Tomorrow-Land (7 page)

Then in April 1962, while hosting Moses at Disneyland to review progress, Disney asked Moses if he would like to meet Abraham Lincoln. It seems Disney hadn't completely forsaken his Hall of Presidents concept, devoting a group of Imagineers to work on an Audio-Animatronic version of American's sixteenth president. He quickly ushered Moses into a secret room in his studio's Animation Building, and there a robotic President Lincoln offered his hand in friendship. Moses was completely astonished. “I won't open the Fair without that exhibit!” he shouted. Disney said it would take his team of Imagineers years to perfect Lincoln. It didn't matter; Moses wanted Lincoln at his Fair, and no was not an option.

Eventually Moses convinced the State of Illinois—Lincoln's and Disney's home state—to host a pavilion entitled “The Land of Lincoln.”
It would take months of intense work from a small army of Imagineers and dozens of failures before it worked properly; Disney's team would complain that all the traffic due to Moses' highway construction in Queens contributed mightily to the machine's delay. But eventually the Audio-Animatronics would meet Disney's high expectations. “I'd like to not be able to tell them from real people,” he said.

It would also take a unique financial arrangement between Moses, Disney, and the State of Illinois to ultimately bring the exhibit to the World's Fair, an arrangement that would eventually blow up in the Master Builder's face. When it came time to negotiate a fee, knowing how badly Moses wanted the robotic Lincoln at his Fair, Disney played hardball with the Illinois legislature, which was allocating the funds for its state pavilion. Disney wanted $600,000 just for Lincoln; more money would be needed to create the entire pavilion. The legislature balked. Although Moses pleaded with Disney, the Imagineer-in-Chief wouldn't budge. He eventually made multiple concessions on various fees for the pavilion and secretly paid the legislature a $250,000 subsidy—an arrangement that no other exhibitor was offered. It worked. On November 19, 1963—the one hundredth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address—Moses and Disney flew to Springfield, Illinois, to announce the Lincoln exhibit beside Governor Otto Kerner. Disney promised a skeptical Illinois audience that Lincoln would seem alive, “maybe more alive than I am.”

The last ride that Disney created at the 1964–65 World's Fair was for a special exhibit in the Pepsi Pavilion that was sponsored by UNICEF, the United Nations children's charity. With opening day less than a year away, Disney accepted the commission. While his crews were busy finishing their creations of the Ford, GE, and Illinois pavilions, he gathered his WED staff and told them that he had one more project for them: a “little boat ride that maybe we can do.”

Using the same Audio-Animatronic technology as his Abe Lincoln, Disney's concept dovetailed seamlessly with UNICEF's mission and the international flavor of the Fair. On this latest ride, Fairgoers would sail around the globe in a small boat, listening to a collection of pintsize
singing puppets of different races and ethnicities, representing the children of the world. At first he envisioned the puppets simultaneously singing their various national anthems, but that didn't work out. He then commissioned Robert and Richard Sherman, the songwriting brothers who had worked on
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
and other Disney musicals, to create a tune that could be sung in multiple languages—something simple and catchy. During his conversations with the Shermans, Disney remarked, “It's a small world after all.”

The Shermans seized on the phrase; it became the name of both the song and the ride, and in a uniquely Disney fashion, it expressed the Fair's lofty goal of “Peace Through Understanding”—and indeed racial integration—in a child-friendly manner. Moses might have been in charge of the World's Fair and its public face, as far as New Yorkers were concerned, but it was Disney and his fantastical machinations that the crowds would pay to see.

7.

You cannot legislate tolerance by constitutional amendment or statute . . . social equality is of slow growth and rests on mutual esteem and respect, not on force.

—Robert Moses, 1943

 

Despite the racial goodwill of Disney's “It's a Small World” ride, by February 1962 Robert Moses and the World's Fair had a race problem. For more than a year, the Urban League of Greater New York had been lobbying the World's Fair Corporation behind the scenes to hire more African Americans and Puerto Ricans to the staff of the World's Fair Corporation. By the Urban League's count, there were exactly two African Americans among the Fair's staff, both secretaries. After being largely ignored by Moses, in June 1961 Dr. Edward Lewis, the Urban League's executive director, went public with the story, complaining to the
New York Times
that he had been getting the “runaround” from Moses. This was exactly the kind of publicity that Moses detested:
World's Fair Urged to Hire Negroes
blared the
Times
' headline.

The Urban League again accused Moses of “an apparent pattern of discrimination” at the Fair. “Our efforts have resulted in conferences and correspondence but no action,” league president Frederick W. Richmond told the
Times
. “We consider this an intolerable situation and will take whatever steps are necessary to make the World's Fair a legitimate showcase of American democracy.” In response to the story, the Master Builder invited Richmond to discuss the issue with him over lunch at Flushing Meadow the following month.

