The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

  If the Moses children were happy in New Haven, so was their father. His department store was prospering and he had begun to buy up property in the city, including the Chamber of Commerce Building on Temple Street. But Bella disliked New Haven. She felt there was no cultural activity there worth talking about, and she felt she was many cuts above the run of the local matrons. In 1897, the Moses family moved to New York.

  Many years later, Robert Moses would say, "I didn't like New York at all. It was too big; the crowds, the noise and the confusion were terrible. I wanted to go back to New Haven, to go to Yale and to become Governor of Connecticut. I felt that way all during my years in New York. . . ."

  Emanuel Moses never let anyone know how he felt. In order to move he had to sell his store and his real estate holdings. In 1897, he was forty-six years old, a businessman who had achieved success and who had seemed to be heading for more. Moreover, he had liked running his store. He was a businessman who enjoyed being in business.

  He was to spend the rest of his life in retirement.

  In New York, Bella found a cause. It was the Settlement House movement.

  In 1897, the year the Moses family moved from New Haven, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews, who had been working eighteen hours a day for a wage of two or three rubles a week, formed Der Algemayner Idisher Arbeter Bund, the General League of Jewish Workers, in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, in a last, despairing, foredoomed attempt to improve their lot, which was even harder than that which German Jews like the Cohens and Silvermans had fled a half century earlier. In Czarist Russia, the vast ghetto known as the Pale of Settlement had become a morass of the most bitter poverty. The virtual legalization of discrimination in the May Laws of the i88o's had touched off a series of savage pogroms. When the strikes called by the cobblers, tailors and weavers who had formed the General League were broken—by bloodshed, imprisonment and torture—the Jews of Eastern Europe felt that their only hope was escape to America. They poured into New York at a rate of ninety thousand a year. By 1907, there would be close to a million Jews in the city, by 1915 a million and a half—28 percent of its population. Eastern European Jews arrived in the New World scarred by the lash and the knout, idealistic and socialistic—and dirt poor. Families were shoehorned into blocks of railroad flats, while fathers used their meager savings to stock pushcarts—and learned, all too slowly, that peddling, which had worked so well for the Seligmans, Guggenheims and Kuhns, was no longer the path to riches in America.

  To aid these immigrants, the Lower East Side settlement houses sprang up, funded and staffed largely by New York's established German-Jewish community. And Bella Moses, newly returned to New York, soon became an enthusiastic funder and staffer. She worked first at the famous Henry Street Settlement, but soon transferred her allegiance to Madison House, one of the smallest and newest of the settlement houses and therefore one in which she could play a more prominent role.

  Two characteristics of Bella's work for Madison House, which was to continue for more than thirty years, soon became apparent.

  One was a characteristic shared by many of the German Jews who traveled down to the Lower East Side in carriage and cab from the servanted enclave around Temple Emanu-El. It was a characteristic that moved one of their chroniclers to call their philanthropy "something very close to patronage." For while the motives which impelled the rich Jews to help the poor Jews were certainly in part manifestations of Zedakah, the religious principle of charity, historians have also found other motives. They have found that many German Jews—solid, respectable, Americanized—were embarrassed by the gruff, uncouth, shaggy-bearded, conspicuously un-Americanized newcomers. "Those people," the Germans felt, were loud, pushy, aggressive— "the dregs of Europe." They spoke of them in terms others applied to the Yellow Peril, the German-Jewish press lamenting the "un-American ways"

  of the "wild Asiatics." The German Jews even coined a word for their coreligionists, a word based on the fact that many Russian names end in "ki." The word was "kikes." Yet, despite their efforts to make clear the difference between themselves and the newcomers, they realized that non-Jews were lumping them all together, taking the behavior of the newcomers as the stereotype by which they thought of all Jews.

