Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  “Get those god-damned niggers!” Clark shouted as he waded into the crowd, striking anyone in his path. It was a bloodbath. Dozens were sent to the hospital. The SNCC’s Lewis was clubbed in the head; he thought he had finally reached the end. “People are going to die here,” the twenty-five-year-old civil rights leader recalled thinking as he was attacked. “I’m going to die here.” The events of “Bloody Sunday,” as it quickly became known, were captured by print and television journalists—some of whom were also attacked—and was broadcast across the country that night. More televised bloodshed for the living rooms of America.

  Two days later there was another march, this time led by King. He stopped after crossing the bridge—as directed by a federal court order. Still, that march claimed another life: A Boston minister, the Reverend James Reeb, a married man with four children, was attacked by Klansmen that night, dying from his wounds a few days later.

  On March 15 President Johnson addressed the nation and promised complete solidarity with the civil rights movement. He was now going to send an unprecedented second civil rights bill up to Capitol Hill to guarantee the right of all Americans to vote. Then, in a moment that shocked many, Johnson closed his speech by looking into the cameras and co-opting the words of the movement, sung and shouted by tens of thousands over the years, pausing momentarily between each word to allow the full weight of the moment to sink in: “And we shall overcome,” intoned the president.

  Watching television at a friend’s house that night, King later recalled, he wept tears of joys. On March 21 King led some three thousand protesters on a third march from Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Montgomery, protected the entire way by the Alabama National Guard, now under the direction and orders of the US government. Governor Wallace could do nothing but peek out at the victorious protesters, hiding his shameful face behind the curtains of the state capitol.

  Exactly a month later, on April 21, the World’s Fair opened for its second and final season, still proclaiming, despite the bloody events of the previous four months, a utopian standard of “Peace Through Understanding.” The message, by now, either seemed utterly meaningless or desperately needed to be said again and again. For this opening day, President Johnson sent Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to address the thousands of VIPs—including Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., and West Berlin’s Mayor Willy Brandt, who also addressed the crowd—in the Fair’s Singer Bowl. Afterward, the smiling Humphrey walked among the Fair faithful next to Chief Justice Earl Warren, taking in the sights and being followed everywhere he went. Humphrey Stars as Show Reopens, the New York Times exclaimed the next day.

  If only the vice president had been that popular at the White House. Just two months before attending the Fair, Humphrey wrote a plaintive memo to Johnson, pleading with him to get out of Vietnam lest it rip apart the Democratic Party and damage support for his extensive domestic agenda. There would be no better time than the present: “1965 is the year of minimum political risk,” he argued; if they acted now, they cold repel any “political repercussions from the Republican Right.”

  For his political honesty, the VP was shunned by the president, who did not seek his opinion on the matter for more than a year. Instead, Johnson heeded the voices of his generals and Secretary McNamara. On March 8, Johnson approved the use of US Marines in Vietnam. By April, Operation Rolling Thunder was carpet bombing North Vietnam, the precise targets picked by President Johnson himself, now convinced that such air warfare would bring a quick end to the conflict.

  However, even as American troops were busy fighting in Vietnam—or occasionally being sent to Alabama to protect American citizens from the KKK—the World’s Fair managed to hold a celebratory second season opening. There was another parade with Disney characters and dancers, Miss America, and special guest Olympic runner Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, who carried with him a message from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as he ran from Manhattan to Flushing Meadow—a publicity stunt dreamed up by Moses personally to draw attention to the Fair’s African republics and highlight the Fair’s international attractions.

  The second opening day also benefited from far sunnier weather than the year before, resulting in more than 150,000 visitors—60,000 more than the Fair’s opening day a year earlier. Happily for Moses, another planned protest from a local CORE chapter failed to materialize on opening day. But four days later, a hundred peaceful protesters marched with signs denouncing Mayor Wagner, accusing him of doing nothing to fix the slums or schools or address police brutality in the ghettos. The protest, held in front of the New York City Pavilion, was quiet and peaceful and didn’t interfere with Fairgoers—only 110,614 of whom showed up that day, a disappointing turnout for a weekend date and probably due to the chilly weather (and news of yet another protest march).

