But the outspokenness and the courage, along with the arrogance and the lecturing tone, had no effect other than to increase the opposition to his system, to rouse the fury of 50,000 voting men and women to fever pitch.
Tammany knew how to use the opportunity he had given it; while not openly opposing reorganization, it linked the plan with the man the employees hated. Recalls one observer, "Reclassification became Moses in these people's eyes." The employees' associations began to circulate petitions calling for the removal of Moses and the men who had appointed him—Moskowitz and James—and those petitions, bearing tens of thousands of names, were submitted to the Board of Estimate. But still Tammany made no overt move. Still the Tiger waited.
Then there began to be doubts about Moses' proposals in the camp of his supporters. Even the most ardent had misgivings about telling men who had become accustomed to making—and supporting their families on— $6,500 to $7,500 a year that they were now making $3,260 a year. Even the adoring Kaplan said "that was a little unfair, really. Put in a new system —okay. But don't adversely affect people who had been working under the old system. Not everyone who was making a good salary in Grade Five was doing so just because of political connections, remember. Some had worked their way up on their own. And a lot of the people who had been given their chance through politics were doing good jobs and deserved the money. You shouldn't suddenly take it away from them." Henry Moskowitz, declaring that "no one can deny [the] soundness and [the] justice of the principle of standardization," said nonetheless that "a ruthless application of the principle ... is unwise. In my judgment it should be gradually assimilated and apply to the vacant positions as they arise."
But Moses argued against compromise. If the principle behind his system was right, he said, there should be no compromising with it. Making exceptions, he said, would kill the whole plan. If the plan was based on salary standardization, then salaries really had to be standard—all salaries. Moskowitz gave in. Some reformers, considering the commission unreasonable, turned lukewarm in their support.
It was the moment Tammany had been waiting for. The Board of Estimate it controlled scheduled hearings on the standardization proposal.
The support Moses expected from Mitchel seemed forthcoming at first. The Mayor and Fusion Comptroller William A. Prendergast urged the Board to adopt standardization and "cut to the bone" unnecessary positions.
But Tammany packed the hearings with Moses' opponents. Rising to defend his plan, a tall, slim, figure in white among the red-faced, burly, cigar-
smoking Tammany politicians in their black derbies that they wore even indoors, he could hardly be heard through the boos. Speaker after speaker related stories of particularly deserving individuals whose standard of living would be reduced, unfairly, under the plan.
Gradually Tammany's strategy became apparent. Each disputed case, the speakers were saying, should be decided on its individual merits by the Board's Bureau of Standards and included as a separate item in the budget, a policy which would not only drag out the hearings indefinitely but would in itself defeat the principle of universal standardization. The Tammany members of the Board said that after careful consideration they didn't see how any other policy could be adopted; humane considerations, fairness, justice— these must not be ignored. They were in favor of standardization, they said, they intended to adopt the Moses plan, but the plan must be modified where individual situations required it. Even pro-Fusion newspapers couldn't find anything to criticize in that.
Mitchel and Prendergast became noticeably silent. When a vote was taken, it was unanimous. Mitchel and Prendergast joined with Tammany to vote for individual consideration.
Moses was disappointed but still hopeful. The Board had, after all, said it intended to adopt standardization. Once the plan was adopted, the exceptions could gradually be eliminated one by one.
But the hearings dragged on and on; there were, after all, hundreds of civil service workers who believed, many with reason, that the proposed reclassification was unfair to them. Their stories made good newspaper copy. Technical arguments for reclassification did not. The Moses proposal began to appear in an unfavorable light.
After weeks of hearings, the Bureau of Standards finally submitted its recommendations to the Board of Estimate, which thereupon adopted a budget including Moses' proposed schedule of civil service grades and salaries, along with hundreds of individual budget items for the individual workers who had persuaded the Bureau of Standards they should be excluded from the schedule. In what was expected to be a matter of routine, the new schedule then went to the Board of Aldermen for approval—and the aldermen vetoed portions of it and added to it dozens of general civil service levels which did not correspond to any levels in the Moses plan. At the end of 1915, the only real result of Moses' effort was still the stacks of yellow form cards.
Nineteen-sixteen was frustration and disillusionment. To meet the aldermen's objections to some of the specific job specifications and salary scales, Moses worked endlessly revising them—only to find when he resubmitted them that the aldermen had still other objections which they had somehow neglected to mention before. There was again no open opposition, nothing that Moses' supporters could seize on as evidence of Tammany opposition to reform; instead, there was again stalling and obfuscation and confusion— and, for Bob Moses, defeat.
Even the efficiency-rating forms of which he had been so proud were turning into symbols of frustration. Attempts to persuade more departments
to use them proved fruitless. Roaming restlessly through the commission offices, he had to look every day at the pile of boxes containing the forms—and the pile never got smaller.