  The solution, many German Jews felt, was to make the shabby immigrants "respectable," to clean them up, dust them off and teach them to act "like Americans." For this reason, the early settlement houses, while working tirelessly to give the newcomers a better life, to provide free lodging, meals and medical care, also emphasized lectures on manners, morals and the dangers of socialism. Many German Jews seemed to feel, as one commentator put it, "as if [they were] assuming the white man's burden"; their philanthropy was that of "patron lords doling out funds to the poor, the miserable, the dependent and the patronized."

  If this description was to some extent true of the movement as a whole, it was to a great extent true of Madison House, whose official history says it was established "To help in the Americanization of residents of the Lower East Side." And to some of her relatives, the description fitted Bella's philanthropy. Undoubtedly there ran through her work a strain of genuine idealism. Deeply moved by the plight of the slum residents she met at Madison, she talked of "helping the lower classes" in terms of a holy crusade. "Public service"—service such as Madison House was furnishing—was a phrase which came more and more frequently to her lips, and she said public service was a cause to which one could happily devote one's life. But she also never forgot that the lower classes were lower. Recalls one relative: "Her attitude to these people was 'You're my children; I know best; you do what I tell you and I'll take care of you.' " Rosalie Silverman Cohen began to refer to her daughter derisively as "Lady Bountiful."

  The other characteristic of Bella's work for Madison House was one much rarer among the platoons of wealthy German-Jewish matrons on the boards of trustees of the settlement houses. Bella, graying now and often spectacled, could have passed for one of these matrons, although her clothes were plainer than most. Like them, she made liberal financial contributions —Madison House could count on her for an annual donation of about $10,000. But unlike many of the matrons, Bella also began to show an active day-after-day interest in the development of the philanthropy to which she gave money—and as the years went by, the trustees and workers of Madison House became aware that her interest was really in one particular type of development. Bella's concern was not captured by the more philosophical aspects of settlement-house work; she sat back quietly during discussions of lecture content or of the best methods of strengthening ties between immigrant parents and American-born children. But when the discussions turned to the laying out of basketball courts in the back yard of the House or the creation of a summer camp in the country for slum children, the slim little woman would lean forward and her fingers would begin to drum restlessly on the table and her soft voice would begin to inundate the

  other trustees with a flood of ideas. It was not long before the trustees came to realize that for a gray-haired housewife and mother, Bella Moses had a most unusual interest in physical construction. Behind her spectacles were the eyes of the builder.

  The eyes could glitter with enthusiasm over the smallest details. When the board agreed to provide living quarters for House staffers, it was Bella Moses who thought of providing the quarters with a lounge so the young men and women could have a place to chat together during their off hours— and it was Bella who went out and found the perfect centerpiece for the lounge, a heavy table six feet across supported by a pedestal instead of legs so that people could sit around it more easily. When the board decided to set up a temporary summer camp in Pelham Bay Park, it was Bella who thought of putting old rugs under the beds to make the tents warmer. And when, in 1900, Madison House decided to embark on its largest project, the construction of a permanent summer camp, the ideas began to pour out of Bella Moses in a steady stream.

  The camp was to be built on an old farm in a beautif
ul valley near Putnam, New York. Bella began to appear at trustees' meetings with proposed layouts of the camp and then with proposed layouts of interiors of the camp buildings. When the camp was opened, Bella and Emanuel visited it every weekend during the season. Often they would make the sixty-mile trip up from New York with their special friends on the board, Olga and Moritz Kirchberger and middle-aged bachelor Herman Wolff. When the Kirchbergers and Wolff agreed that it would be nice to spend longer periods in the camp, Bella proposed that they should all chip in and pay for the construction of a summer lodge big enough for two couples and a bachelor. And when the comfortable, solidly built structure was completed, it was Bella who suggested an agreement under which the building would become the camp's property, its residence for teen-age girls, when all five owners were dead.

