In the late afternoons, as the sun sank toward the Palisades across the Hudson, Bob Moses walked along Riverside Drive. He walked down the steep paths to the park, over one of the bridges across the tracks and, skirting the dirty tar-paper shacks, along the edge of the clean blue river. And as he walked, he dreamed. One Sunday in 1914, he was crossing the Hudson by ferry to picnic in New Jersey. With him were some college friends and their dates, one of whom was Frances Perkins, later to be United States Secretary
of Labor. As the ferry pulled out into the river, Moses leaned on the rail, watching Manhattan spread out behind the boat. Miss Perkins happened to be standing beside him and suddenly she heard Moses exclaim, "Isn't this a temptation to you? Couldn't this waterfront be the most beautiful thing in the world?" As the woman looked at him in astonishment, words began to pour out of Bob Moses and she realized that "he had it all figured out. How you could build a great highway that went uptown along the water. How you'd have to tear down a few buildings at Seventy-second Street and bring the highway around a curve. ... He wanted places where people could leave their boats safely, public clubs . . . like private clubs." Staring back at the bleak mud flats covered by a haze of smoke from the railroad engines, she heard Moses paint for her a picture of what the scene could be like on a Sunday—the ugly tracks completely hidden by the great highway, cars traveling slowly along it, their occupants enjoying the view, and along the highway stretching green parks filled with strollers, tennis players and families on bicycles. There would be sailboats on the river and motor yachts tied up in gracefully curving basins. And the thing that astonished her most, Miss Perkins was to recall, was that Bob Moses had the exact location of tennis courts and boat basins quite definitely in mind; the young Bureau staffer beside her was talking about a public improvement on a scale almost without precedent in turn-of-the-century urban America, an improvement that would solve a problem that had baffled successive city administrations for years. And "he had it all figured out."
Moses was to talk again to Miss Perkins. Every time he did, her astonishment grew. "He was always burning up with ideas, just burning up with them!" she was to say. "Everything he saw walking around the city made him think of some way that it could be better." Happening once to comment that it was too bad that mothers who took infants to Central Park had to leave when diapers needed changing and go all the way home, she saw her idle words strike instant fire in Moses' mind. Why not build diaper-changing shelters? he asked. They could be small structures, used for no other purpose; you wouldn't even need attendants—the cost would be small. Or perhaps they could be additions to comfort stations already built—the cost would be smaller yet. It should certainly be looked into. Moreover, not all the ideas that he told her about required concrete and steel. Bob Moses, she realized, had thought through detailed new concepts of city budget making and social welfare legislation, prison administration and school administration, filing systems and methods of conducting public hearings.
But while Frances Perkins was impressed by Moses' imagination, the Bureau was more impressed by his impatience. Challenged at staff meetings about some details of those of his ideas that he had presented, he responded as Bella did at Madison House board meetings, making it clear that he wasn't much interested in long discussions. The ideas were good; what was needed now was to put them into practice.
Impatience became frustration. Moses wanted the Bureau to take up his ideas officially at once and press the city to adopt them. The Bureau had other projects on which it was already working and which it considered equally important. When it got to Moses' projects, they would have to be thoroughly studied. And as to those suggestions about public works projects like the highway—well, the ABC was not at all certain that the Bureau had the expertise or the responsibility to start suggesting public works.
The frustration boiled over. Moses became more and more critical of some of the Bureau's own procedures, which he felt were keeping it from accomplishing as much as it could. This criticism—offered, with conspicuous lack of tact, by one of the newest members of the Bureau—rubbed senior staffers the wrong way. They felt the procedures had brought the Bureau success; they were particularly incensed at several of Moses' suggestions aimed at speeding up the preliminary work that went into reports. While Bruere felt that some of these suggestions were worth looking into, Cleveland and Allen were more precise, careful men who believed in checking every possible aspect of a situation before writing anything about it, and most of the staffers agreed with this philosophy.
The reaction to rebuff was not graceful. Moses' irritation with the Bureau began to spill over into his work. He didn't feel it was important any more. Investigations didn't accomplish anything. He didn't want to count barrels of concrete; he wanted to pour them. He had said the weekly staff luncheons were a waste of time; the Bureau, believing they were valuable for interchange of ideas, declined to eliminate them—so Moses simply stopped attending. With increasing frequency, sent over to City Hall to get material for a report, he would return without the material and say he had met one of the city officials he knew "and we had a very interesting conversation." Acting as adviser to several Training School students, Moses developed the habit of writing large question marks in the margins of their reports next to statements he questioned—and the papers often were returned with their margins literally filled with these indications of his displeasure. Sometimes, the papers were not returned at all. "I have your memorandum and it's no damn good," he would say to a student. "I threw it in the wastebasket." And the student would find out that Moses meant exactly that; the memo had actually been thrown away; the student would never see it again. He used his tongue as a lash on his advisees. One, considered a brilliant prospect and in fact later to become one of the country's leading experts on police administration, emerged from a conference with Moses so depressed that he gave up his hopes of a public career and resigned from the Bureau. It was only with difficulty that he was persuaded to return. Bruere, who knew Bella and Emanuel Moses socially, stayed tolerant toward their son, but Cleveland and Allen made it clear they were not prepared to put up with his behavior much longer; Moses, they said, just couldn't seem to learn to work as part of a team. Bureau gossip said he would be fired shortly.
