Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  Of the Chicago Fair, Harper’s sniffed, “You had to have the soul17 of a yokel on a visit to town to take it at the pitch of perfect enjoyment its sponsors intended.” And New Yorkers were anything but yokels. Yet the Fair desperately needed their support; according to the numbers, some fourteen million visitors were expected to attend from the metropolitan area alone—about a quarter of the desired minimum of fifty million18 fairgoers in total.* Without them, the Fair couldn’t possibly hope to succeed financially.

  The bankers may not have seen a problem with crass commercialism; nor would the store owners and other captains of industry that made up the World’s Fair Corporation. For them, promotion was key, the newspapers and critics be damned. But Whalen thought he knew the mind of the average city dweller, and, perhaps as a direct result of his experience with them, he understood the cunning ability of reporters to recognize a scam when they saw one. His job, as he perceived it, was to sell the companies on the idea of sponsoring a Fair without actually permitting them to blatantly sell their product lines—a seemingly impossible task.

  In short, he believed he needed a new sales technique that would allow his commercial exhibitors to promote their goods while at the same time avoiding the stigma of having the entire Fair labeled as a strictly promotional endeavor.

  “After we had the basic idea,”19 Whalen explained, “came the job of carrying it out. We were sold on it, but we had to sell it to the people who were going to work for us first, so that they in turn might sell it to the people who would put up the money to make it possible.”

  It was here at last—after so many frustrating years as Mayor Hylan’s secretary, his ill-deserved ridicule as police commissioner, the long shadow of Tammany Hall, and the countless barbs he had taken personally since he first set foot in the public spotlight—that Whalen’s true genius began to shine through.

  “That word, ‘future,’20 bothered me,” he said, recalling an early breakthrough in his thought process. “I kept thinking of fortune-telling and crystal-gazing, and one day as I was riding over to the site in Flushing it suddenly occurred to me that we might call it ‘The World of Tomorrow.’ That’s how the name originated.”†

  It may seem a subtle difference, but what Whalen was beginning to formulate in his mind was the idea that the Fair should promise not only new gadgets and technology, but that those gadgets would deliver on the hope of a better life to come.21 Not in some ethereal, distant “future,” but just around the corner for a country whose populace had had it pretty rough for the past decade. And by focusing on that promise over the means of delivery (the products themselves), it was hoped that Corporate America could perhaps regain some of its lost trust in the eyes of its buying public.

  In a radio address spelling out his vision, Whalen hit on the keynote of this issue: “It is evident that22 the large corporations know that when they exhibit at a Fair they are vividly depicting the vital role played by them in the nation’s life…. [They] also know that during these days of economic trials, the weight of public opinion is all-important—that the consuming public is becoming more and more educated to values.

  “That is why, today,” he continued, “we find in most successful firms a special department devoted to public relations.”

  And when it came to good PR, there was no man better than Grover Whalen. He understood early on that the companies who sponsored his Fair would not just be selling their brands; they were going to have to sell an idea. And the biggest idea they could sell, even the businessmen would agree, was that the corporations weren’t the bad guys everyone was making them out to be. Big business was getting a bad rap in the 1930s. With so many people out of work, it was easy to blame Corporate America for creating the problems of the little guy. What was needed was a little old-fashioned goodwill and “a renewing and compelling cause for hope,”23 as Bernard Lichtenberg, president of the Institute of Public Relations and later one of Whalen’s own PR men, put it. “The New York World’s Fair of 1939 will be the medium through which industry … is determined to tell its story and present its case to the public.”

  And if anyone had any doubts about that, the Public Opinion Quarterly spelled it out for them: Business, it stated, needed to recognize “the necessity of defending itself24 in the eyes of a hostile public. The history of business in the last ten years has proved that its particular public relations problem cannot be solved effectively on a competitive basis…. It is as much the lack of confidence in capitalist democracy itself that must be overcome in the public eye.”

