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

by Caro, Robert A

  the upstate leaders say, he has alienated four large blocs of Republican voters." Senate majority leader George R. Fearon of Syracuse had warned Davison not to nominate Moses. "Don't do it," Fearon had said. "I know Moses." Now he told Davison, "Well, you've done it. Now we're going to lose the Legislature." (Trubee scoffed; the Republicans hadn't done that since 1912.)

  When he did deign to discuss campaign plans with the men who had expected to help plan his campaign, Moses was firm. There was going to be no eating of bagels in Jewish neighborhoods or of sausages in Italian while photographers clicked away, he told them—he was determined t) eschew the side shows which were a traditional part of political campaigns in the state that possessed the largest collection of ethnic blocs in America.

  There was, of course, something admirable in this determination—just as there was something admirable in Moses' enunciation of controversial views before groups hostile to those views. Moses' refusal to take the culinary road to the Statehouse could be interpreted as an indication that he was going to take the high road instead, that he was one candidate who would not pander to the people but who would instead discuss important issues with them freely, frankly and fully, and who would say what he believed— even if what he believed was that the state needed a sales tax.

  But such an interpretation turned out to be an inadequate explanation of Moses' campaign tactics. For the candidate, it turned out, was declining not only to pander to the people but, as much as possible, even to talk to them. And while the road he took in the campaign may not have been the culinary, it was certainly not the high, either.

  Because Moses was less well known upstate than in and around New York City, his campaign managers suggested a heavier-than-usual "crossroads campaign," the traditional gubernatorial candidate's automobile tour of upstate towns and villages. Moses replied that there wasn't going to be any crossroads campaign; he was not going to visit upstate towns and villages; he was not going to appear upstate at all except in large cities such as Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse—and even in the cities there would be no cocktail receptions, no coffee-and-cake receptions, no walking tours of shopping districts, no attempts at all to meet the public. His only appearances would be formal speeches. Then he to'd his campaign managers that he was going to follow the same policy in and around New York City; his only public appearances anywhere would be for formal speeches. And there would not be many of them. When he finished cutting down the schedule of speeches they had planned, his campaign managers realized that he was going to appear in public exactly twelve times. With the exception of those twelve occasions, his only communication with the voters he wanted to elect him to office would come through press releases.

  And if the campaign managers were at first dejected at Moses' insistence on keeping the number of his speeches small, they were soon to count it a

  blessing. For, as Windels put it, "every time he opened his mouth, he lost ten thousand votes."

  Moses' first speech—delivered at the Kismet Temple, a huge auditorium in Brooklyn, after he was escorted to the podium by a steel-helmeted American Legion band and a cadre of the Old Guard, who had dined with him before the rally at their spiritual home, the Union League Club—started the campaign off on the wrong foot.

  Moses had always been as much a fanatic on the subject of religion as his grandmother and mother. He had always insisted that he was not Jewish.* He did everything he could to make his feelings clear: he sent his daughters to an Episcopalian school, made disparaging remarks about qualities he felt characterized Jews and, when he learned that the editors of the Jewish Encyclopedia were planning to include his biography in its pages, threatened to sue them for libel if they did. To a people that had suffered because of their religion and that was suffering still—in 1934, thousands of New York Jews were agonizing over the fate of relatives trapped in Germany—Moses' attempt to deny it was contemptible. Jews who knew of his feelings regarded him with bitterness; members of Temple Emanu-El, the congregation that included most of the leaders of the Jewish community and therefore most of the men who were familiar with Moses' beliefs, laughed bitterly at the fact that he was seen at many funerals of Catholic Tammany politicians at St. Patrick's Cathedral, but almost never at funerals at Emanu-El. t City Comptroller Joseph D. McGoldrick, discussing Moses with a group of Jewish leaders, was shocked at the intensity of their feelings. "To them," McGoldrick says, "he was a Jew who had renounced his religion and that was worse than anything. He was an apostate to his faith."

  But not many Jews were privy to Moses' feelings. Because of his name, they simply assumed he was of their faith. Assumed it, that is, until his first speech, in which, apparently stung by a similar assumption by the press, he brought up the subject of religion himself, and brought it up in a way deeply offensive to Jews. "Moses didn't say, 'I'm a Jew and I'm proud

  * He based his assertion on the fact that he had been neither circumcised nor bar-mitzvah, ignoring the fact that, at the time, Jewish theologians generally agreed that Jewishness was a matter of birth rather than conviction, that a Jew is anyone whose mother was a Jew—a definition that meant that Moses' grandmother could not escape being a Jew no matter how hard she tried, that Moses' mother could not avoid it either and that neither could he. ("Af al pi shechoteh jehudi hu," the Talmud says— "Even though he has sinned [converted to another faith], he is a Jew.") By 1974, there would be more controversy on the point. Orthodox and Conservative rabbis still held to the strict traditional view, but the Reform rabbinate allowed considerable discretion to its members. Some Reform rabbis held to the traditional view, but others felt that Jewishness was not a matter of birth but of conviction; in the words of Rabbi Daniel Davis of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, "My standard is whether or not he wants to be a Jew." Said Davis, therefore: "All you can say about Mr. Moses is that he had Jewish forebears but he did not consider himself Jewish."

  t "Jim Farley would come, but not Robert Moses," says Emanu-El's funeral director, Samuel Berliner.

  of it,' as he should have," recalls Paul Windels. "Instead, he said, 'It's nobody's business what my religion is.' And that got a lot of people very angry." Soon, in shabby shuls in the Bronx as well as at Temple Emanu-El, Robert Moses was being called by a term which comes close to being the ultimate insult among pious Jews. Moses, they said, was an apicoris, "a man who says he isn't what he is."

