Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  Negotiation over action; words over guns. It would work as a national policy for two and a half more years. And no one, not even Albert Einstein, who was at that moment preparing to give his own speech at the Fair later that evening, could have imagined the magnitude of force that would soon be unleashed upon the world.

  Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s rays of eternal hope cheered the soggy crowd, as did his lighthearted reference to the repeal of Prohibition as “an unhappy trial of a few years.” As FDR’s words reverberated down the long corridor of the Court of Peace and echoed over the loudspeakers throughout the fairgrounds, his immediate audience, perhaps expecting that now, finally, he would acknowledge the situation in Europe, sat silently and waited for it. They waited some more, and more after that.

  “And so my friends,” Roosevelt said, wrapping it up, “I hereby dedicate the World’s Fair …”

  He stumbled briefly, having been standing for about as long as his physical endurance would allow. Behind him, John Roosevelt nearly jumped out of his seat, ready to catch his father should he begin to fall. He quickly thrust out his father’s cane, then just as swiftly withdrew it before anyone noticed.

  “… the New York World’s Fair of 1939,” FDR recovered, “and I declare it open to all mankind.”*

  For the first time since he had begun speaking, the crowd broke into a smattering of applause. War, it seemed, was not on the menu that day. Peace was, in the most ethereal forms imaginable. As a finale to the festivities, a chorus line of young women in white robes performed what was called a “Pageant of Peace.” Then they mounted a rostrum called “the Altar of Peace” and waved flags symbolizing the Fair as an “Agency of Peace.”

  After that display, Roosevelt had apparently had enough. He left the podium at three-twenty, exactly twenty minutes after his car had arrived, and by four o’clock he and Eleanor were already chugging their way back to Hyde Park by special train.

  * Although television was most popular at RCA, both General Electric and Westinghouse also featured their own models. Perhaps envisioning its own version of the future, Ford had even installed one in its lounge—primarily to display its commercials.

  * On the subject of the Fair’s ongoing construction, Whalen would naturally spin it his way, stating that his Fair was “more nearly complete than any in history on opening day.” In other words, he may have been unprepared, but he was less unprepared than anyone else before him. And that had to count for something.

  * The correction was necessary. Out on the West Coast, San Francisco was hosting its own, significantly smaller World’s Fair. A true Democrat, FDR was not about to ignore California.

  Grover Whalen introduces Albert Einstein, whose speech was supposed to kick off the first nighttime lighting of the Fair. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  13

  BLACKOUT

  War aside, the World’s Fair did not open without its own controversy. In another of his famous overstatements, Grover Whalen had boasted that the Fair represented “the sum total of almost all that man has produced since history began.” Brushing off his critics, he also stated that “these acres have seen no strife” and that there had in fact been “exemplary cooperation among individuals and industries.” Neither was true.

  Just four weeks earlier, on April 3, New York City Council member James Burke, a Democrat from Queens, blasted the World’s Fair as his neighborhood’s blight and declared that the city itself had become “the victim of the greatest con game1 in history.” He wasn’t quite done. The real slogan of the World of Tomorrow, he said, should be “Never give a sucker an even break.” Whalen, Burke went on, was a P. T. Barnum who “put the city in hock … for the purpose of insuring fat dividends for the bondholders of a private business venture known as New York World’s Fair 1939, Inc.”

  His wasn’t the only voice claiming unfair practices. Another council member, Salvatore Ninfo, representing the Bronx, questioned the Fair’s employment policy. He specifically wanted to know why the Fair was importing workers from outside the city while thirty-one thousand civil service applicants had been turned away. In response, the World’s Fair Corporation tried an end run, asserting that it could not be investigated by the City Council because it was a private company.

  Ninfo was left to shake his head and wonder publicly how any agency could be called private while it was availing itself of $70 million in city investment.