  Of course there was a little more to it than that. Goodwill was one thing, but by showcasing exactly how well a company’s new products and inventions performed in making life easier and more efficient for the average citizen, you could also create a lot of demand for all the new gadgets. And the public, in turn, would hopefully rush out to buy them.

  “I wouldn’t engage anyone25 who did not believe in the functions that the Fair was going to perform and in the service that it would render,” Whalen stated firmly.

  And with that key word, service, he set in motion exactly what the Fair’s purpose would be. Others would define it more clearly in the months to come, but it was Whalen’s original direction, from the master public relations man himself, they would be following.

  Still, there were other, more serious concerns to deal with. One of the most pressing was how to ensure that the Fair would not only turn a profit, but actually deliver on its magic billion-dollar infusion of cash into the city’s coffers. Statistics compiled by Chicago merchants and hotel owners showed that for every dollar spent at that Fair, $13 was spent in the city itself. But there were also lots of folks, most notably the exhibitors themselves, who had felt let down by the relatively meager profits the Fair had generated, considering its cost. Part of the problem was that its sponsors had practically guaranteed that fifty-five million people would attend; fewer than forty million did. Whalen and the other directors were determined not to make such a glaring miscalculation themselves.

  On top of that, there was the deplorable condition of the Flushing Meadows site. Whalen had even stated that the project was so vast that nothing short of a “world war or World’s Fair”26 could clean it up. Despite the involvement of Holy Robert Moses, no one was really sure that such a massive undertaking could be completed in just three and a half years’ time.

  There was first of all the question of who exactly owned the remaining land. When asked, McAneny had stated without hesitating, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”27

  In fact, the city28 owned only about half of Flushing Meadows, most of it acquired by Moses to build his Grand Central Parkway through the Corona Dumps a few years earlier. After condemning the surrounding property, Moses insisted he could scoop up the remaining six hundred acres “at reasonable cost.”

  As such, only two days after the corporation had been legalized, the New York City Board of Estimate approved an astounding $200,000 to begin preliminary work on the site. La Guardia, also quick to act, authorized a resolution designating Flushing Meadows Park (and whatever surrounding land Moses could gobble up) as officially now the property of the New York World’s Fair. His goal, the mayor said, was “to keep the engineers one step ahead of the lawyers.”29

  Although McAneny insisted that “there has not been30 a dissenting voice since the idea of an exposition in New York was first advanced,” it wasn’t true. There were many who simply refused to believe that Flushing Meadows could be turned around in time for the proposed Opening Day in 1939. Most of the dissenters, however, were quickly dissuaded from their skepticism, most likely as a result of either financial or political pressure. New York had its heart set on the site in Queens; those who disagreed with the plan had better get on board or risk missing out on the greatest show the city had ever seen.

  Edward Loomis, president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, stated that he “had not been enthusiastic about the idea.” Then, within weeks, he quickly reversed himself, assuring ev
eryone that he was now a “wholehearted convert.

  “The more I have thought31 it over,” he said, “the more enthusiastic I have become. And as for the site, I consider it the ideal location in New York.”

  There were more. Brooklyn’s borough president, Raymond Ingersoll, wanted the Fair to be held in his district and had offered up several site suggestions. So did Bronx borough president James Lyons. La Guardia shushed them all. “This is to be32 a World’s Fair of the city of New York,” he chastised them. “So let us not hear any more talk about individual boroughs.”

  The mayor did admit, however, that three and a half years was a “very short time” to construct a Fair of this magnitude.

  Throughout, McAneny remained firm in his commitment to the location. “It was the judgment33 of both the city officials and of others consulted,” he said, “that there should be no invasion of existing parks…. The availability of inner water areas capable of conversion into courts of honor or other display features was also held important. It so happens that the Flushing Park territory … meets these requirements.”

  He may have been somewhat overly optimistic when he went on to say that, despite the condition of the land, “the Fair, in short, is off to an excellent start.”

