by James Mauro
Stephen Voorhees answered that science was to be recognized “only in its applications.” Meaning what, exactly? Nylon? Fluorescent lighting? Television?
Whalen spun it in a better light. Science wouldn’t exactly have its own exhibit per se, but the overall goal of the World’s Fair was “to tell the whole story3 of modern scientific research instead of a single chapter,” he said. “As far as practical, to add a working, scientific display to every major exhibit.”
In other words, gadgets and magic.
Part of the difficulty came from the scientific community itself, which could never quite manage to get its ideas and meaning across in a way that everyone could understand. In the middle of 1937, Columbia professor Harold Urey attempted to enumerate what scientists were trying to do with their work: “We wish to abolish4 drudgery, discomfort and want from the lives of men and bring them pleasure, comfort, leisure and beauty.”
“Well, yes!” one can imagine a Westinghouse executive pounding his fist on a conference table and shouting. “That’s exactly what we want, too!” So it came as no surprise that in one of Westinghouse’s live performances, an actress portraying “Mrs. Drudge” toiled to wash her dishes by hand while “Mrs. Modern” waited leisurely in comfort as her electric dishwasher did all the work.
Unfortunately, Wendt and the Science Advisory Committee were a little too late to effect any real influence on the World’s Fair. “Any plan now5 presented must be a compromise,” he reluctantly told its members, “since it must be constructed at a time when the major commitments of the World’s Fair have been made.”
At DuPont’s Wonder World of Chemistry, a puppet show featuring the Tatterman Marionettes performed an elaborate pageant detailing how such modern innovations as Lucite and nylon helped to improve its audience’s quality of life. Con Edison’s City of Light offered a gigantic diorama (the Fair loved dioramas) depicting how the New York metropolitan area benefited from the power of electricity, gas, and steam.
“The whole city in miniature, from Westchester to Coney Island!” its advertisement read. “Subways in action, elevators darting up and down! Factories humming! 130,000 lights go on as thunderstorm darkens sky! 24 hours in the life of New York portrayed in thrilling 12-minute drama!”
No wonder the scientists were upset. The Hall of Industrial Science showed off Plexiglas; Lastex was the U.S. Rubber Company’s “miracle yarn”; Carrier even constructed a seventy-five-foot-high Eskimo Igloo of Tomorrow to show off the wonders of air-conditioning. And to entice visitors inside (and remind them exactly how uncomfortable they were on any given summer day), twin forty-eight-foot-tall thermometers registered the temperature outside and the cooler, Carrier-controlled climate indoors.
At AT&T, a pretty young woman operated “the Voice Operation Demonstrator,” or Voder—a musical organlike structure with keys and foot pedals that replicated the sound of a human voice. And while The New Yorker called it “creepy,” Gerald Wendt succumbed to the lure of gadgetry by stating, “No listener can resist being profoundly moved by the ghostly human quality of this synthetic speech.”
But when it came to pure spectacle, Westinghouse topped them all. Visitors came to know its building by the inverted cone of expanding circles surrounding an imposing tower out front—the structure looking very much like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. The company featured two separate exhibits, the Hall of Electrical Power and the Hall of Electrical Living, featuring a riderless bicycle and the Theater of Tomorrow, but its show-stopper was Elektro, the Moto-Man. Scheduled performances throughout the day featured the robot, seven feet tall and apparently programmed with a snide sense of humor, responding to his operator’s requests with comments such as “Okay, Toots!” He smoked, he talked, he counted, and he was the first robot to walk backward.
“That’s the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen,” says an actor in The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair, a promotional film put out by Westinghouse that takes place almost entirely at the company’s exhibit. Its message, however, was right on point: Young Bud Middleton is a pre-teen cynic who believes the future holds no great opportunity for him until Jim, a Westinghouse engineer from “back home,” explains that scientists are creating new opportunities for growth in industry every day. In the end, after seeing his voice waves appear on-screen and even performing in front of a television camera, Bud gets the message.
