them "efficient" and "economic," to insure that the city would get far more for each dollar spent than in the past, and would therefore be financially more able to do what the voters desired.
Their philosophy, seemingly so elementary, was new in 1907. Previously, in New York and in all American cities, reform crusades had been of the "throw the rascals out" variety; stung to fury by particularly blatant corruption, "Good Government" elements would rise up, oust the reigning political bosses and seat in the mayor's chair a hero who they hoped would "save" the city. But salvation was invariably denied because the administrative systems of cities were so chaotic that change in the direction of government was all but impossible. "Budget," for example, was only a dictionary word; in turn-of-the-century America, not a single city possessed one. Allocating money with reference to the total amount available and to the relative urgency of the needs of the various city departments was therefore impossible. Scientific accounting techniques, only recently incorporated into American business, had never been adapted to government, so uepartmental requests for appropriations were not itemized and therefore items could not be compared with comparable expenditures in the past. In New York, for example, the Board of Estimate made appropriations without even checking to see if there was, or would be, sufficient money available in the city's treasury to cover them; if money ran out, the Board simply issued revenue bonds to make up the difference. Departmental requests to the Board were lump-sum requests which showed in only the most general way how the departments proposed to spend the money they were asking for. Unable to analyze these requests, the Board simply cut each by the same, predetermined percentage, a procedure which some departments circumvented by requesting five times as much money as they really needed.
Given such administrative chaos, the careers of the reform heroes were predictable. In city after city, they failed to make an appreciable dent in municipal problems and, after a term or two, the rascals they had thrown out were back in. In New York, where the businessmen reformers of the Citizens Union had thrust Columbia University President Seth Low into the mayoralty in 1902, Tammany had taken back City Hall in 1904. Said Bruere: "There was the constant futile search for the great administrator, great by instinct and personality. He wasn't found because he doesn't exist. A great administrator needs the tools and techniques of sound administration." The search, he said, "should not be so much for good men as for these good tools and techniques; the idea should be not so much to jail the grafters as to install [in government] business systems which will make grafting difficult." Before government could become humanitarian, he said, it must become businesslike.
The city's businessmen listened to the ABC and put up the money so they could go to work.
Confident that if the citizenry only knew the facts about government it would take the right steps, the three young men decided first to determine and disseminate such facts. Momentarily stymied by the refusal of notoriously corrupt Manhattan Borough President John F. Ahearn to show them his
records, they began to check records that could not be hidden—the construction contract specifications that borough presidents were required by law to publish in newspapers—to see if the specifications were being followed. Construction workers began to notice the presence of young men in high collars, vests and bowler hats who spent whole days performing such inexplicable maneuvers as counting bags of cement. When the count was finished, the young men had discovered—and proved—that the city had, in collusion with favored contractors, paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars of supplies—supplies such as bags of cement—that had never been delivered. The Bureau of Municipal Research published its first report, How Manhattan Is Governed.
In the time-honored ploy of politicians whose party is in power, Ahearn demanded an official investigation, assuming that it would be conducted by Tammany faithful. Unknown to him, however, Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr., had just decided to break with Tammany. McClellan gave Ahearn the investigation he had asked for—but the man appointed to conduct it was an independent twenty-eight-year-old Yale graduate and lawyer, John Purroy Mitchel. Mitchel confirmed the Bureau's findings. City Club President George McAneny, ignoring Tammany pressures on his business, volunteered to deliver Mitchel's report personally to Governor Hughes with his own endorsement, and Hughes summoned Ahearn to public hearings in Albany. At the hearings, Ahearn said he didn't know anything about the contracts; Hughes said he should have—and removed him from office. As the businessmen reformers hastily established a fund to make the Bureau a permanent institution, the ABC started counting bags of cement in the Bronx and Queens—a mathematical exercise which would result in the removal from office of the presidents of both those boroughs.
The offices of the Bureau were filled with excitement; the ABC, young themselves, gathered around them a group of recent university graduates determined to reform municipal government. They had a sense of mission; one, writing a history of the Bureau, said there was in it "not a little romance." Said another: "The men in training were looking for adventure— and most of them found it."
The young men developed techniques that were to reform every aspect of municipal government and create "a new literature on the science of public administration." They devised the first budget used by any municipal governmental unit, a "primitive model employed by the New York City Health Department in 1908. They invented line-by-line itemization to eliminate lumpsum budget requests, and organization charts similar to those coming into use in business to make responsibility easier for voters to pinpoint. When enthusiastic press support forced the Board of Estimate to adopt the Bureau's innovations, city departments, for the first time, had to show what they had spent money for in the past year and which items they wanted increases for—and, for the first time, citizens could understand and could judge a department's record. Tammany Hall called it the "Bureau of Municipal Besmirch"—but its exposes led to the election in 1909 of anti-Tammany reformer William J. Gaynor as mayor. And when reformers McAneny
and William A. Prendergast were elected to borough presidencies, they reorganized their offices along lines the Bureau suggested.
