CHAPTER 6

Crash

As Italo Balbo, Hugo Eckener, and the Piccards pushed the envelope of what was possible in the 1920s and early 1930s, the wider world experienced an unparalleled boom, and then a crushing bust. The giddy party on Wall Street came to a shuddering halt on “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929. The gigantic American economic engine had become detached from the speculative bubble on the stock market, which had soared ever upward, and the crisp air of autumn had finally awakened those with the foresight to get out first. Then everyone tried to get out. Bank failures on both sides of the Atlantic created a downward spiral. Businesses were shuttered; homes and farms were foreclosed on; the lines of the unemployed stretched ever farther; and suspicion, mistrust, and despondency infected the populace.

The historical context for this period, which would come to be known as the Roaring Twenties, was World War I. So much of what ultimately defined the boom and bust, and the society it produced, came out of that terrible conflict. Europe in 1914 stood unchallenged in a way no other part of the world ever has. Economically, culturally, technologically, ideologically—it dominated the rest of the world. But of course, Europe was not unified politically. Its various component parts competed with each other to share a bigger, more prestigious slice of the global cake. They told their people that their claims were just, and those of their competitors were not. Finally, in the summer of 1914, a series of unfortunate—albeit often willful—acts brought on a gigantic war; a war that more recent historians have characterized as Europe’s “suicide attempt.” Italo Balbo and Hugo Eckener had been swept into the struggle; the Piccards had fortunately managed to avoid it to the degree that it could be avoided in 1914–1918 Europe. The leaders of what would later become the first two Fascist states had also been swept up in the war. Mussolini had posed as a patriot-soldier for political effect. Adolf Hitler’s wartime service was of a more serious nature. This failed painter had left Vienna and found his life’s purpose as a volunteer across the border in the kaiser’s army. He was noted by his comrades and officers as being very quiet, fanatically devoted to Germany’s cause, personally brave, and completely lacking in leadership skills. Germany’s best chance to win the war was in August and September, 1914. Once this quick victory had eluded them, the war became a long, ugly, drawn-out struggle between the Germans dug in on French and Belgian soil and the Allies trying to force them out. Attrition: this word took on a new, modern, and particularly sinister meaning in World War I. As these large, wealthy, technologically advanced sister countries butchered each other, they found that the industrial methods that had allowed them to rise to global dominance now needed to be applied to war. The efficiency and scale of Henry Ford’s assembly line had to be adapted to mass murder to achieve victory. The treasure and blood of a whole generation was thrown into the fray. The result was stalemate.

America, generally in step with President Wilson, managed to stay out of the war until 1917. Wilson, who had once decried the militarism of the Old World, now harnessed America’s vast industrial potential and large population to play a decisive role in ending the stalemate and winning the war. The U.S. government intervened on a hitherto unimaginable scale in the American economy, and “efficiency” became the watchword, as important as courage, skill, or morale. “Taylorism,” based on the efficiency model created in the early twentieth century by Frederick W. Taylor, was instituted at all levels to ensure an Allied (American) victory. Charles Dawes, the scion of one of Chicago’s oldest and wealthiest families, with the ear of presidents and powerful bankers, was ultimately put in charge of the wartime General Purchasing Board of the American Expeditionary Forces.¹ John J. Pershing, the AEF commander, placed absolute faith in Dawes’s ability to get the troops what they needed to win—without wasting taxpayers’ money. It would be Dawes and his younger brother, Rufus, who would be the main movers behind the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Charles (who would serve as Calvin Coolidge’s vice president from 1925 to 1929) would become known in the Chicago press for his ubiquitous poker pipe, while Rufus acquired a well-earned reputation as an exceptionally natty dresser. They were quite a pair.