  No doubt Moses had a hand in all this. He wanted his park, and he didn’t give a damn how he got it. From the beginning,34 he pledged that he “would stop at nothing to help,” but if and only if the Fair was constructed in Flushing Meadows. On this point he was adamant, going so far as to issue a veiled threat that this particular location “was the only site in New York35 where they could get any cooperation from the Park Department.” In no uncertain terms, he was stating: No Flushing, no Moses. It was that simple.

  Building any kind of Fair without the support of the city’s parks commissioner was unthinkable. He knew there were challenges; he took particular delight in addressing their concerns regarding “the depth of mud in the meadows” and the “lengths of piles which would have to be used to insure safe foundations even for temporary buildings.” He just didn’t care. As long as the city was willing to pay for it, he would help create their World’s Fair and would personally oversee the development of his eventual park afterward.

  Whatever lingering doubts may have remained, shortly after incorporation, everyone, it seemed, was absolutely overjoyed with the seemingly preposterous idea of transforming the Corona Dumps into a World of the Future. Or the World of Tomorrow or whatever. As long as it was cleaned up.

  In 1935, Robert Moses was forty-six years old and already famous for having developed Jones Beach into a Long Island haven—for those who had cars, anyway. He was also famous for his impossible temper and the fact that he rarely enjoyed any relationships with city officials that didn’t somehow involve angry outbursts, outright threats, and general obstinacy as a means of getting his way.

  Cleveland Rogers, in an Atlantic Monthly portrait, summed up Moses’s confounding demeanor: “A fighter of quick temper,36 he is ruthless in dealing with self-seekers and those who would obstruct his plans. He flatly contradicts opponents, tells them they don’t know what they are talking about, puts them straight as to facts, or sears them with sarcasm and ridicule.”

  His friends called him Bob, but he made sure that those who worked for him used the more deferential moniker “R.M.” He stood over six feet tall and even in middle age retained the broad shoulders and lean body he had developed as a young swimmer at Yale. He had the impossibly large hands of a Michelangelo sculpture and a massive, brooding forehead with thick black eyebrows that frequently folded into a scowl of impatience with what he perceived as the frustrating incompetence of nearly everyone he came in professional contact with.

  The son of37 a wealthy department store owner (which put him in somewhat of the same class as Rodman Wanamaker), he had enjoyed a privileged childhood in dual homes in New Haven, Connecticut, and New York City. His undergraduate success at Yale included membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society, but his inherent stubbornness and refusal to conform to the rules and regulations of any governed body led to his being ostracized by every fraternity. It was an early pattern he was to repeat throughout his life, continually maintaining a position above those around him and refusing to accept anyone’s dictates upon himself. He was elected to the Senior Council, but only after he had a hand in its initial organization.

  After Yale he studied at Oxford, where he swam some more and captained the water polo team (clearly preferring the solitude of water to the company of classmates). After graduating with a master of arts in 1913, he earned a doctorate of philosophy at Columbia, and in 1915 he married Mary Sims, granddaughter of a Methodist minister and no doubt the cause of some consternation between Moses and his Spanish Jewish father. With a decent inheritance from his family, he established a life for his wife and two daughters in an apartment overlooking the East River in Manhattan and a country home in Babylon, Long Island.

  Nevertheless, he remained38 an enigma to his friends and patrons. “Bob Moses is39 the most efficient administrator I have ever met in public life,” said former New York governor Alfred E. Smith, on whose staff Moses had served as secretary of state in 1927 and 1928. “I know he went to Yale and Oxford, but he didn’t get that keen mind of his from any college. And he was a hard worker. He worked on trains, anywhere and any time. When everyone else was ready for bed he would go back to work.”

  This tireless energy drove his staff crazy; he reportedly kept a team of secretaries at his disposal, and he often ran them ragged. His long-winded, impassioned speeches confounded even Smith, who once, after listening for what seemed like hours to Moses’s pleas for new legislation, dropped out of his chair and pretended to faint.

