The Future didn't work. It's full of wacky inventions and wackier outfits. It promised too much and delivered too little. It looks cluttered and stuffed. It's in black and white.

 

The Future that artists and caricaturists drew is a pretty silly place. We get it. But when did we get it? When did the Future turn from a glittering world we all wanted to live in to a distant past we all laugh at?

 

I suggest that it happened earlier than we think. By the 1950s cracks showed in our belief in the Future even as corporations became increasingly desperate to sell us an atomic-powered wonderland. Maybe Our Friend the Atom wanted to stick his hand down our pants. Did the Future really need to glow?

 

The first book I know of that cast a jaundiced eye on predictions of the future from The Good Old Days is by John Durant. In 1956 he was a 54 year-old writer and collector of historic illustrations. He and his wife Alice published a series of Pictorial Histories, of American Sports, American Ships, the American Circus, and their best seller, American Presidents, which they would expand, revise, retitle, rewrite, and repackage for two decades. He also did a number of books on sport subjects, including Highlights of College Football, the Olympics, and the World Series.

 

At some point while flipping through old newspapers and magazines the sheer volume of future stuff began to hit them over the head. As there was no Internet to inflict them on, Durant sensibly got a contract for yet another picture book, called Predictions: Pictorial Predictions from the Past. (Alliteration goes in and out of style, just like future fashions.)

 

In the Introduction, Durant stresses the accuracy of the basic ideas in the pictures:

 

Often with tongue in cheek these imaginative fellows of the drawing board glimpsed the future but just as often they saw it with clear and sober eyes, recording predictions with astonishing accuracy. As the pages of this volume testify, they foresaw such things as radio, TV, air conditioning in the home, the heavier-than-air flying machine, the automobile and the super highway, farming and rain-making from the clouds, the drive-in church service, the baby incubator, plastic surgery, racial integration in the classroom, sky-writing, the penthouse apartment, the trailer home, the four-day transatlantic line, women in military service...

 

One wonders who he thought he was kidding with this Orwellian inversion. His picks make it clear that they foresaw the changes coming in the Future not as a wonderland of benificent technology but as a dystopian nightmare precisely because of the horrors that technology would unleash. The majority of the images are drawn from Life, Judge, and Puck, the leading humor magazines of the day. Like the National Lampoon of the 1970s, these magazines, written for the college-educated few, aimed their barbs downward as much as or more than upward. Stereotyped minorities were their bread and butter; women were always ready to emasculate men; foreigners had odd and menacing ways; advertising was evil; cities were dangerous; old ways were the best and differences were bad. The elites liked their present in the pre-World War I gilded age. It took a generation of radical social change before the opinion-making elites decided that technological change might be beneficial. Max Planck's famed quote about scientific change is equally applicable here: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." The moneyed elites that grew up with electricity, automobiles, telephones, and ease of travel were the first to realize how change could enhance their lives. As always, money allowed them to sidestep most of the negative effects that had earlier seemed so disruptive. But that generation is comprised of the children of the generation reading these humorists; in their time noise, chaos, and clutter were omnipresent in every large American city, ripe for the satirical pen.

 

Below are a number of illustrations from the book. All comments in the captions are mine unless explicitly indicated as a quote from Durant or the original. Some drawings, placed at the bottom, are offensive to modern sensibilities not because of the technology featured - there is none - but because of the social attitudes laid bare. The coming equality of those at the bottom of the social ladder; that's exactly the dystopian change the artists were warning their readers about. We're as far removed from Durant's day as he was from the original illustrators; most of us have lived entirely in a period of increasingly social equality. Yet the fears of technological change and disruption remain, just as strongly as fear and suspicion of the Other. The satire displayed is remarkably precient is some ways but remarkably timeless in others.

 

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