In 1911, the Bureau founded its Training School for Public Service, the first educational institution in the United States dedicated solely to preparing young men for work in government. The young idealists of the era of optimism saw in it a chance to obtain training in a field in which their idealism could most easily be translated into effective action. By 1913, there were hundreds of applicants for its handful of places.
Bob Moses was one applicant for whom a place was waiting, since his mother was a cousin of one of the Bureau's trustees, Columbia professor Edwin R. A. Seligman, and a friend of several others. When he finished his thesis, he was allowed to enroll immediately, was told to share one of the tables that served as desks with a student named Meador and was taken on the tour of City Hall that was the students' introduction to municipal government.
In theory—even his own theory—Moses should have been happy at the Bureau. With its concentration on the improvement of the mechanics of government, it was, after all, addressing itself to concerns that he had expressed in his thesis. The admission policy of the Training School, moreover, answered the main demand of the thesis: the need for "university men" in public service. Only applicants of the most impeccable scholastic background were accepted.
Moses understood this. In his thesis, he had written that the Bureau and its Training School were "the system of the future in American cities."
But once he became part of the Training School, it didn't take Moses long to decide that the system of the future wasn't going to be his future. In the field of public administration, the Training School was unique in its down-to-earth practicality. Pupils not only were put through intensive reading courses on the theory of budget making, accountancy, scientific management, chart making and the use of forms, summaries and statements, but also spent long days in city offices watching budgets actually being made up
and did their scientific management homework sitting in city offices trying to figure out ways to eliminate unnecessary personnel and analyzing projects the city was undertaking, to see if they were really needed. They did the legwork for the Bureau members who were heading the investigations which would result in exposure of corruption or waste in city government.
The students were filled with an esprit so strong that it seemed sometimes as if it must surely waft out the windows of 261 Broadway and melt some of the soot from the blackened granite of the Tweed Courthouse below. They believed in the importance of what they were doing; a half century later, rheumy eyes would light up and smiles would curl corners of wrinkled lips as they talked about it, and they talked in terms old soldiers reserve for old battles. "How would I sum up what we were doing?" one would say. "We were fighting to make democracy work, that's what we were doing!" They were very proud of their position in the army of idealism. They idolized their leaders; Allen, Bruere and Cleveland, they knew, were the very men who had charged through a hail of public abuse and private threats to pull
down three Tammany chieftains. Who knew what victories over corruption might not be won through the use of the information they were collecting in their daily reconnaissance through the files of City Hall? Watching John Pur-roy Mitchel stride by their tables to confer with his friend Bruere, they whispered to one another that they hoped the young lawyer would decide to accept the Fusion nomination for mayor. The ninth floor bubbled with excitement. "You couldn't walk in there without getting an assignment," recalls one Training School student. "You'd open the door and someone would yell, 'Hey! Glad to see you! Get up a memorandum on this!' And you'd go back out the door and over to City Hall without even taking your hat off."
For a while Moses seemed at home in this atmosphere. He did the leg-work, wrote the memos, joined the other Training School students for twenty-cent lunches at Childs and for their one big splurge of the week, a six-course Sunday dinner at Luchow's, which might cost as much as $1.25. He didn't interrupt, as they didn't interrupt, when one of the older Bureau staffers was telling again the story of how everybody in the Bureau had jumped to his feet and cheered on the day that a reporter brought the news that Governor Hughes had just announced that the charges against Ahearn merited a public hearing.
At first, he was very popular with the other students. He was pleasant and friendly and had a gift for putting people at ease. Many of the students admired Moses. Those from midwestern universities were new to New York and slightly awed by the big city. Moses obviously knew his way around. Moreover, most of them were struggling along on students' allowances, and they knew he came from a wealthy family; they were thinking about what they were going to do after graduation from the Training School, and they knew Moses would be able to choose his job without regard for financial considerations. In the late afternoons, when they were all heading for the subway for the ride home, they watched him grab a taxicab. Occasionally, they might be talking about an opera they had seen the night before, having been lucky enough to secure standing-room tickets, and they would ask Moses if he had seen it. Oh yes, he would say, his family had a box. But the young idealists admired Moses most for his education. It wasn't just that he had been to Yale; the world's principal centers of education for public service were Oxford and the University of Berlin, and Moses had studied at both. Now he was attending the most advanced school for public administration in the United States; one of his friends wondered, quite seriously, whether Bob Moses was not the man best educated in public administration in the whole country.
Within a few months, however, the students began to notice another quality in Moses, a quality which became more apparent almost day by day. Blazing behind the big gray eyes, they now saw, was a furious impatience. Within months after entering the Training School, Moses made clear that he felt he had learned all it had to offer. He was irritated by the report cards, by the weekly conferences with his Bureau advisers, by all the aspects of school life that made him remember that it was a school and that he was still, at the age of twenty-five, a student.