The forms that had been distributed were not being used properly. Most of the department heads who had accepted them were reluctant to do the vast amount of work that would be necessary if their many squares and blanks were to be filled in with precise arithmetical grades. Those few who were willing to do the work needed help in using the new system. To provide this help—and to make sure that all departments were using the new salary scales and that employees were doing the work consistent with their salaries— the Civil Service Commission had to rely on its examiners. The enforcement of Moses' system was in their hands. And these were men from the old Tammany regime who, too smart to give Moskowitz and James "grounds for dismissal" by openly defying them, undermined the system by the subtle but effective tactic of slowness in learning and laxness in enforcing the new rules. Moses understood full well that the examiners were making a farce out of his system. "Nothing," he said bitterly, "can make salary standardization more ridiculous than to put it into the hands of [such] men." But it was in their hands, nonetheless, that it remained.
Judges, he learned, were men, too, for all their black robes—and often they were men who had been dressed in those robes by Tammany. When certain department heads refused to hold competitive examinations for elevator-operator positions, the commission ordered the operators dismissed. One, who ran an elevator in the Bronx County Courthouse, brought suit to enjoin the dismissal, arguing that because prisoners rode in his elevator on their way to and from courtrooms, his job was "sensitive" and "exceptional." Of course it was, the judge said reassuringly—and granted the injunction.
The darkening of Bob Moses' optimism occurred against the backdrop of the darkening of America's. A new mood was abroad in the land. "Our country is at peace with the world at war" had been one of Woodrow Wilson's re-election slogans in 1916, but now the War Gods were slogging relentlessly across the Atlantic; the words in the scare headlines were "Lusitania" and "U-Boat" and, finally, "Zimmermann." War, not progress, was on the horizon. Aims changed—the world was to be made safe for democracy; that was a large enough order for even the idealism of youth to handle at one time.
In New York City, the fading of idealism on the municipal level had been especially rapid. With reform enthroned in City Hall, not all reformers stayed reformers. Before Mitchel's election, th
e policy of the Bureau of Municipal Research had been to investigate city government no matter who was running it, but after his election, Cleveland announced, "When its friends are in power, a citizen research agency should not publish unfavorable information." The city's Good Government organizations had become much less active. One reason was that they did not want to hurt what they considered the city's last, best chance against Tammany. But there was also another reason. As Allen himself put it: "One reason for this conspiracy of
silent criticism and public applause cannot be too baldly stated or too vividly remembered, namely, almost every agency of outside criticism 'had its feet in the trough'—to use a conventionalized term for sharing in political patronage." Moses could hardly have been unaware that while he was fighting to bring all civil service positions under competitive examination, no fewer than forty-seven Charities Department inspectors had been appointed by reformer John Kingsbury without examination, in clear violation of the law— or that every one of the forty-seven had previously worked for the private organization which Kingsbury had headed. Moses must have known, as all City Hall observers knew, that city offices ranging from clerkships to judgeships were being filled by reformers from lists furnished by pro-Fusion ward leaders.
Moses' idol had developed a case of galloping clay feet. John Purroy Mitchel's elegance had worked against him. Wearer of the dress suit, winner of the one-step contest at costume balls of the Four Hundred, the Boy Mayor had given himself the image of a friend of the wealthy. His independence had worked against him, too. Scornful of public relations, he refused to change his friendships—or even to go to the public with explanations of many of his actions as mayor, so that many of the notable reforms he initiated never got the publicity they deserved. His investigations cut waste in city government but, preoccupied with economy, he did not want to do anything with the money thus saved, but save it. His boasts were not of what was being done to meet the city's needs but of what was being done to save the city's money. Even his admiring biographer would have to admit, "His concern was for the city rather than for its people."
What probably disillusioned Moses most about Mitchel was not the Boy Mayor's elegance but his proposed "solution" of the problem of the railroad tracks below Riverside Drive. Mitchel proposed giving the New York Central exclusive control of the West Side waterfront and allowing the railroad to cure the Death Avenue problem by elevating its tracks below Fifty-ninth Street, a move that would have permanently blighted a large slice of downtown Manhattan. In return for these favors, Mitchel asked the railroad to pay $300,000—an amount not even sufficient to rehabilitate Riverside Park. A furious Citizens Union called the plan a "giveaway" to a railroad owned by Mitchel's social friends—and it was. And the Mayor's plan would have forever deprived the city of the waterfront highway and park Moses had dreamed of.
In the area of civil service, however, Mitchel was Moses' best hope. The Mayor promised to press again in 1917 for standardization and reclassification. After more than three years of unremitting work on the technicalities of civil service, Moses was still fascinated by them and by the potentiality for public good in their improvement. They are not "dry and dull as some may suppose from reading printed salary schedules," he said in 1917. "A student who wishes to see city government as a whole will find no more interesting . . . study than that afforded by a standardization program."
He was still confident. "I believe that the final results of the work in New York City will be regarded as entirely satisfactory," he said. Why
shouldn't they be? Hadn't he demonstrated—over and over again, by logic and by science—that his system would improve the city's government? Didn't all the city's top officials now understand this? "A second and revised edition of the standard specifications ... is about to be published for the Board of Estimate," he said. "Presumably this will be the final edition." The final edition! Galahad thought he was in sight of the Grail.
