Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  The criticisms stung, but they didn’t stick. One of Whalen’s first official orders of business was to call upon his flair for fashion by personally designing new police uniforms complete with snappy Sam Browne belts. (“He loves to design uniforms,”9 one reporter noted.) Then he sprang into action, firing his chief inspector, William Lahey, and his chief of detectives, John D. Coughlin, “the two men responsible10 for the investigation of the Rothstein case,” he said. On the day after Christmas, he revived the city’s “strong-arm squad,”11 recruiting the “hardest hitting men in the department” to use “blackjack reasoning” in dealing with members of the underworld.

  “I told them12 that there is a lot of law in the nightstick,” Whalen said. “And I told them they need have no hesitation in using whatever means they found necessary in dealing with gangsters and thugs.”

  Almost immediately, he declared an all-out war on organized crime. “I want every13 underworld character to have it impressed upon him that New York is an unhealthy place in which to live,” he stated.

  He also got rid14 of the central office of the Homicide Squad, making it publicly known that out of two hundred and twenty-eight murders in the last year, the police had arrested exactly two suspects. “A record of that kind15 doesn’t deserve any consideration,” he sniffed. “Therefore the homicide squad is abolished and a [new] squad will be established in each borough under a competent officer.”

  Once everything was settled, he promised to begin focusing on the Rothstein murder. Then he reversed himself, stating that there were “certain major cases”16 left over from the Warren administration that “have been put at the head of the list for immediate action.”

  When asked what those other cases were, “Commissioner Whalen did not say,” the papers were delighted to report.

  Since he couldn’t get away with doing absolutely nothing, Whalen devoted himself to a series of causes that he hoped would divert the public’s attention away from the Rothstein case. “There are certain types of places17 which are breeding places of crime,” he said at a press conference, “and I want the city to be rid of them.”

  “Speakeasies, too?” asked one concerned reporter.

  Reluctantly, Whalen answered yes. Privately, like everyone else in the city, he knew the speakeasies were too popular and too numerous to shut down. By some estimates, as many as thirty-two thousand18 establishments were selling illegal liquor in the city in 1928. And nobody, not even the U.S. government, was taking the law seriously. New York’s Prohibition administrator, a man named Maurice Campbell, was a former movie director with several dubious films19 to his credit, including She Couldn’t Help It, The Speed Girl, and An Amateur Devil.

  But rather than institute a citywide raid on the illegal sale of liquor, Whalen focused primarily on those dives that sold “poison liquor.”20 Just after New Year’s,21 he instituted a raid on some fifty-five joints where traces of wood alcohol had been found in the drinks. Despite the well-meaning premise behind it, Whalen’s crusade, it was reported, tended to focus on “those that sold a drink22 for a quarter, whereas the far more numerous establishments that sell a drink for seventy-five cents escaped, with rare exceptions, untouched.”

  Then he turned his attention elsewhere.

  “It seemed evident23 that New York was becoming a hotbed of Communism,” as he described the situation. “There may not have been many in the Party then, but they were all real Tartars, making up for any lack of numbers by their energy and ability to outshout others. It was here in New York that their far-reaching program for the future of the Party in America was being prepared.”

  Why not? Red-baiting was always good for a little news, and who cared about a dead gangster when anarchists and Socialists were taking over the city?

  Perhaps noticing the extraordinary amount of publicity a Chicago treasury agent named Eliot Ness was getting, Whalen formed his own gang of “untouchables”: fifty probationary officers who would actually join the Communist Party undercover, infiltrate their meetings, and secretly send daily intelligence reports back to Whalen. “Red infiltration24 was the greatest enemy of this country and our city,” Whalen insisted repeatedly. Forget the speakeasies. Forget Rothstein. The campaigns against Communists were frequently so violent25 that his police force was nicknamed “Whalen’s Cossacks,” most notoriously after they stormed a march on City Hall by more than a hundred thousand demonstrators.

