Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  The pace was quickening, and for a while it seemed the entire city was on lockdown. Valentine rounded up more than one hundred “suspects” who were later questioned and released for lack of evidence. Extra police were sent out to the Fair and searched every building repeatedly. The French ocean liner Normandie, which had just sailed in to Pier 88, was guarded heavily and searched for bombs. All over the city, people talked about the bomb and about dirty Nazi sympathizers, looking at one another with a curious distrust that hadn’t been there a few days ago.

  When pressed for comment, Valentine, exhausted, finally admitted that he believed the whole thing was an inside job, that no one “but a person who had worked in the British building or had become intricately familiar with its plans would have known enough about the structure to plant the bomb in the strategic spot in which it was found.”

  Though it hadn’t occurred to anyone at the time, the fan room was on the second floor and was in fact strategically located in the exact dead center of the building. Pyke had no doubt it had been left there for maximum impact on the structure. Not to mention the estimated five hundred to seven hundred people inside at the time of the blast. “It was only7 a miracle that hundreds of visitors to the British Pavilion were not killed,” Valentine said, noting that the “dynamite shrapnel”8 was powerful enough to have blown away an entire wall of the pavilion and possibly its support structures. “Only conjecture can visualize the havoc that would have been wrought if the lethal device had exploded within the crowded building.”

  Police immediately began interrogating each of the more than one hundred employees who had worked there so far this year, as well as those in the surrounding pavilions. The most promising development in the case came during the arrest of a man named Caesar Kroeger,9 who had come under suspicion after several Bund members had been rounded up and questioned. When detectives came to the door of his apartment, Kroeger innocently invited them inside. On one wall of his room, they found a large world map with pins stuck in it. Kroeger shrugged it off and explained only that the pins represented cities with strong Communist factions.

  Then, in a desk drawer, the officers found two German Luger pistols hidden under a copy of Mein Kampf. Kroeger was promptly arrested and after booking was found to be an illegal alien. That was enough to set the citywide Nazi fever ablaze all over again. For several days, the arrogant-looking German with the smug mustache became the face of the saboteur who had bombed the World’s Fair.

  After that, it got worse. A report that four sticks of dynamite had been stolen from a construction site in the Bronx sent panic throughout the neighborhood, until a supervisor confessed that, whoops, he had made a mistake in counting it. Two days after the bombing, a gift-wrapped box was found sitting on the glass case that housed the copy of the Magna Carta in the British Pavilion. Written on the paper was the directive, “Mail to the address inside.”10

  Two men from Pyke’s squad carted it quietly off to a men’s room, where a portable X-ray machine showed it was probably empty. They carried it outside, opened it, and found a package of silk stockings and a ladies’ handkerchief. Written on a note card was the message “Danke Schoen.” Pyke was furious. With so much security in the area, how in the hell did someone manage to leave a box on top of the goddamn Magna Carta and go unnoticed?

  At eight-thirty that same day, the night manager of a service station on West Sixty-sixth Street picked up the phone and heard a voice say, “This is just to tell you11 that we’re going to blow up the gas tanks across the street.” Over on Tenth Avenue, directly opposite the station, was a Con Edison electrical plant. At nine-fifteen, the same voice called again: “I’m not fooling. We mean business about the gas tanks.” Police details were sent out to every Con Ed plant in the city, and a growing panic12 set in that the city’s power supply was about to be sabotaged.

  A pervasive feeling that New York was under attack began to spread, and the fear of more terrorism surged like wildfire. Reports of missing dynamite and suspicious packages tore up the phone lines; restaurants and bars suffered a noticeable layoff in business; hotels received numerous cancellations. Called to Philadelphia, Lieutenant Pyke found two bombs at the site of that year’s Republican National Convention.

  Valentine told reporters they were discovered “near the convention hall”13 a few hours before it started. Pyke, he said, had also found a third bomb “in a hall or a place where Communists gathered” and that “this bomb was in the course of destruction.”

  Yet despite the fact that an aide to Governor Arthur James, who had been nominated as a candidate for president, said that one of the bombs “was addressed to the Governor,”14 the FBI issued a complete denial that any bombs had been found. No further investigation was made, and the entire matter was covered up. Pyke returned to New York, embarrassed and incensed.

  On Monday morning, July 8, Grover Whalen, Harvey Gibson, La Guardia, Pyke, and Valentine attended a requiem high mass for Joe Lynch at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx. Sixteen hundred mourners15 showed up, among them a thousand cops and firemen, and celebrities including Babe Ruth. Joe, who had been waked at home, was led by a formal procession to his funeral, accompanied by the police department’s one-hundred-and-ten-piece band. Thousands of his neighbors and friends lined the sidewalks to see him go.

  Before the service, in the Lynch apartment, La Guardia, near tears, pleaded with a detective, “I urge your boys16 to give all their spare time to this case. Do everything you can to solve it and it will be appreciated.”

  The next day, Freddy Socha, who was being waked in a funeral parlor in Brooklyn, would be buried in St. John’s Cemetery in Queens. An equal number mourned at his services, lining the streets of Brooklyn in silent, tearful salute.

