by James Mauro
La Guardia then read a statement from President Roosevelt: “I have today authorized an invitation to the foreign countries and nations participating in the New York World’s Fair to continue their participation in 1940. I take particular pleasure in extending this invitation at this particular time.
“… The continuing hope of the nations must be that they will increasingly understand each other. The New York World’s Fair is one of the many channels by which this continuing conception of peace may be known.”
For Grover Whalen, it was an echo of FDR’s Opening Day speech. Roosevelt’s rays of eternal hope, apparently, still beamed. Like Einstein’s rays later that same night, climbing the Trylon, lighting the world. And there was still the shining hope that they, too, wouldn’t end in catastrophic darkness.
By mid-September, no progress had yet been made concerning Einstein’s letter. With nowhere else to turn, Szilárd wrote to Lindbergh again. Then, on September 15, America listened as the great aviator gave a radio speech that was carried nationwide over all three major networks: CBS, NBC, and MBS (the Mutual Broadcasting System). Many who tuned in could not believe their ears.
“In times of great emergency, men of the same belief must gather together for mutual counsel and action…. We must not permit our sentiment, our pity, or our personal feelings of sympathy to obscure the issue….
“Much of our news is already colored … but we must ask who owns and influences the newspaper, the news picture, and the radio station. If our people know the truth … this country is not likely to enter the war now going on in Europe.”
In a letter to Einstein on September 27, Szilárd stated the obvious: “Lindbergh is not our man.”3
To make matters worse, Alexander Sachs had now been holding on to Einstein’s letter for more than six weeks, and confessed to Szilárd that he was still sitting on it. Finally, now that war had broken out, Sachs decided to take action. On October 11, he stood in the Oval Office, and rather than simply hand over the letter, which he feared “would be passed onto someone lower down,” he read a summation of it that he had prepared himself.
“Alex,” the president said after Sachs had finished, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.”
“Precisely,” Sachs replied.
Immediately, Roosevelt sent for his secretary, General Edwin Watson. “Pa,” he said, calling Watson by his affectionate nickname, “this requires action.”
That same evening, a committee headed by National Bureau of Standards director Lyman Briggs was charged with investigating the military potentialities of nuclear fission. Begun by yet another Roosevelt, the ball, this ball, finally, was rolling.
Grover Whalen, who had seen enough of the World’s Fair that year, sailed for Europe on September 16 to try to sell it all over again for 1940. If nothing else, at least it got him out of New York. Ten days later, he still hadn’t been heard from. (Although his ocean liner, the Statendam, had been delayed by the British contraband control, he had nevertheless made no effort to contact anyone outside of his closest associates.)
Finally having his way without interference from Whalen, Gibson announced at the end of September that the fifty-cent admission fee would now be good for every day of the week until the Fair closed for the season on Halloween night. He also moved the forty-cent night admission up from nine-thirty to eight o’clock.
“More Fair for less money!”4 he declared happily.
A reporter asked him if the reduced fee would continue when the Fair reopened next May.
“Well,” he shrugged, “I should think5 it would be pretty hard to put it back up.”
Finally, the Mayor of the Midway, Joe Rogers, was happy. “It’s pretty good,”6 he admitted. “But they should have done it a long time ago.”
The truth was, for a banker, Harvey Gibson had an odd idea of mathematics. He let it be known that according to his own calculations, every visitor to the Fair had received $35 worth of value for the price of three admissions. Reporters asked him to explain exactly how he’d arrived at that figure.
“It cost approximately7 one hundred and fifty million to build the Fair,” Gibson said, counting off the points on his fingers. “Twenty million more to operate it; ten million for operating the exhibitors’ buildings; and, say, another hundred million in advertising which was given to the Fair by the newspapers.”
Reporters scratched their heads.
“That’s two hundred and eighty million,” he explained. “There will be approximately twenty-four million paid admissions, and we figure that each visitor attended on an average of three times, so that accounts for eight million individuals. Divide two hundred eighty million by eight million and you get the answer: thirty-five dollars.”
