I spent many days and weeks, terrible days and weeks, walking around that slum.
I had never, in my sheltered middle-class life, descended so deeply into the realms of despair. When I entered these buildings, on the floors of their lobbies would be piles of animal or human feces, and raw garbage spilling out of broken bags; the floors were covered so thickly with shards of broken glass that my feet would crunch on it as I walked. The walls would have been broken open and the pipes ripped out, for sale by junkies. An atmosphere of fear hung over East Tremont, of course. I remember one elderly man, with a kindly face, sitting on a stoop; “You’re going to be out of here by dark, aren’t you?” he asked me. When he feared he hadn’t made himself clear enough, he added, “Don’t be around this place after dark!” I remember the people who lived in these buildings: almost all were black or Hispanic. Wanting to interview them to find out what living in East Tremont was like, I would knock on the doors of apartments. Over and over again, in my recollection, the same scene would be repeated. At my knock, there would be a scurry of children’s feet behind the door, but no reply. If I persisted in my knocking, I would hear footsteps coming to the door, and then a voice—in my recollection it was always the voice of a little boy—would ask, through the closed door, the same question: “Are you the man from the welfare?” Usually, when I said I wasn’t, the door wouldn’t be opened. Sometimes, however, it was, and I would be allowed inside—and sometimes that was worse. To this day, I see, in my mind, a black woman, about thirty years old, sitting with several little children around her; no matter what question I asked, she replied, “I’ve got to get my kids out of here. I’ve got to get my kids out of here.”
If the days I spent interviewing residents of the great East Tremont slum were terrible, the days I spent interviewing former residents of East Tremont—people who had lived there before it became a slum—weren’t much better. These people had lived in East Tremont when it had been a neighborhood, their neighborhood, and they had been driven away by Robert Moses, either by the demolition of their homes or by the neighborhood’s consequent deterioration. Their stories, too, were part of the human cost of this highway; and I wanted to find as many of them as possible and interview them.
I found them in a great variety of locales. Some—the luckiest or the most affluent ones—had found apartments in sterile high-rise middle-class housing developments in far reaches of the Bronx. Some, less affluent, were living in small—in many cases, too small—apartments in various neighborhoods in the Bronx or in Queens or in Brooklyn. Others were living with their children in the Westchester or Long Island suburbs. And still others, the unluckiest, had come to rest in “the projects,” the city’s immense, low-income, and quite dangerous public housing.
I asked these couples—or widows or widowers—to compare their present lives with the lives they had had in East Tremont, and the general picture that emerged from their answers was a sense of profound, irremediable loss, a sense that they had lost something—physical closeness to family, to friends, to stores where the owners knew you, to synagogues where the rabbi had said Kaddish for your parents (and perhaps even your grandparents) as he would one day say Kaddish for you, to the crowded benches on Southern Boulevard where your children played baseball while you played chess: a feeling of togetherness, a sense of community that was very precious, and that they knew they would never find again.
And when I tried, just briefly and very gingerly, to raise the issue of human costs with Robert Moses, there was a certain offhandedness in his reply.
The day before this interview, I had spent several hours talking to an elderly couple who were living in a very small apartment in another section of the Bronx. When I asked them how life was now, there had been a long pause, and then the wife had said, “Lonely.” There had been a silence; there wasn’t too much I could say to that. And then the husband had chimed in with a word, and it was the same word: “Lonely.”
Raising the subject of East Tremont with Commissioner Moses, I asked him the most innocuous question I could think of: Wasn’t it more difficult to build an expressway in the city rather than a parkway in the country? He waved his hand dismissively: “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “There are more people in the way—that’s all. There’s very little real hardship in the thing. There’s a little discomfort, and even that is greatly exaggerated.”
Then I asked him if he had ever been worried about losing to the people up there—of having to change his route to save their homes.
“Nah,” he said, and I can still hear the scorn in his voice as he said it—scorn for those who had fought him, and scorn for me, who had thought it necessary to ask about them. “Nah, nobody could have stopped it.” In fact, he said, the opposition hadn’t really been much trouble at all. “[They] just stirred up the animals there. But I just stood pat, that’s all.” He looked at me very hard to make sure I understood, and, intending to return to the subject in more depth at some future date, I said that I did.
* * *
—
DURING THOSE SAME MONTHS in which I was interviewing Robert Moses, however, I was also going through papers: the files of Governors Alfred E. Smith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of Fiorello La Guardia and other mayors; and the private papers of reformers, urban planners, and politicians who had been involved with Moses in one way or another, years or decades before.
Some of the files had lain untouched for decades, since, at the end of a governorship or a mayoralty or a private career, they had been packed away: Some of the papers of Al Smith had been kept in envelopes, and occasionally when I opened an envelope and unfolded the pages within, they crumbled in my hand, so long had it been since they had been unfolded. And while much of what Robert Moses had been telling me not only was fascinating but was confirmed by the information in those files, on some points—including some crucial points—there were rather sharp discrepancies between his accounts and the written record, so it was necessary for me to start asking him to reconcile his account with that record.