  There were clues—a numbered piece of fiber in which the dynamite was supposedly wrapped; a chunk of metal made of an unusual iron alloy; even the tiny alarm clock wheel that was traced to a manufacturing plant in Bristol, Connecticut. But in the end, they added up to nothing. On Wednesday, July 10, Valentine, at his wits’ end and emotionally spent, assembled a gathering of fifteen hundred detectives and ordered them to break the case. He was himself at the breaking point.

  Monday morning, a commissioner in charge of Colonial Hall at the British Pavilion said he got a bomb threat over his private line, an unlisted number. On Tuesday, another call came through to an operator; this time a woman’s voice said, “For God’s sake,17 tell the police that the World’s Fair is going to be bombed at two p.m. today!”

  At ten forty-five she called back, but by this time the threats were getting so ubiquitous that the operator who took the call asked, “Have you told the police yet?”

  “No,” the woman answered.

  “I’ll connect you,” the operator singsonged routinely, and nonchantly put the call through.

  Valentine, frustrated at the public’s indifference, told his men, “This is just the beginning. There have been a series of bombings in Europe. It is possible that we shall have more here…. Remember, you don’t have to die to prove your courage.”

  VALENTINE WARNS OF MORE BOMBINGS, the next day’s headlines read. Again, the city went on alert.

  For a while, the fear and furor died down a bit. Then, in early August, paranoia flared up again when a Nazi flag was found by a night watchman in the British Pavilion. It had been curled up into a tight ball and stuck on a window ledge about fifteen feet from the fan room, and the panic rekindled. As the hot summer wore on, and as Germany continued its onslaught of Western Europe, anti-Nazi resentment grew into a hard and noticeable hatred. German Americans were no longer considered suspicious; now they were the enemy outright and no longer an ocean away. Thousands who had once preached isolationism and even pacifism began changing their tunes. The city had indeed taken on a war atmosphere, as the fairgrounds had on Independence Day.

  In September, a Bund member, Edward Kangesier, was arrested by a special group of police officers known as the Espionage Squad an
d held for questioning in the World’s Fair bombing. His apartment, it was noted, was “littered with Nazi pamphlets, a swastika flag and anti-Jewish banners and posters.” Three days after the bombing, police noted, Kangesier was seen driving a new car, thought to be the result of a big payoff. After “hard” interrogation, however, both Caesar Kroeger and Kangesier were released; the cops could pin nothing on them.

  Nobody on the force wanted the case to disappear, nobody wanted the public to forget about Joe and Freddy to such a degree that it would never be solved. But at this point, with so little evidence, most detectives understood that the only way the bombers were going to be caught was if someone turned in an accomplice in order to collect a reward. So the city voted to offer $25,000 to anyone who came forward with information. It was a lot of money; you could buy a house and car with it and still have plenty left over. Now all they could do was cross their fingers and pray.

  Valentine kept the department’s emotions running high. “If only the persons responsible18 for the bomb had seen the body of Joe Lynch,” he told yet another gathering of detectives. “If we had them there, it was in our hearts to tear them limb from limb.”

  He paused a moment, struck by the comparison of his own words and the impact of the blast on Lynch’s body, and let his anger spill over.

  “We have got to get them!” The commissioner pounded his desk, tears streaming from his eyes, his voice all but gone. “Your professional reputations are at stake! We have got to get them, convict them and have them sentenced to the proper punishment—electrocution. There is only one punishment and that is electrocution!”

  The Life Savers parachute tower in 1939 (© Bill Cotter, worldsfairphotos.com)

  26

  CURTAINS

  The Briggs Advisory Committee on Uranium, as FDR’s initial effort became known, had begun meeting in October 1939 in order to substantiate Einstein’s claim that the discovery of a nuclear chain reaction could lead to “extremely powerful bombs.” Present at the first meeting were Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller—all three of Einstein’s summer guests—but no Einstein. Roosevelt had written him a note of thanks for bringing the matter to his attention, letting him know, “I have convened1 a board to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion….”

  But that’s about as far as the president, for the time being, was willing to go. Throughout the remainder of 1939 and on into 1940, FDR had approved the grand sum of $6,000 for research into uranium, and the committee was getting nowhere. So once again, Szilárd pressed Einstein to write yet another letter urging further action by the administration.

  Another clarion call for research would not be sufficient. Instead, Einstein decided to focus on the threat that struck fear into everyone’s heart—that the Nazis might be the first to develop atomic weapons, empowering them to wreak untold havoc on the world.

  “Since the outbreak of the war,2 interest in uranium has intensified in Germany,” Einstein therefore wrote to Alexander Sachs in March 1940. “I have now learned that research there is carried out in great secrecy… Should you think it advisable to relay this information to the President, please consider yourself free to do so.”

  Once again meetings and conferences were held, and once again Einstein chose not to attend. Perhaps he suspected that he had already gone too far in promoting a new tool for war. Or perhaps, as he had desired so often in his life, he simply wished to be left in peace to work out the secrets of the universe. Whatever the motive, under the circumstances, Einstein would prove to be justified in refusing to get further involved—an FBI report submitted in July 1940 stated, “In view of [his] radical background, this office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature.”

