Labor Takes in the Fair

VOLUME 165

NUMBER 1

JANUARY 1940

BY CHARLES STEVENSON

IT was one of those clear autumn nights at the end of the season, and in it the New York World’s Fair gleamed white and pure under its myriad lights, a fairy city dedicated to the highest idealism, to progress, honesty, and America’s aspirations for goodwill among men. But to Dr. Raphael Ernesto Lopez, the Venezuelan commissioner, the World of Tomorrow chiefly meant labor tyranny and overcharges which had caused a $50,000 deficit in his budget. He hurried breathlessly through his government’s building.

‘We were invited by the President of the United States to make a gesture of international goodwill by exhibiting a bit of Venezuela so you might see what we are. To this end we were to be permitted to use native materials and specialists. But, once here, we have existed only as prey. Even little things!’ he said. ‘See those mahogany statues? A New York union demanded that its men carve them. It wouldn’t allow our sculptors to work on the grounds. Then, because we insisted that only our natives could create Venezuelan art, the movers’ union refused to transfer the statuary from their studio unless we paid a penalty rate of $300 for each of the five seven-foot pieces of wood.’

Fifteen hundred dollars! Any expressman and two helpers could have done the job in an afternoon.

‘We had nothing to sell,’ protested Dr. Lopez. ‘We didn’t want to displace American labor. We let the union paint that wall map, but only our own artists could paint those Venezuelan murals. Yet they were not allowed to work until we hired union men to watch them.

‘Always delays. Strikes. Disputes. Union delegates telling their men not to work too hard. Demands. Would you believe it? They wouldn’t complete our building unless we paid union men $26 a day to turn our lights off and on. I can’t touch a switch. I couldn’t plug in an electric razor to shave without violating union jurisdiction.’

Dr. Lopez gesticulated violently.

‘I’m not anti-labor,’ he said. ‘In my country, where our laws are so advanced that laborers share in employers’ profits and it is illegal to discharge a domestic servant without two weeks’ notice, they call me a socialist. But never have I seen anything like this. Even our protests to the Fair management came to nothing. Mr. Grover Whalen requests us to exhibit again next year. But I ask him: how can I justify these expenditures to my government? It won’t understand.’

Copyright 1939, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

I had gone to New York to investigate evidence that all was not well with the Fair. Dr. Lopez’s complaint is mild compared with some of the others. A round robin signed by foreign exhibitors protests that ‘in certain cases the normal wage of certain workers or foremen has increased to such an extent that it reached $12, $14, and even $16 per hour’ owing to ‘overtime’ resulting from ‘instructions given by the unions to their members voluntarily to slow down work.’ ‘Thus,’ the protest continues, ‘one of the commissioners represented, although being able to get a workman of his country to do a certain paving job for approximately $30, was obliged to use American labor and pay out $600 for the same work.’

A $3600 New England contract for electrical ‘maintenance,’ which prevented any but union men from touching a fixture, did not at first even provide for replacing a burned-out light bulb on less than thirty-six hours’ notice. This presumably extraordinary service entailed employment of an additional electrical crew of three and an $8.81 bill. Union rules prohibited Mr. and Mrs. Roxor Short from turning on lights so that they could paint their murals after the daily departure of the construction men afforded them elbowroom. The fuses disappeared with the workmen. The only solution was to pay overtime from 3.30 P.M. on for an electrician whose function it was to sit until he could extinguish the lights when the artists laid down their brushes.

These are fair samples from my notebook, 142 pages of which are crowded with similar woes. Naturally I was unable to question all exhibitors; there were too many. But every one I did question, foreign and domestic, was as full of complaints as Dr. Lopez. Moreover, what I was told checked in every instance with information given me by press association reporters and with countless news dispatches already recorded by the New York Times and other local newspapers.

Consider such a situation, then, in the knowledge that the Fair’s exhibitors totaled 1724; that the total construction outlay was in the neighborhood of $150,000,000, with additional huge sums for maintenance; that the building costs of the foreigners alone are estimated by the New York Times to have soared at least $10,000,000 over expectations, with the expenditures for individual exhibits catapulting 10 to 150 per cent — and in the sum you have an idea of what happened at the Fair.