  And it worked. “Mr. Whalen declared26 so often and so loudly that he was going to solve [the Rothstein case] that half the people in New York probably think he did solve [it], and most of the others do not care,” wrote Harper’s. For the time being, Walker was pleased.

  If he’d had any doubts before, Joe Lynch was now more than ever determined not to follow in his father’s and brother’s footsteps. For the last four years, he had been working toward a bachelor’s degree in pharmaceutical science at nearby Fordham University; after graduation, he accepted a position there as an assistant professor. If all went well, if the economy continued to boom, he could count on opening his own neighborhood drugstore in a few years.

  Fate, disguised first as a pretty young girl and then, more significantly, as the collapse of Wall Street, intervened.

  Born and raised in the Bronx, Joe had a love of and fascination for Manhattan that his father and brother, as enforcers of the law and therefore witnesses to the city’s worst elements, could not appreciate. Perhaps it was the by-product of his education, or maybe one of his former classmates or fellow professors persuaded him, but in the fateful year of 1928, Joe Lynch ventured into that colorful section of the city known as Greenwich Village to attend a simple church dance.

  That evening, a pretty, dark-haired girl with the unfortunate name of Easter Hore caught Joe’s eye. Tall, slender, and pretty, she had the delicate features of an Irish Myrna Loy, with reddish brown hair to match. It took a while, but he finally summoned the courage and asked her to dance. That, apparently, was all it took. In between dances they chatted easily; Joe was astonished when Easter told him that she, too, was from the Bronx. The coincidence put him instantly at ease. She’d come to the dance after working in her parents’ little candy and sandwich shop in the West Village, over on Greenwich Street near the Hudson River, but in fact she lived with them up on Naples Terrace. The address was not far from Joe’s family home; clearly, it was destiny after all that had brought them together in a neighborhood so far from their own.

  They spent the rest of the evening talking only to each other, and by the time they rode the subway together back to the Bronx, Joe Lynch was more than smitten; he was hooked. The following year they were married, and before their first anniversary a daughter, also named Easter, was born. They called her Essie.

  Her arrival was a blessing, but it coincided with the second injection of fate into Joe’s life. In October the stock market crashed, and with it the dreams he had shared with Easter on those warm summer evenings a year ago—of owning his own store and running his own business, just as her parents did; of their little family buying a home in Riverdale, the more affluent, almost countrified borough just north of Joe’s neighborhood—collapsed as well. Over the next few years, a second child, a boy they named John, after Joe’s father, was born; and then a third, another son they called Robert.

  With three children in tow, the Lynch family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. It was a working-class neighborhood, but at least it was Irish Catholic. It certainly wasn’t Riverdale. In 1935, they were already outgrowing their home when Easter announced she was pregnant again. Joe had just turned thirty, and suddenly his degree and his teaching job weren’t enough anymore. Like every family he knew, the Lynches were barely getting by. The little drugstore seemed a distant pipe dream, his pre-Depression plans blown away as swiftly and completely as a Dust Bowl pasture. Something had to be done, and he had to do it quickly.

  Joe Lynch didn’t like the solution that came to mind, but he didn’t see
much choice in the matter. He called a family meeting and informed his father and brother that, reluctantly and at an age when most men were a good ten years on the job, he wanted to join them on the police force. In the grand scheme of things, considering the shape the country was in, he was lucky to have that option. That so many Lynches wore the uniform practically guaranteed him a place in the department.

  John Lynch clapped his son on the back; John junior shook his hand and grinned. By the end of the evening, they had practically hung a badge on his shirtfront. Joe returned to his children and gave his expectant wife the news, summoning up all the joy and hope he could muster. He was, indeed, lucky. It just didn’t feel that way at the moment.

  “Banker” George McAneny (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  5

  NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR, INC.

  By 1930, the long associations that had aided Grover Whalen throughout most of his life suddenly failed him. Rodman Wanamaker, who had been suffering from kidney disease throughout the last decade, died in March 1928. And after only a year and a half as police commissioner, Whalen resigned and returned to the family store. Mayor Jimmy Walker, like his predecessor Hylan, had grown tired of Grover’s constantly stealing the show. He wasn’t used to sharing the spotlight with anyone, let alone another good-looking, dandy Irishman.

