Lawrence R Samuel's book, "THE END OF THE INNOCENCE" re-assessing the much-overlooked NY World's Fair of 1964-1965, is a goldmine of telling little anecdotes.
Samuel, for example, notes that the application requirements issued in October 1959 for the top 'man' leading the fair (no women need apply), had to be between fifty and sixty - almost by definition pushing any successful applicant to a birth before Edward VII's August 1902 coronation ended the Victorian Era.
In the end the timid hiring committee rescued caution from the wind and went with a man not merely born in the Victorian Era , but in fact a fully formed teenager of the nineteenth century : Robert Moses !
The irony was that Robert Kopple, the father of two young preteen daughters who had gotten the idea of a second NY World's Fair going, did so because he felt the young were ill informed about the world they were about to become the future leaders of.
Mr Kopple made it abundantly clear that the seventy something Moses, a true man of yesterday, wasn't the best person to tell young teenagers all about the world of tomorrow - and Mose made sure Kopple got 'fired' for his efforts.
The problem was that Moses was born in 1888 while the target audience for a 1965 fair oriented to evoking the near future was probably a teenager born in 1949 more than 60 years later.
So Mose's personal vision for the Fair (a sort of Trivoli Gardens moved a few thousand kilometres west of Copenhagen) was far, far out of date.
For what had been once considered hip (for Mose's grandparents) was now less than hip to Mose's grandchildren.
Never no mind : in August 1965, the Beatles were also in the same neighbourhood at the same time (just across Roosevelt Avenue at in the brand new Shea Stadium), humming a very different tune....
Showing posts with label robert moses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robert moses. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Thursday, November 13, 2014
When middle class eugenicists saw Democracy itself as 'unfit' , so did the pulp and comic books
From about the 1890s onwards, a whole generation of people who proudly thought of themselves as progressive - indeed Progressives - saw Democracy itself as evolutionary 'unfit'.
At least officially , they were opposed to despots --- as being far too redolent of the bad old (Catholic) medieval times and Eastern cultures.
But modern progressive bureaucratic expert dictators were much more their cuppa.
In their moments of despair , they longed for a reign of 'experts', who would objectively look at all the 'facts' and dispassionately render the best decision for all concerned, to replace corrupt politicians bribing the uneducated unwashed with middle class tax dollars.
More often, the middle class reformers around the world simply wanted these all-powerful unelected experts to forcefully restrain the corrupt politicians and their working class electorate.
A national or international version of the 'strong City manager and weak Mayor and Council' system gaining converts all over North America.
Who bought into this idea ?
Who didn't ? At least until the late 1960s .
The fascists , communists and Nazis all took this idea up.
Academics in the Humanities who really should have known better, aped the rhetorical claims of the physical scientists around them , espoused this ideal of self-evident facts, experts, dispassion and objectivity.
The once grubby, argumentative, partisan journalists, now seeking respectability's higher wages, stopped thinking for themselves and became stenographers, seeking only scientific objectivity based on observing the W5.
The university (half) educated , increasing dominating all aspects of life, also backed the professors, scientists, journalists (and intellectuals generally) in supporting the reign of experts.
Technocracy Inc , a once very popular North American political movement of the between the wars period, tried to resemble the newly fashionable business corporation in name but then proposed that politicians and corporate businessmen both be replaced by teams of experts : thinking scientists and doing engineers.
The best studied example of such bureaucratic expert dictators in action is that of the corrupt Robert Moses regime in power over New York for half a century.
He was put into his position of almost unlimited powers and no democratic checks upon his behavior by the politicians and the voters themselves !
All the thousands of objective journalists in that 'media capital of the world' never once cottoned onto Moses' corrupt system because he was always issuing press releases proclaiming his purity - and a press release is a fact, is it not ? - and so should be reported as is/ where is, dispassionately.
And so it was - for fifty dark dirty years.
So this belief in expert dictators pushing weak democratic practises out of the way was so strongly 'in the air' in New York City in the first half of the 20th Century.