Another figure whose wartime experiences shaped his understanding of organization on a large scale was U.S. Army engineer, Lenox Lohr. Lohr’s expertise ultimately caught the attention of the Dawes brothers and they hired him to manage the great fair that they were planning to open in 1933. Lohr’s disinterested and professional manner, combined with his confidence in his ability to take wartime Taylorism and apply it successfully to any endeavor, made him the ideal choice. As historian Cheryl Ganz explained, Lohr “determined that with careful organization and planning, the fair would be both economically and educationally effective.”² He was a “can do” guy, and he spoke the Dawes brothers’ language. He also would bring with him a very able lieutenant in Martha Steele McGrew. They would work like slaves for years to make the Dawes brothers’ vision into a reality. But it’s important to keep in mind how World War I shaped that vision, and Lohr’s understanding of how to implement it.

The Dawes brothers made a killing in the stock market’s boom years while at the same time staying involved in civic undertakings. Charles would eventually administer the committee tasked with restructuring Germany’s economy following its defeat in the war. Its solution—a predecessor of sorts to the later Marshall Plan after World War II—is known to history as the “Dawes Plan.” The scheme whereby the United States would loan Germany money in order to help rebuild its economy, shattered since 1918, was spectacularly successful. Charles Dawes also helped rework the sticky issue of reparation payments owed by Germany to her wartime foes, to which she had agreed by signing the 1919 Versailles Treaty. By 1929, Germany was a fully rehabilitated member of the international community with a thriving economy and a vibrant arts scene. Adolf Hitler, convinced that 1. The German Army had not lost the war, and 2. The Treaty of Versailles was a violation of the terms that the armistice was signed under, had gone into politics after the war. Closely following the political progress and copying the methods of Mussolini, Hitler built up a political organization around himself that existed solely as an expression of his Nietzschean will to power. As Germany’s economy was brought to its knees in the early 1920s, this political neophyte was able to gain national notoriety for a failed putsch in 1923. In prison (for a surprisingly short time) he drafted his personal political manifesto, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). The book was little more than a rant against Leftists, Jews, the Weimar Republic, the League of Nations, and anyone else who stood in the way of the national and racial destiny of the German “volk,” as he saw it. But then (largely due to the American money Charles Dawes had freed up) times changed. Hitler continued to rant, but few were listening.

Then on October 29, 1929—“Black Tuesday”—the Wall Street crash occurred and history moved back in Hitler’s direction. Germany was hit particularly hard. What made it even more psychologically devastating was that the German people had thought they’d left this economic and social uncertainty behind them. And now? With the ground seemingly caving way beneath them, Germans were far more willing to listen to angry orators such as Adolf Hitler. Seemingly overnight, the ex-corporal and watercolorist went from being dismissed as a political crank to being taken seriously as a potential national savior.

For his part, Benito Mussolini saw the large-scale failure of capitalism as partly a result of its liberal democratic underpinnings. The State should intervene by forming a corporatist relationship between management and labor for the benefit of the nation, rather than any one individual. It went without saying that he represented the nation. By 1931, with the economic maelstrom sucking all of the industrialized economies into its maw, socialism also seemed to offer an alternative. In the secretive Soviet Union, its new master, Joseph Stalin, had already launched the massive “Five Year Plan” before the crash; many idealized this red star in the east, not remotely comprehending the human cost this “plan” would extract. Totalitarianism, whether of the leftist or rightist variety, seemed to own the future. One could choose to be terrorized by ideologues or bullies, it seemed. America licked its wounds, and Hollywood pretended the party was still going on. But there were some who woke clear-eyed to these increasingly ugly or delusional realities, and acted.