Only one person at the Bureau was sympathetic.
She was a woman who worked as Cleveland's secretary.
Mary Louise Sims was slim, of less than medium height and rather plain, but gay and vivacious. With ash-blond hair and a clear white skin, she looked fresh and clean. She came from Dodgeville, Wisconsin, one of the six children of a Cornishman who worked in the little town's lead and zinc mines. Mary's family didn't consider itself poor, but, as one of her sisters put it, "there wasn't much money to throw around." When Mary decided that she wanted to go to college, she had to earn her first year's tuition as a seventeen-year-old teacher in Dodgeville's one-room little red schoolhouse and then, after she entered the University of Wisconsin, work her way through. After she graduated and began to work full time in Madison, the state capital, a portion of her earnings each week was still put aside for college tuition—for a younger sister.
In Madison, Mary was a secretary, but that was not an adequate description of the work she did. Her employer was Francis E. McGovern, the Governor of Wisconsin, and McGovern noticed that Mary had an instinct for and insight into politics, including the merciless in-fighting that was part of the decor in any statehouse. He used her as confidante and adviser.
But Mary's ambitions were not for herself. She had sought out a job with a politician not because she was interested in politics but because she was interested in what politics could do. She was another of the moths who in the years before World War I hovered so thickly around the flame of idealism. In 1913, Cleveland and Allen visited Madison to study Wisconsin's governmental structure. No one could explain it better than Miss Sims, the Governor said, and delegated her to show the visitors around. She had already become interested in the "eff
iciency and economy" movement. In the course of the tour, Cleveland and Allen talked to her about how they were trying to make democracy work, about fighting to free government to institute reforms that would really help people. Mary resigned as the Governor's secretary and came to New York to work for the Bureau. In 1914 she was thirty—four and a half years older than Bob Moses—and was known to Bureau staffers and students for her friendliness, her quick wit and the depth of her belief in what they were doing. Bob Moses fell in love with her.
Although women had always been attracted to him, Moses had never before, although he was twenty-five years old, centered attention on any particular one. But now he talked about Mary constantly, and he talked about her in terms that left no doubt that the pedestal he had placed her on was a high one. The lover of the Good, the True and the Beautiful seemed to feel that he had found their embodiment. "He was," a friend said, "very, very much in love."
His devotion was complete. Taking Mary along on his walks around the city, he poured out to her his ideas—and his frustration at the indifference with which they were received by the Bureau. At the Bureau, they would meet in the library, among the books, and they would sit and talk for hours. He introduced her to his friends. They noticed that she was always gay and
laughing but that she could also, in a quiet way, deliver a remark that could demolish an opponent's argument—or an opponent.
The Bureau's whisperers soon learned that it was unwise to let Mary hear their criticisms of Moses. If she did, she would not hesitate to let them know where, despite her feelings for the Bureau, her first loyalties now lay. They just didn't understand Bob, she would say. One day he would get a chance to show what he could do.
And, as it turned out, the chance came soon. Having finally accepted the Fusion nomination, John Purroy Mitchel had been elected mayor on November 4, 1913, at the age of thirty-four. Bruere had become his closest confidant, the expert who provided the tinder to fuel Mitchel's zeal; Bruere provided the facts and theories, Allen was to say, and "Mitchel took fire" with them. Now, as mayor, Mitchel made Bruere City Chamberlain. And he asked the Bureau to list the city departments most in need of reorganization and to recommend Bureau experts equipped to advise on the reorganization. Near the top of the Bureau's list was the Municipal Civil Service Commission, and Allen, Bruere and Cleveland found that only one staffer in the Bureau was an expert on civil service. They had no choice but to submit his name to Mitchel, and when, in 1914, the Mayor appointed a new Civil Service Commission, he asked the commissioners to rely for technical assistance on this man and to regard him as if he were in fact on the city payroll.
The new commissioners found the man a more than willing assistant. At last, he was being given a chance to participate in the actual workings of government itself, in workings that could change men's lives, in workings that could make a city a better place to live. Into the work of the Municipal Civil Service Commission, Bob Moses hurled all his energy and all his brilliance, all his zeal for reform, all the long-pent-up enthusiasm and fire of the boundless idealism of his youth.
requiring physical strength—lifeguard or fireman, for example—the examiner painted over the candidate's side of the dial which registered the force with which the gong was struck, so that only the examiner could see the results, and the results the examiner reported frequently had a relationship less to strength than to amount—the amount of money the candidate pressed into his hand. More than 1,200 employees had been exempted from any competitive examination at all.