  The naysayers continued right through Opening Day. At two o’clock, just before the speeches started, about two hundred African Americans showed up to picket the Fair. They were all from the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, and they marched specifically in protest against Grover Whalen and his “discrimination against Negro workers.” A month earlier, on March 16, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People charged that “negroes” had been excluded “from all employment2 with the New York World’s Fair, except in the capacities of maids and porters.”

  The criticism stung Whalen deeply. Performers like Hattie McDaniel, who costarred that year as Mammy in Gone With the Wind, and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, the gravel-throated, perennial foil to Jack Benny (“Mistah Benny! Mistah Benny!”), had been relegated to those same menial roles in Hollywood for years. Why were they picking on his Fair?

  Whalen knew that racism existed in many parts of the country, despite Roosevelt’s assertion of a “completely homogenous nation.” Yet as early as January 1937, he had addressed more than five hundred members of the New York Urban League in Harlem and stated proudly, “I know that you people3 do not want to be set apart from the rest of the world, and I again promise you that the managers of the Fair will give you your just representation.”

  The “you people” part may have stung somewhat, but the audience felt his sincerity and cheered him loudly.

  Nevertheless, some of the charges of discrimination were blatantly true. Whether or not Whalen knew about them is another matter. One such example (that clearly no one in New York could have approved) was a set of “Sales Instructions” from a Milwaukee-based travel agency that called itself “World’s Fair Tours.” In a company memo, the agency had no trouble assuring its staff that “the specific article4 we are selling is a prearranged tour for white people.” Moreover, the agency stressed that it would not be offering any tours to what it not so subtly referred to as “the general public.”

  On the subject of ethnic representation, the Fair itself was of two minds.5 On the one hand, Henry Dreyfuss had chosen William Grant Still to compose the theme music for Democracity; and the courtyard of the Contemporary Arts Building showcased an imposing sculpture called The Harp, created by African American artist Augusta Savage and featuring an all-black choir.

  Conversely, when a photograph of two African American Cub Scouts at the Fair was distributed to the press, the Publicity Department made sure to stress that blacks appearing in official photographs was “extremely unusual.”

  And then there was the middle ground—the murky subtext of racism that was both accepted and ignored (by both blacks and whites) at the time because its appearance was everywhere. The Fair’s most popular show was The Hot Mikado at the World’s Fair Music Hall. The musical’s headliner was Bill Robinson, whose roles as a slave-era, nappy-headed servant in Shirley Temple films like The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel had made him a Hollywood star. Robinson, better known by the minstrel-tainted nickname “Bojangles,” was portrayed on the program’s cover with the wide white eyes and red pulpy lips of a lawn jockey. And no one protested, or even noticed. Not even the NAACP.

  But protests weren’t Whalen’s foremost concern at the moment. The opening ceremony was over, it was nearly four o’clock, and still the massive crowds he had predicted had yet to show. Worse, the rain had finally kicked in, alternately drizzling and then coming down in heavy sheets. Thunder echoed off the buildings like a warning: This was only going to get worse. Frantically, Whalen headed back to his office and called for repor
ts. What he heard made him sink lower into despair.

  A policeman monitoring traffic along both the Queens and Northern boulevards reported that it was actually “lighter than last week’s.”6 The big city parking lot, with spaces for some twelve thousand cars, wasn’t more than one-quarter filled. Each of the other five fields, all of them able to hold five thousand cars apiece, were said to contain no more than a few hundred.

  By four-thirty, visitors were seen streaming up the exit ramps to already crowded trains. By five, it became a rout.

  The second major ceremony marking the opening of the Fair (this one, mercifully, open to the public at large) was the dedication of a sixty-five-foot-tall statue of George Washington (thanks to Joseph Shadgen). The statue dominated Constitution Mall, standing like a watchful guardian between the Theme Center and the Court of Peace. At five o’clock, Governor Lehman officiated at a reenactment of the first inauguration, with Washington himself being portrayed by a local cartoonist named Denys Wortman. This was to be the culmination of a ceremony that had begun at Mount Vernon, where Wortman had stepped into a one-hundred-year-old coach-and-four for his long journey to Flushing Meadows. Now he was ready for his close-up. Costumed in a homespun suit but sporting a dress sword, Wortman rode up to the imposing statue and dismounted just as a fresh downpour began. The meager crowd that had awaited his arrival suddenly broke for cover, as if the sight of him had frightened them all away. Distraught and drenched, Wortman’s Father of Our Country took the oath of office in front of only a handful of admirers.