Lauro de Bosis was an Italian conservative, the son of an Italian poet, Adolfo de Bosis, and a New Englander mother, Lillian Vernon. De Bosis believed in the democratic system and hated Mussolini for what he had done to his country. He felt a single decent act might awaken the nobler soul that he felt lay sleeping in his fellow Italians—so many of them seemingly mesmerized by the glorious laurels Italo Balbo had won for Italian aviation on his just-completed air voyage to Brazil. De Bosis was under no illusions about what Balbo’s successes symbolized. His master, Benito Mussolini, exploited these like a narcotic peddled to the Italian people to keep them artificially sated with nationalistic triumphalism. If Balbo could win hearts in the sky, why not someone else, with a different message? In a farewell letter published in newspapers throughout the world, de Bosis argued—from exile in France—that the sky still belonged to free men.³ He wrote that if “my friend Balbo has done his duty,”⁴ he’d likely be shot down in flames before he could complete his mission. In a daring “raid” reminiscent of D’Annunzio’s wartime exploit to drop leaflets on Vienna demanding Austria’s surrender, de Bosis flew his airplane from the island of Corsica, violated Italian air space, and headed for Rome. The eminent historian Piers Brendon best described what happened next:

With only seven and half hours of solo flying experience to his credit he set off . . . in his russet-colored, white-winged Pegasus and glided like a phantom over the Eternal City. He flung out a shower of leaflets denouncing Mussolini’s corrupt and tyrannical government, appealing to the King and urging a boycott of every Fascist enterprise and ceremony. They floated onto the green lawns of the Quirinal Gardens and the outdoor cafés in the Villa Borghese. They landed like snowflakes on the Piazza di Spagna and the Piazza Venezia. De Bosis was not shot down but on his return journey he apparently ran out of fuel and crashed into the Mediterranean. No trace of him or of the Pegasus was ever found. Commenting on this act of self-immolation, The Times said: “So long as there are men like Lauro de Bosis, the safeguarding of freedom is assured.”⁵

Before he set off, de Bosis wrote a poem entitled “Icarus.” In it, he emphasized the nobler aspect of man, which he saw being degraded in Mussolini’s Italy. Reading the poem, one can’t help but feel that Italo Balbo would have felt an instinctive kinship with the young poet-pilot. The difference was that one had all, but sold his soul to the devil, while the other had never made that compromise with eternity:

a noble goal

Son, child of mine, thou art not dead.

Mine eyes have seen thee like a god illuminated by the sun.⁶

Thus, the 1930s dawned quite bleak from the perspective of the liberal, democratic, capitalist order that had appeared to have emerged victorious from the 1914–1918 war. The new U.S. President Herbert Hoover certainly didn’t help lighten the atmosphere either. He had received the presidential baton from the equally buttoned-up Calvin Coolidge in March 1929 when the good times looked like they would go on forever. But, of course, they didn’t. And Herbert Hoover just did not seem up to the task. On top of the bread lines, soup kitchens, and shanty towns, the failed and hypocritical experiment in social engineering known as Prohibition was still the law of the land. No one seemed to take it particularly seriously, not even the Bible-thumping bourgeoisie of Middle America who had done so much to initiate it in the first place. Or, rather, they didn’t take it particularly seriously where they themselves were concerned—it was only when the “other guy” wanted a drink, particularly if they were of immigrant stock, that they took it seriously. The hypocrisy reached all the way up to the corridors of power in Washington. Inevitably, Prohibition had a corrosive effect on the social mores the Bible Belt claimed it was trying to protect. That is, a law that would be difficult to enforce even if it was taken seriously, let alone applied sporadically and hypocritically, wound up undermining respect for all law, and to a certain degree social convention in general. Thus, the irony of the most libertine period in American history taking place under the auspices of multiple conservative administrations. Hemlines rose, pre- and extramarital sex became, if not the norm, at least far more common, and the recreational consumption of alcohol and drugs increased. The generation of women who had struggled for the right to vote now disapprovingly saw their increasingly scantily clad daughters and nieces going places and doing things they felt demeaned women. This was not what they had struggled for. But the younger generation of women, with their bobbed hair and exposed legs free to dance the “Charleston,” disagreed. They felt empowered. Times were indeed changing.

