2014 has been an interesting year for 50-year anniversaries:

1) The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show;
2) The Ford Mustang; and
3) The New York World's Fair.

It was a showcase for companies and future technology, such as "a touch tone phone"!    It was also an exhibition of US confidence and self esteem!    It was the US telling the world "we are #1" rather than meaningless "hope and change" speeches!
One big development in the last 50 years is that we were a manufacturing nation in 1964 as you can appreciate in this tour of the facilities recently published in The New York Times.
We made cars, telephones, TV's and lots of other things.    Check out the industrial area from the aforementioned article:

"In the part of the fairgrounds closest to the Van Wyck Expressway, more than 45 pavilions devoted to industry (with some religious organizations sprinkled in) surrounded a pool around which was held a nightly fireworks show.

Anchored by the General Electric Pavilion’s Progressland, the Industrial area was a collective advertisement for corporate America, with the Kodak Pavilion’s roof designed like the surface of the moon, and Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen’s egg-shaped IBM Pavilion, where visitors sitting on grandstands were lifted swiftly into a theater.

At the Bell System exhibit, visitors previewed phone technology that is now commonplace.

Perhaps the biggest hit: The Pepsi-Cola Pavilion’s Unicef-Disney production of “It’s a Small World,” with a song, in rounds of several languages, that became forever lodged in people’s minds."

We don't do make products like this anymore and that is something to think about.  

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

1) How many of those companies are still making anything in the US?   Who is hiring American workers in US plants?

2) How can you maintain a middle class if everything is made by cheap labor elsewhere?

I am not peddling "doom and gloom" this morning.  I understand that 2014 is different than 1964.  However, a great nation has to make things and we are making less of everything these days.

P. S. You can hear my chat with Frank Burke, management consultant & American Thinker contributor, about manufacturing today PLUS ffollow me on Twitter @ scantojr.