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

by Caro, Robert A

Some of these men broke under the strain of the demands Moses placed upon them. More than one of the men close to Moses in the 1920's had taken

  to drink by the i93o's and been dismissed. There were stories of nervous breakdowns within the ranks and of marital difficulties caused by men's inability to work at the pace Moses required and still find time for their families. There was at least one suicide.

  But those who didn't break were rewarded. Advancement was rapid. And he had the knack, the knack of the great executive, of delegating authority completely. His men learned that once a policy in their area of authority had been hammered out by Moses, the details of implementing that policy were strictly up to them; all their boss cared about was that they get it done. They therefore had considerable power of their own, and this was incentive to those of them who wanted power.

  In rewarding his men financially, Moses was hampered by civil service limits on pay and promotion schedules, but his ingenuity found a hundred ways around those strictures. If a man wasn't making what Moses thought he should be, he would put the man's wife on the payroll in some job that required no work—such as answering the telephone in their home—and pay her an additional stipend. He early hit on the idea of using Park Commission labor and contractors to build homes—generally, comfortable, spacious two-story Colonial houses—for his top executives on park property so that they would be spared the expense of rent, and of using Park Commission personnel to maintain the houses so that they had none of the other expenses of the normal homeowner, either. The Park Commission even picked up the heating and electricity bills for these executives. To make sure that no fuss would be raised about the unusual procedure, the houses were generally built on secluded pieces of park property, so that the public didn't even know of their existence.

  The rewards Moses offered his men were not only power and money. If they gave him loyalty, he returned it manyfold. Moses might criticize his men himself, but if an outsider tried it—even if the outsider was right, and Moses privately told his aide so—Moses would publicly defend him without qualification.

  And the most valued reward—the thread that bound his men most closely to him—was still more intangible. "We were caught up in his sense of purpose," Latham explained. "He made you feel that what we were doing together was tremendously important for the public, for the welfare of people." The purposes were, after all, the purposes for which they had been trained. They were engineers and architects; engineers and architects want to build, and all Moses' efforts were aimed at building. Men who worked for him had the satisfaction not only of seeing their plans turned into steel and concrete, but also of seeing the transformation take place so rapidly that the fulfillment was all the more satisfying. Moses' men feared him, but they also admired and respected him—many of them seemed to love him.

  The increasing illegibility of Moses' signature was one result of the amount of work he was doing for the state. There were others. They were the public works that were completed by the end of Smith's last term. By

  December 31, 1928, new hospitals, some specially designed for care of crippled children, for mentally disabled veterans and for the blind, the deaf-and-dumb and tuberculosis sufferers, dotted the state. Great new state asylums for the insane had been completed, as well as an institute for the study of the causes of insanity. Sing Sing and other new prisons had been constructed. So had a State Health Laboratory, a State Teachers College at Albany and a thirty-story building behind the capitol to house previously scattered state offices. During the more than three decades that the Legislature had been ordering the elimination of grade crossings, exactly twelve had been eliminated* before Smith came to office. By the time he left the Governorship, more than two hundred had been eliminated. As for highways, when Smith left he could boast that "We have built since 1919 three thousand miles of new highways and reconstructed two thousand miles."

  With the added responsibilities, of course, came added power. Shuffling the offices on the capital's second floor, Smith gave Moses the one next to the Executive Chamber to use when he was in Albany. The location of the office was symbolic. The capital's readers of the map of power knew that in governmental matters—Belle Moskowitz was the chief adviser on political matters and there was no rivalry between her and Moses; they liked and respected each other—Moses was next in power to the Governor.

