Tomorrow-Land by Joseph Tirella Page B

this latest ride, Fairgoers would sail around the globe in a small boat, listening to a collection of pintsizesinging puppets of different races and ethnicities, representing the children of the world. At first he envisioned the puppets simultaneously singing their various national anthems, but that didn’t work out. He then commissioned Robert and Richard Sherman, the songwriting brothers who had worked on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and other Disney musicals, to create a tune that could be sung in multiple languages—something simple and catchy. During his conversations with the Shermans, Disney remarked, “It’s a small world after all.”
    The Shermans seized on the phrase; it became the name of both the song and the ride, and in a uniquely Disney fashion, it expressed the Fair’s lofty goal of “Peace Through Understanding”—and indeed racial integration—in a child-friendly manner. Moses might have been in charge of the World’s Fair and its public face, as far as New Yorkers were concerned, but it was Disney and his fantastical machinations that the crowds would pay to see.

7.
    You cannot legislate tolerance by constitutional amendment or statute . . . social equality is of slow growth and rests on mutual esteem and respect, not on force.
    â€”Robert Moses, 1943
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    Despite the racial goodwill of Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride, by February 1962 Robert Moses and the World’s Fair had a race problem. For more than a year, the Urban League of Greater New York had been lobbying the World’s Fair Corporation behind the scenes to hire more African Americans and Puerto Ricans to the staff of the World’s Fair Corporation. By the Urban League’s count, there were exactly two African Americans among the Fair’s staff, both secretaries. After being largely ignored by Moses, in June 1961 Dr. Edward Lewis, the Urban League’s executive director, went public with the story, complaining to the New York Times that he had been getting the “runaround” from Moses. This was exactly the kind of publicity that Moses detested: World’s Fair Urged to Hire Negroes blared the Times ’ headline.
    The Urban League again accused Moses of “an apparent pattern of discrimination” at the Fair. “Our efforts have resulted in conferences and correspondence but no action,” league president Frederick W. Richmond told the Times . “We consider this an intolerable situation and will take whatever steps are necessary to make the World’s Fair a legitimate showcase of American democracy.” In response to the story, the Master Builder invited Richmond to discuss the issue with him over lunch at Flushing Meadow the following month.
    The meeting, it seemed, went well. The civil rights group asked Moses to add more African Americans to the World’s Fair’s board of directors—a collection of New York luminaries such as David Rockefeller, Time Inc. publisher and owner Henry Luce, and Dr. Ralph J. Bunche,the Queens-born United Nations diplomat and first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the 1949 armistice between Israel andits Arab neighbors. The next day Moses had his right-hand man Charles Poletti follow up with the Urban League to see if its leaders “really want two additional directors added to our board” and told Poletti “to assure them of full participation.” Although he complained that there were already “too many directors,” Moses chose one—Lawrence “Judge” Pierce, a former Brooklyn DA turned New York City Deputy Police Commissioner—from a list of four African-American candidates. However, by the end of 1961, the World’s Fair Corporation’s executive staff, who actually organized and planned the Fair, was still 100 percent white.
    The Master Builder had come under fire from civil rights activists before. In fact, he had a