Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  Before the year was out, he had sold more than $7 million worth. John D. Rockefeller personally bought $250,000 in bonds. Con Edison bought in for $750,000; the New York Telephone Company came in for half a million, as did the Pennsylvania Railroad. Macy’s bought almost half a million, led by board member Percy Straus, who was now chairman of the Fair’s committee on architecture and physical planning. Straus honestly believed in the Fair’s ability to restore public confidence in business and the city, but he was realistic when it came to recouping his money.

  “If by some mischance11 the full amount invested is not returned,” he stated, much to the chagrin of Gibson and Whitney, “the difference will be but a small contribution toward rebuilding the prestige of New York.”

  By the end of January, more than $17 million had been sold, including a $100 bond purchased by a twenty-three-year-old truck driver named John Weir Jr., who lived near the fairgrounds and had been driving one of Moses’s endless caravans of trucks since groundbreaking in June. Recognizing a good story when he saw one, Whalen pounced on the occasion, riding out to Flushing Meadows to hand-deliver the bond and congratulate Weir on his investment. (And, naturally, reap the benefits of a well-timed photo op.)

  But there was more to it than good PR. Amid all the large corporations and multimillion-dollar pavilions Whalen had swimming in his head, for him, truck driver Weir represented what this Fair was really all about. He was the average American to whom the Fair would speak, the embodiment of the “Everyman” whose life would be enriched by its message. Moreover, he was one of the thousands who, after years of hardship, had been given the opportunity to work and support his family because of this World’s Fair.

  In a personal note to Whalen, Weir had written, “Among other things12 I should like to tell you that I like my job, am filled with enthusiasm and visions of the success of this undertaking and that I am uplifted with the knowledge that I have contributed by eight hours per day since its inception in helping to build it up.”

  The letter stirred something deep within Whalen’s working-class roots. Weir’s eloquence in writing may not have been uncommon, even for a truck driver, in 1930s America, but his dedication and spirit to the task at hand renewed Whalen’s initial enthusiasm and perhaps reminded him of the struggles he’d had to overcome.

  “I have often heard my father speak of you with kindly admiration,” Weir had told him.

  On a bitterly cold January morning, Whalen leapt over icy puddles to shake the hand of the man driving Truck Number 29 on Dragline 34. Weir, wearing a greasy sailor’s cap, was speechless.

  By the end of February, the $20 million mark had been met, including another quarter million by second-banana department store moguls the Gimbel brothers. Whalen himself even bought $10,000 worth. Then things started to get tricky. The total estimated cost of the Fair had grown from McAneny’s $40 million to upwards of $70 million and then $100 million. With a little over two years left to go, the corporation was now stating that the actual cost would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $125 million; that in fact they needed to spend the aforementioned $40 million before the gates even opened on construction and operating expenses alone.

  To reach that figure, the $28 million in bond sales was to be supplemented by over $11 million in pre-Fair revenue, including advance ticket sales and rents from exhibitors and concessionaires. It was all figured out to the penny. The corporation’s prospectus stated that “careful estimates by engineering experts” assured a minimum of forty million visitors in 1939, with a “reasonable hope” of fifty million, in which case the Fair would turn a profit of over $1 million in its first season. “An even larger attendance is not an impossibility,” the prospectus went on to suggest.

  And if the Fair went a second season, with an estimated twenty-four million paid admissions, the profits would soar to more than $8 million even after the debentures had been paid off in full, with interest.

  Yet despite the bold assurances, sales of the bonds all but dried up by March 1. Whalen was at a crossroads. He was, as a Harper’s magazine profile described him, “the man for the moment; but the way had been prepared for him by a sequence of the right men at other moments.”* Now, finally at the helm of a great endeavor rather than the puppet master behind the curtain, he knew he had to commit one way or the other. The papers were already naming him as the potential Democratic nominee for mayor; his off-the-cuff response was that he was too busy with the Fair to give it serious consideration at the moment. But he purposefully didn’t discourage the idea, either.

