Tomorrow-Land (37 page)

Pope Paul's pleas fell on deaf ears, none more deaf than those of Cardinal Spellman, who the following year would further embarrass the Vatican and the pope with yet more verbal warmongering. During a Christmas trip to visit American soldiers in Vietnam, Spellman reminded troops that they were “holy crusaders” waging “Christ's war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”

After the Yankee Stadium mass, just as Moses had wished, it was off to the World's Fair. The pope arrived late in the evening, and after having viewed Michelangelo's masterpiece and the other treasures of the Vatican Pavilion with President Johnson at his side, he stood on an outdoor balcony overlooking the Fair faithful and blessed them. Imagining the “religious convictions” that Michelangelo must have felt as he created his statue, the pontiff said, “We feel that these same religious convictions can move men in a similar way to seek peace and harmony among the peoples of the world.” It was a historic public relations coup: A World's Fair devoted to “Peace Through Understanding,” and Moses had pulled the necessary strings to get the Vicar of Christ to make time during his historic fourteen-hour trip for the Fair and bestow his papal blessings on the exhibition.

The papal visit wasn't the only history-making event that week in New York. The day before the pope's arrival, President Johnson had flown in for a symbolically resplendent ceremony that would take place on Liberty Island, home of the Statue of Liberty. On a clear blue morning, surrounded by both Senator Kennedys, Johnson sat at a desk with the presidential seal and signed the 1965 Immigration Act, a piece of his late predecessor's domestic agenda that his brothers now championed. The law changed decades of discriminatory—and inherently racist—quotas that greatly limited the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe; Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and South and Central America, all the while allowing far larger numbers of immigrants from the “whiter” northern Europeans nations. “From this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here,” Johnson said. “This is a simple test, and it is a fair test.”

The bill was close to the president's heart, as it had been to his predecessor. At the time of his death, President Kennedy had been working on a book,
A Nation of Immigrants
—released posthumously in 1964—to curry public opinion for the bill, which in multiple polls, the American public were either against or indifferent to. President Johnson considered it one of the most important pieces of his Great Society legislative agenda, saying the law amends “a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.”

Although he believed the signing was a historic event, Johnson also predicted that the law “will not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.” While that might have been the president's intention, the new law would throw open the doors of America to the very same nations that had come to the World's Fair, and had softened the blow of the BIE's boycott. Just as the postcolonial world came to Flushing Meadow in 1964 and 1965, it would come to Queens, and America, to stay in the decades after the Fair.

For two days in early October 1965, as the World's Fair entered its final weeks, thanks to President Johnson and Pope Paul VI, the
exhibition's utopian themes—multiculturalism and peace—took center stage while the world watched.

With barely two weeks to go, the World's Fair was busier than ever. New Yorkers who had ignored the Fair or taken the exhibit—“this wondrous World of Oz that had existed in our own backyard,” as one Queens resident put it—for granted for so long, now rushed to see what everyone had been talking, and arguing, about. Even after its record Labor Day weekend, the Fair had been booming—still not enough to dig the Fair out of its financial hole, but gratifying nonetheless.

Then during the very last week, as the crowds lined up for their first (or last) glimpse of Walt Disney's talking Abraham Lincoln or another peek at Michelangelo's
La Pietà,
or leisurely enjoyed a Belgian waffle in the Belgian Village or watched the dancers from around the world perform their routines for the last time, attendance passed the fifty-one million mark, making Moses' Fair the most attended international exhibition: nearly seven million more than the 1939–40 World's Fair, and ten million more than the Belgian Expo in 1958. There was even some truth to Moses' declaration that “the Fair had done more for New York than any comparable event in history anywhere.” Indeed the Fair had been a boon to the city's economy: Hotels, merchants, restaurants, Broadway shows, and cultural institutions all saw increases in business.

As the Fair's closing day approached, there was even an attempted thaw in relations between Moses and some of his most vociferous critics in the media. “I think you might agree that the over-all balance of what we have printed about the Fair, especially lately, has been decidedly favorable,” Jock Whitney, the multimillionaire publisher of the
New York Herald Tribune
—and one of Moses' personal bêtes noires—wrote to the Master Builder in early October. Moses wasn't convinced, but he did reach out to those who he felt had helped, like
Daily News
columnist Jimmy Jemail. “We count you among those who have stood by the Fair from start to finish.”

