Reading the work of Times art critic John Canaday was an experience I will not soon forget; it’s no wonder that his rapierlike wit and precise prose irked Robert Moses so much. His pieces, such as “Pop Art Sells On and On—Why?” (The New York Times, May 31, 1964), were intrinsic to understanding the pop art revolution. And his pieces about art and the World’s Fair, as the text shows, became part of the Fair story.
Other works I consulted on Warhol and pop art were: Andy Warhol by Carter Ratcliff (Abbeville Press, 1983); Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, edited by Kynaston McShine (Bullfinch Press/Little, Brown, 1991), especially Robert Rosenblum’s essay “Warhol As Art History”; Warhol by David Bourdon (Harry N. Abrams, 1995); and Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World by Gary Indiana (Basic Books, 2010). Among the illuminating essays to be found in the late Robert Hughes’s collection, Nothing If Not Critical (Penguin, 1992), is a wonderful piece on Warhol.
19.
My chapter on the New York City crackdown on the downtown bohemian art scene drew from stories in the New York papers, mostly the Times, about the Wagner administration’s efforts and Operation: Yorkville. Information about how these events actually affected artists like Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg was found in the aforementioned biographies such as City Poet, I Celebrate Myself, and Ed Sanders’s memoir Fug You. O’Hara’s World’s Fair poem can be found in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen (California University Press, 1995).
It is always a pleasure to reread the work of Allen Ginsberg; I kept my City Lights volumes of his work on my desk while writing this chapter and frequently turned to Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems 1947–1980 (Harper & Row, 1984). I drew on information from The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman by John Cooney (Times Books, 1984) and The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon by Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover (Sourcebooks, 2002). Arthur Gelb’s City Room has wonderful scenes about Lenny Bruce. Steve Allen was the subject of a November 10, 1962, Talk of the Town piece in which he mentions Bruce; the April 20, 1966, issue of The New Yorker ran a Notes and Comment piece upfront that served as an obituary of the famed comedian.
The story of Ralph Ginzburg’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s roles are recounted in The Last Innocent Year. Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland discusses the Abraham Fortas fiasco. I also consulted the works of my former professor at Queens College, John Tytell. His book Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage (Grove, 1995) was very helpful in understanding the downtown scene in the early 1960s.
The information about filmmaker, poet, and archivist Jonas Mekas was gleaned from all the above-mentioned books about the downtown art scene plus several Talk of the Town pieces in The New Yorker from 1962 to 1965, as well as a lengthy profile from the January 6, 1973, issue by Calvin Tomkins.
20.
As I have noted, the stall-in saga of Brooklyn CORE and the World’s Fair is a forgotten chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. The story played out in the New York papers, beginning with the Journal-American’s original story, and quickly became national news. Besides the Times’ authoritative coverage, I found numerous articles in the Arnold Goldwag/Brooklyn CORE Collection at the Brooklyn Historical Society, plus flyers, pamphlets, and telegrams from Arnold Goldwag to the Kennedys and others. Much thanks to the helpful staff there for their assistance.
Elements of the story were found in The Last Innocent Year (which includes Martin Luther King’s response); The Making of the President: 1964 by T. H. White (Atheneum, 1965); and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein (Nation Books, 2001). Tamar Jacoby is one of the few writers to devote time to the subject, as she does in her book Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Basic Books, 1998).
Most helpful of all was Professor Brian Purnell, whose work I first encountered when I found his PhD thesis online. He later turned the thesis into a book chapter, “ ‘Drive Awhile for Freedom’: Brooklyn CORE’s 1964 Stall-In and Public Discourses on Protest Violence,” in Groundworks: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward (NYU Press, 2005). I am also grateful to Professor Purnell for answering my questions about the stall-in and its significance in the history of the civil rights movement in the North. Moses’ comments and reactions to the episode were found in the files of his papers in the New York Public Library. James Farmer wrote about the episode in his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart.
21.
The opening day events at the World’s Fair were culled from newspapers and magazines covering the day’s festivities, as well as The End of the Innocence and Bill Cotter and Bill Young’s two Fair books. The New York Times covered the clashes on the 7 Train and the events inside the World’s Fair, especially the booing of President Johnson, whose speech was found online at the LBJ Presidential Library (lbjlibrary.org). The many memos, letters, etc. found in the Robert Moses Papers and World’s Fair Archives helped illuminate the picture. The material about the planned stall-in came from the sources listed in the previous chapter.
22.
The June 5, 1964, Time cover story was found in the magazine’s online archives. The May 23, 1964, Saturday Evening Post’s story on Moses, “The Old S.O.B. Does It Again,” was found among the Robert Moses Papers; both are invaluable documents on Moses and the Fair. The information about the actual Fair was drawn from Bill Cotter and Bill Young’s photo books; The End of the Innocence; the Walt Disney biography; The 1964 World’s Fair Guidebook (published by Time-Life Books); and newspaper clippings about those first days at the Fair. Also important were Ada Louise Huxtable’s assessment of the World’s Fair, found in her collection, On Architecture, and Professor Vincent J. Scully Jr.’s “If This Is Architecture, God Help Us” from the July 13, 1964, issue of Life magazine. Once again, John Canaday’s take on the World’s Fair in the New York Times was both unique and amusing.
