by Johannah Herr and Cara Marsh Sheffler

“There is no system more corrupt than a system that represents itself as the example of freedom, the example of democracy, and can go all over this earth telling other people how to straighten out their house, when you have citizens of this country who have to use bullets if they want to cast ballots.”

—Malcolm X

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Yesterday, there was a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. Twenty-five years apart, in the very heart of the American Century, two World’s Fairs were held in Flushing Meadows, Queens, in 1939 and 1964. On the precipice of World War and at the height of the Cold War, the world descended upon New York City, to see what the future might hold. Beginning in the 1850s at London’s Crystal Palace, grand exhibitions to showcase industrial might and innovation captured the public imagination, eventually evolving into the multi-national recurring phenomenon of World’s Fairs. These fairs, at the height of their popularity, occurred every five years and drew participating nations the world over. The 1964 Fair contained multitudes: everything from underwater hotels and lasers in the jungle to Billy Graham and dinosaurs. But, most importantly, it contained a vision of tomorrow. 

Last year, we published our third book together as ¡AGITPOP! Press, an artist-writer duo. Official Guide: I Have Seen the Future initially served as an accompaniment to Johannah’s body of artwork of the same title. Our tongue-in-cheek “guide” offers a speculative vision of what the 1964 World’s Fair would have looked like had it accurately predicted the present day. Images of Johannah’s bright, flocked architectural models from the show are featured as pavilion theme centers, alongside appropriated critical text posed as attractions and rides; advertisements with altered text; and Cara’s essays, inviting us to question who was modeling our future and why. 

For Syllabus, we have chosen to explore the research component of our book and present it as a course’s actual syllabus, complete with activities, screenings, and assigned reading. Those who complete our online course will achieve—if, sadly, no actual credentials—an insight into how to apply research-driven, intersectional thinking to any headline in the news. We believe that it is by scrutinizing yesterday’s hopes for tomorrow that we can best understand how we ended up where we are today.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. Understand the extent and contemporary implications of government and corporate collusion beginning in the wake of WWII.
2. Expose the relationship between Cold War propaganda and American consumerism.
3. Understand the formative role segregation played in the design of the American suburb and, consequently, acquisition of wealth in postwar America.
4. Examine the inextricable connection between the military-industrial complex and the “Space Race.”
5. Deconstruct the two following myths:
   1. That of the US as a good actor in international development (beginning with the Marshall Plan), and
   2. That of the “Third World Country.” 
6. Understand the connection between the United States’ place on the world stage and environmental degradation.
7. Gain an intersectional understanding of how state-sanctioned violence built the American Century. 
8. Demonstrate an ability to apply a comprehension of systems of oppression to the present news cycle, domestically or internationally. 

COURSE UNITS

Taking its cues from the Official Guide New York World’s Fair 1964 / 1965, our Guide is divided into chapters according to the following themes: The American Home, Urban Renewal, Transportation, Food, Science & Education, International, and Communication. (The collages below incorporate imagery from the book as well as the aforementioned sculptures Johannah built as architectural models of each pavilion’s theme center.) The units of our course will follow the same structure. The readings and screenings are culled from source material from the research that went into writing and designing the book; the activities and field trips are intended as edifying complements to and sometimes physical manifestations of that research. 

We have also included an introductory unit to outline the pioneering public-private partnership that funded the 1964 Fair—and will look very familiar to contemporary eyes. Collusion is at the heart of all the research we undertook, and aim to share with this course. 

The future was always brought to you by Exxon Mobil.

…and General Motors, US Steel, Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemical—the list goes on! 

Crucially, the 1964 Fair was sponsored by these and so many other corporations. When we set about creating our guide, we were drawn to the World’s Fair in the World’s Capital (which also happens to be our home). But actually there were two World’s Fairs in Queens, one in 1939 and one in 1964. Both were helmed by the same man, Robert Moses. 

Moses serves as a critical character in our course. Though he held many titles over many decades in New York, his legacy as a builder of roads, parks, housing projects, stadiums, and so much more is rivaled only by his personal corruption and racist views that defined the mark he left on New York. His blueprint for development and public-private partnerships was copied throughout the country. The economic minefield of segregation he imposed on entire neighborhoods condemned generations to poverty. 

