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

by Caro, Robert A

  Edna did not flourish in this atmosphere. An extremely plain, shy girl, she became more and more quiet and withdrawn. But everybody exclaimed over Bella's two boys. Just over a year apart in age, in appearance they might almost have been twins. They were tall—Paul an even six feet, Robert an inch taller—and graceful and very slim, although Robert was wiry and strong and had wide shoulders and wrists that hinted at a frame that would one day be powerful. Their height and the darkness of their hair and skin made them resemble their father, but the father's somewhat broad features had been refined in the boys so that they were stunningly handsome, with high cheekbones and slim, almost aquiline noses to go with full, sensual lips and wide, deep, liquid gray eyes. While the father's skin was dark, the blood of Seville ran even closer to the surface in his sons, making their faces olive-colored, almost swarthy backdrops for smiles that everyone

  agreed were charming. And where the father's movements were deliberate and calm, theirs were flashing and the set of their heads was haughty. If Paul was quicker to smile, both boys were equally quick to anger; they had tempers that went with the haughtiness. They looked like two young, handsome, passionate Spanish grandees set down by mistake in the stodgy red damask of Forty-sixth Street.

  And the boys' minds were as remarkable as their looks. Teachers at the schools they attended told Bella with a unanimity that must have become almost monotonous that her sons were brilliant. And they were popular, not only with girls, who were attracted by their quick wit as well as by their looks, but with the boys with whom they went to school, although Paul was the more popular—Robert was more of a loner. Robert was interested in athletics, but not in sports which required him to be part of a team. He preferred, instead, gymnastics, swimming and track, sports in which the athlete competes alone. In track, he chose the loneliest of events, the crosscountry run.

  If the handsome, sparkling brothers made quite a picture in the library after dinner, framed by dark wood and Rembrandts, black-uniformed Old Annie hovering behind them with silver service as they chatted with mother, father and sister over demitasse, the picture was complemented by conversation that was the quick play of quick minds, wit striking fire from wit. If there were no visitors present, Edna joined in. The father, of course, was the outsider. It was not that anyone was actually rude to him, relatives and friends would recall. His family's attitude was, rather, amiably patronizing. In the words of one visitor, "It was the kind of thing where, when Emanuel said something, the kids would say good-naturedly, 'Oh, Dad! Oh, Father!' And then they'd go right on with what they had been saying. It was as if everyone, including him, had sort of accepted the fact that he had nothing to contribute." After he moved to New York, Emanuel Moses did a lot of reading. "Reading," he would often say, "is the solace of old age."

  Relatives and friends began to notice that within this family circle, an inner circle was forming. It was Robert Moses and his mother. More and more, within the family, they formed a small, increasingly private clique. More and more, it became apparent that Robert was his mother's favorite. This favoritism was expressed with the intensity that characterized everything Bella did. All her children were spoiled, spoiled by maids and cooks and grandmother, spoiled by wealth. But in Robert's case, the spoiling was also done by his mother. Increasingly, Bella Moses began to cater to her younger son's every whim. "You would never think of this word in connection with Bella," one relative says. "But the only word you could use to describe her treatment of Robert was 'doting.' "

  No one was sure of the explanation. Relatives speculated that it was because Bella's slashing, incisive mind had found in Robert a mind with like qualities. Perhaps this was part of the explanation, but it ignored the fact that her other son possessed the same qualities. Perhaps another part of the explanation was that when the family discussions grew especially lively, Robert knew where to stop. On issues about which Bella felt especially

  strongly, Paul would often disagree with his mother. Robert never did. And Bella Moses, after all, was not a woman who liked to be disagreed with.

  And part of the explanation, almost certainly, was that Robert tendered his mother the sincerest form of flattery. If Bella cherished the ideal of public service, public service conceived of in idealistic, almost Platonic terms, this ideal was becoming the theme of more and more of Robert's conversation, too. More and more, in the after-dinner chats in the library, Robert began to talk about dedicating his life to "helping people."