  Smith let the capitol know it. He wanted no interference with Moses in the jobs he had been given, he said whenever a cabinet member complained that Moses, in his speeding up of construction projects, was interfering in the affairs of his department. One top departmental engineer repeatedly refused to accept Moses' orders. Smith called the engineer in—and fired him on the spot. The engineer chose a bar near the capitol to drown his sorrows. By the end of the day, many of his friends in other departments and the Legislature had seen him there. To all who approached him he poured out the story of the injustice that had been done him. The engineer may have been looking for sympathy, and to his face, certainly, his auditors gave it, but in the power-conscious capitol what was important to them about his tale of woe was the lesson they learned from it: as long as Smith was Governor, Moses was not to be crossed. By nightfall, the story—and the lesson-had been absorbed by the capitol. When the New York Tribune, in an analysis of the capitol scene, headlined in 1927: moses second in power to the governor, the capitol knew that the headline was true.

  As to the effect on personality of the infusion of ever larger doses of power, the clearest evidence was in two remarkable extemporaneous speeches that Moses delivered in 1927 before two associations of Long Island real estate brokers, t

  * Omitting the cities of Syracuse, Buffalo and New York, where state laws gave jurisdiction over the work to city administrations.

  t We have a record of them because W. Kingsland Macy, feuding with Moses at the time, sent a stenographer to take notes.

  The speeches dealt with the future of Long Island. The Island was, Moses said, a gigantic cul-de-sac, a body of land with no outlet on its eastern end. Therefore, he said, the Island "is not a commercial community." Instead, it is a place for people to live and play, mostly play. It is "a natural recreational community, the inevitable playground for millions of people in the metropolitan section." New roads, therefore, should be parkways designed to bring people out from New York City for recreation and not for any other reason. The scope of the Island's interlocking problems—water supply, zoning, transportation—can never be solved by the existing system of government; there are simply too many separate and independent municipalities—towns, villages and cities—to allow coordinated planning. "Before you can solve these problems," he said, "you have got to change the system of county and town government. This is an obsolete form; you can't tackle the job with it."

  What was remarkable was Moses' tone, his remarkable self-confidence. When he said, "The form of government you have will not solve your problems here," he added: "That is not a theory; I am sure of it." And this was no servant of the people trying to persuade. The opposition to parks on Long Island, he told the Long Islanders, was "stupid opposition." There "has been too much lack of cooperation by [the Island's] public officials, too much tendency to criticize." And it must stop. "The townspeople want to deliberate about park propositions. There is a limit to the amount of deliberation that can be done."

  We will do the planning, he said. We don't need your help. We don't need your suggestions. "We don't need so much advice and cooperation as to the general program as we need help and advice with the specific problems as they come up. Theory and plans we take for granted." By specific details, he made clear, he meant only putting pressure on local governing bodies to approve specific sections of parkway or park plans.

  And if Long Island didn't cooperate, he said, it would be too bad for Long Island. "The state has a limited amount of money," he said. "It can be spent elsewhere." And if the "stupid opposition" doesn't cease, it will be. "It can and will be used elsewhere if we can't get the cooperation
. Somebody else is going to get it."

  Some people must be hurt by progress, he said. But that is unavoidable. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

  "There are people who like things as they are," he said. They cannot be permitted to stand in the way of progress. "I can't hold out any hope to them. They have to keep moving further away. This is a great big state and also there are other states. Let them go to the Rockies."

  In other extemporaneous statements, Moses showed no hesitancy in displaying his feelings about the importance of law. After he had decided to return the control of boxing to the Athletic Commission, he was busy for a time defending the commissioners, and when a reporter asked him if they had not in some instances violated the law, Moses replied that that really wasn't important. "Whether the commissioners have gone beyond their legal rights, I haven't any idea," he said. "One duty naturally leads to

  another. Sometimes it happens that in order to do one thing in the right way, it becomes necessary to do something else."

  Sometimes Moses' feelings about the law were expressed less ambiguously. While building bathhouses on Long Island, he ran afoul of the State Industrial Commissioner. The commissioner was Frances Perkins, who once, a decade and a half earlier, had stood on the deck of a ferry and listened to a young man with burning eyes talk about a great highway along the waterfront. In the decade and a half since that Sunday, the young man had learned how to build great highways.

