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

by Caro, Robert A

  The reformers stood ur md cheered when Moses had finished, but the reaction of city officials was somewhat less satisfying. For all the cooperation he roeci n cd from them he ~ : v. r.ill have :::n the starry-eyed idealist of 1914 arguing in the language of a Yale bull session for the construction of mothers' shelters in Central Park-

  "The teak :: ha plana was too big for them. Not one city official, he would recall, seemed capable of comprehending a highway network on the scale he had proposed—a fact which would not have been surprising even if the officials had been men of vision, since no highway network on that scale had ever been proposed for any city in America, or, for that matter, aoj : .:;• in the world.

  The scale of the money involved was too big for them. The total cost would obviously be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and they felt there was no sense in the city even considering such an amount.

  hat the city officials could comprehend about Moses" plan they didn't like. The relocations involved for his highways would be on a scale almost unknown in the city: the Whitlock Avenue approach to the Triborough Bridge in the Bronx would alone require the condemnation of buildings containing more than four thousand apartments—voters' apartments.

  Moses' general plans for his parkway system were turned over for analysis to city engineers, who, sensing the attitude of their superiors, did not rush to begin working on them. Try as he would. Moses could not get the city to move on them. And once the Depression began to tighten its hold on New York, there was no longer much sense in trying to get the city to move. In 1932, the city had not even begun seriously considering any of the park-l he had proposed at the Hotel Commodore dinner two vears before.

  Walker's administration did agree in 1930 to issue $30,000,000 in bonds to buy new park land. In 1930, the city acquired 2.530 acres that would be known as Great Kills and Willowbrook parks on Staten Island; Highland, .Alley Pond and Kissena parks in Queens: and Owl's Head Park in Brooklyn. But, by the end of that year, it was becoming apparent that the city's people had needs even more pressing than the need for parks, even if there had still been any market for the bonds that had to be sold to buy them. In 1932, with only $4,000,000 of the S30.000.000 spent—and exactly one tenement-area park acquired—even most reformers were agreeing that acquisition of park land was a luxury that New York would have to postpone to some other, happier, decade.

  When Roosevelt, under Moses* prodding, agreed to fight the Depression with a state public works program of unprecedented size, Moses saw the agreement as a chance to make the city move. The state had never spent any money on roads in New York City, but Moses persuaded Roosevelt to authorize the state's Temporary Emergency Relief Administration to pay the construction costs of the Grand Central Parkway and the Central Avenue linkup with the Southern State Parkway, and of another. "Inter-borough," parkway, long proposed but never built, that would provide

  New York City Before Robert Moses 345

  access into and out of central Brooklyn. The city would have to pay only for the right-of-way. The Legislature, having learned the inadvisability of giving Moses an opportunity to drive the opening wedge for a project that would later turn out to cost many times what he had estimated, gave Moses only $5,000,000, payable at the rate of a paltry $1,000,000 per year. All other expenses, the bill provided, must be paid by the city. But in the city Moses had no political leverage. The Board of Estimate kept delaying approval of the route, the allocations for right-of-way kept getting involved in endless snarls and at the end of 1933 Moses could look back and see that it had taken him as long to build a total of two miles of the parkway projects in Queens as it had taken him to build twenty-two miles of the Southern State Parkway.

  Roosevelt's successor as Governor, Herbert H. Lehman, deeply respected Moses. Says one man who served as an adviser to both: "Roosevelt saw Jones Beach in terms both of people swimming and in terms of the political gains that could come from those people swimming. Herbert Lehman thought only of helping people to go swimming and be happy. And he felt that no one could do that job better than Robert Moses."

  Within a month after Lehman took office in January 1933, he handed to Moses even more power than Roosevelt had given him. In 1932, Congress, at President Hoover's request, had created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to help self-supporting public works projects. Lehman set up a State Emergency Public Works Commission to screen such projects and determine which should be submitted to Washington, and named Moses its chairman. This post gave Moses the power to get work under way on his huge park and parkway plan for the Niagara Frontier; a Niagara Frontier Bridge Authority was established, received $2,800,000 in federal funds and constructed bridges that linked both the north and south ends of Grand Island, near Buffalo, to the mainland. A Thousand Islands Bridge Authority built the international bridge to Canada. Under his direction, a New York State Bridge Authority was established to purchase—through agreements he negotiated—the Bear Mountain Bridge from the Harrimans and its other private owners. A Saratoga Springs Authority began refurbishing and expanding the spa. Negotiating in Washington with the RFC, Moses obtained funds for the Port of New York Authority to construct the Lincoln Tunnel and for the city to construct Hillside, Knickerbocker and other housing developments. And he persuaded Mayor O'Brien to ask the Legislature to establish a Triborough Bridge Authority that could issue its own bonds, secured by toll revenues, and that would therefore be eligible for aid from the newly formed federal Public Works Administration, and the PWA granted a $44,200,000 combination loan and grant to the Authority on condition that the city make certain additional token contributions. But hardly had the Tammany-controlled Authority gotten its hands on the first installment of the grant than it blew it on inflated condemnation awards and counsel fees; in addition, the city proved unable to make even the first installment of its token payment. The PWA thereupon cut off funds and announced that no more would be forthcoming until the city paid up and the

  Authority cleaned up—and in 1933 there were no immediate prospects of either development.