The meeting, it seemed, went well. The civil rights group asked Moses to add more African Americans to the World's Fair's board of directors—a collection of New York luminaries such as David Rockefeller, Time Inc. publisher and owner Henry Luce, and Dr. Ralph J. Bunche,
the Queens-born United Nations diplomat and first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the 1949 armistice between Israel and
its Arab neighbors. The next day Moses had his right-hand man Charles Poletti follow up with the Urban League to see if its leaders “really want two additional directors added to our board” and told Poletti “to assure them of full participation.” Although he complained that there were already “too many directors,” Moses chose one—Lawrence “Judge” Pierce, a former Brooklyn DA turned New York City Deputy Police Commissioner—from a list of four African-American candidates. However, by the end of 1961, the World's Fair Corporation's executive staff, who actually organized and planned the Fair, was still 100 percent white.

The Master Builder had come under fire from civil rights activists before. In fact, he had a long history of opposing the aims of such groups—“professional integrationists,” he labeled them. As a delegate to the 1938 New York State Constitutional Convention, Moses wrote to lawmakers arguing against a proposed antidiscrimination amendment, claiming that the civil rights law would only “fan the very flames you seek to quench. Moreover, you will encourage scamps and professional agitators to blackmail not only bigots but those who cannot afford to comply with impossible laws.”

Such antidiscrimination laws, Moses stated in a lengthy 1943
New York Times Magazine
piece, were meant to do nothing more than “amuse politicians, fool the minorities and make the angels weep”; he also wrote disapprovingly of “Negro leaders who will accept nothing but complete social equality.” Instead, Moses advocated incremental changes to the social order, and held up Booker T. Washington—who thought that blacks should concentrate on education, securing jobs, and basic political rights but set social equality aside for the time—as an example of the kind of leadership to which the blacks should look. (Washington's famous “Atlanta compromise” speech, which laid out his philosophy, was announced at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta.) “The truth is that the path to fair and honorable treatment of our colored citizens,” Moses advised, “is a long and thorny one to be traveled slowly and surely with wise and patient leadership.” Moses, the impatient modernist who was forever dreaming of new public works projects to build—moving earth, rock, men, and steel according to his
vision—advocated a sedate, cautious philosophy toward improving the living conditions of black New Yorkers.

And it was exactly such a conservative, wait-and-see approach to race relations that had run its course by the early 1960s. Now Moses' anti–civil rights stances were tainting the Fair's reputation, a major public relations faux pas for an international exhibition—funded with taxpayers' dollars—that proclaimed to be a symbol of “Peace Through Understanding” for the entire world.

The Urban League knew that the Fair would be a job bonanza. People would be needed to work the exhibits, staff the restaurants, man the ticket booths, and serve as security guards. Most importantly, thousands of good-paying construction jobs would be created. Flushing Meadow Park and its surrounding environs would be one massive construction site for years to come. The Urban League wanted Moses to ensure that the companies involved, both foreign and domestic, respected New York State's antidiscrimination laws. It also wanted to force the building trade unions to hire African Americans and Puerto Ricans—a key strategy of many civil rights organizations' campaigns in the North. However, even Moses' power had limits, and he was loath to pick a fight with the very unions on whom he was depending to build and maintain the structures of the World's Fair. “We would have to attempt to force the trade
unions to change their present methods, whatever they may be,” he wrote to Poletti. “We could not possibly succeed in this, and . . . we have plenty of problems with the unions.”

Columnist James A. Wechsler
of the
New York Post,
then a strongly liberal newspaper, slammed Moses for his laissez-faire stance, declaring that “the notion that all employment at the Fair should be left to the vagaries of private business and old-line unionism is a monumental abdication of responsibility.” The world will be watching the Fair, predicted Wechsler—no fan of Moses—and “there will be harsh questions asked about its hiring policy.”

Moses dismissed the
Post
piece—“completely malicious and inaccurate and which of course we shall not answer”—and clarified the Fair's hiring practices in a memo to his staff the next day. “There is absolutely
no discrimination of any kind in hiring help by the Fair, nor is there or will there be any minority quota political system of hiring,” he wrote. “As to higher positions, we appoint on merit, not on pressure from any groups whatsoever involving racial, religious, color, political, sex or other extraneous considerations. . . . We don't go looking for directors of Polish, German, Italian, Greek or any other racial or national extraction.” As usual, when confronted with external pressure or accused of irresponsibility, Moses attacked his critics, claimed moral indignation, and prepared to wait out the controversy. “My firm conviction is that this agitation . . . will blow over very soon,” he promised.

He was wrong. America was changing and the slow growth of public support for civil rights was accelerating. In postwar America, the national movement for black freedom was making an impact upon the nation's collective conscience, thanks to a new generation of leaders as divergent as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC; Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X (who lived just a mile or so from Flushing Meadow Park); James L. Farmer Jr. the cofounder of the Congress for Racial Equality, or CORE; and John Lewis, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. By the early 1960s, the movement had organized tens of thousands of anonymous and ordinary African Americans who marched, protested, and resisted the nation's racist policies through civil disobedience, even as they were murdered and brutalized by their fellow citizens for wanting the same protection that American law afforded their white neighbors. And they weren't alone: White Americans—clergymen, nuns, rabbis, college radicals, housewives—were joining the fight.

