Lyndon Johnson's 1964 World's Fair Prophesies

For those of us of a certain age, it seems difficult to believe that it has been nearly fifty years since the last world's fair took place here in New York City. It was 46 years ago, to be exact, that President Lyndon Johnson arrived in Flushing, Queens to deliver a speech on the fair's opening day, April 22, 1964. It had been six months--to the day--since Johnson had been thrust into the presidency upon the assassination of President Kennedy. The country was still in mourning, and the early days of the Johnson administration had largely been devoted to restoring confidence and some optimism to a people still grieving and still in shock.

A time would come, in the not too distant future, when Johnson would not be able to appear in New York City without thousands of anti-war protesters greeting him with the chilling chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?", but that still lay ahead. It was a sad honeymoon period in the Johnson presidency, but compared to what would come later, a honeymoon it was. Still ahead, too, was the 1964 election in which the prospect of a President Barry Goldwater would so frighten the American people that Johnson would finally take office in his own right with one of the greatest landslides in the history of American presidential elections. And thus, the time was ideal, on a blustery spring morning on the plains of Flushing Meadow Park, for Johnson to make an inspirational speech.

I watched the speech earlier in the evening on City Classics, a television show that goes into the city's archives and takes a look at its past history, and I was struck as much by what Johnson got right in his stab at prophecy as what he got wrong. It was natural for Johnson, a product of New Deal liberalism and an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt, to turn with some pride to what the nation had achieved since the previous World's Fair held in New York City in 1939, a year in which the U.S. was still suffering through the Depression but beginning to look ahead to better times:

The last time New York had a World's fair, we also tried to predict the future. A daring exhibit proclaimed that in the 1960's it would really be possible to cross the country in less than 24 hours, flying as high as 10,000 feet; that an astounding 38 million cars would cross our highways. There was no mention of outer space, or atomic power, or wonder drugs that could destroy disease.

These were bold prophecies back there in 1939. But, again, the reality has far outstripped the vision.

Now it was Johnson's turn at the role of prophet, and, as he peered into the future, he said:

I prophesy peace is not only possible in our generation, I predict that it is coming much earlier. If I am right, then at the next world's fair, people will see an America as different from today as we are different from 1939.

They will see an America in which no man must be poor.

They will see an America in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin or the nature of his belief--and no man will be discriminated against because of the church he attends or the country of his ancestors.

They will see an America which is solving the growing problems of crowded cities, inadequate education, deteriorating national resources and decreasing national beauty.

They will see an America concerned with the quality of American life--unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction--concerned not only that people have more, but that people shall have the best.

Although no new world's fair is currently scheduled to take place here in New York, now, half a century later, we can take stock of just how well President Johnson did in his role as a prophet. The reader may share with me a certain chill at the accuracy of his first sentence: "I prophesy peace is not only possible in our generation, I predict that it is coming much earlier." Johnson, of course, had no way of being able to foresee wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, and even if he had the ability to do so, would have considered such adventures far less significant than the over-riding concern for his generation of post World War II politicans, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It would be exactly 50 years after the 1939 World's Fair took place that the Berlin Wall would come down, soon taking with it the entire structure of Soviet communism, and hopefully the threat of a global nuclear holocaust. Whether a product of optimism or genuine political insight, in this first prediction, Johnson amazingly got it right.

In just the brief moment in which we have to celebrate this bit of political perspicacity, however, a far different mood begins to emerge upon his uttering the very next sentence: "If I am right, then at the next world's fair, people will see an America as different from today as we are different from 1939." Listening to the speech in 1964, an audience might well have concluded, (as many did after the fall of the Soviet Union), that the differences one would see in such an America would all be positive, that there would be enormous post cold war "peace dividends." Instead, in the light of what has actually taken place since 1989, Johnson's next predictions have a truly tragic resonance.

"They will see an America in which no man must be poor."

