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

by Caro, Robert A

  Even before Roosevelt's inauguration, Clark was writing to him at Warm Springs suggesting an alternate route—with a sharp southward dip just before it got to Old Westbury so that it avoided the Wheatley Hills completely.

  Dashing off his own letter to Warm Springs, Moses told Roosevelt that Clark was trying to "change the location of about six miles of right-of-way in the center of the parkway, for the sole purpose of avoiding a few people whom he represents." This, Moses said, would involve "torturing the parkway down toward the middle of the island where the landscaping problem is almost insuperable." He would never agree to do so. To brace up Roosevelt, he added that the Wheatley Hills barons are "people of large wealth who have always been able to buy what they wanted or to get what they wanted by influence and pressure. It is difficult for these people to believe there is anyone they cannot reach in some way."

  For several months, Moses seemed to be winning the fight. Roosevelt drove over the two routes himself and wrote Clark that he saw no reason to change Moses' plans.

  But those plans were soon to be changed nonetheless. For Grenville Clark discovered how Otto Kahn, Moses' relative, had persuaded Moses to shift the parkway route off his private golf course.

  Clark relayed the discovery to Hutchinson and Hewitt. The two legislative leaders telegraphed Moses demanding "a complete list of all properties . . . payment for which has been made or is intended to be made by funds from private sources for any parkway or proposed parkway," and "a complete list of persons who have given funds to the Long Island Parkway [sic] Commission." And the telegram demanded: "Please also state whether the route of any proposed parkway was ever tentatively laid out over, through or near the land of any donors of money. ... If so, after receipt of such gift, was route of any proposed parkway changed so as to run over or through a different part of the land of any donor or donors, or so as not to run at all through or near such land?"

  At first, Moses was defiant. Hastily sending an explanation to Roosevelt, he admitted that Kahn had given $10,000, but said that "the idea that we shifted our route to please one man because he gave us some money is too absurd to entertain." The "real reason" for the shift, he said, "was the objection of" Stimson, De Forest and "various others" to the routing of the parkway across their land, and their refusal to donate land unless the route was shifted south—a statement which conveniently ignored the fact that if the route hadn't been shifted off Kahn's land in the first place, it would never have touched their land and their donations would not have been needed.

  At first, Moses' new executive gave him support, backing the Wheatley Hills route. But Clark began hinting that any attempt to push that route

  would result in the disclosure to the public of the Moses-Kahn deal, which, he said, if "finally brought to light will not make a creditable chapter in the history of this State." Various attempts at compromise failed, and Clark— and Hewitt and Hutchinson—made clear to Roosevelt that any attempt to obtain legislative appropriations for the Northern State Parkway until its route had been shifted out of the Wheatley Hills would result in an all-out fight.

  The fight over the Taylor Estate—now to be named Heckscher State Park—had been an all-out one, of course, but there would be a significant difference this time. The issue in the first case had been that of millionaires blocking the public; in the Northern State Parkway case, it would be that of a millionaire giving $10,000 to keep his private golf course untouched and the money being used to throw hard-working farmers off their land. It was not the type of issue likely to redound to the credit of the official who had accepted the $10,000 and thrown the farmers off their land—or of a Governor who was placed in the position of defending his action.

  Whether Roosevelt was motivated by the threat of public disclosure to prevail on Moses to compromise is not definitely known. But the following sequence of events is clear. On October 23, 1929, Clark gave Roosevelt what amounted to an ultimatum: he and his clients had decided, he said, that it was impossible to reach any kind of agreement with Moses, because he refused to compromise and was highly insulting, and that a full-scale fight would be launched during the 1930 legislative session. Nineteen-thirty was an election year; among those running for re-election would be Franklin D. Roosevelt. Less than two weeks after Clark issued the barons' ultimatum to Roosevelt, Moses agreed to a "compromise." Under the "compromise," the Northern State suddenly altered its eastward course at Glen Cove Road, the western border of the Wheatley Hills, just as it was about to plunge into the estate area, and instead swung south for two full miles, far enough so that when it resumed its course, it would never come near the Wheatley Hills. To make it appear that the "compromise" was really a compromise and that both sides, instead of just the state, had given in, Moses announced to the public with great fanfare that the barons had agreed to pay the state $175,-000, which he said would pay for the entire cost of the detour. Actually, however, the cost of the additional right-of-way alone would be $2,250,000, so that more than 90 percent of the bill for the accommodation Moses reached with the barons had to be footed by the state's taxpayers.

  The long-term costs to the public of Moses' accommodation include figures that cannot be prefaced with dollar signs. For one thing, the accommodation condemned users of the parkway to a perpetual detour of five miles around the Wheatley Hills. Coupled with the six-mile detour forced on parkway users by Moses' previous accommodation with Otto Kahn and the other Dix Hills barons, it meant that a commuter who lived anywhere east of Dix Hills and who used the parkway to get to his job in New York City was condemned to drive, every working day of his life, twenty-two extra and unnecessary miles. He had to drive no unnecessary miles per week, 5,500 per year—all because of Moses' "compromise." By the 1960's there were about

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  21,500 such commuters, and the cost to them alone of Moses' accommodation totaled tens of millions of wasted hours of human lives.

