Participants
The Guest of Honor at the first Worldcon was Frank R. Paul and the event was chaired by Sam Moskowitz. Along with Moskowitz, other organizers were James V. Taurasi and Will Sykora. Notable people attending included John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Ray Bradbury, Hannes Bok, Milton A. Rothman, John D. Clark, Jack Williamson, Frederik Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Donald A. Wollheim and Harry Harrison.
In addition to its groundbreaking role as the first of its kind, the convention was noteworthy for the exclusion of a number of politicized Futurians (those excluded were Wollheim, Pohl, John Michel, Robert A. W. Lowndes and Jack Gillespie) by convention chair Moskowitz, an event known to fannish historians as "The Great Exclusion Act."
According to Pohl, in his autobiography The Way the Future Was, the Futurians held their own counter-convention which was attended by several who went to the regular convention. He also downplayed the aspect that politics played, himself believing that it was a personality conflict between the convention organizers and the Futurians and said "We pretty nearly had it coming", continuing with "What we Futurians made very clear to the rest of New York fandom was that we thought we were better than they were. For some reason that annoyed them".
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“A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)