II

Most persons today recognize that labor is entitled to governmental protection and self-protection and to the living wage made possible through the power of collective bargaining. Cognizant of old oppressions, it was the public which accorded labor the sympathy and support to gain this power with the hope that it would be applied intelligently. But any honest account of the Fair must portray a small but casehardened group of New York union agents applying this new-won power not to enforce the legitimate union wage, which all exhibitors were willing to pay, but to obtain exorbitant overcharges, to bully and squeeze the last drop of tribute from an exposition so tremendous and so motivated that it must stand as a measure and advertisement of American calibre.

To do this the little tsars showed that they were bigger than the Fair corporation, the United States Government, bigger even than the leading national officers of the American Federation of Labor, all of whose objections they overrode. Their own carpenters’ union does not appear by the record to have been a party to their abuses, but that union, along with the entire labor movement, has thereby suffered loss of prestige — as, for instance, when Nevada withdrew, partly in revolt against the electrical union’s edict that its members rewire equipment brought to New York. The object in question was a five-ton working model of Boulder Dam. Had the union been permitted to chisel apart the thick concrete and put in new wires, installation of the state’s exhibit would have cost $9000.

Certainly our international relations and the income which accrues to all labor through foreign trade will not be bolstered by such abuses as those whereby unions, until stand-bys were hired, prohibited employment of foreign specialists who had been endorsed by the Labor Department as being essential to the exhibiting governments for work the Americans could not do. The Netherlands junked one of the Fair’s most expensive exhibits partly because of this. It will be a long time before a good many nations cease to believe that one of their functions in the United States was to be exploited.

Of course, contractors have used the union abuses to cover their own attempted extortions at the Fair. In the case of the New York Zoölogical Society, a rigging and moving contractor proposed to charge $600 for moving a small aquarium eighty feet. His explanation was that, besides equipment, he required six men for six days at $17 a day apiece — which might have been convincing if the Society had not stumbled on another contractor who did the job in a half hour for $7.70.

Union delegates, however, followed the aquarium into the grounds to demand that it be moved by their contractors. Again, the electricians’ union prefers to have its men work for employers who play its game. Thus the ultimate responsibility is labor’s, and on the face of the evidence the Fair must go down as one of America’s most audacious adventures in labor tyranny.

Connecticut had to pay $16 for one electrical wall outlet. But when canny Massachusetts managers were asked to pay $13.30 for an outlet that would normally cost $3.00 they turned the tables on the union. They accepted the bill as entirely legitimate, adding that they would expect that in writing off charges for seventeen other base plugs which had been eliminated by mutual consent from their exhibits the allowance would be made at the $13.30 rate.

Others did not fare so well. Armando d’Ans, Argentina’s architect, says that a nine-by-twelve-foot neon-lighted wall map, which the most expensive Buenos Aires firm charged $800 to build, cost another $8857 to repair and install at the Fair — this because the cost-plus contract produced a bill which listed five days of hire for three trucks at $750 and employment of twenty-one men, more than half of them at overtime rates for nineteen hours a day.

III

In the beginning, the advertising stressed the Fair’s lofty purposes. Admiral William H. Standley, director of foreign participation, declared that ‘the countries participating would be treated courteously,’ kept ‘comfortable and happy’ in a ‘warm and human city.’ Grover Whalen, the Fair’s president, explained to the Foreign Commerce Club that the exposition would be a ‘ compelling impetus toward the harmonious coöperation of all groups.’

There was every reason to believe these advance notices. In all good faith Secretary of State Hull wrote to Mr. Whalen: ‘Undertakings such as yours contribute significantly to the betterment of international relations and to the maintenance of world peace. . . . I am confident that under your able direction no effort will be spared by the management of the New York World’s Fair to accord the representatives of foreign governments and foreign visitors every mark of friendly and cordial hospitality.’

Had not the city council exempted building materials and exhibit articles from local sales taxes? Did not Congress remove the tariff from all imports which foreigners required in order to make the pavilions representative of their countries? Since the foreign exhibitors would clearly need their own native craftsmen, the Labor Department did everything to facilitate their entry. The French, the Dutch, and others told me they had been led to expect the extraterritoriality and immunity of a fair conducted under the rules of the International Bureau of Expositions. Lastly, the State Department and President Roosevelt issued the invitations in the name of the United States Government.

