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

by Caro, Robert A

  nature of Wilcox's illness and the reason for his desire for haste, agreed. When a small but key parcel came on the market and Wilcox was afraid it would be purchased and developed by private interests, he and Schoellkopf purchased it and presented it to the commission as a gift. When two more key pieces came on the market in 1925, he persuaded Schoellkopf to have the power company purchase them and hold them until the commission received, at the 1926 legislative session, an appropriation to allow it to purchase them in turn. The admiration in which Wilcox was held helped the parkway along; several of his friends said they would buy parcels needed for the right-of-way and give them to the commission in his name, and Schoellkopf advanced money to speed the transactions. The only point of contention between the Niagara commissioners and Moses was that the commissioners wanted to carry out the Niagara development themselves, to keep, as Moses had solemnly promised them they could, power over the park's development and administration, to remain in charge of what was to them a cherished piece of nature instead of turning it over to a faceless bureaucracy in the Parks Council offices in New York City, three hundred miles away. In so wanting, they stood in the way of Moses' absolute control of state parks.

  Clearwater, the Niagara Commission's representative on the Parks Council, was a larger irritant for the same reason. When the judge argued that the council was only an "advisory" body and that the regional commissions should be allowed latitude in their work, he was arguing, in effect, against absolute control of all state parks by Moses. And when Alphonse Clearwater spoke, the other council members sitting around the table with him seemed to remember more clearly the promises Moses had given them and the principles of park development that they had once been determined not to surrender. Several times, the judge had even swayed Robert H. Tre-man, the chairman of one of the three new regional commissions, and the decisive sixth vote had been cast against a Moses proposal.

  The refusal of the Niagara Commission to submit to his control had already, Moses complained, made him look "ridiculous." In submitting park spending plans to the three-man committee of the Governor, Hutchinson and Hewitt, Moses, anxious as always to obtain as much money as possible as quickly as possible, had asked for immediate allocation of Niagara's whole million-dollar appropriation. But when Hutchinson asked Wilcox if the commission really needed the whole sum in 1926, Wilcox refused to lie. He said that the commission could use no more than $400,000 of the money in that year.

  The Niagara Commission's independence was threatening to cause Moses serious problems. While the commission envisioned a complete parkway system around Niagara Falls, he wanted it to extend all the way to Buffalo, twenty-five miles away. The Niagara commissioners had no objection to the plan, but they didn't want to be responsible for it; they were not trying to build a vast park system; they were interested only in the land they knew and for whose protection they had been fighting for so many years. Furthermore, the parkway Moses wanted would be primarily in Erie County; they felt the newly created Erie County Park Commission should

  have jurisdiction over it. But the bond issue gave money for improvements on the Niagara Frontier only to the Niagara Commission, and they were afraid that under the law they would be forced to assume responsibility for it. When Moses asked them to give $100,000 of their million for planning of the Erie County section of the parkway, they objected because they felt the whole million was needed around the falls, but they said that they would give it anyway—as long as in return a law was passed making clear that the portion of the parkway in Erie County was not their responsibility. This apparently minor point appeared to worry Moses beyond all relationship to its legal importance, possibly because asking the Legislature to pass new park reorganization laws might give it the opportunity to oust him from control. Furthermore, the existence of open conflict within the Parks Council was a threat to his assertion of absolute dominance over it; as long as maneuverings within the parks empire he was creating were kept quiet, he could quietly work his will within it; let it once become a source of controversy and the Legislature might well begin stepping into it, and the Legislature would not be disposed to allow his dominance to continue.

  So Moses moved against the Niagara commissioners. First, although they had a superintendent and an engineer to direct the commission's staff and day-to-day affairs, Moses demanded that they appoint an "executive officer"—who they suspected would be one of his men. They refused.

  Then there ensued in April and May 1926 a number of Parks Council meetings at which the commission had no representative present. Clearwater, its authorized representative, was suddenly struck down by an illness so severe that doctors gave him no chance of living. Wilcox, his authorized substitute, was too weak to take his place. And council members who were friends of the two old men reported that in their absence rumors—vicious rumors—were being circulated about them in whispers at council meetings. Someone—Wilcox felt sure he knew who—was hinting darkly that the Niagara Commission, in making its park and parkway plans, had sold out to the interests of Schoellkopf's power company. On June 3, Smith wrote Moses a letter—Wilcox was always to believe that Moses wrote it, and persuaded Smith to sign it—asking Moses to investigate "transactions and relations between the Niagara Reservation Commission and the power companies, including the reservation of easements by the power companies on land sold by them to the commission."

  "I also wish to learn," said the innuendo-loaded letter, "whether this park commission has laid out a program which will insure the protection of the Niagara Riverfront ... or whether they are just buying isolated pieces of land along the banks of the river and leaving the rest of the land in the hands of the power company and other private interests."

  Wilcox could hardly believe what he read. Moses, he was sure, was behind the letter, but Moses had known and approved of the commission's arrangements with the power company.