  “Well, we won the election.1 Now Grover can go,” Walker said after thoroughly trouncing La Guardia in 1929, and the remark got back to Whalen.

  In truth, Whalen had meant to serve a term of only one year. He had stated so in a list of conditions he had presented to the mayor before agreeing to take the job in the first place. Despite the fact that he had insisted he “would tolerate no interference2 in cracking down on professional gambling, including any that might be going on in Tammany clubhouses,” and that he would hire and fire whomever he pleased “without consulting the mayor,” Walker had agreed to everything.

  And while Whalen noted that Walker “never violated any of the terms of the agreement,” he added regretfully, “I lost his friendship.”3

  That much was evident at the press conference in City Hall, where Whalen formally announced his resignation. Walker chastised the crowding journalists by mocking Whalen’s future plans: “Now, now,” he said. “This isn’t Wanamaker’s4 bargain counter.”

  It was a low blow, and no doubt Whalen deeply felt the sting of his ex-boss’s joke. And as if that weren’t enough, Walker had chosen Assistant Chief Inspector Edward Mulrooney to succeed Whalen, telling his new commissioner, for the record, “It was your devotion5 to duty which led you away from spectacle and sensation that prompted me to select you for this position.”

  In other words, the very qualities that Whalen possessed and that had caused Walker to appoint him just eighteen months earlier were now reviled by the mayor as being exactly what the job didn’t need.

  The press conference was a public embarrassment for Whalen, and he didn’t deserve it. True, he had spent countless hours6 in his office working and reworking the patterns for traffic regulation in the city. Some of his sillier suggestions had even included altering the curtain times for various Broadway shows (musicals versus dramas) in order to ease crowding along Times Square. And the press may have been justified in making fun of his notorious delight in personally blaring the siren of his official car as he raced toward fires and other calamities, real or imagined.

  But during his run, he also reduced the rate of major crimes in the city; he reorganized the structure of the department and improved its overall efficiency; he established what would become the Police Academy; and he instituted social service considerations in the prevention of crime at its roots. Yet despite all this, he would carry his reputation as “Gardenia of the Law”7 for the rest of his life.

  As it turned out, however, Whalen’s resignation was, yet again, a fortuitous and timely decision. On September 1, 1932, Jimmy Walker was essentially booted out of office after testifying in front of the Seabury Commission, which was investigating charges of corruption in the police department, among other things. Grover had gotten out just in time.

  But Rodman’s death cast a pall over Whalen’s renewed executive position at Wanamaker’s and made his triumphant return a rather hollow experience. From mid-1930 to late 1934, he led a relatively calm and stable life, but it was a frustrating existence for a man of ambition—his wants and needs thwarted by what now seemed to him a dull career in retail haberdashery. There were fewer headlines, for one thing, and despite the fact that a good deal of the press coverage about him had been negative, he missed being in the spotlight.

  When Prohibition ended in 1933, the Schenley Distillers Corporation offered to appoint him as chairman of its board of directors—partly, perhaps, as payback for his work in seeing that “poison liquor” got out of the speakeasies. He had never shut down very many of those establishments, and at the time he rarely touched a drop of liquor himself. But eager to move on from Wanamaker’s, he accepted the offer and quickly forced the federal government to enact a law forbidding the reuse or resale of any liquor bottles.

  For the first time in his life, he traveled for pleasure, spending protracted vacations reacquainting himself with his wife and three children. His boy, Grover junior, especially welcomed the attention, but the time away from the hubbub of New York only fueled his hunger to get back in the game. He accepted a sideline job as head of the National Recovery Administration in Manhattan and, recalling some of his past glory, organized an immense NRA-boosting parade with a quarter-million marchers; but it was little more than a showy title despite his return to civic duty.

