BOOK REVIEW: 'Twilight at the World of Tomorrow': Very Readable Account of Creation, History-Making Events of NYC World's Fair 1939-40
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
If it hadn't been for a schoolgirl's question about the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration as the first president under the Constitution, a gigantic ash pit in the heart of the New York borough of Queens probably would have remained a blight on the landscape for several more years and the 1939-40 New York World's Fair never would have taken place.
In 1934, as James Mauro recounts in "Twilight at the World of Tomorrow" (Ballantine, 432 pages, illustrations, index, $28.00) Jacqueline Shadgen, the daughter of out-of-work engineer Belgian immigrant Joseph Shadgen, wondered what the U.S. would be doing to mark the anniversary of Washington's inauguration in the then capital of the U.S., New York City, in 1789. (This account of Jacqueline studying history reminds me of how the teaching of history has been cast aside in today's educational curriculum. If it's taught at all, which I doubt, the study of history is merged into something amorphous called "social studies".)
Shadgen's decision to promote a World's Fair in the midst of the Great Depression snowballed as major players like Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, parks commissioner and "power broker" Robert Moses and official NYC greeter and later Fair president Grover Whalen took the concept and ran with it, announcing in the summer of 1936 that the fair would open in three years.
After all, the Big Apple could hardly be bested by Chicago, the Second City, which had scored with its recently concluded Century of Progress World's Fair in 1933-4, an event which carded a modest profit -- as opposed to the losses that had plagued world's fairs since their creation -- and to the present day.
James Mauro decided to write "Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War" when he came across a half-buried plaque in Flushing Meadows Corona Park dedicated to two New York Police detectives, Joe Lynch and his partner, Freddy Socha, who died while disarming a suitcase bomb discovered at the British Pavilion of the Fair on July 4, 1940.
Mauro weaves into the story Albert Einstein's famous letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about Nazi Germany's progress in developing a possible atomic bomb. The letter led to the creation of the Manhattan Engineering District, code name for the American effort more commonly called the Manhattan Project, to build the atomic bomb. Einstein, a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, was a speaker at the fair and became a naturalized American citizen in the year of the British Pavilion bombing, 1940.
The promoters of the fair issued bonds to raise the $150 million ($2.3 billion in today's dollars) to clean out the waste disposal site, familiar to anyone who's read F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", and create the iconic Trylon and Perisphere and the other buildings and attractions at the fair. Major industrial designers, including Henry Dreyfuss, who created the spectacular and popular Futurama exhibit for General Motors, and Walter Dorwin Teague, on the Fair's Theme Committee, who, along with Robert Kohn, created the Fair's theme: "Building the World of Tomorrow."
Along with showcasing the start of television broadcasting in the U.S. and the first fax machine, and nylons and other new developments in technology, the Fair's international pavilions underscored the events that lead in the fall of 1939 to World War II. Germany didn't have a pavilion at the Fair, but its partner in the dismemberment of Poland, the Soviet Union, did, along with countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland that were engulfed in the war. Fascist Italy had a pavilion and so did Palestine.
Mauro's book will appeal primarily to history buffs (like me!), as well as readers interested in true-life crime and domestic terrorism highlighted by the numerous bomb threats at the fair, culminating in the deadly bomb of July 4, 1940.
Inevitably, Mauro's book will be compared with Eric Larson's 2003 nonfiction bestseller "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America" based on events at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Larson's book dealt with a serial killer, H.H. Holmes, who used visitors to the fair as his victims. The comparison with Mauro's book is fair, but I think Mauro's account of real, if less sensational events, stands on its own two feet.
About the author: James Mauro is a former editor of Spy magazine and executive editor of Cosmopolitan. Most recently, he was editorial director for Moffly Media, publishers of the Connecticut periodicals Greenwich, Stamford, Westport, New Canaan Darien and AtHome. His writing has appeared in Radar, Details, Spy and Psychology Today.