Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations

7 STUMBLE

145 7 Stumble Primed by the eagerness of civic boosters across the United States, an inspection team from the United Nations touched down in New York in January 1946 to find a site for the future Capital of the World. The leader of the group, Stoyan Gavrilovic of Yugoslavia, embraced the dream. He believed that the United Nations would create not merely a headquarters but a world capital that would be a symbol and assurance of peace for perhaps fifty, or one hundred, or even fifteen hundred years. “What the builders of the United Nations have in view is one of the finest things that the world has ever seen,” he said in an interview broadcast on the CBS radio network. “The idea is to build a place which will be reserved entirely for the United Nations, a place which will become the Capital of the World.” Gavrilovic believed that a UN capital in the United States, far removed from the power struggles of Europe, would be a place where “every problem concerning every people, big or small, regardless of size, regardless of race, regardless of religion and everything else, will be handled.” What a difference such a place would have made for his country, which had been caught in two world wars during his lifetime, and for his own family. In 1941, just two days before the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, his wife and son had escaped Belgrade in a small boat; they ended up in Palestine while he, transported by British plane and warship, landed in Cairo. They reunited briefly at his next diplomatic post in Cape Town, South Africa, but another harrowing experience lay ahead in 1942, when torpedoes hit a ship carrying Vera and young Ivan Gavrilovic to the United States. They spent two days on a life raft before being rescued by the United States Coast Guard. For the duration of the war, they settled in New York while Gavrilovic continued his work for Yugoslavia, sometimes in New York but often far away in London, Belgrade, Washington, or San Francisco.1 The nation that sheltered the Gavrilovic family seemed to offer an unrestrained welcome for the United Nations as well, judging by the numerous eager Americans who had dispatched their elaborate brochures, 146 American Dreams promotional films, and important representatives to London. Thus encouraged , the diplomats came to the United States to shop for forty to fifty square miles of American real estate—an area roughly twice the size of the island of Manhattan. Gavrilovic explained that such an expansive territory would provide the United Nations with room to establish its own identity, to grow in size and magnificence, and to inspire future generations. The world capital would have “momentous and historic meaning,” he said. “A place of this kind attracts world-wide attention. A place of this kind will become a Mecca to which thousands and thousands of people will flock from all over the world.” The Capital of the World as Mecca implied a spiritual quality, a place of pilgrimage. Imagining the world capital as Mecca conveyed serious purpose, solemn duty, and connotations that reached beyond Western tradition even though Western powers dominated the UN.2 When the diplomats arrived at LaGuardia Field on January 6, 1946, they found an official welcoming committee from New York City, photographers , and reporters who pressed eagerly for any clue about their preferences for a site. At the team’s temporary headquarters at the WaldorfAstoria Hotel, more solicitous letters and telegrams were accumulating. The mayor of Morristown, New Jersey, began an especially vigorous campaign to persuade the UN team to visit his town, “the military crossroads of the Colonies.” A man from Hawthorne, New Jersey, sent an invitation complete with drawings of world capital buildings named for Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. An official from Easton, Pennsylvania, pointed out that with just a bit more travel, the UN could have a lovely site in the Poconos . Boosters from New York and Philadelphia sought meetings to try to put their cities back into the scope of the diplomats’ search. From greater distances, promoters of Niagara Falls, the Black Hills, and San Francisco continued to believe that they would still, somehow, have a chance.3 Nevertheless, in the areas around Boston and New York, the perspectives of diplomats and the interests of the UN’s potential neighbors were about to collide in unanticipated ways. The UN’s actions in selecting a location , whether for a headquarters building or a grand capital...