What were all these forces? Economic forces. Money—whether in the form of bond-underwriting fees, overtime-loaded jobs, rents from huge apartment developments, contracts, increased department-store grosses or any of the hundred forms of the payoffs called "fees." Under the system as it had existed before Robert Moses, these forces had been present in the decision-making process but had been to a degree subordinated to the force supposedly supreme in a democratic system of government. Moses mobilized these forces—whipped or enticed them into line behind his banner—so effectively that they and they alone were the forces that mattered, the forces that determined how the city would be shaped. He mobilized
economic interests into a unified, irresistible force and with that force warped the city off its democratic bias. During his decades of power, the public works decisions that determined the city's shape were made on the basis not of democratic but of economic considerations. During most of his reign —the post-La Guardia portion of it—the city's people had no real voice at all in determining the city's future. He and he alone—not the city's people, not the government officials the people elected to represent them, not the power brokers who dominated some of these officials—decided what public works would be built, when they would be built and to what design they would be built. He was the supreme power broker.
disappearance that forced detectives to release a waterfront hoodlum who was reportedly willing to testify that Anastasia had murdered a dockworker who had dared to speak up against him at a union meeting, and there was the discovery of the hoodlum's body in a river shortly thereafter—and there was the sworn testimony of a police sergeant that the files had been removed on Moran's orders. There was the mysterious death of Abe (Kid Twist) Reles, another mobster reportedly willing to testify against Anastasia, who was killed when he hit the sidewalk six stories below the window of a hotel room in which he was being held in "protective custody" by six policemen under O'Dwyer's orders. There was the fact that before O'Dwyer received the 1945 mayoral nomination, he paid visits to fifty-two-year-old philanthropist Frank Costello, born Francisco Costiglia, ruler of the eastern underworld, at the Mafia Don's apartment, and there was the fact that contributions for O'Dwyer's mayoral campaign were solicited by a Costello henchman. And there was a fact even more puzzling, a fact known only to a handful of intimates. Under New York election law, a man nominated for office in a primary election cannot thereafter decline the nomination unless he is subsequently nominated for a judgeship. On the very day in 1945 on which O'Dwyer received the mayoral nomination for which he had been working for four years, he suddenly begged Democratic leaders to allow him to decline it by nominating him for a judgeship instead, an appeal that the leaders thought was a joke until he repeated it almost frantically and they realized, to their astonishment, that he was in dead earnest—an appeal that even intimates could not explain, for apparently not one of them conceived at the time of one possible explanation: that the glib, smiling Irishman was being torn inside by the conflicting claims of ambition and fear; that, driven by the ambition to seek the mayoralty, he might at the same time be desperately afraid of what the spotlight in which a mayor must walk might reveal when it shone on those shadowy places in his past.
As mayor, O'Dwyer impressed even the most cynical of observers as anxious to be a good one. He had a real love for New York. Years later, living in Mexico City in what he defiantly insisted was not exile, he would sit for hours listening to Broadway show tunes, talking endlessly of the city he had left behind ("Lovely, dirty, naughty New York . . . Oh, that great big New York up there! Thank God, I've got those memories . . . most of the time I can't get New York out of my head").* He had the qualities to be a great one: powers of intellect and decision, intimate knowledge of the city, capacity for hard work, sophistication about the powers of the office and their use, and an immense popularity, fueled by an instinct for public relations. During and after the election campaign, many of the rumors about
* In the bedroom of O'Dwyer's luxurious Mexico City penthouse was an old trunk which contained a faded photograph of a young, handsome patrolman on the beat at Bush Terminal in 1917; Magistrate O'Dwyer's black robe; and a glittering golden badge embossed with the seal of the city, the word "Chief" and five silver stars. Once, with a visitor present, O'Dwyer opened the trunk, put on the black robe and sat staring in silence at the shield. "The badge of the Mayor of the City of New York," he said at last, softly.
O'Dwyer's past were repeated publicly by his opponent, Judge Jonah J. Goldstein, and confirmed by a Brooklyn grand jury, but O'Dwyer shrugged off the charges as "political," and neither press nor public took them seriously. He wanted to be a great mayor, to do things for the city he loved—and Moses, dazzling him with his plans, slapping down on his desk solutions to the city's problems, convinced him that it was only through Moses that those things could be done.
