Freedom's Forge (10 page)

The New York World’s Fair would be the biggest fair of all time. More than 44 million visitors would eventually come to the 1,262-acre site at Flushing Meadows. They would tour exhibits from across the country and from more than thirty countries—including several that would soon be at war.

The king and queen of England paid a visit to the British pavilion,
which had on display a rare copy of Magna Carta. There was a pavilion for the League of Nations, although the unbridled aggression of Germany, Japan, and Italy had reduced that organization to an international joke. The world’s biggest pariah, Joseph Stalin, got what everyone agreed was one of the fair’s prime spots for the Soviet Union’s pavilion, just across from the so-called Court of Peace.

As for Italy, Benito Mussolini spent $5 million on its exhibit, which turned out to be one of the gaudiest. It trumpeted the virtues of Fascism underneath a two-hundred-foot tower that was topped by an enormous statue of the goddess Roma. Imperial Japan was also there, with a pavilion in the shape of a giant Shinto shrine. It harbored a pearl-and-diamond-framed replica of the Liberty Bell, as Japan’s ambassador spoke of “the cordial relations existing between the United States and Japan.” Despite Japan’s unprovoked attack on China just a year earlier, the fair organizers declared June 2 to be official Japan Day.
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One important country was missing, however: Nazi Germany. The Führer, a German spokesman explained, had other priorities.

The 1939 World’s Fair was supposed to give Americans a window on the world, and epitomize the belief common across the country in the thirties that America’s hand of friendship extended to everyone, even Japan and Germany. But it was also a robust exercise in commercial boosterism. After a decade of economic depression and gloom, its organizers hoped the fair would help to revive America’s seven million or so businesses. They were still reeling from the second depression in 1937–38, when GNP slid 4.5 percent and unemployment bounced back up to 19 percent. The fair’s slogan was “The Dawn of a New Day.” If Americans really were ready for a bright new start, all assumed American business would point the way.

Virtually every major corporation had a pavilion to display its wares and coming commercial attractions. There was U.S. Steel and American Tobacco, Borden and American Radiator, Westinghouse and Carrier and Eastman Kodak and American Telephone and Telegraph. DuPont Corporation, once reviled as the “merchant of death,” offered the Wonder World of Chemistry. General Electric revealed to the public the first fluorescent lightbulb. Radio Corporation of America offered a television in a monstrous wooden case, with a seven-inch picture tube.
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In
the Aviation Building, shaped like an enormous airplane hangar, Douglas, Boeing, and other companies displayed their latest flying marvels.

There was not a single warplane among them.

At the far end of Flushing Meadows Park, farthest from the Court of Peace and across the Grand Central Parkway, stood the pavilions belonging to America’s largest industry and the Big Three automobile companies. Chrysler’s, the smallest, was wedged behind the sprawling Ford pavilion designed by Albert Kahn. And looming over both was a long sleek red and silver Art Deco building topped by silver-on-silver letters:
GENERAL MOTORS
.
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The fair’s opening day was a blazing hot Sunday, and Bill Knudsen was there. He stood tall and white-haired in the sunshine, a little heavier than when he was running Chevrolet but still strong and erect for a busy executive of sixty. After speeches by President Roosevelt and by Albert Einstein, who explained to the somewhat baffled crowd the concept of cosmic rays, visitors fanned out in all directions to stare at the immense spectacle of the World of Tomorrow, as the organizers dubbed it.

It had been an eventful two years since the Danish immigrant had taken over the company. General Motors now manufactured 45 percent of all cars sold in the United States, with Chevrolet alone outselling all the divisions of Chrysler—Plymouth, Dodge, and DeSoto plus Chrysler itself—and ranking number one in both passenger and commercial for two years in a row. Since 1931 Chevy had ranked number one every year except one.
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In less than a year he and Alfred Sloan would meet to watch GM’s twenty-five millionth car roll off the assembly line.

