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

by Caro, Robert A

  Bob Moses in 1918 was a man, not so young any more, looking for a job. Offered an army commission as a lieutenant, he decided after some hesitation not to serve in the war. A friend, Benjamin Van Schaick, was an executive of the government's Emergency Fleet Corporation, which had recently been created to build a new American merchant fleet, and Van Schaick got Moses an executive job with the corporation. But when Moses arrived in Washington, he found he had no clearly defined duties. Temper flaring, he demanded a new assignment and was sent to the huge shipbuilding works on Hog Island in the Delaware River. Too late, he realized he had made a mistake. "That was a stupid move," he was to say. "The place to be was with the top people in Washington." Hog Island was booming like a California gold field with the influx of tens of thousands of shipworkers, and the only home he could find for his daughter and his wife, who was pregnant again, was a rather shabby apartment.

  The Hog Island operation was being conducted with all the inefficiency that might be expected from a massive production effort thrown together in wartime haste. When Moses complained about the inefficiency—the shipyard often had scores of hulls and not a single keel to attach them to— he was ignored by Hog Island officials. Trying to outflank the officials, he wrote a report detailing the inefficiency and proposing a complete new material-procurement method and persuaded Van Schaick to give it directly to Washington. Washington was impressed and called the local officials on the carpet. Their response was to wait until Washington's interest died down and then call Moses in and fire him.

  Van Schaick, who quit voluntarily when he heard what had happened to his friend, procured them both executive positions at a Long Island City factory that was producing airplane engines, but when the war ended in November, the factory was closed down.

  Moses had no choice. He had to go back to the Bureau of Municipal Research and ask the men he had scorned for a job. When they finally agreed to give him one, the stipend and duties attached were insultingly small.

  Most of Moses' contemporaries were no longer at the Bureau. They had moved on to bigger things. Many, protected by civil service provisions from Hylan's wrath, were deputy commissioners in New York City governmental agencies, some were full commissioners in Philadelphia or Chicago. Some were executive secretaries of private welfare and social work agencies. Others had

  been hired away by reform groups in other cities to form new municipal research bureaus. Still others, like Raymond Moley, an associate professor at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, were on university faculties. But Moses' continuing attempts to find a niche outside the Bureau brought him only humiliation. One day, Moley happened to be in Cleveland City Hall. As he walked down a corridor, he saw a long line of men waiting to be interviewed for a minor municipal job. One of the men on the line was Bob Moses. And he didn't get the job.

  Back at the Bureau, Moses graded students' papers and gave lectures. When the Bureau finally managed to place him with a government agency, the United States Food Commission, he found not only that he was going to be little more than a clerk but that his superior would be another former Bureau staffer, a man several years younger than he. And even this job shortly disappeared. His second child had just been born and it was another daughter, Jane. Moses had desperately wanted a son, but now doctors told Mary she would be unable to have any more children. Bella kept giving the couple money, but she didn't seem to realize how much more was needed now that there were two little girls in the family, and Bob and Mary didn't like to ask for more. They were very short of money. Once Mary worriedly confided to a friend that she had owed a grocery bill for weeks and didn't know how she was going to get the money to pay it. Their apartment, at West End Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street, was too small, and a larger one was out of the question.

  The mood of the country, so optimistic when Moses had entered public life five years before, was one of pessimism and disillusionment. As clouds of discord blotted over hopes for an honorable and lasting peace, sunlight ceased to gleam on old illusions and enthusiasms. The star of the man whom Moses had idolized on the national level as he had idolized Mitchel on the local—highly educated university man Woodrow Wilson—was waning. Pro-gressivism was all but dead. There was little talk of reform.

