What Happened to the "World of Tomorrow"?
An interview with H. Bruce Franklin.
H. Bruce Franklin is a US cultural historian who’s written on many topics: science-fiction, prison-literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and US cultural history.
I found out about Franklin’s work through Noam Chomsky’s effusive praise for Franklin’s 1988 book War Stars. Chomsky recommends that 1988 book all the time.
Perhaps the most striking blurb for the 1988 book is this one from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “War Stars is so crammed with fascinating facts and ideas that it should interest people of all political persuasions. It should be required reading.”
Franklin went to the 1939 World’s Fair when he was little. I can say without hyperbole that no images that I’ve ever witnessed in my life have moved me more than these incredible color-images from that jaw-dropping 1939 event.
I asked Noam Chomsky about the ’39 World’s Fair, and Chomsky wrote this to me:
I went to the ’39 World’s Fair and was dazzled by the demonstrations of the technical and other marvels of the world that is soon to be ours.
Still waiting.
So what happened to the “World of Tomorrow” that was “soon to be ours”?
I was honored/thrilled to interview Franklin. See my interview with him below. I lightly edited the interview, and added hyperlinks.
1) What are the main ideas in your 2018 book Crash Course?
The book is a crash course on modern American history, whose course seems more and more heading for a crash of our nation, our species, and many other species on our beautiful blue planet.
Crash Course begins in the 1939 World’s Fair, where the five-year-old me was introduced to “The World of Tomorrow,” the official theme of the fair. I met a giant talking robot, glimpsed “television sets” bigger than me, and traveled around the greatest, most spectacular vision of the future, GM’s Futurama, where driverless cars raced on multilane superhighways through wondrous gleaming cities. The future was a world of peace, as we learned at the Court of Peace and the Lagoon of Nations.
In reality, World War II had already begun. Soon I would be thoroughly enculturated by that war. I learned that our nation was leading the world in a fight for freedom and democracy and peace. On August 6, 1945, eleven-year-old me was thrilled when President Truman announced that an American warplane had just dropped an “atomic bomb,” a weapon that harnessed “the basic power of the universe,” on Hiroshima, “an important Japanese army base.”
Eight days later, I was crammed in the back of a pickup packed with other boys and girls, all yelling our hearts out so we could be heard over the cacophony of honking horns and howling air-raid sirens and wild cheers from the flag-waving throng lining the sidewalks. We kids in the truck were screaming: “Peace! Peace! The war is over!” We believed that this was the end of not just this war but of War itself. We were going to live the rest of our lives in a prosperous and victorious nation, the World of Tomorrow on a peaceful planet.
We didn’t know that two days before our August 14 joyous celebration of peace, our government had decided to invade and occupy the southern half of Korea, a decision that led to a war, which, according to Washington, is still ongoing. Crash Course gives the chronology of that fateful event. We didn’t know that World War II’s largest land battle in Asia had begun on August 8, concluding with the deaths of eighty thousand Japanese soldiers, the surrender of six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers and hundreds of Japanese generals to the victorious army of the USSR (which lost thirty thousand soldiers), and that this Soviet entry to the war was what convinced Japan to accept the US terms of surrender.
We didn’t know that eight days after August 14’s celebration of peace, on August 22, President Truman would pledge American ships and weapons and financing to enable France to reinvade its colony of Vietnam, which was already successfully overthrowing its Japanese occupiers and creating an independent nation. Two weeks later, on September 2nd, Vietnam would declare independence in a Declaration of Independence that began by quoting our own, while half a million Vietnamese cheered the US fighter planes flying over the ceremony.
Crash Course goes on as a memoir of my life: factory work on the NY waterfront, working as a deckhand and mate on tugboats in NY harbor, my years as a navigator and intelligence officer in the US Air Force, my decades as a civil rights and anti-war activist, my experience as a revolutionary and subject of FBI and CIA efforts to “neutralize” me (as FBI documents put it), and the evolution of my thinking throughout the decades from 1945 to 2018. It is partly intended as an introduction to my nineteen other books and hundreds of essays. But mainly Crash Course is a book about the history of modern America, as experienced by one American over more than eight decades.
2) Why does war harm freedom, for how many years of its history has the US not been at war (one must keep in mind the wars against the Native American Nations), and what has the constant war done to American freedom? James Madison wrote in 1795: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Yes, it’s hard to find many years of American history when the US was not at war. And the genocidal wars against the original inhabitants of the land started about a century and a half before there was a nation that named itself the United States of America (the genocide started in 1619 for the Jamestown colony and in the 1636–1638 Pequot War for New England).
