Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  For the time being, Einstein thought no more about it. He had an engagement that evening to tackle a piece by Bach with his friend Rothman, the “sundials” merchant.

  A few days later, their plans were switched again. “I decided15 to consult friends with more experience in things practical than we were,” explained Szilárd, understanding that science and politics were two different worlds. One of those friends recommended that Szilárd talk to Alexander Sachs, who knew President Roosevelt personally. Sachs suggested that Einstein skip the State Department entirely and write a letter directly to FDR, promising that he would take it to the White House and hand-deliver it himself.

  Another meeting was arranged on Long Island, only this time Wigner wasn’t available to act as chauffeur. Instead, Szilárd enlisted another Hungarian companion, with a bigger car, to accompany him. Edward Teller, who in his lifetime would become famous as “the father of the H-bomb,” owned a 1935 Plymouth.

  “I believe his advice is valuable,” Szilárd wrote to Einstein, scheduling the visit, “but I also think you might enjoy getting to know him.”

  On this second gathering in Dr. Moore’s little cottage a week later, Einstein again dictated a letter in German, which Teller this time wrote out. The three of them drank tea and discussed exactly how much detail the final draft of the letter should go into.

  “I wondered how many words we could expect the President to read,” Szilárd said. “How many words does the fission of uranium rate?”

  Back in New York, Szilárd wrote out two versions, a long and a short one, and left it up to Einstein to decide which was better. Possibly, the echo of the World’s Fair’s seven-hundred-word limit on his speech on cosmic rays came to Einstein’s mind. He decided to sign both and leave it up to Szilárd, who chose the longer.

  “Sir,” the infamous letter began:

  Some recent work16 by E. Fermi and L. Szilárd … leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the administration. I believe, therefore, that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations.

  … That it may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

  This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable … that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

  … In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the administration and the group of physicists working on chain reaction in America.

  Einstein ended the letter with two very specific recommendations for Roosevelt:

  (a) To approach government departments, keep them informed of further developments, and put forward recommendations for government action, giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States.

  (b) To speed up the experimental work which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of the university laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the cooperation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.

  To make sure he got the message across, Einstein included a warning about Germany’s activities: “I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over….”

  The letter was signed: “Yours very truly, A. Einstein.”

  Now it was up to Alexander Sachs to do his part and see that the letter got into Roosevelt’s hands. With nothing further to do, the scientists waited. Einstein went back to sailing, back to his warm summer evenings playing music with Rothman and reading the newspapers to see which World’s Fair pavilion Hitler might conquer next.

  * Again, the quote has been attributed in several incarnations. Szilárd later remembered Einstein saying, “Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht,” or, “That never occurred to me.”

  The exterior of DuPont’s Wonder World of Chemistry (© Bill Cotter, worldsfairphotos.com)

  20

  “YOU TELL ’EM, MICKEY!”

  As the first anniversary of Martha Hore’s killing came and went, Joe and Easter allowed themselves the luxury of hope for the future again after a year of mourning and despair. Only one hurdle remained: the upcoming trial of Joe Healy, which would finally begin sometime in the new year. If all went well, Healy would be convicted quickly and they could get on with their lives. After all, they had another new baby, a third daughter named Mary, after Joe’s mother, to look after.

  It was summer before the case finally came to court. Healy had been sitting in jail for eighteen months, and as his trial approached he began to lose hope for a merciful judgment. On June 23, 1939, just as a jury was about to be chosen, Healy pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree murder in order to avoid the gas chamber. The 1930s had already seen more executions than any other decade in American history, an average of 167 per year. Joe Healy did not want to be one of them. Judge Koenig of the general sessions court accepted his plea.

  On July 6, Koenig gave him the maximum allowable sentence: twenty years to life imprisonment. Calling the murder a “vicious crime,” he justified his decision by stating that he believed Healy had killed Martha Hore deliberately, not merely as a result of the “holdup,” but solely because he was afraid she would identify him to the police. Healy paled at the sentence, unable to believe his ears. He had befriended the head of the Probation Department, a man named Irving Halpern, who subsequently wrote a report detailing Healy’s troubled childhood and the death of his mother at age nine.

  Judge Koenig barely scanned it. He had not even allowed Grace, who by now had a sixteen-month-old boy to take care of, to enter the courtroom while the sentence was being imposed. Joe Healy’s only ally that day was his father, Joe senior. The two of them did not exchange words as Healy was led away, back to the Tombs before being transferred to a state penitentiary for at least the next twenty years of his life.

  When she heard the verdict, Grace bravely declared that she would wait faithfully for her husband while she worked to raise their son. The boy, she told reporters, was named Joseph Healy III.

