Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as planned. A rain-soaked Opening Day afternoon seemed to portend the Fair’s dismal fortunes over the next two seasons. Early morning sunlight and promise faded to evening shadows and misgivings: The Fair opened as a glorious vision of a better life to come and closed in bankruptcy.

  It was partly a matter of timing. The difference between September 1938 and that same month just one year later—from British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace for Our Time” speech to his country’s declaration of war against Germany—provided a timeline to the collapse of hope. There was simply no denying that before construction was completed, the World of Tomorrow was already outdated. By Opening Day, two of its pavilions represented countries that, for all practical purposes, no longer existed: Austria and Czechoslovakia. Before the Fair’s end, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, among others, would be added to the list—each nation’s collapse ringing like a death knell in the ears of the American public. During the second season, the Polish exhibit would be draped in black, marking exactly half of the Fair’s major European pavilions as now under the control of Nazi Germany.

  During the Fair’s lifetime, the real world of tomorrow would degenerate from something toward which one looked courageously, with no small measure of hope and promise, into a bleak and blank question mark. The national mindset would tilt drastically from optimism to dread, from hopeful emergence out of the Great Depression to saddened acknowledgment of what lay ahead. By early December 1941, a little over a year after the Fair had closed its doors for good, most of its young male visitors would be lining up for induction into war.

  The year 1939 also marked a turning point in the life of Albert Einstein. On March 14, he turned sixty at a time when the number meant old age. He celebrated the milestone16 quietly at home with only his stepdaughter Margot and his longtime secretary, Helene Dukas. Their private family dinner was an altogether different affair from the hoopla that had accompanied the scientist’s fiftieth birthday in 1929, when the occasion was marked by a national celebration throughout Germany. Those days were a distant and disturbing memory to him now, but there was still so much more to do.

  After a lifetime marked by fame and marred by anti-Semitism, Einstein had immigrated to America and settled in at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. And this year, he had finally applied for naturalization and was looking forward to becoming an American citizen. No doubt his life had changed dramatically. Any thought of returning to his native country was now out of the question. His politics were changing, and the “Hitler problem” weighed heavily on his mind.

  A lifelong pacifist, he had on that national occasion a decade earlier announced that he would “unconditionally refuse17 to do war service, direct or indirect,” regardless of the cause. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  By the summer of 1939, Einstein was happily enjoying an extended vacation at his rented home in Peconic, Long Island. He had been appointed honorary chairman of the Science Advisory Committee to the World’s Fair, and his proximity to Flushing Meadows allowed him to take part in several major events there: He gave a notorious speech on Opening Day that ended in a spectacular power failure; he wrote a message for the time capsule that was both prophetic and terrifying; and most significant, he was chosen over key Zionist leaders to dedicate the opening of the Palestine Pavilion, an honor that propelled him out of the quiet privacy of scientific study and into the stormy political arena as a de facto leader of the Jewish people.

  (His name had one more connection to the Fair: In a midway show called the Congress of Beauties, model Yvette Dare had trained a macaw named Einstein to remove her bra in time with the beating of tom-toms.)

  That year, he also apparently failed to see the connection between his most famous work and the development of a new kind of weapon that he would have almost nothing to do with, but with which his name would forever be associated. As recently as his sixtieth birthday, he had written, “Our results so far18 concerning the splitting of the atom do not justify the assumption of a practical utilization of the atomic energies released in the process.”

  The “utilization” would come to Einstein that summer, brought to him by a friend and former colleague who interrupted an afternoon sail with a theory that would change the world. Fifteen years later, close to death, Einstein would recall his actions during 1939 and 1940, the course of the World’s Fair, as the “one great mistake19 in my life.”

  At a little after four o’clock on the Fourth of July, Joe Lynch got the call he was dreading—another bomb threat at the World’s Fair. He listened with only faint interest; a few weeks earlier, he had investigated a phony claim that had been called into the Italian Pavilion. Yet this was a weird one: An electrician working at the British Pavilion had found a suitcase tucked away in a utility room that was off-limits to the general public. Without thinking, he had picked it up and carried it to his boss’s office, where the two of them discovered it was “ticking like a clock.”20

  Joe promptly hung up and called Freddy Socha’s house. He was in luck;21 Freddy was off that day, but the rain had kept him at home as well. The two of them made plans to hustle out to the fairgrounds and check this thing out. With any luck, Joe told his wife, they could do the job quickly and he’d be home in time for supper.

  What neither man counted on was that the ticking suitcase in Queens would grip the city in a manic manhunt, a bomb frenzy, and a fury of anti-Nazi paranoia for the next year and a half. At one point, Commissioner Valentine placed every police officer on twenty-four-hour duty and added to the fear and furor by warning the public, “This is only the beginning.”22

  It was, and it would not stop until December 7, 1941, capping a historic series of events that began in 1934 with a man on a mission and a little girl’s recitation of what she had learned in school that day.