I believe that most people usually prefer to live at peace. However, empires wage wars as a condition of their being, and the history of America is a history of several small colonies growing up to become the mightiest global empire on this planet. The decisive year in this process was 1898, when the ongoing contradiction between imperialist/anti-imperialist forces was resolved as the empire went global with the Spanish–American War. To bring this about, the culture had to metamorphose into one that could overcome people’s preference for peace. This cultural process, especially between the Civil War and the Spanish–American War, is explored in detail in War Stars.
3) Will you write about today’s sci-fi trends—AI, the singularity, Mars-colonization? Watch from here to the end of the video to see a fascinating discussion about today’s sci-fi trends. There’s tons of hype around AI, too, of course.
I did watch that video, which is mainly an insightful unmasking of Elon Musk’s fantasies about colonizing Mars and the real content of those fantasies. I liked the video. Musk is actually playing the role of the heroic capitalists in Robert Heinlein’s fiction, which I dissect in Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction.
Although our culture today features oodles of Wow!Gosh! fantasies about AI, colonizing Mars, creating gene-edited supermen, et cetera, American science fiction is hardly dominated by enthusiastic visions of the future on Earth or in space. The most popular franchise, Star Wars, is set “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” In recent movies, future space travel is not some delicious pie in the sky. In Gravity, a disaster wipes out most of our existing orbiting vehicles and Sandra Bullock is the only character who survives. The Martian paints a terrifying picture of Mars, and we sure are happy when Matt Damon escapes from the dreadful planet. Two recent movies—The Midnight Sky (2020) and Stowaway (2021)—could hardly be more bleak about colonizing other planets, even in our solar system.
The machines we are using to explore space are indeed wondrous and we should keep building on our technical achievements. Those who propose colonizing Mars or some other planet are living in dreamland. If we can’t stop messing up this planet, how could we possibly turn another planet into a better home?
4) What are the main ideas in your 1992 book M.I.A.?
First fact: No US POWs remained in Vietnam after Operation Homecoming in early 1973.
Second fact: The belief that Vietnam retained US POWs after Operation Homecoming is a powerful myth with profound influence on American politics and culture.
The United States of America in the 21st century has two national flags. One is the colorful red, white, and blue banner created during the American Revolution, with stars that represent—in the words of the 1777 Continental Congress—“a new constellation.” The other is the black and white POW/MIA flag, America’s emblem of the Vietnam War.
The POW/MIA flag is the only one besides the Star-Spangled Banner that has ever flown over the White House, where it has fluttered yearly since 1982.
As Trump’s troops invaded our Capitol on January 6 and fought their way into the Rotunda, some posed in front of its permanent POW/MIA flag, the only flag that has ever been displayed amid the epic paintings and heroic statues, a position of honor granted in 1987 by Congress and the President of the United States.
The POW/MIA flag flies over every US post office, thanks to a law passed by Congress—and signed by President Clinton—in 1997.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the legislatures and governors of each of the 50 states issued laws mandating the display of this flag over public facilities such as state offices, municipal buildings, toll plazas, and police headquarters. The POW/MIA flag also hangs over the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and waves at countless corporate headquarters, shopping malls, union halls, and small businesses. It is sewn into the right sleeve of the official Ku Klux Klan white robe and adorns millions of bumper stickers, buttons, home windows, motorcycle jackets, watches, post cards, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and Christmas-tree ornaments. Much of my speaking in the 21st century has been to saltwater fishing clubs meeting at the local headquarters of the VFW, Elks, American Legion, and Knights of Columbus, and over each of these buildings flies the POW/MIA flag.
The flag displays our nation’s veneration of its central image, a handsome American prisoner of war, his silhouetted head slightly bowed to reveal behind him the ominous shape of a looming guard tower. A strand of barbed wire cuts across just below his firm chin. Underneath runs the motto: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.
This flag has flown and still flies as America’s understanding of the meaning of the Vietnam War. In 1991, that meaning shifted dramatically, as it came to symbolize America as a heroic warrior, no longer emasculated by Vietnam. Celebrating on March 1, 1991, our historical defeat of Iraq, President George H. W. Bush exclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” Those black and white flags had been transformed into symbols of American pride, not shame.
