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

by Caro, Robert A

  And if Moses was to return from Oxford with a somewhat studied indifference toward clothes, he was to display the same attitude toward money, an attitude which some friends felt, from remarks that Moses made,

  was an attempt to imitate the scions of British nobility he met at Oxford who never thought of money because they had no need to. His family first saw this attitude on board the luxury liner Potsdammer in the harbor at Southampton, where they had just picked up Robert before going on to Lucerne. When Emanuel began to tell his son about money that had been deposited for his Oxford expenses in a London bank account, Robert, who previously had had a normal college boy's interest in his allowance, said loftily, "I don't want to talk about things like that." The affectation that may have underlain this attitude is suggested by another trait that became apparent at Oxford: a seeming compulsion to pick up checks, to be the host at every gathering. Dougherty, who was not in need of subsidy, recalls: "If you went anywhere with Bob—to lunch or dinner or to have a drink—he'd grab the check and just insist on paying it. It got so people felt a little annoyed. But if you grabbed one first, you'd have to have sort of a squabble with him about it."

  Oxford was also influencing the young man on more significant levels. In long letters to his parents, he said that he had definitely decided to dedicate his life to public service. On his return to the United States, he said, he would make a career in government. He even had his field picked out; he intended to become an expert on the renowned British civil service so that he could inculcate its principles in America. Government pay might not be high, he said, but he didn't care about money. Bella Moses read the letters to relatives with approval.

  And while Oxford was refining and strengthening Moses' idealism, it was having the same effect on his arrogance, which, increasingly took the form of galloping Anglophilia. Moses' admiration for things Oxonian broadened into an admiration—strikingly deep—for all things British. Coupled with this feeling was one almost of scorn for things American. Writing to the Yale Alumni Weekly in praise of the single-examination Oxford system of education, he went beyond the praise to say: "I hesitate to imagine the introduction of such a scheme in the United States, where intellectual independence is safeguarded by daily recitations ..."

  There was another overtone, too. Under the influence of Oxford's conservative insistence on the Tightness of the British system's provisions for keeping the reins of government in the hands of a highly educated upper class, Moses came more and more to admire that system. Such admiration, of course, postulated as a concomitant an amiable contempt for the capability for government found in members of the "lower" classes—which in this context included everyone not a member of the British nobility. And from this attitude, it was a logical step to reserve supreme contempt for those whom the British aristocracy considered most incapable of self-rule— the people of the nations British troops had conquered, which meant, in general, people of color, brown, yellow or black.

  Moses took this step.

  With agitation for increased self-government rising in Great Britain's

  colonies, Oxford in 1911 sponsored a World Congress on Race Problems to examine the question—along with the broader question of general discrimination by Great Britain against colored people. Delegations were sent by the colonies and by liberal organizations from many European countries. American students selected Moses to represent their country because of his reputation as a debater.

  Previous speakers had pleaded for equality, for fraternity, for "immediate brotherhood." Moses' point of view was somewhat different. Immediate brotherhood, he said flatly, was "not practical." The "subject peoples" of the British Empire were simply not ready for self-government yet. Furthermore, he didn't see any time in the near future when they would be.

  As the audience realized what they were hearing, a certain restiveness began to develop. When Moses started explaining—quite clearly— why he didn't think the "subject peoples" would be ready for self-government for a long time, several subject people rose and charged at him. One step ahead of them was roommate Higgins. He grabbed Moses, shoved him through a door at the back of the speakers' platform, and hustled him out of the building.

  The climax of Moses' academic career was the thesis he submitted for a Ph.D. degree: The Civil Service of Great Britain.

  The thesis contained no "torch divine o'erhead." The floridness of Moses' Yale poetry and prose style had turned hard, cogent and marvelously lucid at Oxford. Short, hard sentences must have carried his professors through the intricacies of parliamentary in-fighting and regulation rewriting with refreshing ease. He displayed not only a complete familiarity with a bewildering array of bureaucratic technicalities but a gift for the felicitous phrase. Describing Carlyle's appeal to Parliament to muck out the "Augean stables of bureaucracy," Moses wrote that Carlyle appealed with "excre-mental eloquence." Macaulay's speech on the need for promotion by merit was, he said, "the most masterly vindication of the principles of competition ever left unanswered."

  Not only Moses' prose style but what was behind the style had hardened, too. The all-too-conscious revelation in the thesis's pages of what the British civil service symbolized to Robert Moses demonstrated that two years of Oxford had solidified the cast of mind formed in the mold of heredity and upbringing. The youth who had been raised in an atmosphere pervaded by a mixture of idealism and arrogance had found the rationale for such noblesse oblige in the British theory of the rights and duties of the upper classes; the thesis with which he laid the capstone of his education focused down on the British civil service as the embodiment of this attitude, the practical result of this theory. And he saw the result as glorious.