It is not surprising that foreign nations flocked to this sanctuary of brotherly love. But the joker appeared in the form of a contract between the Fair corporation and the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York — a contract which, though signed on April 27, 1937, did not have its terms made public until June 17, 1939, when they were announced in the New York Times by Thomas A. Murray, president of the Council. I am informed that the contract was intended to apply solely to the construction work of the Fair corporation. But why was it not extended to the construction of our foreign and our local exhibitors? The text follows : —

AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION TRADES COUNCIL AND THE WORLD’S FAIR AUTHORITIES

1. That the Building Department of the World’s Fair Exposition will agree that in the performance of the construction, alteration, maintenance and repair work, to employ union labor and that labor so employed shall be trades chartered by their respective International Unions of the American Federation of Labor, having classification over work to be performed.

2. In the event of difficulty on any project within the prescribed area of the World’s Fair Exposition, that the Building and Construction Trades Council shall contact the authorized representatives of the World’s Fair authorities relative to grievances. If, after twenty-four (24) hours notice the grievance has not been adjudicated, it is agreed that the members of the Unions shall remove themselves from all operations within the World’s Fair area.

3. It is hereby agreed by the Building and Construction Trades Council, and its affiliated trades, that there shall be no stoppage of work by this Council, or its affiliated trades, on any jurisdictional dispute, and that same, if any, will be submitted, as per procedure established, to the Building Trades Department of the American Federation of Labor, or other tribunal approved by the Building Trades Department of the American Federation of Labor.

4. It is further agreed, by the World’s Fair authorities, and all other awarding authorities of all contracts relating to the work in question, that there shall be no lock-out, or cause to be locked-out, employees, parties to this agreement.

Approved, — GROVER A. WHALEN /s/ April 27, 1937

It will be observed that nowhere is there mention of the promised and legalized rights of the foreigners to bring in their own specialists. In addition, the contract did not provide for hire of more than a single shift of workers, an ominous omission which meant that if lagging schedules made it necessary to work more than thirty or thirty-five hours a week, this could only be done by paying time and a half or double time.

The compensating clause prohibiting jurisdictional strikes was to have slight meaning to men who were to interpret the agreement as giving them jurisdiction over everything short of the substratosphere; as permitting them to load construction with unnecessary workmen, to loaf, and to make the prohibition against more than one shift a nightmare to exhibitors and a gold mine for themselves.

But of course this necessitated first a show of power through strikes, both grievance strikes and the jurisdictional variety outlawed by the contract. The first of these strikes was engineered by the electrical union, which had reason to feel that it enjoyed a special proprietorship in the exposition, having purchased $20,000 Fair bonds outright and highpressured its members into buying an additional $100,000 worth. On May 2, 1938, its 400 workers then on the grounds walked out, leaving the lights burning (the authorities did not dare extinguish them, owing to union rules), because a General Motors road-show preview had operated momentarily with its own electrical system.

Next, some 6000 building-trades workers — virtually all on the grounds — were pulled out, to support the electricians in a fight to prohibit the New York Telephone Company from using its own employees to help drag its own cables. Under a prevailing agreement the union men already were doing 98 per cent of the telephone installation work. To take over the remainder, which could only account for $12,000 more in pay, many times twelve thousands were lost and the dust gathered on more than forty uncompleted buildings. Exhibitors were frantic. They looked to Mayor La Guardia for relief, but nothing happened. Though Mr. Whalen previously had said the strike was outside his province, it was he who eventually settled it by dictating that the company should bow.

Next came a truckers’ strike, causing another tie-up. Then the plumbers struck. It was not that they found fault with the Fair, but they thought they had better shut it down to high-pressure a wage of $2.00 an hour from employers who elsewhere were paying $1.80 an hour in accordance with a union vote which Business Agent Archie Henderson said was ‘illegal.’

But the palm goes to the ‘Fair Ground Workers Union.’ That strike came to light when pickets established lines and the story filtered out that the corporation was replacing unionists with non-union ground keepers. In ‘sympathy’ the Hodcarriers, Building and Common Laborers called out their large membership and ‘dissuaded’ strikebreakers from entering the grounds. Again there was talk of a general strike, but this was unnecessary. The skilled mechanics could not work because the men who had the job of handing them their materials were on the picket lines.

Now what were the motives for that outbreak? It appears that there was no union organization of the groundkeepers. The hodcarriers, therefore, quietly decided to sponsor one for them and promptly called the strike when the Fair refused to fire all those who did not immediately join it. In this case Mayor La Guardia felt it advisable to appoint investigators. They reported that the union had enrolled only 172 of the 1360 groundkeepers. That ended the strike.

