by James Mauro
“Einstein asks me12 to say that if there are other angles of the problem that you want him to develop,” Aydelotte wrote in his conveyance of the solution to Bush, “… you only need let him know and he will do anything in his power.”
But Einstein was never again asked, and he had nothing further to do with the development of the atomic bomb. In March 1945, Leó Szilárd again paid a visit to his friend and even pressed him to write another letter to FDR, this one with the opposite purpose—to dissuade the U.S. government from using the new weapon as a tool to end the war with Japan. This time, his letter was ignored. On August 6, 1945, the first of two atomic bombs was dropped on Hiroshima. When Helen Dukas brought him the news, Einstein, fresh from a nap, hung his head in despair.
“Oh, my God!”13 he said.
The following summer, in its Fourth of July issue, Time magazine featured an illustration of Einstein with a mushroom cloud in the background, the equation E=mc2 superimposed on it. The issue was titled “Cosmoclast Einstein,” and the magazine named him as “the father of the bomb.”
“Had I known the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he sadly told Newsweek in 1947, “I would never have lifted a finger.”
Even Newsweek’s cover featured Einstein, with the words, “The Man Who Started It All” headlined across it.
In 1954, near the end of his life, he admitted, “I made one great mistake14 in my life … when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made.”
Grover Whalen, his spirit broken by the calamity of the World’s Fair, decided to take a long vacation to the Dominican Republic with Hugh Kelly, Anna’s brother, to recuperate at his sugar plantation. “I wanted to go someplace where nobody would know me and where I could get a complete rest,” he said, admitting that he felt “quite exhausted, physically and mentally.”
After a long sail, the two men spent lazy afternoons on horseback, riding over the forty-thousand-acre plantation every morning and enjoying the sight of wild horses and cowboys. A few weeks into his visit, a herdsman rode up to Whalen, tipped his hat, and floored him with the greeting, “How are you, Commissioner?”15
“Commissioner?” Whalen responded.
“Although I was born right here in San Domingo, I went up to New York and joined the cops,” the cowboy told him.
“And how did you happen to come back here?”
“Well, when you were police commissioner you fired me,” the horseman said, grinning.
“What for?”
“Numbers game.”
“Were you guilty?”
The cowboy nodded. “I’ve been back in this damned hole raising cattle ever since.”
The experience “made the Fair seem very far away,” Whalen recalled. With renewed vigor, he returned to New York, to his new job at Maison Coty, and even reclaimed his volunteer duties as chairman of the mayor’s reception committee. It was as if he were once again the Whalen of old.
In 1942, he organized a parade of half a million men and women, marching up Fifth Avenue (changing his old route so that it passed the headquarters of Coty, of course) in a salute to “New York at War.” More than two million turned out to watch, and Whalen made sure the crowd understood that it was going to come off “rain or shine.”
It rained.
Whalen continued on as New York City’s “official greeter” through the 1950s, finally retiring to his Connecticut estate when it seemed as though the city, and the world, had fewer and fewer dignitaries worth greeting.
“The little mind,16 confronted by too great a dream come true, usually has to take its choice between levity and madness,” wrote The New Yorker, lamenting its own, as well as its native city’s, wisecracking approach to the World’s Fair. “When we speak flippantly of the miracles of order and beauty so casually wrought by Grover Whalen, it is with secret envy…. Life will probably always be like that—the men of vision creating, the little men carping, with terror and amazement in their hearts.”
Whalen himself gave the last word on the Fair in 1951, asking, ultimately, what was the only serious and important question that remained to be asked: “Didn’t they realize17 that we created a twelve-hundred-and-sixteen-acre dream city where there had just been a dump before?”
On March 1, 1962, he watched on television18 as astronaut John Glenn was honored with a ticker tape parade that was being described as reminiscent of Lindbergh’s. The following month, on April 20, one day before the Seattle World’s Fair opened, Grover Whalen passed away at the age of seventy-five. Robert Moses had just named him honorary chairman of the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Which would end in bankruptcy.
* The tower can still be seen there today, minus its benches and parachutes, next to the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball stadium.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Authors of nonfiction owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people who unselfishly devote their time and energy to the daunting task of seeing a book progress from concept to publication. In my case, that goes double. First and foremost, my thanks go to my vigorously talented agent, Scott Mendel of Mendel Media Group. You’ll often hear that such-and-such project never would have happened without someone’s input, but it was Scott who first suggested that I could, and should, write this as nonfiction rather than the novel I had originally submitted to him. That suggestion changed my life. His input was always spot-on, and he remains a true career mentor to this day.
As a first-time author, I could not have found a more perfect editor than Jill Schwartzman, who never grew tired of my ceaseless questions and who miraculously understood from the get-go exactly how this book should present itself. Whenever I was deep in the forest of confusion and frustration, she would always point the way home. It takes a hell of an eye and a great amount of talent to be able to do that. My thanks extend to the entire team at Random House and Ballantine: Libby McGuire, Lea Beresford, Becca Shapiro, David Stevenson, Susan Turner, and Dennis Ambrose, among others. All of them are the best at what they do and made this book the best that it could be.
