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Mirror Of Our Culture*
By Robert E. Rambusch

"We have crossed the threshold of a new age whose implications the fair failed to treat seriously. Perhaps the fair does mirror too well our present culture, but it is not enough to hold up the cracked mirror. A billion-dollar venture has the responsibility to present for our consideration not only the world as it is but the reality of human dignity and potency capable of transforming ourselves and our universe. There remain many uncomfortable realities which the 1964-65 New York World's Fair did not confront or even acknowledge."

I

FIVE thousand years from now in 6939 some archeologist is supposed to dig up the time capsules deposited September 23, 1939 and October 16, 1965 by Westinghouse Electric Corporation describing the life and interests of our world at the time of the two New York World's Fairs. Among other things the 1939 capsule contained a woman's hat, a safety pin, a can opener, a tooth brush, and a fountain pen. Canned beverages now have flip-tops, the tooth brushes are electrified, and the ballpoint has largely replaced the fountain pen. In the 1965 capsule are a plastic heart valve, birth control pills, a laser rod, and the Ranger's pictures of the moon. Time capsules and world's fairs offer the opportunity to assemble our achievements, and for the discerning, to assess our accomplishments and our aspirations. Professor William Partridge writing on "The Educational Value of World's Fairs" pointed out

* This first appeared as a lecture, October 13, 1964, at the Institute for Religious and Social Studies, the graduate school which is conducted by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York City, with the cooperation of Catholic, Jewish and Protestant scholars. THEOLOGY TODAY is grateful for permission to print Mr. Rambusch's article and Prof. Macquarrie's "How to Speak About God," THEOLOGY TODAY, July, 1965, which was originally given as a lecture in the Institute for Religious and Social Studies' 1963-64 curriculum.

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that fairs are necessary to the study of mankind.¹ Definition as to what constitutes a "fair," "exposition," or "exhibition" is not clear, for these terms have been interchangeable. Mr. Leone Levi made the distinction that "the exalted and liberal principle distinguishes modern exhibitions from ancient fairs or bazaars. The one had for its object to educate the mind, and to improve national industries; the other to facilitate the meeting of buyers and sellers, and to promote the interests of private individuals. A fair is the result of a necessity created by the want of easy communication, and the exhibition is the result of the extended intercommunication of nations. There is much danger of degeneracy in all human conceptions, and the moment an exhibition becomes a fair, its glories are extinguished."² Robert Moses, President of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, says, "What distinguishes a world's exposition from a local fair obviously must be its universality and its inquiry into the common destiny of mankind. All the talents are engaged in a fair . . . the hope is that if they can together build a big show, they can eventually build a viable world. A modern world's fair therefore combines an ancient herd instinct with a new objective extending beyond a mere holiday into the great Quo Vadis which arrests our heedless flight and challenges our common inescapable humanity."³

A total condemnation of the New York World's Fair would be too simple. Its deficiencies are as apparent as are Mr. Moses' assurances that "this one will be the biggest, (and) the first billion dollar fair in history."⁴ The inter-galactic ambition of the fair is reflected in its official slogan, "Peace Through Understanding." This romantic aspiration was first articulated by Prince Albert at the opening of the 1851 exhibition in London's Crystal Palace. Mr. Moses promoted the idea of a world's fair ". . . since other recent international gatherings of a diplomatic sort have not been eminently satisfactory in advancing the idea of brotherhood."⁵ There have been some twenty major world's fairs since 1851 and at least that many wars besides two cosmic conflicts. Several of the New York World's Fair pavilions became symbols of invaded and conquered

¹ Partridge, William, "The Educational Value of World's Fairs," Architectural Forum, 1902.
² Levi, Leone, "The Prospective Results of International Exhibitions," 1855.
³ Moses, Robert, "Why a Fair? And Why This Fair," New York Times, April 19, 1964.
⁴ "Moses Builds a Fair," Architectural Forum, January 1964.
⁵ Moses, Robert, "The Fashioning of a Fair," Official Souvenir Book.