The Roaring Twenties indeed roared. The “lost generation” that had come of age during the war (whether on the winning or losing side) seemed to want nothing to do with idealism, instead embracing hedonism as their modus operandi. Social critics, such as the young author F. Scott Fitzgerald, decried this loss of idealism in his timeless novel of the age, The Great Gatsby. What made the self-invented, quasi-fraud Jay Gatsby “great” was that, unlike everyone else around him in the Twenties, he had not lost his idealism. He held tight to it, and stayed pure, despite his half-truths and criminality. However, this contextual understanding of the period, one could argue, is flawed. First, the Roaring Twenties implies that the period is confined to that decade only when in fact as a recognizable historical and cultural period it really can be traced back to the enactment of Prohibition on January 17, 1920 through its official termination on December 5, 1933. In other words, the Roaring Twenties were really the Roaring Twenties and early Thirties. What of the stock market crash, and the subsequent depression? Though the crash would come to define the beginning of the Great Depression in the public mind, at the time this was not necessarily the case. For one thing, economic depression had already inflicted serious damage in the agricultural countryside. It was news to farmers that the Great Depression started on October 29, 1929. And it was not altogether clear at the time whether the crash was a momentary corrective—that while inflicting some real pain (like the 1893–1894 economic downturn), it would eventually turn out to be relatively short in duration. Those involved directly, and heavily, in the stock market often did take a disastrous hit because of the crash (for their part, the Dawes brothers had had the foresight to get out before Black Tuesday). But not everyone was broke. The grim, grinding poverty that we have rightly come to associate with the Great Depression wasn’t being documented yet to the same extent as it would be under the progressive-minded Roosevelt administration later in the 1930s. The good times rolled on, where they could (such as in Hollywood), and the Zeitgeist remained more firmly linked to the pre-Depression Twenties than to the later post-Prohibition era. This is important when looking at the genesis of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair—yes, real economic loss and social disruption was happening, but it took some time for the psychology of the times to catch up to the evident historical realities. Thus, the 1933 Fair, planned in one era of plenty and carried out in another of austerity, in fact was part of the same era, the same mindset. It was the end of Prohibition that signaled the end of this era, not the crash.

This was the context for the great Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. The origins for the idea of a fair began with a local booster named Myron Adams. He initially suggested making the lakefront south of the “Loop” into a grand triumphal arcade for the victorious Allies of World War I. But this then evolved into a more ambitious proposal to have Chicago host its second World’s Fair—this time to commemorate the centennial of its incorporation as a town in 1833 (thus, the fair’s eventual title: “A Century of Progress”). In 1923, Adams formally proposed his idea to the city’s mayor and received an enthusiastic reception. However, with a change in administration in City Hall, the idea was greeted with greater skepticism; the most important being: “Who is going to pay for it?” There had been World’s Fairs since the first in London in 1851, and certainly there were plenty of Chicagoans who recalled quite well the remarkable Columbian Exposition of 1893. But for all the fairs that had successful runs, there were plenty of other examples that demonstrated they were anything but guaranteed. The city’s treasurer, Charles Simeon Peterson, ultimately took up Adams’s idea and on a fact-finding trip to Europe viewed smaller international expositions to learn. After returning to the United States, Peterson reached out to the city’s most prominent men, and at a meeting on December 13, 1927, the die was cast. Two major decisions made that day would shape the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair—the first, a recommendation from the president of the National Bank of the Republic, George Woodruff, urged that this new fair look forward, not backward, as its predecessors (most famously the 1893 Columbian Exposition) had done. The second major decision was the selection of the dapper, tightfisted, Rufus Dawes as the president of the Fair Committee. It now had a vision, and a leader capable of realizing it.⁷

Chicago’s corrupt mayor—a puppet of Al Capone—gave his tepid endorsement, but pledged no funds. Charles Dawes and his brother Rufus, with connections at the highest levels of American business and finance, would have had it no other way. Their vision was for a privately funded fair that would not only pay for itself, but turn a profit. Efficiency, the god of the progressive era that formed these men, would work seamlessly with science and innovation to triumph over corruption and waste. The new age that dawned so unpromisingly on the horizon was not one to be feared, if one had the nerve and the brains to meet it.