Moses was now on the wrong side of history. His “separate but equal” position was essentially no different than that of the bloc of Southern segregationist Democratic senators, including Senator Strom Thurmond (of South Carolina), Senator Richard B. Russell (of Georgia), and Senator Fulbright (of Arkansas, and Moses' main senatorial adversary, who tried to kill federal funding for the Fair in 1960). In 1955 this trio, along with sixteen other senators and eighty-two members of the House of Representatives, signed the Southern Manifesto—Russell, in fact,
wrote the final draft—attacking the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision of the US Supreme Court, which had declared the South's racist “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws unconstitutional.

It didn't matter that Moses actually believed in “separate but equal”; that is, he thought it could work, and sometimes because of his efforts, it actually did. As far back as the late 1930s, Moses had created no less than eleven monumental public pools with New Deal funds across the city's five boroughs. He built two specifically for the then–racially divided Harlem: one in the primarily Italian immigrant neighborhood of East Harlem (Jefferson Park Pool) and one in the heart of predominately black Central Harlem (Colonial Park Pool
*
)—built with “Negro labor,” Moses proudly bragged to the twenty-five thousand people who turned out for the elaborate opening-­day ceremony. Each pool featured the same art deco architecture and amenities that served thousands of inner-city residents, young and old alike, desperate for recreational facilities. This was Moses' practical separate-but-equal solution to the racial problems of 1930s Uptown New York.

On occasion, and in his own way, Moses would advocate for the victims of discrimination, such as in 1939 when he gave a group of lectures at Harvard University on politics. After discussing the twin pools he had built in Harlem, Moses admitted that “a little honest indignation” was in order for the working folks at the bottom of the social order, whom he described as “Lifschitz the sweatshop worker,” “Baccigaluppo the seasonal day laborer,” and “Taliaferro the urban Negro, who can't get into a union.” What Moses seemed to be confessing in his lectures was that, in his opinion, there was only so much government could—or
should
—do to rectify such social ills.

Two years after the Harvard lectures, Moses and his beloved mentor Al Smith resigned from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing after the organization disqualified a New York all-black barbershop quartet from advancing to the national contest's finals due to their race.

Moses continued to pursue his own brand of “separate but equal,” pushing the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build the Riverton
Houses in Harlem, a “blacks-only” middle-class housing development that opened in 1947 (partly, no doubt, to offset the criticism of the company's Stuyvesant Town “whites-only” apartments). Not long after the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, Moses secured more Title I funds for a new project: Lenox Terrace, a $20 million luxury housing complex in the heart of Harlem, designed for upper-middle-class residents. The complex didn't open until 1958 due to financial problems; Moses had to personally intercede to solidify the finances when banks balked at lending money for upscale housing in Harlem.

A decade later, after attracting an eclectic mix of professionals and artists, Lenox Terrace would be declared “Harlem's most fashionable address” by the
New York Times
. “The fiction that the only people who will stay in Harlem are those who can't move and those who are provided for in the lowest rental public housing dies a hard death,” Moses crowed at the time. Neither project would have ever happened were it not for the Master Builder. However, at the end of the day, both housing complexes—intentionally or not—perpetuated a separation of the races, keeping whites and blacks on either side of the entrenched “color line.”

By April 1962, with the job discrimination scandal still in the papers, Moses caught a break for a few days when the World's Fair publicity machine announced that Pope John XXXIII had granted permission to send Michelangelo's Renaissance masterpiece
La Pietà
to Queens, where it would become the centerpiece of the Vatican Pavilion. Although Moses caught a further break when criticism of the pope in the Italian press for entrusting a priceless treasure to uncultured Americans helped extend the story's lifespan a few extra days, the Fair's race problem wouldn't go away. Harlem's congressman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., requested a federal investigation into the Fair's hiring practices. Moses could ignore such politicians, but he could not discount criticism from within the Fair itself. The most prominent African American associated with the World's Fair, Bunche, explained to the
New York Amsterdam News
that he planned “to thoroughly investigate these charges and to see that something is done about it.”

Bunche was a voice that Moses had to heed, so he instructed Poletti to set up a meeting with the Nobel laureate, even as he lamented the fact that if outside groups started dictating hiring practices at the Fair, he feared a Pandora's box of political problems with exhibitors and unions (which were notoriously racist in their hiring policies). “There will be not a single exhibit of any state south of the Mason and Dixon line if we begin to tell them whom they must employ,” worried Moses. “How can we tell the Arab nations whom to employ, or the Russians? Can we tell them we find no Jews among their employees and that they must employ some?”

But Moses' fears were unfounded. In April, after Bunche lodged his complaint—and after the Urban League threatened to bring their grievances to the White House and New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller—the World's Fair Corporation hired Dr. George H. Bennett, an African-American educator who worked at the UN and had international connections. The sky didn't fall, and no geopolitical fracas ensued. Instead, Bennett went on to become a key member of Poletti's all-important International Division.