  The thesis reveals its author as a man convinced that public service is a noble calling and one that must be based on the highest ideals. Moses did not believe that the "perfection" of the British civil service system was an end in itself. Rather, he saw it as an instrument, an indispensable one, for the implementation of great social reforms. Progressive nations, he wrote,

  had begun creating new departments of government to free mankind from the traditional horrors of old age, disease and unemployment. "These new departments," he said, "must have leaders and a personnel" with outstanding qualifications if they are to fulfill their noble purpose. His idealism is further documented by his admiration, an admiration that approached idolatry, for the uncompromising reformers—Trevelyan, Northcote, "the genius" Ma-caulay—who had fought to make the civil service system equal to the new demands, and by the vehemence, the sincere, deep passion, of the phrases with which he described the patronage system that had been the reformers' chief obstacle.

  Quoting descriptions of the incompetents whom patronage foisted upon the service, he cited a report which concluded, "Patronage is the worst form of bribery," and concurred—with feeling. "The incessant demands of office-seekers, and the contemptible meanness and petty irritations attendant on a distribution of favors," are, he said, "intolerable." Merit, "o*^n competition," Moses said again and again, should be the sole basis of appointment and promotion in public life.

  Mingled with the idealism, of course, was the arrogance. It was subordinate to the idealism; if the idealism was displayed in Moses' convictions about what should be done, the arrogance emerged only in his convictions as to who was best suited to do it. But it was every bit as pure and uncompromising. The Civil Service of Great Britain reveals its author as the possessor of a depth of class feeling and conservatism more appropriate to a retired Colonel of the Guards than a young progressive from New York City. "Open competition" may be what the young author said he wanted— but the openness was to certain individuals only. "Merit" may be the determinant he said he desired, but it was not merit based on a man's handling of his job. The competition Moses wanted was a competition open only to a highly educated upper class. The merit he was talking about was merit not in public service but in the education given exclusively to members of that class.

  What Moses admired i
n the British civil service was that it had two separate and distinct classes: a very small administrative and policy-making "upper division" reserved for "university men," and a much larger "lower division" consisting of "clerks of ordinary education" selected through examinations on the high-school level who "do the lower and more mechanical work." The class differentiation that Moses admired was a rigid one. Carefully placed technical hurdles made it difficult, almost impossible, for a young man, even one of dedication, industry, ambition and talent, to rise out of the lower division.

  "Brilliant," Moses called this setup. "Far-sighted." It attracts into public service precisely the men most needed there, "the most intelligent and capable young men in universities," he said. And it keeps them in government by reserving for them posts from which they can exert real influence and authority.*

  * With criticisms of the system Moses had little patience. "The question of admitting natives to the Indian service comes up now and again, but it can hardly be said to be

  Was there, perhaps, a question as to the democracy of such a system? Moses' answer was that a civil service with no class differentiation is "one of mediocrity" and "such democracy is false democracy." What about the young man who educates himself, who goes to night school, perhaps, and earns a college degree while he is in the lower division of the civil service? Might not he be considered fit for promotion? Well, Moses said,

  [My] conclusions on this difficult question of democracy versus education in the civil service are these:

  In a sense it is a cruel thing to set up class distinctions—even if they only be intellectual . . .

  But where does our sympathy lead us? Can the state repair the defects of heredity or of early education? Can it endow the average individual with the intelligence, acuteness and cultivation which economic exigencies have denied him? . . .

  There should be no social bar to promotion from the lowest to the highest place—but let us not fool ourselves. When we have made every possible provision for the encouragement of early promise, when we have prepared every child as far as possible for its suitable vocation, the subordinate employees of the government . . . who are fit to rise above the ranks will be few and far between.

  As for recent complaints of the lower-class civil servants about wage scales and working conditions, Moses said there was no need to worry about those subjects:

  The writer believes—in spite of Mr. Walling and his socialistic brethren—that the civil servant may safely depend upon the public parliamentary recognition of the justice of his cause, upon the fairness of the Treasury or a minister . . . and upon royal commissions ... to get real grievances redressed and reasonable demands granted.

  What was of more concern to "the writer," in fact, was that the lower-class workers might not understand this and might continue agitating— might, in fact, even form unions! Hopefully, a sense of loyalty would stop the workers short of such an act of open rebellion, but if this should not be the case, Moses said, "in the last analysis," there must be "the remorseless exercise of the executive power of suppression and dismissal to solve this question."

  The last chapter of Moses' thesis is a plea to his own country to adopt the British system for its own civil service. The chapter is pervaded by contempt for the standards of government service in the United States, where "spoilsmen" and job-hungry politicians lurk everywhere, and "we have been so busy fighting for a full realization of the competitive principle . . . that the great problems of division, of intellectual qualifications . . . and attracting the best men into our government departments have been quite neglected," so that government is staffed by "a very miscellaneous and often ill-educated

  acute," he said. "Few care to make the trip to England." The suggestion that examinations be held also in India has "been voted down thus far," he noted, and this is "fortunate." "There are as many places open to them now as they are reasonably capable of filling."

  division of clerks." Patronage must be eliminated and an upper division created immediately, he said.