  A short time later there was a break in the weather, and once again fairgoers came out of exhibit lobbies into the open, checking to see if the storm was over. It wasn’t. If ever the gods seemed to be directly mocking Grover Whalen and his World’s Fair, it must have come at the moment when the still hopeful remnants of the crowd looked up and saw an ominous sight: While the sky just outside the perimeter of the fairgrounds looked bright and sunny, directly over their heads a dome of clouds hung low and heavy, like a mood-killing spaceship. It was as if everyone else in New York were enjoying a fine Sunday afternoon, while those at the Fair were being dumped on.

  By that time, most of them had had enough. After a day that had blown first hot and then chilly, humid and then soaking, another mass exodus began heading home to change out of their wet clothes and process the scenes of wonder that had been laid out before them. Those who did remain dawdled in restaurants or revisited exhibits they’d already seen in a desperate attempt to get out of the rain.

  In an effort to keep them all from leaving, Whalen ordered the engineers in charge of the Perisphere to begin projecting the multicolored images across the great white globe that were normally reserved for nighttime viewing. As they did so, the Perisphere’s theme song began to play, a mournful dirge with the now ironic title “Rising Tide.”

  The music, one observer noted, added a “sad note, slightly morbid7 under the circumstances.”

  At seven o’clock, darkness fell and the final ceremony of the long day began. Albert Einstein, in his role as scientific adviser, was already frustrated with the Fair’s rejection of true science8 in favor of gadgets and trickery. Against his own better judgment, he had reluctantly agreed to give a speech explaining cosmic rays to what remained of the Opening Day crowd. In typical World’s Fair fashion, his words were just a prelude to the real fireworks—the dramatic turning on of the nighttime lights of the Fair. It was to be the first public demonstration of fluorescent lighting, and they were expecting a big show.

  The plan was to “capture”9 ten cosmic rays from outer space at the Hayden Planetarium on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Each ray that arrived would be signaled by a beam of light that one by one rose up and illuminated the stately Trylon, accompanied by the ringing of the great bell wire at the base of the Perisphere. (Also known as “the Voice of the Perisphere,” the amplified piano wire played every night from hidden speakers, filling the fairgrounds with an eerie-sounding, science-fiction-like melody.) At the arrival of the tenth ray, the lights would turn on everywhere, finally ending the gloom.

  Also typically, the Fair’s planners had requested that Einstein limit his speech to five minutes. At first he was furious, not out of any sense of ego or the fact that no such limitations had been placed on any other speaker that day. It would take volumes to even begin to explain the subject, he protested, and probably no one would understand it anyway, least of all the laymen in attendance. No, he indignantly refused the request; he would not do any such thing.

  Fortunately, the Fair’s director of illumination, Bassett Jones, could be as persistent as he was creative. Jones hounded Einstein, barraging him with phone calls, pleading letters, and telegrams, until the scientist finally gave in. For several weeks before Opening Day, he angrily scribbled notes on cosmic rays, all the while wondering why he was wasting his time with such nonsense. Angry and frustrated, Einstein wrote and rewrote his speech until he had shortened it to what he considered was a ridiculous seven hundred words.

  “I’m very sorry,”10 he apologized halfheartedly. “But I can’t cut it down any further.”

  In the end, Einstein’s rays, hopeful or not, never got off the ground. As he rose to the same podium where FDR and others had spoken earlier, he could see all around him a smattering of spectators, but he couldn’t see their faces. Most of the remaining fairgoers held copies of the World’s Fair News over their heads in an effort to stay relatively dry.