  In 1924, Moses was elected president of both the State Council of Parks and the Long Island State Park Commission, and quickly developed thirteen parks totaling more than ten thousand acres in Nassau and Suffolk counties. The total cost of these, and the parkways he built to provide access to them, exceeded $50 million, and Moses readily admitted that it sometimes took “strong-arm methods” to get them built.*

  Even Jones Beach had been no easy task. The town of Hempstead voted decisively against its development, and the owners of Long Island’s famed estates were aghast at the idea of a public park along their southern shoreline. “If this Moses scheme40 goes through,” argued a representative of the nearby town of Islip, “Long Island will be overrun with the rabble from the city.”

  “Can’t you realize,”41 one particularly overwrought landowner confronted him, “that this is the last real fox-hunting country left in New York? If you build a road across it the hounds will lose the scent every time the fox crosses the concrete.”

  Moses’s by now infamous sneer was evident in his retort: “Perhaps we can build a tunnel under the road for the fox.”

  In the end, he won the battle by threatening to take away the towns’ bay bottom rights, a necessary staple to their fisherman economy. The strong-arm tactics taught him an important lesson.

  True to his independent, arrogant nature—a trait he supposedly inherited from his mother, Isabella, and especially from his grandmother Rosalie Silverman—Moses drafted the laws and by-rules of every government position he ever held. In 1933, he essentially conceived and created the job for which he was most famously known throughout his life, commissioner of parks under Mayor La Guardia. (He officially assumed the position in January 1934.) Before him, the job had been performed by five borough park commissioners whose salaries totaled $62,000 a year. Moses consolidated them all and took only $13,600 a year for his trouble. Discounting his two-year term as secretary of state, it was the only salary he took in return for what he considered was public service.

  “The minute you put42 a salary on the job,” he once told Governor Smith, “it becomes an item for the politicians.”

  Throughout the Depression, he spent $300 million to increase the number of city parks from one hundred and nineteen to more than four hundred;
built ten swimming pools, each costing $1 million, for city families to cool off in during summer; and at the end of 1933 he took over the disastrously managed construction of the Triborough Bridge, which he promised to complete by July 1936. In the end, the bridge would cost the city more than $60 million, but Moses would open it right on time.

  Still, there was that fiery temper to deal with, as well as his almost childlike habit of repeatedly resigning from any position whenever he couldn’t get his way. In fact, Moses so often threatened to resign as parks commissioner that La Guardia kept a printed pad of forms on his desk that read: “I, Robert Moses, do hereby resign as ____________ effective ____________.” Whenever Moses began to bluster, La Guardia would simply tear off a sheet and hand it to him, grinning like a kid.

  Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to the U.S. cabinet under Franklin Roosevelt, said, “Robert Moses is a good man,43 but you have to let him have his own way.” He rarely lost a battle, if only because when all the shouting was done, Moses’s voice still bellowed loud and strong while his opponents had fallen exhausted and hoarse.

  “His most ferocious attacks44 could be devastating,” wrote Herbert Kaufman in the Political Science Quarterly. “He could wither his adversaries with contempt, humiliate them with ridicule, harpoon them with invective, and destroy them with innuendo.”

  But 1935, even for Robert Moses, was a record-breaking year for controversy. He got his name in the papers virtually every day, usually in connection with one argument or another involving his numerous park projects.

  Since January,45 he had been embroiled in a particularly nasty battle with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who wanted Moses fired from the Triborough Bridge Authority. As head of the Public Works Administration, Ickes had issued Administrative Order 129, officially withholding funds from anyone who held both a municipal and a PWA office. And since construction of the Triborough was a PWA project, that meant Moses. In fact, it applied only to Moses, who claimed it was a personal vendetta and the result of a grudge FDR held against him.*