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countries during the 1939-40 fair, and one of the biggest attractions the year before Pearl Harbor was the million dollar Liberty Bell sheathed with eleven thousand cultured pearls and four hundred diamonds exhibited in the peaceful Japanese pavilion. It is ironic that after World War II the newly formed United Nations found temporary housing in an empty 1939-40 World's Fair building. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other eastern European nations are not represented at the international area of Flushing Meadows, but fortunately are represented at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan.

The New York World's Fair failed to have its plans certified by the Bureau International des Expositions, which bureau Mr. Moses dismissed a bit cavalierly as "three people living obscurely in a dumpy apartment" in Paris. "We notified the B.I.E. that we could not conform to their rules, and that we would not join. . . . The fair will get along without them."⁶ The Fair has evidently gotten along without them, "them" including France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Canada, Norway, and the Eastern European countries. The consolation offered by the world's fair president is, ". . . there are notable absentees . . . Italy is out, to be sure, but we have the Pieta from Rome, which is more important than a Fiat. It is a fact we don't have the U.S.S.R., but we have a circus of our own with a bear who skates like a man."⁷

The symbol of this world's fair is the twelve story high paperweight called the Unisphere. The paid advertisement in the official fair guide quotes the world's fair president-"and what builder more imaginative and competent (is there) than U.S. Steel?"⁸ This donation will be one of the few structures retained in a future park when the rest of the fair buildings are torn down next year. Mr. Moses prophesies, "I have a hunch, that, like the Eiffel Tower, it will be a landmark and reminder long after the critics who build nothing are forgotten."⁹ Not only critics who build nothing, but more important, critics who give nothing, for according to Mr. Moses "the Unisphere was roundly denounced as insulting to the national and international intelligence, uninspired, dated, trite, corny, ridiculous, and in fact lousy . . . . (Those) aspirational abstract sym-

⁶ "Moses Builds a Fair," op. cit.
⁷ "The Fashioning of a Fair," op. cit.
⁸ Official Guide, New York World's Fair.
⁹ "Robert Moses Answers His Critics," Architectural Beacon, Jan.-Feb., 1964.

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bols offered as substitutes (were) without any accompanying evidence of financial support."¹⁰

In 1960 virtually the entire architectural planning board for the fair resigned. This board consisted of talented architects and industrial designers who felt that a repeat of the beaux arts layout for the 1939-40 fair was already dated in its own time. The planning board evolved a master plan for a large, transparent building, a ring a half a mile in diameter. The interior space would allow for flexibility in allotting exhibition area to the different exhibitors. Such a creative approach utilizing contemporary building materials and techniques might have engendered new frontiers in architecture. The plan was rejected. The planning board submitted its resignation, which Mr. Moses promptly accepted, and he pronounced, "I don't know how to satisfy the longings of today's theoretical planners for the tabula rasa, or clean slate, on which to apply their talents. We have aimed not at the grand plan which would influence all architects for generations, but for freedom of choice, clash of ideas, and competition of tastes, individual or corporate. One of the most articulate of the advance guard urged us to house all industry in an immense, two story doughnut . . . with a lake and little pleasure islands in the middle. . . . It would be hard to find a greater contrast in style and purpose than between the doughnut and the reality."¹¹

II

The security of mediocrity was preferred to opportunity for creativity. George Nelson analyzes this historic repetition by pointing out that "the investors in the 1939 Fair lost 63 cents of every dollar . . . a fact never forgotten, for to lose money is a sin far more serious than adultery, perjury, or homicide . . . . The planners of the New York World's Fair are using the 1939 plan . . . a scheme which was already out of date twenty-five years ago. The official reason for this respectful nod to tradition was that there were miles of streets, water pipes, sewers, underground wiring, and so on, which could be recovered, thus reducing the risk for the investors. Unhappily, when work began, it was discovered that most of these valuable services had vanished forever in the bottomless mud and they had to be (put) in all over again. . . . Having established their

¹⁰ "Moses Builds a Fair," op. cit.
¹¹ "The Fashioning of a Fair," op. cit.