  Real trouble began when a much smaller group of white teenagers from Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, claiming to be part of a organization called SPONGE—or the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything—led a counterprotest against CORE. Although some carried signs proclaiming their support for Governor Wallace, it wasn’t so much a protest as it was an opportunity for them to harass the civil rights activists.

  George Schiffer, a lawyer for CORE, complained to the Fair’s security chief, Stephen P. Kennedy, the former New York City police commissioner. He asked that the East New York group stage their protest in another area of the Fairgrounds. “I don’t see any pickets,” Kennedy deadpanned. “I don’t see any disorder. I just see people enjoying the fresh air and seeking peace through understanding.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you sent them over here,” Schiffer shot back.

  Not long after, a fight broke out between the groups, and a CORE picketer was punched in the face; only then did Kennedy’s guards get involved. Although the melee was over shortly after it began, the incident was further proof that racism and ignorance were not confined to the states of the Old Confederacy; there was plenty of such sentiment to go around in New York City, even a melting pot like Queens.

  Soon after the NAACP got wind of a song that was featured in the Chrysler Pavilion’s new show and quickly lodged a complaint. The song, “Dem Bolts,” was a play on the old minstrel show tune “Dem Bones.” Although at first the carmaker changed some of the offending words—dropping the Amos ’n’ Andy–like “dem” in favor of “them”—the Detroit automaker eventually scrapped the song rather than risk a national boycott of their cars, which the civil rights group threatened. Similarly, an employment agency placed a newspaper advertisement—“WANTED: Blue-Eyed Blondes”—for jobs at the World’s Fair. The NAACP immediately raised a red flag. Just as quickly, Moses wrote a letter to the group and other civil rights organizations explaining the Fair had nothing to do with the offending ad, nor did it endorse racial hiring policies. The agency quickly withdrew the ad and apologized.

  In the first weeks of the ’65 Fair, more trouble brewed between the American-Israel Pavilion and the Jordan Pavilion. The American Jewish Congress had successfully sued for the right to hand out flyers in front of the Jordan Pavilion denouncing the offending mural; in retaliation, the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations handed out flyers in front of the American-Israel Pavilion telling Americans not to purchase “Israeli War Bonds.” (That provoked the pro-Israeli group to set up a free lunch of kosher bologna and beer, taunting the pro-Palestinian group to partake in the free food.)

  As the opposing groups continued to distribute their flyers day after day, tempers flared. On May 1 a group of Israelis taunted a group handing out the anti-Israel flyers. Soon the Pinkerton police were separating two men. The entire episode was hardly the World’s Fair’s finest moment: Over the course of the Fair’s two seasons, the opposing groups made sure the seemingly intractable problems of the Middle East extended to Flushing Meadow.

  By the spring of 1965, among the Fair’s other problems wa
s the stewing violence that was enveloping New York City. On May 22 an elderly woman was standing at a Queens subway station awaiting her train, when a twelve-year-old girl approached her. Without saying a word, the girl plunged a knife into the woman until she bleed to death. That very same night, at Flushing Meadow, a group of young people snuck into the Fair by riding in the back of a delivery truck for a small fee. Karnick Yeterian, a twenty-year-old dental technician from the Bronx, and his friends decided to jump off the truck early, figuring they wouldn’t have to pay the driver. When the driver’s friends demanded Yeterian pay his nickel for being snuck inside, he just ignored them and set out to see the Fair. That’s when Henry Roman, age fourteen, jumped the dental technician and threw him to the ground; then Raphael Villa, fifteen, plunged a hunting knife into his chest. Another murder, this time over a nickel.

  The crimes were unrelated, but to the citizens of New York—particularly Queens, where both murders took place—they illustrated one fact: In Birmingham, innocent children were killed for the color of their skin; in New York City, children killed over nickels, or for no reason all.

