alumni for contributions, and also brought back word of a concession from Camp that was small but significant, coming from a man who had previously run Yale athletics without making any concessions at all: if the association raised $3,200, Camp's Athletic Union would contribute the other $300.
Persuading the minor sports to combine into one association, which meant turning over their finances to an outside body, proved almost as difficult as persuading Camp. Hockey and basketball, which were classed among these sports but were popular enough among students so that their managers could generally raise money by a door-to-door appeal on campus, were particularly reluctant. Yet because hockey and basketball were the only two of the minor sports in which there was much interest, their participation was essential.
Moses argued that even for hockey and basketball the existence of a formal association would make it much easier to obtain money from alumni and students who had treated as a joke the many separate appeals from the different minor sports. And the idealist also argued on higher grounds. In one editorial, he wrote: "As far as Basketball and Hockey are considered per se, they have nothing to gain. But . . . there must be a sacrifice on the part of the Basketball and Hockey teams for the sake of common good. . . ."
Hockey and basketball agreed to join. The other sports followed. On June 11, 1908, Moses was able to announce the formation of the Yale University Minor Sports Association.
With Moses organizing its fund drives, the association proved to be more vigorous than Camp had expected. When he realized the extent of its fund-raising efforts among alumni, traditional fountainhead of football funds, Moses was called in by Dean Wright and advised to be "calm and dignified." Any "undue pressure" on alumni, he was warned, would result in the withdrawal of the $300 offer. Moses promptly made the threat public in the Courant and announced that the fund-raising would continue.
Moses' friends—and men on campus who had previously hardly noticed him—were impressed by his courage. Sixty years after he graduated, one member of the swimming team could recall that "the report was that he and Camp had quite a go at it. We thought it was quite a thing." Moses' idealism began to be talked about widely in the class—and it was because of this that Ed Richards was all the more surprised when, on a day in January 1909, he climbed out of the pool after doing his laps and heard what Moses was suggesting about Og Reid.
"After I had accepted his resignation," Richards recalls, "he began to put pressure on me to take him back on the team and let him go ahead with his approach to Reid. He managed to work up an amazing amount of pressure. He really was very clever about it. He got the managers [of the other minor sports] to send a delegation to me to talk me out of it. I told them, 'No, it's not an honest way to treat Og Reid. He's always treated us very! nicely.' Then Bob went to the man who was the heart and soul of swimming at Yale—Maxie Swartz. Maxie was really just the janitor at the pool, but he was a good old guy. He took a lot of interest in the swimmers, and he was always around the team. Bob got Maxie to ask me to take him
back. He had Maxie tell me, 'Oh, Reid has plenty of money. He'll never miss a little of it.' But I talked it over with a few other guys on the team and they said I was right and I refused Maxie too."
Although Richards' firmness terminated Moses' connection with Yale athletics, his activity in more esoteric areas of campus life continued. His interest in art and poetry had made him a member of 1909's little clique of intellectuals and esthetes and, to some extent, he was becoming its leader. He was active on the Courant. He may not have been invited to join any of the more "important" clubs at Yale, but he became president of the one he did join, the Kit Cat Club, a new organization which was named after the group of convivial literary spirits who had surrounded Samuel Johnson and which included "Yale men who have shown literary ability and interest in literary subjects." During his senior year, he and a classmate published Yale Verse, an anthology of the best undergraduate poetry of the previous ten years.
Moses' academic work continued to be outstanding. A half century after he graduated, a professor said: "I well remember Robert Moses in my classes. He was alert, enthusiastic, very active, always doing 'A' work. ... He was a model student. It is the energy of the man . . . and his very great intelligence that I remember most clearly. ..." Seniors were awarded "Premiums," small cash awards established by alumni for outstanding work; Moses won a handful for math and English and Latin, in English composition for an essay on the "Mona Lisa," besides making Phi Beta Kappa.