In 1991, I taught American Studies for a few weeks as a visiting professor at Tokyo’s Meiji University. I had just finished the manuscript for M.I.A., Or, Mythmaking in America, a history of how Richard Nixon created the “POW/MIA” category and used it to prolong the war, and how and why the preposterous belief in POWs in postwar Vietnam came to possess our nation. I thought I understood everything about the history and meaning of the POW/MIA myth, but I was wrong. And I was about to learn something crucial about American culture and culture in general.
Where does a society’s culture exist? Obviously in the artifacts, cultural productions, and discourse of the society, and of course inside the minds of the people who constitute that society. That’s why sometimes it can be hard to understand or even see what is most peculiar or even bizarre about one’s own culture: it’s inside one’s own head. Learning that in Anthropology 101 is one thing. Discovering how that works in yourself is something else.
One night several Japanese scholars of American Studies—from Meiji and other universities—expressed their keen interest in the POW/MIA myth. They said that, on some level, they understood it, that from their study of POW movies and other cultural artifacts they saw that the prisoner of war was functioning in American society as an icon of militarism. “But,” one said, “that’s what we find so puzzling. When militarism was dominant in Japan, the last person who would have been used as an icon of militarism was the POW. What did he do that was heroic? He didn’t fight to the death. He surrendered.” I was flabbergasted and totally flummoxed. Here I had been studying the POW/MIA myth for years and I had missed its essential and most revealing aspect.
After we got home, I had to look once again at those sickening, but often alarmingly effective, POW/MIA movies. Only then did I realize that this is a myth of imprisonment, a myth that draws deep emotional power by displacing onto Vietnam the imprisonment, helplessness, and alienation felt by many Americans, most especially white male Americans, in an epoch when alien economic, technological, and bureaucratic forces control much of their lives. And the man on the flag is American manhood itself, beset by all those bureaucratic and feminine forces seeking to emasculate him. He incarnates America as victim. I explore this concept—that the flag represents American manhood—in M.I.A. and in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies.
5) At what point did scholarship vindicate your view on the “MIA” issue, if indeed a vindication ever occurred? You participated in this heated 1992 discussion on C-SPAN about the issue—it’s not clear to me if scholarship already supported your view in 1992 or what the whole trajectory was.
One can’t prove a negative. A dragon might be living under Washington, even though we don’t have evidence of its presence. There is still not a shred of evidence that any US POWs were retained by Vietnam. This irrational belief is both a useful political lie and a potent myth.
6) What are the main ideas in your 2001 book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies?
It’s hard to describe this book in a few sentences. In fact, the quotations on the back cover from lovely reviews all seem to be about several different books.
This book is a complex interweaving of American culture relating to the Vietnam War with the actual history of the war, including American opposition to it. Each chapter stands as a somewhat independent essay (some chapters have been reprinted in other books, including major college readers). But each chapter also interrelates with the other chapters. A prologue discusses “Different Perceptions of Reality,” and the first chapter traces the history of visual representations of US wars. There’s a lot about the antiwar movement, especially within the armed forces. There’s stuff about science fiction, based in part on my experience as the Advisory Curator of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s exhibit “Star Trek and the Sixties.”
7) What are the main ideas in your 1988 book War Stars?
There’s an old saying, “You can’t tell a book by its cover.” Well, War Stars is a book you can tell by its cover, which features a picture of a space machine—identified by the capital letters U.S.A. on its side—attacking planet Earth with beam weapons. This picture, believe this or not, is an official creation of the US Department of Defense—I had to get the Defense Department’s official permission to use the picture (as noted on the back cover). It is evidence that the “Defense” policy of the United States has become a version of collective insanity.
Above the picture is the title of the book, War Stars, that sums up its subject and some of its content.
Our thermonuclear weapons are actually small stars, designed to explode with the fusion energy that powers our sun. Hence war stars.
The book tells the history of American stars of war, that is, the men who led us on our mad quest for superweapons, always in the name of “defense.”
Who are these stars? The first was Robert Fulton, who in the 18th century invented the ultimate superweapon that would abolish war forever: the war submarine.
Then came the authors of countless novels and stories, published from the 19th century to the present, about superweapons and America besieged by foreign and homegrown enemies.
During World War I, the leading star of war was Thomas Alva Edison, who invented a host of superweapons (almost all useless) and presided over the Naval Consulting Board, the first organization of America’s leading industrialists, the embryo of the military-industrial complex.
World War II brought forward a galaxy of American stars of war, from Billy Mitchell, the prophet of “strategic” bombing, to Harry Truman, who climaxed this aerial genocide with the utterly unnecessary annihilation of two Japanese cities with nuclear bombs, an act he defined as “the greatest thing in history.”
