The continuous attempts by Moses to get Hirshhorn’s collection rendered his critics’ claims of “Fair antagonism to modern art and design . . . manifestly ridiculous.” Fair officials, he noted, may have their individual tastes—as he most certainly did—“but these don’t enter into the determination of the Fair to give every possible encouragement to every school, period, academy and fashion,” he lectured the Times. And apparently those tastes included James N. Rosenberg, a painter of expressionistic landscapes, who joined Genauer and the others in their attack on the Fair. “It is sad when late in the game old friends become mere acquaintances,” Moses responded in a private letter to the artist. “I guess I shall have to turn your landscape to the wall.”
Moses laid the blame for any lack of art pavilion on Heckscher or the various art groups that demanded the Fair bankroll their ventures. Multiple attempts, both inside and outside the Fair, were made to secure funding from a variety of sources and organizations such as the Ford Foundation. Ultimately, each fell through. Fair executives worked with New York City’s cultural institutions—from the newly opened Lincoln Center (which Moses played a major role in creating) to all the major museums (including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim)—to hold World’s Fair–affiliated exhibitions, becoming, in a sense, cultural annexes of the Fair. Both city and state officials were counting on the millions of tourists who would flood Flushing Meadow to explore Manhattan’s cultural and tourist attractions, thereby boosting New York’s tax coffers.
But what Genauer, Geller, and the rest seemed to miss—or ignore—was a story in the New York Times in early October announcing some extraordinary radical art that would be on display at the New York State Pavilion. The architect Philip Johnson had designed the pavilion, itself a strange, new, postmodern work of art. Heralded as “the architectural delight of Flushing Meadow,” by the Times’ architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, Johnson’s pavilion was a series of festive circular towers, a rounded theater, and a large open-air oval with a roof shaped like a giant bicycle tire, complete with suspension rings. Johnson, a prolific art collector, had commissioned ten artists, almost all of whom were working in the new style known as pop art (sometimes called the new realism), to create twenty-by-twenty-foot murals that would be mounted outside the pavilion’s theater like a “charm bracelet.”
Johnson hired some of the most controversial young sculptors and painters—almost are were in their thirties—working in New York City, or the rest of America, in the early 1960s: Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and a former graphic artist named Andy Warhol. The article even highlighted some of the controversial works that were being created specifically for Moses’ World’s Fair. According to the Times, millions of Fairgoers would see art that included a painted comic strip of a laughing redheaded woman; a collection of crashed car parts; a sculpture of black tuxedos made “rock hard” with resin; a sculpture of stone balloons; a collage of photographic images and oil paint showing contemporary scenes of American life; and a silk screen depicting the “Thirteen Most Wanted Men” in New York State. This was as contemporary and controversial as American art got in 1964, but none of the critics who were lambasting Moses for his lack of aesthetic grace seemed to take note; apparently pop art wasn’t to their liking.
However, at least one conservative critic did take note. Wheeler Williams, the president of the American Artists Professional League, lodged his complaints in a letter to Moses, Mayor Wagner, and Governor Rockefeller—who was ultimately in charge of the pavilion and who had commissioned Johnson to design it—protesting “the use of the avant garde art” at the New York State Pavilion. “This Fair is not a circus or jahrmarkt,” he wrote, using the German word for amusement park, “and such a presentation is unworthy of the ideal and accomplishments of the citizens of this great State. It cannot possibly enhance the American image in the eye of any foreign or native visitor.” He added that he hoped Moses would stand his ground and not lower ticket prices for children, “so that as few as possible will see” the Johnson-commissioned works.
Williams ridiculed the pop art pieces to reporters. The artists, he told the Long Island Star Journal, were “way out, like man, say Beatnik Land or some haven for Bohemian artists.” A spokesperson for the Museum of Modern Art retorted that Williams’s complaints were nothing more than a case of sour grapes, while Johnson defended his commissions, adding that they were not picked “at random” but because they represented the “best” of the current generation of artists. Williams was also surprised to find that the avant-garde artists had another unlikely defender: Moses, the only public official who responded to his letter. “As to what you term the ‘avant garde art commissioned for the New York State Pavilion,’ I have no opinion and express none,” wrote Moses, “except to remark in passing that your letter seems to be just a bit intemperate.”
While Moses wasn’t a fan of such work, he was true to his word that there was room for all schools of art at his World’s Fair, despite what his foes—whom he dismissed as the “long-haired critics, fanatics, and demagogues, perfectionists and daydreamers”—said. And like some of his most vocal critics, he spoke highly of Johnson’s handiwork, defending the New York State Pavilion as a building “that grows on you.” By early 1964, he would put the postmodernist structure on his short list of Fair buildings that he wanted to grace the post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park.