  Succeeding speeches were worse.

  Moses insisted on beginning many of them with an attempt to "dispose of" a "false issue" that he maintained the press was raising: the fact that his candidacy was part of an attempt by the "Power Trust" or "Old Guard" to recapture control of the state.

  Actually, the press had scarcely mentioned the issue. It was Moses, unable to endure even a hint of criticism, who kept bringing it up. There were press conferences—at least in the early stages of the campaign, while he was still holding press conferences—at which he was the only person who mentioned the phrase "Old Guard." His method of issue disposal, moreover, was not particularly convincing. It consisted of flat assertions: he was not the Old Guard or Power Trust candidate, he said on one occasion; "neither one of these stuffed shirts has any place in my life or acquaintance"; on another, he stated without qualification, "I am a liberal." Not only were these assertions false—both before and after the election, Moses repeatedly declared without qualification, "I am a conservative"—but they sounded false, since Moses was of course unable to explain who had obtained him the nomination if it was not the Old Guard. His assertion that he would regulate utilities as strictly as Lehman had an equally hollow ring, since he did not offer a single specific regulatory proposal. The only result of Moses' insistence on "disposing of" the utilities issue was to keep it fresh in voters' minds— and to keep himself on the defensive about it.

  And Moses on the defensive was a more attractive sight than Moses on the attack.

  He had decided that the way to defeat Lehman was to destroy the Governor's image. Unfortunate
ly for this strategy, Lehman's case was that rarity: one in which the image was the man. The Governor's intimates knew him as an individual somewhat less than brilliant and aware he was less than brilliant, but determined to make up for this shortcoming by hard work and dedication, and ambitious not for himself—he had not even wanted to be Governor, accepting the post only when Smith and Roosevelt, admiring his integrity and his dedication to liberal principles, insisted that he succeed them—but for the people. And the voters knew him the same way.

  After the campaign, Moses himself would say that Lehman "was essentially a cautious, dependable citizen of the old school" who "carried on the work of Smith and Roosevelt without basic innovation" but who was "enormously conscientious and hard-working. ... I would classify him as a distinguished Governor." Herbert Lehman, Robert Moses would say after the campaign, was a man of "fine character."

  Moses knew even better than most of Lehman's intimates that the only thing that mattered with Lehman was principle; it was Lehman who, running the state while Roosevelt was on vacation, had appointed Moses More-land Commissioner to head a politically sensitive investigation into the bankrupt City Trust Company without bothering to clear it with the Governor—because he thought Moses was the right man for the job. In a score of quarrels between Roosevelt and Moses, Lehman had stood up— quietly, nervously but unshakably—for Moses, for no other reason than that he thought Moses was right. And Moses knew something that even most of Lehman's intimates didn't know—because Lehman never publicized it; he knew that Lehman, touched by the plight of the small depositors who had lost their savings in the City Trust debacle, had donated a million dollars of his own money in an attempt to save the bank. There were no points at which the image could be attacked—truthfully—and Moses knew it, as his statements after the campaign reveal.

  But this was not after the campaign. This was the campaign, a campaign in which, at least for Moses, the prize was power. And the voters were soon reading headlines that said "moses calls lehman weak"; "moses

  CALLS LEHMAN STUPID"; "MOSES CALLS LEHMAN PUPPET FORCED TO SPEAK

  for tammany." And the headlines didn't exaggerate the viciousness of Moses' attacks. In the speech in which he called Lehman "weak," he also said that the Governor had "no guts" and that he "applies to every act the test of personal and political expediency." "Puppet" was one of the more polite terms that Moses employed in his accusations about Lehman and Tammany Hall. The Governor is "the respectable front" for the Hall's crooked politicians, Moses said, "the instrument of consolidating their power and furthering their ends." The Governor, he said, is "a miserable, sniveling type of man . . . contemptible." Repeatedly, Moses challenged Lehman to debate him. Moses was, after all, a past president of the Oxford Union. Just let him get slow, plodding Herbert Lehman on the platform and he would tear him apart, he told aides.