  "He was building [the] bathhouses in violation of an . . . ordinance," Miss Perkins recalled. The ordinance specified that union labor be used on the job, but Moses had "just hired the local handymen and unemployed laborers to do brick masons' work. . . ."

  I called him up to say, "You mustn't do that. Naughty, naughty, you can't do that. What are you thinking of?"

  Well ... he treated me to . . . vituperation . . . although we were on the most intimate of personal terms. ... He was building bathhouses for the people of New York. ... He was going to have bathhouses for the people of New York. ... He just gave me the devil.

  I said, "There's a law about this, Robert. I hate to tell you this, but I shall have to invoke the law about this matter."

  Moses said, "Well, go ahead and invoke it! Do anything you think you can do. These bathhouses are going to be built. I'm just going to keep right on building them. You do the best you can to stop it."

  He went ahead and built his bathhouses. I invoked all the elements of law enforcement available, but before they got around to making the inspections, issuing the orders, getting him into court and coping with the various postponements that he was able to get, the bathhouses were done and people were going swimming out of them. ... I think the court rebuked him, but even the court didn't have the nerve to tear them down.

  Nor, it was charged, were Moses' feelings about the law confined to bathhouse building. Angry East Islip and Babylon residents had long been complaining about the breakneck speed at which Moses' big Packard limousine sped through the quiet streets of their villages. On July 31, 1927, Moses led sixty members of the State Parks Council on a tour of Long Island. Long Islanders complained that the cavalcade of limousines carrying the council members sped through the streets of those villages at excessive speed while outriders—state troopers on motorcycles—cleared the way by forcing pedestrians and other cars off the road. When the cavalcade arrived at the Babylon Town dock where the Park Commission yacht was moored, the residents complained, the troopers forced everyone except council members off the dock, despite the fact that it was a public dock. As old Judge Cooper editorialized: "We got a taste of what authority in the wrong hands means."

  Disregard for law, of course, implies regard for that which law is a barrier against: naked force, power sufficient to bend society or individuals,

  if not protected by law, to its will. And this, too, now became noticeable in the character of Robert Moses.

  Moses was playing by the rules of power now and one of the first of those rules is that when power meets greater power, it does not oppose but attempts to compromise. He had met power invulnerable to him—or even to his champion in the Governor's chair—in the barons of Long Island's North Shore. And where once, in laying out the original route of the Northern State Parkway exactly where he believed it should ideally go, laying it out without compromise, running it right past the massive porticos of the barons' castles, he had spat in the eye of power, now he hastily administered eyewash.

  He would not move the parkway route down out of the hills the barons held and onto the plains in the Island's center. This would mean that the parkway could never be truly beautiful. But, within the hills, there were many possible routes, and he was willing to compromise with the barons on which route would finally be chosen. He made deals: with at least a dozen barons he covenanted that he would move the parkway away from the homes to the edges of their property, out of sight of their castles, if they would in return donate the right-of-way so that he would not need a legislative appropriation for it; with a dozen more, where moving it to their estates' borders was impractical, he agreed to move it as far as was practical —and, so the estate would not be sliced in half by the parkway, so that equestrians could proceed unchecked on their rides and hunts, to build, at state expense, bridges, one for each estate, over the parkway for the exclusive use of the baron in residence and his retainers and guests.

  The compromising did not stop there. Were the barons afraid that the alien hordes brought to Long Island on the parkway might encroach on their lands? Precautions against this could be arranged. Specifically, he would covenant with the concerned barons that there would be no exits from the parkway within their borders. And he gave his solemn oath that state troopers patrolling the parkway would be under orders to keep automobiles from the city moving, not allowing their occupants to picnic, or even to stop, by the side of the parkway within their borders. Publicly, Moses never stopped excoriating the Long Island millionaires. But in private, many of them were coming to consider him quite a reasonable fellow to deal with.