  Grover Whalen gave a brief introduction and tried to make light of the situation. “I just apologized11 to Professor Einstein for the weather,” he said, looking dapper as ever in a dark suit and bow tie. “And he said it’s all right, it’s just water.”

  Einstein laughed politely at the joke, then got immediately down to business.

  “If science, like art,12 is to perform its mission truly and fully,” he began, “its achievements must enter not only superficially, but with their inner meaning, into the consciousness of people.”

  Only a few words into his speech, the rain-soaked loudspeakers crackled with static, garbling his heavily accented English and further confusing the crowd. If they couldn’t follow his explanation under ordinary circumstances, now they were completely in the dark.

  Not that it mattered much. Here was Einstein, the great, eccentric scientist they had read and heard so much about; the man whom “laymen” scratched their heads over but grinned at in appreciation anyway. The oddball who talked about bending light and relativity and something called mass-energy equivalence, about which they knew nothing at all, but whose crazy white hair and funny clothes had made him an icon of intelligence. He was as puzzling and entertaining to them as the young egghead contestants on the popular radio program Quiz Kids. They had no idea what he was talking about, but they knew it was something important, and they listened reverently despite all the distortion and the wind that carried his words away as quickly as he had spoken them.

  Their rapt attention pleased Einstein as much as it confused him. Years later, he would ask, “Why is it that nobody understands me, but everybody likes me?” It would never be truer than on this night.

  By the time he got down to the mechanics of his speech—“If a metallic conductor13 is isolated completely by means of an electric insulator, an electroscope for instance”—the crowd was hopelessly lost. Nevertheless Einstein pressed on, reading from his translated German text and taking up his full five minutes of allotted time. They had come to hear an explanation of cosmic rays, and like it or not, they were going to get one.

  When it was over, he politely shook Whalen’s hand and took his seat, waiting to see what would happen next. With great flourish another voice, louder and more distinctly American, barked over the public address system: “Give us ten cosmic rays!”14

  In response, the voice of Dr. W. H. Barton, who was manning the apparatus that trapped the rays at the Planetarium, responded with an equal modulation of drama: “Here comes the first ray!”

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sp; The spectators, tired and drenched but eager as children, craned their necks upward as if to witness something akin to a shooting star. By now the remaining streetlights had been turned off, and the twilight effect was dramatic. The bell wire rang suddenly as the first tier of light struck the Trylon. A majestically higher note of music accompanied each progressively taller bolt of color that lit up the tower layer by layer, as if it were materializing by magic before their very eyes. And between the fervent countdown, the booming of the bell wire, and the illumination of the rays, both cosmic and electric, the anticipation grew to near frenzy. The crowd echoed each called number: “… eight, nine …”

  Then, just as the day had proved weatherwise—with the future, both of the world and of the World’s Fair, darkened by ominous clouds that held off hope—these particular rays proved equally unreliable and uncertain. When the tenth ray was captured and Einstein threw the switch15 to light up the final tip of the Trylon and the fluorescent lights, the electrical system overloaded and caused a total blackout.

  Instead of making the Fair as bright as day, brighter than the day in fact had been, the power failure returned it to near complete darkness.

  Whalen turned frantically to his aides for answers. Einstein probably chuckled at the irony of it all. Light apparently not only bent, it sometimes broke. The crowd didn’t know what to think.

  After several minutes, Whalen gave the order to set off the fireworks that had been planned for later on, when the main fairgrounds closed for the day. As roman candles began bursting over their heads, fairgoers turned their attention away from Einstein and his fluorescent dawn to the wonders exploding in the sky. It was an easy transition, a mere shift in perspective from science to spectacle, from light to dark to light of a different, albeit noisier, kind. “One they could applaud,”16 as one astute reporter put it.

  Einstein left the podium shaking his head, amused by what he had seen. He was escorted to his car for the long drive back to Peconic and his lakeside summer home. The speech, he noted mischievously, had been worth it after all.