Here’s an interesting photo that my late uncle took at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York (the shot was actually taken in 1940). It shows the League of Nations pavilion, a rather serious, substantial looking affair. The League is putting on a good face, but in reality is powerless at this point (and had been for quite a while). The bullets were already flying in Europe and Asia, and the second world war was gaining unstoppable momentum. My uncle was 15 at the time. In four years, the USA would send him and his older brother to serve its Navy in the Philippines. Luckily and thankfully, they would both come back unscathed and would share in the suburban prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s.

As to the League … it went out of business not long after this picture was taken. But after the war, it was more-or-less reincarnated as the United Nations. And unlike the League, the UN was taken seriously for awhile. But it’s fallen on hard times in a world of global warming and terrorism and sectarian conflict. The dream of world unity will have to wait for another era.