Chapter 56
Half a decade after Joseph Stalin’s death, the Russians and Americans signed the Soviet-American Cultural Agreement in 1958, which began an official cultural exchange, including national exhibitions that would take place on each other’s soil in 1959. The Soviets would assemble a kind of a midget Moscow in New York, while the Americans would engineer a “Main Street USA” in a country that was to many a sub-zero Mordor of labor camps and bread lines, watched over by the Sauron-eye of the KGB.
Jack Masey, who had spearheaded the Jeshyn International Fair in Kabul, Afghanistan, was handed a beggarly $3.6 million budget to produce what was officially called the 1959 American National Exhibition. The money was barely 26 percent of that furnished for the United States pavilion in Expo ’58, also known as the Brussels World’s Fair. Main Street USA would be set in an area of Moscow’s Sokolniki Park that covered 400,000 square feet (about nine acres), an exhibition space many times the size of the more generously funded pavilion in Brussels. Worse than the skimpy budget though, was the slimy bigotry of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond who nuked the exhibition’s fashion show, where a black couple would have (fictitiously) married in front of a white audience. (Thurmond overcame his abhorrence of racial mixing long enough to impregnate his family’s sixteen-year-old black maid.) Meanwhile, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings on the exhibition, slurring Jackson Pollock and others whose works were slated to appear as “ink blobs,” “meaningless doodles,” and “dismal and dreary.” One eager witness before the committee, Wheeler Williams, president of the American Artists Professional League Inc., spread accusations with the recklessness of an oil spill that about half of the nearly 70 artists whose work had been chosen for the exhibition were Communists (many were admittedly left-leaning), or at least Communist stooges. Congressmen preferred that the exhibition hang portraits of illustrious (i.e., dead, white, male) Americans and install fiberglass re-creations of famous landmarks, which in total would have been less exciting and certainly no more subversive than the shopping malls that were just beginning to spread across the country.
For Masey, between the bare-bones budget and the political meddling, it was like giving Rembrandt a set of felt-tip markers and a crumpled napkin, and then demanding a masterpiece. But just as Rembrandt’s supreme creative triumphs are personified in his portraits, Masey’s particular brilliance was expressed through Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.
The one constructed for the Russian exhibition was no exception. Looking like the “2001” version of the sixteenth century St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, the gold-anodized dome stunned Soviet prime minister Nikita Khrushchev into issuing a rhapsody of praise for the 23,800-square-foot hub.
Surrounding the dome in the park where czars once hunted with falcons were several neighboring exhibition spaces. One, designed by George Nelson (a founder of Modernism and one-time director of design for Herman Miller Inc.), resembled a scrimmage of inverted umbrellas made of fiberglass. Here were a trio of open-air exhibitions—a fashion show, oversized pictures of American architecture, and an evergreen classic, Edward Steichen’s touring photographic expo, “The Family of Man,” the photographic equivalent of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Another was a fan-shaped glass building housing consumer goods supplied by 450 companies, such as RCA Corp. and Levi Strauss & Co., as well as the controversial art show. Nicknamed the “Jungle Gym,” the glass structure was sectioned with primary-color panels like Mondrian paintings come to exuberant 3-D life. Its multiple subdivisions were jammed with a range of consumer goods that spanned cameras to clothes and toys to TV sets. Levis were set out in stacks temptingly easy to steal from, a deliberate move by the Americans to disseminate their cultural memes through the theft of its apparel.
Alluring as the fashion show, the artworks, and the steal-able jeans were, it was the multimedia feature, running inside the golden dome, from Charles Eames and his wife, Ray, which outshone them all.
The Eameses had designed groundbreaking furniture, films, and exhibits, but for the expo, they created the first multiscreen epic, called “Glimpses of the U.S.A.” where seven twenty-by-thirty-foot screens flashed 2,200 still images projected concurrently through seven projectors.
Starting with a satellite’s view of the universe, the images’ focus narrowed Earthward, dropping down like a space capsule on reentry to sights of deserts, mountains, and seas. From those natural geographic vistas, the scenes swung to man-made ones, of weathered cities and groomed suburbs. A sequence of quotidian images followed, no less profound for their steep ordinariness, a slice of life yet unaffected by the cultural mutiny led by “Howl” or “The Feminine Mystique”: men leaving for work, smooching their wives, getting into cars to motor to work, moms handing children their lunch boxes before they leave for school. Andre-the-giant automobiles driving on highways as convoluted as concrete fractals. Workers entering skyscrapers to work like worshippers entering cathedrals to pray.
So it went, a day in the life of the American nation, set to a too-much-caffeine score from Elmer Bernstein of “The Man with the Golden Arm” and “Sweet Smell of Success” fame, ending with parents reading bedtime stories to their children and spouses kissing each other before a concluding shot of forget-me-not flowers whose name in Russian, nezabutki, means the same as in English.
“Glimpses” was so popular that it drew groups numbering as many as 5,000 visitors at a time, who were brought into the dome for the twelve-minute-long film sixteen times a day for the duration of the exhibition. Of all the metrics to gauge popularity, perhaps the most telling is this: The floor in front of the screens had to be resurfaced several times during the six-week expo from the sheer relentless wear and tear of thousands of feet.
(Cinematically, the Eames’s effort was comparable perhaps only to the Lumiere Brothers’ projecting of films onto a humongous 4,100-square-foot-screen that 25,000 could watch at a time at Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1900. )
Before they departed the dome, visitors were invited to approach the IBM-sponsored display, where one of the company’s RAMAC 305 computers programmed to answer 4,000 questions about this American life awaited attendees’ queries. Besides “What is the price of American cigarettes?” and “What is meant by the American dream?” the Russians also asked “How many Negroes have been lynched in the United States since 1950?” It was a question the machine answered honestly: “Seven deaths—six Negroes and one white— have been classified as lynchings since 1950 by the Tuskegee Institute, a Negro college. Responsible Americans condemn lynching.”
Like terrorist anchor babies and death panels of a future age, the supposed threat represented by the nearly seventy works of abstract art (by Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, et al) at the exhibition never materialized. The works, along with the unadorned honesty about racism, elicited a balance of cheers and jeers, but clearly showed American life was an embraceable chaos.
Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos
The Cold War, nonetheless, was in full heat when Vice-President Richard Nixon clashed with Khrushchev in the tiff immortalized as the Kitchen Debate. (Or, as one put it, “Nik and Dick.”) Taking place inside the model house furnished by Macy’s Inc. with midcentury-modern furnishings, the remarkable encounter involved Khrushchev snarking at the various gizmos inside Whirlpool Corp’s. $250,000 “miracle kitchen,” which included a Roomba-like robot cleaner (secretly controlled via radio by a staffer watching from behind a two-way mirror). Like the Soviet press that derided the house as “a Taj Mahal,” Khrushchev scoffed at the notion that it was affordable to average Americans. In response to the premier’s stumpy belligerence, Nixon deftly parried that it was better to compete with dishwashers than doomsday machines. Despite the sparring, the two posed for a photo together drinking Pepsi, a picture of amicable détente that was seen worldwide.
Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos
Pulled in by a golden dome, a kitchen of the future, modern art, and Pepsi, an estimated 2.7 million people explored the American National Exhibition. The expo was a soft weapon drawing both countries closer while making their fundamental differences starker. Declassified documents later revealed the U.S. government thought the exhibition was “the most productive psychological effort ever launched . . . in any Communist country.”