A third big note of thanks must go to a true friend and the most intuitive business leader I have ever worked for, Jonathan Moffly, without whose support I would not have had the opportunity to actually sit down and write. Jonathan saw what this meant to me, and his generosity and patience added immeasurably to my being able to get this done in a timely manner. By extension, my thanks go as well to Jack and Donna Moffly, and to all the Moffly Media staff. The greatest compliment I can give them is that they put up with me. No easy task.
Gabe Perle, who literally wrote the book on publishing, gave me legal advice and an eyewitness account of the World’s Fair. I cannot think of this book without the image of him dancing the tango there in 1939.
Several people helped me with the tremendous job of research. Debbie Celia of the Westport, Connecticut, library found numerous journals and obscure books I never could have unearthed on my own. Laura Ruttum and Thomas Lannon helped me navigate through the endless sea of material available at the Manuscripts and Archives division of the New York Public Library. Beth Spinelli of the New York City Police Museum devoted her time to shedding light on the details of the lives and careers of Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha. Mary Lynch Connolly, one of Joe’s daughters, was instrumental in getting the whole thing started.
For visual references, I depended in part on the startling images provided by Bill Cotter and his terrific website, worldsfairphotos.com. He has also published several collections of images from both the 1939 and 1964 New York World’s Fairs through Arcadia Publishing’s “Images of America” series. Bill generously provided several key photographs for this book, and I bought several CDs loaded with fascinating glimpses of many World’s Fairs from his site. Jason Kinch used all of his talents as a photographer to make me look reasonably human for my jacket photo, and lent his skill to improve the quality of several historical images throughout.
On a personal note, back to the
other person without whom this book would never have been written: my wife, Heather, who, after reading some pages of a novel I had been working on, said to me, “This is what you should be doing.” The rest, as they say, is history—in this case literally. She has endured every sacrifice, every writer’s mood, and every physical manifestation of stress the human body can create for itself. (I count five as of this writing, and none of them are pretty.)
Finally, a note of thanks to two former professors who gave me the skills way back when: Richard Price, the novelist and screenwriter, who taught me how to write; and Edward Chalfant, the noted biographer of Henry Adams, who taught me how to read. Edward offered me solace and support after I confessed to him my abject terror in daring to take on a subject like Albert Einstein. Richard’s work continues to haunt me to this day, and I often think of his advice over a seedy diner lunch: “There are stories in everything. The key is to find one and tell it.”
Amen, brother.
NOTES AND SOURCES
There exists a multitude of reference material for anyone looking to find more information about the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The best and most complete of these is the collection housed at the New York Public Library—literally hundreds of boxes of original documents, memos, minutes of board meetings, and the like. From these, one can extract the sum total of the history of the Fair in facts and dates, but the collection as a whole presents a somewhat detached, corporate picture (as it should, having been donated by the World’s Fair Corporation). What was needed to round out this book was color: personal anecdotes, critical perspectives, the day-to-day follies of one of the most extraordinary events to take place in the twentieth century.
On the whole, actual visitor remembrances tended to be muddled by the passage of time, although occasionally a truly interesting detail would emerge. For the most part, then, anecdotal information had to be gleaned from accounts written while the Fair was active. The most helpful of these came from popular periodicals, including but not limited to The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Time, and Newsweek; as well as more obscure professional journals such as the Kenyon Review, Spring 3100, Parnassus, Perspecta, and Vital Speeches of the Day. Some newer academic journals, including Design Issues, Cultural Critique, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, provided scholarly insight and analyses in startling detail, even if I did not always agree with the author’s point of view. (Some folks had a rather interesting perspective when it came to that narrow slit of an entrance to Futurama, for example.) And notable cynics such as Lewis Mumford needed to be taken with a grain of snark. The New York elite in particular (to me, at least) seemed to have their guns out for Grover Whalen and the World’s Fair and led me to believe that no exposition held in their esteemed city would have been good enough.
In researching material for this book, I therefore realized early on that most of the reading had to be done up front, before any serious writing was to begin. I needed to digest the sum total of what had been written and documented about the Fair, and then process those reports, before I could develop a true picture of what it was like to experience that particular place in that particular time. As such, I began by researching everything—checking every journal and newspaper account of the same events until it became obvious that at some point one has to stop and say, “Enough!” And out of the checking of multiple sources there also arose an interesting problem: Published accounts of identical events almost never matched exactly; the same with direct quotes, name spellings, and in some cases even the facts themselves. (Case in point: The original police reports of the Fourth of July bombing list different times, statements made, and even the spellings of Detectives “Morlock” and “Socka.”)
No doubt this is due to the lack of recording devices available to journalists at the time; most scribbled quotes in shorthand and reported what they remembered hearing and seeing. For this reason, I have chosen to document most direct quotes from a singular source: The New York Times, the “paper of record.” Therefore, in the following notes you will find an inordinate number of citations from that newspaper. In my retelling of events, however, I never relied on a single journal or account; details from newspapers are retraced from such varying sources as the Daily News, the Herald Tribune, the Journal-American, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and, for major news events, even The Washington Post (for a non–New York perspective).
