The quarrel was based on Moses' plan to turn the site of the demolished Central Park Casino into a playground. Mrs. Sulzberger had allowed herself to be reconciled to the creation of "perimeter" playgrounds in Central Park by Moses' argument that small children could not be kept out of the park anyway and the strategic placing of playgrounds next to park entrances would "intercept" them and confine their destructive energy to the park's edge. She had never thought that Moses would begin to lay concrete in the park's interior. Hearing of the plan for the Casino site, she protested publicly on behalf of the Park Association in a letter released to the press on December 2 3> 1935> in which she stated, "It seems to me that in our desire to establish playgrounds, which are sadly needed in the city, we are completely overlooking the rights and needs of the adult population. Central Park will fail to fulfill its purpose if . . . there is no longer space where men and women can have quiet and relaxation."
Moses' letter of reply, which he released to the press on December 24, closed with the words "Merry Christmas." But the rest of the letter was couched in the tone Moses customarily employed with protesters. Your arguments, he informed Mrs. Sulzberger, are "preposterous" and "irresponsible generalizations. ... It is difficult for me to believe that you seriously contend that the needs of the adult population are being completely overlooked in our parks ..." The letter even closed with a threat. "This particular question does not seem to me to be important enough to quarrel about, unless you insist on proving your generalizations, in which case I am prepared to refute them by a public exhibition of plans, photographs, maps and supporting figures."
It would have been interesting to see how the Times, which buried the exchange of letters on page 25, would have covered such an exhibition. But there was to be no need for one. Mary Moses saw to that. A week later, the Sulzbergers and the Moseses were among the guests at the dance given every New Year's Eve by the "Jewish Gatsby," Adolph Lewisohn, in the great gold-and-white ballroom of his Fifth Avenue mansion. Mrs. Sulzberger recalls that "Mary came over leading Bob by the hand like a little boy and she said, 'You know Iphigene's a good friend. You had no business writing her a letter like that. Now you tell her you're sorry and you kiss her.' " Moses told her he was sorry and kissed her—and at 2 a.m., when the Sulzbergers, as was their custom every New Year's Eve, served friends a scrambled-egg breakfast at their apartment, the Moseses were there as usual.
Mrs. Sulzberger had too deep a sense of her responsibility to the public to take the insulting letter personally, anyway; Robert Moses was too valuable to the city to quarrel with, she felt. And, she was to tell the interviewer, it was "unappreciative" to quarrel with a man who had done so much for New York. On the day after the New Year's breakfast, in an act of selflessness made all the more noble by the fact that her power made it unnecessary for her to perform it, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, sacrificing her pride on the altar of what she believed to be the public interest, wrote a public apology to Moses—and ordered it printed in her own newspaper.
... I owe you an apology for having said that ". . . we are completely overlooking the rights and needs of the adult population." No such sweeping generalization is warranted. I do, however, believe that we are in danger of paying too little attention to those rights and needs.
You close your characteristically vigorous defense of the Park Department's plans with the remark that the issues raised in this particular controversy do not seem to you to be "important enough to quarrel about." I and other members of the Park Association would dislike greatly any occasion for quarrel with you. You come close to our ideal of what a Park Commissioner should be and we have no desire to be associated, even for a moment, with those who have attempted from time to time to hinder you in your plans for the rehabilitation and development of the parks.
Mrs. Sulzberger's influence on the newspaper of which her father had been, and her husband was, publisher was not overt. Intrusiveness was not her style, which was so reasonable, dignified and soft-spoken that people sometimes mistook her gentleness for timidity. But, as the Times's historian, Gay Talese, has pointed out, "no perceptive editor . . . made this mistake." "Her most casual remark," wrote Turner Catledge, later managing editor, "would be treated as a command."