The controversy over art at the World’s Fair was over for now. But by the time opening day rolled around, many New Yorkers who had never heard of pop art or Warhol before would soon get their first glimpse of this odd, downtown hipster and his work that would capture so many imaginations and revolutionize art, and perhaps even more importantly, the art market. And they could thank Moses and the World’s Fair for that.
12.
Americans are the youngest country, the largest country, and the strongest country, we like to say, and yet the very notion of change, real change throws Americans into a panic.
—James Baldwin, November 1963
Robert Moses arrived at his office in the Administration Building at Flushing Meadow early on the morning of Friday, November 22, as he always did—driven to work in a chauffeured car. After quickly getting down to work, he dictated a number of memos on a range of issues, including the ongoing controversy about modern art at the World’s Fair. He happily noted that the previous day’s edition of the New York Times ran a story about the priceless paintings by El Greco, Goya, and Velázquez from Madrid’s Prado Museum that would be exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion; it was exactly the kind of press he hoped would silence his critics.
As he scoured the morning papers, scores of hard-hat workers labored in the late November weather to finish the dozens pavilions that were in various stages of construction. The World’s Fair would open in exactly five months and there was much—perhaps too much—to do. Shea Stadium, the new baseball park that existed because Moses wanted a ballpark in Queens, was, as it had been for months, behind schedule. More than one hundred electricians were working seven days a week to ensure that the stadium, with its fifty-six thousand seats, would be open in time for the New York Mets to play the 1964 season in its new state-of-the-art home.
As far as Moses was concerned, the stadium was one more pavilion at his World’s Fair, an ingenious way of attracting tens of thousands of fans throughout the long baseball season, which, like the Fair, extended from April to October. Shea Stadium was also a key component of Moses’ post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park, which he promised would become “the most important park in the entire City, measured by size, usage, or any other yardstick.” Although Moses was instrumental in having the stadium built, he wasn’t directly involved in its construction and could only watch as others realized his vision, a position he never relished. Earlier that week he had confided to an associate that “the stadium may be completed by April 15,” but he w
asn’t holding his breath.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Moses’ beloved England, screaming teenagers and youths were agog over a new musical quartet calling themselves the Beatles. The youth of England besieged record shops that morning to purchase the band’s second LP, With the Beatles. The album, which featured a moody black-and-white photo of the band gazing straight ahead with deadly seriousness, as if they were the possessors of some joyless knowledge, immediately topped the British charts, where it finally dislodged their own debut album Please Please Me, released exactly seven months earlier.
The four Liverpudlians with matching custom-made suits, identical mop-top haircuts, irreverent attitudes, and, perhaps most shocking to the class-conscious British, working-class accents, had produced a series of chart-topping hits—“Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—that had, seemingly overnight, destroyed and resurrected the British pop industry in their own image. One journalist even created a new name for the mass hysteria that the band was creating among the younger portion of Her Majesty’s royal subjects: Beatlemania.
Earlier that month Her Royal Majesty got a chance to hear the band in person at the Royal Variety Performance at London’s Prince of Wales Theatre. Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and the Queen Mother—the latter two seen snapping their fingers and clapping along to the beat—attended the black-tie affair among other well-heeled Brits. As the Beatles were about to end their set with their roaring take on the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” John Lennon was unable to resist mouthing off in front of his social betters. “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help,” he informed his diamond-flashing, tuxedo-wearing audience. “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”
The concert and the pandemiclike spread of Beatlemania reached journalists in America, despite the fact that Capitol Records, the American subsidiary of EMI, the band’s British record label, had refused to release any of its music stateside. “American Top 40 in those days was bland white artists, and that’s the way the American record companies wanted it then,” recalled Paul White, a Capitol Records A&R executive. “There were the Fabians”—as in Fabian, the clean-cut teenage pop star—“and ordinary types of things that didn’t offend anybody.” Still, Time and Newsweek covered the Beatles’ unprecedented popularity in the United Kingdom and Lennon’s cheeky comments at the Royal Variety Performance.
Soon NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report aired a segment on the group. By chance, Ed Sullivan, the TV impresario who hosted his self-titled variety show on CBS—the most important half-hour of television in show business—was at London’s Heathrow Airport on October 31 where he witnessed Beatlemania firsthand, as thousands of screaming teens gathered to glimpse their heroes returning from a Scandinavian tour. Within weeks he had negotiated three appearances by the group for his show in February 1964.
