The most popular exhibits at the fair were built by rivals in a corporate potlatch. Collectively, they declared that the social problems of the 1930s could be solved by applied science, with little recourse to politics. Yet, while all the corporate exhibits had this intention, the most successful of them were those that took the form of dramas with covertly religious overtones. As a group they reversed the ritual of the eternal return --found in many traditional societies-- in which a people ceremonially recreates a golden yesterday that it believes existed before a troubled and chaotic present.... Corporations promised a cornucopia of goods and services that would eliminate social problems and usher in an age of universal ease and abundance.

All of the five most popular exhibits celebrated the future. Three of these (General Motors, the Perisphere, and Consolidate Edison) were synchronic representations of ideal landscapes during an exemplary day, not in the distant future, but at most a generation later. Visitors glimpsed a promised land that could be entered in their own lifetimes and bequeathed to their children...

...there were detailed models of the world that invited fairgoers in search of renewal to project themselves into symbolic landscapes. Such displays did more than unveil the artifacts of future life; they extended the historical continuum of the museum toward idealized spaces and times waiting to be born. The artifacts displayed at the fair seemed to have been retrieved from the future by scientists and engineers, and the designer-curators had found suitable dramatic forms to represent these future objects. the most popular dramatic enactments of the World of Tomorrow allowed visitors to enter a "future state" in a process that resembled religious ritual...

The 1939 fair was a quasi-religious experience of escape into an ideal future equally accessible to all. it offered a new version of republicanism --one that retained only a few vestiges of the classical architecture that had once articulated that vision. No speeches given at the fair were as memorable as its technological exhibits, which were designed less to sell particular products than to synthesize the technological, electrical, and geometrical sublimes into one form that modeled the future. Within the fairgrounds, the worried Americans of the late 1930s could feel re-empowered as they gazed down on immense miniature utopias. The fair was a shrine of modernity, offering what seemed an achievable future. Fairgoers could step away from the contradictions of their own time into a monumental perfection... The synthesis reduced fear to a temporary disorientation that lasted only until the senses adjusted to the illusion of olympian vision. In the postwar years these techniques would reappear in a new form of permanent exposition: the theme park, where a synthesis of sublimes could be experienced in perpetuity. (pp 222-224)