  In the middle of July, Grover Whalen began receiving the reports he had been dreading but still could hardly bring himself to believe. After recovering somewhat during a spectacular four-day Fourth of July holiday weekend, attendance at the Fair actually began to drop. The crowds he had envisioned would materialize as people gassed up their cars for their summer vacations were still, for whatever reason, not steering them toward New York. It was inconceivable, but there it was.

  Once again, the critics came out in full force. The Fair was too “high-hat”;1 the plain folk were worried they’d be laughed at; it was all over their heads anyway. Nonsense, Whalen sputtered. The Aquacade was playing to packed houses day and night. By July 15, General Motors was bragging that five million people had passed through its doors; Ford had already documented more than three million visitors.

  Over at the AT&T building, which bordered the Theme Center on the north side of the Court of Communications, five free long-distance telephone calls were raffled off every half hour. An auditorium full of eavesdroppers listened in with earphones, thoroughly entranced by private conversations that stretched from the completely mundane to the occasionally hilarious.

  “Hi, screwball!”2 said a kid brother
to his sister and her boyfriend. “Have you hooked him yet?”

  Another call, to a man from Seattle, was introduced by an operator with the greeting “Mr. Tompkins,3 this is the Telephone Company … calling you from the New York World’s Fair.”

  “All right, all right!” Tompkins shouted. “I’ll pay your damned bill!” and promptly hung up.

  What was high-hat about that?

  “It is evident4 that from now on the upswing of visitors from out of town will continue in line with our expectations,” Whalen had stated hopefully on July 5, buoyed by the holiday rush. “Thousands of persons who have already visited the Fair and returned to their homes have begun to shower us with letters telling us that they were thrilled by the Fair and are advising all of their friends and acquaintances not to miss it.”

  Then he got in a dig at the critics: “In all of these letters there is a complete absence of complaint concerning food and other prices at the Fair.”

  The Whalen publicity machine went at it full force, flooding the airwaves with more than seven hundred radio programs carried over nineteen thousand stations. On the day when King George so desperately needed a bathroom break, more than sixteen hundred stations carried fourteen and a half hours’ worth of coverage. Two hundred and thirty-six newsreels were produced for showing in theaters around the country. In one of them, Mayor La Guardia appeared with two movie stars, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, who had risen to the apex of their popularity by portraying All-American teenagers from small towns in the series of Andy Hardy movies and other pictures.

  Mickey: “I have a lot of friends out where I live out on the Coast and they might come and visit the World’s Fair. But I want to ask you if there’s any place they can stay other than the Park Avenue hotels.”

  La Guardia: “Why, sure, Mickey! New York City’s like every other town in this country! Except that we can give you better accommodations and better food for less money…. And if they come in groups, we can give it to them as cheap as fifty cents a night!”

  Mickey: “Well, Mr. Mayor, that looks like we’re gonna move in!”

  La Guardia: “You move in! You tell the kids, Mickey!”

  As for the newspapers, more than eighteen million column inches had been devoted in 1939 to spreading the news of the Fair all around the world. Many were reproduced word for word from press releases generated by Perley Boone and his team, and they were to a large extent positive. It was a massive undertaking. Publicity for the Fair was carried in more than one hundred and thirty million other types of outlets. The Trylon and Perisphere were featured on more than half a million Sears, Roebuck shipping cartons; three and a quarter million S. H. Kress paper bags and lunch counter menus; and two and a half million Child’s restaurant menus. And, amazingly, one and a half million Bell Telephone customers found the Theme Center logo plastered across the tops of their phone bills.

  During the first seventy-seven days of operation, nine hundred and sixty-three special events were held on the fairgrounds. Sixty-four conventions had their own “day” at the Fair. Fifty-six countries, thirty-three cities, and sixty-seven fraternal, patriotic, and civic organizations also got a day in their honor, including National Gastroenterological Association Day, Kalamazoo Day, Brooklyn Poetry Circle Day, and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Day. And that was only from Opening Day to July 11; over the remaining three and a half months of the first season, more than a thousand such events were scheduled to come.

  “With respect5 to visitor reaction, the venture is an unqualified success,” Whalen wrote in his president’s report to the board of directors on July 20. “The people of this country accept the exposition as the greatest of its kind and are desirous of seeing it.”

  Still, he acknowledged what had to be acknowledged: “The one factor known to have mitigated against attendance thus far is the misconception of high prices in New York and at the exposition.”

  It was maddening. Despite the constant flood of Fair-generated reports to the contrary, wildly exaggerated tales of price gouging continued. “Don’t believe these stories6 about hamburgers selling for a dollar and a half,” La Guardia protested at a Chicago luncheon for seven hundred advertising men. “They cost a dime and they’re not transparent or synthetic.”