  Lehman, advised by men who knew Moses well—Proskauer, Shientag and Moskowitz, for example—handled Moses just right. The Governor ignored the invitation to debate—and, to a large extent, he ignored Moses' charges. In fact, to a large extent, he ignored Moses, sticking strictly to a discussion of the issues and his record as he campaigned earnestly—nine speeches in a single day—through the upstate towns and villages and the streets of New York City in which Moses would not deign to appear. The Governor mentioned Moses just three times in the first three weeks of the campaign—and every mention was devastating. In answer to Moses' charges that he was a puppet of Tammany Hall, the Governor pointed out that he had left Moses in charge of the state park system and had increased his powers in other fields—against the advice of Tammany leaders. Weak? He had fought for Moses' park policies—against the Republican legislative leaders who were now backing Moses. The third time Lehman mentioned Moses was in a speech in Binghamton, whose householders paid monthly

  electric bills to the Associated Gas and Electric System, a utility which had recently been publicly disclosed to have paid State Senator Warren Thayer $21,600 to kill measures that might have lowered its rates:

  "The Republican candidate for Governor undertook ... to eliminate certain . . . issues from this campaign," Lehman said mildly. "He attempts to dispose of the public utility problem by claiming it is not [an] issue. Surely we can understand his desire to avoid the public utility issue. We can appreciate his anxiety to divert attention from the weakness of the record of his party. . . . Unfortunately . . . however, candidates do not make issues. The people make the issues. It is the people themselves who determine those matters upon which they are entitled to honest report. ... no candidate can tell the people of the State of New York that it is not important to furnish electricity, gas and telephone service to consumers at low rates."

  Newspapers throughout the state agreed. Even the Brooklyn Eagle, whose editor, Cleveland Rodgers, was one of Moses' most enthusiastic admirers, had to admit, "He cannot dispose of the so-called 'power issue' by oversimplifying it, as he tried to do."

  Moses' response was to increase the violence of his attacks and the wildness of his accusations. He accused Lehman of being responsible for corruption in the Court of Claims—an accusation which ignored the fact that the Court was not under the Governor's control and which was not strengthened by the fact that to document the Court's incompetence, Moses accused of drunkenness a judge who actually had been dead for more than a year. He accused Lehman of discussing the City Trust report with him in advance of its publication in 1929 because he was "anxious to avoid an extension of the . . . investigation," a charge that Moses later admitted in private was not true. Some of his charges had no logic at all. He said flatly that Lehman "created most of the state deficit"—although, as Moses well knew and the press pointed out, when Lehman took office, the deficit had been $114,000,000, and the Governor had since reduced it practically to zero. He implied that Lehman had made an alliance with the O'Connell brothers, Dan and Ed, the Democratic bosses of Albany, because he was "afraid" of them—not only afraid in political terms but physically afraid, because the Governor of the State of New York was worried that the two O'Connell boys might beat him up. Incredible as the statement was, there is no other way to interpret Moses' exact words: "He wants O'Connell votes and he is physically afraid of crossing or antagonizing people who, if they have nothing else, have boldness and physical courage."

  Even the Governor's financial integrity was not safe from Moses' tongue and pen. In the campaign's most astonishing charge, he startled dozing reporters at a sleepy Republican Women's Club luncheon in Syracuse by accusing Lehman, who had done more to break the utilities' power than any Governor in the state's history, of being the utilities' secret ally. Waving a sheaf of papers that he claimed documented his charges, Moses stated flatly that the Governor had financial "ties with the utility field." And, as the reporters goggled with amazement, he added that the corrupt "Senator Thayer is a very . . . small factor in public utilities in New York State

  politics. Why, Governor Lehman is much more a factor than Thayer ever thought of being."

  When Moses' "documentation" was examined closely, the "ties" he mentioned with such sinister implication turned out to be nothing more than the underwriting of a utility company bond issue—underwriting that had not even been done by Herbert Lehman but by Lehman Brothers, the family banking firm, in which Herbert Lehman had never played much of a role, and from which he had severed every tie years before. (Such scrupulousness was by no means common among public officials of the day, but, as Lehman biographer Allan Nevins put it, "He was scrupulous about everything. If some decision of his might affect a company in which he owned stock, he whipped off a sale of the stock." During Lehman's long public career, there never had been, and never would be again, even the faintest hint of impropriety.) But Moses did not let these facts deter him. Nor did he let deter him the fact that, hard as he tried, he could not find a single direct link in Lehman's life with any utility company. Lehman's banker brothers had such links—so Moses talked about the brothers ("Robert Lehman is o
n the board of directors of the American International Corporation. Arthur Lehman is a director in the American International, a holding company— really, a surprising list of utilities stocks and bonds: 77,000 Columbia Gas and Electric; 50,000 American Electric Power and Light. . . . There's a lot of this stuff") and then, attempting to establish the Governor's guilt by association, said, "Now, I have got a lot of other stuff with me along these lines. There isn't time to read it, but it is a very interesting record and I am going to refer to it at length to show you how false the Governor is."

  It was on October 23 that Moses really went too far. In a speech in Utica's Majestic Theater before two thousand dairy farmers from the surrounding countryside, he called Lehman a "liar."

  "That was a word that was just never used then in campaigns for high office," Paul Windels recalls—veteran political observers could not recall it ever having been used in a New York gubernatorial campaign—"and it really sent a wave of shock through everybody. People had been becoming quite angry at the things he was saying about Lehman—you had to know Lehman to understand why—and this was the last straw."