. The narrator also pointed out the design of the party. The tablecloth, the dishes, the maid's uniform, and the hostess's dress were all blue and white. The woman guest's dress was white and both the men were in dinner dress. Sparkling emphasized that the performance could entertain and edify, as well as reinforce the wife's leading role in matters of decorum: The auditorium . . . is packed each day at both shows. . . . The show has elicited some very pointed sighs of relief from the women, who have been re-assured on certain troubling points of etiquette (NYPL box 364). The costumes were the same for every performance and so was the menu. Every meal began with Campbell's soup and every meal ended with Jell-O, both major exhibitors at the fair. The four diners at the "Live Dinner Party" ate Campbell's soup and Jell-O twice a day in their tuxedoes whilst spinning around on a turntable.1 Both the All American Dinner and the Live Dinner Party presented, in their different ways, a vision for the future of the American table. At the Live Dinner Party, diners performing correct manners wore formal dress and ate processed foods, while at the All American Dinner, diners wearing informal dress and cooking their own food performed a menu related to heritage. Both offered up a feminized version of the American table where men, lagging behind American women in the sprint to the future, would be refined by codified table manners and gentler, more feminine foods. Both dinner performances were finally performances of consumption. Proper deportment and etiquette elevated the industrially produced food on exhibit at the fair, and elevated the people who prepared and ate it. Enthusiastic attendance at both these model dinners would seem to indicate that almost all of the fairgoers who came to enjoy the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 were striving to become more typical. In the fifteen years since America had severely restricted immigration the country had become more introspective, and it was essential to American homemakers to prove themselves as Europe was sliding into war. That hundreds would pack the house to watch four people eating dinner testifies to how very urgently, how very passionately, Americans of 1940 wanted to do the right thing, the typical thing, if only they knew what it was. Note to Part IV 1. Another production of Sprackling's, a performance entitled "Bringing up Bridget" about how a young housewife should train her first maid, was not performed at the fair. Edith Barber's other book published that year, Speaking of Servants, was not on sale at America at Home along with the Edith Barber Cookbook. V Conclusion: The Future is not What it Used to Be The flavors of the World of Tomorrow that industrial and municipal exhibitors of the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 offered up to American consumers were flavors of a safe, clean future where food, housework, domestic space, and even the deportment of Americans themselves would be different, modern, and better. Americans, in their cooking and eating, would conform to the smooth lines of the fair's futuristic design even as they conformed to one another in their efforts to become "typical." The exhibits that valorized typicality frequently did so by equating typicality with consumption of manufactured and uniform goods--consumption of milk, of packaged food, and of the many electrical appliances that would bring the kitchen up to typical American standards. Marketing techniques appealed to patriotism and conflated good citizenship with good consumerism. Industrial manufacturers planned their exhibits to allow potential consumers to look inside the manufacturing process and see that there was nothing therein about which to be alarmed. The spaces were vast and clean, all vessels were transparent, and, in many cases, all the labor was carried out by lovely young women. Food of the future as presented at the fair would be more packaged, more processed, and more synthetic. In 1939 many felt this was good news. Processed and packaged food stood not for tastelessness but for safety and hygiene. The fair's exhibits urged women in particular to steer the way for their families in their electrified kitchens--kitchens in which they would no longer be confined as in the old days, but to which they would willingly return time and again, to indulge in recreational cooking in-between their diverting and self-improving activities. In these open and comfortable kitchens, women of the future using factory prepared foods could whip up impressive and decorative creations that delighted guests and flattered the decorative cook herself. American housewives would also have the pleasure of serving food to their families in a casually elegant atmosphere. Uncouth behavior would be as out of place in the World of Tomorrow as a washboard or crank's stove. The world of tomorrow would be an America of the future where automobiles would rule the roads, machinery would make the lives of American workers safer and easier in the factory and in the home. Cooking and eating in particular were to be more streamlined and more hygienic as prepared foods and futuristic equipment entered the American lifespace. Food exhibits at the New York World's Fair 1939-1940 invited visitors to throw off the outmoded prejudices of the past and feast on the future. Sources Items identified by box number are from the New York World's Fair 1939-40 collection of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation. I am endlessly grateful to Bonnie Slotnick for the amazing World's Fair promotional recipe pamphlets. Warm thanks to Alfred J. Witte for access to his collection. Reference List An entirely synthetic supply. 1938. New York Times, January 10, 16:3. Caro, Robert A. 1974. The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. New York: Knopf. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1980. More work for Mother: The ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. New York: Harper. Cummings, Carlos E. 1940. East is East and West is West: Some observations on the World's Fairs of 1939 by one whose main interest is museums. Buffalo: Bulletin of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, Volume XX. Cusker, Joseph P. 1990. World of Tomorrow: The 1939 New York World's Fair. 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In Exhibiting cultures: The poetica and politics of museum display, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Levenstein, Harvey A. 1988. Revolution at the table: The transformation of the American diet. New York: Oxford University Press. ________. 1993 Paradox of plenty: A social history of eating in modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. MacMillen, C.E. 1939. Foreign chefs at fair praise gas kitchens. Gas Age, October 12, 48-50 and 68. Man's future depends on what he decides to eat. 1938. Scientific Monthly 46(April):374. Mandelson, Anne. 1996. Stand facing the stove: The story of the women who gave America The Joy of Cooking. New York: Henry Holt. Marinetti, Filippo T. 1989. Futurist cookbook. Translated by Suzanne Brill. London: Trefoil Publications Ltd. Miller, I.C. 1940. What makes a World's Fair exhibit click? Food Industries 12 (January)55-59. New York Museum for Science and Industry. 1940. 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New York: Pantheon. Tatomirovic, Aleksandra. 1985. The United Nations as sacred place and tourist attraction: Experiences of a tour guide. Graduate Paper, Tourist Productions, Department of Performance Studies. New York: New York University. We are not a nation of Elmers. 1940. The Sayre Pennsylvania Evening Times June 15, n.p. World of Tomorrow miracles with Minute Tapioca. 1939. General Foods Corp. Promotional recipe pamphlet. Zim, Larry, Mel Lerner and Herbert Rolfes. 1988. The World of Tomorrow: The 1939 New York World's Fair. New York: Harper and Row. Jochnowitz ** 1