  Time magazine, noting that the average daily attendance in July was 137,456 (only 6 percent better than Chicago’s average for that month in 1933), listed six “guesses” as to why so many people just weren’t coming:

  Entrance fee too high;

  Unfavorable reports of high food prices, etc. (An 85¢ dinner, 40¢ lunch, can be got at the Fair but its swank restaurants charge five times as much);

  New York City itself is too much competition for any World’s Fair;

  Antagonism of country’s press toward New York;

  Absence of community pride among New Yorkers;

  Hard times.

  Pick one. Any and all of them probably applied. Worse, the billion-dollar boost in citywide business was also failing to materialize: July department store sales were up a mere 2 percent over 1938; most hotels were showing only a slight increase in bookings; and although total Fair attendance by mid-July was somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen million (about three-quarters of them paid), only around three million were from out of town. Almost 85 percent of them had traveled less than five hundred miles to visit the Fair. In contrast with the original fears regarding Manhattan’s blasé citizens, it wasn’t the New Yorkers who weren’t showing up; it was actually Mr. and Mrs. America, and their carloads of junior Americans. And as such their absence translated into relatively little new revenue coming into the city.

  While at least publicly Whalen remained all smiles and good news, behind the scenes it was a different story. Reporters noticed that his perfect smile now had a tendency to fade all too quickly as soon as the cameras were put away. He began to look serious, even somber at times. His immaculate mustache became streaked with gray. And while he maintained his usual attire of blue suits, blue shirts, and natty ties, a handkerchief began replacing the ever-present boutonniere. For those who knew him well, the sight of Grover Whalen without a boutonniere was almost disturbing.

  The Fair had begun with a working capital deficit of $3 million. As early as May 12, less than two weeks after the Fair had opened, construction costs, owing to the various delays caused by all the strikes, had exceeded estimates by $1.4 million. Concessionaires were for the most part bleeding money; even customers who did come didn’t seem to want to part with any additional dough once they’d shelled out their admission fee. The price was too high, the midway operators complained. Why not cut it to fifty cents and see what happened?

  Whalen wouldn’t even consider it. Personally, he refused to believe that seventy-five cents was too much to charge for all this splendor; it would be a crime to lower it to, say, Chicago’s standards.* How could they not see what a bargain they were getting?

  Finally bowing to all the pressure, on July 13 Whalen appointed a special committee of three directors—Mortimer Buckner, Floyd Carlisle, and Thomas McInnerney—to examine the budget for the six-week period of July 20 through August 30 and present a plan to cut costs. They came back with an immediate 10 percent pay cut for any executive making more than $5,000 a year, including Whalen, who magnanimously volunteered to cut his pay by 25 percent, from $100,000 to $75,000.

  The pay cuts didn’t sting as much as the layoffs. Almost five hundred employees were dismissed on July 18, the bulk of whom were all three hundred of “Grover’s Boys,” the smartly uniformed “information cadets” he had trained as his personal corps of officers and who had gained fame and ignominy as his most ardent saluters. (Although the tale was almost certainly apocryphal, several reporters told of one cadet who saluted Whalen’s empty car as it passed by, carrying only the president’s top hat.) It was true, however, that on the day they were all dismissed, a large group of Grover’s Boys yanked off their shirts and dived headfirst into the Lagoon of Nations, whooping
and hollering to beat the band. Whalen hated to see them go.

  Along with the cadets, Whalen’s World’s Fair police force was reduced from six hundred to four hundred and fifty. It was, he must have noticed, a bloodletting on his behalf—almost every personal whimsy, every attempt at finery he had brought to the Fair, was being discarded. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see his private barber’s chair carted off to be sold at auction. Nevertheless, the pay cuts and layoffs ultimately resulted in a significant reduction in operating expenses—approximately $415,000, or a little more than 15 percent.

  What may not have registered in importance was an ominous move on the part of George McAneny, who formally resigned as chairman of the board at a directors meeting on July 20. That McAneny and Harvey Gibson had somehow collaborated on this decision was almost certain. For the moment, their motive remained a mystery, but Grover Whalen hadn’t gotten this far by failing to recognize the obvious. Gibson was chairman of the finance committee. If the board of directors insisted on getting the Fair’s money troubles under control, Gibson was the man they would choose to take over completely and do it for them.

  In the wake of McAneny’s resignation, two distinct camps began to form: those who supported Whalen and his dream Fair and those who felt that someone with a keener sense of a dollar ought to be in charge, namely Gibson. Whalen could sense it almost immediately as the executive committee meetings grew more contentious, and the minions who were ordinarily cowed by Whalen’s leadership suddenly began questioning why, for instance, with the Fair losing so much money, the expensive fireworks display over the Lagoon of Nations was allowed to continue even during the slowest days of the week.