Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  It came as no surprise to the jaded viewer that the first glimpse of GM’s interpretation of the future was a fourteen-lane superhighway (seven in each direction) featuring streamlined, teardrop-shaped cars. On the four outermost lanes, bordered by three-foot-tall partitions, speed was limited to fifty miles per hour; in the next two lanes, you could push it to seventy-five; and on the inner lane, you could zoom along at one hundred miles per hour—safely, since the distance between cars was monitored by “radio-activated beams” sent from the lead car’s bumper to the instrument panel of the car following behind it.

  “Directly ahead is a modern experimental farm and dairy,” the narrative continued. “Note the terraced fields and strip planting. The fruit trees bear abundantly under individual glass housings.* Strange? Fantastic? Unbelievable? Remember, this is the world of 1960!”

  The ride flew on, past an aeration plant and a university, usually accompanied by some unique development in adjacent roadways. After a few minutes, the scene dimmed as the sun began setting and lights went on in isolated farmhouses and a small town off in the distance.

  “Night falls on the countryside and wives are serving supper to hungry families and farm hands,” the soft, authoritative voice went on. “The highway surface is automatically lighted by continuous tubing in the safety curbing, which evenly illuminates the road surface. But what’s this just ahead? An amusement park in full swing! A merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, boys and girls shrieking with glee on a pretzel-like sky ride. Here’s fun and merriment in this world of tomorrow!”

  They passed a monastery, a steel town, and an enormous dirigible hangar suspended in oil so that it could be turned to meet any wind direction. Riders heard, “You are now at fifteen thousand feet,” as beneath them, dawn broke over snowcapped mountains. The “flight” descended to show the detail of a winter lodge complete with ski run. As night faded, the ghostly spires of a white city gleamed in the distance. “Look far—far across the valley! The city is forty miles away…. This is the metropolis of 1960.”

  For a brief moment, the scene disappeared in a thick cover of clouds, and then, as if by magic, the city of the future came into close-up view. People moved on sidewalks elevated fifteen feet above street level so that cars could move freely without pedestrian interference. An elaborate system of ramps and escalators carried passengers from vehicle to walkways and building entrances. The skyscrapers were also domed in glass, and most of them had landing spaces for “autogyros” and other flying commuter craft.

  In the attraction’s most brilliant feature, Geddes had designed the end of the ride to float just above a four-cornered intersection featuring an auditorium, a department store, an apartment house, and, of course, a GM dealership. Suddenly, the moving cars burst out of the building into the open air, where visitors stepped out of their chairs and found themselves standing in a life-size replica of the scene they had just “flown over”—a cross section of the city of the future featuring the exact same buildings in the exact same locations. Only now they were free to walk along it.

  It was a big finish all right, and some who experienced it for the first time were spellbound, believing they had somehow been miniaturized and placed in the giant diorama themselves. Others were certain they had been magically transported to 1960. When they regained their senses, each was handed a little blue-and-white pin that read I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE. Almost everyone was sure they had.

  But Geddes’s genius was not just that he had created “the largest and most lifelike model ever constructed” or even that he couched General Motors’ obvious self-promotion in a display that would demonstrate how a broad-scale national highway system would allow for the gradual spreading out of the population across a more vastly appealing landscape. Nor was it the even subtler message that more highways would naturally create an even bigger demand for new cars to drive across them.

  Geddes’s grand design not only made seeing the future a grand spectacle, but the process by which they were allowed to view it was as futuristic as the model itself. The experience of flying was not a common occurrence for most visitors to the World’s Fair. Popular science-fiction magazines of the day were obsessed with flight and with flying men. Superman had made his debut in Action Comics just one year earlier;* real-life aviators such as Lindbergh, Wiley Post, and Howard Hughes consistently captured the public’s fascination, and their exploits had elevated them to godlike status.

  Now, with Futurama, ordinary fairgoers could experience the same thrill, enjoying the same heroic perspective as they flew comfortably, in plush sofas, over GM’s version of the World of Tomorrow. Geddes’s innovation purposefully brought riders into the show itself, not only as witnesses to but as participants in the future unfolding before them.

  Even the mechanism was startling in its ingenuity. The “carry-go-round” was a third of a mile long and contained five hundred and fifty-two chairs. (That it was essentially a moving conveyor belt was not lost on GM’s production designers.) But what made it especially unique was the intricate sound system required to deliver narration in synch with the passing scenes. Each sequence had to be coordinated so that the first car passing a particular view got one loop of narration, while the next group of cars heard a description of their point of view. And so on across the entire oval track.

  Designed by James Dunlop and built in part by Westinghouse, “the Polyrhetor,” as it was called, was a twenty-ton contraption that pulled sound from twenty-one individual strips of movie film revolving around an eight-foot steel drum. Seven photoelectric beams divided the strips into one hundred and forty-seven units of sound, and each was picked up and transmitted to two cars at a time via seven corresponding trolley tracks that ran beneath the cars.

