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

by Caro, Robert A

  Before the motherly little woman had finished speaking, the roomful of politicians had realized that they were listening to a master politician. Al Smith had bought her suggestion on the spot.

  Reorganization of the state government was not a new idea. It had been a basic reform tenet for years, and in 1915 a Bureau of Municipal Research study commissioned by a State Constitutional Convention had found no fewer than 169 separate state departments, bureaus, boards, committees and commissions, many with overlapping functions—taxes, for example, being collected by seven different agencies, public works being carried out by ten. Some agency heads were responsible to the Governor, some to the Legislature and some to officials who were themselves elected by the people and were hence not responsible to either Governor or Legislature. Some agency heads appointed by the Governor were removable only by the Legislature, and there seemed to be almost as many different procedures of removal as there were men who could be removed. His term was only two years, and the terms of some gubernatorial appointees were longer, so that each incoming Governor was forced to entrust the carrying out of some of his policies to men appointed by previous Governors, who might be politically opposed to him. Such nominal members of the executive department as the state engineer, treasurer and secretary of state were not appointed but elected and, therefore, even if they were of the Governor's party, did not owe their primary allegiance to the Governor but to the voters and could, if they wished, ignore his wishes with impunity.

  Most important, the study found that the Governor possessed little real authority. Not he but the chairmen of the various committees of the reactionary and corrupt Legislature controlled the state's purse. The document that was called a state budget was actually a collection of appropriations drawn up by these chairmen. No legislator—or any other state official— reviewed the collection, balanced one appropriation against another, cut them down to agreed-upon necessities or measured them against estimated revenue. Even after the document was formally printed, individual legislators continued to introduce their own "private" bills, generally for pork-barrel public works projects, which required public expenditures, and these, when passed, did not even appear in the "budget." No one bothered to add them

  up, so that, when the Legislature adjourned, no one could be sure how much money it had appropriated. The Governor technically had the power to veto appropriations, but since state law forbade him to veto part of an appropriation item, legislators simply made sure that each debatable expenditure was lumped with one too essential to be vetoed.

  The Bureau had become convinced that it was this lodging of administrative power in Legislature rather than Governor that, more than any other single fact, explained the utter failure of twenty years of effort by a succession of liberal Governors such as Roosevelt and Hughes to increase the involvement of the state with the new needs of its people. Because the Governor stood at the head of the state and represented all of its people rather than just one assembly or senate district, the Governor must be held responsible if the state failed to move as the voters wanted it to move. But going hand and hand with responsibility, the Bureau said, must be power. If a man was to be held responsible for moving government, he must be given power to move it, "executive power commensurate with executive responsibility" in the Bureau's slogan.

  To get power into the hands of the executive, the Bureau recommended a centralization of governmental functions. The 169 agencies should be combined into twelve departments headed by men appointed by, and removable by, the Governor, whose term should be lengthened to four years. An "executive budget" system should be instituted. Under it, department heads would submit financial requests to the Governor, who would weigh the requests against the resources and needs of the state and propose an over-all budget. Only then would the budget be submitted to the Legislature, which would review it, in a series of hearings that would insure that the public could understand it, and then would have the power to reduce it by eliminating items. The Governor would therefore be proposing the way the state was to be run; the Legislature would be reviewing the proposal, and if the differences between Legislature and Governor proved irreconcilable, the public would settle them at the next election. Furthermore, after policy had been established, it was to be administered by the Governor instead of by the Legislature's many committee chairmen.

  The Bureau's 1915 report, Government of the State of New York, was 768 pages long. With reform leaders taking the floor to argue for its principles, many of its key points were adopted by the Constitutional Convention. But Tammany and the upstate bosses outwitted the reformers by persuading them to combine all the proposed constitutional amendments in a single package, and distaste for one or two unimportant but unpopular amendments, combined with a quiet mobilization of Tammany and upstate machines, resulted in the defeat of the package in a November 1915 referendum.

  Bob Moses, who, as a Bureau staffer, had worked on its 1915 report and who now, in his new job, recruited other staffers who had worked on that report, expected at first that the report of the Reconstruction Commission would be practically a duplication. But there was a bigger difference between working

  for the Bureau and working for Belle Moskowitz than sumptuousness of office arrangements. The Bureau made recommendations; Mrs. Moskowitz made laws. The Bureau got enthusiastic and excited; Mrs. Moskowitz got things done. And no sooner had her chief of staff begun work, two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, than she began to teach him how things got done.

  The lessons started almost immediately. When Moses submitted a preliminary outline of suggested commission goals, he included a phrase straight out of the reform textbooks and his Municipal Civil Service Commission days: "Elimination of unnecessary . . . personnel." Mrs. Moskowitz struck the phrase out. Personnel, she said, were voters. You didn't antagonize voters. When Moses, copying a 1915 Bureau recommendation, suggested that the unwieldy ten-member "council" which ran the Department of Agriculture be scrapped in favor of a single, professional commissioner, she pointed out that the council memberships were distributed by the Legislature and were among the choicest patronage posts it possessed. The Governor, she said, would need the support of the Legislature if his program were to be approved. The council, she said, would remain.

