Broken Icarus: The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Rise of Fascism

The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair showcased dazzling technological and scientific advances and “frightening new political philosophies,” according to this eye-opening account. High school history teacher Hanna (Rendezvous with Death) draws vivid profiles of aeronautical innovators who attended the fair (official motto: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”), including Italo Balbo, Italy’s dashing chief of aeronautics and a dedicated Fascist; Hugo Eckener, designer and captain of the massive Graf Zeppelin airship, who sought to make a “final public display of his contempt for Nazism”; and the husband-and-wife team of Auguste and Jean Piccard. Fairgoers witnessed such astonishing sights as Balbo’s air armada of 24 seaplanes splashing down in Lake Michigan; the arrival of Eckener’s Graf Zeppelin, piloted in a pattern intended to hide the Nazi swastika on the stabilizing fin from the crowd below; and the Piccards’ high-altitude ballooning. But the feats of Balbo and Eckener also provided propaganda coups for Mussolini and Hitler, Hanna notes, and with the 1937 Hindenburg disaster and the outbreak of WWII in 1939, the sights and sounds of innovative aircraft became linked “with death and destruction meted out from the sky.” Interweaving colorful anecdotes and incisive cultural analysis, this entertaining history strikes a cautionary note about the promise and peril of technology. (June)