After the ironic, and laughable, power failure on Opening Day, Albert Einstein retreated to his rented cottage in Peconic, Long Island, and settled in for a long summer of sailing and reflection. At Princeton, he had become something of a recluse. After the death of his stepdaughter Ilsa in Paris in 1934, his wife had returned to Europe alone, to accompany her surviving daughter, Margot, safely back to America. Margot’s husband, Dmitri Marianoff, who had been an assistant to Einstein in Germany, had left her, and with no means of support she decided to take up residency with them in Princeton.
The trip, however, proved fateful for Elsa. Every possession of theirs, including those of their children, had been confiscated by the Nazis, and the death of Ilsa had left her literally heartbroken. In December 1935, Elsa entered Montefiore Hospital. One year later she was dead, the victim, it was reported, of an inflammation of the heart. She was fifty-eight years old.
By 1939, at the age of sixty, Einstein had been robbed of his home, his property, his savings, and his native country. Now he was a widower as well. As a result, Einstein rarely spoke publicly on any subject, preferring to comfort himself in solitude and professing to be hard at work on his unified field theory. To a certain extent, his involvement in the World’s Fair, in particular his dedication of the Palestine Pavilion, forced him out of his internal existence of private thought and into the realm of politics and the world at large. That real world reaction may have had something to do with his fateful decision later that same summer.
On May 28, Einstein was invited to return to Flushing Meadows to dedicate the building. It was hardly an occasion he could turn down, since visiting heads of state customarily dedicated foreign pavilions. That Einstein was chosen as lead speaker (in the absence of any formal ambassador) over key Zionist figures such as Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, signified that Einstein was in effect being recognized not only as a great scientist, but also formally as a leader of the Jewish people.
Still, it was an honor he may or may not have desired. His stern pacifism had been rooted in his disgust for military aggression of any kind, yet the plight of the Jews in Germany had caused him to retreat in spirit from the true doctrine of war refusal. And as biographer Ronald Clark noted, “He wanted to aid the Jews6 and he wanted to help keep the peace of the world. But whenever he was in danger of becoming too deeply involved, there was some new riddle of the universe that demanded attention.”
But the events of that spring made it almost impossible for Einstein to remain silent. On May 17, the British government published its new policy regarding Palestine, which, it was hoped, would settle the twenty-year conflict between Arabs and Jews. The policy, issued as a white paper, did anything but. Among other things, it called for an independent Palestine to be governed by both Arabs and Jews, in direct conflict with Great Britain’s former Balfour Declaration of 1917, which had named Palestine as “a national home for the Jewish people.” Further, it restricted the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to seventy-five thousand over the next five years, at which point the Jewish population would be frozen at a one-third minority, and gave the British high commissioner the power to prohibit Jews from purchasing land in certain regions.
That only a fixed number of Jews would be allowed to escape Nazi barbarism to the Holy Land was indeed an abominable position for such a world power to take. Almost immediately, riots broke out in Tel Aviv, a twenty-four-hour general strike was called, and mass demonstrations were held in all Jewish towns. The next day, more than one hundred and eighty teenagers were wounded when police battled
an angry mob of five thousand marchers at the district commissioner’s office. The confrontation lasted more than three hours; when it was over, five British constables had been shot, one was dead, and the conflict showed no signs of letting up.
For Einstein, the timing was critical. A week before the pavilion’s dedication ceremonies, Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the Jewish National Fund, called for Jews throughout the United States to flock to the World’s Fair “as a demonstration of determination to stand by the ideal of a national homeland.” Additionally, leaders of American Zionist organizations collectively called for a mass demonstration at the Fair to protest against Great Britain. Already a group of rabbis were chanting prayers in front of the British Pavilion.
All of this made the World’s Fair itself a kind of symbolic epicenter of the global political scene—a stage upon which conflicting elements could act out their grievances and receive the appropriate attention each party felt it rightfully deserved. This wasn’t exactly what Grover Whalen had had in mind for his World of Tomorrow, but in some major way it elevated the Fair’s status from a mere exposition to a gathering place for the voices of dissent in the face of oppression—the world in miniature played out in a scale-model replica on the grounds of Flushing Meadows.