And so on up to George W. Bush, who convinced Congress and millions of Americans that Iraq was going to attack us with nuclear weapons, and used that fantasy to plunge us deeper and deeper into the Forever War.
The cover also gives the subtitle: “The Superweapon and The American Imagination.” Why in the world did we create weapons that menace the existence not only of our nation but also of our species?
The answer lies in our culture. But where does culture exist? War Stars, like many of my books, is an exploration of America’s culture, which exists inside our heads.
8) What was changed/added in the 2008 version of War Stars?
The original edition went to press in 1987 and was published in 1988, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. During the so-called Cold War, we kept inventing and deploying superweapons until we succeeded in creating what Daniel Ellsberg calls the Doomsday Machines, one for us and another for the USSR, each supposedly to deter the other, each capable of exterminating our species.
But by the time War Stars was first published the Cold War was just history, or so we thought. Millions of us now awaited our “peace dividend”: instead of spending trillions of dollars on the Cold War, including our Doomsday Machine, we would rebuild our collapsing infrastructure, fix our disgraceful education system, and bring our shameful health system up to the level of other industrial nations—in short, get the wonderful future we thought we were about to get when World War II ended in 1945.
Instead, we got the Forever War, more military spending, a dysfunctional government, and shamelessly underfunded public educational and health systems.
So the two decades following the first edition proved its diagnosis and prognosis were tragically accurate; this convinced me to do the 2008 edition.
9) To what extent—and in what ways—is War Stars becoming more and more timely?
While our very existence is imperiled by our assault on our environment, the “Yellow Peril” theme traced by War Stars can today be heard in the war drums trying to march us off to war with China.
The very first American novel imagining war with another country was Pierton Dooner’s Last Days of the Republic. According to this popular 1880 novel, China now “menaces not only our civilization, but indeed, our very existence as one among the nations of the earth.” In 1910, Jack London published “The Unparalleled Invasion,” a short story imaging—and advocating—the use of germ warfare to wipe out every person in China.
The Revised and Expanded Edition of War Stars was published in 2008. That was the year when the US banking system collapsed, thus threatening global capitalism, and when Barack Obama was elected as our savior and as the peace candidate (versus war hawk John McCain). Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, but the Forever War expanded and consolidated as our normal state of affairs during his eight years of presidency. Then came the catastrophic four years of Donald Trump that profoundly intensified the existential threats to our species.
Alas, the analysis and prognosis offered by the 2008 edition have become more and more accurate as the years have gone by.
10) What would you change/add in a new version of War Stars?
Obviously, I would add the history of war stars since 2008.
One crucial subject would be Trump’s creation of the independent United States Space Force and the terrifying prospect it now poses for life on this planet. I would argue for keeping on the cover that Defense Department picture of a USA space vehicle attacking planet Earth with beam weapons.
11) What do you think about Noam Chomsky’s comment that the two themes in War Stars—that a superhero/superweapon will save us at the last minute from a terrible/awesome enemy that is about to crush us and that the enemy is actually somebody we’re crushing—might be explainable by a “recognition, at some level of the psyche” that the “people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves, and then you’re in trouble”?
I’m grateful for this passage and Noam Chomsky’s other insightful comments over the years about War Stars.
12) What explains the unusual “paranoid streak” in US culture that Chomsky refers to that shows up in a constant/longstanding fear of “invented dangers”?
In another comment about War Stars, Chomsky zoomed in on my description of “the imperial eagle…as a bird that habitually views its own behavior as a defense against its prey.” That sums up the nature of the beast.
No other nation or empire has waged war against so many peoples and nations, internally and around the world. But American culture rests on a belief in our preeminent moral goodness and righteousness. That’s why this imperial eagle has to justify its behavior by seeing all its wars as self-defense, hence morally justifiable. Two key cultural moments came in 1947, when we abolished the Department of War, and in 1949, when we created the Department of Defense.
13) What are the most exciting projects that you’re currently working on?
This interview has made me think about doing a new edition of War Stars that would take the story from 2008 to the present.
Another project, one I’m already working on, relates to The Most Important Fish in the Sea—a book that’s central to a mass movement that has led to recovery of much of the Atlantic Coast’s ecology. This movement is now working on saving the ecology of the Gulf Coast.
I want to give a dramatic picture of this movement, which includes large numbers of working-class saltwater fishermen who want the fish to be there for them, their children, and their grandchildren.