O'Dwyer's relationship with Moses started out as a close alliance. Hardly had he been elected when the city's Pandora's Box of troubles—held shut during La Guardia's last term only by a world war—sprang open. The civic leaders who obtained pre-inaugural audiences impressed on him the need for new schools, hospitals, libraries, sewers and subways whose construction had been deferred by the war and by the prewar Moses monopolization of the city's resources. Idlewild Airport was barely a quarter finished. La Guardia's runways were sinking rapidly back into Flushing Bay, necessitating a mammoth reconstruction job. There existed, of course, a postwar construction program completely outlined and, to a large extent, planned in detail by the Moses-controlled City Planning Commission—it was deposited with O'Dwyer by a Triborough messenger the morning after the election. But the program carried a price tag: $1,565,000,000. O'Dwyer asked Budget Bureau experts to find out how much money he would have available to build public works, and disbelievingly heard the answer: none. Thanks to the wartime moratorium on construction, the city could borrow about $150,000,000 before bumping up against the state-imposed debt limit, but the interest and amortization on such borrowing would have to be paid out of the expense budget, and under the current budget—an austerity wartime budget at that—the city's revenues were already $6,000,000 short of its $763,000,000 of expenditures. There was no sign of any immediate substantial increase in revenues, and expenditures could not be reduced: almost $500,000,000 represented salary paid to city employees, almost $200,000,000 service on already-existing debt piled up layer by layer not only by Tammany crooks but by Moses' vast public works—which he had said repeatedly were not costing the city a cent. Approximately $700,-000,000 was, therefore, as good as already spent. The budget requests already submitted by city departments would raise the budget by $153,000,-000 if they were granted. When O'Dwyer first heard these figures, he was to say, he sat stunned. And, Budget Bureau experts told him, they hadn't yet talked about subways: in the current fiscal year, every ride a man, woman or child took—for a charge of a nickel—cost the city 6.3 cents, and the subway deficit was more than $50,000,000. Next year, thanks to rising expenses, every ride would cost the city 6.7 cents, which would raise the deficit to $78,000,000. At that very moment, moreover, the militant Transportation Workers Union, whose president, Mike Quill, had hired the Mayor's brother Paul as counsel, was demanding a huge salary increase. If O'Dwyer was not to be branded as the mayor during whose administration New York City went officially bankrupt, new taxes were needed—and they were needed fast. But the city could not impose new taxes without permis-
sion from the state—and the state's Governor and legislative leaders, Republicans and up for re-election in 1946, were more interested in embarrassing than assisting him.
The situation had wilted even the hardy Little Flower. It staggered O'Dwyer, who had limited administrative experience, none in dealing with citywide problems and with Albany. Talking to a visitor in Mexico City years later, he would say, "I tell you, there were times when, as mayor, I truly wanted to jump. You would look out over the city from some place high above it, and y
ou would say to yourself, 'Good Jesus, it's too much for me!'"
Then, even before O'Dwyer's inauguration, Moses appeared with a proposal. It listed public works projects which could be deferred—and it spelled out methods of paying for those which could not.
The city didn't have any money for new housing, but the state did: a left-over $80,000,000 from a prewar $300,000,000 housing bond issue. It would be simple to persuade the upstate Republicans who dominated the Legislature to release that money to the City Housing Authority: just remove the "liberals" who now dominated the Authority and who wanted to "give away" housing to the poor, loading it down with "frills" that they would not appreciate, and turn the Authority over to Right-thinking conservatives who could be counted upon to see that housing dollars provided what housing dollars were supposed to provide and nothing more: a roof over the head of people too lazy or ignorant to provide one for themselves.*
The current capital budget included $41,000,000 for Idlewild Airport, a Moses-planned project whose construction he had been directing. It would be simple to free the city from that expense, and from the additional $200,000,000 it might take to complete Idlewild: turn it over to a new public authority that could raise the money by selling its own bonds.