Interspersed among major shutdowns were countless strikes, jurisdictional and otherwise, against individual exhibitors. Fifteen window cleaners sat down at the British pavilion because one of their number had been discharged. The painters at work in the British pavilion walked out in a jurisdictional row. General Motors planned to dedicate its building with a dinner to be followed by a pageant. But the union electricians would not allow the stage hands to have charge of the lighting effects behind the stage, so the stage hands walked out, and in turn prohibited the musicians from playing.

IV

It required only a few such instances to show that something was decidedly wrong at the Fair. After such warnings, exhibitors knew better than to resist when the electricians’ union held that the labor contract gave it jurisdiction over turning lights on and off and the right to rewire new equipment ‘to guard against fire,’ though there is evidence that this very practice has increased insurance rates.

Gerard Swope, president of the General Electric Company, declared that the union at times obstructed the use of G. E. equipment. The concern threatened to withdraw its exhibit as a consequence. ‘The contractors dare not use our products because they know that local No. 3 will refuse to install them, and that costly delays and substitutions, if not actual damage and violence, will result,’ he wrote Mr. Whalen in a letter which was made part of the record in the suit brought by electrical manufacturers to break an alleged local No. 3 boycott.

Indeed, in the interpretation of that labor contract little escaped A. F. of L. domination. If you agree with John Sloan, the famous painter, that the Fair’s art was to be a ‘chamber of horrors,’ you can blame the A. F. of L.’s Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America and their affiliates. The brethren ruled that no muralists save members of their union could touch a brush at the Fair and that they should not do even a sign painter’s job ‘from sketches, designs, etc., unless same are made by a union member and bear the union label.’ This impossible condition was modified to permit an artist to sketch designs. But, once on the grounds, such designs had to be executed solely by the union members. Even that, however, did not help. Domenico Mortellito, secretary of the Mural Artists Guild, made it clear that an artist could work on his own picture only by joining the union — an unpopular restriction which in the end left the control of his art in the hands of people who did not understand it.

Everywhere the unionists exerted this type of control. The International Photographers of the Motion Picture Industry, local No. 644, went so far as to notify six newsreel companies to cease taking pictures of the Fair until the corporation employed more union photographers.

The ferreting out of numberless new jobs overloaded exhibitors with unnecessary employees. One example: Norman S. Mackie, of the Old Masters exhibit, employed eight experienced picture hangers from the Knoedler Art Galleries to put up his priceless paintings. The delegate of an upholsterers’ union promptly demanded their job. To prevent a general construction tie-up, Mr. Mackie agreed to employ four unionists whose chief function was to drive occasional nails into the wall. But the four proved a mere entering wedge, for, he says, the delegate kept insisting that there were not enough of his men on the job, and before long he was compelled to carry eleven nail drivers on the payroll at wages ranging up to $175 a week.

As the date for the Fair’s opening, April 30, 1939, appeared on the horizon, the pressure was doubled. Now exhibitors were made painfully aware of the aftereffect of the strikes. The interruptions had so upset schedules that the buildings never could be completed except through heavy payment of overtime wages.

When you have a cost-plus contract which means $4.00 an hour for an electrician at double time, plus a minimum 21 per cent of the labor cost which goes to the contractor under the trade’s code, you have a financial cancer. But, as if that were not bad enough, suppose that you, as an exhibitor, were so far behind schedule that the available labor supply was insufficient. You could not augment it with out-of-town workers. You could only allow your contractor to bribe men away from other builders by offering still higher wages.

The setup for this extra profit-taking could not have been more perfect had the airtight contract and the strikes been planned deliberately to this end. For, as most exhibitors agree, their labor relations were amicable until they had invested so much that they could not withdraw.

Stalling. More delays. Jay Downer, who had been a member of the Fair’s Board of Design, told the American Society of Landscape Architects how labor’s early attitude of coöperation fell away as a mist, how electrical workers, particularly, attempted to force overtime and then took the attitude of a tiger after his first taste of blood.’ In the last few weeks, he said, many concessionaires were ‘bled white’; labor became as if crazed for more and still more overtime wages, and men would not even accept work unless assured of considerable overtime pay. He recited how one concessionaire was compelled to hire seven electricians to do the work of two and still was not ready on the opening day. Mr. Downer said he chanced by that night; two of the men were taping and joining cables, while the remaining five merely looked on with amusement. It was several days before they finished. Similar incidents consumed the last spare money of many concessionaires, Mr. Downer explained.