Robert Moses was also President of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, but there is a crucial difference between the two. The 1939 Fair was sanctioned by the World’s Fair Paris-based governing body. The 1964 one was not. As such, it required funding from the private sector . For that reason—despite the Art Deco aesthetic seductions of the earlier fair—our book focuses on 1964. 

The corporate sponsorship of the 1964 Fair made it feel hideously contemporary to us. Corporations in 2023 are legally people and functionally more powerful than many governments. Some have even suggested giving large, multinational companies seats in the United Nations (yet another Robert Moses building project, as covered in our International Unit). By learning how the corporate bottom line has come to not merely inform, but dictate, domestic and foreign policy, we can better understand the power structures that control our lives.  

Activities: 

• Follow the Money! Collusion Mind Map: Select a handful of major corporations, political races, government agencies, and campaign donations. Write out on a piece of paper. Connect the dots until you have an entirely black page. Feel free to use this map as a starting point. 
• Listening Activity: Compare the lyrics to Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” and Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Part II” to get a sense of different cultural legacies from Queens and the career of Robert Moses (the architect of both the World’s Fair referred to in the former song and the Queensbridge Houses in the latter). 

Field Trip: 

• “The World’s Borough”: Visit Flushing Meadows and the Queens Museum—take a trip on the 7 train to the 1964 World’s Fair grounds and make sure not to miss the Panorama. 

Reading List: 

• Official Guide New York World’s Fair 1964 / 1965 – The original World’s Fair Guide provides a lay of the land and an understanding of the model our book followed 
• Official Guide: I Have Seen the Future, ¡AGITPOP! Press – This provides the source material for our course and the synthesis of all of our research. You will also see the aesthetics and design of the original Guide leveraged to reveal intentionally obscured histories; relevant to this unit, our Guide contains “hacked” advertisements with critical text woven throughout, subverting the role of advertising in the original fair, while exposing the advertisers. We will refer to this Guide throughout the course. 
• Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s by Robert Haddow – An examination of the link between Cold War consumer propaganda and “exposition” culture, this book explains the corporate and cultural motivations behind the Fair. 
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro – Considered by some to be the best biography ever written, Caro’s exhaustively researched portrait of Moses also served as a takedown of a man who was once an indomitable public figure. We will refer to this book throughout the course. 

In 1964, The American Home was on the move! Across the land, the American family migrated to a new and verdant frontier: the suburb. This unit is dedicated to exploring this newly settled outpost and its vanguard, Levittown, Long Island.

The history of the American suburb is one in the same with the history of segregation. Levittown was fundamentally segregated using an ugly legal tool: a racial covenant. Home ownership deeds in Levittown featured race restrictions that were nearly impossible to remove, as did countless similarly modeled suburbs throughout the nation. The result was the phenomenon known as “White Flight,” in which white families left American cities, quite literally, for greener pastures while minorities were left stranded in under-served urban environments, with far fewer opportunities to accrue generational wealth (more on that in the following unit). 

However, while the model community was deliberately white-washed and guarded by a white picket fence, many also felt trapped within by a sense of stifling conformity—notably women. This unit will also look at the beginnings of Second Wave feminism as a response to the advent of the suburb. 

Activity:

• Title & Deed: For this unit, look at the deed on your present home, the home you grew up in, or a relative’s home and see what—if any—racially restrictive covenants you find. 

Field Trip: 

• Burb Excursion: Take a trip back to where it all began, Levittown, Long Island. (For extra credit, take public transit.) Before your trip, research original building models and community regulations, then compare to what you find. (NB, contrary to stereotype, white picket fences were actually banned from Levittown originally—as was all fencing, of the literal sort.) 

Screening: 

• Revolutionary Road – The film adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel falls firmly into the horror genre for many viewers, offering a damning glimpse into the corrosive effect of the suburb. 