  Forced to either take it a step further or risk the ire of his party, he reconsidered and accepted an invitation to enter the primary.

  With the bond sale stalled at a little over $20 million, Whalen turned to Whitney for help. But for some reason, the man seemed strangely preoccupied; no one could get him on the phone. In fact, he’d all but disappeared, and he’d apparently stopped selling the bonds altogether. His behavior was inexplicable; if the measure failed, they might as well have nothing. The bonds were sold on quota; any amount less than the $27 million and change made them worthless.

  Desperate for any incentive to jump-start sales, Whalen came up with a new idea. He created the Terrace Club, an exclusive establishment in an elaborate building on the fairgrounds that would be open only to individuals who bought a minimum of $5,000 worth of bonds. Within a few weeks, he sold almost $4 million worth, effectively closing the gap enough for the remaining amount to be swallowed up by the various banks represented by the corporation’s board of directors.

  Disaster had been averted, but only briefly. In the second week of March, the reason for Whitney’s disappearing act became public: Whitney & Co. filed for bankruptcy. Worse, Richard Whitney had been summoned to face charges of “conduct apparently contrary13 to just and equitable principles of trade.” In a whirlwind of confession, Whitney pleaded guilty to stealing $105,000 from the estate of his father-in-law, George Sheldon, of which he was a co-trustee, as well as from several other customers’ accounts. The story of his rise and fall as a financial genius played out in the daily papers like a Wall Street soap opera. Whitney was charged with two counts of grand larceny; his brother, George, a partner at J. P. Morgan, was reported as being in on the scam. Even Edward Simmons, current president of the New York Stock Exchange, was mentioned as a co-conspirator.

  On April 11, Judge Owen Bohan sentenced Whitney to five to ten years in prison. Led away in handcuffs, he spent that night in the Tombs, an unlikely jail mate of Martha Hore’s killer, Joe Healy. Eventually, the former chairman of the World’s Fair bond committee would also share accommodations with Healy as an inmate of Sing Sing prison.

  Despite the Whitney debacle, once the bond sale was secured Grover Whalen set sail for Europe once more, this time with an even better ace up his sleeve. Undeterred by his lack of admission into the Soviet Union the previous fall, Whalen had traveled to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with Constantine Oumansky, an adviser at the Soviet embassy. The following weekend, Oumansky returned the favor and visited Whalen in his office in the Empire State Building. By now, with $28 million burning a hole in his pocket, Whalen had outdone himself, commandeering an entire floor of the famed building and decorating his own director’s room in his signature cream-colored leather chairs and ornate, art deco splendor. The setting was, according to one visitor, a “utopist’s dream.”

  On Friday night, Oumansky was wined and dined by Mr. New York, and all day Saturday, he listened as Whalen pored over the plans and models of the Fair. By Sunday, he was a devoted fan. Whalen was pleased; he now thought he stood a good chance of getting into the USSR and selling them on the idea of a pavilion after all. What he hadn’t expected came when Oumansky stood up and asked to use the telephone. He wanted to call the Kremlin directly and tell Premier Stalin the news.

  “The telephone operator14 on duty at our switchboard that day never did get over the shock,” Whalen later described it. Amazingly, Stalin got on the phone and
listened as Oumansky talked excitedly about the World’s Fair. “He told the Premier that the USSR had been offered a most desirable location on the fairgrounds site upon which they could erect a building,” Whalen recalled, “and he strongly recommended it to Stalin.”

  After half an hour of excited chatter, Oumansky held the phone to his chest and asked Whalen rather meekly how much the pavilion would cost. “I told him about four or five million dollars,” Whalen said. “He relayed the information to Stalin and after some further discussion closed the conversation and hung up.”

  Without even haggling over the price, Stalin had agreed to erect a large pavilion for $4 million. It was the Fair’s first large-scale foreign contract, and when the official Soviet ambassador, Alexander Troyanovsky, formally signed the contract a short while later, Whalen made sure the press was in attendance. He also not so subtly suggested to them that they’d better get used to such occasions.