  The imitation went beyond enunciation of ideals. People who had classified as a manifestation of supreme and deep-rooted arrogance Bella's refusal to be swayed by—or, in later years, even to listen at length to—the opinions of others, now began to notice this same arrogance in Robert. They noticed also that, increasingly, the rhythms of Robert's voice echoed the sharpness of his mother's sallies. The tall, handsome young man even adopted—consciously or unconsciously—a distinctive pose favored by the graying, bespectacled, plain little woman, an unusual tilt of the head. When a person disagreed with Bella, she had a way of leaning her head back on her neck and staring at the disagreer through the bottom of her spectacles with her eyes half closed, quizzical and skeptical. People began to notice that, while Robert Moses did not wear glasses, he was beginning to adopt, in arguments, the same tilt of the head.

  In later decades, when Robert Moses was famous almost as much for his personality as for his achievements, observers would marvel at the depth and degree of his outspokenness, stubbornness, aggressiveness and arrogance. They would wonder at the origin of the mold in which he had been formed in so hard a cast. But relatives and friends of the Moses family never wondered. Whatever it was that made Robert Moses the way he was, they knew, whatever the quality that had shaped an unusual—in some ways unique— personality, the quality was one that they had watched being passed, like a family heirloom, from Robert Moses' grandmother to his mother to him. "Robert Moses," these people would say, "is Bella Moses' son."

  tening to President Arthur Twining Hadley's opening address, he was two years younger than most of his classmates. Men from the same prep school generally roomed together as freshmen, but while the five other men in 1909 from Mohegan Lake "were fond of Bob, they kind of regarded him," in the words of a classmate, "as a young boy"—and they didn't invite him to room with them. In his freshman year, he boarded alone in a doctor's house near the campus; if he participated in any extracurricular activities, or linked his arms with classmates to dance down Chapel Street and cheer Ted Coy for his three touchdowns against Princeton, or if he came rushing out of his room at the cry of "Riot!" to help freshmen overturn trolley cars and pelt policemen with water bombs, nobody noticed him. Boys selected their sophomore roommates from the friends they had made at Yale; in his sophomore year, Bob Moses again roomed alone, this time in a dormitory. Lonely, he frequently hung around the suite in another dormitory in which the Mohegan Lake alumni lived. Classmates remember him in his first two years as "diffident," "quiet" and "shy." One of the wealthy prep-school graduates who roomed in the big, friendly suites in Vanderbilt, most prestigious of the dormitories, would recall him as "almost a recluse."

  At night, when the other students on his floor began to roughhouse, Moses would quietly close his door. Alone in his room, he would write poems—dreamy-eyed romances and imitations of Walter Pater and Swinburne. And he would read. When he found a subject that interested him, he would clear the library shelves of books on the subject, lug them back to his room, stack them on his desk and read through the stack until it was finished.

  Ironically, it was the reading and writing he did behind the door closed against his classmates' shouts that first made them take an interest in him. There was on the campuses of that era a respect for scholarliness and brilliance, and Bob Moses' classmates slowly began to realize the extent to which he possessed these qualities. One of the members of the Mohegan Lake suite says: "I liked Bob from the first, but in the beginning it was a sort of paternal feeling. When he'd come around
to the room, he'd seem so young and lost. But then I began to be attracted to him for his mind. I loved Latin; I got very high marks in it, but I knew just enough Latin to know that Bob was on a level way above mine. He really knew Latin. I started talking to him—and I became aware of a quality of mind that was exceptional. He was brilliant. I liked talking to him, and I became friendly with him. And that was what happened between Moses and a lot of people; by the end of sophomore year or the beginning of junior year, people were beginning to talk about him. He became admired for his scholarship—and all of a sudden we noticed he was coming around to our suite less and less. He had gotten friends of his own."