  By June the burgeoning anti–Vietnam War movement had also crept into the Fairgrounds, when the Student Peace Union passed out flyers in front of the US Federal Pavilion, even though they had been denied the right to do so by Moses, who was still dealing with the political migraine from the American-Israel/Jordan Pavilion mess. The quartet of students were largely ignored by Fairgoers before being removed. One young Fair worker, Michael Cohen, age nineteen, reported to work at the Wisconsin Pavilion with a placard that read All Hands off Vietnam, or at least tried to: He was stopped at the gate by the Pinkerton police, had his Fair pass revoked, and had to pay $2.50 for a ticket to go to work.

  For whatever reason, Moses granted permission for an August rally by an organization called Women Strike for Peace, which wanted to commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan as well as call for the end of hostilities in Vietnam. On August 6 four hundred women dressed in black, under the careful watch of the Pinkerton guard, marched silently—they were allowed to picket as long as they did not disturb Fairgoers’ fun—around the Unisphere. At other times of the day, they marched to the Japanese Pavilion and handed out flyers asking Fairgoers to remember the tens of thousands who had died in the flash of a mushroom cloud.

  In Washington, DC, on that same August day, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been passed by overwhelming majorities in the House of Representatives and the US Senate. It was the second historic legislative victory for the Johnson administration and the postwar civil rights movement, which had fought for more than ten years to achieve equality under the law. While no one should have thought that the struggle for black freedom was over, the stated goals of groups headed by King, Lewis, and James L. Farmer Jr. had now been achieved. There would be plenty more to do, but one era of the movement was over—at least to those millions of Americans who mistakenly thought that eradicating inequality could be accomplished with the stroke of a pen. In reality, the struggle to redeem America’s racist soul was just beginning.

  For those African Americans who could already vote—in places like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles—freedom and equality meant something else entirely; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t going to radically alter their lives. The de facto desegregation that they had been living with was not going to change. For them, the legislative changes delivered over the last year were far too little and far too late. Their anger was about to boil over, just like it had the previous summer in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, only this time it would be the Watts section of Los Angeles that would light a fire that the nation could not ignore.

  32.

  “Beatles Say—Dylan Shows the Way”

  —Melody Maker, January 9, 1965

  As the World’s Fair entered its final weeks, the Beatles arrived in New York on August 13 to kick-start their 1965 North American tour. The New York Times issued a friendly warning to the band: Since their last US concert, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium eleven months earlier, the musical landscape had shifted dramatically. For the first time since their stateside debut the previous February, the Beatles had competition.

  Under a blaring six-column headline—The Beatles Will Make the Scene Here Again, but the Scene Has Changed—the Times’ pop music critic, Robert Shelton, argued that although the group had inspired a seismic “upheaval in pop music, mores, fashion, hair styles and manners,” the Liverpool quartet no longer had a monopoly over the charts. In 1965, pop radio had become a free-for-all.

  From January to August, a dizzying array of groups had snared No. 1 hits on the Billboard charts, including the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, and the Beach Boys. There was also a steady onslaught of mop-topped British Invasion groups attempting to cash in on the Beatles’ popularity, like Herman’s Hermits, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, and Freddie and the Dreamers. There were even homegrown Beatles imitators like Gary (son of Jerry) Lewis and the Playboys, who began a string of hits starting with “This Diamond Ring.” Also scoring their first No. 1 hit on this side of the Atlantic were the Beatles’ friendly rivals, the Rolling Stones, with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” an instant classic that stayed atop the charts for a full month. With Keith Richards’s full-throttle, fuzzed-out guitar and Mick Jagger’s snarling vocals, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was edgy, dark, and dangerous. It made the Beatles sound like bumble-gum pop.