The president who would come to initiate the "War on Poverty" during his tenure almost fifty years ago might be surprised to find that, according to the Census Bureau, one in five American children live in poverty, precisely the same number that existed while he was in office, and that, in 2009, the number of Americans living in poverty rose to an estimated 43.6 million.

"They will see an America in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin..."

The president who, just four months after this speech would sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law and, a year later, sign the Voting Rights Act, might well take pride in the truly revolutionary changes that have taken place in the lives of Black Americans. That a Black man would be elected president in 2008 might both surprise and be a source of intense pride. Nevertheless, a nation in which "no man is handicapped by the color of his skin" remains an as yet unrealized (and, according to some pessimists, a systemically impossible) goal. Furthermore, the deep divisions that the '64 and '65 civil rights legislation engendered continue to play havoc not merely with the prospects for racial harmony and integration, (the Kerner Commission's own prophesy of "two societies, one white and one black--separate and unequal" having been largely realized), but have evolved into a "red states, blue states" dichotomy that, while there is a constant undercurrent of race, has taken on the characteristics of a far broader and deeper, almost theological schism.

"...or the nature of his belief--and no man will be discriminated against because of the church he attends or the country of his ancestors."

On this score, Johnson can certainly be forgiven his lack of foresight since it would be hard to find even a single American who, in 1964, could have foreseen the era of Islamophobia, "Islamofascists" and the mere possibility of a debate about locating a Muslim house of worship on a particular piece of real estate. It would probably be indelicate even to speculate on the images that the word "Muslim" conjured up in the citizenry of 1964. "Gobalization" as we now know it was more the stuff of science fiction novels than a real prospect for the near future.

"They will see an America which is solving the growing problems of crowded cities, inadequate education, deteriorating national resources and decreasing national beauty."

Here, too, the pace of progress has been disappointing--to put it mildly. For a while it seemed that our nation was going in the direction not of crowded but of depopulated cities, depopulated by the aftermath of "burn, baby, burn," white flight to the suburbs, a spreading rust belt and red-lining by the worlds of banking and finance. One may no longer see the word "ghetto" in print, its having been replaced by the euphemistic "inner-city" jargon, but the ghettos are still there. Little progress has been made in education reform, and black children in Northern ghettos are now more segregated than their brothers and sisters in the schools of the former Confederacy. In spite of the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history, the multi-billionaires of our own era seem not to have the propensity for building libraries and museums that the so-called "robber barons" of the past bestowed upon urban centers in the past, most American cities now having been abandoned for all-white enclaves and gated communities on what was not so long ago farm land. The preoccupation of President Johnson's wife, "Lady Bird" Johnson, with highway beautification now seems quaint, her desire to "leave this splendor for our grandchildren" a piquant historical artifact in an era of profound decay of infrastructure.

"They will see an America concerned with the quality of American life--unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction--concerned not only that people have more, but that people shall have the best." (Bold mine.)

It is here, in President Johnson's final prophesy, that we find the key, the very essence of why so much that his speech looks forward to has failed to be realized. While his speech must be credited with having alluded to this core understanding of how a "great society" is maintained and developed, tragically, the nation has proven itself all too willing "to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction." It is our willingness to accept public deprivation that explains the absence of public transportation, health, housing and education standards that the rest of what we proudly call the "civilized world" takes for granted. The New Deal liberalism that produced Lyndon Johnson's public philosophy has now been subsumed under the rhetoric of creeping socialism and dread Europeanization. The prevailing philosophy of the post-modern United States, antithetical to the naive utopianism of both old world philosophies and the hopeful optimism that prevailed at both the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs has resulted in a land resembling Brecht's Mahogonny, a land dominated by what another European writer, the Englishman Thomas Carlyle, in 1839 described as "the cash nexus." "You get what you pay for," Mr. and Mrs. America. No state subsidized bullet trains for us, no national health insurance, no adequately funded public schools. A nation not merely of two races--separate and unequal, but of two classes--separate and unequal: the very, very rich and the rest of us.