  Moses began to submit his poetry for publication, not to the famous Yale Literary Magazine, where Leonard Bacon and cadaverous, freckle-faced, red-haired Sinclair Lewis were among the classmates competing for places on the board, but to a newer, less prestigious publication—the Yale Courant. Encouraged by the acceptance of a poem for the December 1907

  issue, he contributed more poems and several short stories, and when, in March 1908, the new Courant editorial board was selected, he was on it.

  He also joined the Yale swimming team. Swimming occupied approximately the same position in relation to other sports at Yale as the Courant did to the Lit. Intercollegiate competition in the sport had begun only a few years before, and few colleges had swimming teams. A highlight of meets was still an event called the "plunge for distance," in which the winner was the competitor who, after diving into the pool, could travel the farthest without moving his arms or legs. At Yale, the team practiced—in an ancient, dank, low-ceilinged, too-short pool—only three times a week. The Yale Daily News reported the results of the meets—when it reported them at all—at the very end of the list of sports results, after even fencing and wrestling, and thanks to the influence of Walter Camp, who felt that the famous Yale "Y" should be worn only by football, hockey and baseball players—he wasn't too sure about hockey and baseball—swimmers were eligible only for a "Ysa," an insignia standing for "Yale Swimming Association."

  Moses joined the swimming team as a sophomore. If he ever won a race, the victory was not reported in the News. But he was known as a hard worker in practice and a fierce competitor in meets, and he could be counted upon for second- or third-place points in either the fifty-yard or the hundred-yard crawl. As a junior, Moses was elected manager, an honor which entitled him to arrange meets and buy the team's train tickets.

  Swimming and the Courant enabled Bob Moses to broaden his acquaintance at Yale. And the classmates who got to know him began to see something special in the tall, slim Jew from New York, very handsome in the required high, rounded collar, who had the huge, emotional eyes and earnest, passionate manner of the idealist, the poet, the lover (in the phrase they learned in a popular course on Walter Pater) of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

  The eyes and the manner, these classmates learned, were not misleading. Not only was Bob Moses a poet but his poems were poems like the dreamy-eyed "Song of the Arctic Nereid, a hymn to the nymphs of the sea," or "Fragments from the French":

  Fair night! Fair night!

  Afar the day has fled;

  Fair night! Fair night!

  A torch divine o'erhead

  God's goodness flames eternal and abides

  Our erring footsteps keeps and, watching, guides,

  Fair night! Fair night!

  To-morrow! But is the morrow sure

  To-morrow! The lashes slumber lure; Ah! Shall we greet the dawning day, Perchance in vain we longing say,

  To-morrow!

  And the idealism was deep. Not only had Bob Moses read most of Pater; he believed in what he had read. He loved learning genuinely and for its own sake. If he was competitive in swimming, he wasn't in classroom work. He wasn't uninterested in marks, but he wasn't especially concerned about them either. He spent night after night behind a closed door reading, but his friends began to realize that the reading was not for grades; sometimes they would look at the stack of books on his desk and not one of them had anything to do with the courses he was taking; they were there because they interested him. And their subjects covered a wide spectrum of knowledge; if Moses seemed particularly fascinated by literature and history, he was also reading everything he could find on the history of art. One of his friends was taking German; he came across a phrase one day that seemed to fit Bob Moses— durstig Geist. Moses did indeed, the friend said, have a "thirsty mind."

  After his sophomore year, one of his new friends went with Moses to Europe. Many college men spent their summers in Europe in the halcyon days before the Great War, but most of them spent their eight weeks abroad in the lobbies of the fashionable hotels of Paris, Rome and Geneva, striking up conversations, under the indulgent eyes of chaperons, with young ladies making their Grand Tours. Moses, the friend reported on their return to Yale, bounded out of bed early in the morning to be at museums when they opened, and he stayed in the museums all day. In Venice, which became his favorite European city, he spent hours in front of the famous Veronese frescoes and Michelangelo statues—and more hours searching out frescoes and statues that his companion had never heard of but about which Moses, in those long nights behind the closed door, had learned every detail.