They thought he had gone senile.
On Monday, October 2, Joe Lynch brought his family out to see the World’s Fair. All policemen showing their badges that day were admitted free, and their children got in for a dime. Freddy Socha came, too, and brought his wife, Jennie. Joe and Easter, with the conviction of Joe Healy behind them, let each of the children pick out one exhibit they wanted to see.
For himself, for old times’ sake and to revive his old Fordham University studies, Joe dragged them all, the kids protesting loudly, to the Hall of Pharmacy. At least it wasn’t too far a walk; oddly, for such a mundane subject matter, Pharmacy was one of the seven largest buildings at the Fair, and it was right there beside the Theme Center where the Street of Wings dumped you into the Court of Power.
The kids were enthralled by the magic medicine chest, a mirror twenty feet tall and fifteen feet wide that alternately reflected your image and then let you see through it. Behind the giant sheet of glass, a puppet show brought everyday household drug products to life. But Joe thought it was a little silly. He was hoping for something a bit more instructive. Still, he took every piece of literature they offered and stuffed them in his pockets. Old interests die hard.
Naturally, they couldn’t get out of there without passing through the Drug Store of Tomorrow and having a streamlined ice-cream soda at the Fountain of the Future. Joe gobbled his down and enjoyed watching his children blow straw wrappers at one another. Only Easter seemed anxious to leave. He caught glimpses of her in the counter’s mirror, this one not magic, and then it came to him. The luncheon counter on Greenwich Street. He hurried the kids up, and they all consulted a map to see where to go next.
In the final ten days of the season, Gibson announced that the World’s Fair of 1940 would be a “people’s playground.” And as if to prove it, a week later he declared Friday, October 27, to be “Children’s Day” at the Fair. One hundred and fifty thousand New York City schoolchildren were given the day off and admitted for a nickel, and the result was even more disastrous than might have been expected.
According to the New York Times account:
At 10:03 a.m., fourteen-year-old June Higgins fractured her arm in a subway station crush.
At 10:17, a gas meter inspector made the mistake of stooping over to take a reading and was knocked flat by three well-placed kicks.
At 10:45, Frank Armour, the panic-stricken manager of the Heinz exhibit, shouted for guards to clear away what was left on the sample counters after kids had stormed the place and were cleaning him out. “Give ’em only pickle pins!”8 Mr. Armour roared.
At 2:00, a gang of kids had all but destroyed a replica of a New England merchant ship—tearing up the forward hatch, ripping out the pins, and throwing its flags into the water.
By late afternoon, the Perisphere was covered with sayings and dirty rhymes, and what looked like ten thousand names had been written across the base of George Washington’s great statue.
The kids, the Times wrote, “managed to strip the World of Tomorrow9 of the last vestige of dignity it had managed to retain from the early, hopeful days of its opening.”
Oh, it ended with a bang all right. On the last Saturday of the 1939 season, a northwest gale blew through New York C
ity and ripped a sixty-square-foot chunk off the Trylon at a little past noon. Six-pound hunks of plaster, falling from a height of five hundred feet, had been carried as far as fifty yards away. Yet amazingly, nobody got hurt. Since August, when the movie opened in theaters nationwide, a lot of visitors had been comparing the World of Tomorrow with The Wizard of Oz. From a distance, the gleaming Trylon and Perisphere even made it look like the Emerald City. Now the winds were backing up that imagery.
For whatever reason, the decision had been made to close the Fair not on the last weekend in October, but two days later, on Halloween. On Sunday, the weather cleared somewhat, and more than four hundred thousand procrastinators finally showed up for what almost everyone, Fair officials included, considered to be the real Closing Day.