  * Although “Fishhooks” sounded like an appropriate nickname for a garbage dump owner, it actually stemmed from his famous inability to reach for his wallet whenever a dinner check arrived at his table.

  * More accurately, regularly televised programming made its American debut that day. Television itself had been around in various forms for approximately three decades by 1939, and in Great Britain, the BBC had begun regularly televised programming three years earlier. The use of the word television here and on Opening Day is intended to mean the publicly accessed medium as we know it today.

  * Guinan ran a bawdy speakeasy called the 300 Club and was known for her famous greeting, “Hello, suckers!”

  PART ONE

  The

  DEVIL TO PAY

  When a fair is over, there is frequently the devil to pay. For often as not World’s Fairs result in thumping deficits.

  —Time magazine, 1939

  The Flushing Meadows site, pre-construction (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  1

  “WHY DON’T YOU DO IT, DADDY?”

  By all accounts, 1934 was a remarkable year: Flash Gordon made his first appearance in the comic strips, and Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, would go on to win every major Academy Award. In May, one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl swept away massive heaps of Great Plains topsoil; in August, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s new Führer. Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger were all gunned down in spectacular, tabloid-titillating fashion. On Broadway, Ethel Merman opened in Cole Porter’s big new hit, Anything Goes; while farther uptown, in Harlem, seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald made her singing debut at the recently christened Apollo Theater.

  But savvy New Yorkers, sophisticated or streetwise, had something much more important on their minds. The repeal of Prohibition the previous December had made it easier and cheaper, if somewhat less fun, to spend an evening socializing over a glass of beer or a highball. Almost overnight, some thirty thousand–plus speakeasies in the city closed their doors for good, to be
replaced by everything from the neighborhood saloon to the tony, upscale supper club. In the late summer of that year, at a cocktail party held in an unremarkable tavern in Kew Gardens, Queens, that was neither saloon nor salon, a small group of would-be swells mingled and chatted amiably. They were by no means the cream of society (the Kew Gardens location could attest to that), but some could claim proximity, or at least relation, to it.

  One in particular1 was Edward Roosevelt, a stout, balding, bespectacled man whose round face and weak chin gave him the look of an elementary school principal or a henpecked husband. He was, however, a second cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt and a sixth cousin of her husband, the president. The association wasn’t doing him much good at the moment, though; like a lot of other people in the country at that time, he was looking for work. He’d spent most of his adult life in Europe as an executive at Ford and International Harvester, but now that he was back in New York, he was living at a YMCA on West Twentieth Street that catered mostly to the merchant marine. Despite his portly physique, he paid for his room and board by working as a recreational instructor. Leading ancient, long-retired sailors in meaningless exercises seemed like the depths of misery, and Roosevelt kept mostly to himself and waited for something better to come along.

  The party was in full swing when a friend tapped Roosevelt on the arm and introduced him to an energetic, sophisticated-looking man who seemed particularly anxious to meet him. Edward squinted over his wireless glasses and tried to decide exactly who would benefit whom over this introduction.

  “Mr. Roosevelt,2 this is a Mr. Shadgen,” his friend stated, adding, “Who has some distinct ideas about fine wines.”

  Edward, having lived for quite some time in France, had developed an interest in wines and decided to give this stranger his full attention. At forty-three years old, Joseph Shadgen was broad-shouldered and stood six feet tall, a somewhat impressive figure compared with Roosevelt. Moreover, he was neatly dressed and impeccably well groomed. With the high sweep of his neatly combed, distinguished gray hair and the little swoosh of a silvering mustache that barely exceeded the width of his nose, he looked like a middle-aged Charles Boyer. Before Shadgen opened his mouth to speak, Roosevelt probably sensed he was European. The little bow he gave as they shook hands confirmed it.

  The two men, approximately the same age, shared a remarkable economic history, each having achieved an impressive degree of success early in life, only to find themselves thrust into financial uncertainty as a result of the Depression. The major difference between them was that Roosevelt was an American who had sought his glory in Europe, while Shadgen was a European who had tried to seize the day in America.

  As they spoke, casually at first, Roosevelt must have noticed that Shadgen carried with him, in his manner and his carriage, something of an aristocrat, deserved or not. Although raised as a citizen of Belgium, Shadgen had been born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and when one has had a grand duke as monarch, a little touch of nobility remains. In 1915, he had immigrated to America, and for the last ten years he’d worked as a civil and mechanical engineer for the firm of C. H. Smoot & Company. He liked to describe himself as an “idea man” and often boasted that he had once made as much as $150,000 a year.

  This, unfortunately, was not one of those years. When Charles Howard Smoot died in 1933, Shadgen abruptly left the company and moved his wife and young daughter from their oceanfront home in Brooklyn to a modest house in Jackson Heights, Queens—a sparsely populated area hard hit by hard times. He drove an old Packard that he kept in cold storage because it had recently refused to run.