Reading List:

• The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan – This seminal text of Second Wave feminism became a battlecry for a generation of women at once coddled and trapped by gender equality and kept out of the workforce. Although criticized for portraying a uniquely white and privileged experience (the poor have always worked), the book defined a movement and helped usher in an era. 
• Was Postwar Suburbanization “White Flight”? Evidence From The Black Migration, Leah Platt Boustan – Platt Boustain draws a definitive link between the phenomenon of the suburbs and postwar segregation. 
• “Cold War Leftovers,” The LA Times, Denise Hamilton – A look back at the peculiar phenomenon of the fallout shelter. 
• White Flight!, ¡AGITPOP! Press – The fourth book by the course’s instructors, White Flight! accompanied Johannah’s show “I Have Seen the Future: American Home Pavilion.” The show imagined a model home torn directly from the pages of our Guide; this book serves as a riff on suburban circular, taking cues from Levittown’s own “Thousand Lanes.”    

Following our unit on the suburbs, we will study how the other half lives. The housing project was ostensibly marketed to replace the slum (famously documented in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives). However, Robert Moses’ agenda of “slum clearance” was often little more than a land-grab fueled by greedy developers and informed by Moses’ own notorious racism. 

Bastardizing Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” Moses created large, charmless structures that effectively ghettoized entire neighborhoods. As minorities were blocked from many benefits of the GI Bill as well as barred from home ownership through redlining and other exclusionary banking and legal tools, generational wealth could not accrue around the projects. Those who did manage to hold onto property they owned watched real estate values plummet. Urban decay soon accompanied a vicious cycle of poverty and violence.   

Activities:

• Eminent Domain Mini Golf: Pages 57-58 of our Guide feature an imaginary attraction, “Eminent Domain Mini Golf,” billed as, “18 holes where once there were thriving neighborhoods!” For this unit, you will make a golf course from similar research about your own community, using ours as a model. 

Field Trip: 

• Out of Order, NYCHA Edition: Head over to the nearest New York City Housing Authority buildings to you and take a survey on how many elevators are operational. Note how many stories these buildings have, the presence of lead paint, and overall state of maintenance for the tenants who live there. 

Screening: 

• A Dream Deferred: The Broken Promise of New York City Public Housing – PBS’ devastating documentary on the failures of public housing. 

Reading List:

• Dorsey v Stuytown Corp. – The text of the court case that kept Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village (Mitchell-Lama developments in Manhattan intended for WWII veterans on the GI Bill) segregated to whites-only. 
• “How Lincoln Center Was Built (It Wasn’t Pretty),” The New York Times, Keith Williams – A short, illustrative article on the “slum clearance” of the West Side of Manhattan around what is today Lincoln Center (and what previously had been the setting for West Side Story). 
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro – We will focus on the postwar chapters that handle the New York City Housing Authority. 
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein – A gripping read that thoroughly explains the rise of redlining and other legal and economic tactics to enforce urban segregation. 
• The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs – The most famous book by Robert Moses’ greatest foe, Jane Jacobs. A resident of the West Village, Jacobs stood down Moses’ plans for a highway intended to bisect Lower Manhattan (and raze Soho), organizing her community into an oppositional force. 

As residents of New York City suffered the consequences of urban renewal, automobile culture thrived. Eisenhower’s Highway System, though conceived of to move military materiel, helped spur the market for cars in the US and quash plans for mass transit. Fossil fuels were needed and Detroit’s auto plants boomed. 

Often accused of building for cars more than for people, Robert Moses was a champion of highways—even in the heart of New York. The entire neighborhood of East Tremont was infamously claimed by eminent domain and its residents displaced to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, which prioritized the convenience of residents of West Chester and Bergen County over New Yorkers. 

In total, Robert Moses built 627 miles of road in New York city, but one mile in East Tremont saw 54 apartment buildings razed and 1,530 families displaced. The story of the single mile that the Cross Bronx cleared in East Tremont is emblematic of a larger strategy of eminent domain: people get out of the way so the car can roam free. We will study the legacy of bisected neighborhoods, pedestrian deaths, and pollution.  

Activity:

• Play In Traffic! Take a tour of the deadliest intersections in New York City (most are adjacent or within some form of Moses development) and assess your various experiences crossing the street. 

Field Trip: 

• Life’s a Beach! Robert Moses infamously created low overpasses on his highways that buses could not go under, rendering many leisure destinations he developed, like Jones Beach, as bastions of white privilege—even if working class ones. Try your hand at taking public transportation to various area beaches. 