  None found him more reasonable than financier Otto Kahn. In dealing with Kahn, Moses, in his excursions beyond the limits of the spirit of the law, went further than he had ever gone before. The Legislature, subservient to the will of the barons, refused all through 1924, 1925, 1926 and 1927 to give Moses a cent for the Northern State Parkway. Funds were refused even for the surveying of proposed routes—a refusal which made it almost impossible for Moses to work out deals with the barons because he could not be sure whether routes proposed were engineeringly feasible. But in 1926, Kahn learned that Moses intended to run the parkway right through the middle of the eighteen-hole private golf course he had constructed for his pleasure on his Cold Spring Harbor estate.

  Kahn, who happened to be a relative of Moses—he was married to the daughter of one of Bella's sisters—offered to secretly donate $10,000 to the Park Commission for surveys, if some of the surveys found a new route for the parkway in the Cold Spring Harbor area, a route which would not cross his estate at all. And Moses accepted the money.

  Regard for power implies disregard for those without power as is demonstrated by what happened after Moses shifted the route of the Northern State Parkway away from Otto Kahn's golf course. The map of the Northern State Parkway in Cold Spring Harbor is a map not only of a road but of power—and of what happens to those who, unwittingly, are caught in the path of power.

  The parkway was originally supposed to run through Otto Kahn's estate. Since Otto Kahn had power—the power that went with money—he was able to get the route shifted to the south. South of Otto Kahn's estate lay the estates of two other men of wealth and of influence with the Legislature—Congressman Ogden Livingston Mills and Colonel Henry Rogers Winthrop. The Congressman and the Colonel were able to get the route shifted farther south, far enough so it would not touch their estates either. But shifting the route south of the Mills and Winthrop estates meant that it would run through the estates of two other men of
wealth and influence, Colonel Henry L. Stimson and Robert W. De Forest. So the route was shifted south again. And south of the Stimson and De Forest estates lay a row of farms, and farmers had neither wealth nor influence.

  James Roth was one of those farmers. When he had purchased his forty-nine acres in 1922, much of it had been woodland and all of it had been rocky. Roth had hauled away the rocks and cut down the trees. He owned a team of horses, but they could not budge many of the stumps. As the horses pulled at them, Roth pulled beside them. So did his wife, Helen. So that both would be freed for the pulling, their son, Jimmy, at the age of five, had to learn how to handle the team. As his parents sweated at the ropes, he sat on one of the horses, kicking him forward.

  After the farm was cleared, the Roths found that the southern fifteen acres were no good for planting. But the rest of the land was rich and fertile. In the afternoons, during harvest season, James Roth, who had been up since before dawn working in the fields, would load up one of his two wagons and drive to market. While he was gone, his wife and son, who in 1927 was six, would load the other. When Roth returned he would— without pause, since every minute was important to a farmer trying to work thirty-four acres without a hired man—unharness the team, hitch it to the loaded wagon and begin the trip again—while Helen and Jimmy would reload the first wagon. But by 1927 the farm had begun paying. "We felt pretty secure," Jimmy recalls. "We had a nice farm. In those days, a farm wasn't just real estate, like it is now. In those days, a farm was your living. It was your home. And we had a nice farm."

  Then, in 1927, a representative of the Long Island State Park Commission—of Robert Moses—drove up to the Roths' farm and told them the state was condemning fourteen acres out of the farm's center for the Northern State Parkway. James Roth argued with Moses' representative. He pleaded with him. All he wanted the commission to do, Roth said, was to move the parkway route about four hundred feet south, less than a tenth of a mile. That would put it in the barren part of the farm. Taking fourteen acres from the center meant that a substantial part of the fertile acreage would be gone. Even more important, it meant that the farm would be sliced in two. How would he get from one side to the other? How would he be able to work it? But Moses' representative refused to listen to the Roths. The route had been decided on the basis of engineering considerations, he said. It could not possibly be changed.