Mrs. Sulzberger believed that Moses came "close to our ideal of what a Park Commissioner should be"; the Times evidently believed so, too. Its reporters and editors may never have been directly ordered to give Moses special treatment but, during the Thirties as during the Twenties, they were not so insensitive as not to know what was expected of them. Moses' press releases were treated with respect, being given prominent treatment and often being printed in full. There was no investigating of the "facts" presented in those press releases, no attempt at detailed analysis of his theories of recreation and transportation, no probing of the assumptions on which the city was building and maintaining recreational facilities and roads. The Times ran more than one hundred editorials on Moses and his programs during the twelve-year La Guardia administration—overwhelmingly favorable editorials.
Once, trying in desperation to make sure that Mrs. Sulzberger got to hear both sides of an issue, La Guardia invited her to visit his office to hear Moses argue with the official with whom he was currently feuding, city WPA administrator Victor Ridder. (She was not the only female present; the Mayor for some reason—possibly to create a homey atmosphere—had his adopted daughter, Jean, then eight years old, in the office, too, and she sat
on his knee during the ensuing discussion.) La Guardia's ploy worked. At the end of a shouting match between Moses and Ridder—"They really went at it for a while," Mrs. Sulzberger would recall—the Mayor ruled against Moses, and for once there was no Times editorial disagreeing with the decision the next day. But such a ploy could obviously not be repeated in every dispute. And in most disputes Moses could count on the Times's support.
Dramatic proof of how popular the press had made Moses was, moreover, available to the Mayor every time he spoke in public. Just as audiences reacted with Pavlovian predictability to every mention of Brooklyn —with laughs—so they reacted with Pavlovian predictability to every mention of Robert Moses—with cheers. At the end of a playground opening, there was almost invariably a "Two, four, six, eight—Who do we appreciate?" for Moses. "La Guardia wanted to fire him often, but he didn't dare," says mayoral law secretary Kern. "The press— The New York Times in particular—had babied him like a spoiled child. He couldn't do anything wrong in their eyes. They made him a myth. And a man who had to go to the electorate couldn't fire a myth. He [Moses] was too big to fire." Occasionally Windels would try to brace the Mayor to stand up to Moses. But on those occasions, the Little Flower would wail, "What'll the Times say?" If from a personal viewpoint it is not too much to say that La Guardia liked Moses, from a political viewpoint it is not too much to say that he feared him.
At the beginning of his mayoralty, La Guardia attempted to take an interest in the Park Department. When he received protests about Moses' plans for a local playground from a local organization, he would grant its representatives an interview, and if he felt their arguments had merit, he would ask Moses to reconsider. When some individual protested about a Park Department policy or about alleged mistreatment by a Park Department employee, he would send the protest to Moses with a pink slip attached— a slip that in the color code set up by La Guardia to govern his relationship with his commissioners meant the Mayor wanted an immediate reply.
But Moses would either ignore the pink slip or would reply by saying that the Mayor must learn to stop interfering in the "internal affairs of the Park Department." "My policies can't be carried out if the Mayor is going to listen to appeals from individuals," he would write. And if La Guardia sought to press an inquiry, Moses would threaten to resign or to take the issue to the public. "If you disagreed with [Moses], why, you were a public enemy," Windels said. The Mayor had no choice but to let Moses have his way.
By the end of his first term, La Guardia was le
tting Moses have it. The Astoria Ferry and playground closing fights, which became public knowledge, were exceptions. Most of the disagreements between the Mayor and the commissioner were kept secret—because La Guardia did not press them. When one threatened to become public, the Mayor quickly backed down. He and Moses had been arguing over a twenty-five-acre tract of land in Coney Island owned by the Dock Department but unused. Moses wanted all the land for a park; the Mayor was in favor of a Board of Education
plan to use a few of the acres for a school. When he imprudently mentioned to reporters that "the location of a school on the border of a park is ideal," the reporters went to Moses for comment. "I thought this administration wanted playgrounds. Either they do or they don't," he said. And he added what the Herald Tribune called "some even more uncomplimentary remarks" about the Mayor. La Guardia hastily scrambled for cover. "I can't believe my Park Commissioner made any such statements," the Mayor said. "No controversy exists and none can be made out of it." And the school idea was dropped. "He didn't want to fight with Moses no matter what." Lazarus says. As long as he didn't fight, La Guardia had learned, Moses would provide him with a seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of political benefits. If he did fight, Moses would humiliate and defeat him. The little Mayor had learned—the hard way—that it was better not to interfere.