The Riggers and Machine Movers Union had claimed the job of rigging New England’s model of a clipper ship. But its members made so little progress in three weeks that the contractor had to suspend and bring in the Ship Carpenters and Nautical Riggers Union from New Bedford, Massachusetts. The local men thereupon called a strike and gave the newcomers two days to get out. Before the jurisdictional fireworks could start, the work was completed and the New Bedford men gone. Meantime, though, the pavers had walked out in an unrelated dispute, and when this was settled they still refused to apply concrete to the sides of the hole in which the ship rested because the machine movers were still cherishing a mighty huff. Not until June 20, two months after the Fair’s opening, and following such threats of bombing that special guards were necessary, was it possible to pour water in the concrete pool so that the ship would appear to be afloat.

V

But it was in the foreign section that the most woe was encountered. The foreigners were especially vulnerable, owing to the fact that as diplomatic guests they were supposed to exhibit with smiles. It was their intention to have the pavilions turned over to them as mere shells so that they could apply finishing touches characteristic of their own countries. This meant many separate cost-plus contracts late in the construction period. And the unions were already angry. The foreigners were importing their own materials and their own specialists, just as the United States Government and the Fair authorities had said they could.

Take the case of France, whose deputy commissioner, Maurice Garreau-Dombasle, told me he would like to be quoted as declaring that ‘unbearable’ requirements and the payment of ‘enormous sums’ imposed by the unions increased the cost of the French pavilion by an amount in excess of $100,000. Imported wiring had to be ripped out, he said, at costs so high that one chandelier, which was to have been a show piece, had to be abandoned. In addition, jurisdictional rows were an unending cause of grief. Men unloading marble would halt if they found a few pieces of stone in the load. Stone lifting required the employment of another full crew. When a Frenchwoman attempted to remove wrappings from a vase a union agent slapped her. You could not even unpack your own boxes. That, too, was a union job. When he brought in from France five art plasterers, whose entry was carefully in compliance with the printed instructions, the unions would not allow them to apply decorative motifs to the pavilion for the reason that they would displace Americans. Yet the fact is that at that moment the French were already employing a hundred New York plasterers.

Because the prestige of the United States Government was behind the Fair, because France’s invitation had come through diplomatic channels, M. Garreau-Dombasle’s government decided to make an issue of the case. It appealed to the State Department, and the latter, aghast, had the Labor Department send a conciliator to New York. But in vain. The unions overpowered the laws which had guaranteed the French workmen’s entry. The A. F. of L. national headquarters tried to reason with the local leaders, but unsuccessfully. Mr. Whalen used his powers of persuasion. But to no avail. Not until two months had passed was a compromise evolved. This was the solution: that in addition to the hundred Americans already employed France should hire five more unionists to loaf, and to collect overtime whenever the foreigners labored for more than six hours.

As a contrast to the treatment accorded France in America, M. GarreauDombasle told me that when the 1937 Paris exposition was tied up by a general strike the French unions did not wish to inconvenience their country’s guests, and therefore permitted the American exhibit to be completed solely by British and Belgian labor.

To give a national character to their building, the Rumanians conceived the idea of facing it with Rumanian marble. But the stone was first held up at the docks because the unions contended that polishing and cutting it abroad had deprived Americans of jobs. Then, when at last the entry was granted, one crew of unionists had to be employed to load the material into dockside trucks at wages ranging from $15 to $17.50 a day, although sometimes the actual labor required no more than a couple of hours. At the Fair grounds another similar crew unloaded the marble, while a third carried it to the building, with corresponding time to spare. At this point the Rumanians had intended to use their own marble-setters, but Americans went to work instead, and so slowly that the bosses urged them to more speed. This aggravated matters; additional time was lost in argument. After a week the work had to be torn down as unsatisfactory. Now the union decided it would allow the foreigners to do their own job, but on condition that two Americans additionally be paid for each foreigner who held a trowel. Since the Americans insisted on collecting overtime whenever a Rumanian worked long, theirs proved a congenial occupation at a reported wage of from $200 to $400 a week. By the time the marble-setting became an interior job the union agents had so loaded the payroll that the laborers had difficulty stepping over the sitters. In exasperation the supervising engineer laid them all off, apparently on the pretext that the Rumanians were going to quit too. When the Americans protested, he lined up his foreigners behind him and threatened to start a war on the spot unless the Americans cleared out. They did. After that scene work was done secretly behind locked doors, even though a general strike was threatened when electricians, reporting the next day, discovered that marble had been laid during their absence.