May was an especially dreary month when it came to harbingers of war. On May 1, May Day, Hitler addressed a million and a half Germans and thumbed his nose at the U.S. boycott of German goods. “I believe7 it would have been more rational to import German commodities rather than the most inferior German subjects,” the Führer stated. “We can be only happy to get rid of them and are content to leave it to others to get on with them. We shall see to it that they do not threaten us, and I have made every provision in advance for such a contingency.”
(The reference was clearly to Einstein and his former German compatriots. The threat of which he spoke may have had something to do with the significant events of the following Fourth of July.)
Two weeks later, Mussolini assured a crowd of fifty thousand uniformed men and women that an alliance with Germany would be signed by the end of the month in Berlin. Il Duce, it was noted, seemed to part the clouds with this speech; it had been raining for several days until just minutes before he appeared, when the sky cleared and remained bright until he had finished.
“Will there be war or peace?”8 he asked. “I answer this question by declaring that … there are not at present in Europe problems big enough or acute enough to justify a war.” It may have been a gesture toward peace, but in response, only the women cheered. The men, all of them potential soldiers, were clearly disappointed.
And when Mussolini referred sarcastically to the supposed moral superiority of potential enemies, a single-worded cry of protest went up: “Palestine.”9
Nevertheless, Whalen tried everything he could to keep the situation in Europe from turning his World’s Fair into a political stage show. In mid-May, he declared it was Tulip Week at the Fair when one million bulbs were sent from the Netherlands and planted throughout the grounds. Robert Moses dedicated the Gardens on Parade exhibit, but only because it was to become the nucleus of a botanical garden for his future Versailles.
On English Speaking Union Day (whatever that was), Tallulah Bankhead recited poetry to the accompaniment of the British Coldstream Guards Band. Orson Welles read another poem, of course titled “The World of Tomorrow,” written by twenty-three-year-old Pearl Levinson, who was the winner of the $1,000 prize for an official “Poem of the Fair” contest. And because so many people were complaining about the high cost of food, Whalen announced that four new “popular priced” restaurants would open, the largest with more than two thousand seats. He also increased the number of hot dog and hamburger stands based on their strong daily business, and may have wistfully regretted his decision not to go forward with his idea for the Trylon-and-Perisphere-shaped snacks.
But not every big event was going his way, and some events were taking place that no one had planned. One afternoon that month, a 950-pound Mexican steer named Pancho Villa managed to leap over a five-foot fence in the Cavalcade of Centaurs, the Fair’s fancy name for a good old-fashioned rodeo and Wild West exhibit in the Amusement Zone. Chased by a pair of brazen cowboys on horseback, Pancho staged his one-man running of the bull up and down streets, charging first at a group of barkers outside Cuban Village and sending them hurtling for cover. Then he turned his wrath on the “bobbies” of Merrie Old England and sent them scattering every which way, looking like a nineteenth-century version of the Keystone Kops.
In hot pursuit by Bud Nelson and Gregorio Acosta (who were loving every minute of it, whooping and hollering and whipping their reins back and forth across their horses’ necks), Pancho ran past the shimmying, topless mannequins outside Crystal Lassies,* past the Infant Incubator and the spinning windmill of Heineken’s on the Zuider Zee, all through the entire length of the Loop. Visitors stood in awe, not quite sure if what they were seeing was part of the everyday happenings at the Fair.
After several passes, the rampaging bull crashed through the World’s Fair Boulevard Gate and escaped into the streets of Queens, crossing the Grand Central Parkway extension and charging up 111th Street, where he passed astonished policemen gathered outside their station house at Fifty-first Avenue. Jaws dropped and cigarettes fell from their lips as they saw first the bull, then the two “Yee-hawing” cowboys galloping after him. Nelson, swinging a lariat around his head, had actually roped the beast and almost got him under control when the bull renewed his charge and dragged the cowboy two city blocks before Nelson thought to let go of the rope.