Reading List:

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro – We will closely read the aforementioned chapter about the razing of East Tremont. 
• Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, Angie Schmitt – This book compellingly lays out the human cost of urban planning that favors cars—and makes clear which communities shoulder the greatest burden.
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein – We will focus on the chapters that handle urban planning and highways. 
• Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs – We will read about environmental crises around traffic and how this sector of urban planning helps divide rich and poor, alienating cities’ denizens from one another. 

Paradoxically, the population of the richest country in the world is simultaneously malnourished and obese. The United States is a country that prides itself on the notion of “the Heartland” and farmers, where presidential candidates are obliged to eat corndogs and kiss babies at State fairs. Yet, the US is fed largely by Big Agriculture and its population is less than 20% rural. Meanwhile, American cities host shameful “food deserts” where healthy eating choices are nearly impossible to come by. 

This unit focuses on what we call “the food pyramid scheme,” and how profits both crushed the small farmer (while valorizing that image) and deprived inner cities of nourishing food (while castigating those therein). The collateral damage inflicted on our privatized and deliberately opaque health care system will also be touched upon. 

Activity:

• Play Supermarket Sweep: Food Desert Edition! Taking the game show in reverse, go shopping in a food desert on a food stamp budget. Once your cart is full of Olde English, Hostess, Goya, etc, assess the nutritional value of what you were able to buy. Also note the state, availability, and price of fresh produce. 

Field Trip: 

Super Size Yourself! In the spirit of the movie (see below), meal plan for the week at McDonald’s only and track what it does to your body.  

Screening: 

• Super Size Me – Morgan Spurlock subjects his body to an all-McDonald’s diet for one month to see just how much damage it causes. 

Reading List:

• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Eric Schlosser – In the muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Schlosser exposes fast food as an industry that is literally killing Americans.  
• Silent Spring, Rachel Carson – Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book on the harms of DDT proved to be a foundational text of US environmental activism. 
• Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, John Gregory Dunne – Dunne worked with Cesar Chavez to create an account of the Grape Strike and the migrant farm workers’ struggle for rights. 
• “Scientists Are Examining Some Long-Expired Twinkies to See What’s Wrong With Them,” Food and Wine, Jelisa Castrodale – A short piece on the Twinkie: food that decidedly does not nourish, yet is emblematic of American culture.

Did you know the journey to the moon started with the London Blitz? In this unit, we study the Space Race and its role in the Cold War, putting a great deal of emphasis on Operation Paperclip. 

Although WWII was ostensibly fought to “defeat the Germans,” after the war, the US Government brought over dozens of Nazi scientists to help defeat the USSR in the Space Race. These included NASA rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, who worked with Walt Disney to produce pro-science government propaganda for children. 

Nazis were allowed incredible levels of security clearance and societal influence while multiple sectors of American government and industry were purging those deemed to be too Left during the Red Scare. Additionally, some of these Nazi scientists were responsible for the invention and propagation of chemicals including Agent Orange and Napalm. 

Activities:

• DIY War Crimes: For this unit, we invite you to go into your own garage or local hardware store and see if you have at hand what it takes to make your own Napalm or Agent Orange. You might be shocked at how easy it is to obtain the necessary ingredients. 

Field Trip

• Super Fund Scavenger Hunt: Go to your nearest Superfund Cleanup Site (e.g., Gowanus, Newtown Creek, etc) and test the water and soil. 

Screenings:

• Doctor Strangelove, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb – Stanley Kubrick’s hilarious and extremely nihilistic satire of the Cold War, written and filmed at the height of the conflict.
• Disney’s Man in Space – Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney’s Space Race propaganda film, watched by nearly 40 million American viewers when first aired.  

Reading List:

• Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, Annie Jacobsen – An exhaustively researched exposé of the project that actively recruited Nazis as the Third Reich was falling—so named for the “paperclipping” of material over parts of scientists’ dossiers that mentioned their Nazi affiliations.
• Hiroshima, John Hersey – A devastating and up-close account of the damage done by the atomic bomb in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.
• “Hitler’s Willing Business Partners” The Atlantic, Jack Beatty – An article explaining how IBM collaborated directly with Nazis.