One striking discrepancy concerned two curves in the Northern State Parkway, which Robert Moses had been building eastward out through Nassau and Suffolk Counties in 1929 and 1930, during Roosevelt’s governorship. In two spots—Old Westbury, in Nassau County, and Dix Hills, in Suffolk County—the parkway swerved inexplicably south toward the middle of the island before, on the far, or eastern, side of those areas, it curved back and resumed its eastward course. Moses, who during his entire career had eloquently and persuasively portrayed himself as uncompromising—as a public servant who was above politics and would never compromise with what he felt was right—had used the Northern State Parkway to demonstrate that point in his interviews with me. He had told me, quite eloquently, that its route was the one he had originally chosen, that he had refused to compromise over that route—a statement that, of course, meant that the two curves had always been planned.
In going through files, however, I had come across maps showing the proposed parkway without those curves—maps on which the parkway, in a substantially different route from the one it actually followed, ran in a generally straight line through the beautiful hills in the northern part of Long Island. And in Roosevelt’s papers I had also come across a series of letters and telegrams that had been sent to him during 1929, the first year of his governorship.
One letter was from Grenville Clark, a noted attorney, who was representing the Old Westbury robber barons in their fight to keep Moses’ parkway, and the city masses the barons despised, away from their estates. It referred, in obscure terms, to an arrangement between Moses and the multimillionaire Otto Kahn, which, Clark wrote, on March 29, 1929, if “finally brought to light will not make a creditable chapter in the history of this State.” Other letters and telegrams I came across, in various files, showed that Clark was not exaggerating. They revealed that the Northern State Parkway had originally been supposed to run through
the middle of an eighteen-hole private golf course that Kahn had constructed for his pleasure on his Dix Hills estate. In 1926, the legislature was refusing to allocate funds to Moses for any purposes connected with the parkway, so that he didn’t even have enough money for surveys. The letters showed that Kahn had offered to secretly donate $10,000 to the Park Commission for surveys, provided that some of the surveys found a new route for the parkway—one that would not cross his estate at all. And they revealed that Moses had secretly accepted the money, had used it for surveys, and had indeed found a new route—one that avoided Kahn’s estate. South of Kahn’s estate lay the estates of other powerful robber barons, so the route was shifted south again—more than three miles south—so that it ran down the center of Long Island, through a group of small farms.
Clark delivered an ultimatum to Roosevelt, telling the governor that if the parkway’s route was not changed to avoid both estate areas, in Old Westbury as well as Dix Hills, the public would be informed of how a millionaire had given $10,000 to keep his private golf course untouched and how Moses had accepted the money and used it to throw farmers off their land. Moses thereupon agreed to a “compromise,” which was not really a compromise at all but a complete surrender, under which the parkway would make the two southward curves, so that it would avoid the estate areas, and under which Moses also agreed that instead of building parks along and at the end of the Northern State Parkway, as he had originally planned, there would not be a single park anywhere along that parkway, or anywhere in the section of the North Shore that the barons controlled, so that their Gold Coast would remain undefiled by the city masses. And, in return, the Kahn-Moses transaction was kept secret—and it had remained secret, when I came upon it, for almost forty years.
When the time came for my seventh interview with Robert Moses—on April 27, 1968—I knew I could no longer postpone asking him about the arrangement with Otto Kahn. And there were many other questions that my research had raised about which I had to ask him—hundreds of questions, really.
I got to ask him only one, however.
I worded my first question about Kahn and the Northern State Parkway as politely—and, indeed, as obliquely—as possible, but Robert Moses’ mind worked very fast, and I was later to conclude that with my very first mention of Kahn’s name he knew that I had seen the crucial letters and telegrams. I could see his eyes harden. There was not a word of verbal reaction; he simply changed the subject and, very shortly thereafter, said he would have to cut the interview short that day.
Every time, during the remaining five years I was working on The Power Broker, that I tried to arrange another interview, his secretaries said he was busy; and I never talked to him again.
* * *
—
WHILE MY INTERVIEWS with Moses were over, however, my research was not. I decided to try to find the farmers through whose land the parkway had finally run, to see if they could cast any additional light on the subject.
Finding them was not easy: Though the huge estates of the great barons were all labeled by name on Moses’ maps (famous names: not only Kahn but Whitney, Vanderbilt, Phipps, and Morgan, among others), the farms, being much smaller, appeared on the map as mere dots or slivers; there wouldn’t have been room for names even if someone had wanted to put them there. And during the forty years since their land had been taken most of the farmers had died or moved away. When I did find them—to be more accurate, when we found them: Ina, the only researcher I had on The Power Broker (and the only researcher I have had on all my books), and I each tracked down several of the farmers or their children—I didn’t learn anything new about the Kahn-Moses transaction. In fact, they had never heard of it; they believed that the parkway had come through their farms solely because of the reason that Moses’ representatives had given them—that engineering considerations made the route the only one feasible.
I did, however, learn about them.
I will never forget talking to Helen Roth, the widow of one of those farmers, James J. Roth, and to her son, Jimmy.
As I was asking Mrs. Roth and her son about the parkway’s route, Jimmy started talking also about the parkway’s effect—on their lives—and after a while his mother, in a very soft voice, chimed in.
