Progress and the Great Productive Machine

This thesis focuses on the years that span the opening of Ford’s Highland Park and the 1939 New York World’ s Fair entitled The World of Tomorrow, as a significant era in American history that defined our utilitarian culture and lifestyle of freedom. Through principles of efficiency, standardization and utopianism, within the “capitalist mode of production,” modern Americans became components in the greater mechanism of mass production. Entertainments followed suit. Films and musical productions from this era indicate the extent to which mechanical thought infiltrated the minds of both America’s most creative thinkers and their audiences. Modern Americans began to identify themselves through the propagandizing motifs of mass media and New Deal cultural idealism, which ultimately promised a shining future for the country through industrialization. Featured exhibits in The World of Tomorrow portrayed American optimism and New Deal utopianism.