James Mauro - Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 Worlds Fair on the Brink of War

The trouble with intellectuals is that they dont know what a Worlds Fair is all about, wrote George R. Leighton in Harpers Magazine. A Worlds Fair is an art form, a combination of beauty and bombast and the universal hankering for a holiday.

Mr. Leighton visited the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, and later the 1964 version, and sums up one of the most important questions this book attempts to answer: What makes a Worlds Fair a successmoney or love? Theres something enduringly magical about a World of Tomorrow built on an ash heap and poised directly between two of the most catastrophic, and self-defining, events in twentieth-century American history: the Great Depression and World War II. No matter the cost, the result was a promise that life would soon be brighter, easier, and filled with more leisure time than anyone had ever known. And in that way the World of Tomorrow looked hopeful to a degree that it hasnt ever since.

This book came about as the result of an accidental finding one day as I was strolling around the grounds of Flushing MeadowsCorona Park, the site of both the 39 and 64 Worlds Fairs. There, buried in the ground outside of the only remaining building from the 1939 Fair (which now houses the Queens Museum of Art), is a historical marker detailing the events of July 4, 1940. And yet, of the numerous visitors to the Fair that I spoke to, no one remembered anything about it. Several of them assured me that I must be mistaken.

But its true. In fact, every detail of this book is nonfiction; all of the quotes come from a letter, speech, or other documented source, and I have cited as many facts as seems reasonable without going overboard. Theres a temptation in research to footnote every sentence. But thats impossible and, I feel, unnecessary. You cant write history without filling in the blanks or youll leave a lot of blanks. For advice, I turned to a former professor, a true mentor and noted historian, Edward Chalfant. In the first of his three-volume biography of Henry Adams, he offers this perfect summation of the process:

What the biographer does is tirelessly imagine story after story until a story comes to mind which is in every respect sustained and in no respect undermined by all the available evidence, precisely understood. Then the biographer tells that story.

That is what I have done in this book. If there are nagging questions that arise in the readers mind: How does he know what Grover Whalens mood was?, suffice it to say that the answer lies in the body of evidence as a whole. That is, if attendance at the Fair was below expectation, I find it justified to state that its president was worried. The minutes of the Fair Corporations board meetings support that assumption.

In any case the reader can rest assured that I have analyzed the research, have documented as much as possible, and then taken a step back and filled in the pieces where necessary. To my knowledge, those pieces are as accurate, and as few, as possible.

A worlds fair is its own excuse. It is a brief and transitory paradise, born to delight mankind and die. International expositions do not prevent wars; they go on despite wars. They dont solve the problems of depression and unemployment; they persist in the face of depressions. The worlds fair idea is tough and durable, and the reason is this: people think theyre just wonderful.

G EORGE R. L EIGHTON ,
Harpers Magazine

The World of Tomorrow, 1939 (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)