Tomorrow-Land (28 page)

When the US government's final report was issued in September, the
New York
Times
cited it as characterizing the riots as a series of “attacks on authority,” not a racial disturbance. The NAACP's Roy Wilkins was pleased—he had feared the uprisings would damage the greater cause of civil rights. Intentional or not, Hoover had helped the movement by airbrushing the racial component of the conflict out of the picture. But by doing so, the FBI and the nation's political leadership missed the point entirely.

Urban ghettos were repositories for a slew of social problems: rundown housing, rat-infested streets, horrible public schools, subpar hospitals, and rampant crime, including the crime that dare not be named—police brutality. Such places were prime examples—Exhibit A, in fact—of the death knell of American cities. Their very existence was proof positive that America was failing to provide real opportunities for all its citizens. And the irony, of course, was that these ghettos existed in the North, where blacks were free to vote.

The Harlem riots were the latest example that New York City—home and host of the 1964–65 World's Fair—was imploding. Race riots, the murder of Kitty Genovese, pollution, soaring violent crime—all were the mark of a great metropolis in decline. Or as a
Fortune
magazine cover story put it shortly before the FBI report was released, New York was “a city destroying itself.”

While a young black teen was shot dead under extremely questionable circumstances, and while Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant burned, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. vacationed on the sunny Mediterranean island of Mallorca. Cautious as ever, the mayor didn't think it was necessary to fly home while the two largest black neighborhoods in his city burned. “New Yorkers scarcely missed him,” wrote Richard J. Whalen, the author of the
Fortune
story. “They have come to expect deep silence from City Hall in any emergency.”

When Wagner finally returned, ahead of schedule, he immediately met with King at City Hall on July 29, in the hopes of finding a solution to the root causes of the Harlem riots. More jobs were needed. New York slums had only grown worse since the end of the war and the
emergence of Title I and “slum clearance”—the details of which Wagner, like his predecessors, had left in the hands of Moses. Wagner knew—and just about everyone in New York City and in Albany knew—that giving Moses an enormous task meant giving the Master Builder license to do whatever he wanted. It mattered little if Moses' solutions—invariably erecting soulless high-rise slab towers in once bustling, if poor, neighborhoods—worked or not. Few had the fortitude to challenge the Master Builder, least of all Mayor Wagner.

The mayor and King agreed on just about everything except Lieutenant Gilligan. King argued that the New York policeman should be suspended or, at the very least, put on leave. But Wagner and his staff wouldn't go for it. Such a move would only encourage those who wanted a civilian police review board and, in their view, undercut police authority. Wagner was dead-set against such measures. A review board made up of citizens, he would later tell President Johnson and the First Lady at a private meeting at the White House, would kill New York's Finest's morale, dropping it to “zero overnight.” King was unconcerned about police morale, singling out Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy as “utterly unresponsive to either the demands or the aspirations of the Negro people” and claiming that Murphy was doing all he could to block any civilian review board from trying to “investigate charges of police brutality.” And, in fact, the police commissioner was.

As New Yorkers pondered the meaning of the riots, down south the urban disturbances were all the proof that the anti–civil rights forces needed. Mississippians who resented the presence of the Freedom Summer workers, the reporters from around the nation, and the scores of FBI agents felt vindicated that just weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, blacks in New York had erupted in a frenzy of destruction, burning down their own neighborhoods and turning parts of New York into a war zone. “It is a sad commentary that while mobs stalk the streets of New York,” said one Mississippi US representative, “. . . some 15,000 so-called civil rights workers and troublemakers are in Mississippi—a state with the nation's lowest crime rate—subjecting innocent, law abiding people to insult, national scorn and creating trouble.” There were still those
in Mississippi who denied that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman had been murdered—such as Senator Eastland, who even in late July was still claiming the disappearance was “a hoax” and the work of Communist spies. Bloodshed and shame, these people argued, were only to be found in New York.

That farce ended on August 4. While the World's Fair welcomed its twenty millionth visitor in Queens—the winners were a family of six from Bedford, Indiana—down in Philadelphia, Mississippi, FBI agents chased down a few leads. And although comedian Dick Gregory had offered a $25,000 reward for anyone who could provide information that led to a conviction, it was only after the FBI was said to open up its checkbook that the “cotton curtain” loosened and people in the small town started talking. “Blood, in the deep south of all places, is thicker than water,” wrote Louis E. Lomax, “but greed, particularly among poor Mississippi white trash, is thicker than blood.”

The federal agents had arrived early that morning to start digging through the top of the dam with heavy machinery. It took a few hours in the airless summer heat, but the stench of death was soon apparent. They used shovels before digging with their hands. Some smoked cigars to mitigate the smell of decaying flesh.