The year Knudsen had taken over, 1937, had also been the year of a punishing and ugly labor dispute with the United Auto Workers. For four months GM’s plants in Flint were shut as police battled strikers while demonstrators threw rocks and bricks at tear-gas-firing cops. Knudsen had handled the day-to-day negotiations with the UAW himself, finally persuading his colleagues to yield to the union’s key demands in order to get the men back to work. What struck UAW attorney Lee Pressman most, however, was not Knudsen’s understated
negotiating manner, or the fact that he was the one GM executive who seemed anxious to end the strike.

It was how the sight of his beloved machines sitting idle and silent gave Knudsen almost physical pain.
⁵

Then, in March 1939, Detroit hosted a huge civic celebration for Knudsen’s sixtieth birthday, with a banquet at the Detroit Club attended by politicians and businessmen, including his old boss Henry Ford. “Whatever I’ve done,” Knudsen told the crowd, “whatever I’ve got, is due to the men who helped me. I don’t know how I can ever repay for the happiness I have had.” Ford expressed his regret he had ever let Knudsen go. “He was too big a man for me,” he confessed to friends. “There wasn’t room for both him and me at the company.”
⁶
They shook hands, the old bitterness forgotten. For the first time in years, Knudsen knew peace in the industry and on the shop floor.

Yet in his heart Knudsen was troubled. He had been on an inspection tour of GM’s European plants in the fall of 1938, and heard on the radio how Neville Chamberlain announced peace for our time. He had met the heads of Germany’s air force, Hermann Goering and Ernst Udet, and sensed that in the event of war Germany would unleash a military machine unlike any in history—and that GM’s plants there would, willy-nilly, be commandeered into the war effort. He could see a shadow fall across his native Denmark and the rest of Europe as bomb shelters and trenches were being dug in London’s Hyde Park and children were evacuated from the city—even as Americans were listening to
Amos ’n’ Andy
on the radio and ignoring what was happening to the world beyond their borders.

Knudsen brought home a gas mask as a souvenir. “Thank God we don’t have to be quite so scared here,” he told an interviewer, “but I think one good way [to avoid trouble] is to be prepared for trouble.” Privately he worried Americans were not.
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Knudsen slowly walked through the passageway leading into the GM building like a cleft carved from a cliff, then up the gentle slope of one of the two serpentine ramps and past two enormous letters in red and silver:
G
and
M
. “The conception,” wrote
Architectural Record
, describing the building, “was one of immense power.”
⁸

Waiting inside for him was his old boss and now chairman of General Motors Alfred Sloan, looking more anorexic than ever but with a smile of anticipation. He had assembled more than a thousand special guests for the unveiling of GM’s pièce de résistance, what would become the most famous exhibit of the entire fair: Futurama.
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Of course, there were other things to see in the cavernous GM pavilion. There were displays of the company’s latest developments in automobile technology, and exhibits showing the wonders of assembly-line mass production. There was even a section where a visitor could order and purchase a new Chevrolet, watch it being assembled in a mock-up of the factory floor, and drive it home that night.
¹⁰

Ford and Chrysler had similar displays. But the Futurama was unique. It was the brainchild of Norman Bel Geddes, America’s foremost industrial architect and a former Broadway set designer. He had come up with the idea after working with J. Walter Thompson on an ad campaign featuring a futuristic city built around the automobile. Bel Geddes presented it to GM as the core for its World’s Fair exhibit. Knudsen’s right-hand man, Dick Grant, turned him down flat. Too expensive, Grant said, shaking his head. The company was planning instead to replicate the assembly line it used in the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago, which would cost only $2 million.

“Can General Motors afford to spend two million dollars to admit it hasn’t had a new idea in five years?” Bel Geddes blurted back.
¹¹
That convinced Bill Knudsen. He only agreed to Bel Geddes’s futuristic city display on condition that it cost no more than the original $2 million they had slated. It was a promise Bel Geddes was never born to keep.

Sloan and Knudsen, like their guests, walked side by side into a sixty-foot-high chamber where Bel Geddes had assembled a vast diorama of more than half a million miniature buildings, one million miniature trees, and some 50,000 toy-sized cars, along with other accessories to give the series of tableaux a sense of visual realism—right down to miniature cow patties. A moving platform gently dropped each visitor into tall, cushioned seats arranged on a conveyor belt one-third of a mile long, while everything went dark.
¹²

Knudsen looked up as an enormous map of the United States flashed
across the entire wall. A narrator said, “General Motors invites you on a tour of future America. The moving chairs below the map will transport you to 1960.”