The strike did not materialize, but the Rumanian Government paid a whopping bill. It had to pay approximately $900 for the two-hour job of moving a small statue. I have seen its electrical maintenance bill, which for three months totaled $3057.79.

Some of the nations preferred to pay up rather than protest. In this category are Japan, Britain, and Russia. Working on the Russian building were electricians who boasted that they collected $300 a week. Though some commissioners presented docile faces, their countries quickly received information which has resulted in bitter denunciation.

When Belgium’s pavilion was dedicated, Dr. Joseph Gevaert, its high commissioner, apologized because electrical equipment was not complete, ‘due to unforeseen circumstances.’ Shortly thereafter, however, the De'pêche Coloni-ale Belgeet l’Essor Colonial et Maritime stated that Belgium had become the unwilling victim of American ‘gangster methods’ because it refused to meet demands which, presented by the electricians an hour before the pavilion’s dedication, would have added $34,000 to its cost. The article continued: —

‘Result: Electrical current was cut off from the pavilions of Belgium and the Congo. Owing to a small auxiliary dynamo, light was assured nevertheless for the first day, but during the night parts of the motor disappeared mysteriously.’

The article was entitled ‘The Beauties of American Hospitality.’

The Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant interviewed a Dutch specialist who recited in detail how eight American unionists whiled away eight hours placing a tank which three Dutchmen could have handled in thirty minutes. The Americans, he said, deliberately pushed the tank out of position, and when the Dutch boss became so aggravated as to reach for a rope the men were supposed to be pulling, he had to be restrained by Professor Rosse, the Netherlands architect, to avoid a brawl.

The Dutchman added that his crew of American carpenters, painters, electricians, iron workers, case openers, and cleaners had a habit of disappearing, four at a time, and ‘I find them resting, sometimes asleep, or somewhere strolling in the grounds. . . . Occasionally a stranger,’ he continued, ‘turns up. Asked what his business is, he tells me he is coming to see that his men are not working too hard. Then there’s the painters’ delegate who, after fifteen minutes of work, took an hour’s rest. “Take it easy,” he used to say.’

Holland’s most important exhibit was a mail-sorting machine, a mechanical miracle as big as a newspaper printing press and so intricate that none except engineers supplied by the manufacturer could assemble it. Now the Dutch are a shrewd lot, and, as explained to me by Dr. Neil Van Aken, executive secretary of their participation committee, they had stipulated in their contract with the Fair corporation that they should be permitted to use their own labor, even though the law already gave them this right. Yet, two weeks after the six Dutch engineers had begun putting together the forty-two tons of parts, the Millwright and Machinery Erectors Union swooped down, demanding the job under threat of a strike. Mr. Whalen could only say, ‘Sorry.’ Even when the Dutch Government sent Mr. Whalen a message pointing out that relief must be had within forty-eight hours if the Fair corporation was to escape responsibility for delay and damages, Mr. Whalen could only express regret.

The only possible arrangement was for Holland to turn the job over to men ignorant of the mechanism, with Dutchmen beside them reading the blueprints and having their vocal explanations translated, as nearly as possible indicating each step in sign language. Eventually, the Americans stood by while the Dutchmen did most of the work. But the required overtime, Dr. Van Aken said, raised assembling costs $7000 over the original estimates.

Dr. Van Aken was emphatic in stating that this sort of thing was typical of Holland’s entire construction at the Fair. ‘Electric cables were cut,’ he told me. ‘The wrong kind of connections were put in so that the jobs had to be done over.’ The cost of the Netherlands pavilion rose more than $75,000 above the appropriation. Its cost for the season was double the original $500,000 budget.

With the Fair finally opened, the unions still did not ease up. Electrical ‘maintenance’ contracts were hung so tightly around the necks of exhibitors, both foreign and domestic, that they were never rid of them. The New York Zoölogical Society’s representative protested that he was served with a demand to pay $30 a day maintenance for his little exhibit, but, by forming a united front with three others, he was able to get part-time service at $70 a month. Though he paid, however, he said he never saw the electrician. Arkansas threatened to quit because the Motion Picture Operators Union demanded that one of its members be employed at $150 a week to watch its amateur-type automatic projector unreel a travelogue. Foreigners were not permitted to work in their own governments’ restaurants unless they paid union dues.