And there they found them, lying buried in the Mississippi soil. The first body was Mickey Schwerner, naked except for his Wrangler jeans and his wedding band. Below him was Andrew Goodman, found facedown, his left hand in a tightened fist clutching the red clay that would be his burial ground, and raising the specter that he had been buried alive. Then, at last, they unearthed James Chaney, whom the terrorists couldn't resist beating senseless, very likely whipping him with chains, breaking his bones and body before he finally bled to death from his wounds. When the bodies were wrapped in plastic and sent to the coroner's office, in a sadistic twist of fate, Deputy Sheriff Price was on hand to help carry them. By all accounts, Price had been one of the last people to see the trio alive.

The news that the three were dead was hardly shocking to the citizens of Meridian, Mississippi, or Neshoba County. Three civil rights
workers arrested midday and released late at night? Two of them Jewish New Yorkers, the other a local black man, the blue station wagon they were driving was found, burned out and abandoned, and no one had seen them for weeks? It didn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind had blown.

But even now, with the dead bodies uncovered, some whites still felt that somehow
they
had been betrayed. “Somebody broke our code,” one complained. “No honorable white man would have told you what happened.” Some blacks complained, too. The simple fact was that there were at least a dozen unsolved murders of blacks in Mississippi at the time and no one was in a rush to solve them; it took the death of two white liberal New Yorkers for the world to pay attention.

Such was the sentiment that Rita Schwerner voiced. “My husband did not die in vain,” she proudly proclaimed. “If he and Andrew Goodman had been Negro, they would have taken little note of their death. After all, the slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.”

For all the hope and optimism that the Freedom Summer and the passage of the most significant civil rights legislation in the history of the republic had ignited in the hearts and minds of Americans, the decaying bodies of three young men in the mud of Mississippi and the human wreckage of Harlem and the blood-stained pavement of East 76th Street defied the notion put forth by President Johnson that America was moving toward a “Great Society” or operating with the World's Fair's utopian purpose of peaceful coexistence among nations. Before America could end the Cold War with the Soviet Union, it had to end the civil war with itself. And by August 1964, it showed no signs that it was capable of doing so.

24.

Many citizens of the United States who have planned a visit to the World's Fair in New York City are much concerned for their safety from mob violence.

—Letter from a would-be Fairgoer to Robert Moses, June 15, 1964

 

The chaos engulfing New York City was the worst possible news for the World's Fair: Race riots, civil rights protests, the public ridicule of the President of the United States by college students, charges of police brutality, and every day more horrific crime stories with headlines that dared you to look away. Just two days after the Fair opened, the papers had described another tragic murder involving two minors—
Boy, 16, Throws Girl, 12, from Roof
—and that was from the high-minded
New York Times,
hardly one of the city's “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” tabloids. All of these events invited the question that Robert Moses once asked in a
New York Times Magazine
article back in 1943: What's wrong with New York? Twenty-one years later, many Americans and would-be Fairgoers pondered the same question.

In late July, Moses sent a sample of the letters he had been receiving for months to Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. The first was from a Marshall, Texas, man who feared for the safety of his daughter and three granddaughters, who were planning to visit the Fair. His letter quoted a magazine article about Genovese, recounting how thirty people “witnessed the rape of a defenseless woman by a sex maniac without rendering any assistance.” He went on to say: “This would not have happened in this part of the country.” He wanted Moses' personal assurance that New York City was safe.

Another man from St. Paul, Minnesota, expressed similar reservations. “The news stories concerning racial incidents, muggings, and actual killings have done much to cool our feelings for the Fair,” he told Moses. Another wrote the Master Builder asking if it were true that cars
with Alabama plates were being targeted by vandals, ostensibly in retaliation for the sins of Bull Connor and Governor George C. Wallace, now a presidential candidate.

“I'm sure you will be perfectly safe here,” Moses assured any out-of-towner who asked. And while he admitted that violent crimes occurred in New York and other big cities—“this is true of . . . rural districts as well”—the real problem, he claimed, lay with the New York media. “The metropolitan press unfortunately plays these incidents up,” he explained.

Despite these concerns, just four months into the Fair's first season, Moses had already turned his attention to improvements for Season Two, which would begin on April 21, 1965. There was no shortage of problematic pavilions to fix: There was the unofficial French Pavilion (shut down by Moses because the business group that organized it hadn't made the exhibit suitably French enough); the struggling American Arts Pavilion (which managed to aggravate the critics who had lobbied for it and inspire only apathy from the public); the cash-strapped Louisiana Pavilion, with its old-time riverboat-style revue
America Be Seated,
which was too close to a minstrel show for the NAACP, whose complaints ended the show after two days; and the Texas Pavilion, which despite its acclaimed
To Broadway With Love
show—which won praise for its integrated cast from Fair director Dr. Ralph J. Bunche—had red-stained balance sheets and was losing a reported $130,000 a week by early summer.