  Moses' own mood was one new to him. He seemed confused and worried. With his thirtieth birthday less than a month away, not only dreams but hopes had disappeared. He had been trained for work in government, but with Hylan in control in New York there was obviously no place for him in city government. He had no connections in Washington. There was a new Governor in New York State, elected in an upset—Alfred E. Smith— but Smith was a Tammany man, one of the Tammany men, in fact, who had been most vociferous in scorn of Moses' civil service proposals. Moses had met Smith several years before, when he had been city sheriff, and had not been at all impressed by the short, paunchy Irishman with the red face, gold-filled teeth and loud, rasping voice. "He is a typical Tammany politician," he said to a friend at the time. "What can you expect from a man who wears a brown derby on the side of his head and always has a big cigar in the corner of his mouth?"

  Smith was the very antithesis of Moses' ideal of a politician. Whether

  it was really true that he had never read a book all the way through, the story was plausible; not only had Smith never been to a university, he had never been to a high school—and he boasted about that fact. His remark on the floor of the State Assembly that his only degree was "FFM"—for the Fulton Fish Market, where he had worked as a boy—was already a legend. There seemed as little likelihood of a place for Bob Moses—for his dreams or for himself—on the state level as on the city. There seemed, in fact, to be no place anywhere for him to turn.

  And then, one day, Bob Moses got a call from Henry Moskowitz's wife, Belle.

  she had begun working, at Madison and other settlement houses, with immigrants even poorer than herself. Writing, producing and directing plays for the Educational Alliance, she was appointed its director of entertainment while she was still a student at Columbia, carrying a schedule that included every course she could find in the university catalogue that she thought might help her to understand, and assist, the underprivileged.

  In 1903, she married one of the young men with whom she had been working at the Alliance, an artist and architect named Charles M. Israels. They had three children. In 1911, Israels died. In 1914, no longer a beautiful girl but an extremely plump and plainly dressed matron, she married social worker Henry Moskowitz. Dozens of reform leaders attended both weddings. Reformers regarded Belle as one of their inner circle.

  But had anyone troubled to closely study her career, he would have seen that there was a difference between Belle and the average reformer: Belle Moskowitz's dreams became realities.

  In 1909, for example, the Women's City Club, under Belle's direction, began an investigation of the city's so-called "dancing academies." The "academies" were the only easily accessible places of weekday recreation for the poor girls of the Lower East Side who worked in garment-center sweatshops. These girls, many of them in their early teens, were unsophisticated. But the academies served liquor at tables on the dance floor, had rooms ready for hasty rental down adjacent corridors and seemed expressly designed for what reformers euphemistically referred to as "the downfall of young women."

  Reformers had been railing for years against the academies but previous clean-up efforts had followed the familiar pattern: investigations which caused newspaper furor and loud demands for change, verbal acquiescence by Tammany, and then, after the furor died down, business as before.

  Belle altered the pattern. Instead of loudly denouncing conditions at the academies, she quietly checked incorporation certificates to learn the names of their owners—and found that they included both Tammany leaders and community pillars. Instead of giving the names to the newspapers, which would have brought headlines but not results, since all her ammunition would have been used up, she went to the leaders and pillars and told the
m she would keep their names secret if they saw to it that regulatory legislation was passed—and strictly enforced. It was. "These laws," the Times editorialized, "did more to improve the moral surroundings of young girls" than any other single social reform of the period.

  When, in 1913, after years of struggle, garment workers' unions finally forced dress manufacturers to agree to the appointment of an impartial arbitrator to hear workers' grievances, union leaders realized that the appointment of a typical reformer—one ready, with Pavlovian predictability, to side with the workers in every case—would alienate the employers and wreck the system. They suggested Belle Moskowitz for the job. The employers, knowing her only as one of the reform crowd, agreed reluctantly —but they quickly found that Belle decided each case on its merits. The attorney for the employers' association admitted: "She understood the union

  leaders perfectly. She understood the employers quite as well. No one could fool her." And her recommendations for the improvement of working conditions in the industry were accepted by both sides—and implemented.

  But in November 1918, when Mrs. Moskowitz telephoned Bob Moses, no one had studied her career, and none of the young men at the Bureau paid the quiet, matronly woman any special attention when she would drop by, as she sometimes did in the late afternoon, to chat with Bruere or Cleveland. Moses, on the day that she telephoned, didn't even know what activity she was currently engaged in. He wondered what she wanted.