Amid the complaints there arose jokes such as Americans always evolve to comfort themselves in trying situations. One was that the New York Zoölogical Society’s electric eel had been compelled to join the electricians’ union. But when a New York Times reporter repeated the joke to Dr. Roderick MacDonald, manager of the Society’s exhibit, the latter replied that too much labor trouble really did centre on the eel for it to be humorous to him. He pointed out that about fifteen minutes before the fish was supposed to use its own electricity to light a series of flares which were to begin a parade formally opening the amusement area, one of the Fair’s electrical foremen ran up to demand immediate replacement of the wire which had been rigged to assist the eel. He said, ‘The people who made it [the wire] do not employ men who belong to our union.’

After the foreman’s crew had installed new equipment amid painful delays, Dr. MacDonald was told: ‘You’ll never use that wire again.’

‘We found out what the man meant,’ he added, ‘when we discovered that every socket on our wire had been destroyed.’

VI

It was inevitable that there should be a blowup. It is logical, too, that Dr. Van Aken should have touched off the powder, because, besides his Dutch connections, he was president of the Foreign Commissioners’ Club, at whose sessions he heard the complaints of other commissioners.

His public statement appeared in the New York press on June 8, 1939. France then followed with its complaint. Venezuela already was in a tempest. Portions of the Rumanian trouble leaked out. The New York Times remarked in a news article that it had no difficulty finding ‘a dozen’ foreign commissioners who ‘were quick to admit privately their agreement with all he [Dr. Van Aken] said.’ Then came amusementarea protests, and protests from the different states. Maine’s manager said his state’s work would have been done in half the time and at half the cost at home. Florida protested that its costs were a third above estimates.

Meantime Justice Salvatore A. Cotillo, of the New York Supreme Court, in an open letter called the attention of Governor Lehman, the United States Commissioner, Mayor La Guardia, and Mr. Whalen to the Italian exhibit, where strikers had ‘worked damage to the restaurants, cut up the seats, cut off the electrical power.’ He stated that Italy’s strife had been ‘duplicated’ in the Russian, Belgian, French, English, and other pavilions. He demanded reform.

The New York Times demanded editorially that the city order a public inquiry, adding that failure to do so was ‘not good for the reputation of the city or the country.’

What happened? Dr. Van Aken, the chief complainant, received anonymous telephone calls threatening him unless he ‘ kept his mouth shut.’ ‘ It has been very disconcerting to my wife,’ he told me. ‘You know womenfolk. They would call me in the middle of the night, get me out of bed, and Mrs. Van Aken would say: “Oh, Neil, what will happen to us?”’

Investigators from a state legislative committee called on Dr. Van Aken in the summer, listened to his story, and have not been heard from since. Mayor La Guardia preserved silence. Governor Lehman merely acknowledged Justice Cotillo’s letter. Theodore Hayes, the federal representative at the Fair, remarked to the press that the foreigners were being treated outrageously.

Mr. Whalen explained to the New York Times that ‘we have had only the usual amount of labor problems that any project such as this would have’ and that ‘many of these were caused by jurisdictional disputes over which we had no control.’ The italics are mine, for let it be remembered that the A. F. of L. contract with the Fair corporation specifically prohibited such disputes.

Second, in the face of all the accumulated evidence, he said, ‘We know of no conditions that would justify such a statement as that attributed to Dr. Van Aken.’

Third, on June 10, the day after he had been prodded by the Times, he began an ‘inquiry,’ which consisted of sending wires to representatives of all nations asking whether their ‘governments’ had authorized Dr. Van Aken to issue public statements in their behalf. Dr. Van Aken never had intimated he spoke officially for any government, but only on information he had gained as president of the Foreign Commissioners’ Club. Consequently, not even colleagues who had urged him to protest could reply that their governments had designated him to do so.

Fourth, when commissioners later met with Mr. Whalen, and men such as Dr. Lopez, the Venezuelan, arose to insist that they could not return in 1940 unless labor abuses were ended, he reversed his position. On September 13 he promised ‘greater coöperation than was possible this year,’ and pleaded that ‘we have learned our weaknesses and shall profit by our experience.’ And then, as he hurried to Europe to try to appease the International Bureau of Expositions for failure to comply with its regulations, he insisted that he could promise better behavior from the unions if the nations would only return. He admitted, however, that none of the labor leaders had pledged their coöperation to this end.

