Defunctland: The History of the 1964 New York World’s Fair (Kevin Perjurer Productions, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly interesting video on the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair and the clash of the ego titans between Robert Moses and Walt Disney – this came from a Web site called “Defunctland,” https://defunctland.com, which seems to specialize in stories about Disney, Universal and their theme parks from a “black” perspective. I had already read bits of the story in the “black” biographies of Robert Moses, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and Walt Disney, The Disney Version by Richard Schickel. Caro’s book is over 1,000 pages and incredibly detailed (and has set the consensus view of Moses ever since – that he was a racist creep who as he got older and harder of hearing became more and more out of touch with the public he was ostensibly serving – while Schickel’s, written just after Disney’s death, had little to do with the World’s Fair and the attractions he created for it (many of which are mainstays of Disney’s theme parks today – the Enchanted Tiki Room, It’s a Small World and the electromechanical Abraham Lincoln, which my old junior-college friend Richmond Young praised for its writers’ skillful cherry-picking of Lincoln’s actual speeches to create a mishmash that would appeal to just about everyone’s political sensibilities, from hard-Right to far-Left, and leave them thinking, “Lincoln thought about things the same way ! do!”). Schickel was particularly intimidated by the whole concept of “audio-animatronics,” which allowed robotic figures to come to visible life and speak dialogue (though there’s a funny part of the Defunctland video about how Walt Disney directed the actor recording Lincoln’s lines and essentially browbeat him into giving the “worried Lincoln” performance he wanted).

Disney’s Lincoln debuted about a decade after the science-fiction writer Walter M. Miller, Jr. wrote “The Darfsteller,” in which both live plays and movies have been replaced by “autodramas,” shows enacted in live space and real time by tape-controlled robots, and the hero of his story is one of the few remaining living actors who sneaks his way into a show otherwise being acted by robots. Miller is best known for his magnum opus, the three-part novel A Canticle for Liebowitz (1959), which would make one of the great dystopian sci-fi film cycles if anyone ever films it, but I treasure his other work, particularly “Dark Benediction,” which anticipates Canticle in suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church would become the channel by which civilization would be preserved after a catastrophe destroyed it (nuclear war in Canticle, a space-brought plague in “Dark Benediction”) but also seemed to me to be one of the best, if not the absolute best, worldwide plague story and one of the first books I ordered from Amazon.com as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started (along with Alfred Crosby’s 1976 book America’s Forgotten Pandemic, about the 1918-1919 flu pandemic; when I read the book about suffragists and their last push to get women the vote in the U.S. I was struck by the irony of Woodrow Wilson’s role: “Ah, a racist, sexist President who ignored a pandemic. Where have we seen that one since?”)

Anyway, the Defunctland video on the 1964 World’s Fair portrayed Moses as a crotchety old man with wildly outdated notions about what constituted popular entertainment (as Caro noted in his book, Moses was used to building bridges and toll roads people would have to pay to use, not putting on a show to which people would have to be persuaded to buy tickets), antagonizing the Bureau of International Expositions [BIE] (which had a rule that no country could host two World’s Fairs in the same decade, and the organizers of the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 had played by the rules and got the BIE’s approval while Moses publicly insulted them as “three people living in a dumpy apartment in Paris”) and really interested not in the Fair itself but in turning enough of a profit that he could turn the site (Flushing Meadows in Queens) into a huge urban park that would be named “Robert Moses Park.” It was a fascinating program about the clash of the ego titans and the nexus of government and corporate power – and in a way Moses anticipated the modern era in which governments have pulled back from funding major enterprises and egomaniacs in the private sector have taken over (as witness the current space race between Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to see who can get up their rockets first and farthest and fastest – as I’ve told Charles, in the late 19th century men with more money than they knew what to do with, the first Gilded Age tycoons who took advantage of economic policies that were making the rich insanely richer and starving everyone else, spent their money on what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” and in particular built ocean-worthy yachts, the modern-day multibillionaires of the second Gilded Age build rockets and launch themselves into space, turning the stars into a playground for the rich and preparing to escape the planet while the rest of us are left behind to live the plot of John Brunner’s mega-dystopian novel The Sheep Look Up in real life).

Just as Moses responded to the Bureau of International Expositions’ boycott call (their refusal to approve of his fair meant that countries which were signatories to the BIE treaty couldn’t have officially sponsored government pavilions) by appealing to the private sector, allowing American corporations to turn it into a gigantic trade fair and also encouraging corporations from other countries to sponsor pavilions that would bear the names of their countries but without government involvement so the countries would be in at least technical compliance with the BIE treaty. Moses also locked anyone building a pavilion at the fair into using the contractors he selected (essentially the ones he’d always used as part of his power network) and allowing themselves to be gouged by these people – at one point the people running the Spanish pavilion, outraged by how much they were being charged for trash service, threatened to dump their garbage in the reflecting pool around the Unisphere, the metallic globe that was supposed to be the Fair’s icon. The story is a fascinating one and it was quite interesting to hear it again – and to see actual clips from the time of the World’s Fair and the people involved in it, including Walt Disney at work on creating a vision of electromechanical entertainment and the futurism of the so-called “EPCOT” (“Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow”) that would eventually be incorporated into Walt Disney World in Florida (for which Disney,.once again anticipating the tycoons of today, incorporated his own city so he wouldn’t have to deal with the pesky demands of a city government the way he had to with Anaheim at Disneyland) – but only, as the Defunctland documentary wryly notes at the end, after Walt Disney the person had died (of lung cancer he almost certainly got from his lifetime habit of major amounts of smoking).