  The lessons were given in daily morning conferences. Moses would arrive brimming over with ideas and impatient for their approval. But the reception they received from Mrs. Moskowitz was somewhat different from the one his ideas had been accorded by Mr. Moskowitz. As Moses excitedly paced around her office, she would sit calmly, attentive but noncommittal. When he finished, she usually would not say anything for several minutes. Often, she would praise the ideas, and break into a smile, full of real pleasure, at Moses' inventiveness. But, equally often, Moses' ideas would be thrown out.

  "There was a real divergence of opinion there," staffers recall. "Moses was very theoretical, always wanting to do exactly what was right, trying to make things perfect, unwilling to compromise. She was more practical; she wanted to do the same things as Moses, but she wanted to concentrate on what was possible and not jeopardize the attaining of those things by stirring up trouble in other areas." And her decisions were always final. While Moses paced and argued, trying to change her mind, Mrs. Moskowitz would sit quietly and, when Moses had finished, would quietly repeat her earlier decision. "There was never any question," recalls another staffer, "that she was the boss."

  Often, Moses would come bursting out of Mrs. Moskowitz's office cursing under his breath. Striding around the large room in which thirty staffers had desks, he would let the breath out. "He used to call Mrs. Moskowitz all kinds of names which weren't gentlemanly at all," one of the men who sat in that room recalls. "I remember him saying, over and over, 'Do you know what that old she son of a bitch told me this morning?' " Once, lunging across the room in a rage so blind that he thudded into a desk, he paused for a moment, leaned down to the startled man sitting at it, and muttered grimly, "I could have kicked
that woman in the shins!"

  But, in spite of the cursing, there was a difference in Bob Moses. The man who had not hesitated to criticize to their faces his superiors at the

  Bureau of Municipal Research was careful that his cursing of Mrs. Moskowitz was done out of her earshot. "He certainly didn't talk to her the way he talked about her," a staffer recalls. While he might dispute a decision heatedly, he stopped arguing once she made clear that the decision was final.

  Some of the staffers believed this change of attitude was due to a newfound prudence in a man aware that the opportunity he had been given with the commission might be his last chance to make good in his chosen career. One says: "If he had talked to Mrs. Moskowitz the way he talked to Cleveland or Allen—or to Mr. Moskowitz—he would have been thrown out, and if he had been thrown out of that job, that would have been the end of Bob Moses, and he knew it."

  Such an explanation, however, failed to take into account the full extent of the difference. For one thing, Moses was not only obeying Mrs. Moskowitz but also obviously studying the lessons that she was teaching, and studying them hard. His conversation began to include the phrases of practical politics as well as those of scientific management textbooks. His analysis of a state job began to take into consideration not only whether the position was necessary for the betterment of mankind but also who had appointed the man who now held the position. He learned to weigh the governmental gains that might be achieved by the position's elimination and by the use for worthier purposes of the salary allocated to it against the political losses the elimination might entail—how much it would antagonize the appointer and how great an obstacle such antagonism might be to Smith's over-all program.

  The difference went deeper. It was not just that he obeyed Mrs. Moskowitz and it was not just that he learned her way of thinking; rather it was that, after a while, he seemed almost eager to learn. He had always scorned the considerations of "practical" politics. Practical politicians had crushed and destroyed his dreams and had come near to crushing and destroying him. They had done it with an ease that added humiliation to defeat. And now, given a chance to learn their methods, Bob Moses seemed almost enthusiastic about embracing them.

  He was an apt pupil. In his first conferences with Mrs. Moskowitz, they had discussed how the commission would go about obtaining from the Republican-dominated state agencies the information—on salary and internal organization and promotion policy, for example—needed to evaluate the agencies' work. Moses' initial reaction was straightforward. Why couldn't commission staffers simply demand the information? he asked. Smith was Governor, wasn't he? If an agency proved recalcitrant, Smith could simply order the agency head to cooperate. Mrs. Moskowitz made clear that the commission wouldn't proceed along any such lines. In the first place, she said, many of the agencies regarded themselves as independent of the Governor; an order he gave them might be disobeyed. Even if it was obeyed, it could cause hard feelings and the Governor didn't want hard feelings; he wanted reform. He had only two years to make a start on it, and he was going to have plenty of trouble no matter how he went about it. He didn't want any more than was absolutely necessary. The commission must be very

  careful not to stir up any that could possibly be avoided. And not only did Moses, once so impatient and impolitic, become a model of discretion on his trips to Albany, talking only to men to whom Smith's aides could introduce him as a friend; to his staffers he repeated over and over, in urgent, handwritten notes: "Be careful. Remember that we must not embarrass the Governor." And the commission was able to avoid any angry confrontations with agency heads.

