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

by Caro, Robert A

  If it was a hint, however, Moses didn't take it. He would have liked Spencer's job, but the job wasn't what was important to him; reforming the civil service was. He set out to do it.

  The Bureau assigned ten men to Moses as assistants. The idea of working under him didn't appeal to the older men, but the younger ones, who hadn't known him before, liked him. "He worked all of us hard," one of them recalls. "But he worked himself harder. He was at the Bureau when you got in in the morning, and he was still there when you left at night. He'd lose his temper, but it was silly to argue with him anyway, because you knew darn well that he had looked the point up before he talked to you and knew it better than you did."

  Moses' assistants sat for days watching city workers perform their jobs so that they could break each job down into gradable components. They observed employees of private businesses. They interviewed department heads and civil service commissioners in other cities. Soon memos addressed to "Dr. Moses" were flooding onto his desk. By the spring of 1915, he was able to begin writing the Detailed Report on the Rating of the Efficiency of Civil Service Employees, Excepting Members of the Uniformed Forces in the Police and Fire Services and in the Lower Ranks of the Street Cleaning Service. Day after day, he sat in the Bureau, his fine-pointed pen racing over the pages of yellow legal note pads. Often, coming across a point he wanted to check himself, he would fling himself out of his chair and out of the Bureau offices, and stride, sometimes breaking in his haste into a few steps of a run and then self-consciously checking himself and settling back into a walk, over to City Hall or the Municipal Building, where he could see records and officials himself. Soon, to save time, he asked for and was given a desk of his own in the Civil Service Commission offices on the fourteenth floor of the Municipal Building, his first toehold in the halls of power. He wrote and rewrote sections of the report before sending them off to the typist. And when they returned, the fine-pointed pen slashed at the neat pages, crossing out words, putting in others, clarifying, refining, hardening. On July 8, 1915, after nineteen months of work, he typed on a Bureau letterhead: "Dear Commissioner James: I am transmitting herewith detailed report . . ."

  Under the present system, Moses reported, most department heads simply gave each of their hundreds of employees "C"—or average—ratings on their "report cards" rather than try to pinpoint outstanding or delinquent workers. To obtain more accurate ratings, he wrote, department heads must be required to give each employee arithmetical grades in dozens of categories. In addition, there must be a complete "reclassification" of the civil service, adding many new levels, to insure that employees would be given

  the precise salary and authority they deserved. There must be a complete "standardization" of salaries so that employees doing the same type of work would be getting the same pay even if they were working in different departments. The commission should have authority to see that promotions and raises were given strictly on the bases established under the system.

  Moses' proposal was a codification of idealism. Omitted, at the insistence of Moskowitz and James, was any mention of "higher division," "lower division" or "university men." There was to be only one standard for promotion in public life: "open competition," how hard and well a man worked and how he performed on examinations. Examination results would be posted in public, and report cards would be open to public inspection so that every city employee would know the basis whereon he and his competitors were judged. Seniority would become unimportant; not experience but ability would be crucial.

  The proposal was of a purity, a strength and a scope that was almost more religious than governmental. The system was to be completely new, Moses said. All traces of the old must be washed away. And it must be all-embracing. All government service, he said, could be divided into sixteen categories: executive, legislative, judicial, professional, subprofes-sional, educational, investigational, inspectional, clerical, custodial, street cleaning, fire, police, institutional, skilled trades and labor. Each category could be divided into specific jobs—custodial, for example, into caretakers, janitors, watchmen, storekeepers and bridge tenders. Each job could be scientifically analyzed to show its "functions" and "responsibilities." Each function and responsibility—and there were dozens of them for most jobs— could be given a precise mathematical weight corresponding to its importance in the over-all job. And the success of the employee in each function and responsibility could be given a precise mathematical grade. These grades would, added together according to weight and combined in service records for each employee, "furnish conclusions expressed in arithmetical . . . terms" and these conclusions and these alone should be "used as a basis for salary increase and promotion."

  It was the proposal of a fanatic. John Calvin specifying permissible arrangements for women's hair in sixteenth-century Geneva was not more thorough than was* Bob Moses enumerating the "functions" and "responsibilities" of New York's civil servants. No aspect of conduct on the job was too small to be graded. Even personality must be reduced to number. "Personality," Moses said, "includes those intangible elements the existence of which do not readily admit of proof, but nevertheless . . . each employee must be rated on personality." Men would have to make sacrifices for the sake of the system: acknowledging that some present employees would not score high enough on his tests for the jobs they held, he had a simple solution—such employees would have to accept demotions and pay cuts. Unnecessary employees, he said, would have to be "eliminated."

  The idealism was harsh and uncompromising. In judging the ability of

  an examining officer, said one of Moses' aides, echoing Moses' views, a "pretty fair clue" is the number of "below standard" ratings given: the more "below standard" ratings, the better the examining officer. If there could be such a thing as a Calvinistic civil service efficiency-rating system, Moses had devised it.

