ABSTRACT
In 2012 the United States National Film Preservation Board added 25 titles to its registry of films to be preserved by the Library of Congress. Among the Hollywood hits, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A League of Their Own, was a promotional industrial film produced by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. The Technicolor The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair follows a mythical, middle-class family from Indiana as they visit the 1939 world’s fair and tour the popular Westinghouse Pavilion. There they discover the company’s time capsule and exhibits designed to celebrate “the transformation of life through electricity,” including television, Elecktro (a smoking robot), and an efficient, electric dishwasher. 1 Throughout the film Babs, the family’s college-age daughter, is courted by Nicholas Makaroff, her slick, foreign-born, art teacher, who vies for her attention with Jim Treadway, the all-American, hometown boy working as a guide in the pavilion. As the family explores one impressive display after another, it becomes clear that the two young suitors “represent ideologically opposing attitudes toward industrialization and progress” as they debate the benefits of capitalism versus Marxism. 2 While the exhibits inside helped to illustrate Jim’s arguments, the modern factory-like design of the pavilion, with its large spans of glass, also spoke to the openness and efficiencies of capitalism. By the end of the film it becomes clear that underneath his fancy intellectual façade, Nicholas’s weak political ideals are unable to compete with Jim’s clear explanations of the societal benefits of America’s capitalist system. As a result, Jim (and capitalism) wins the hearts of Babs, her family, and, as hoped by Westinghouse, the millions of visitors to the company’s pavilion.
