Half a century ago, around the time of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, where much of the action of Tomorrowland takes place, people in the U.S. really believed in the future. Our involvement in Vietnam had not yet escalated, Watergate was still years away, and Kennedy’s dictum to ‘Ask what you can do for your country’ was received not as jingoism, but rather as an invitation to pitch in and help.
Back then America had an unambiguous sense of itself as ‘the good guys’. Still flushed with the success of having helped to win World War II, and bathing in the domestic economic boom that followed, the U.S. felt that its place in the world was exemplified by the Marshall Plan.
Started during the Truman administration, the Marshall Plan provided low interest loans to European nations to help rebuild their economies after the war, while allowing each country to determine, for itself, how it would spend the money. Note how different this model was from the idea of a superpower imposing its political will on smaller client nations.
I think that this view by the U.S. of its place in the world set a high standard that seeped into other spheres. For example, Kennedy’s formation of the Peace Corps seemed like a logical extension of the same philosophy: We are not here to conquer the world, but to help the world. And I sincerely believe that this attitude of the time, that we are supposed to be kind to others helped give traction to the civil rights movement.
Of course the reality was far from the ideal. There was tremendous pushback against civil rights, the push for equal rights for women was still nascent, and by today’s standards the nation was rife with prejudice and intolerance.
But the will toward being a force for good was there, unsullied by cynical disillusionment, and that created a strong wind for change.
What does all this have to do with Tomorrowland?
We will get to that, appropriately enough, tomorrow.
“Half a century ago… people in the U.S. really believed in the future.”
How do you know this? I know it’s a common trope, but what basis do we have for believing it is true?
I’ll certainly grant that it was true in some subcultures. But across the US? I’d like some reliable data.
I was there.
I’ve talked to others who were there, too, and they give differing accounts.
Excuse, let me make my last comment clear: some agree with you. But certainly not all. I suspect this varies a lot across groups.
That’s good to know. It would be interesting to look at how old they were and where they were in the country, and to try to correlate those factors with how the varying accounts differ.