The Sullivan deal helped CBS land exclusive rights to Beatles appearances for one year. The network aired its first story on the band with a four-minute segment on Morning News with Mike Wallace in the early hours of November 22, with plans to re-air it that evening on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
While the Beatles were making news on American televisions, Ken Kesey, an athletic, golden-haired, twenty-nine-year-old novelist, was on the road in Texas headed back to his ranch in La Jolla, California. Kesey had driven cross-country to New York City with a friend to see the Broadway adaptation of his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Kirk Douglas. While in New York, he was curious to see what the World’s Fair was about and drove out to Queens to glimpse the pavilions being erected. “Wow, this is spectacular,” Kesey said, suitably impressed by the oddly shaped buildings in Flushing Meadow. “We’re gonna want to come see this.” Next time, though, he thought, he would bring some friends.
As his car sped westbound on a Texas highway, Kesey heard news that would erase all the other events of the day. On a campaign trip to Dallas, in preparation for the upcoming 1964 election, America’s young, charismatic president was assassinated as he sat in the backseat of a black open-air limousine, next to his wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, while their car passed through Dealey Plaza in the bright midday sun. Although doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital reportedly fought to resuscitate him, nothing could be done for the forty-six-year-old president. “Everywhere you went you looked in people’s eyes and they all felt the same thing,” Kesey said. “It wasn’t just sadness, it was the loss of an innocence, the loss of the idea that good is always going to prevail.”
Back in Flushing Meadow, after Cronkite informed the nation shortly after 2:30 p.m. eastern standard time that the President of the United States was dead, Moses released a short statement in honor of the commander in chief who had visited the Fairgrounds just twelve months earlier. “The World’s Fair had counted confidently on the international leadership, support, and encouragement of President Kennedy,” wrote Moses, who sent both staff and workers home for the weekend. “We shall have to go on without his support but with his inspiration ever in mind.”
The World’s Fair, which Kennedy had promised to attend, would open five months to the day after his assassination. To millions of Americans, whether they loved or hated Kennedy, his shocking murder—and the eventual official and questionable government explanation of it—was undeniable evidence that something had gone terribly wrong with the country. What they did not and could not know was that the events of November 22, 1963, were just the beginning: An era in the nation’s history was over, and the new one that had just begun would prove to be far beyond the imagination of most Americans.
13.
The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence.
—President Lyndon B. Johnson, November 27, 1963
For four days the entire nation was riveted to their televisions; the only news transmitted over the airwaves was coverage about President Kennedy and his funeral. On Sunday, November 24, just two days after the president’s murder, his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot dead by shady Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby while in police custody and in full view of live television news cameras.
Anyone watching that Sunday morning—young or old—witnessed another mysterious assassination unfolding in real time, another unprecedented shock to America’s collective psyche, just one in a series of indelible, tragic images over those four days that would haunt the country for decades to come: the grief-stricken First Lady, her delicate features covered in a black veil; the president’s seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, kneeling with her mother at her father’s casket as it lay in state in the Capitol; and her little brother, John F. Kennedy Jr.—who turned three on the day of the president’s funeral—saluting the coffin carrying the father he would barely remember. “It just didn’t seem like America this weekend,” one New Yorker complained to the Times.
Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the Oath of Office aboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at the Dallas airport just hours after Kennedy’s murder. A shell-shocked Jacqueline Kennedy looked on at the untimely and succinct transition of power. She was still wearing her wool Chanel strawberry pink dress, splattered with her husband’s blood. “One leg was almost entirely covered with [blood] and her right glove was caked—that immaculate woman—it was caked with blood,” remembered the new First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, who comforted her predecessor in the back of the airplane. “And that was somehow one of the most poignant sights . . . exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” But when Mrs. Kennedy was asked if she wanted to change into new clothes, she refused. “I want them to see what they’ve done to Jack,” she said with a fierce determination.
Two days after the funeral, the new president addres
sed Congress and the nation. Three years earlier, during his inaugural address, Kennedy had told the country, “Let us begin”; now here was Johnson, America’s new and unelected president, offering a grieving nation the new refrain: “Let us continue.” Then Johnson declared how “no memorial, oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. . . . We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”
If the leaders and members of the civil rights movement were suddenly dumbstruck as they watched Johnson’s speech at home that Thanksgiving Eve, suddenly perplexed at the sight of the Texan, they could be forgiven. Every black man or woman who had suffered the savagery of attack dogs, fire hoses, and beatings or endured jail for seeking their constitutional rights had plenty of reasons to distrust the new president. As a congressman and then US senator, Johnson had either failed to support or, when he became the Senate Majority Leader, personally gutted civil rights legislation—as he did in 1957 and 1960. Yet there he was, the one-time protégé of segregationist senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, architect of the Southern Manifesto (which Johnson never signed), picking up the fallen standard of Kennedy and throwing his thirty-two years of political muscle behind the civil rights movement, just as he had promised two of Kennedy’s closet aides, Kenneth O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien, he would aboard Air Force One shortly before he took the Oath of Office.
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