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plan, the planners set up another principle . . . each exhibitor was free to put up any kind of building he wished."¹²

Mr. Moses explained the implication of this declaration of architectural independence by saying, "We have standards governing construction by exhibitors, but we do not tell them what they can build. . . . Greek and Barbarian, traditionalist and modernist, conservative and iconoclast, right wing and left, they all look alike to us. . . . We cannot prevent the maker of condiments from building his pavilion in the form of a pickle, or the business machine from putting up a huge typewriter computer, nor the brewer from preferring a bottling plant to a dance hall. . . . The architectural magazines can report on the masterpieces and ignore or criticize what they don't like. In the end the public will decide what wears well aesthetically."¹³ It is this Jacobean concept which has earned the description "God's junkyard" for our highway billboards, our unsightly and monotonous housing developments, and our scarred landscape. The fair has masterpieces: the IBM pavilion, the Austrian and Spanish pavilions, the beautiful exterior wall of the Japanese building, and the inventiveness of the New York State pavilion-tent of concrete tubes and plastic awning. But these experiences of creativity and ingenuity are few and far between in this billion dollar fair whose buildings Time magazine calls "eye-catchers that suggest refreshment stands on U.S. 1."¹⁴

Traditionally art has had a fitting place in fairs of the past. Delacroix, Ingres, and Courbet were in the Paris 1865 exposition, and Picasso's famed "Guernica" was painted for the Spanish Republic pavilion during the Civil War. Some of the national pavilions have art treasures, but usually art has infiltrated such unlikely places as the abandoned Argentinian pavilion and the bazaar-like Transportation and Travel pavilion which houses incongruously a superb collection of beaten and cast gold work from Pre-Colombian South and Central America. A montage of the FBI's "13 Most Wanted Men" by pop-artist Andy Warhol was rejected by officials because most of the "most wanted" criminals were of one nationality. Mr. Warhol submitted a second canvas featuring 45 still-photographs

¹² Nelson, George, "The Eye of an American at the New York World's Fair," Domus, May, 1964.
¹³ "Moses Builds a Fair," op. cit. and "Robert Moses Answers His Critics," op. cit.
¹⁴ "The World of Already," Time, June 5, 1964.

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of a smiling Robert Moses. This substitution has not been approved. Three sculptural bronzes by Donald De Lue, Paul Manship, and Marshall Fredericks commissioned by the Fair Corporation and which are to remain in the future park, are hopelessly uninspired. In the article "The Day Pop Art Died," Katherine Kuh maintains that on the opening day of the World's Fair, April 22, 1964, "Pop art died a natural and undramatic death, inadvertently eliminated by Robert Moses when he turned the New York World's Fair into a gigantic spectacle that out-pops all competition. . . . Instead of interpreting the banality of our mass produced environment, the pop artist merely reproduces it. At the Fair, the model so completely overwhelms the copy, as to make the latter obsolete… No one interested in Pop Art should hiss the hotdog stands… each topped by what resembles huge scoops of glistening whipped cream . . . or the eighty foot tire that the U.S. Rubber Company has turned into a ferris wheel."¹⁵ One could add the gargantuan Chrysler toy cars, or the fifteen foot high orange atop the Florida pavilion. The rejected architectural "doughnut" was replaced, not by the envisioned pickle or typewriter, but by the banal orange and ferris wheel tire.

Interestingly enough the amusement area has proven fiscally disastrous. Many of the large, expensive commercial shows have closed; gone is the circus with the bear who could skate like a man, and, according to Mr. Moses, replace Russia's participation.

III

The industrial exhibits have found ways to make education or indoctrination painless, entertaining, and free. The dome is the most popular architectural form of many pavilions, and houses a series of theaters employing movies, slides, tableaux, live performers, puppets, and animated robots. Walt Disney perfected the latter claiming the science of audio-animatronics as an "entirely unique form of art and entertainment, which will eventually take its place beside the theater, opera and motion picture." The Disney life-size animated figure of Abraham Lincoln capable of some 250,000 combinations of action rivaled in popularity the immobile Pieta of Michelangelo.

¹⁵ Kuh, Katherine, "The Day Pop Art Died," Saturday Review, May 23, 1964.