But by August, Moses' biggest problem was the Lake Amusement Area—the square mile of Fairgrounds adjacent to Meadow Lake that was accessible by a footbridge. He had built a small amphitheater and a marina that would anchor the area, but the surrounding Fairgrounds were ultimately populated with a zoo and a circus, as well as various sideshows and rides. From the get-go, Moses had instituted a no “midway” policy—referring to the traditional seedy entertainment areas of World's Fairs where one could find barkers luring customers into Coney Island–style funhouses, penny arcades, cheap games of chance, or circus freaks shows (like Olga the Bearded Lady, who was famous enough to earn a profile in
The New Yorker
in 1940). When the lights went down and the
kids went home, these same venues would become more risqué and were strictly for “adults only.”

Not at Moses' Fair, though. The Master Builder flatly refused to allow anything ribald or what he judged “bad taste” anywhere near Flushing Meadow. As Judge Samuel Rosenman, one of Moses' most trusted confidants, told
The New Yorker
months before the Fair opened, “You can have gaiety and amusement without any obscenity.” By the summer of 1964, many of the producers of the Lake Amusement Area blamed Moses and his “ban-the-bust, no girlie show” dictum for their failing shows. “Moses is running the Fair as if it were a state park,” complained a producer to the
New York World-Telegram
. Said another: “Moses isn't a showman. He has created a public image of the Fair as a serious place and has taken the fun out of it.”

For Moses, that was the final straw. “We can do nothing further for the noisy whiners, kickers and mud throwers in the so-called Amusement Area who have attacked the Fair because we won't pay their advertising and other bills,” he complained in a letter to his friend Roy S. Howard, who owned the paper: “I see no reason for us to spend any more time and money on shills, barkers, and Coney Island promoters who guessed wrong and really mean nothing to the success of the Fair.”

But tradition and history were on the promoters' side. World's Fairs had long incorporated less idealistic and baser entertainments to attract adult customers. The 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition was best remembered by many for Sally Rand's “Streets of Paris” routine where she wiggled and danced to Chopin's “Waltz in C-Sharp Minor” and Debussy's “Clair de Lune” until she was covered only by carefully placed ostrich feathers. The striptease was such a hit that she repeated it at the Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition three years later, renaming it “Sally Rand's Dude Ranch” (when she revised it yet again for the 1938 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, it was known as “Sally Rand's Nude Ranch”). Not to be outdone, producers at the 1935 Pacific International Exposition in San Diego dreamed up Zoro's Nudist Gardens, which featured a male actor dressed up as a robot who cavorting in a pastoral setting
with a half-dozen fully nude female performers, in what could best be described as sci-fi soft porn.

Inspired by the ever-mounting risqué acts in the American expos of the 1930s, set designer Norman Bel Geddes wanted to up the sex ante once again for 1939–40 New York World's Fair. Having already masterminded GM's Futurama exhibit—the Fair's “World of Tomorrow” centerpiece—he now envisioned something less exemplary: a Crystal Gazing Palace (a playful riff on the legendary Crystal Palace after “Sexorama” was rejected). Bel Geddes's “glorified peep show” featured a G-string-clad dancer on a stage in a room full of mirrors, thus allowing one seminude dancer to appear like a platoon of naked performers, while men sat in two rooms gazing on. Bel Geddes also created “The Living Magazine” show, in which seminude models posed as if they were part of a 3-D magazine cover. Customers were allowed to photograph the women as much as they liked. For all its utopian visions of the future, when it came to women, the World of Tomorrow was as sexist as the World of Yesterday.

Moses wanted no such exhibits at his 1964–65 World's Fair, his “endless parade of the wonders of mankind.” His Fair was “essentially educational” he said again and again, and had no room for the cheap, puerile, and déclassé. His conservative stance won him praise from like-minded citizens and clergy, like the Reverend John P. Cody, a high-ranking priest from the New Orleans Archdiocese, who within a few years would become Cardinal of the Chicago Archdiocese, one of the most important positions in the US Catholic Church. “Can we survive without vulgarity, just escaping censorship and police intervention?” Moses wrote to Cody. “We have chosen the side of the angels.”

If you wanted to sell something, then keep it clean, Moses believed. And all World's Fairs were selling
something
. Nowhere was this more evident than in the series of American World's Fairs held throughout the 1930s. As the Great Depression devoured the nation's self-respect and economic might, every year of that turbulent decade saw a Fair in a different corner of the country: North, South, East, and West. Those Fairs—including New York's 1939–40 World's Fair—were selling
capitalism and the free market system, which, thanks to the economic misery of the Depression, had plenty of detractors at the time. After all, it was the unbridled free market fundamentalism of the 1920s that had laid waste to the American economy.