Bob Moses had done little else but fight for his system for more than three years. Now, in 1917, he fought harder. He made more speeches; he lobbied more editorial writers. He argued with the borough presidents and aldermen whose votes would decide the system's fate.
Getting in to see these officials was never easy. Unless Moskowitz or James knew the official personally, Moses would first have to ask them to speak to some official they knew who did. Then that official would ask the other to see Moses. When the time came for his appointment, he would often be kept waiting—since he was surely among the least important of visitors— in City Hall anterooms, eyed by secretaries who could gauge his unimportance by the length of time their bosses kept him waiting. And when they finally ushered him in, Moses would know that he was talking to a man who regarded the talk only as an irritation. Yet he never stopped trying—and he never stopped hoping.
Unfortunately for his hopes, however, 1917 was an election year and John Purroy Mitchel wanted to be re-elected—and, with 50,000 civil service employees infuriated by Moses' proposals, Tammany nominee John F. "Red Mike" Hylan was making them a major campaign issue. Tammany wanted City Hall back and Tammany speakers were telling mass meetings of city employees, "We do not believe we should have so many efficiency experts"— and the employees were jumping to their feet and bellowing in reply, "A new mayor! A new mayor!" When Moses' system came up before the Board of Estimate, Mitchel was silent. The system was not adopted. Moses' idol, the epitome of the cultured university man in politics, did take one definite step in regard to civil service, however. In October, a month before the election, he fired Henry Moskowitz as Civil Service Commission chairman and replaced him with a man acceptable to the employees.
When Red Mike Hylan swept into City Hall—Mitchel, who had been elected in 1913 by the largest plurality in New York's history, was turned out in 1917 by an even larger plurality—Progressivism in the city was dead. "We have had all the reform that we want in this city for some time to come," Hylan said, and issued an order soon after taking office in 1918: all Bureau staffers who had been working with city agencies were to be dismissed at once.
Dismissed, Moses watched as the handful of civil service innovations that represented the pathetically small accomplishment of his four years of effort were destroyed one by one. The meager measure of standardization that had been enacted was abolished by amendments to the 1918 budget. The few positions that had been removed from the exempt list were placed back on it. Hylan's department heads ended the use of the efficiency records. The
yellow forms of which Moses had been so proud were henceforth to be used, if they were used at all, only as scrap paper.
Within months of Hylan's inauguration, in fact, civil service in New York was plunged into depths unknown since the heyday of the Tweed Ring forty-five years before. Non-Tammany employees were forced out of their jobs by humiliating assignments and pay cuts. Hundreds of positions previously competitive were made exempt because of their "exceptional and sensitive" nature. The exemptions covered lifeguards, chauffeurs—and, as a final sprinkle of salt in Moses' wounds, a very highly paid "special examiner" to the Civil Service Commission itself. The special examiner was Frank A. Spencer, the man Moskowitz and James had fired and whom, once, in his days of optimism, Bob Moses had hoped to replace.
In an attempt to help men who might try to reform civil service in other cities, Moses summed up in a speech to a political science convention "certain deductions" which he had made from his experiences. The main deduction was a simple one. "Executive support" was the essential you could not do without. "When a program for standardization work is first made," he said bitterly, "an effort should be made to get the persons who are responsible to pledge themselves to stand squarely behind the program."
At times in his summation, there was an attempt at the old self-confident tone. But it was a sad attempt. Trying to analyze the maneuvers which had bound his system in parliamentary red tape and then, with the red tape holding it helpless, had hacked it to death, Bob Moses finally stopped and
said simply, "It is futile to attempt to establish beyond doubt who of the many agencies involved ... is responsible. ..." His dream, a dream for which he had fought with all the strength, brilliance and purity of purpose of youth and idealism, was dead—and he couldn't even be sure who had killed it.
The net result of all his work was nothing. There was no civil service standardization, no great highway along the Hudson, no mothers' shelters in Central Park. Intending to reform the city, he had worked hard and mastered with a supreme mastery reform's techniques. Convinced he was right, he had refused to soil the white suit of idealism with compromise. He had really believed that if his system was right—scientific, logical, fair—and if it got a hearing, the system would be adopted. In free and open encounter would not Truth prevail? And he had gotten the hearing.
But Moses had failed in his calculations to give certain factors due weight. He had not sufficiently taken into account greed. He had not sufficiently taken into account self-interest. And, most of all, he had not sufficiently taken into account the need for power.
Science, knowledge, logic and brilliance might be useful tools but they didn't build highways or civil service systems. Power built highways and civil
service systems. Power was what dfreams needed, not power in the hands of the dreamer himself necessarily but power put behind the dreamer's dreams by the man who had it to put thereV, power that he termed "executive support." Neither he himself nor James or Moskowitz had had such power. And the man who did, the man on whom he had counted for support, the mayor who was the epitome of his idealization of the public official, had not, in the final test, been willing to use his power on behalf of Bob Moses' dreams.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 12