  “The log jam was broken,”15 Whalen declared, beaming. “Some complained that I had, in effect, upset the apple cart, and now every country would have to participate on a large scale. No one was going to allow the Russians to overshadow them at Flushing.”

  The next morning, he got a call from the Bureau of International Expositions, inviting him to return to Paris. “I took the next ship over,”16 Whalen said.

  Although President Roosevelt had verbally extended an invitation, through an act of Congress, for foreign nations to participate in the World’s Fair, the gesture apparently wasn’t grand enough for Grover Whalen. Never one to go cheap, he produced an elaborate, nineteen-by-twenty-five-inch prospectus to use as a formal presentation and had them sent out to various foreign ministers. Among the colorful maps and descriptions of the Fair, Whalen oddly chose to include a poem by Christopher Morley. Titled “Sky Line,” the ode to Manhattan included several double-edged lines:

  Sorceress beyond compare,

  City of glory and despair …

  Symphony fatal and divine

  City of mine.

  Perhaps it summed up Whalen’s feelings about his native metropolis, but nevertheless its recipients could not fail to give the book their full attention: It weighed more than ten pounds.

  Buoyed by his victory with Stalin and the USSR, Whalen decided to go on to Italy and see what he could do with Il Duce. “I called on17 the American ambassador and he said Mussolini wasn’t seeing any Americans,” Whalen said. “So I went to see a fellow who was the Italian Consul General here in New York in 1929, when I was Police Commissioner. He got on the phone, and then said to me, ‘How would tomorrow night at six o’clock be, for a ten-minute interview?’”

  Floored but immensely proud of himself, Whalen went out and bought a new pair of shoes for the occasion and “got all dolled up.”

  “As I entered18 the Dictator’s office I saw a highly polished floor at least two hundred feet long,” he said. “At this point my new patent leather shoes reminded me painfully of their existence…. I was left alone with a skating rink of polished parquet in front of me.”

  Off in the distance, Mussolini stood with his back to Whalen, looking through enormous windows at the sunset. Whalen had been warned that Il Duce was a short man and very sensitive about his height. “Then I saw that the desk, behind which he stood, was placed on a foot-high platform,” Whalen noted.

  Finally, Mussolini turned and broke the silence. “I understand you served19 as Police Commissioner of New York,” he said.

  “Yes, I did,” Whalen answered.

  “How did my people behave?”

  “Some good, some bad.”

  Mussolini looked him straight in the eye and asked, “The bad ones—from Sicily?”

  Although the meeting had been slated for only ten minutes, their conversation dragged on for more than an hour as the dictator famously rolled his eyes and droned on about Italy’s domestic situation. Finally, sensing that the time was right, Whalen asked about Italy’s participation in the World’s Fair.

  “What, Italy compete with Wall Street?”20 the dictator responded. “What, for example, would it accomplish?”

  “The American people21 would like to know what fascism is,” Whalen stated matter-of-factly.

  Mussolini harrumphed. “You want to know what fascism is? It is like your New Deal!”

  Feeling as though he were hitting a brick wall, Whalen tried flattery. The theme of the World’s Fair, he said, was “Building the World of Tomorrow,” which he graciously compared with Mussolini’s vision for Italy. The strategy worked. Mussolini, echoing Stalin, asked how much it would cost to build a pavilion.

  “I said that participation22 in the Fair would cost Italy five million dollars,” Whalen said, upping the price tag, “and he told me that he would appropriate this. Altogether, I spent an hour and three quarters with him. After that, it was a cinch to get the other foreign nations.”

  Before Whalen was done, sixty-two nations would sign on to be represented at the Fair, an astounding twenty-two of which would build individual pavilions, by far the greatest collection of foreign representation any exposition had ever known. In fact, so much space was let out that Whalen had to cable Voorhees and the Board of Design to tell them to tear up their original plan for the Government Zone—space that had previously been assigned for American states would now be needed just to accommodate the foreign pavilions.