Two days later, it was a ghost town. Only around fifty thousand paid to get in, and most of the exhibits closed up early, fearing vandalism and souvenir hunters who would tear a piece of whatever they could get their hands on to keep as a memento. Eight hundred and twenty city cops and World’s Fair policemen were on hand against any rowdiness, but they needn’t have bothered. Rain and raw winds kept everyone from misbehaving—at least the visitors, anyway. Out in front of the Arctic Girls Tomb of Ice exhibit (informally known as “Frozen Alive”), which once again featured models in “abbreviated bathing suits,” a couple of jokers hid behind its façade and periodically bombarded the rare passersby with chunks of ice.
To mark the occasion, as darkness set in the Perisphere was lit up like a giant jack-o’-lantern; every half hour, it winked its right eye and spooked the hell out of whoever happened to catch it. Of the concessions that did remain open, many were left understaffed; their employees, once again out of work, gathered in bars and drank toast after toast to the great summer folly in Flushing. For the first time all season, there was barely a line outside Futurama.
In the end, despite the financial losses, most of the exhibitors were happy. General Motors reported that more than five million people had traveled 1.7 million miles over Futurama, and an additional eight million, tired of waiting, had visited their other exhibits. Two million had ridden 350,000 miles over the Road of Tomorrow in shiny new Ford vehicles. Eight million saw GE’s lightning show; six and a half million were awed by Elektro; and so on. Hostess sold a million cupcakes; half a million had ridden to the top of the Parachute Jump and made it safely down again (with only one well-reported anecdote about a couple who had been stranded10 at the top of the ride for several hours).
Planters wasn’t very happy; they had sold $20,000 worth of peanuts, but it had cost them more than double that to do so. And Borden, even with Elsie the Cow, said, “There was some benefit,11 but it was necessarily general and not specific.”
Out of all of them, Billy Rose was one of the few who came out of it financially smelling like … the shrewd theatrical producer that he was. The Aquacade had put on four shows a day since May 4, and even with a capacity crowd limited to ten thousand, he had sold more than five million tickets with a gross receipt of $2.7 million.
Ten million people, who probably regretted it later, had visited Japan’s pavilion. As for Italy, George McAneny had assured the crowd on Italian-American Fete Day in late September, “There shall never12 in the course of our two histories be anything to change our friendship…. I believe no power on earth, certainly none in the heavens, will ever sever our cordial relations.”
The USSR Pavilion had become a spooky place by the end of the summer. A frequent visitor13 named Edward Chalfant, who had become friendly with a Russian girl at the information booth, was now told by her that she could no longer speak with him; that he should leave and not come back. The pavilion itself did not return in 1940.
The last formal ceremony took place at four-thirty, under skies as soggy as those on Opening Day had been. A stumbling line of World’s Fair troops marched by, taking swigs from flasks and barely managing to keep in step. Gibson said a few words no one listened to, and it was all over in ten minutes. Only one reporter showed up to mark the occasion, and he hadn’t even brought a photographer.
The army band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then launched into “Auld Lang Syne,” although no one sang along. As Gibson and the others filed out of the Court of Peace and headed off to the Administration Building, in a touring car but sans Indian brigade, a single audience member clapped, and a woman, standing ankle-deep in a puddle, summed up the emotions of the day.
“I’ll bet they’re going to eat,”14 she said.
No one knew exactly what time the Fair officially closed its doors on the 1939 season, when the last person left, or when the gates were locked for the winter. Everyone was too busy trying to stay out of the rain.
A few days after the close, as he was wrapping up business for the long winter layoff, Gibson agreed to be interviewed in his new office, the one that had belonged to Grover Whalen and which still contained many of his souvenirs and mementos. It was, the reporter noted, “an eerie experience.” Gibson sat behind Whalen’s enormous desk wearing an ill-fitting brown suit and looking entirely uncomfortable in his new surroundings.
The office, oval-shaped, had been designed to conform with Whalen’s notion of himself as president of the Fair. (Employees were under firm instructions to refer to him not as “Mr. Whalen,” but only as “the president.” All memos were similarly addressed.) The lavish décor irritated Gibson to no end.