  In other words, one hundred and forty-seven separate bits of narration were delivered simultaneously throughout the ride, on a continuous loop since the cars themselves never stopped revolving around the circuit. Each segment was calculated to the exact second and the precise amount of time two cars took to pass a certain point. Incredibly, despite the fact that the conveyor occasionally slowed down to accommodate large crowds, the system never fell out of synch.

  More than thirty thousand people a day, the exhibit’s capacity, visited Futurama. Within two weeks, it was voted the most popular show at the Fair. The Perisphere’s own City of Tomorrow, Democracity, had fallen to second place once visitors learned that you had to pay a quarter to get into that one. Futurama, among all its other wonders, was free.

  Still, despite its aspirations (and mostly rave reviews), the exhibit did not go without its critics—all those multilane highways were bound to set some folks off. Lewis Mumford complained that “the future, as presented here,13 is old enough to be somebody’s grandfather” and wondered why the roads had no tollbooths. Other astute, ordinary citizens took notice of something else: Geddes had placed no churches in his World of Tomorrow. (The situation was rectified for the second season.)

  Walter Lippmann delivered the harshest verdict, mostly because his observation was impossible to dispute: “G.M. has spent14 a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and highways by public enterprise.”

  Toward the end of May, the company invited five thousand of its executives to the Fair to celebrate General Motors Day. GM vice president Charles Kettering responded to the critics by declaring, “All we are trying to do15 is to show people the world isn’t finished … show the young people they have as much opportunity as they ever had.” Echoing the Whalen mantra, he continued, “Our Futurama is aimed to give us a peek into the future—what we could do if we want to do it.”

  Then they crowned “Miss General Motors of 1960,” a twenty-three-year-old stenographer from their Delco Remy plant. Good thing they hadn’t come a week earlier, when one of the moving model cars careened over an embankment and caused a multivehicle pileup, stopping the show for about t
wenty minutes mid-ride.

  The only other problem came on the day Whalen magnanimously offered free entry to the Fair to any U.S. Navy man in uniform. The ride’s dim lighting and two-person love seats promoted some amorous behavior for sailors and their girlfriends. “There’s a special kick16 in stepping into the chairs in 1939 and necking right into 1960,” one of them winked.

  Distinguished visitors to Futurama included Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR’s mother, who commented to the gentleman helping her out of the moving chair, “It’s beautiful.17 I wish my son could see it.”

  “I loved it,”18 said another woman who was moved to tears by the exhibit, “because I was so proud of my boy. His voice is so beautiful.” She was the mother of Edgar Barrier, a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, who so aptly supplied the “angelic” narration.

  * “How will the little boy climb it?” complained E. B. White. “Where will the little bird build its nest?”

  * He would also have his own event, Superman Day, on the afternoon of July 3, 1940.

  The art deco splendor of the General Motors building, with its sinewy lines of fairgoers. Behind it lay the New York City building (still in existence today), the dome of U.S. Steel, and, on the horizon, the Parachute Tower.

  (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  15

  VISIONS AND DREAMSCAPES

  Throughout May, there were so many formal ceremonies, buildings to dedicate, and foreign dignitaries to greet that Grover Whalen rarely had a chance to change out of his striped trousers and frock coat. Not that he minded much. The sight of him in full formal regalia became so commonplace that one morning, as he enjoyed a pleasant stroll around the fairgrounds in a plain blue suit, a World’s Fair policeman didn’t recognize him and failed to snap to a salute, something Whalen insisted on whenever he passed.

  Grover immensely enjoyed having his own police force again. He had dressed them sharply and had even hired a public-speaking expert1 to give them lessons in grammar and diction. “Slang will have no place2 in the World of Tomorrow,” said the instructor, Dr. Walter Robinson, who taught at St. John’s University in Brooklyn. “Visitors must be made to realize that there is some correct speech in New York.”

  In fact, Whalen liked the transformation so much that he extended the requirement to concessionaires and even the tour guides who rode visitors around on bicycle carts. Then he hired army officers to teach information guides and ticket takers how to drill in formation, and pretty soon everyone, not just the police, was required to salute Grover Whalen.

  “He expects that kind of thing3 and he loves it,” one drill instructor informed his class.

  “What about Mayor La Guardia?” a student asked him.

  “Never mind about the mayor,”4 he was told. Furthermore, “You may see a beautiful blonde coming along. The sun may be shining through her dress. She may be a very tasty dish. But no flirting!”

  Some worried that Whalen was making it all a little too nice, a little too well mannered, for their taste. Signs planted to keep people off the grass contained only a single word: PLEASE. This was not the way New York talked, after all, and there was concern that, since the city “has its loathsome5 fascination for the provinces,” visitors might offer more colorful reports back home if the Fair “just relaxed and let him have it on the chin.”

  On May 2, Whalen bit his lip as Prince Olav spoke pessimistically about the chances for world peace in the years to come, World’s Fair or no World’s Fair. Then, perhaps sensing that his words were a bit of a downer under the circumstances, he bucked up the audience to “hope against hope”6 that war wouldn’t happen after all.