  In expounding her proposals, Bella was always a lady. She never raised her voice. But veneered only thinly by her excellent manners was a certain aggressiveness—and if there was a prolonged disagreement with her proposals, the veneer could wear thin indeed. When discussing a project in which she was especially interested, Bella had always displayed impatience with other people's ideas, but in her later years on the Madison House board she seemed more and more unwilling even to consider such ideas—or, in fact, to listen to them. Says one House staffer who sat in on board meetings: "In a quiet way, Mrs. Moses could really be quite . . . impatient. She knew what she wanted and she intended to have it." Says another: "She liked to get things done. And if she had to step on toes to get them done, she'd step on toes."

  Some of Bella's proposals were based on generalized theories. You should always buy the best, she would say. Having the best equipment made people respect it—and take care of it. Some of the trustees, feeling that Madison House, perennially broke, should economize, were annoyed, but

  Bella brooked no compromise. When the head worker was furnishing the staff quarters, for example, she instructed him: "Now, there'll be no pictures dragged out of people's closets. Buy pictures—and buy pretty ones." She was convinced also of the importance of symbols. They were needed, she said, to "give the children a sense of identity," by which she meant a sense that they were part of Madison House. As soon as the camp was opened, she designed a huge "Camp Madison" banner and hung it in the dining hall.

  Once Bella got involved in a project, no task was too small for her. Camp counselors saw the slim little matron inspecting the grounds hour after hour. When the inspections disclosed flaws, she was not bashful in bringing them to people's attention. "We had been taught that in social work you should be somewhat permissive," recalls one of the workers. "She wasn't that kind of person. If she saw that the kids weren't cleaning up the bunks properly, she'd say, 'Now get busy! Get that bunk cleaned up!' If she came back and it still wasn't clean, she'd say, 'Didn't I tell you to clean it up?' " And if her hints didn't bring results, she had more direct methods. If a floor remained unswept too long, she'd grab a broom and sweep it herself. Beds were supposed to be made before breakfast, but one bunk never seemed to get them done in time. One morning, Bella said shortly, "I'll make them for you"—and did, all ten of them.

  When disputes arose among the trustees, there was one vote Bella could always count on. Emanuel Moses was a member of the board, too, although, as one trustee commented, "he was so quiet you'd hardly know it." The trustees came to know Emanuel as a likable and generous man—but they also learned that his wife did the talking for the Moses family. This was true in the Moses home as well. "The relationship between Mother and Father was simple," Paul Moses would recall. "Father did what Mother directed." If the relationship seemed similar in general to that of Bella's own parents, there were more specific parallels, too. Like Rosalie, Bella had especially strong feelings about religion: she did not believe in it. She did not want her sons to be circumcised, to be bar-mitzvah—or to have any training whatsoever in the Jewish faith. She wanted her family to be members of the Society for Ethical Culture. Her husband was more religious, but Bella's feelings were the ones which prevailed, as her mother's had prevailed. When Rosalie had joined the Society for Ethical Culture, Bernhard had joined, too. When Bella joined the Society, so did Emanuel.

  Bella Moses' children grew up in snug luxury. The family lived at 20 East Forty-sixth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, in the heartland of the German-Jewish elite. The neighborhood was one of lavish private homes. The Seligman house was almost directly across the street from the Moseses', and two doors down lived the Lehmans; their youngest child, Herbert, was a student at Williams College. It was a neighborhood in which the children all knew one

  another; they visited one another's homes, so alike with the varnished oak and black-walnut paneling, red damask and green repp, heavy-legged, plump-cushioned sofas, gold-fringed lamps and Dresden figurines. They played together in Central Park while private tutors stood sentry duty, and, the boys wearing white gloves, attended Viola Wolff's dancing classes together.