Other political considerations which deterred the Mayor from interfering with Moses in the fields he had carved out for his own were the same reasons that had deterred a Governor—Roosevelt—from interfering: Moses' ability to complete public works fast enough to provide a record of accomplishment for an elected official to run on in the next election; his ability to build public works without scandal; his willingness to serve as a lightning rod to draw off opposition from the elected official—most of all, perhaps, his matchless knowledge of government. Says Judge Jacob Lutsky, who not only served in the La Guardia administration but was a top adviser to Mayors O'Dwyer, Impellitteri and Wagner: "You've got to understand—every morning when a mayor comes to work, there are a hundred problems that must be solved. And a lot of them are so big and complex that they just don't seem susceptible to solution. And when he asks guys for solutions, what happens? Most of them can't give him any. And those that do come up with solutions, the solutions are unrealistic or impractical—or just plain stupid. And those that do make sense—there's no money to finance them. But you give a problem to Moses and overnight he's back in front of you—with a solution, all worked out down to the last detail, drafts of speeches you can give to explain it to the public, drafts of press releases for the newspapers, drafts of the state laws you'll need to get passed, advice as to who should introduce the bills in the Legislature and what committees they should go to, drafts of any City Council and Board of Estimate resolutions you'll need; if there are constitutional questions involved, a list of the relevant precedents—and a complete method of financing it all spelled out. He had solutions when no one else had solutions. A mayor needs a Robert Moses." But there were new reasons, too, why La Guardia found it politically unfeasible to interfere with Moses. And these reasons had the deepest—and most ominous—significance for the city.
Some revolved around the federal government's newly expanded role in the city's affairs.
Always before, the city and the city alone had had the power to determine the priority, location and design of public works—because the city
and the city alone had been paying for them. Every step in the construction of a school or a bridge or a park—from the initial preliminary study of the project's engineering feasibility to the final use of the power of eminent domain to evict citizens to make way for it—had to be authorized by the city government, by officials elected by the city's people. Therefore, those people retained ultimate control over the public works that did so much to shape their lives. The correspondence between their will and public works was, of course, not at all exact; innumerable factors—chief among them, perhaps, the corruption that under Tammany Hall interposed private gain as an integral factor in the governmental equation—bent off its bias the great drive shaft of the engine of city government, the drive shaft that according to the blueprint for that engine, the City Charter, was supposed to be turnable only by the public will. But there was a correspondence. A mayor strong enough to dominate the Boards of Estimate and Aldermen would disturb the balance of the drive shaft, which was meant to rest equally on executive and legislative action, but because the mayor was an official elected by and ultimately responsible to the people, the crucial correspondence still existed.