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The more successful and creative film productions are Francis Thompson's "To be Alive" commissioned by Johnson's Wax, Saul Bass' delightful "The Searching Eye" at Eastman Kodak, the simple yet impressive black and white documentary film "Voyage to America," and the multiple screen and model experience of "The Past as Prologue" at the United States pavilion. The most varied and imaginative use of simultaneous stimuli is the Charles Eames production of "The Information Machine" showing the similarity of the human mind to computers in problem solving. This IBM demonstration is experienced inside an egg-like theater some forty-five feet above the ground. The audience is elevated into this theater on a steep grandstand or "people wall" by a hydraulic lift. The very means of being conveyed upward into this theater conditions the audience to accept as natural anything the creative mind and obedient machine can effect.

General Motors, determined to repeat its popular Futurama-show at the 1939-40 fair, has again devised a moving belt of wagons, passing scenes of pre-historic times to the cities of the future when man will overcome the elements and challenges of terrain and climate, build luxury hotels under the sea, level mountains for cities, plough through jungles, and live in antarctic regions. The Ford Company has entrusted its exhibit to Walt Disney. His audio-animatronic cute cavemen alternate with terrifying battling dinosaurs to demonstrate modern man's superiority over pre-historic ancestors. Mr. Disney's talents are also employed at the Pepsi Cola building and the General Electric Carousel Theater, making him, in Katherine Kuh's words, "an overworked if somewhat dubious hero."¹⁶

The overworked and equally dubious motto "Peace Through Understanding" is curiously reflected by one of the more frightening exhibits, the underground home, sponsored by the Underground World Home Corporation. The pamphlet given to each paying visitor notes that "the Underground Home is . . . protected from the ravages of nature, the physical and psychological assaults caused by our industrialized society and the population explosion . . . but most of all, it offers the average man the proverbial island unto himself. The utmost in security (it) lessens the likelihood of human intruders, protection from storms of all types; is impervious to nuclear fallout."

¹⁶ "The Day Pop Art Died," op. cit.

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Sociologists point out that religious adherence in America is voluntary, hence different denominations are competing in the market place. This is amply demonstrated by the soft and hard sell approach in the nine religious pavilions, in addition to a half-dozen religious stalls in the Hall of Education, and a Garden of Meditation. This Garden of Meditation is cloistered between the Brass Restaurant, the rear of the Christian Science pavilion, the Belgian Village amusement area, and the First National City Bank. The world's fair executive committee gave rent-free land to the equal but separate religious denominations, a privilege accorded only the Federal government, the States, and the Boy Scouts of America. The American Israel pavilion was charged the standard land rent of three dollars a square foot a year, and is listed as a religious exhibit although it does charge admission and is run as an educative and profit venture. The Mormon pavilion has the most inferior architecture, didactic art forms, and the most aggressive guides. Edward Durell Stone designed the Billy Graham pavilion which is reminiscent of a cheerful Howard Johnson restaurant. The pavilion features a film entitled "Man in the Fifth Dimension" and mingles the features of a travelogue with a pungent monologue attesting to man's inability to put either God or a mother's love in a test-tube. Those wishing to make a decision for Christ are invited behind the fifty-foot wrap around screen after the feature film.

IV

The Protestant and Orthodox Center is an architectural and aesthetic disappointment. The interior, divided into competing denominational cubicles, resembles thirty-six Allegheny Airline ticket counters in Newark Airport. Rivalries rather than the diversity in Protestantism are made manifest. The Greek Orthodox features beautiful ancient icons and ceremonial vesture and objects. Of interest to the historical minded is the charred cross of Canterbury Cathedral, and to the "pop" minded, the large wood-carved tableau of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper."

The best art form in the Protestant and Orthodox center is the controversial film "Parable" whose intent was laudable. The viewers' response to the film is confused due to the non-articulated message proving inarticulate. This confusion may be one of design

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rather than default ("the interpretation depends primarily upon what each person brings spiritually to this film"¹⁷).

The Vatican pavilion containing an embarrassment of riches is in part an embarrassment. Its main feature is the much publicized Pieta in its "Swan Lake" setting. Also included are the irrelevant Time-Life blow-up transparencies of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a stamp collection, a coin collection, delightful peek-a-boo display boxes for children, some Fonda del Solish Mexican folk-art, colorful banners, a contemporary sacred art exhibit from St. John's Abbey, projected slides, a plaster reproduction of St. Peter's tomb, a plaster cast of a sarcophagus, the Early Christian statue of the Good Shepherd, a monstrous photo-blow-up of the Vatican Council in session and hand-tinted with color, scarlet-vested usherettes suggesting in equal parts the episcopacy and Coco Chanel, and a nondescript chapel. The positive aspects of the Vatican pavilion are lost in the anarchical juxtaposition of the valuable and the valueless. The notion that "there is room in the Church for everyone" was concretized in the Vatican pavilion's "room for everything."