In our Guide, we featured an image of Johannah’s sculpture, “The Unilateral Unisphere.” A satire of the Unisphere, the centerpiece of the 1964 World’s Fair that still stands in Flushing Meadows, Queens, the land masses of the “Unilateral Unisphere” are recognizable chunks of the United States broken up across the globe, to the exclusion of all other countries. (Additionally, the rocket orbiting the globe is a Saturn V rocket, engineered by known Nazi war criminal and Operation Paperclip participant, Arthur Rudolph.) 

The sculpture is intended as a send-up of the US desire to spread “democracy” quite literally across the globe. It also portrays a worldview in which Americans look abroad and only see themselves, or simply do not know simple geography. Beyond warfare, the US has created a world in its own image through capitalistic diplomacy, trade agreements, expos, and appliances.  As we say in the Guide (in reference to a Disney ride debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair): “it’s a small world, after all—when you don’t really consider anything outside of America!” This unit drills down into the root of that blinkered worldview. 

Activity: 

• Private Sector Model UN: The UN has 193 member states, each considered a sovereign nation. However, as mentioned earlier, some  have suggested giving large, multinational companies seats in the United Nations. For this activity, look up the 193 wealthiest corporations in the world and see how their worth measures up against member states’ GDPs.  

Field Trip: 

• East Side Story: Visit the United Nations, a Robert Moses development. 

Screening: 

• The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara – Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning documentary provides an unflinching interview with the “best and brightest” architect of the Vietnam War—and his journey from the meritocracy to the military to the auto industry to the State Department and, finally, to the World Bank.  
• The Vietnam War – Ken Burns’ award-winning, expansive documentary on the war. 

Reading List:

• Napalm: An American Biography, Robert M. Neer – A wrenching account of the damage this chemical, a hallmark of US warfare in the Vietnam War, has wrought. And, yes, Napalm was first concocted in a lab by a Nazi scientist brought to the US by Operation Paperclip. 
• “World War II, Race, and the Southeast Asian Origins of the Domino Theory,” Wilson Center, Wen-Qing Ngoei – An intersectional appraisal of the root causes of US involvement in 20th-century conflicts throughout East Asia. 
• United Nations Charter – The founding document of the UN. 
• “Malcolm X and Anti-Imperialist Thought,” Black Perspectives, Russell Rickford – An appreciation of Malcolm X as an anti-colonial advocate across borders. 

Our final unit examines the fatal intersection between imperialism, domestic racism, and surveillance. Surveillance is at the rotten core of state-sanctioned violence. While Hollywood sold us sexy spycraft through the personage of James Bond, and whose enemies luxuriated in exotic Caribbean lairs or simply in Moscow, the FBI quite literally hunted down American civil rights leaders. The same military-industrial complex created ostensibly to protect us from the USSR and its agitators was, in reality, used to gun down any threat to social order on US soil. 

Activity:

• When NSA Does Not Stand For “No Strings Attached”: Surveil yourself! Using government information, public records, and your own digital footprint, come up with the most compromising, damning dossier someone could build on you. Destroy at once.

Field Trip: 

• Roadtrip! Volunteer State Edition: Take a ride to Tennessee to visit The Lorraine Motel and the National Civil Rights Museum.   

Screenings: 

• Angels In America – Mike Nichol’s adaptation of Tony Kushner’s epic play about the Rosenbergs, Roy Cohn, Mormonism, AIDS, and much, much more.
• Malcolm X – Spike Lee’s award-winning biography of the murdered civil rights leader. 
• From Russia With Love – The second James Bond film and Pro-Western propaganda at its finest.  

Reading List:

• The so-called “FBI – King suicide letter” – An FBI-penned letter sent anonymously to Martin Luther King, Jr. urging him to kill himself in the midst of a campaign of surveillance, blackmail, and terrorism J. Edgar Hoover had covertly undertaken.
• “What an Uncensored Letter Reveals,” The New York Times Magazine, Beverly Gage – Gage reacts to the smear campaign Hoover waged against MLK upon the release of the uncensored “suicide letter” in 2014.
• Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom, Nelson Blackstock – A comprehensive analysis of the beginnings of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence operations, aimed at infiltrating civil rights and antiwar movements. 
• “Cold War Espionage Paid Off—Until It Didn’t” Science, Catherine Matacic – A brief article explaining the counterproductive nature of Cold War paranoia in the international surveillance apparatus.