  This slow period had gone on long enough; Whalen was rapidly becoming bored at the lack of stimulation and even controversy. He needed a new challenge, so much so that when, as he put it, “nineteen thirty-four8 … brought me into another job, which turned out to be the biggest—both in scope and problems—I had ever been faced with,” he jumped at the chance.

  George McAneny brought it to him, by way of Joseph Shadgen and Edward Roosevelt.

  In the summer of 1935,9 after long months of lunches and meetings and speeches and discussions, Whalen and McAneny traveled to Chicago to see for themselves exactly how that city’s World’s Fair had fared financially. McAneny met with former vice president Charles Dawes, who had served under Calvin Coolidge and later became chairman of the finance committee of the Century of Progress Corporation. Whalen, still unable to shake his Wanamaker roots, called on various business and retail interests like Marshall Field.

  The trip provided the final confirmation that a World’s Fair in New York would succeed greatly. McAneny and Whalen returned with the news that Chicago’s Fair had, after paying back more than $11 million to its investors, even managed to turn a small profit.10 More than that, it had also brought about $770 million worth11 of new business to the city. They quickly estimated that, based on population and economic differences, the New York World’s Fair would generate at least $1 billion in possible revenue.* And when a report by independent statisticians added another $500 million to that number, the race was on to make a formal announcement by summer’s end.

  On October 22,12 the steering committee known as New York World’s Fair 1939 formally became a corporation. Its first six directors included five of the original insiders: McAneny, William Church Osborn, Percy Straus, Matthew Woll, and Grover Whalen. The only new face was Mortimer Buckner, chairman of the New York Trust Company, who replaced the Bowery Bank’s Henry Bruere. In all, the newly formed company listed one hundred and thirty-one incorporators—including such notables as Pierre Cartier, Harry Guggenheim, and David Sarnoff, president of RCA—representing twenty-three banks, thirty corporations, fifteen white-shoe law firms, and a variety of business interests. It was, according to one account, “probably the most eminent group13 in the aggregate that ever signed papers of incorporation in New York.”

  Those papers, drawn up by Frank Polk, former undersecretary of state, spelled out the compan
y’s function: “The corporation is not organized14 for any pecuniary profit … and no part of its net earnings shall inure to the benefit of any member, director or individual. The balance, if any, of all money received … shall be used and distributed exclusively for charitable, scientific and educational purposes.”

  It was both a noble and an impressive beginning. But from the start the directors knew they had a huge task on their hands. First and foremost was establishing a theme: What will this World’s Fair stand for? Will it be dedicated to the prospect of world peace? Education? Science and technology? One fact was understood completely—that a World’s Fair held in New York City could not possibly be a compendium of many ideals merged together, a crazy quilt of principles and messages lacking a single, underlying purpose. Something that would fit nicely into a slogan, for instance.

  “We had to find an idea15 on which to peg the Fair,” Whalen explained. “We wanted something different from any Fair that had ever been undertaken before. It was at one of our first conferences that someone suggested that, instead of tying up the Fair with the past, we should connect it with the future. And it was proposed that we should call it ‘The World of the Future.’”

  So now the Fair had a theme; its overall message, in the sense of what exactly was being promoted, was harder to define. Any World of the Future, and indeed any World’s Fair, lived and died by its corporate sponsors. Lord knows Chicago’s Fair, despite its stated purpose as celebrating a century of science, had seen its share of company logos, including such down-home, middle-American brands as Kraft, Walgreens, and that city’s own Sears, Roebuck. Even the automotive assembly line, considered one of the best shows at that Fair, was criticized as “Chevrolet all the time.”

  The difficulty was that any Fair held in New York, that most cynical of cities, couldn’t possibly get away with such shameless corporate promotion without a thunderstorm of protest and war cries of hucksterism from its all-too-savvy and sophisticated press. Not to mention its citizens. “If the Galoshes Hall16 were to do no more than push row after row of attractively priced My-T-Dry Galoshes,” The New Republic warned, “the fickle audience would soon wander off.”