  More important, Moses' great accommodation deprived the public forever of parks in the loveliest part of Long Island. He had once wanted parks on the wooded hills of the North Shore, and his original concept of the Northern State Parkway was therefore of a road leading to parks, as the Southern State Parkway led to parks. But, as part of his "compromise," he had to promise the barons that there would not be a single state park anywhere along the parkway, or anywhere in the section of the North Shore that they controlled—and with a single exception/' acquired in 1967 and still undeveloped in 1974, there are no state parks anywhere in that part of Nassau County or western Suffolk that was known as the "North Shore"

  * Caumsett State Park, the former Marshall Field Estate, on Lloyd Neck.

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  or the "Gold Coast."* Robert Moses' "compromise" with the North Shore barons amounted to unconditional surrender. In later years, most of the barons would have disappeared from the Long Island scene. The names of most of them would be unfamiliar to the new generations using the Northern State Parkway. But every twist and curve in that parkway—and, in particular, the two great southward detours it makes around the Wheatley and Dix Hills—is a tribute to their power, and to the use to which they put it after they discovered the chink in Moses' armor. Farmer James Roth was not the only person who paid for Moses' deal with Otto Kahn.

  The completeness of Moses' surrender—coupled with the fact that Moses never surrendered on any park or parkway issue while Smith was

  * Motorists using the Northern State Parkway cannot reach any park unless they transfer, forty-one miles from Manhattan, to a spur parkway that leads, after another six miles of driving, to Sunken Meadow.

  Detour For Power

  The Northern State Parkway, proposed route The Northern State Parkway, actual route

  Estates of barons most vigorously opposed to original route

  Farms of James Roth and others

  HUNTINGTON

  Governor—makes it difficult to escape the concl
usion that the change in Governors had something to do with it. By accepting Otto Kahn's $10,000, Moses had presented his opponents with a weapon which they used to club him—and New York State—into submission. But, by illegally appropriating the Taylor Estate, he had presented many of the same opponents in that battle with an equally dangerous weapon. And somehow Al Smith had avoided its swings and beaten them into the ground. Fighting under the Squire of the Hudson was not precisely the same as righting under the King of Oliver Street.

  There were other differences. In Albany, where a legislative session is round after round of hastily formed alliances, trust in a man's word is all-important; when a man promised his support on a bill, he could not later take it back; if he did so, the word on him would soon begin to circulate through the corridors of the capitol, and when discussing their relationships with him, legislators would say, "We deal in writing"—a phrase which, in Albany, was the ultimate insult. Al Smith could say, "When I give my word, it sticks." Now, in the corridors of the capitol, many men were saying of the new Governor, "We deal in writing." Diminutive Reuben Lazarus, the onetime legislative page boy who had since become one of the capital's most knowledgeable bill drafters, good enough to be New York City's legislative representative, believed that he had been misled twice within a month by Roosevelt when he asked the Governor his intention on bills important to Tammany Hall, and told Roosevelt to his face: "Governor, from now on we deal in writing; and I'm going to demand a bond on your signature."

  No man had more bills awaiting signature than Robert Moses. And Roosevelt seemed to take special delight in misleading him. Once Lazarus was sitting in the anteroom outside the Governor's office, "and I heard Moses, inside, shout, 'Frank Roosevelt, you're a goddamned liar and this time I can prove it! I had a stenographer present!' And Moses came storming out of FDR's office without even seeing me, he was so thoroughly angry. I was next and I walked in. The Governor's face was breaking into a grin of real pleasure. He . . . acted as though he had just come out of the bath after a clean shave in the morning." After several such incidents, Moses developed a new routine for his trips to Albany; he would arrive early in the morning for conferences with Roosevelt at the Executive Mansion, but even though the Governor might promise that a bill then on his desk for signature would be signed, Moses would not leave the capitol until it was.

  But if Roosevelt gave Moses a hard time before doing so, he did nonetheless sign most of Moses' bills. And although he may have hated Moses, during the four years of his Governorship he gradually increased, not decreased, Moses' power.

  He did so, moreover, despite the fact that Moses never trimmed his sails in their personal relationship. He never called Roosevelt "Governor," and he made a point of not doing so; not only in private letters but also in official correspondence it was always "Dear Frank."

  He refused to follow conventional lines in their official relations, either. Although his State Parks Council was a part of Roosevelt's administration, the council adopted major new policies without conferring with the Governor about them—sometimes even without notifying the Governor about them. Once, when Moses had the council pass a resolution asking the Legislature to remove all historical state reservations from the council's control and turn them over to the Department of Education, the Governor was reduced to begging Henry Lutz, "Will you be good enough to let me know whether the report is true. . . ."