  Moses did not deny there was a human element involved; he knew of its existence all too well—it was constantly interfering with the mathematical perfection of his system, and it must be suppressed. "It is essential," he said, "to have a definite, almost a mechanical, program of adjustments in order to avoid personal and political pressure." For some reason, it was hard to make examiners understand this. They were always becoming sympathetic to individuals and talking about the "human factor," and "an examiner who . . . always wishes to take the 'human factor' into consideration is a dangerous man to associate with such work. The consideration of the 'human factor' is entirely a matter of policy for policy-determining bodies in applying salary and grade specifications." The infusion of people, moreover, was always interfering with the work to be done. Annoyed that his recommendations had to be discussed at public hearings, he noted that because of the time he had to spend at such hearings, "it is difficult to . . . keep the field work running smoothly and correspondence up to date." There must, he said, "be some limit to public discussion."

  Shining through all Moses' statements was confidence, a faith that his system would work, a belief that the personalities of tens of thousands of human beings could be reduced to mathematical grades, that promotions and raises could be determined by a science precise enough to give every one of those human beings the exact rewards he deserved. Asked once if it might not prove difficult to divide a job like that of janitor into different levels based on different functions and responsibilities, Moses replied flatly that it would not be difficult at all. To the expert, he said, such differences are "clearly discernible." When someone ventured to argue that it might be hard to bring under his system appointees in policy-making posts because policy-making ability was too subtle to measure, Moses could barely restrain his impatience. "There is no reason why it cannot be worked out in that way," he said.

  Moses also had confidence that his system would be adopted. It would take "courage and integrity" to push it through, he said, but the city at last had a mayor with such qualities—and with an educational background that would enable him to understand that the system was good and that
its adoption would so improve the civil service as to make it truly an instrument for the betterment of the lives of the city's people. Moses talked often about Mitchel; the young mayor was his beau ideal of the public servant, the embodiment of the virtues enumerated in the Ph.D. thesis.

  And certainly the first reactions to Moses' Detailed Report must have made the confidence seem justified. Terming it "pioneer work," the Civil Service Reform Association said that Moses' efficiency-rating system was

  the most thorough ever devised. Moskowitz called it "an epoch in the administration of civil service law." James said: "No city, state or national civil service has anything commensurate with this." Mayor Mitchel announced that he would push for the system's adoption. Bella and Emanuel had purchased nineteen acres of land in Lake Placid—Hawk Island—for a summer retreat and had been up there for more than a month. Now, his report finished and praised, their son hurried to join them for what was to be a golden summer. He felt very close to attaining a goal in which was tied up all the idealism of his youth—the accomplishment of a concrete achievement that would truly help people. And now his attention was focused on the girl who seemed somehow a part of that idealism.

  "Bob was very much in love that summer," a friend recalls. "We did a lot of swimming and mountain climbing in the Adirondacks, but Bob was talking about Mary all the time." He brought her up to meet his parents, and Bella liked her immediately. On August 15, 1915, one month after he had handed in the report, he and Mary were married. The ceremony was performed at the nonsectarian Labor Temple in New York City by its director, a Presbyterian minister, and the couple honeymooned in a rustic camp near Lake Placid.

  Returning to New York in the fall, the couple moved into a small apartment on Ninety-fifth Street near West End Avenue. They had no regular income except Mary's salary at the Bureau, and before the end of the year they knew she was pregnant—a daughter, Barbara, would be born on May 23, 1916—and would have to stop working. But Bella said she would give them enough to get by on; she didn't want Robert to interrupt his work by taking a paying job. Neither Mary nor Bob had much interest in the things that forced other young couples to be concerned with money, anyway; they were perfectly happy, for example, to furnish their living room with only Bella's old sofas and their own shiny idealism.

  Every morning—early—Moses would get a call from a young lawyer named George Gove, who lived nearby. "I'm leaving," Gove would say and hang up. Moses would be standing in the street when Gove arrived.

  Together, the two young men would walk down Broadway all the way to the Flatiron Building on Twenty-third Street, where Gove had his office— and then Moses would continue alone to the Municipal Building, some six miles south of Ninety-fifth Street.

  Gove was a tall, rawboned farmer's son from Wisconsin who regarded himself as a good walker, but he had trouble keeping up with Moses. As they walked, Moses would talk and, as his thoughts raced, his legs seemed to keep pace, so that at times he was almost trotting in his eagerness to get downtown. "We talked about everything under the sun," Gove recalls— art, philosophy, history. The one subject not mentioned was one other young men might have dwelt on: making money. "He just wasn't interested in that," Gove says. The subject that dominated the talk was government and particularly the government of New York City. "He was all caught up in his work," Gove says.

  Moses was sure the work was going to pay off. Historians call those

  last years before America's entry into the Great War America's Age of Optimism; it was Bob Moses' age of optimism, too. His superiors couldn't praise him enough, and took his advice eagerly. When, during a speech, they were asked a particularly sticky question, Moses would lean forward and whisper the answer. They had authorized the printing of the detailed forms on which the arithmetical grades were to be reported, and in the rectangles of heavy yellow paper Moses could see the first tangible results of his years of education for public service. Forms had already been sent to several of the more cooperative departments, and the rest were in boxes stacked in a corner of one of the Civil Service Commission offices, ready to go.