Moses' Fair was selling the notion of
progress
: the kind of progress that had created a National Highway System and enshrined skyscrapers as a new form of American art; the kind of progress that had successfully split the atom and was now close to putting a man on the moon; the kind of progress that unleashed the single-minded directives of a Master Builder who could—and did—mold and shape the largest and greatest metropolis on earth according to his whim, filling it with expressways and block towers, bridges and tunnels that led millions outside of its shadows and into vast pastoral settings of parks and beaches. This was the ethos of postwar America, and it was the personal philosophy—almost a religion, really—of Moses. “Big things happen to cities that make big plans,” Moses said. And when the Fair was over, he had very big plans for Flushing Meadow Park. Stripteases and peep shows didn't figure into his calculations.

But while Moses stuck to his strictly family entertainment policy, the Lake Amusement Area offered few, if any, amusements that could attract customers either young or old. “Why spend time at the circus when you were at the World's Fair?” asked Bill Cotter, who attended the Fair dozens of times as a child. “You could go to the circus anytime.” The truth was, the Lake Amusement Area, with its county fair–style rides, had to compete against the Fair's most popular attractions, such as Walt Disney's “It's a Small World,” the Vatican Pavilion's
La Pietà,
the panoramic views offered by the observation towers at the New York State Pavilion, or the old-world charms of the Belgian Village. And when the Lake Amusement Area did garner media attention, it was for all the wrong reasons. On July 6 several Fairgoers, including a number of children (the youngest was just five years old), were stuck a hundred feet in the air in a gondola for three and a half hours when a ride malfunctioned. As emergency workers labored to fix the ride, a crowd of nearly seven hundred people gathered and watched in anticipation until the
families were rescued. “This is the biggest crowd we've had in the Lake Amusement Area all year,” noted one worker.

The area was also in a remote location, far from the Fair's popular attractions and its main avenues that fanned out in every direction from its centerpiece, the Unisphere. A visit to the Lake Amusement Area required that Fairgoers walk over a footbridge. At night the poorly lit district was hardly inviting to already jittery tourists fearful of New York's soaring crime rates. (By summer, Moses reluctantly approved $100,000 worth of new lighting for the area.) What's more, throngs of teenagers congregated there, away from the Fair's more populated areas; no doubt many of them were harmless, hormone-laden teenagers, but there were enough of them to garner a piece in the
New York
Times
a week after opening day.

The interests of the American teenager occupied a blind spot for the seventy-five-year-old Moses, a particular problem for the Lake Amusement Area, which regularly featured musical shows and concerts. Moses' most daring tastes in music ran to the easy-listening styles of his close friend Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, and Mitch Miller, whose sedate style and popular “Sing Along with Mitch” routines had made him a TV star. Moses was also a fan of swing-era bandleader Benny Goodman, still active in 1964 but synonymous with a style of jazz that was popular during the previous New York World's Fair. Some of the biggest draws at the Fair in the summer of 1964 were shows by the timeless jazz maestro Duke Ellington and the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Brubeck, who was at the height of his popularity, had achieved a mass audience thanks to his crossover hit “Take Five,” had landed on the cover of
Time,
and had been savvy enough to name two tracks on his 1964 LP,
Time Changes,
“Unisphere” and “World's Fair.”

Though popular, these artists still didn't appeal to teenagers. Moses, however, thought differently. He was sure his friend Guy Lombardo would reach the youthful crowds who had the potential to become repeat customers. “Guy Lombardo would appeal to the somewhat older and more conventional nostalgic group,” Moses wrote in a memo marked
urgent
to World's Fair director Rosenman, “but I have noted that he is also a favorite with many of the kids, if not the wildest ones.”

Even marketing experts trained in reaching young audiences couldn't change Moses' mind. “Our experience tells us, however, that Guy Lombardo's music is not the dance music for Americans today, except for a relatively few people,” an executive with the Thom McAn shoe company (which was interested in sponsoring a musical dance) had written to Moses in March. Instead, the executive proposed three different bands to attract a wide variety of Fairgoers but cautioned “the distinct sound of Guy Lombardo is not one of them. We don't think that his is the right music, the right image for a 1964 World's Fair or for us.” Regardless, Moses rushed through a contract with his friend Lombardo in early April due to “extreme urgency” under the assumption “that it will have the endorsement of the committee.”

But in between headliners like Goodman and Lombardo, who played six nights a week at the Taparillo band shell, plenty of other bands and performers had a chance to play the World's Fair, including a number of rock 'n' roll acts. One of the groups included two local musicians, guitarist-keyboardist Al Kooper, and bassist Harvey Brooks, who had grown up in the same Queens neighborhood just a few miles from the Fair. Their group played forty-five-minute sets, twice a day, seven days a week, performing covers of the Beatles' “A Hard Day's Night” or whatever songs were topping the charts. Kooper, who would soon kick-start his long rock music career by playing with Bob Dylan, loved the steady World's Fair gig. “Until I played with Dylan, the Fair gig was the best-paying job I ever had,” he recalled.