There is little recognition in any religious building of man's spiritual problems in a technological era. It is the Hall of Science that architecturally suggests a house of worship, another Sainte Chapelle, with its undulating towering walls of blue, stained glass symbolizing infinite extension of space. Ada Louise Huxtable observes "at a time when science vies with religions in explaining the mysteries of the universe, this is an oddly significant architectural twist."¹⁸

In general, the New York World's Fair of 1964-65 is anti-architectural; there is a definite absence of any kind of aesthetic standard which perhaps all too accurately epiphanizes the general chaos of our culture. The temporary nature of the fair buildings to be demolished is reflective of our jerrybuilt values. As George Nelson indicates, "Except in the time of war no nation has ever so cheerfully thrown away one billion dollars. And this massive gesture is not without value, for it will show to all that care to look that in addition to the tradition (of the monstrous Beaux Arts layout ...a dream of the eighteenth-century tranquility) symbolized by Thomas Jefferson, we have equal reverence for the newer tradition established by the invention of Kleenex."¹⁹

¹⁷ "Parable" program.
¹⁸ Huxtable, Ada Louise, "Romantic Science Hall," New York Times, Sept. 10, 1964.
¹⁹ "The Eye of an American at the New York World's Fair," op. cit.

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The technical level of communication in. the fair exhibits is excellent, with many inventive and informative multiple-input information techniques. The choice of subject matter in most of the films is escapist. Life is seen through the eyes of a clown, or a child. We are looking back at America's past, or to prehistoric times, or to our own childhood with nostalgia in a refusal to face present challenges, terrifying as they are. We are reassured by the evocation of a simpler and more manageable world view. This is reminiscent of Sir Isaac Newton's words, "To myself I seem to have been only a small boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, now and then, in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell . . . while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." The sophistication of the technology transmits paradoxically the message of puerility.

This world's fair lacks a sense of wonder, precisely because children are already acquainted daily with wonder through television. Seeing a man actually orbited into space is more awe-inspiring than having this orbiting explained a year later in models and films at a fair.

In The Education of Henry Adams that patrician historian viewed the dynamo exhibited at the 1893 Chicago exposition with concern. The machine appeared a threat to man and a competitor. Today man views the mechanical as an extension of himself. The fair demonstrates the gadgetry of technology with little emphasis on its relevance. We live in a world in which information and destruction can come from the push of a button. The fair reflects our computerized society, but fails to situate it in a directional context.

V

Mr. Robert Moses assured fairgoers that "the wits tell you there is no formula for success and the sure recipe for failure is to try and please everyone . . . but that is precisely what we aim to do at Flushing Meadow …."²⁰ :(The purpose) of the fair is to bring millions to New York to celebrate our three hundredth birthday and sample our wares, to look about, to see what the other fellow is doing, make friends and leave something here for posterity."²¹

When all the fair buildings are torn down, a park will be left featuring the trite Unisphere, the Pavilion of Science, and a group

²⁰ Moses, Robert.
²¹ "Why a Fair? Why This Fair?" op. cit.

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of three bronze statues commissioned by the Fair Corporation (other fairs have left for posterity an Eiffel Tower, a Mies van der Rohe modern German Pavilion, and a "Guernica"). A tidy profit is promised the fair investors, and impressions and memories are promised the fair-goers.

We have crossed the threshold of a new age whose implications the fair failed to treat seriously. Perhaps the fair does mirror too well our present culture, but it is not enough to hold up the cracked mirror. A billion-dollar venture has the responsibility to present for our consideration not only the world as it is but the reality of human dignity and potency capable of transforming ourselves and our universe. There remain many uncomfortable realities which the 1964-65 New York World's Fair did not confront or even acknowledge.