  Whalen sailed back to New York triumphantly. He had $30 million worth of contracts in his pocket. By June, he had withdrawn his name from the mayoral ballot.

  * Their original plan called for nine zones. Budgetary concerns pared it down to seven.

  * Typically, as far as his press coverage went, the profile was titled “Barnum in Modern Dress.”

  The Trylon and Perisphere under construction. Many considered its steel framework more beautiful without the stark white gypsum board that eventually covered it. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  11

  “FOLKS, YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET!”

  The next two years were a frenzy of activity and promotion. When Moses and his crew had finished their transformation of the Corona Dumps, construction began and continued night and day. Foundation work for the Theme Center was laid in May 1937, and almost immediately images of the Trylon and Perisphere started popping up everywhere. Designed by the architectural team of Wallace Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux, the Trylon was to be a seven-hundred-foot-tall, tri-cornered obelisk; the Perisphere—a huge, hollow globe—would rise eighteen stories high and as broad as a city block.*

  “We promised the world1 something new in Fair architecture,” Whalen boasted, “and here it is—something radically different and yet fundamentally as old as man’s experience.”

  By summer, the major corporations began signing up, beginning with General Electric in June and continuing on with Kodak, AT&T, Heinz, RCA, and a host of others. They were by no means easy sells for Whalen. One strict rule was that no company could reproduce a trademark or product in its building’s design. When the National Cash Register Company submitted plans for a structure in the shape of a giant register, Whalen banished them to the Amusement Zone. Howard Heinz demanded that his exhibit be shaped like a pickle; Whalen told him to forget it and promptly sold their space to Borden while Heinz was vacationing in Europe.*

  In the end, the problems became less a matter of who would or wouldn’t participate than where the Board of Design was going to put them all. Early on, they had decided to place the Transportation Zone in a large area across from the main exhibit grounds, separated by the Grand Central Parkway but easily accessible by a pair of footbridges. Whalen had imagined Detroit’s Big Three automotive companies would fill up most of the space. After some fancy salesmanship, he got Ford and General Motors to agree on the location. But Walter Chrysler balked, refusing to participate unless he could pick a site in the main area.

  Whalen held his ground, telling him it was Transportation or nothing. Chrysler chose nothing, so Whalen divided the allotte
d space into halves instead of thirds and allowed Ford and GM to go hog wild with their pavilions. Chrysler eventually changed his mind, but by then space was gone. Voorhees and his crew took out their erasers and created new space in a smaller area originally designated for a comfort station.

  By August, the Administration Building was completed. Grover and his staff, which now numbered over six hundred, vacated their offices in the Empire State Building and followed a convoy of twenty-five moving vans to the fairgrounds. Three days later, at a dedication ceremony for the site of the Theme Center, Whalen stood under a broiling sun and proudly announced that 86 percent of exhibition space had been “spoken for,” including participation by thirty-one American states.

  By now his declarations of peace, and of the role his World’s Fair would play in it, were becoming ubiquitous. When a reporter dared ask him, “Wouldn’t a European war2 completely ruin the Fair?” Whalen shot back, “There’ll be no war. That’s all newspaper talk.” The Theme Center, he said at the dedication, was “a new layout for life…. The World’s Fair will predict, may even dictate, the shape of things to come.”

  In fact, Whalen began to speak so often about world peace that, as in the Rothstein affair, many people believed his Fair would single-handedly solve the growing disturbance overseas. “My personal investigation3 in Europe has conclusively proved to me that there’ll be no war,” he asserted triumphantly. “A wave of enthusiasm for the World’s Fair is sweeping Europe. That’s what Europe is thinking of now—not war.”

  Of his trip abroad, he added, “It is the hope4 of many to whom I spoke that New York’s World’s Fair of 1939 will provide a peace table around which the powers of the world may sit and develop a worldwide peace program.” Straight-faced, he also declared at a business luncheon that several countries were even considering sending “peace ships” to the Fair.