  The eyes that had picked Bob Moses out of the herd of young reformers were watching his progress. It was as spectacular as it had been at Oxford, where he had learned part of the political science. There, he had graduated with honors. Belle Moskowitz, who taught him another aspect of the science, did not confer degrees, but she awarded him her own type of honor: by the spring of 1919, less than six months after she had taken over Moses' tutelage, she was leaving the supervision of the State Reconstruction Commission almost entirely in his hands.

  The commission's work meshed with his personal convictions. Reorganizing government to make it more responsive to social needs was an aim that he had enunciated for himself in his Oxford thesis, and all his work in government thereafter had only strengthened his belief in the urgency of the need for such reorganization. More specifically, the reorganization on which the Reconstruction Commission was embarked was almost certainly going to be designed to increase the powers of the state's chief executive, and power for the executive was another theme that, at least in implication, ran through the thesis.

  The commission's work, moreover, was of a scope and an aim consonant with the sweeping, soaring, almost visionary quality of his idealism. For years he had laughed bitterly with other young reformers at the open chicanery of the Black Horse Cavalry, at the inefficiency of the system which sent tax collectors from seven different state agencies to the same factory, at the utter hopelessness of the administrative machinery of New York State. Now, at last, here was a chance to replace that machinery, not just to oil it but to take it apart and haul it away, and then replace it with a new one. Here was a chance to change a state, the most populous and influential in the nation.

  If Moses was hopeful of success this time, his hopefulness was not the naive overconfidence of his Civil Service Commission days. The success or failure of the Reconstruction Commission's efforts, he understood, was not in the hands of the commission but depended on someone else. But he had real hope that this time the someone else might come through.

  Moses had been quite prepared to be disappointed by the Governor he had called "a typical Tammany politician." But Al Smith's speech to the prominent liberal Democrats, independents and "federal" Republicans on the commission at its first meeting had certainly not been pro forma. Mangled cigar stub stabbing out from his wet lips at the vested, watch-fobbed civic

  leaders before him, he had rasped, "Is this commission going to do something or is it just going to offer a report? Are you going to have something definite that can be put into effect to benefit the state? Because if you are not, the sooner you report and go out of existence the better." Nor had Smith's actions been pro forma when the Black Horse Cavalry refused his request for $75,000 to enable the commission to begin work. Here was a ready-made opportunity to reap political capital. As Mrs. Moskowitz had surmised, the GOP's federal wing raged against their party's legislators, along with most of the state's important newspapers. Without doing anything else, simply by letting the commission die and pointing out that the Legislature had killed it, Smith would have scored a political coup. But Smith did something else. He asked the members of the commission to put up the $75,000 themselves, and when they did, he publicly promised that he would abide by, and sponsor, any recommendations it made when it completed its report.

  Often now, in the late afternoon, the Governor would drop by the commission offices. He came primarily to obtain Mrs. Moskowitz's advice on some problem or other. "You could see," says one of the young commission staffers, "that Smith really trusted her. Over and over again, I heard him say, 'Now, Mrs. M, you do so and so or you look into such and such this week and let me know how you feel about it.' " But on his way to the little office in the corner that had been reserved for him—and equipped with a big brass spittoon—the Governor would stop and chat with the staffers, telling them the inside stories of political in-fighting going on in Albany or kidding them about the pretty secretaries in the commission stenographic pool next door. When he finished talking to Mrs. Moskowitz, he would call them into his office and—between well-aimed expectorations toward the spittoon—he would tell more stories. He would talk to them seriously, too. The frank, serious blue eyes that looked so out of place over the big-veined nose and the gold-filled teeth in the flushed face would stare straight into theirs. I won't let you down, he would say. You just get the facts and come up with the
recommendations. I'll fight for them. "Nobody could help liking Al Smith," one of the young men said. "You had to like him—and you had to believe in him."

  Moses had worked hard before. He worked harder now. Some of his young staffers worked late; when they left, a light was almost always still shining through the frosted-glass top half of the door to Moses' office. In the morning, the staffers would find on their desks long, detailed memos— signed "Robert Moses, Chief of Staff"—outlining new assignments.

  Moses would criticize staffers' reports mercilessly. When he returned them, they would be adorned with large, angry double question marks. Sloppy phrasing would be slashed through. "Most essential question not discussed at all," Moses scribbled on one report. "What overhead organization do you propose? Do you believe in a commission or a single commissioner? If the latter, should a rules-making board be attached to him?"

  Staffers became accustomed to seeing Moses' handwriting filling the margins and spilling over their type and, scrawled across the top of the first page, heavily underlined: "REVISE ALL!"

  Activity in the office revolved around the tall, wiry figure with the shock of black hair who worked in shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He had appointed an "assistant chief of staff," reformer Channing Schweitzer, but, too impatient to work through a chain of command, when he had something to say to one of the staffers, he would come out of his office and say it himself.