“Grover Whalen is president15 of the Fair just the same as ever,” he said, perhaps hedging his bets against taking full responsibility for its potential bankruptcy. “I have just come in to help him with some details which perhaps I am better at than he is.”
Gibson also seemed to be making an effort to shrug off some of his banker’s hard exterior, talking smoothly, trying to make friends. Visitors who came to the World’s Fair in 1939 got “mental indigestion,” he said, from too much free science and not enough free entertainment.
When asked if he would be as involved in next year’s ceremonies as Whalen had this season, Gibson laughed. Distinguished visitors, if there were any, would still be met by Whalen and Mayor La Guardia.
“I don’t know what we’d do16 without the Mayor,” Gibson said. “I’m not very good at meeting people.”
Then he hurried to explain, once again, the reason he had been given the top job, “as if,” the reporter noted, “he thought [I was] going to get mad.”
“If the bondholders17 felt any better with me devoting my full time to the business management of the Fair, I felt obliged to do so,” Gibson stated matter-of-factly.
And what about the Manufacturers Trust Company? How were they managing in his absence?
Better than if he were there, he sighed.
Making one final effort to drum up some enthusiasm, Gibson launched into what was to become the mantra for the New York World’s Fair in 1940:
“What we need18 is more of a carnival spirit.” Gibson looked up, tried a smile, failed at it, and let his face turn serious again. “The wheels have already been set in motion, and next year, by God, we’re going to have a carnival spirit!”
And so they did, to such a degree that those who came back could hardly believe the transformation.19
PART THREE
For Peace and
FREEDOM
1940: The Second Season
On behalf of the visiting Elmer from Kansas City,
Let’s have a smile on me!
On behalf of the gentleman slicked-up and lookin’ pretty
Let’s make it two or three.
We’re all gathered here on this auspicious day,
And, well, bless my soul, there’s Elmer, what-cha say?
Let’s have a smile on me!
—From the promotional song for “Elmer,”
official mascot for the World’s Fair in 1940
Harvey Gibson shows off “Elmer,” his “secret weapon” for the 1940 season.
(Courtesy of the New York Public Library)
/> 23
“HELLO, FOLKS!”
If there was ever any question about the differences between Grover Whalen and Harvey Gibson, the proof came on a spring day in 1940, as the World’s Fair was sprucing itself up for its second and final season. Gibson, who was short and plump compared to Whalen’s regal stature and rugged physique; who was white-haired and clean-shaven while Whalen sported a perfectly coiffed chestnut brown head and manicured mustache; who wore silver-rimmed spectacles and a stern expression in contrast with Whalen’s sparkling, unfettered eyes and equally dazzling smile … well, if Whalen were dapper William Powell of the Thin Man movies, then Gibson was dowdy old Judge Hardy from the Mickey Rooney flicks of the sticks.
On that spring morning, Gibson left Whalen’s old office and walked down to the basement of the Administration Building, where the employee barbershop was, to get himself a shave and a haircut in preparation for Opening Day 1940.
“Why don’t you let me1 come to your office and shave you in the private chair that Mr. Whalen used to use?” the head barber asked him.
“Why,” Gibson sputtered, “I’ve never sat in a private barber chair in my life! You’ll never catch me using that thing!”
And so it was. Grover Whalen had built his version of a magnificent World’s Fair on the idea that bigger (and, therefore, necessarily more expensive) was better. The grander the show, the more people would turn out to see it. Of course, it hadn’t quite turned out that way. Gibson, on the other hand, was a cut-corners-wherever-you-can sort of guy. The adage “You’ve got to spend money to make money” was not in his lexicon.
Spend money to save money was more like it. One of his first initiatives was to hire local college boys to ride around the perimeter of the fairgrounds on bicycles in order to make sure no kids were sneaking in under the fences without paying.