  Governor-elect Smith, Mrs. Moskowitz told him, had decided to appoint an official commission to draw up a plan for the complete reorganization of the state's administrative machinery and for the implementation of sweeping social welfare reforms. The Governor-elect, she said, intended to use the report as the basic program for his administration.

  The commission, Mrs. Moskowitz said, would be composed of the state's most distinguished citizens, but Governor-elect Smith had appointed her as its executive head, and she was looking for a "chief of staff" to work under her and head its work force, which would include at least fifty persons. This chief of staff, she said, would have a free hand in hiring the fifty and complete charge of the day-to-day work of the commission. Would Dr. Moses be interested in the job?

  Dr. Moses said he would.

  The next day, Mrs. Moskowitz took Moses to see the Governor-elect in his apartment at the Biltmore Hotel. The meeting was brief and cordial. When Mrs. Moskowitz introduced Moses, all Smith said was that if this young man was her choice for the job, he was sure Dr. Moses would do a good job. From the Biltmore, she took the new appointee straight to the Hall of Records, at the corner of Chambers and Lafayette streets, where a whole section of the third floor had been allocated to the commission, to show him his office, a large, handsomely appointed room that was the first office of his own that Moses had ever had. The commission's work was to get underway immediately, Mrs. Moskowitz said. Bob should start hiring his staff at once.

  The Bureau of Municipal Research, where, only a day before, Moses had been working, was just four blocks away from the Hall of Records, but Moses had come in that day a long way from the Bureau by any measurement other than distance. He had been looked down on by his associates there as a loudmouth and a failure. Now, after a single telephone call from a woman he hardly knew, he was suddenly in a position to call those associates —and invite them to apply to him for jobs.

  Bob Moses was never to learn why, of all the brilliant, dedicated reformers she knew, Belle Moskowitz had picked him for the first official job she had had it in her power to dispense. Perhaps it was because she had heard about him from her husband. Perhaps it was because, of all those reformers, it was he who had most strongly caught her shrewd and appraising

  eye. Whatever the reason, he never learned it. But he was able to find out from reformer acquaintances how she had come to be so trusted by Al Smith that the Governor-elect had given her that power.

  Most reformers regarded Smith as the epitome of all that they detested in the Tammany politician. Not only was he uneducated and uncouth—his spitting and drinking were legend—but, more important, he took Tammany's orders unquestioningly. For years, he had been Boss Charlie Murphy's chief henchman in Albany, and as president of the Board of Aldermen during Mitchel's mayoralty he had led the opposition that outsmarted and defeated the Boy Mayor at every turn. Al Smith's ethics, according to most reformers, matched his habits.

  But a handful of reformers, those who had actually had occasion to work with Smith, had astounded their friends even before his nomination for Governor by arguing not only that Smith was not a typical Tammany politician but that this red-faced, jut-nosed, gold-toothed, harsh-voiced smoker of big cigars and wearer of brown derbies and suits with wide stripes was, in fact, the best hope that existed for the actual enactment into law of the social welfare measures for which they had fought so long with so little real success. One of this handful of pro-Smith reformers, Moses was told by his acquaintances, was Belle Moskowitz. She was, they said, among the most enthusiastic of the group. She had, in fact, come to see in Smith the instrument through which her dreams for the poor people of New York City would become realities.

  The gubernatorial election of 1918 had been the first in New York State in which women were allowed to vote. Uncertain how to appeal to the new voters, Smith had felt he needed a woman active in female civic organizations who could sell him to such groups. Most of the female do-gooders around town wanted nothing to do with Smith's campaign. But Belle volunteered eagerly.

  However similar their ultimate aims were to turn out to be, Smith had nothing but contempt for typical reformers. Regarding them as wild-eyed, impractical and, most important, incapable of producing results, he called them "crackpots." Women reformers, he had found, were invariably crackpots. Women, he felt, didn't belong in politics anyway. In the tight little tenement Irish world in which he lived, most of them confined their interests to their homes and their children, and that was how it should be. He was prepared to listen to his new adviser with no more than token interest.