But although the city's new mayor was dominating the city's government, that mayor was not controlling the construction of public works in the city to a similar extent. Not the city but the federal government was paying for the bulk of those public works, and the federal government was much more interested in speed, in getting something to show for its expenditure, than in the considerations that would at least partially motivate a mayor— priorities, location and design, for example. And, because speed of construction depended upon the existence of detailed plans, the federal authorities were therefore primarily interested in such plans. Because the Mayor needed plans and needed them fast, he had no choice but to give priority not to those projects which were most urgently needed, but to those projects for which plans were available—and to a considerable extent not he but Robert Moses decided which projects those would be. Because not he but Moses had the "large, stable planning force" of engineers trained to design urban public works on the new, huge scale made necessary by the growth of the city and made financially feasible by the new federal involvement, to a considerable extent he could not even evaluate those plans. He could not argue intelligently for changes in the location or the design Moses was proposing. Continually La Guardia sought to overcome this handicap. "He was always prodding other departments to come up with plans," Windels recalls. "But it took them so long." And when the plans were available, the labor often was not; Moses' stake-driving tactics had tied it up on Park Department projects. Moses' popularity, moreover, made it all but impossible for the Mayor to snatch the labor back. The convenient symbol of La Guardia's frustration was the firehouses the Mayor had wanted to build with the 5,000 men he had authorized the WPA to detach from Park Department projects in 1937, the 5,000 men he was unable to detach after Moses forced him to back down by locking the playgrounds: the Mayor had twenty new firehouses in mind; he was able to build three. But firehouses were only a symbol;
schoolhouses, jailhouses and police station houses were also involved—as were hospitals, sewage disposal plants, sewers and subways. La Guardia was forced to cut back his planned programs of construction of almost every type of municipal institution except parks—Robert Moses' parks—and bridges— Robert Moses' bridges—and roads—Robert Moses' roads. The lion's share of the billion-plus dollars poured into New York City by the New Deal was spent on Moses' projects. To a considerable extent, in the planning of large-scale public works in New York City during the 1930's, Robert Moses operated independently of the elected official who had appointed him—and therefore independently of the people's will.
The significance of this fact for the development of New York is heightened by the amount of federal money involved.
Even during the flush years of the Jimmy Walker era, New York's expenditures for capital improvements had run only slightly above $100,-000,000 per year. That figure represented, in dollars, the annual alteration— hopefully, for the better—to the civic estate.
But during the first five years of the La Guardia era, the federal government, through CWA, WPA and PWA, contributed more than $1,150,000,-000 for public works in the city, a figure which, when combined with the city's own expenditures (which La Guardia was, by 1936, able to restore to the Walkerian level), meant that during those five years the civic estate was altered more than it had been altered in the preceding fifteen, that New York was able to effect a far greater and more rapid alteration in its physical public structur
e than had ever before been possible. And this magnified Moses' influence on the city's destiny. The portion of its remaking carried out independently of the people's will was relatively immense.
Then there were other political deterrents to any interference with Moses by La Guardia.
Some were a result of the continuation—and acceleration—of Moses' evolution from scorner of politicians.
The Legislature hadn't changed much since the days when Robert Moses had been denouncing its corruption and avarice. But Robert Moses had changed.
No longer did he respond to a legislator's patronage request by telling him to "stick it up your ass." The state park system was a vast reservoir of jobs—both year-round jobs and, because of the seasonal nature of park work, summer jobs particularly coveted by politicians who wanted their teenage children to earn good money in the open air during school vacations. And, because the reservoir had outlets (parks) in every corner of the state, Moses had jobs to distribute not only on Long Island but in the undeveloped, job-poor upstate counties in which the leaders of the Republican legislative majority lived. There was a line, firmly drawn, above which patronage was not allowed to intrude into the state park system; top administrators, the elite cadre known as "Moses Men," still had to work their way up from the ranks, still were promoted strictly on the basis of ability and willingness to work killing hours—and still owed their allegiance solely to Robert Moses. But Moses had proved more and more willing to fill lower-echelon jobs with
people recommended by key legislators. As for lucrative construction contracts, the one-time idealist had become known in Albany, according to Saul Kaplan, counsel to Assembly minority leader Irwin Steingut, as "a practical fellow who understands the facts of life and what makes things tick, a fellow who is prepared to cooperate with anybody." There was a point at which "cooperation" stopped: the point at which it would interfere with the completion of a project as Moses had originally envisioned it. He employed practical politics only to further his dreams; he did not allow it to interfere with them. "Sometimes someone would ask him for something and it would interfere with what he wanted to do, and in that case, he'd say it couldn't be done," Kaplan says. "But as long as you weren't a pig— okay. If you put a gun to his head and said 'either-or,' he'd tell you to go to hell. But if you laid the cards on the table and didn't try to kid him, he'd help if he could. And if he said you could help him in solving a couple of problems—you helped."
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 70