  Moses' greatest enthusiasm was reserved for a more famous work of art—the "Mona Lisa." He seemed riveted to the floor of the Louvre in front of the painting. When he got back to Yale in the fall, he wrote poems about it, including one, apparently done in the style of Swinburne's "Dolores," that called her "Our Lady Divine."

  In literature his greatest enthusiasm was for Samuel Johnson. Chauncey Brewster Tinker, a young professor whose empathy for Johnson's era was reflected in an almost eighteenth-century courtesy and insistence on form but whose austerity was burned away on the lecture platform by what one colleague called "the white fire of the poet," made his "Johnson and His Circle" course "a journey in a beautiful and exciting country." Wandering off on his own, Bob Moses explored that country's byways. The assigned reading included excerpts from Boswell's biography of Johnson; Moses read the book complete, became interested in biography and proceeded to read stacks of biographies as well as books on the nature of that genre.

  His friends began to see that Moses' idealism was not confined to the printed page. If the more perceptive members of his class realized that "democracy of talent" was a false description of life at Yale, Moses had specific ideas on how to make the slogan a reality. The suggestion that class officers be chosen on merit rather than on the basis of fraternity membership was not the only remedy for Yale's social ossification which Moses proposed,

  both in late-evening bull sessions and in the Courant. He was also, for instance, insistent that some sort of "social recognition" should be given for scholastic achievement. And, in at least- one instance, he proved his willingness to fight for his ideals.

  Moses not only enjoyed swimming himself; he was convinced that the sport should receive more emphasis at Yale because, as a classmate put it, "he regarded [it] as something in which every undergraduate could take pleasure, as contrasted with the gladiatorial sports like football and baseball." He had the same feeling about other minor sports, such as tennis, track, golf, gymnastics, fencing, shooting and wrestling, all of which had, like swimming, been only recently incorporated into the intercollegiate athletic scene. His enthusiasm about them reached such a peak, in fact, that his friends jokingly began to call him "the minor sport."

  Every attempt to upgrade such sports at Yale had run head on into the frenzy over football—it was the era when gridiron heroes like Ted Coy and Tad Jones were the campus gods, when the winner of the Big Three title was national champion, when every victory was celebrated with bonfires and torchlight parades down Chapel Street—and into the personal opposition of Camp, who, in addition to being first among the Eli football pantheon, had the more practical advantage of being treasurer of the Athletic Union. With the Yale Bowl that was his dream drawing ever clo
ser to reality, Camp had been squirreling away the annual surplus of the Union with such enthusiasm that it had already reached $120,000, and he was not about to turn any of it over to the sports he derided.

  Bearding Camp in his suite at the New Haven House, Moses suggested a distribution of some of the football surplus among the minor sports. Camp flatly refused to give a nickel.

  Another undergraduate might have left quietly. Recalling the scene, Moses was to say: "What you have to understand is what a colossal influence he had; he dominated all of athletics there; his word was absolutely law." But this undergraduate, before leaving, told Camp that someday the minor sports would be just as important on the intercollegiate scene as baseball and hockey. And although Camp treated the prediction as "kind of a joke," he was soon to stop laughing. For Moses refused to let the matter drop.

  In editorials in the Courant and the Yale Daily News, Moses attacked with a directness unusual in college publications of the day. Pointing out that almost as many men participated in minor as in major sports, Moses accused Yale's "football managers"—a euphemism understood perfectly by the Yale community—of being "unjust" to "one-half of Yale athletics."

  Camp let it be known that he was personally offended. The editorials continued. Dean "Baldy" Wright called Moses to his office for a friendly but pointed discussion. The editorials continued. And when Moses came up with a plan to create a Minor Sports Association that would hold a single fund-raising drive, raise $3,500, and, through an executive committee composed of the sports' managers, distribute it among the various teams according to their needs, the dean hastily gave the association permission to appeal to