  In vain, Moses pointed out to the Board of Estimate that the money the TERA and PWA were prepared to spend in New York would create vast improvements in the city—at virtually no cost to its taxpayers. In vain, he pointed out that the money would put thousands of hungry men to work for salaries that would feed their families. Such considerations were not of interest to the Tammany-dominated Board. And those that were of interest, Moses, outside the city's power structure as he was, could not offer them.

  All through 1933, the city's financial situation worsened. In May, City Comptroller Charles W. Berry informed Mayor O'Brien that the city would be unable to pay $100,000,000 in short-term revenue notes coming due in June. The bankers agreed to extend the notes only after the city agreed to an almost doubled interest rate and budget cuts so stringent that they made it all but impossible for the city to keep its physical plant in repair. And, despite the extension, in September Berry told O'Brien that the city would be unable to meet its October 24 payroll.

  After nine days of frantic meetings in which a worried Governor Lehman participated, the bankers agreed on September 27 to further extensions —after the city agreed to accept even more stringent repayment provisions, and to balance its 1934 budget.

  The city's worries were still not over. It required legislative authorization to meet the bankers' demands, but the Legislature's Republican majority saw the city's plight as a lever they could use to pry various concessions from Lehman, and a long, tense bargaining session ensued. Not until October 18, just six days before the city would, by all common business definitions, enter a state of bankruptcy, was the authorization given. And a look ahead was hardly reassuring. The amount of short-term revenue notes coming due in the next two years was $500,000,000.

  Nevertheless, in the summer of 1933, Moses was convinced that events were moving for, rather than against, him. For during that summer, over a period of several weeks, he was convinced that he was going to
get a chance personally to move the city—as its next mayor.

  New York's reformers considered Moses one of them.

  The Old Guard of reform viewed him almost paternally. Darwin James and Henry Moskowitz liked to tell anecdotes about his work for them on the Municipal Civil Service Commission. Henry H. Curran, Fusion candidate against Hylan in 1921, remembered Moses as secretary of his campaign committee. Joseph M. Price, a wealthy dress manufacturer and chairman of the City Club's board of trustees, remembered him pleading earnestly in the City Club lounge for the club's support for the executive budget proposal. And Richard Spencer Childs, who had made Moses secretary of his New York State Association, delighted in telling friends (inaccurately): "I am the man who gave Bob Moses his first job."

  Other, slightly younger, reformers—men in their fifties like Stanley Isaacs and Raymond Ingersoll—considered Moses a comrade-in-arms. And he was nothing less than an idol to many of a new generation of reformers, including six-foot five-inch, blond and blue-eyed Newbold Morris, a Yale graduate who at thirty was president of the Silk Stocking Fifteenth Assembly District Republican Club; college professors like Wallace S. Sayre, twenty-eight, of New York University, and Adolf A. Berle, Jr., thirty-eight, and Joseph D. McGoldrick, thirty-two, of Columbia; and young experts in public administration like Rufus E. McGahen, thirty-nine, secretary of the Citizens Union, and Paul Blanshard, forty-one, director of the City Affairs Committee of New York, who were spending enough evenings studying legislative bills and debating municipal policy in the lounges of the City Club and Citizens Union to prove that the Tammany view of man was still, as one historian puts it, "only partially valid; men are moved by things other than just narrow self-interest."

  The attitude of the reformers toward Moses was understandable. Not only had he fought in so many causes in which they believed; he had triumphed. Reformers who had learned through bitter, repeated experience the difficulty of translating ideas into realities were almost in awe of his success in doing so. Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement wrote him: "May I . . . tell you how profoundly I admire your genius in designing the parks and procuring them for the community." "His . . . administrative accomplishment at Albany," Rufus McGahen said, was "amazing."

  The reformers didn't know the details of those triumphs. They were not, after all, on the inside of state government, where Moses' power plays had been executed, and they knew nothing of his methods. If there had been a change in Robert Moses, none but a handful of them had even an inkling of it, and those who had seen glimpses of the change had, like Childs, been charmed into forgetting them by a Moses who needed their continuing support. They attributed Moses' arrogance to brilliance, his impatience to zeal.

  Moreover, reformers, more than slightly addicted to a black-and-white view of morality and life, tended to classify all government officials as either "politicians," who were in public service for power and money, who put those considerations ahead of the common good and who had debased

  politics into a somewhat questionable way of making a living; or as "public servants," who were "nonpolitical" and therefore good. And they had no doubts about which class Moses belonged to. As a Bureau staffer, no reformer had been more scornful of practical politicians than he. His well-publicized refusal to accept a salary for his services, coupled with his frequent denunciations of patronage and of favoritism in contracts and condemnation awards, convinced reformers, since they had no reason to question his sincerity, that his views had not been changed just because he had obtained power. "The principle is the important thing," he had written. They thought he still believed that. "High purpose," Richard Childs was to tell the author. "And ability. And not interested in getting something for either the boys or for himself—utterly selfless in all of it. That was how I thought of Moses."