Though Moses had lived alone during his first two years at Yale, in his last two he had roommates, as a senior Raymond P. McNulty and Elias "Five A" Johnson. "I didn't come to him," Johnson recalls. "He approached me and asked me to room with him. Of course I was glad to. We had been friendly before. But I think the fact that he approached me is an indication of a tendency I noticed in Bob; he selected his friends."
The friends Bob Moses selected were of a specific type: cultured, artistic, interested in the things he was interested in, many of them members of the tight little circle that included members of Kit Cat and the Courant. They included Malcolm T. Dougherty, who had already displayed the talent that was to make him a prominent painter of marine life, class poets like Bacon, Carl Thurston and Ed Proctor, and Courant and Lit contributors like James McConaughy, later Governor of Connecticut, and Harold Phelps Stokes, later chief editorial writer of the New York Herald Tribune.
Johnson, a very'poor boy from Chicago attending Yale on a scholarship, was perhaps Moses' closest friend. He had already earned a reputation as the class "brain," and if Moses loved to read, "Five A" loved to study. Night after night, the two young men would retire immediately after supper to their living room in White Hall and stay at their desks until midnight or one or two o'clock in the morning, when they'd take long walks which usually ended at a little all-night luncheonette which served the turn-of-the-century equivalent of the late-evening hamburger—a heaping bowl of corn flakes and milk.
In honor of Johnson's slimness—he carried a hundred and twenty
pounds on a five-foot seven-inch frame—Moses gave him a new nickname, "Slat." On weekends, he often took Slat home to the apartment Bella and Emanuel had rented in 1906 in a large apartment house at the corner of Central Park West and Seventieth Street, coming down to New York by train and across town from the station by horse-drawn streetcars. To while away time on the trips, the boys would play an early version of Twenty Questions, "Ask Me Another," but Johnson, despite his five "A's," confessed himself hopelessly outclassed. "Bob had the damnedest questions on art and poetry and what not through the ages," he would recall. "His reading was fantastic."
His circle of friends liked and admired Bob Moses. "He was always glad to see you," one says. "He really liked you—and you liked him." He might love to read, but he was certainly no "greasy grind." He enjoyed jokes —telling them and hearing them—and he had a quick, infectious laugh. Tall and strong, he enjoyed running and mountain climbing, once leading several friends to the top of Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks. He and Johnson might spend most evenings studying, but on some evenings they would walk along Chapel Street, where the "townies," New Haven girls who were not averse to meeting Yale boys, paraded, and Moses was notably successful at striking up conversations, much to the discomfort of the painfully shy Slat. "I remember that one night when we were reading, Bob suddenly jumped up and said, 'Come on, let's take a walk,' " Slat recalls. "We went down Chapel Street and there were a couple of girls ahead of us, and he made some kind of remark and they started laughing. I got afraid and went back to the room, but he walked off with them."
What his friends admired most was his idealism. Sometimes, it took rather odd forms. One night, he and the scrawny Johnson had an argument that escalated into a short but violent fight, and Moses showed no hesitation in knocking sprawling a man so much smaller than he. But once Johnson was down, Moses helped him up and, shaking his hand, congratulated him on his courage in fighting someone bigg
er and stronger. In discussions about campus life, however, Moses was more consistent. His appeals for true democracy at Yale continued. The argument about which fraternity's nominee should be given the class office was one example. Johnson was trying to convince a group of classmates of the right of his fraternity to the job, when Moses suddenly jumped up and, in Johnson's recollection, "bawled the living daylights out of me. He was saying things like 'What does the fraternity have to do with it? It should be on the basis of ability.' But it wasn't so much what he said as the way he said it. You could see he was speaking from the heart; you could see the honesty coming through in what he was saying. And all of a sudden, I was ashamed. Of course, I saw, he was right. Why should money or influence or who a guy's friends were matter?"
When bull-session discussions turned to careers after college, Moses said he was going to "go into public service." He didn't have any specific plans, and even talked occasionally of teaching government. But, more and more, his thinking seemed to his friends to be turning to a more active role. He wanted, he told them, to help the underprivileged, the lower
classes, the people ground down by forces beyond their control. These phrases were not unusual ones among college seniors. But Moses' friends were impressed by the intensity, the evident, deep belief, with which he spoke them.