In particular, he resented the legwork. The Training School men were required to summarize the results of their investigations in memos that had to be written as if they were official Bureau reports but that would actually be seen only by the Bureau men who were writing the real reports that would be published. Moses wanted his memos published. He began to press for admission to the Bureau itself, making clear that, because he had an allowance from his mother, he would require no salary; within a year, on that financial basis, he was admitted; his student days were over.
The impatience was not slaked. No sooner was he in the Bureau than he began to make cutting comments about its procedures: the voluminous filing and cross-filing of all information was a waste of time, he said; the weekly staff luncheons were a waste of time; the Bureau's constant emphasis on procedure was a waste of time. The Bureau wasn't "getting enough done," he said. But it was becoming apparent to many of his colleagues that the Bureau would never be able to get enough done to satisfy Moses, no matter how many "technicalities" it dispensed with, simply because the Bureau was merely an agency that investigated and advised government. The way to get things done, Moses was making clear, was to be in government. Through Bella, he had a nodding acquaintance with several members of Mayor Gaynor's administration; he began to neglect his work at the Bureau and spend more and more time at City Hall hanging around their offices. His colleagues began to whisper about Bob Moses. The slang of the era contained a phrase that described what they thought he was doing. He was, they whispered, "pushing his acquaintance" at City Hall. There was an adjective heard frequently in the whispers, too. The adjective was "ambitious." Bob Moses, the idealists of the Bureau said, was interested—much too interested—in making a name for himself.
But if there was ambition, that was only a part of what was driving Bob Moses. And the whisperers never saw the other part. For they never saw what Moses did in the late afternoons after he grabbed the taxicabs.
Sometimes, of course, Moses would tell the cab driver to take him straight home. But often he would ask to be dropped off across the West Side, on Riverside Drive, at the end of Seventy-sixth Street near the Hudson River. And as he climbed out of the cab there, he climbed out into a scene far different from the doormanned serenity of Central Park West.
He would be standing on the high bluff that was Riverside Drive; behind him, if he looked up, stately apartment houses would appear to be swaying over him against a backdrop of moving clouds. But he would be looking down. Below him, along the edge of the river, was a wasteland, a wasteland six miles long, stretching from where he stood all the way north to 181st Street. The wasteland was named Riverside Park, but the "park" was nothing but a vast low-lying mass of dirt and mud. Running through its length was the four-track bed of the New York Central, which lay in a right-of-way that had been turned over to the railroad by the city half a century before. Un-painted, rusting, jagged wire fences along the tracks barred the city from its waterfront; in the whole six miles, there were exactly three bridges on which the tracks could be crossed, and they led only to private boating clubs.
The engines that pulled trains along the tracks burned coal or oil; from their smokestacks a dense black smog rose toward the apartment houses, coating windowsills with grit. The smog had an acrid odor, but people who lived in the apartments hardly noticed it; it was scarcely worth mentioning alongside the stench that seemed to hang over Riverside Drive endlessly after each passage of a train carrying south to the slaughterhouses in downtown Manhattan carload after carload of cattle and pigs. When, despite the smell, Riverside Drive residents were driven by the heat to open their windows, they were kept awake at night by the clank of the couplings which hooked the cars together.
Walking in the park was adventure; the walker sank at intervals into the landfill of which it had been constructed, for water had eaten away much of the fill from below. In many spots, it had broke
n through the crust of the fill to form little lakes. Every year the park grew smaller, as its edge crumbled into the river.
Areas that were still solid had been appropriated by the railroad for wood-lined pits in which coal was piled. Lying along the river were heaps of rotting timbers, stored years before by some city department and forgotten. At Seventy-ninth and Ninety-sixth streets, untreated garbage mounded toward the sky; the Sanitation Department used those areas as dumping grounds from which the garbage was transferred to scows which towed it out to the open sea, but somehow the rate of transfer was never fast enough to clear the refuse away entirely. Other solid spots held human refuse: derelicts who had built tar-paper shanty towns considered so dangerous that the police stayed away from them. At night, the open fires over which the derelicts cooked flickered in the darkness below the Drive.
Looking south, Moses could see the bluff sink and the park narrow until both disappeared, and houses, factories and warehouses crowded close to the waterfront. The railroad tracks wended their way between the buildings, making several sharp curves, and then emerged on Eleventh Avenue, along which, at street level, trains inched their way in a straight line down to the foot of the island. In front of every train, to warn away pedestrians and drivers, rode a cowboy on a horse, waving a large red flag. Since the trains came at frequent intervals and moved extremely slowly along the avenue, traffic was frequently backed up for blocks. Often, a driver would become impatient and ignore the warning flag. For that reason, Eleventh had become known as "Death Avenue." For years, the city had tried without success to find a solution to the problem posed by the presence of the railroad along the West Side.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 9