1939: fourteen ton typewriter

1939.The Year of the New York World’s fair and its theme of “the world of tomorrow.” The vision was aught between the end of the Depression and WWII; the Unired States was on the threshold of a new era, but to the experts of the future, sadly, it looked like a fourteen ton typewriter…

…But other aspects of the same time seem more reassuringly familiar. There were country clubs, evenings of bridge, traffic jams, and even a few devotees of the new fad of back-yard cookery. Parents and children were debating whether or not sex education ought to be included in school curricula. Commencement speakers in 1939 deplored godlessness and called for a return to traditional beliefs. The New York Times remarked on the mobs of “almost naked” people on resort beaches, although in our present age it is easy to see how little the Times understood the potentialities of the situation. Moralists deplored the purposelessness of youth, and youth happily took up the theme.

---Clark Gable, Hollywood December 1939---

—Clark Gable, Hollywood December 1939—

Granted that the seeds of many recent changes had been sown before 1939, the quarter century that followed saw changes in many aspects of American life that were so rapid and far-reaching, as to be unprecedented in the national experience, and perhaps unprecedented in that of any other nation other than those suddenly transformed by war or plague. Irving Kristol wrote, “it is fair to say that our times begin in 1945, with the end of World War II in Europe.” We see 1939 as the watershed year between the older America and a newer one, partly because various imprtant technological developments happened, by one of those accidents that may not be accidental, to get started then, but much more importantly because it marked the end of one era, that of the depression, and the beginning of the war that was to be the basis of American transformation.

---Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Kathleen Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, sons and daughter of United States Ambassador to England Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., arrive at the House of Parliament in London to hear Prime Minister Chamberlain's announcement that a state of war existed between England and Germany, September 1939.---click image for source...

—Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Kathleen Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, sons and daughter of United States Ambassador to England Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., arrive at the House of Parliament in London to hear Prime Minister Chamberlain’s announcement that a state of war existed between England and Germany, September 1939.—click image for source…

The depression was petering out anyway in 1939; boo and expansion were on the way, even though the economists of the time could not see it. The war enormously accelerated the process, by creating the need for a vast military and war production establishment that ended unemployment and sent national production zooming. But much more significant in the long run, the war, by making scientific and technological advance into matters of national life and death, was the forceps that brought the new age into being. It need scarcely be said that scientific and technological change is the heart of the story of postwar United States.

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