As Moses' acquaintance expanded, moreover, so did the admiration. When, during his senior year, his class held elections for the seven-member Senior Council, the winners were six fraternity men and Bob Moses, who, with fifty-nine votes, came in third.
Other barriers could not be breached, of course. As graduation neared, 1909 elected its socially prestigious Class Day Committees. Moses was elected to neither the Class Supper Committee, the Senior Prom Committee, the Cap and Gown Committee—nor to any of the sixteen other committees selected. By the time the class graduated, forty-five men were in the Senior Societies, one hundred in the Junior Fraternities, fifty-one in the Sophomore Societies—and Moses was not one of them. He never lived in Vanderbilt Hall. And to many of the men who did live in Vanderbilt and who did participate in the secret ceremonies of Skull and Bones or Wolf's Head, the honors that Robert Moses did achieve were unimportant. "Frankly," says one of them in accents ancestral, "I couldn't tell you what the Kit Cat Club was. Or the Senior Council." When 1909 voted for its outstanding members, Moses received only a few scattered votes as "Brightest," "Most Scholarly" and "Done Most for Yale." In the official Class History, which listed the rosters of clubs and committees and their outstanding members, his name hardly appeared at all.
But what was, perhaps, significant about Bob Moses and the Class History was not that his name appeared in it infrequently but that it appeared in it at all. His achievements at Yale might be dim beside those of the prep-school Episcopalian leaders of the secret societies, but they were bright indeed for a Jew. If in his first two years at Yale Bob Moses had been a lonely nobody, in his last two years he had become considerably more than that.
And the way in which he had become more was, in the light of his later career, even more significant. He became a campus figure partly, of course, because of the brilliance and idealism that were part of his inheritance. He displayed also, in his refusal to knuckle under to Walter Camp, his inherited stubbornness—and a considerable amount of real moral courage. But, in the fight of his later career, what is most interesting is that when he realized that, because of the handicap of his religion, his brilliance and idealism would not take him to the top in the world of Yale, he made, within Yale, a world of his own, and a world, moreover, in which, in collegiate terms, he had power and influence.
He never went out for the Lit but he made himself an important member of the staff of a less prestigious publication. He never went out for a major sport but he was active in a minor one. He was never invited to join one of the better clubs but he was president of the lesser club he did join. And if he was not included in the more select social circles of the class, he created a circle of his own, a small coterie of persons with like interests, a
coterie within which he was the acknowledged leader. The men in the coterie admired Bob Moses. The men he chose to be his friends were happy to be chosen.
Alongside the massive cathedrals of Yale's traditions, buttressed by prejudice and pride, Bob Moses had erected his own small but sturdy structure. "In our little world . . . ," Bacon was to say, "he made himself a position of power."
In the light of Moses' later career, that was the key point.
in preserving Oxford as a home of English conservatism and tradition" and "We should carry into the bustle and stir of the New World, the atmosphere of the Old."
As strong as Oxford's conservatism was its emphasis on public service. Its tone in 1909 had been set for the preceding three centuries by rich young men who were sent to the university as a preliminary to public life and who, from positions in Parliament or the civil service or the learned professions, actually did, after graduation, govern Britain and its vast territories overseas. But the leavening of devotion to public service with an unabashed insistence on the rights and privileges of aristocracy could not help but make that devotion somewhat patronizing, infusing it with a strong air of condescension and noblesse oblige in its most obnoxious form. It was a refined, more subtle but also more deeply rooted version of the attitude of the German Jews of New York toward the Russian and Polish latecomers, of Bella toward the children whose parents didn't even know how to bring them up so they would be able properly to clean the cabins Madison House had been kind enough to build for them.