  But Wilcox had gotten only a taste of what was in store for him.

  Moses called a meeting of the Parks Council for June 26 to consider the Governor's letter. Wilcox, Schoellkopf and the two other Niagara Com-

  mission members, Robert W. De Forest and Robert H. Gittins, met and prepared resolutions giving their side of the story and sent them to Moses, asking him to have them read to the council. No Niagara commissioners were present at the council meeting—Clearwater and Wilcox were unable to travel—and they learned after the meeting that Moses had not even told the council about the existence of the resolutions and instead had persuaded it to appoint a five-member committee to investigate the matter at a hearing at the Parks Council office in New York City on July 15. The committee, the Niagara commissioners realized, was packed against them; there was one old park man, Major William A. Welch of the Palisades Commission, on it, and its chairman, Jay Downer of Westchester, although an engineer friendly to Moses and an exponent of the new park theories, was regarded as a man of integrity, but the third member was a representative of Conservation Commissioner Alexander MacDonald, and Moses and his friend and aide, Henry Lutz, were members ex officio, so Moses had three votes out of the five.

  Whether the only available record of the hearing is complete is impossible to ascertain. The only transcript available was made by Rose Pedrick, Moses' secretary, and Wilcox later complained in a letter to Moses that "several times the stenographer was told to omit things, or portions of the discussion, which were really of the greatest relative significance." These omissions appear at two crucial points in the transcript as "discussions off the record" and once Miss Pedrick refers to an "argument between Mr. Gittins and Mr. Moses" without telling what the argument was about.

  Complete or not, however, the transcript is interesting.

  What are the specific charges against us? Wilcox demanded as soon as the hearings began. There are no charges, Downer hastily replied. This is not an investigation—"Take that word from the record. This conference; it is a conference. Substitute the word 'conference.' "

  You mean there is no on
e willing to stand up here to our faces and make charges? Wilcox asked. "No, sir. No, sir," Downer replied. "No charges have been made by anybody so far as I know." The only reason the committee was interested in the commission's relations with the power company, he said, was that the Legislature might be reluctant to allocate money for land along the gorge until the power company gave definite written assurances, preferably legal options, that it would give the commission easements over the intervening lands it owned so that the Legislature could be assured that the parkway would be continuous. The only thing the committee wanted was an assurance from Wilcox and Schoellkopf that their informal agreements would be formalized.

  Well, Wilcox said, there is a letter written by Governor Smith, "implying that we are handling the thing not for the public interest but for the interests of other people ... of the power company . . . plainly implying it, so much so that he might as well have charged it in terms . . . just as plainly as if it were put in a little more brutal language, charging us with collusive and improper relations. ... If the English language has any mean-

  ing, it means that." Where did the Governor get his information—false information, outright lies, in fact—on which the letter was based? Moses said hastily, "Mr. Downer, may I interrupt a moment. . . . Personally, I regard the question of where the Governor got his information as something that we have no right to go into." And Downer hastily agreed. Throughout the hearing, which would go on for six hours, at a high cost in pain and weariness to Wilcox and to De Forest—who was seventy-nine years old and so ill that he had been in bed for more than a month—the Niagara commissioners would seek to learn what the charges against them were and why, if there were no charges, they had been summoned to New York City. Throughout the hearing, Downer would evade a direct answer, trying to focus attention on a number of minor matters that had nothing to do with the power company. Near the end of the long day, Downer tried to conclude the hearing. "Just one minute," Wilcox said, and insisted that "the big question that appears in the Governor's letter" be discussed. He made the committee listen while he read into the record Schoellkopf's contributions to the parkway plan, and presented proof that the power company was not getting anything from the informal arrangement and in fact was donating to the state land worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Governor's letter talked about "transactions and relations between the . . . Commission and the power companies including the reservation of easements by the power companies on land sold by them to the Commission," Wilcox said. Why, he said, no power company had ever "sold an acre of land to our Commission or made any reservation [easement] whatever on any land whatever." And Downer, as if his sense of fairness had at last won over his loyalty to Moses, said for the record that he had, in fact, toured the Niagara site himself and had been "impressed with ... the many things that they [the power company] . . . had planned to do for the furtherance of the parkway."

  "We have no time to waste in hearing any defense of gentlemen of your reputation as to any collusion with anybody, and this committee will not go into any such question," Downer said. "We are not interested and we do not believe any such things and have nothing in our minds in regard to it. We know your reputations too well to believe you would do such a thing. . . . There is no such thing in the minds of this committee." And when Wilcox insisted that he be formally exonerated of any wrongdoing in his informal argreements with Schoellkopf, Downer said flatly, "I have no fault to find with that transaction," a position with which Welch heartily agreed. Moses, who had repeatedly interrupted Downer and the commissioners during discussions of the other, minor subjects, had been noticeably silent. Now he said, "I would like to ask as a question of fact whether or not the money in the case of the two parcels we discussed before was or was not furnished by the power company." And Downer said flatly, "What if it was, Mr. Moses?"