  He agreed only reluctantly to her suggestion that he address a luncheon of the Women's University Club. Uneducated, he felt he would be out of place before an audience of college graduates. He planned to make a brief talk filled with platitudes—and as hasty an exit as possible.

  Sitting on the dais, looking down on the audience of smartly dressed women chattering over fruit cocktail, his misgivings increased. "What the hell am I going to say to a bunch of women like this?" he growled.

  "If you're smart," the motherly lady by his side replied, "to this bunch of women you'll make the same speech you'd make to a bunch of businessmen."

  Taken aback, Smith decided to give it a try. He spoke on the economic issues of the campaign. A master at gauging crowd reaction, he saw as he spoke that the technique was succeeding, and when he finished, the reception was as enthusiastic as the ones he received in Tammany clubhouses.

  Smith had been given almost no chance to win. Tammany's strength was traditionally more than offset in statewide campaigns by the combination of the solid core of educated, independent, anti-Tammany voters in New York City and the solidly Republican, rural, Protestant, Prohibitionist strongholds upstate. Smith realized that he must win over the independent voters, but in the early stages of the campaign he had been having little success. After the luncheon, he began to rely more and more on Belle Moskowitz for advice in handling them. And when, thanks in part to a hefty chunk of their support, he had won the governorship and called a conference at the Biltmore apartment to map out his program, he had invited her to attend.

  Smith told the roomful of burly Irishmen that, because of the inefficiency and duplication of effort he had observed during his twelve years as a state assemblyman, he wanted to reform the state's administrative machinery. The plump little Jewish matron sitting among them had long wanted such reform too, because without improvement in the machinery of government, it was useless to talk about the social reforms of which she had long d
reamed. When Smith asked for ideas on how to start a drive for administrative reform, Belle had one ready. Even before he took office in January, she said, he should form a Commission for Reconstruction, Retrenchment and Reorganization in the state government.

  To the bluff old Irish leaders seated around the little matron, her suggestion had seemed like one they would expect from a reformer. They waited for her to talk about all the benefits that would accrue to mankind from such a commission.

  Slipping the word "retrenchment" into the commission title would be a great public relations device, Mrs. Moskowitz had said quietly, connoting as it did economy and prudence.

  Smith had been elected because of the support he had been able to draw from independent voters and Republicans, Mrs. Moskowitz had continued. If he wanted to be re-elected, he had to keep such support. The state's Republicans, as they all knew, were divided into two branches. One was the GOP's "regular" organization, bossed by arch-reactionary William ("Big Bill") Barnes of Albany, which ran the state in an atmosphere of such corruption that GOP legislators were known as the "Black Horse Cavalry" because of their looting expeditions against the state treasury. The other branch was the GOP's "federal crowd," which contained most of the party's impulse to public good and had earned its title by the distinguished service rendered in Washington by Charles Evans Hughes and a cadre of stalwarts of the Progressive Republican movement that had swept Theodore Roosevelt to the governorship of the state and then to the presidency—Elihu Root, TR's Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, later Secretary of War, and George W. Wickersham, later Attorney General. The "federal crowd" had been pressing for administrative and social welfare improvements for years. They would

  be enthusiastic about a "Reconstruction, Retrenchment and Reorganization Commission." In fact, they would be happy to serve on it, and they would tend to feel kindly toward the Governor who had asked them to. The "regular" Republicans, who would see in talk of "reconstruction" a threat to their control of the state government, could be expected to oppose the commission's work. Its creation, therefore, would have the dual effect of splitting the Republican Party and lining up with Smith those Republicans who exemplified Progressivism and reform to independent voters. The support of such Republicans would help negate Smith's greatest handicap, the Tammany label he bore. In addition, she reminded the leaders, the "federal crowd" were heavy campaign contributors.