Bella's son was very happy at Oxford. His most frequent companion was Mai Dougherty, his friend from Yale, who was also studying at Wad-ham. "Bob had a very good time at Oxford," Dougherty recalls. "He liked it very much. It was such a relief after Yale. Yale had that pseudo-democracy, but it was not democratic at all; it was snooty, with all that social tradition. When we got to Oxford, we found all this changed. It was understood by everyone there that by the very fact that you belonged to Oxford, you were the select and the elect. You didn't have to compete for prestige or honors to become one of the elite. Because you were there, you were the elite." Moses' understanding of this fact—and his acceptance of it —shone through an article he sent to the Yale Alumni Weekly. "There is a moribund institution for workingmen's sons somewhere in Oxford," he sneered. "I have never yet met an undergraduate who knew its exact location, nor have I met anyone who did not become incoherent with rage when it was defended."
Moses liked the gentleman's life that Oxford offered. Breakfast, lunch and tea were served in the students' rooms, and they were encouraged to entertain friends—of whom Moses had plenty. Says one classmate, "Bob was almost universally loved." The first American in history to be elected captain of the Dark Blue water-polo team, he was also swimming captain, although, as at Yale, if he ever won a race, the victory went unrecorded. Taking up debating, he became the first American ever to be elected president of the august Oxford Union, that hardiest of debating clubs.
Oxford's exemption of students from all marks and tests except for a single, all-inclusive examination given after two years appealed to the student who even at Yale had refused to be bound by the confines of his courses. "The Oxford education . . . confers on the average undergraduate independence of mind," he wrote in the Alumni Weekly.
Vacations were an especially happy time. Moses and Dougherty spent their "vacs" on walking tours of England or traveling abroad, often with
Moses' roommate, John Gilbert Higgins, a Rhodes Scholar from Newfoundland who sported a long knitted scarf and a thick Irish brogue.
In Switzerland, the youths tried out a sport that was just beginning to attract the attention of American tourists: skiing. In Italy, Moses saw again the frescoes and statues he had loved as an undergraduate and spent hours being gondolaed around Venice, a city with which he had fallen in love. Every summer, his family would sail to Europe and take a large suite of rooms in a hotel overlooking the Lake of Lu
cerne. There, Moses and Dougherty played tennis, swam and climbed mountains.
In 1911, a Rhodes Scholar named El Allail, the son of an Egyptian bey, invited Moses and Dougherty to visit Egypt. Crossing the Mediterranean on a leaky, shuddering tub named the Equator, the youths found themselves in the company of hundreds of Levantine natives and a troupe of women Dougherty describes as "international tarts sailing for the winter season in Cairo and Alexandria." On the first night out of Marseilles, the Equator's captain selected one, disappeared with her into his cabin—and remained there for the rest of the four-day voyage. The same procedure was followed by every other officer except an aged quartermaster. The engines broke down —along with the latrines. But when the ship—and its attendant aroma—arrived at Alexandria, El Allail ensconced Moses and Dougherty in luxury. The three youths spent the days swimming on a magnificent beach at the mouth of the easternmost branch of the Nile and evenings chatting over dinner with the highest British colonial and native Egyptian officials, including the Khedive of Egypt. The Khedive must have been impressed with Moses; he asked him to be his secretary.
The mark of Oxford's influence would be plain on Robert Moses for the rest of his life.
Oxonians habitually wore "bags," old flannel trousers so long unpressed that they were completely shapeless, and sweaters or heavy tweed jackets. The academic gowns required for lectures were often worn along with bedroom slippers. Moses, who had always been exceptionally neat in dress before Oxford, would return to New York affecting a carelessness about attire that at times went to extremes. Insisting he needed only one suit, he would wear it until it was shiny. He had only one pair of shoes, which he never shined; returning home on a rainy day, he would sit in front of the fire in the Moseses' luxurious living room, holding his feet close to the flames, making a point of telling friends that he couldn't go out again until his shoes had dried because he didn't have another pair. He obtained new underwear and socks only when his mother bought them for him. After his marriage, his wife would take over this chore and, since he refused to go to clothing stores at all, would select suits herself, have them brought to their apartment and arrange for a tailor to come and fit them there.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 7