Then on October 17, the World's Fair's last day, a record 446,953 people passed through its gates. At midnight, the turnstiles closed as the
color-shrouded fountains of the Unisphere and the Pavilion of Light glowed brightly one last time. Families took it all in and the thousands of workers—from security and maintenance men to ticket collectors, performers, waiters, and cooks—left the Fairgrounds for good.

The fantasy, at long last, was finally over.

EPILOGUE

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS

 

On a warm and sunny day in early June 1967, Robert Moses and other city luminaries gathered once again at the former site of the World's Fair in Queens, New York, while the Sanitation Department Band played. This ceremony, held eighteen months after the Fair closed its gates forever, was a farewell and a grand opening. The official mandate of the World's Fair Corporation had ended; the oddly shaped pavilions and overcrowded restaurants that had serviced fifty-one million Fairgoers over the course of 1964 and 1965 had been torn down and disposed of. With its mission complete, the Fair Corporation was relinquishing control of the newly manicured 1,258 acres of green space to New York City. Now rechristened Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, it was the second-largest park in the five boroughs.

Uncharacteristically, Moses did not deliver a speech, although as the man of the hour, he introduced the various speakers to the crowd. In a moment rife with symbolism, the seventy-eight-year-old Master Builder, who had spent four decades dreaming of converting the “the ash dump” of Flushing Meadow into the “the finest park in the City,” ceremoniously lowered the World's Fair flag that had marked the territory as his own since he began organizing the exhibition in 1960. After Moses did so, August Heckscher, now his successor as parks commissioner, lifted the official flag of New York City to flap in the wind underneath the blue June sky. The imaginary promised land of Moses was now rejoined to the city he had built. “Guard it well, Mr. Mayor, and Mr. Parks Commissioner,” he said. “It has echoed to the sounds of many footsteps and voices. The world has beaten a path to its doors. Now we return it to the natives.”

As he toured the festivities in the new park that day, attending a swimming race, cutting the ribbon at the new pitch-and-putt golf
course, or, along with Cardinal Francis Spellman, dedicating a commemorative bench marking the former site of the Vatican Pavilion, Moses was mobbed by autograph-seekers. Everywhere he went, young and old sought him out. Still, despite the adulation of the crowds, who were making the most of their new park by picnicking and sunbathing, Moses reverted to form at the unveiling of Donald De Lue's statue of George Washington.

The critics had savaged De Lue's bronze sculpture,
The Rocket Thrower,
which Moses had commissioned for the World's Fair and kept for the post-Fair park; the
Times
' John Canaday called it “the most lamentable monster, making Walt Disney look like Leonardo Da Vinci.” It was one of the many slights that Moses had not forgotten. “We have been told by sour, unhappy critics and avant-garde planners that our fair lacked fun in the modern vernacular,” he intoned. “It all depends on your definition. The fair had inspiration which will long outlast the cheap, strident ballyhoo and sensationalism which we refused to exploit and accommodate.”

And to a degree he was right. Although Moses' Fair was a financial disaster—investors only earned 62.4 cents on the dollar, while New York City recovered only $1.5 million of its $24 million loan to the Fair Corporation (and city accountants wouldn't see that money until 1972)—it had been immensely popular. The most popular World's Fair to date, in fact. The 1964–65 New York World's Fair would attract 1.3 million more customers then the 1967 Montreal Expo, then currently under way in the northern Canadian city.
*
While Moses' technological Eden might have been a simulacrum, and due to his financial mismanagement, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park did not resemble the grandiose park he had long envisioned, by the summer of 1967, the bygone days of the World's Fair must have seemed, to many, like an idyllic respite in the life of the nation.