  The Belgians weren’t any help, either. At the dedication of their pavilion, Dr. Joseph Gevaert, high commissioner to the Fair, had the audacity to complain in his address about his building’s electrical problems and actually canceled what was to be the highlight of their show, an exhibition of diamond cutting, “due to unforeseen circumstances.” The circumstances were that Belgium had refused to cave in to some electrical workers’ demands, so they cut off its current. The pavilion was able to open only with the weaker supply of juice from an auxiliary generator. Later that night, someone swiped its motor.

  Belgium itself was posing all kinds of problems in 1939. Albert Einstein was becoming gravely concerned about the Germans buying up huge quantities of uranium from the Belgian Congo—he worried that Hitler was using it to develop new weapons to use against his enemies. Regardless, Count Robert van der Straten-Ponthoz, the Belgian ambassador, declared in his speech, “We maintain the open-door policy,7 and all nations may buy or sell in the Belgian Congo on an equal footing with the mother country.”

  Whalen was put off by all the shenanigans, but at least he could take comfort in the fact that he had personally fired that Belgian son of a bitch who claimed the World’s Fair would never have existed without him. Although Edward Roosevelt had been given a cushy job as the Fair’s ambassador to Latin America, Joseph Shadgen had been shuffled off to a small room in the early Empire State Building offices and left pretty much on his own. He was offered a salary of $625 a month for, as he described it, “sharpening pencils and coloring in maps” in the Drafting Department.

  “I worked for the Fair Corporation8 from July 30, 1936, to May 28th of this year,” he said in 1937. “I had nothing to do and sat at my desk from nine a.m. to five p.m. That was like being in jail for a man of my temperament.”

  Despite the fact that he had been required to sign a quitclaim giving up whatever rights he may have had in thinking up the Fair, Shadgen felt that George McAneny had essentially stolen the idea from him, built the Fair where he said it should be built, and even borrowed concepts from the sketchy maps he had once laid out across the banker’s desk. Shadgen promptly sued for $2 million in damages: $1 million from the Fair itself and another million tacked on for personal revenge against McAneny.

  The case dragged on for more than a year, and Whalen did his best to suppress the story. Finally, six months before Opening Day, the corporation offered Shadgen $45,000 to forget the whole thing. To their amazement, he accepted the token offer, insisting that he had won “a moral victory” against the Fair. Immediately afterward, he vowed that he would never set foot in the place, and he never did.

  “Friends tell me I am crazy,”9 he lamented. “I … I have no wish to see it. To me it is sometimes like a bad dream. Other times, just one of those very, very funny stories that can happen in the big city.”

  But Belgium wasn’t the only foreign pavilion complaining about the unions; in fact, just about every major exhibitor had had its share of problems with the workingmen of New York City. On May 2, 1938, all four hundred electrical union workers walked off the job and went on strike because General Motors had dared to perform a test run with power from its own generators. The electricians’ demands were quickly becoming legendary.

  “They wouldn’t complete our building10 unless we paid union men twenty-six dollars a day to turn our lights off and on,” complained Raphael Lopez, the Venezuelan commissioner. “I can’t touch a switch! I couldn’t plug in an electric razor without violating union jurisdiction.”

  It was true; according to their contract, only union men were allowed to touch a light fixture, “to guard against fire.” And that included the changing of lightbulbs, a service for which they charged $8.81.* It got so absurd that a married pair of mural painters, ironically named Mr. and Mrs. Short, discovered that electricians at the end of a workday were removing all the fuses in whatever building they worked, preventing the couple from turning the lights back on themselves. The host building had to hire a union man to sit around until the Shorts were done for the day so that he could personally and professionally flick the lights off himself.

  The conflict came to a head on June 30, when six thousand construction workers from the Building Trades Union joined the electricians and began publicly picketing the fairgrounds. Their main complaint was that the New York Telepho
ne Company was using its own employees to pull cables, a job they considered to be rightfully their own. The walkout completely suspended construction on more than forty buildings, and it lasted for eighteen days. Whalen finally stepped in11 and settled the matter by neatly dividing the work between the warring factions: Construction men would pull the cables from manholes into the buildings, and the Telephone Company men would pick up the work from there. All at extra cost, of course.

  Right through the Fair’s opening, the various unions hired by the corporation continued their onslaught. After Norman Mackie of the Old Masters exhibit hired eight experienced frame hangers to professionally display his artwork, he was forced to employ eleven members of the upholsterers union, at $175 a week, “to drive occasional nails12 into the wall.” Romania had to pay $900 to union men who moved a small statue, a total of two hours’ work.

  Nevada withdrew from the Fair after the electricians demanded to completely rewire a five-ton working model of Hoover Dam. One contractor submitted an estimate of $600 to the New York Zoological Society to move a small aquarium across a room, declaring the job would require six men for six days. A second contractor did the job in half an hour and charged them $7 and change.

  The unions struck back through sabotage and bomb threats, sending Detectives Lynch and Socha out to the fairgrounds so many times that they became familiar with the layout a year before the Fair was open. Union workers also had a habit of disappearing on the job. “I find them resting,13 sometimes asleep, or somewhere strolling in the grounds,” said a specialist at the Netherlands’ pavilion. “Occasionally a stranger turns up [and] tells me he is coming to see that his men are not working too hard.”