1939: The Lost World of the Fair.

This is an immensely charming book that aims to evoke the spirit of the 1939 World's Fair in New York--not just of the fair itself, but also of the city and of American culture generally. In clean, elegant prose, Gelernter lovingly describes the fair's exhibits and the architecture, technology, movies, magazines, urban culture, and social mores of the day; and, Doctorow-like, he weaves a narrative about fictional characters amid all the precise nonfiction details. He does quite a good job of bringing the moment back to life. Even the fictional characters' ways of speaking and thinking feel as if they belong to a different time from our own.

To call Gelernter nostalgic would be like calling Bill Gates affluent--it wildly understates the case. He regards 1939 as the halcyon moment in American life, the peak from which we have been descending ever since. What he loves about that time is the pervasive tone of optimism, civility, and respect, and the enthusiasm about applied technology. (It's impossible to avoid thinking of 1939 as a riposte to the Unabomber. Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale, is the Luddite terrorist's best-known victim.)

The fair itself was a paean to a streamlined future, with particular emphasis on consumer goods like automobiles, suburban homes, and refrigerators. The surrounding city was, by today's standards, nearly crime-free, and otherwise pervaded by a social trust that has since disappeared. Roosevelt on the radio, Fred Astaire movies at Radio City Music Hall, Moses and LaGuardia at the helm of New York, the music of Gershwin and Duke Ellington wafting through the air--that's the idea.

By moving the good-old-days baseline back from the fifties to the thirties and focusing on technology as well as family values, Gelernter has gotten more freshness out of nostalgia than it usually has. And because he has done his homework, he knows enough not to over-burnish the picture. He duly notes the much greater pervasiveness than today of poverty, discrimination, and war. Realizing that at the time he's apotheosizing, a majority of America's leading intellectuals probably were Communists in spirit if not actual membership, he doesn't bother to claim that 1939 was free of political correctness either. (After all, the term was invented around 1939.)

But he firmly insists that something essential and precious existed then and doesn't now. The word he returns to again and again is "authority": "Authority has all but vanished. Its disappearance from American life is just as significant an event, I believe, as the closing of the frontier." In other places, groping for a different term, he refers to the prevalence in 1939 of an "ought culture" or a "civic religion." People followed rules. Children obeyed their parents. No excuses were made for deviant behavior. Men wore neckties when they went out in public and stood when a woman entered the room. There was a real shared excitement about the future.

1939 has something of the quality of a piece of music in which the melodic line is playfully varied but the underlying theme is rigid and unchanging. It's finally more interesting as a narrative experiment than it is intellectually, because the basic point is made over and over in almost exactly the same way without being developed. The one fresh turn that Gelernter makes is to suggest that the disappearance of the mood he admires is mainly attributable not to such familiar villains as the ACLU, psychologists, and liberal judges, but to the dreams of 1939 having come true to such a remarkable extent. Back then what made the society cohere was a shared longing for a bountiful future; once this was achieved, around 1970, no new organizing principle emerged to replace it, and the society disintegrated into individualism and relativism.

The obvious objection to make to a book like 1939--so obvious as to be almost unsportsmanlike--is that things weren't as great back then, and aren't as terrible now, as Gelernter says. It's more interesting to take him on his own terms and say that he's right to be nostalgic for 1939 but delineates that time's virtues too narrowly. His 1939 is too much Top Hat and not enough The Grapes of Wrath. He is so completely focused on an orderliness that has vanished that he badly underplays 1939's other main virtue: a democratic spirit of empathy for people in trouble and of universal obligation to help personally in trying to solve America's problems. The erosion of that democratic spirit by snobbery and duty-shirking on the part of the leadership class has contributed greatly to the erosion of Gelernter's beloved authority. Authority holds only when every-body likes and trusts the people who have it.