Since the Fair shut its gates, the Vietnam War had raged uncontrollably in that faraway land. The sustained aerial bombardment of North
Vietnam, code-named Operation Rolling Thunder, that had begun in February 1965 was followed by American ground troops, which began arriving the following month. The war was so divisive; a second battlefront had opened stateside as the antiwar movement grew into something akin to open rebellion. On April 15, 1967, more than one hundred thousand people, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Benjamin Spock, marched from Central Park to the United Nations; nearly another hundred thousand marched that same day in San Francisco. The war's American architects—President Lyndon B. Johnson and the “best and brightest” minds he had inherited from the Kennedy administration, New Frontiersmen like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy—had perpetuated the lie that the United States was winning in Vietnam, that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel was coming into focus.

None of it was true.

And each month the proof of their lies—young dead Americans in US government body bags—was shipped home to their families. Johnson's popularity was plummeting. After his historical victory in 1964, the American people began to turn on him during the 1966 midterm elections. By June 1967, with the upcoming presidential election only months away, he feared defeat at the polls, or worse, that the junior Democratic senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, would rally the antiwar vote, uniting the campus radicals with the Northern liberals that Johnson was convinced had never accepted him, and reclaim the White House in the name of his martyred brother.

Despite his historic passage of the civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965, the forgotten ghettos of urban America burned, as riot after riot took its toll on the national psyche. What had begun in Harlem in August 1964 would spread to Philadelphia, Newark, Chicago, Boston, and in July 1967, Detroit. Nonviolent civil disobedience had seemingly run its course. The break between the young activists—like the Brooklyn chapter of CORE, with its World's Fair stall-in—and the national civil rights organizations had metastasized into a complete rupture. “Black Power” was the
cri de guerre
of the day, not “We Shall
Overcome.” Two years after Malcolm X's assassination, young radicals, both black and white, had decided that “the ballot” approach was inadequate; there was, after all, only so much that civil rights legislation could achieve. Now many, like the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, were choosing “the bullet.”

New York's urban nightmares—crime, pollution, poverty, racial hostility—continued to mount. Crime rates rose each year since 1964; the details of such horrendous murders like that of Kitty Genovese on a quiet tree-lined street in Queens would continue to shock Americans. Their occurrence, however, was to be expected. There was violence in the streets, and thanks to the nightly news broadcasts of the Vietnam War, in living rooms throughout the nation; it was inescapable. And if someone refused to fight in Vietnam and to say no to violence, as Muhammad Ali did in April 1967, there would be serious repercussions. “I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” Ali exclaimed. “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.” For his civil disobedience, Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship title and banned from boxing. (The US Supreme Court would overturn the ruling in 1970.)

The social upheaval that had begun to boil over during the World's Fair had coalesced into a cultural revolution. On January 14, six months before Moses lowered the World's Fair flag, thirty thousand people congregated in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for “A Gathering of Tribes for the Human Be-In.” The event wasn't a “sit-in” or a stall-in but a new kind of happening; it united the various elements of the burgeoning youth culture: hippies, hipsters, acidheads, rock fans, antiwar college radicals, tree-huggers, and Zen apostles.

Ostensibly there to protest a recent law banning LSD, the event was really the psychedelic generation's coming-out party; and serving as guides for this new Aquarian Age were three members of the Beat Generation, poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, all of whom had been pushing the cultural envelope and protesting America's Cold War mentality in one form or another since the 1950s. Timothy Leary, the godfather of the acid movement, was there, too, telling the crowd they should “turn on, tune in, drop out.” In
many ways, the Human Be-In was an epochal World's Fair of the mind, and an inner exhibition for a new generation.

While Ken Kesey wasn't there, he had helped make it possible. After returning to the West Coast from the World's Fair sojourn in July 1964, Kesey and his Merry Pranksters went about holding a series of “Acid Tests” in California. Throughout 1965 the free rock concerts, where an early iteration of the Grateful Dead held court, along with psychedelic light shows and free LSD, helped Kesey spread the Gospel of Acid.

Always one to recognize the commercial implications of a popular trend, Andy Warhol saw the Day-Glo writing on the wall and began backing a nascent rock group called the Velvet Underground in late 1965. They became the house band for his touring multimedia show, the Plastic Exploding Inevitable. Throughout 1966 the part-happenings, part-concerts featured Warhol's experimental films beamed onto the venues' walls, while the Velvet Underground played and bright pop art colors flashed everywhere. The band's classic debut,
The Velvet Underground & Nico,
complete with a Warhol-designed cover—an electric yellow banana and the words
Peel Slowly and See
—debuted in May 1967 and would go on to become one of the most influential rock albums of all time.