Then one by one the chairs were whisked along past the series of dioramas as music and narration were piped through the chairs thanks to a system devised by an engineer named James Dunlop and a team from Westinghouse. Called the Polyrhetor, it used seven photoelectric beams to pull out some 147 units of sound from twenty-one separate film sequences, which it then transmitted to two cars at a time in a continuous synchronized audio loop. Nothing like it had ever been created, and nothing like it would appear again until the advent of digital technology in the nineties. Millions of visitors would pass through Futurama, without the sound track ever once falling out of sync.
¹³

What those visitors saw was stunning. Bel Geddes had carefully lit his dioramas to appear almost larger than life size, with cities topped by brightly lit skyscrapers (powered, the narrator said, by something called atomic energy), rural landscapes of rich greens and browns with abundant grain and fruit trees stretching to the horizon. Visitors saw sweeping green meadows and amusement parks with endless Ferris wheels and dancing children, and they saw cars.

They saw cars everywhere. The lanes and streets and highways of every scene of the future were full of them, with moving sidewalks in the cities set above the roadway to protect pedestrians, while out in the hinterland great four-lane thoroughfares called “Super-highways” (a term the Futurama would make famous) allowed you to work, shop, and play miles from the city or your neighborhood, the narrator explained, while workers would leave their cramped tenements to live in the lush countryside, each with his snug little house set behind a green lawn.
¹⁴

Finally the train stopped, and the lights came up. The audience sat in stunned silence for a moment. Now they could see the diorama as it really was, with the enormous “skyscrapers” not much taller than a five-year-old child. As they filed out, each was handed a button to wear. It read, “I have seen the future.”

And for tens of millions of them and their children, it
was
the future—not just in 1960 but for decades after. It was an American future. It was not as perfect as the one socialists and other utopians were promising, with an end to every human problem from hunger to housing—and not as regimented or disciplined as Fascists and Communists prescribed. There was no room here for the Aryan Superman or the New Soviet Man. It was simply better than they had now; a future built to human needs and comforts, not mighty ideals. To millions of Americans in 1939, that mattered more than some rational radiant order.

In 1940 the Depression would enter its eleventh year. Average per capita income was two-thirds what it had been in 1929. Unemployment hovered just above 16 percent. The future presented by the GM men seemed dazzling, almost unrealizable. Even Knudsen and Sloan were impressed. Afterward they sat alone together in the pavilion’s press room. Knudsen murmured something about hoping people realized the dreams they had just seen
were
realizable through mass production and the spirit of free enterprise; “better methods, good wages, low prices, better tools, and plenty of hard work from everybody.”

Then Sloan added, “But who knows what the world of 1960 will be like? The real world of tomorrow will outstrip anything we can imagine today.”
¹⁵

Later, Knudsen made a broadcast from the World’s Fair to his native land: “May God give continued peace to [Denmark] and her children, and may He also continue to give our beloved United States the progressive, go-ahead spirit, the democratic way.”
¹⁶

But his hopes for Denmark, at least, were misplaced. The last sentence uttered by the Futurama narrator was, “All eyes on the future.” On September 1 the future arrived.

German tanks and planes roared across the Polish border. The next day France declared war on Germany, and on September 3 Great Britain followed suit. The Polish pavilion was declared closed until further notice. Italy’s and Japan’s, however, remained open, since although both were Germany’s Axis allies, both were still officially neutral. The priceless copy of Magna Carta on display in the British pavilion was supposed to go home when the fair closed on October 1. After high-level
discussion, however, officials thought it would be safer to let it stay in the United States.
^*

When the fair reopened on April 30, 1940, the mood was very different. The slogan of “Building the World of Tomorrow” was replaced by a more somber “For Peace and Freedom.” The Soviet, Czech, and Polish pavilions were gone. Newspapers were filled with news of French and British troops poised on the Belgian frontier in the event of a German attack. A pipe bomb set at the gate of the British pavilion went off, killing two New York City policemen.