  When the conversation finally got around to wine, Shadgen’s Belgian accent added a distinctly continental air of sophistication to his pitch. For the last few months, he said, he had been working as a technical consultant for the Rockefeller Liquor Study, which had been anticipating all sorts of calamities now that the public was allowed to drink themselves silly again. And with the repeal of Prohibition, the trading and purchasing of fine wines would surely regain its popularity with the Manhattan elite. But since most of them lived in apartments, however large, where on earth were they going to store it?

  His idea was to form a company; rent a large, underground space somewhere on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (around twenty-five thousand square feet, he reckoned); and divide the area into mini–wine cellars. Then all he had to do was rent the units, make sure the proper temperature was maintained, etc., etc., and he could sit back and rake in the money. All he needed, Shadgen said, was a partner who could help him rope in a few key investors to get it off the ground.

  Edward nodded and listened intently. The fundamentals of Shadgen’s wine storage idea seemed sound. With sufficient start-up money, there was indeed no limit to the number of subterranean wine lockers they could sublease.

  From the start, it was an unlikely partnership. Shadgen was a good talker who needed a door opener; Roosevelt was a (currently, at least) poor relation who needed a project to which he could attach himself and the meager connections his name brought with it. Miraculously, when the effect of their drinking wore off the next morning, Roosevelt still thought it was a good idea, and one that required immediate action. Shadgen and his new partner spent the better part of the next several weeks almost inseparable—scouring suitable storage locations, sketching out plans, and hunting down investors to fund the whole thing. They even rented desks in a cramped real estate office from which they would run their little company until the profits started flowing in. It was all going well except for one small detail: Nobody else thought the idea had merit, and no one would invest.

  After weeks of frustration, watching his savings dwindle and his hopes of turning his friendship with a bona fide Roosevelt into his much-deserved fortune, Shadgen decided to give the partnership one more try. Privately, he had another idea in mind—one much larger in scope and scale than the wine storage concept. In fact, it was so huge that he’d been reluctant to share it with anyone, let alone his new partner.

  It had come to him earlier that year, on a warm spring evening while he waited for dinner and made small talk with his twelve-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, who had just returned home from school. As she entered the room, still wearing her uniform from the nearby Blessed Sacrament Convent, Shadgen pulled her up next to him and asked, “Well, what did you learn3 in school today?”

  Jacqueline was probably too old for the question, but she answered it anyway. “I learned that the United States is a hundred and fifty-eight years old this year,” she told him.

  Her father simply stared at her in silence. “Because the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776,” she explained.

  Shadgen thought this over. He had a surprising grasp of American history for a foreigner, or perhaps because of it. This didn’t make sense to him. The Declaration of Independence was merely that, he told her—a declaration, the signing of a document that spelled out only what the Founding Fathers intended to do. The nation, he believed, wasn’t really “born” until it elected its first president, George Washington, in 1789.

  Jacqueline gave him a suspicious look, and the two began to argue. It was the word of the sisters at Blessed Sacrament versus her father, who hadn’t even been born here and who still spoke with an accent. The Fourth of July 1776 had been drummed into her head for as long as she could remember as the nation’s birthday.

  “Oh no,” he answered firmly. “The United States would be only a hundred and fifty years old in 1939.”

  When Mrs. Shadgen called out that dinner was ready, the two of them dropped the discussion and headed quietly for the dining room. Still, something had clicked in that stubborn, persistent brain of his.

  The idea to host a World’s Fair in order to boost New York City’s economy at the end of the 1930s should have come from the minds of its great community leaders. It didn’t. “Don’t get the idea4 that I was doing any of this for civic good will,” Shadgen would later remark. “I was working for two things—money
and reputation.”

  To date, there had been5 exactly fourteen officially recognized World’s Fairs, and all but four of them had lost money. The very first,6 London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, had been managed by Prince Albert himself and advertised its global status as “the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.” Punch magazine described it as “the only National Building that an Englishman is not ashamed of.” More than six million people visited from all over the world, and the idea caught on—in no small part due to the fact that it had also managed to turn a profit of over $500,000.

  The French tried to top it just four years later at their Exposition Universelle of 1855, which introduced the Singer sewing machine, then went hog wild with World’s Fair fever, repeating the effort in 1867, 1878, and, most notably, 1889—the Fair most famous for its construction of the Eiffel Tower.

  America had gotten into the act when New York copycatted London and held its own Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853. Although it was housed in a single iron-and-glass building on a four-acre plot of land,* there were four thousand exhibitors when it opened on July 14, and before it closed in November of the following year, more than one million people came to see it. Yet despite the mass influx of tourism into the city, the Fair was a financial flop, losing about $300,000 and leaving a visible legacy of failure when the structure burned to the ground in 1858.