  Downer's anxiousness to avoid discussion of the "big question" raised in Smith's—or Moses'—letter deprived Wilcox of an opportunity to get the committee's approval of acquisition by the power company of a key piece of land that had just come on the market and that Wilcox was eager

  to have Schoellkopf snap up and turn over to the commission for the parkway before someone else bought it and began to build on it. This, Wilcox was to say, was a bitter disappointment to him. "The opportunity ... is slipping and my interest and ability to act are waning," he wrote, "and I fear this promising plan may come to naught." But at least the commissioners felt they had been exonerated.

  But they had not reckoned with the full extent of the change in Robert Moses. The Niagara commissioners felt sure that Downer's report on the hearing would be fair. And they were right. The committee chairman wrote that Schoellkopf s only relationship with the commission had been to assist it and to have his power company assist it, at considerable expense to both himself and his company. Such criticisms as Downer did make of the commission's operations, based on the minor matters discussed at the hearings, dealt with technicalities, and so did his recommendations for changes in its procedures. But when the Parks Council met on July 24—with Wilcox, exhausted by the earlier trip to New York and the strain of the hearing, again confined to bed and absent—Downer's report was not distributed. Neither was its summary, which contained the exoneration. Instead, its list of "recommendations," which concentrated on the technicalities and did not include the exoneration or even mention the "big question," was read— so hastily that an aide Wilcox had sent to take notes was able to gain only a general idea of its contents—and the innocuous recommendations were adopted.

  Wilcox's aide asked Henry Lutz to send a copy of the report to Wilcox, and Lutz promised he would do so. On July 30, Wilcox had not received it, and he sent Lutz a telegram asking for it. Lutz did not even reply.

  On August 3, Wilcox, in bed, unable to determine what the report about him said or if it had been sent to the rest of the Parks Council, wrote Lutz. His letter was, considering the provocation, one of remarkable courtesy. The harshest line in it was its last: "If there is a copy of that report in existence or available, I should be glad to have it as soon as convenient."

  Lutz did not reply. But Moses did. The first sentence of his letter to Wilcox was: "I will pass over without extended comment the unpleasant tone of your letter. I presume that you have become so accustomed to addressing people in this way that you are hardly aware of its effect on others." He was writing, Moses said, to defend Lutz from Wilcox's attacks. Downer's report, Moses said, was not ready, although the Parks Council had adopted its "conclusions" and "the action taken by the Council has been outlined to the Governor." An astounded Wilcox realized that Moses had sent a copy of his, Moses', letter to the seventy-two other regional commissioners without sending them a copy of Wilcox's letter—and therefore the commissioners could have no way of knowing that Wilcox's letter had not in fact been unpleasant, and they could not know the events that had led up to it.

  Since Wilcox's letter was not insulting, why did Moses say it was? In Wilcox's view, Moses realized that the Downer report would not make the Niagara commissioners look bad to the other regional commissioners and

  would not justify to Smith what he had almost certainly told Smith about them, that he therefore needed another issue to divert attention from the main one, and that he seized on Wilcox's innocuous letter as the whole cloth out of which to manufacture it. In any case, his handling of the letter was consistent with his other actions in the matter. He had sent the seventy-three regional commissioners copies of Smith's letter implying wrongdoing by the Niagara Commission, but he had not sent the regional commissioners —he had not even let them know of the existence of—the Niagara Commission's resolutions that gave its side of the story. He had read at a Parks Council meeting Downer's "recommendations" which seemed to find some fault, however minor, with the commission, but not the summary which exonerated the commission of the major charges. And now he accused Wilcox of writing an abusive letter to a council employee, without allowing the regional commissioners
to see the letter for themselves—and to see that it was not abusive. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Moses had determined to hound from the state park organization a group of elderly men whose only crime was their refusal to allow him to exercise unbridled power in that organization and to remove them from control of the park they loved, the park that one of them had created, the park to which they had given so much of their lives.

  When he received Moses' letter, Wilcox, who had been confined at home, weak and in pain, since his trip to New York, left his bed and went to his office to dictate a reply. He was unable to stay there long or to work in substantial stretches, and it took him five days to finish it. But he finished it. And although its main purport was to exonerate himself from charges of discourtesy and dishonesty, it was also a telling document in charting the evolution of Robert Moses.

  "You speak from a high position," Ansley Wilcox wrote.

  Seemingly, this should bring with it a feeling of responsibility and consideration, not merely a sense of dominating authority and a desire to have your own way without opposition in all matters, large and small. It might have led you to show some special consideration to the Niagara Commission and Commissioners, owing to their age and long service and the experience of all of them, giving them an intimate knowledge of many special local problems which you and other members of the State Council, however wise and experienced in general, are only able to guess at; and owing to the desperate illness and disability of Judge Clearwater, our President, and partial disabilities of Mr. De Forest and myself. But it has not produced any such consideration—quite the contrary. . . . Our Commission and its members have been treated by you unfairly and brutally to a degree which cannot be expressed in polite language.