  Although the Beatles were an indisputable global phenomenon—having already sold some one hundred million singles and twenty-five million albums worldwide—from January to August 1965, they had occupied the top spot on the US charts for only five weeks with three different singles. An amazing feat, no doubt, but it paled in comparison to the band’s chart domination in 1964: six No. 1 singles (at one point they held the top spot for fourteen consecutive weeks); five Top 10 hits; two Top 20 songs; plus another that reached the Top 40. So dominant were the Beatles in 1964 that, during a week that April, just as the World’s Fair was about to open, they had twelve singles on Billboard ’s Hot 100 chart, including the top five spots. By August 1965, the Times could legitimately claim the Beatles had suffered “a slight popularity decline.”

  Not that the Beatles had any reason to worry. Still in their early twenties, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were arguably the most popular songwriting duo in pop music. Bands began to follow the Beatles’ lead, and even occasionally surpass them. The Animals, who like the Beatles hailed from England’s gritty, industrial north, played a particular brand of hard-edged R&B-inflected pop, and scored a major hit in September 1964 with their rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” an old folk standard. Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly had both recorded the song, as did Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. The Animals’ version, however, would become the definitive one.

  Instead of strumming the song’s simple chord progression like a folkie would, guitarist Hilton Valentine turned the old standard into an instantly catchy riff, while Alan Price added haunting blasts of electric organ as vocalist Eric Burdon sang in a blues-drenched, soul-weary voice. By September 1964 the song was lodged atop the charts—the first British Invasion band after the Beatles to hit No. 1—and stayed there for three weeks. This prompted The New Yorker to compare the two bands in whimsical political terms: The Animals were new and exciting, like Bobby Kennedy; meanwhile the Beatles were passé, a la Hubert H. Humphrey.

  The track was unlike any previous pop recording: The Animals weren’t pining for a girl or craving some innocent romance; they were singing about spiritual ruination. By the summer of 1965, songs with mature lyrics were state-of-the-art for rock ’n’ roll, and it was a trend, as the Times pointed out, “not reflected on Beatles records.”

  The Beatles knew it, too. As Lennon would confess years later, in those early Beatlemania days, he and McCartney didn’t worry much about lyrics. “The words were al
most irrelevant,” Lennon said, while McCartney admitted, “We weren’t that fussy about [the words], because it’s only a rock ’n’ roll song. I mean, it’s not literature.” However, others didn’t feel that way. When asked at a 1965 press conference about the significance of lyrics, Dylan declared, “The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words.” Actual poets like Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure couldn’t have agreed more: They hailed Dylan as one of their own, a literary adherent to their Beat Generation.

  But lyrically speaking, the most interesting song in 1965 was “Eve of Destruction”—an anthem of anxiety penned by a nineteen-year-old West Coast songwriter named P. F. Sloan. Recorded by gravel-voiced ex-folkie Barry McGuire, it became a No. 1 hit in September 1965, going on to sell more than one million copies. And unlike any Beatles song, “Eve of Destruction” referenced Red China, Vietnam, and the plight of the young American draftee: “You’re old enough to kill, but not for voting.” For the first time, young Americans—millions of whom Robert Moses was still hoping to attract to his World’s Fair—could listen to the music flowing from their radios and hear about the anxieties of their generation: the Vietnam War, civil rights, the Cold War, and the threat of a nuclear holocaust—and all of that in just over three and a half minutes. Pop music was no longer just entertainment.

  The music industry soon labeled this trend “folk-rock”—the ­marriage of the meaningful lyrics of folk music to the sounds of a rock band. The prevailing conventional wisdom of the time regarded rock ’n’ roll as ephemeral pop made for teenyboppers, vacuous fluff played by musical neophytes on electric instruments, whereas folk music was authentic American music, passed down from generation to generation and performed on acoustic instruments by serious musicians like Baez, Pete Seeger, and, of course, Dylan. Folk didn’t follow trends. The topical “protest songs” folksingers wrote—or interpreted—were concerned with politics and social justice. They didn’t shout “yeah, yeah, yeah” or wear mop-tops. Nor did they trouble themselves with vulgar commercial concerns such as hit records (at least not publicly). The union of these two disparate musical genres was the next step in the evolution of rock ’n’ roll, and the Beatles—the originators of the rock renaissance—were in danger of being left behind.