  His brilliance was legendary among them. In the field of public administration, they agreed, his mind was unequaled in suppleness and inventiveness. Lillian Wald was not the only reform leader who used the word "genius" in describing Moses. One reformer who maintained a certain detachment about reformers because he was at home not only in the paneled board room of the City Club but also in the bare-walled clubhouses of Brooklyn's Fourth Assembly District—where he had proved himself a canny practical politician by ousting the old-line Republican boss and installing himself in his place— was Paul Windels. Says Windels: "Those people [reformers] could get a little starry-eyed sometimes, and at that time they were very starry-eyed indeed about Bob Moses. They saw in him a man whose ideals were just as high as theirs and who had in addition qualities which enabled him to accomplish things of revolutionary magnitude in the public sphere. The younger men there, and some of the older ones, too, to tell you the truth—they idolized that man. They seemed to consider him the Beau Ideal of what the reformer should be. And to tell you the truth, I thought I was a pretty shrewd cookie —and sometimes I felt the same way."

  More practical considerations also recommended Moses to them as a candidate. First, there was the immense favorable publicity he had received. This was no candidate respected in the councils of reform but unknown to the public; this was a candidate about whose virtues the public had been educated for years. More important, there was Moses' relationship with Al Smith. The Brown Derby was still the most popular figure in the city. When, early in 1933, a downtown Tammany club had begun circulating petitions urging him to run for mayor, it collected more than 200,000 signatures in one week before Smith issued a statement categorically refusing to make the race. The Fusion leaders knew how Smith felt about Moses. If Moses ran, they believed, Smith would either break with Tammany and support him or, at the least, remain neutral. And either of those stands, they believed, would result in a mass Democratic defection to Moses, a defection essential to victory in a city in which the party registration of enrolled voters was almost four to one Democratic.

  Before the Fusion Conference Committee began meeting in March

  I933> Moses was contacted by City Club board chairman Price, who had, as chairman of the legendary Committee of One Hundred and Seven, been the prime mover behind John Purroy Mitchel's nomination in 1913, and who wanted now to play the same role for Moses. Moses assured Price that he would accept the Fusion nomination if it was offered to him. As soon as Seabury turned down a renewed offer of the nomination, Price brought Moses' name before the Fusion Committee and received an almost unanimously favorable response.

  But Seabury had not been present at the meeting. And Seabury's opinion of Moses was markedly different from that of other reformers.

  He didn't like him. Opinionated as well as dedicated, Seabury was accustomed to deference when he presented his views (reformers fondly called him "the Bishop" because of his pontifical air, although they were careful to do so behind his back), and deference was not Moses' strong suit. In 1932 the two men had had a bitter confrontation in Al Smith's Fifth Avenue apartment when Seabury attempted to win the ex-Governor's support for a City Charter revision that would determine membership on the City Council on the basis of proportional representation and would therefore encourage minority parties and help end Tammany's domination of the council. Seabury and Moses, a foe of proportional representation, had argued for hours before Smith, who, ill with a severe cold, was propped up in bed, too hoarse to speak. Exactly what happened at the confrontation is unrecorded, but Moses says, "He [Seabury] didn't stand up very well. He didn't seem to have his stuff [facts] at all. It was a very, very painful session."

  More than personality differences lay behind Seabury's hostility to Moses, however. Its root lay in the judge's hostility to Tammany Hall— and in his conviction that Moses' election would allow Tammany to retain control of the city.

  A direct descendant of "Speak for Yourself, John" and Priscilla Alden of the Mayflower, whose ancestors included Samuel Jones, "the Father of the New York Bar," and a long line of distinguished Episcopalian clergymen, Samuel Seabury had, even as a boy studying in his father's library with the portraits of
a dozen famous ancestors peering down, stern and patrician, on his work, been markedly aware and proud of this lineage of law and righteousness, and determined to live up to it.

  He was an idealist. In his youth an adoring disciple of single-tax philosopher Henry George, he was elected at the age of twenty-one president of the Manhattan Single-Tax Club. At twenty-four, he gave up his own nomination as Citizens Union Party candidate for the State Assembly to play Sancho Panza in that most gallant of all the Don Quixote rides of New York politics, George's mayoralty campaign of 1897. (When that impossible dream was ended by George's death less than a week before Election Day, Seabury followed on horseback behind the casket—adorned with white roses and the inscription "Progress and Poverty"—as the body of his idol was borne through the streets of the city with half a million citizens watching

  and the hats coming off as the cortege approached and the whisper going through the great crowds: "Uncover, uncover.")

  And his idealism had a target. All his life Samuel Seabury stalked the Tiger. While still in his teens, he took to the street corners—and was stoned by Tammany hooligans—as he spoke against Tammany candidates as an independent Democrat. As a young lawyer, in love with the law, he hated the Tammany-controlled judges who turned New York's courts into instruments of politics rather than justice. Representing, in a hundred cases, men unjustly accused by police who took orders from Tammany and unfairly tried before judges who took orders from Tammany, he knew the bitterness of a hundred unjust defeats.