Frontiers of the Future – 1937

There is a lot of pessimism out there about the future. NASA has retreated from space, the economy has sucked for years, sucks today, and will suck for years to come, wars all over the place, politicians behaving extraordinarily badly, the climate going goofy. It’s thus not unreasonable for people to think that The End Has Come. I know I certainly feel that way more and more these days.

We have, however, been there before. When the big-government policies of Hoover and FDR turned the depression of 1929 into the Great Depression, and FDR’s constant meddling caused the Great Depression to drag on for years longer than it needed to, many Americans thought that, like today, our best days were behind. Economies are based to a great degree on intangibles, such as what people *feel*, and so people feeling bad about the economy helped keep the economy depressed. In order to help turn the economy around, people had to *feel* better about it, so that they would work at improving it. A great deal of propaganda was thus produced, both by government and by industry, to help prop up morale. One such bits of propaganda is “Frontiers of the Future,” produced in 1937 by the “National Industrial Council” and narrated by famed world-travelling reporter Lowell Thomas. It attempts to predict the future of American industry, with some successes, some lapses and one giant oversight… no World War II.

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