The details regarding the film Parable were gleaned from the many memos and letters Moses exchanged with his officials on the subject. “The Jordan Mural Affair”—as Moses referred to it in his book, Public Works—received major coverage in the New York papers. Documents about this episode were found in the Robert Moses Papers and World’s Fair Archives at the New York Public Library. As usual with Moses, the whole affair was played out in the press, and in this case, the courts. The details of the Board of Directors’ meeting were found at the library.
23.
To recount the tale of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney, I relied primarily on The Last Innocent Year by Jon Margolis. I also relied on Three Lives for Mississippi (University of Mississippi Press, 2000) by William Bradford Huie, a Southerner who understood the region’s history and codes, a journalist who had written about the Klan and Jim Crow for national magazines, and a novelist. He originally reported on the Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney case for the New York Herald Tribune. Also invaluable in my research was Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson (Penguin, 2010) and We Are Not Afraid by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray (Bantam, 1989). I found Lewis E. Lomax’s dispatch “Road to Mississippi” in a 1964 issue of Ramparts at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
My account of the Harlem riots depended largely on the reporting of the New York Times, Arthur Gelb’s City Room, and James Farmer’s Lay Bare the Heart. The riots are also touched upon in other books, including Freedom Summer, Sweet Land of Liberty, America Divided, and The Last Innocent Year. I found the great Ralph Ellison’s Harper’s piece on Harlem in their digital archive. Richard J. Whalen’s September 1964 cover story for Fortune, “New York Is a City Destroying Itself,” touches on the riots and Robert Wagner’s time as mayor.
24.
Among the documents of the Robert Moses Papers and the World’s Fair Archives at the New York Public Library, I
found the letters from would-be Fairgoers who wrote Moses asking for his assurance that they would be safe if they came to New York in the summer of 1964; others wrote to tell him they were not coming. Also in the Moses Papers were the memos detailing his thoughts and plans for Season Two of the Fair. Moses’ problems with the Lake Amusement Area made it into various periodicals, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York World-Telegram, among others.
Sally Rand’s history performing at various World’s Fairs, as well as the role of burlesque shows and stripteases at various Fairs, was found in Robert Rydell’s World of Fairs. Edward Ball wrote a great piece about sex in the utopian visions of World’s Fairs in “Degraded Utopias,” The Village Voice, Fall Art Special 1989. Thanks to Heidi B. Coleman of the Isamu Noguchi Archives for helping me find it. This chapter also benefited from my interviews with Bill Cotter and the great Al Kooper, who shared his memories about growing up in Queens, playing the World’s Fair, and playing with Dylan at both the Newport Festival and the Forest Hills concert in 1965. A special thanks to him.
A special mille grazie also goes to Justin Rizzo—il mio fratello da un’altra madre—for cluing me in about Dave Brubeck’s World’s Fair–themed songs on Time Changes, as well as The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization by Diana West (St. Martin’s; 2008), which recounts Benny Goodman’s meeting with the Beatles and references his daughter Rachel Goodman’s Esquire piece about that surreal moment. I based my account of Bob Dylan’s recording and activities in the summer of 1964 on Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home; Dylan’s own Chronicles Volume 1 (Simon & Schuster, 2004); and the pieces in The Essential Interviews: Dylan on Dylan, edited by Jonathan Cott (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006), particularly Nat Hentoff’s piece from the October 24, 1964, issue of The New Yorker, “The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’, Sounds.” Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads by Greil Marcus (PublicAffairs, 2005) is essential reading for anyone trying to understand Dylan, his music, or its place in American culture, as is, of course, David Hadju’s Positively 4th Street. For Dylan’s meeting with the Beatles, I also consulted Bob Spitz’s The Beatles and the above-mentioned books.
25.
I based my narrative on Ken Kesey from a number of sources: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Signet, 1969); Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000 by Martin Torgoff (Simon & Schuster, 2004); On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture by Ken Babbs and Paul Perry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990); and Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties by Robert Stone (Harper, 2007). I also consulted The Holy Goof (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), a biography of Neal Cassady by the late William Plummer, a gentleman and a scholar, whom I had the pleasure of knowing. Kesey is also mentioned in Margolis’s The Last Innocent Year.
Magic Trip was key to understanding the cross-country trip undertaken by Kesey and the Pranksters. Several quotes were drawn from that wonderful documentary. Also useful were I Celebrate Myself, Bill Morgan’s Allen Ginsberg biography. John Tytell’s incomparable Naked Angels, his literary biography of the Beat Generation, was as inspiring today as when I first read it more than twenty years ago as a young college student. I also consulted T. H. White’s The Making of the President 1964 and Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm.
Part Three: Bringing It All Back Home
26.