Most important, $425,000,000 of the city's debt limit had been incurred for the subway. In calculating the city's debt, the state did not include self-supporting projects. Therefore, if the subways could be made self-supporting, the $425,000,000 could be lifted out of the constitutional debt limit, and the city would have $425,000,000 more to spend on public works. And the way to make the subways self-supporting was simple: raise the five-cent fare to ten cents.
The last two of these measures would give the city additional borrowing capacity to raise funds for public works. And, Moses said, it would be simple to finance the amortization and interest on such borrowing in the expense budget: just raise taxes. He had a list of proposed new taxes, and the resultant revenues, already worked out. And when O'Dwyer asked him whether or not Albany would approve such new taxes, Moses told him not to worry—that if he accepted the proposal, and gave him authority to negotiate on the city's behalf, he would take care of Albany.
Moses' proposal was a fiscal codification of his philosophy and his lust for personal power. Since a greater proportion of the poorer classes rather than upper rode the subways, doubling the fare was a financial burden that
* Among "frills" Moses specifically objected to: covers on toilet bowls, doors on closets.
would fall heaviest on those of the city's people least able to bear it. Moses' taxing proposals left real estate taxes unraised and income taxes unmentioned, these being taxes that would adversely affect big real estate holders and the city's wealthier citizens, whose welfare Moses equated with the welfare of society. Instead he proposed doubling the i percent sales tax and imposing a 5 percent tax on all monthly telephone, gas, electric and other utility bills as well as on admissions to all places of amusement in the city—three regressive taxes that would fall heaviest on the city's poorest inhabitants.
And the new projects that could be financed as a result of this income would be his projects. The projects he told O'Dwyer could be "deferred" included scores of schools, public libraries, hospitals and health centers (not to mention flrehouses). The "nondeferrable" list included his proposed new highways. Every one of those huge roads would go ahead on schedule.
And there would, at least by some accounts, be a more direct increment to his power, too. According to these accounts, Moses had an associate hint to O'Dwyer that the easiest way to get state money for the Housing Authority would be to appoint as its chairman an official with close ties to the Legislature: namely Robert Moses. Equally important, a threat to his power would be removed. The Port Authority, whose surge for power he had stemmed for a decade at the city's western shore, had seen in the city's inability to finance airport construction a chance to breach his defenses at last—by taking over the city's airports. But, O'Dwyer was to recall, "Bob Moses represented to me that under no circumstances could I go along with the Port Authority"; and under Moses' proposal for a new airport authority, he wouldn't have to.
Liberals were outraged by Moses' tax proposals—"municipal extortion from those who are not in a position to carry such a burden," one called them—and by his proposed fare increase, because it would be regressive, because the five-cent fare, low enough to allow even the city's poor to use subways not only to get to work but to travel to cultural institutions and amusements, was, as Stanley Isaacs put it, the city's "greatest single unifying influence," and because the break in the previously sacred five-cent barrier would establish a dangerous precedent. Operating and maintenance costs were obviously going to keep rising as already-old equipment grew older and TWU salary demands rose. Were the subway riders to pay for every rise? If they were, they would soon find themselves spending a totally disproportionate amount of already tight budgets just for the privilege of traveling around their city.
Not only would Moses' proposal dump a new burden on the poor; the burden would be heavy indeed.
"More than half of those living here have a family income of less than $3,000 per year; many less than $2,000 per year," Isaacs pointed out. If two members of the family were working, it would cost them sixty dollars a year more just to get to work. Isaacs—a wealthy, educated Jewish aristocrat but a product of a home in which the feelings of those less fortunate were considered nightly at the dinner table—understood, as Moses did not,
what sixty dollars a year meant. "This is a heavy load," Isaacs wrote the Herald Tribune. "It just cannot be met in many cases without cutting the food budget, without providing less milk for the children, depriving them of needed clothing."
Isaacs, moreover, understood the real motive behind Moses' proposal. The Coordinator was claiming that he simply wanted to make the subways self-sufficient, the councilman said. But this was not the truth.
Commissioner Moses really gave the case away when he . . . explained that he wanted the subways made self-liquidating ... so as to release $425,000,000 from the debt limit; so that the city can spend a very substantial part of this huge sum on new express highways, throughways and bridges for the motorist, who will not be asked to pay a penny toward the capital cost. These highways are furnished him free of charge. The unfairness of this seems obvious to me.