As for Albert Einstein, my goal was to present a portrait of the man as a human being caught up in extraordinary, and probably exasperating, times. Yet Einstein’s native German provides numerous examples of altered quotes relayed in different words even in his biographies and writings. Except in rare cases (as explained in the footnotes), for consistency’s sake I’ve again relied on the Times’ accounts when it came to reportage. For his speeches, however, I went to the original source: the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. They were most helpful in providing copies of original handwritten documents or typewritten notes edited in Einstein’s own scrawl.
As for the notes that follow, I’ve cited as many quotes and facts as I felt necessary, including broad or controversial statements about the Fair or conclusions drawn after multiple points of view had been considered. The details are there for anyone who wishes to conduct further research, and some suggestions are made when it comes to further reading on the men who created and built the Fair—Grover Whalen in particular. His autobiography, Mr. New York, suffers from selective memory, while the all-too-biased press accounts are suspect for their puzzling vitriol. (Even the revered New Yorker, in an extensive, two-part profile published in 1951, grafted enormous ears onto his photo simply in order to make him appear foolish.)
Unjustly a forgotten man now, Whalen remains an enigma in the annals of New York City history. I hope I have done him justice.
As to the lives of Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha, the path to uncovering their stories was a bit more tricky. Documenting the everyday activities of ordinary workingmen involves deduction as well as investigation; suffice it to say I’ve had some rather interesting conversations with members of the NYPD who would prefer that I not bring up their involvement at all. Original documents provided by the New York City Police Museum helped round out their profiles. But I will say that interest in the case is still incredibly high, theories about the perpetrators are numerous, and an odd cloak of secrecy still surrounds a murderous act that at this stage can never be solved.
PROLOGUE: THIS BRIEF PARADISE
1 On the Fourth of July For Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha history, see Spring 3100 (July 1940; July 1942); Mary Hosie, “Victim Answered Call to Fair on His Day Off,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 5, 1940; “Aftermath of World’s Fair Bombing,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 18, 2008; Maki Becker, “Remembering Ultimate Sacrifice,” (New York) Daily News, July 25, 2000; and Bernard Whalen, “Easter Lynch,” NY Cop Online Magazine, Fall 2002.
2 There were security issues “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, July 15, 1939, p. 9.
3 nude and nearly nude models The Fair was of two minds when it came to nudity in the Amusement Zone. On the one hand, Grover Whalen dictated, “No entertainment of the Sally Rand type will be permitted at the Fair”: Joseph Mitchell, “Mr. Grover Whalen and the Midway,” New Yorker, April 3, 1937, p. 22; on the other, the Cuban Village featured a “Miss Nude of 1939” contest: “Mayor Acts to End Nudity at the Fair,” New York Times, June 3, 1939.
4 By June, the bombings turned deadly “Bombing Is Third Within Two Weeks in City,” New York Times, July 5, 1940.
5 a waste-management project For a complete history of Flushing Meadows, see Benjamin Miller, Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York—The Last Two Hundred Years (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 178–84; Robert Moses, The Saga of Flushing Meadows (New York: Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, 1966); and Roger Starr, “The Valley of Ashes: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Moses,” City Journal (Autumn 1992).
6 In a novel
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), pp. ix, 23.
7 “talks, sees, smells” Official Guidebook of the New York World’s Fair, 1939 (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939), p. 203.
8 “cross-section of today’s civilization” Ibid.
9 It was called many things For descriptions and memories of the Fair, see Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller, and Seymour Chwast, Trylon and Perisphere: The 1939 New York World’s Fair (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), pp. 14–17.
10 “It was the paradox” Sidney M. Shalett, “Epitaph for the World’s Fair,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1940, pp. 23–24.
11 “the greatest salesman alive” “In Mr. Whalen’s Image,” Time, May 1, 1939, p. 72.
12 “an unforgettable opportunity” Gardner Harding, “World’s Fair New York,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1939, pp. 193–94.
13 inventing the ticker tape parade Grover Whalen, Mr. New York: The Autobiography of Grover Whalen (New York: Putnam, 1955).
14 “recognized on the street” Elmer Davis, “Barnum in Modern Dress,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1938, p. 454.
15 The whole thing lasted For detailed descriptions and analyses of the World’s Fair, see John Peale Bishop, “World’s Fair Notes,” Kenyon Review (Summer 1939): 239–50; Joseph P. Cusker, “The World of Tomorrow: Science, Culture, and Community at the New York World’s Fair,” in Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939/40, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Queens Museum, 1980); Ed Tyng, Making a World’s Fair (New York: Vantage Press, 1958), pp. 16–24; and David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York: Avon Books, 1995).
16 He celebrated the milestone “Einstein Will Mark 60th Year Tomorrow,” New York Times, March 13, 1939; “Einstein Has Quiet Birthday,” New York Times, March 15, 1939.