When James and Helen Roth bought their farm—forty-nine acres in Dix Hills—in 1922, much of it had been covered with woods, and all of it had been rocky. It had had to be cleared, and since Roth’s team of horses couldn’t budge many of the stumps, he—and, many times, his wife—pulled beside their horses, hauling at the ropes, while their son, as soon as, at the age of five, he was old enough to do so, handled the team, sitting on one of the horses and kicking him forward. By 1927, however, the land was finally cleared, and despite their discovery that the soil on the southern fifteen acres of the farm would never be any good for planting, the remaining thirty-four acres were rich and fertile. Life was grueling for all three members of the family: there was no money for a hired man. At harvest time, Roth, who had been up before dawn working in the fields, would load up one of his two wagons and drive to market while Helen and Jimmy loaded the other. Every minute mattered to a man trying to work thirty-four acres without a hired man, and so when Roth returned he would hurriedly unharness the team, hitch it to the loaded wagon, and drive to market while Helen and Jimmy reloaded the first wagon. But by 1927 the farm had finally begun to pay. “We felt pretty secure,” Jimmy said. “We had a nice farm. In those days, a farm wasn’t just real estate, like it is now. In those days, a farm was your living. It was your home. And we had a nice farm.”
And then, in 1927, after Moses struck his deal with Otto Kahn, one of Moses’ aides drove up to the Roths’ farm one day and told them that the Long Island State Park Commission was condemning fourteen acres from the center of the farm for the Northern State Parkway. Taking fourteen acres from the farm’s center meant taking fourteen of the farm’s only thirty-four fertile acres. And cutting the farm in half with a parkway meant that getting from one half of the farm to the other would require driving off the farm to the nearest road that crossed the parkway; thereby making it far more difficult to work the part of the farm that remained. There was, however, a solution that would not hurt the Roths nearly so much: moving the parkway four hundred feet south—less than a tenth of a mile. If the Long Island State Park Commission did that, the land taken would be taken from the barren part of the farm, and, since that land wasn’t worked much anyway, the splitting of the farm by the parkway wouldn’t matter nearly so much.
James Roth pleaded with Moses’ representative to take that route. All he was asking, he said, was that the road be moved less than a tenth of a mile; that wouldn’t matter to drivers using the road—and it would lessen the harm not only to his farm but to all the other farms involved. Moses refused even to consider the plea, saying that the route had been determined by engineering considerations that could not possibly be changed.
“My father was really rocked by this,” recalled Jimmy Roth, who as a little boy had sat on a horse watching his father’s and mother’s backs bent into the ropes. “And I don’t know that I blame him. I’ll tell you—my father and mother worked very hard on that place, and made something out of it, and then someone just cut it in two.” The fourteen acres were condemned; the condemnation award “never came to much,” Mrs. Roth said. And since the farm now consisted of two separate, rather small pieces instead of a single big one, they couldn’t even sell it.
Working the farm, moreover, became much harder. It took the Roths at least twenty-five minutes to get their team to the nearest road that crossed the parkway and then double back to plow the other side of the farm. Each round-trip took about fifty minutes, and these were fifty-minute segments chopped out of the life of a man to whom every minute counted. “It was quite a ways,” Mrs. Roth said, in her quiet voice. “It was quite a ways for a man who was working hard already.”
Many oth
er farms—twenty-one in the Dix Hills area alone (I don’t think I ever counted the ones in the Old Westbury area, but there seem to have been more than twenty-one there)—were similarly ruined by the Northern State Parkway: To those farmers, the day they heard that “the road was coming” would always be remembered as a day of tragedy. One consideration alone made the tragedy more bearable to them—their belief that it was necessary, that the route of the parkway had been determined by those ineluctable engineering considerations. But I knew, from the telegrams and letters, that it hadn’t been necessary at all. It would, in fact, have been easy to move the parkway. Besides, for men with power or the money to buy power, Robert Moses had already moved it. It was running across James Roth’s farm only because Otto Kahn hadn’t wanted it to run across his golf course, and could pay to make sure it wouldn’t, and because the Whitneys and the Morgans had power that Moses had decided to accommodate rather than challenge. “For men of wealth and influence,” I was to write, Moses “had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one-tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot.”
I can’t honestly say, particularly after so many years have passed, that it was during my conversations with the farmers and with the people of East Tremont that my concept of the kind of book I wanted to write changed. I don’t really remember exactly when it changed. But these conversations with the Long Island farmers had brought home to me in a new way the fact that a change on a map—Robert Moses’ pencil going one way instead of another, not because of engineering considerations but because of calculations in which the key factor was power—had had profound consequences on the lives of men and women like those farmers whose homes were just tiny dots on Moses’ big maps. I had set out to write about political power by writing about one man, keeping the focus, within the context of his times, on him. I now came to believe that the focus should be widened, to show not just the life of the wielder of power but the lives on whom, and for whom, it was wielded; not to show those lives in the same detail, of course, but in sufficient detail to enable the reader to empathize with the consequences of power—the consequences of government, really—on the lives of its citizens, for good and for ill. To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.
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