By June the summer of 1967 would be proclaimed the Summer of Love, as thousands of teens and young Americans converged on the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, seeking to immerse themselves in a new lifestyle of free love and drugs. Just two weeks after the lowering of the World's Fair flag in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the first rock festival of its kind was held south of San Francisco. The event was called the Monterey International Pop Festival, and it was there that the world at large was introduced to Janis Joplin, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and the Who. Rock music had come a long way since that cold February day in 1964 when the Beatles' Pan Am flight touched down at JFK International Airport in Queens.

The Beatles themselves had undergone a musical and physical transformation. On June 1, 1967, just two days before the Flushing Meadow ceremony, the band released what many considered their masterpiece:
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“Any of these songs is more genuinely creative than anything currently to be heard on pop radio stations,” opined William Mann, classical music critic for
The Times
(London). It certainly was an entirely
new
kind of rock album, conceptual in nature, with a psychedelic and pop art–influenced album cover, and fueled by the band's ongoing experimentation with drugs, particularly LSD. By expanding the parameters of what rock music was—or could be—and using the recording studio as a “fifth” member of the band, the Beatles provided the Summer of Love with a new psychedelic soundtrack.

Even as the Beatles were exploring the limits of pop music and new ways of recording it, Bob Dylan was headed in an entirely different direction. After the chaotic concert in Forest Hills, he launched an American tour, where belligerent fans taunted him at every stop, pausing briefly during the winter of 1966 to record the double LP
Blonde on Blonde
. Believed by many to be
his
masterpiece, Dylan's album was the culmination of the blues-based electric sound that he had been experimenting with since
Bringing It All Back Home
. He soon launched a world tour, where he and his backup band endured more hostile audiences in Australia and Europe.

Dylan was quickly burning out: too much success, too many drugs, too much of everything. While on hiatus in Woodstock, New York, on July 29, 1966, he crashed his motorcycle and retreated from the public eye. Convalescing in both body and spirit, he turned his back on the political movements he inspired and eschewed the transfigured electric sound of his last three records, returning to a stripped-bare, simple folk and country style
,
which resulted in the album
John Wesley Harding
. “I asked Columbia [his record company] to release it with no hype,” Dylan said, “because this was the season of hype.” The psychedelic revolution would go on without him.

That wasn't the only music Dylan was making in 1967. During the Summer of Love, he was holed up in the basement of a house near Woodstock, New York, where he and his touring band—the five members of which would soon be known to the world as the Band—recorded a plethora of new songs that sounded like old, arcane standards straight
out of the Americana songbook, which would eventually be released years later as
The Basement Tapes.
In the midst of what many thought of as the dawning of a new age, Dylan and the Band were turning back the clock—at least musically—to a simpler, seemingly less complex era.

If by 1967 the World's Fair seemed to represent an earlier, less complicated time for many who didn't like the direction the country was taking or the youth movement, with its lax attitude toward sex and drugs and its refusal to accept America's Cold War ideology, which had made the Vietnam War a reality, then they were fooling themselves. It was an illusion, no more real than the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion's “It's a Small World” boat ride created by the late Walt Disney (who, like Lenny Bruce, died in 1966). In fact, the years 1964 and 1965 were far from peaceful, and there was little, if any, understanding in New York City or the country at large.

Instead, Moses unwittingly had created a World's Fair that was emblematic of its times and displayed all the contradictions of postwar America: It espoused noble ideals, yet failed to live up to them; it purportedly sought peace, but often sowed conflict; despite the critics, it did celebrate art, but all the while preached the Gospel of Commerce and Industry. Although he converted the Fairgrounds into the second-largest park in the city, Moses' new park fell far short of his vision. Failure was not something that the Master Builder took well; and having endured a lifetime of Moses venting his volcanic temper at them, the New York press couldn't help but bask in his defeat. (That is, what was left of the New York press after a disastrous newspaper strike put the last nail in the collective coffins of the
Herald Tribune
, the
World-Telegram
, and the
Journal-American
.)