More important, who would benefit from highways, throughways and bridges? The same upper and middle classes—suburbanites, and the two thirds of a city that could afford to own an automobile—the same classes which, under Moses' proposal, would be freed from supporting the subways through their real estate taxes. The city's wealthier classes—its car-owning classes—would be subsidized at the expense of the poorer classes. If you insisted on increasing the subway fare, at least spend the money from the increase on subways. With $425,000,000 you could, in 1946, have modernized all moving equipment on New York's subways and made possible the construction of comfortable, modern stations—and could, in addition, have sufficient left over to build the more urgently needed new lines. Spending the money from the subway fare on highways would compound the inequities already existing in the city's transportation setup. It was neither fair nor just.
Isaacs and other liberals were also distressed by Moses' airport-financing scheme. Noting that, to offset the lack of other revenues, Moses had suggested that the proposed Airport Authority be allowed to pay interest rates almost 50 percent higher than the Port Authority—or the city—would have to pay, they assailed his scheme as a "giveaway" to bankers. And they knew whose money it was that was being given away: the city's people's. The rates Moses was proposing would raise the interest costs—the bankers' profit—close to $70,000,000 above what the Port Authority or city would have to pay. As it happened, the city had sunk almost precisely that amount into preliminary work on Idlewild and would therefore be subsidizing by that amount any authority that took it over. Why, they demanded, could not the Port Authority be all
owed to take it over—on condition that it pay the city back, over the years, the $70,000,000?
The liberals' objections were echoed by La Guardia, who had resisted similar Moses proposals for years. (The sales tax had been imposed only as an emergency measure to finance Depression relief; La Guardia had been determined to remove it as soon as the war ended.) Realizing that Moses' airport plan would turn over even his beloved La Guardia Airport to a public authority, La Guardia attempted in his first radio broadcast after O'Dwyer's inauguration to teach his successor what he had learned—too late—about
authorities. You'll find that each is a "super-government," "a wart on your neck," he warned O'Dwyer. "The investment bankers get to be greedy on authority bonds," he said. "Bankers were in control when I took office in this city. They can come back a little at a time. Don't do it!"
The liberals' fears were echoed by at least one high city official: Comptroller Lazarus Joseph. And Joseph added a point that Moses, in his detailed analyses of city finances, had somehow failed to mention: the state, which at that time took from the city each year far more in taxes than it returned to it, had a surplus, due to the wartime moratorium on construction, of $570,000,000. Why could not Governor Dewey and the Legislature ease the city's financial bind by simply giving some of that surplus back? Democratic legislators repeated the question. Pointing out to O'Dwyer that while he didn't have to run for re-election in 1946, they did, and therefore did not want to be identified with a tax and fare increase, they demanded that the Mayor throw his prestige behind the demand for more state aid for the city.
Moses' answer was, reportedly, to the point. He threatened, as one reporter put it, to "reveal some facts that would greatly embarrass" the Democratic legislative leaders. The leaders' response was prompt. They swung into line—and, in a naked display of power during a closed-door party caucus in Albany, they whipped other Democratic legislators into line. O'Dwyer did not throw his weight behind the demand for state aid. As for Comptroller Joseph, he had no influence with the men who mattered in Albany—Dewey and the Republican legislative leaders—and Moses did. O'Dwyer gave Moses the authority he had requested, the authority to represent him—to represent the city —in the financial negotiations in Albany. And although the Comptroller had been elected by the city's people as the city's chief fiscal officer, at the very moment at which he was appearing before Senate and Assembly fiscal committees on the third floor of the State Capitol, Moses was closeted secretly on the second floor, working out his program with Dewey and State Comptroller Frank C. Moore and the legislative leaders who, with Dewey, controlled the Senate and Assembly. O'Dwyer himself never went to Albany. There are those close to him who believe that during the negotiations—which took weeks—he never spoke to Dewey even over the telephone. The city's mayor transacted the city's business entirely through a broker: Robert Moses. Moses was the broker—the middleman—between the Mayor and the Governor, between the city and the state, between Democrats and Republicans.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 116