No aspect of city mismanagement was more frustrating to reformers than civil service maladministration. What good were campaigns to change the government, if the people running it, administering its machinery, were still the same unqualified, inefficient, indifferent political hacks?
John Purroy Mitchel's announcement that he intended to clean up the civil service therefore was especially cheering to reformers. The impeccability of the reform credentials of the two men he selected to form the majority on the three-member Municipal Civil Service Commission—new chairman Henry Moskowitz, a meek, disheveled social worker who had been the first headworker of Bella and Emanuel Moses' Madison House, and banker Darwin R. James, a natty one-time Princeton track captain and president of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities—cemented their optimism. Samuel H. Ordway, chairman of the Civil Service Reform Association, said, "We expect great things ... a real advance in civil service administration."
But generations of Tammany civil service commissioners, masters in their own way of the art of government, had been there first. Anxious to blaze a path straight to the door of rectitude, Moskowitz and James found themselves trapped instead in a maze of technicalities constructed over decades primarily to keep great things from happening. Civil service administration, the two reformers soon realized, was an art and a science— and it was an art and a science they knew absolutely nothing about.
Not trusting long-time commission secretary Frank A. Spencer or Spencer's assistants to lead them out of the maze, Moskowitz and James tried to fire them, learned to their frustration that one of the technicalities prevented this and settled for transferring them to other departments. And they turned to the young man from the Municipal Research Bureau as their guide.
From a technical standpoint, they made a good choice. Two men who had read Moses' thesis—it had been published—were Luther C. Steward, first president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, and H. Elliot Kaplan, later president of the New York Civil Service Commission and executive director of the Civil Service Reform Association. Years later, when Kaplan had read everything there was to read on civil service, he was asked to evaluate the thesis and said simply, "It was a masterpiece." There were, he said, "very few people in the United States in 1914 who knew much about civil service. Bob Moses really knew." Steward's wife, who had been working beside her husband in 1914, was even more emphatic. "Bob Moses wasn't one of the men in this country who understood civil service best at that stage," she said. "He was the man who understood it best."
James and Moskowitz asked Moses for a plan of action.
Moses said that the first step had to be a reform of the city's efficiency-rating system, the system of ratings given by supervisors to their subordinates to help determine whether to promote a civil service employee or give him a pay raise; under the present method, ratings didn't give the Civil Service Commission enough information for a sound judgment.
Making an evaluation system precise was perhaps the most difficult job in civil service, Moses explained; each job had to be broken down into component parts, so that each part could be graded, and in totaling the grades each part had to be given a mathematical weight corresponding to its importance in the job as a whole. But he knew how to do it, he said. Impressed, James and Moskowitz told him to go ahead—and let it be known that they were considering bringing the Bureau staffer into city employ and starting him off at the top: as Spencer's replacement as commission secretary.
Then, one morning, Bob Moses found his name in a newspaper. only "gentlemen" need apply, a headline said, that is moses' theory
OF CIVIL SERVICE REQUIREMENTS.
Because he "is being considered as a likely successor to Frank Spencer," said the article under the headline, Moses' Ph.D. thesis, "of which he acknowledges the authorship, and in which he openly advocates that positions in the government service should be open only to university men and 'gentlemen who had inherited breeding and culture,' has caused a mild sensation in civil service circles."
It was a small article, five paragraphs in the Brooklyn Eagle, and no other paper bothered to pick it up. But it must have served as a warning to the Mitchel administration of the line of attack that would be used if Moses was appointed—and of Moses' peculiar vulnerability, because of the thesis "of which he acknowledges the authorship," to such an attack. There was no more talk of the appointment.
The article marked the first appearance of Moses' name in a New York newspaper. It was his f
irst direct acquaintance with a newspaper "leak." To the average reader, it would seem that a reporter had discovered the thesis himself, or had been motivated to look for it because of the "mild sensation" he had noticed in civil service circles. But there had been no "sensation," mild or otherwise, over Moses' rumored appointment; hardly anyone in city government even knew who he was. Actually, Tammany had simply done a little research and tipped off a reporter to the existence of the thesis and had told him what he would find if he went up to the public library and looked at it.*
The story could be taken as a "first" of another type, too, a first hint of what was to come, a gentle intimation that politics, in its own way, was rougher than water polo, that the race Bob Moses was entering was not a swimming relay in which judges watched the touch-offs to insure that every-
* After its publication, it became a family joke that only six copies had been sold three to Bob's mother and three to his grandmother.
thing was fair. It could be taken as a reminder of how important patronage was to Tammany—far too important to let anyone take it away. Disposing of a young man's hopes for a minor city appointment was so simple it was hardly worth mentioning; a little newspaper leak, done offhand by some politician who had more important things on his mind, could take care of that. Were the threat to grow more serious, however, there were other methods.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 10