But Nelson got right back up on his horse, followed by several mounted policemen who now joined the chase, plus a squad of motorcycle cops and even a police emergency vehicle. At Forty-sixth Avenue and 108th Street, two and a half miles from the fairgrounds, Nelson got his lasso around him again and held on as Acosta swung his own line around the bull’s neck. Finally the animal stopped, exhausted but seemingly pleased with himself, after crashing into a peanut vendor’s cart. They tied him to a fire hydrant until everyone got their wits and wind back, and when they saw the bull standing calmly on a city street and thought about what had happened, the rodeo men collapsed into a fit of laughter that no doubt amused Pancho Villa but confounded the hell out of the peanut vendor.
In a little while, regaining themselves, Nelson and Acosta returned the proud Pancho to his frontier prairie alongside Fountain Lake.
That same day, May 17, Whalen was looking to his original foreign backers, the Soviets, to draw in a capacity crowd for its opening ceremony. The USSR Pavilion10 was indeed magnificent, and you couldn’t miss it. A seventy-nine-foot-tall statue, alternately nicknamed “Ivan” and “Worker Joe,” perched atop a towering pylon. Next to the Trylon, the tower was the tallest structure at the Fair. Dressed modestly in work clothes, this stainless-steel Superman raised a shining red star above his head. He was pitched slightly forward as if in midstride during a revolutionary march, and one of his feet extended over the base that supported the statue, suggesting that the next step would stomp the crowd below.
The pavilion itself swept around the pylon in an open horseshoe shape, fronted on both ends of the semicircle with huge columns sporting bas-relief profiles of Stalin and Lenin—the two leaders facing each other, the latter featuring his quote “The Russian Revolution must in its final result lead to the victory of socialism.” A pair of bright red flags displaying the hammer and sickle snapped obediently in the wind while the Red Army Ensemble of Singers rang out with stirring patriotic melodies at all hours of the day and evening.
It was quite a statement for a representing country to the World’s Fair to make, but the structure’s imposing nature drew thousands of the curious and open-minded into the vast expanse of its exhibit. The main outdoor area was large enough to display the Tupolev ANT-25, the airplane in which Valery Chkalov had flown a nonstop, fifty-five-hundred-mile flight from Moscow to Vancouver, Washington,
in sixty-three hours—nineteen hundred miles and thirty hours longer than Lindbergh’s historic flight a decade earlier.
The pavilion’s interior was also roomy enough to show off a sixty-foot section of the Mayakovskaya station of the Moscow subway, dubbed “the palace subway” by Muscovites. (Take that, Manhattan!)
Whalen’s old comrade and original money producer Constantine Oumansky officially opened his country’s pavilion. Oumansky had recently been promoted to ambassador, a fact that delighted Whalen. His pleasure was short-lived, however. The speech started off well. After being introduced by Whalen and briskly shaking his hand, Oumansky assured the attentive crowd that Russia was and would continue to be a “good neighbor” to the United States and was anxious to preserve world peace in the World of Tomorrow. His statements were greeted by much applause and one of Whalen’s trademark gleaming smiles.
It went downhill from there. Pounding on the podium in classic Soviet style, Oumansky went on to affirm that in the preservation of said peace, Russia’s mighty army was more than ready to defend its borders against invasion.
“The Soviet people,”11 he said, looking somewhat uncomfortable in an ambassadorial morning coat that fit him badly, “are not impressed by threats. Neither do they beg for alliances. They are prepared to cooperate on a basis of complete reciprocity and equal obligations with powers which are interested in the maintenance of peace.”
Whalen’s toothy smile faded slowly into a reluctant, tight-lipped acceptance. Yes, Oumansky continued, they would fight against German aggression in Eastern Europe; but, no, they wouldn’t do it single-handedly. England and France had better live up to their obligations, he warned, quoting Stalin that “warmongers accustomed to12 having others pull chestnuts out of the fire for them” could forget it.