  Moses' demeanor revealed his confidence. Openly mocking the weekly staff luncheons and elaborate filing systems, he made no secret of his contempt for the Bureau. Chatting with Bureau staffers, he took care to let them know, in a studiedly offhand fashion, that it was fine to be doing "real work" at last.

  He carried himself with an air of vast knowledge. "There was, in his makeup, very little doubt," one of the staffers was to say years later. Another recalls that Moses was the first person he saw on his first day at the Bureau. "Here was this tall, handsome character in a white suit—a summer tropical kind of suit—and he was talking on the telephone to the street-cleaning commissioner. I gathered from the conversation that someone had been advocating some new method of cleaning the streets and the commissioner was saying that he didn't think much of the suggestion. And all of a sudden this character in the white suit raps out, 'Well, we don't think much of it, either.' You should have heard the tone! It was so definite! I thought it was an extraordinary tone for a guy to use who had never been confronted with the problem. I sized him up immediately as self-confident, opinionated and critical." Getting to know Moses, the new staffer found no reason to change his evaluation. "He seemed to regard himself as one of the anointed," he said.

  But reality was just around the corner.

  Tammany's wily old sachems had probably realized early what Moses' plan would mean for them: it would effectively destroy their control of the civil service. But the sachems, unwilling openly to oppose reform themselves, had said nothing, biding their time. And now the development they had been waiting for was coming to pass; the system's 50,000 members were beginning to realize what the plan would mean for them.

  The downgrading of seniority in Moses' system would mean that these city employees would lose a large advantage—in many cases their only advantage—over bright young outsiders trying for their jobs. The elimination of unnecessary jobs would mean that some of them would be out of work entirely. Moses' insistence on demotion for men who failed to score high enough on new examinations to qualify for the jobs they presently held would have the most far-reaching effects of all. Men who had run their ward boss's errands for years in return for advancement up the civil service ladder now came to realize that under Moses' system the rewards for which they had

  waited so long might be snatched from them; in fact, for many of them, "might" was only a euphemism; they knew all too well what their qualifications were and how they would make out on honestly run examinations.

  Moreover, Moses' system would effectively bar the simplest path to future raises. Under the old system, once a civil service worker reached Grade Five, the highest grade for clerical employees, he could be given raises, raises without limit as to number or amount, without having to take any examinations at all; all that was necessary was approval from his department head—and since department heads gave raises on the advice of Tammany bosses, the loyal party worker could be assured that his loyalty would be rewarded. Grade Five was, in fact, the biggest carrot that Tammany possessed. More than 10,000 of the 50,000 city employees were at that level, and while the base pay for Grade Five was $3,260 a year—in itself a handsome wage when the average clerical worker in private industry earned $2,100 a year—the earnings of many of the 10,000 had been raised to $6,500 or even $7,500.

  Under Moses' system, all civil service workers at Grade Five—all 10,000 of them—would have their pay reduced to $3,260 a year and would have to pass examinations for any future raises. Even if they passed the examinations they would have to climb back up the monetary ladder one step at a time, for promotions were to be given only level by level. And examinations would no longer be given, as they had been, to cozy groups of two or three competitors, or to one man who happened to be the only person who had been notified that the examination was being given. To climb back up to their former salaries, Grade Fivers would be competing with hun
dreds of applicants.

  As the realization of these facts began to seep down to the mass of civil service employees, there was hysteria in the ranks. Protest meetings were arranged.

  Young Bob Moses volunteered to speak at the meetings. He wasn't ashamed of his system, he said. He was proud of it. He would be glad to defend it.

  But Moses wasn't at Oxford any more. The only effect of his courage was to make things easier for his enemies. Civil service reorganization was a subject so complicated that it was difficult to interest even civil service workers in it. What was needed was a single, visible object on which the workers could focus their hatred. And now Moses had given them such an object—himself.

  He was the perfect target. Tall, in a white suit, elegant, haughty, arrogant instead of conciliatory when challenged, he stood before the thousands of sullen, clerkish men like the very epitome of the efficiency expert they feared and hated. And they expressed their hatred and fear in boos and catcalls and vicious, shouted insults.

  Moses refused to quit. Night after night, carrying a heavy leather briefcase crammed with facts and statistics he almost never got to use, he stood before civil service employees' associations, speaking into a hail of abuse.

  "Once you saw him on those nights, you could never forget him," Kaplan

  recalls. "Tall, handsome—he'd get up on the platform and go right to bat. He wouldn't pull his punches or try to modify the things he was saying so they'd be less unpopular. Those people had come to hate the word 'efficiency.' Talking 'efficiency' to them was waving the red flag before the bull. But in those speeches it was efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. The more they booed him, the more self-confident, even arrogant, he seemed. In the worst of it, he went right on talking, and with the attitude 'When I say this is it, this is it!' "