  The house in which the Moses children were raised—among oak paneling and red damask—was the one in which their mother had lived when she was a girl; when Bernhard Cohen died, he had left it to Bella in his will, and when she decided that the Moses family would move back to New York, her mother had been happy to move out of the house and into the suite at the Windsor a block away. The house was a large brownstone— five stories and a basement—but there was plenty of money to run it; if the Moseses were not nearly as rich as the Lehmans, the Seligmans or other Grand Dukes such as the Schiffs, they were, in turn-of-the-century terms, rich enough; between Bella's share of her father's estate and the sale of Emanuel's New Haven interests, the family had assets of about $1,200,000. Bella was able to command an establishment that included an extremely talented German cook and three maids, including a long-time retainer known as "Old Annie."

  The two Moses boys slept in custom-made beds, six feet six inches long, on hair mattresses woven to order by the most famous mattressmaker in New York, C. P. Rogers. They slept in the same room again, but adjoining their New York bedroom was their own library-study, its walls lined with books. Once Paul counted them; there were more than two thousand. Dinner was served—off the finest Haviland china—in a paneled dining room along one wall of which stood a tremendous sideboard bearing gleaming crystal decanters. After dinner, the family would repair to the library, whose walls were covered with Rembrandt and Diirer prints, and Old Annie would pour coffee from a silver coffeepot into French demitasse cups—each cup a different bright color—that cost twenty-four dollars apiece.

  In the summer, there were trips to Europe, or Grannie Cohen might rent a summer place in Elberon, one of the expensive resort towns along the New Jersey shore that had become known collectively as the "Jewish Newport." Grannie's house would be much smaller than the Lewisohns' Elberon castle on a hill, of course, but it would be big and roomy. The Moseses wouldn't travel down from New York by private railroad car as did the Schiffs, but they did have a touring car and chauffeur. And the boys would have a wonderful time.

  They always had a wonderful time with Grannie Cohen. If she had, in the opinion of some, not been overly attentive to her own children, she doted on her grandchildren. Every spring, as soon as the weather turned warm, she would take Robert and Paul on a weekend to Atlantic City, purchasing the railroad tickets by the elbowing method while the two little boys watched the imperious old lady with awe. After checking into a hotel, with the manager himself showing her to her room, she would take the boys out along the Boardwalk and cram their pockets full of tickets to the thrill rides at Young's Pier and Hyler's. And when the boys rode the roller coasters or

  the loop-the-loop, they would not be unaccompanied. Sitting between them, holding tight to her huge hat, would be Rosalie Silverman Cohen, then in her late seventies, laughing with glee.

  Bella was strict with her children. Running a taut house, she ordered every aspect of their lives. Their advice was not solicited—even about their own clothes. Once, opening a closet to get their t
uxedos for a party, they found that the dress suits had disappeared and new ones had been hung in their places. When they inquired, Old Annie explained that their mother had decided that the old ones were no longer "suitable." On one visit to Brooks Brothers, Paul asked for a green cap; his mother ordered a red one—for no reason that he could see except that he had asked for green.

  Bella was particularly interested in the boys' education. She selected as their tutors young men with outstanding credentials; the boys' favorite, for example, had just returned from Oxford, where he had taken a double first in classics and literary humanities. When Paul was thirteen, Robert twelve and Edna nine, the children were enrolled in the Ethical Culture School. After two years, the boys were transferred to the Dwight School for two years and then were sent to board for a year at one of the most expensive of college preparatory schools, the Mohegan Lake Academy near Poughkeepsie, before they went on to college, Paul to Princeton and Robert, who had never forgotten his desire to return to New Haven, to Yale.

  Even while the boys were at Ethical Culture and Dwight, Bella hired tutors to give them additional instruction. And she furnished still other instruction herself, assigning them books by Laurence Sterne and other of her favorite authors to read, and then holding long discussions with them—and with Edna when she was old enough—about the books' meaning. Casually reading a passage, she would suddenly turn to one of the children and ask, "What's that mean?" "And when she asked that," Paul would recall more than half a century later, "you had better know." Even while the children were playing, they were reminded of the importance of good English. If one of them mispronounced a word, down the stairs would come their mother's voice saying, "What was that? What was that?"