VII

The foregoing, of course, does not take account of all the labor abuses, for that would require a book. It does, however, show in general the nature of what has occurred, and from the labor standpoint the reason is not difficult to comprehend. As Bert Kirkman, president of the electricians, declared in a Times interview, there was a demand that the men should benefit from ‘good times’ because they ‘went through hell during the depression years.’

From the standpoint of others in responsible positions, the reason why the abuses were permitted must remain more remote. As long as they stopped short of public appeal, it is not enough to say that the national leaders of the A. F. of L. and the Fair authorities did all they could to prevent the abuses. They only argued privately and in vain with the labor agents to ease their oppression.

Mayor La Guardia, who has had the political support of the unions, would have gained in stature by ordering the investigation requested by the Times. The whole labor movement would have benefited from the cleansing which would have resulted had President William Green of the A. F. of L. publicly denounced the scandal. Although at this writing the Justice Department is preparing to go before a grand jury with complaints about the New York electrical union’s general policies, all of which were reflected at the Fair, it would seem that the Federal Government could have done more than it did, especially when it was able to prevent labor trouble at its own exhibit merely by declaring it would not tolerate strikes. To be sure, Fair corporation officials have had hot sessions with the building council leaders, both over general abuses and over the rule against more than one shift of workers. But is that enough?

There has been no big complaint about labor at the San Francisco Fair. According to Dr. Van Aken, the directors there simply asserted they did not want an exposition unless they obtained in advance a guarantee that the unions would not interfere once a building was given over to an exhibitor. So they got that guarantee and there was no trouble over foreign specialists.

Why did not the New York directors get a similar agreement? Why did they permit the foreigners to expect the privileges of such an agreement when the management already had signed its ironclad A. F. of L. contract? No matter what the original circumstances might have been, why was not something done to seek relief when the labor demands became unreasonable? Why did the authorities not tell the unions there would be no fair unless the latter agreed to permit the hire of more than a single shift of workers? Some protections at least might have been evolved on that point. But as the Building Trades Employers Association pointed out in its publication, News and Opinion, the Fair corporation at the outset rejected any suggestion that an experienced builder be appointed to its board to assist in framing precautions against such ‘extreme’ labor demands. Why was he not wanted? It had Harry Van Arsdale, the power behind the electrical No. 3, as chairman of its advisory subcommittee on building and construction trades labor relations.

Such stupidity is inconceivable in an organization astute and imaginative enough to conceive the World of Tomorrow.

This being the case, you might argue that labor actually bought the Fair. Dr. Van Aken raised that point by recalling the purchase of Fair bonds by the electricians’ union. Again, long before the A. F. of L. contract was made public, the New York Times as early as May 4, 1938, declared in a news report that ‘it is said ‘ the electricians had been given a monopoly in consideration of these purchases. On the other hand, $120,000, the price the electricians had paid, would scarcely be a sufficient price for the license they took.

So you come to a dead end of rationalization.

When I myself reached this dead end I thought it best to go direct to the Fair corporation. At its press relations office I outlined my perplexities. I asked for an interview with someone who, in Mr. Whalen’s absence, might say a word in the corporation’s defense. The man, I was told, was Commander Howard A. Flanigan, executive vice president. My message was taken to him. His reply, as relayed to me, was simply this: that he would not see me for the purpose of discussing anything about labor policies; and that no one else connected with the Fair would be allowed to speak on the subject.

I interpret this to mean that no official of the Fair can be suspected of taking sides at a time when negotiations for next year are going forward. However, this very silence permits of one more possible answer to the questions.

It is that when the Fair was in its initial stage some one or more of its managers neglected to see to it that the Fair should be protected, and when the abuses became serious it was too late to make amends. By the time labor was making excruciating demands the exhibitors who clamored for relief had millions invested.

If you want to accept this explanation, the authorities were then confronted with two possible courses. If they went on, attempting vainly and quietly to placate labor, they at least could open the Fair and hope the losses would not be too crushing. If they called labor’s hand, its tsars might irreparably tie up the entire show for a total loss. The authorities, thus between the devil and the deep sea, chose what they believed to be the lesser evil.

I cannot guarantee that this is the explanation. What is your opinion?