  The report, among other things, cited the ridiculous protest made by the Women’s Patriotic Organization that had called for Einstein to be denied an entry visa back in 1932. In addition to offering a number of bungled facts and conclusions, the FBI questioned whether “a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.”

  Which in fact Einstein promptly did, though not in response to any ridiculous FBI report. Having taken the citizenship test on June 22, he was sworn in on October 1, 1940. The ceremony took place a little more than one week after his final accolade at the World’s Fair. On September 22, Einstein had been honored at the Wall of Fame as one of six hundred foreign-born Americans “who have made notable contributions to our living, ever-growing democracy, devoted to peace and freedom.” That the Fair had jumped the gun by nine days in declaring him an American apparently went unnoticed.

  “[Immigrants] are the only ones3 to whom it can be accounted a merit to be an American,” Einstein stated in his message for the Wall of Fame, “for they have had to take trouble for their citizenship, whereas it has cost the majority nothing at all to be born in a land of civic freedom.”

  Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was also one of those chosen to be honored, and Einstein included in his statement the highly unpopular sentiment that the United States owed a debt to African Americans “for all the troubles and disabilities” that had been placed upon them and were still allowed to continue.

  On the one hand, Einstein was being honored for his contributions as an American; on the other, his loyalties were being questioned and he was considered a security risk. Eventually the Briggs Committee came under the auspices of the more serious, and effective, National Defense Research Committee. And once again, it came about as a result of a letter from Einstein:

  “I am convinced4 as to the wisdom and urgency of creating the conditions under which that and related work can be carried out with greater speed and on a larger scale than hitherto,” he wrote. “Given such a framework and the necessary funds, it [the large-scale experiments and exploration of practical applications] could be carried out much faster than through a loose cooperation of university laboratories and government departments.”

  By the end of the following year, Einstein’s multiple letters detailing the possibility of atomic weapons and his urging of formal action on the part of the U.S. government led to the creation of the Manhattan Project. The actual date of its official, though highly secret, launch was significant: December 6, 1941. A day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the weapons ultimately used to defeat her would begin their conception.

  By midsummer, once the Fair had seemingly recovered from the Fourth of July bomb and the curious onlookers began disappearing from the explosion site, the overall scene grew somewhat desperate. Boys who pedaled tourists around in bicycle “rickshaws” began taunting customers on weekdays when the crowd was almost nonexistent, racing their carts dead at them and then swerving away at the last minute just to amuse themselves. At night, leaning out the windows of the Press Building, bored reporters amused themselves by howling drunkenly at the moon. Concessionaires who sold the Today at the Fair newspapers goaded one another into shouting, “Don’t buy these programs, folks!5 Absolutely nothing going on anyway!”

  And what was going on turned out to be either disastrous or foreboding. At the end of July, a “Baby Crawling Contest”6 drew rampant criticism in the press. Reporters sent to cover it couldn’t hide their disgust at the sight of seventeen infants crying and broiling under a hot sun for over an hour as they attempted to cross a lawn half a football field long. It ended only after one of the judges accidentally stepped on a contestant.

  Then it was announced that the army’s parachute troops would begin training in towers very much like the one set up in the Fair’s Great White Way. What had once been a simple “thrill ride” now took on a more serious connotation for the young men who coaxed their dates into the two-seated benches. Worse, the ride itself began breaking down on a regular basis; on several occasions, it stranded panicky passengers for hours.*

  At one such calamity, a reporter for radio station WOR was describing the scene on-air when a society photographer approached and asked him politely
not to identify the stranded couple.

  “Why not?”7 the reporter asked. “What’s the matter with telling his name?”

  “He’s from Baltimore,” the photographer responded, “and that’s not his wife.”

  And then there was Robert Moses. Renewing his old habits of threats and timelines, he sent a report to La Guardia in August “reminding” him of the city’s obligation to come through with the money for his vision of Versailles. The original agreement stipulated that the first $2 million in so-called profits be set aside for Flushing Meadows Park, and despite the bad news in attendance and revenues, Moses had somehow managed to have that figure doubled to $4 million. But even though everyone knew there weren’t going to be any profits, Moses still wanted his money.

  “The World’s Fair made it possible8 to reclaim permanently this entire section of Queens with the development of a great park as the primary objective,” Moses noted in his report. “Unless this work is started promptly, the entire area will be an eyesore and a shambles….”

  By “promptly,” Moses meant October 28, the day after the Fair closed for good. He wasn’t going to waste any time tearing this thing down, either. Within four months, he wanted the entire area cleaned out and hauled away so that come March 1941, he could finally begin the work he had set out to do in the first place. The New York World’s Fair Corporation, he noted in the report, had set aside only $100,000 for demolition. No way was that going to cover it.

  In response, the corporation’s executive vice president, Howard Flanigan, took up an old, familiar argument. Not only had Chicago’s Fair been cleaned up without its management having to spend a penny, he stated, but the contractor hired to demolish it had actually paid $28,000 to the Fair for the rights to the salvage left over from its buildings.