This chapter is largely based on the relevant documents found in the Robert Moses Papers and World’s Fair Archives about the end of the Fair’s first season. It is also based on Richard J. Whalen’s September 1964 cover story for Fortune, “New York: A City Destroying Itself”; his book of the same name released the following year; and Moses’ reaction not only to Whalen’s piece but to all the stories then appearing in the New York papers about crime and the city’s other ailments at the time. I also had the pleasure of speaking to Richard Whalen. A very special thanks to him.
Critical to understanding the saga of the Lower Manhattan Expressway was Anthony Flint’s Wrestling With Moses and Robert Moses and the Modern City, as well as Ric Burns’s amazing documentary New York, particularly Episode Seven: The City and The World.
27.
All the relevant newspaper articles noted in the text were found in the Robert Moses Papers at the New York Public Library, as were Moses’ memos and letters about those articles and his exchange with Charles Grutzner of the New York Times. The report by top executives of the Fair’s biggest industrial pavilions and Moses’ pointed reactions were also found in the archives.
28.
The Fair’s post–Season One problems were detailed among the files in the Robert Moses Papers and World’s Fair Archives. The whole affair played out in the New York daily papers, particularly the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, which by then had become the paper most likely to irritate Moses on a daily basis. Details of Moses’ showdown with George Spargo appeared in Life. Bruce Nicholson recounts his trip to Madrid with Moses to meet General Franco in his book, Hi Ho, Come to the Fair.
29.
Bob Dylan’s experiments in the recording studio in early 1965 are recounted in Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home; Greil Marcus’s Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads; and David Hadju’s Positively 4th Street, among other Dylan books. Al Kooper’s memoir, Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards (Backbeat Books, 2008), was also helpful. Dylan’s albums from this time, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3: 1961–1991 and The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, were all essential.
30.
I based the events of the early days of the Johnson administration on Jon Margolis’s The Last Innocent Year. Also useful was Robert Caro’s Pathway to Power. James Farmer’s Lay Bare the Heart provided insights and details about meeting President Johnson. Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland also gives a wonderful account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
31.
In the wake of the Kitty Genovese murder and race riots, the media took a long, hard look at New York City. Following Richard J. Whalen’s lead, the Herald Tribune began a series titled “City in Crisis” (later compiled into a book of the same name). Malcolm X’s life and death are recounted in Malcolm: A Life of Reinvention. The story of Selma is recounted in America Divided and The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, among other places, including newspaper reports.
Details about the World’s Fair’s second season were found in the New York Public Library’s archives, The End of the Innocence, and the New York newspapers. Details about the murders in Queens were found in New York: A City Destroying Itself (Morrow, 1965) and in newspaper accounts. The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was detailed in the aforementioned civil rights books.
32.
The details for this chapter about the Beatles and Bob Dylan in the summer of 1965 were pulled from more than a dozen sources, such as newspaper accounts, mostly from the New York Times, particularly Robert Shelton’s report “The Beatles Will Make the Scene Here Again, but the Scene Has Changed” (August 11, 1965), an early serious attempt to rate the band’s effect on pop culture and the culture at large; and “The Sky Glows Over Queens as the Beatles Take Over Shea Stadium” (August 16, 1965). Essential to my narrative were Read the Beatles, Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, and Anthology by the Beatles. My account of Bob Dylan’s Forest Hills concert is based on David Hadju’s Positively 4th Street, Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, Al Kooper’s Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards, and newspaper reports.
Joe Mannarino told me about the Beatles’ arrival at the World’s Fair, and Al Kooper told me about the Forest Hills experience from the stage. Robert Shelton filed many excellent stories on Dylan for the Paper of Record, while a December 12, 1965, New York Times Magazine piece, “Public
Writer No. 1?” by Thomas Meehan examined the literary creditability that college students bestowed on Dylan. Critical to my assessment of Dylan at this time were D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and ’65 Revisited, as was The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963–65, directed by Murray Lerner. Dylan Speaks: The Legendary 1965 Press Conference in San Francisco was also helpful. Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home is a brilliant and informative documentary by any barometer.
33.
Robert Moses’ battles with Abraham Beame and other city officials were documented in the New York metropolitan papers of the day and in World’s Fair documents found in both his papers and the Fair Archives at the New York Public Library. I based my narrative of Pope Paul VI’s arrival in New York, his visit to the World’s Fair, his trip to the United Nations, and his interactions with Cardinal Francis Spellman on a number of sources, including The American Pope by John Cooney; The Pope’s Journey to the United States, written by staff members of the New York Times and edited by A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb (who produced the quickie paperback since the Paper of Record was on strike); and the New York Times’ lengthy account, “Pope Paul’s Visit to New York and Peace Appeal to U.N.” by A. M. Rosenthal (October 11, 1965). The historic trip was covered by all the major media. The accounts of the pope’s trip in both Life and Time were also helpful. Moses had been angling to have the pope visit the World’s Fair long before there was even a glimmer of hope. The relevant documents on the subject were found among his papers at the New York Public Library.
Tomorrow-Land Page 39