  To follow Moses' suggestions, the United States would have had to close almost completely the higher ranks of government service not only to all men without a college degree but to all men without a degree from an Ivy League college. In fact, by logical extension of Moses' philosophy, graduates of Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn would be allowed in those higher ranks only by sufferance; in his view, government in America should be ruled, as was football at the time, by men whose birth and breeding had allowed them to attend one of three colleges—Princeton, Harvard or, of course, Yale.

  Moses said in his thesis that he feared that America's acceptance of this suggestion would be delayed by its exaggerated concern for equality. Most men are simply incapable of handling the demands of government service, Moses said, and the time has come for Americans to realize it. "We must decide," the young author said, "how much encouragement we may honestly offer to those who expect to rise from the ranks without the almost essential early education of the university man." Moses saw only one real hope for his country—the fact that a man who met his highest standards, Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, had just been elected President. Wilson's writings, Moses felt, "show not only a clear understanding of the defects of our . . . civil service, but also a keen realization of the executive leadership necessary to remedy them."

  Moses had begun the thesis after graduation—with honors—from Oxford in June 1911. After a last summer in Lucerne, he spent the fall of 1911 doing research in London. Then he spent a term studying political science at the University of Berlin. Returning to New York in the summer of 1912, he moved back into his old room on Central Park West—it was the height of his one-suit, one-pair-of-shoes period, but Bella at least made sure that the suit was an expensive white tropical from Brooks Brothers—and began writing. He enrolled in Columbia University's School of Political Science, but took no courses formally, spending most of his time on the thesis, which he completed in the summer of 1913. As soon as he finished it, and even before he took the oral examinations for the Columbia Ph.D. he was to receive, he entered public service by getting a job with the Training School for Public Service of the Bureau of Municipal Research, a private fact-finding organization located in an office building at 261 Broadway, which was about to become a virtual arm of the city government.

  Robert Moses' education was over. He was beginning the career in public service about which he so often had talked with so passionate an idealism. The quadrangles of Oxford were behind him. Instead of cloisters, there would be the arena. And one day in the summer of 1913, dressed in his clean white suit, Robert Moses carried his bright, shining idealism down to 261 Broadway and flung it on the table to find out what it was worth in the game of life.

  As the time was right for Bob Moses, so, seemingly, was the place. If there was an epicenter of the idealism that was rolling across America, it was the ninth floor of 261 Broadway. The impulse to do good may have been rampant beneath the domes of statehouses and the national capitol, but it reached its zenith in city halls. Perhaps this was because in cities corruption was more visible than in federal politics, issues more succinctly dramatized. Or perhaps it was because the reforming impulse thrived on problems, and it was in the cities, swelling with the immigrant tide, faced with problems of housing, schooling, policing, fire protection, traffic regulation and sewage disposal on a new scale, that America's problems were beginning to loom largest.

  Unlike European cities, which also mushroomed in the Industrial Age but which had been built atop previous centuries' strong administrative foundations, America's had sprung into gianthood relatively overnight, often organized around nothing but the factory or the mill, and had no such tested governmental framework. What framework they did have was undermined by blatant corruption, their governments controlled by private interests and by political bosses who, with their Christmas baskets and everything the baskets symbolized, marshaled hundreds of thousands of ignorant voters into vast, seemingly impr
egnable political machines. "With very few exceptions," asserted historian Andrew D. White, "the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom—the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt."

  To combat these conditions, reform movements sprang up in almost every large city in the United States—and in no city was Progressivism more vigorous than in New York. In New York, its spearhead was the Bureau of Municipal Research. To many observers, in fact, the Bureau was the spearhead of municipal reform not only in New York but throughout the United States; historian Charles A. Beard was later to conclude that its methods constituted "nothing short of a revolution in the . . . approach to such matters."

  The three young men who had founded the Bureau in 1907—William H. Allen, Henry Bruere and Frederick A. Cleveland—believed, as did the city's older reformers who had backed them financially, that the growth of forces which had diminished the individual's control over his own destiny had made it incumbent on government to ride to his rescue with increased welfare services. But this trio—known among reformers as "the ABC"— added to the reform ethos new elements derived from two other passions of the era, natural science and scientific management. The emphasis of natural science on empiricism, on firsthand observation, on the obtaining of facts, led them to conclude that it was vain to talk about changing the philosophy of government before learning the facts of government, and they said therefore that the first step toward reform should be analysis of government operations. From scientific management—the age was marveling at the assembly-line techniques introduced by Henry Ford—they concluded that after government operations had been analyzed, the next step should be not a change in philosophy but an improvement in such operations to make