Little wonder then that it strongly , if unconsciously , influenced the writers of pulp fiction and comic books who never wrote directly about bureaucrats.
Instead they wrote about Zorro, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet and Batman --- instead.
And about nominally democratic community after community that was besot by some complex-seeming evil that the community members were unable to democratically and collectively resolve.
In comes a masked lone ranger , an expert --- with the gun or the fist.
Shazam ! A quick stern-but-fair bit of extreme violence and the evil doers are dead and the problem solved - forever.
The solution and the problem were both actually quite simple, weren't they ?
The lone ranger super hero moves on , to clean up the mess in other democracies.
So let us revise Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team seeking penicillin-for-all , as seen by his Republican Party-leaning scientific opponents : unfit doctors, unfit black and Jewish patients, unfit natural penicillin in an unfit democracy....
At least officially , they were opposed to despots --- as being far too redolent of the bad old (Catholic) medieval times and Eastern cultures.
But modern progressive bureaucratic expert dictators were much more their cuppa.
In their moments of despair , they longed for a reign of 'experts', who would objectively look at all the 'facts' and dispassionately render the best decision for all concerned, to replace corrupt politicians bribing the uneducated unwashed with middle class tax dollars.
More often, the middle class reformers around the world simply wanted these all-powerful unelected experts to forcefully restrain the corrupt politicians and their working class electorate.
A national or international version of the 'strong City manager and weak Mayor and Council' system gaining converts all over North America.
Who bought into this idea ?
Who didn't ? At least until the late 1960s .
The fascists , communists and Nazis all took this idea up.
Academics in the Humanities who really should have known better, aped the rhetorical claims of the physical scientists around them , espoused this ideal of self-evident facts, experts, dispassion and objectivity.
The once grubby, argumentative, partisan journalists, now seeking respectability's higher wages, stopped thinking for themselves and became stenographers, seeking only scientific objectivity based on observing the W5.
The university (half) educated , increasing dominating all aspects of life, also backed the professors, scientists, journalists (and intellectuals generally) in supporting the reign of experts.
Technocracy Inc , a once very popular North American political movement of the between the wars period, tried to resemble the newly fashionable business corporation in name but then proposed that politicians and corporate businessmen both be replaced by teams of experts : thinking scientists and doing engineers.
The best studied example of such bureaucratic expert dictators in action is that of the corrupt Robert Moses regime in power over New York for half a century.
He was put into his position of almost unlimited powers and no democratic checks upon his behavior by the politicians and the voters themselves !
All the thousands of objective journalists in that 'media capital of the world' never once cottoned onto Moses' corrupt system because he was always issuing press releases proclaiming his purity - and a press release is a fact, is it not ? - and so should be reported as is/ where is, dispassionately.
And so it was - for fifty dark dirty years.
So this belief in expert dictators pushing weak democratic practises out of the way was so strongly 'in the air' in New York City in the first half of the 20th Century.
Little wonder then that it strongly , if unconsciously , influenced the writers of pulp fiction and comic books who never wrote directly about bureaucrats.
Instead they wrote about Zorro, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet and Batman --- instead.
And about nominally democratic community after community that was besot by some complex-seeming evil that the community members were unable to democratically and collectively resolve.
In comes a masked lone ranger , an expert --- with the gun or the fist.
Shazam ! A quick stern-but-fair bit of extreme violence and the evil doers are dead and the problem solved - forever.
The solution and the problem were both actually quite simple, weren't they ?
The lone ranger super hero moves on , to clean up the mess in other democracies.
So let us revise Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team seeking penicillin-for-all , as seen by his Republican Party-leaning scientific opponents : unfit doctors, unfit black and Jewish patients, unfit natural penicillin in an unfit democracy....
Friday, October 10, 2014
This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide
We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.
We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of many wildly different little neighbourhoods.
'The more the merrier' is today our motto.
We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.
We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.
Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities, New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.
We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.
We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).
Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....
We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of many wildly different little neighbourhoods.
'The more the merrier' is today our motto.
We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.
We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.
Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities, New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.
We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.
We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).
Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)