  Moses may have obeyed Al Smith's patronage suggestions without question, but he wouldn't even listen to Roosevelt's. As Jones Beach and other state parks opened during Roosevelt's regime, the number of jobs at Moses' disposal steadily increased. By 1930, the number of lifeguards, special police, gardeners, parking-field and bathhouse attendants, janitors and toll takers at the Long Island parks was more than fifteen hundred. Long Island Democrats eyed these jobs greedily—and expectantly, since Moses was a subordinate of a Democratic Governor. After they had asked Moses for some jobs and had been refused, they appealed to Roosevelt to order him to make some available. Roosevelt gingerly suggested to Moses that he cooperate, and Moses curtly refused. The Governor's personal requests received the same treatment. Roosevelt sent on to Moses a job application with a notation attached—"Dear Bob: This is an old school boyfriend of mine and I would be very glad if you could help him in some way." Moses replied by simply sending the Governor a copy of the official employment regulations of the commission, which included the sentence: "Recommendations based upon merely personal or political acquaintance will not be considered."

  And the explanation for the increase in Moses' power during Roosevelt's Governorship certainly wasn't that he gave in like a good subordinate if he had a difference of opinion with his chief over a matter of policy. In fact, if his powers of persuasion were not sufficient to persuade Roosevelt to alter what Moses felt was an unwise decision, he did not hesitate to mobilize forces against the Governor.

  For years, Roosevelt, naval buff and lover of the sea, had wanted to transform Fort Schuyler, a little-used fifty-six-acre Army base at Throgs Neck in the Bronx, into a Merchant Marine Academy. The folding chairs set up on the Assembly Speaker's dais for his inauguration had hardly been stored away when he began prodding the Army to close the base and turn the land over to the state. In 1931, the Army finally agreed—but no sooner had it done so than Moses announced that Fort Schuyler should be turned into a park instead. When the Governor refused even to consider that suggestion— Fort Schuyler, he said, was going to be a Merchant Marine Academy; the matter was closed—Moses mobilized his forces.

  The Park Association of New York City met to formally endorse Moses' suggestion. So did the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association, the Public Schools Athletic League, twenty-five other civic organizations "of a total membership of half a million" organized into a committee to back the park plea—and the Sulzbergers' Times. The influential who made up the Park

  Association's board of directors took the trouble to write personally to Roosevelt on the issue. After conferring with Moses, Nathan Straus, Jr., association president, said, "If it's made an academy it will train three or four hundred boys; if it's made a park, 300,000 to 400,000 people will use it every summer weekend."

  Apparently Roosevelt did not realize for some time that it was actually Moses who was behind the opposition. As late as January 8, 1932, Guernsey Cross, obviously under the impression that Moses was on the Governor's side, wrote to ask him for a suggested reply that the Governor could make to a letter from George F. Mand, president of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce. Moses replied promptly: "Attached is suggested reply to [Mand]. 'Dear Mr. Mand: I agree with you . . . that it is much more important to use this area for municipal recreation purposes than to make it the headquarters for the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy, which can well be taken care of with a smaller and cheaper piece of land outside the city limits.'" Cross hurriedly asked Conservation Commissioner Henry Morgenthau to draft the reply instead.

  Even after he realized Moses' involvement, however, there was nothing Roosevelt could do. When Samuel Rosenman and Herbert Lehman, contacted by reform leaders, both asked him to forget about the academy, he must have realized that he was surrounded, and he surrendered. (He was able to realize this pet project only after he had been elected President. On December 29, 1932, two days before his term as Governor ended, he signed, on behalf of New York State, a lease proffered by the War Department giving the land to the state for a New York Merchant Marine Academy. And even at this date, Roosevelt did not make any public announcement of the transaction, so that the public did not learn what he had done until he was no longer Governor.)

  Part of the explanation for Moses' increased power was simply the breadth and depth of his knowledge of the government at whose head Roosevelt, with little preparation, suddenly had found himself. No one knew the vast administrative machinery the Governor was supposed to run better than this man the Governor hated. To a considerable extent, the machinery was his machinery; he, more than any other individual, had drafted
the executive budget system, the departmental consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He, more than any other individual, knew the considerations—constitutional, legal and political—that lay behind wording in those laws that was otherwise so puzzling. He knew the precedents that made each point in them legal—and the precedents that might call their legality into question. He knew the reason behind every refinement, every clarification—and every obscuration—in the laws' final versions. When discussing a point of law with some young state agency counsel, Moses liked to let the lawyer painstakingly explain the legal ramifications involved and then say dryly: "I know. I wrote the law." This store of knowledge, coupled with an intelligence capable of drawing upon it with computer-like rapidity, constituted a political weapon which no Governor could afford to let rust in his arsenal.

  Roosevelt's very first major administrative hurdle—the compilation of his first budget—taught him Moses' indispensability. The 1929 budget would be the first drawn up under the executive budget system Moses had codified. But no sooner had Roosevelt presented it to the Republican Legislature—a 411-page "complete plan of proposed expenditures and estimated revenues"— than the Legislature struck at its heart, tacking on to the appropriation bills a rider that would give the chairmen of its finance committees, Hewitt and Hutchinson, an equal say with the Governor in determining how each department should spend the lump sums proposed for it by the Governor. The rider was the last desperate challenge of men who saw their power being stripped from them, and they didn't spare the invective; a Syracuse assemblyman, referring to Roosevelt as "that man downstairs," trumpeted that "the very foundation of the State is in danger with this message of avarice, usurpation and presumption."