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

by Caro, Robert A

  The tension disclosed in the heavy underlining of the written criticism on the reports would sometimes spill over in short but violent bursts of anger. When a key piece of paper was misfiled one day and a secretary had to report she could not locate it, he glared around the room and shouted, while the staffers discreetly studied the tops of their desks, "Where the hell did it go? Who's got it? Who's got it?"

  But if Bob Moses often shouted, he also often laughed, his teeth gleaming in a broad infectious grin, and his laughter was never louder than when it was directed at one of his own mistakes—which he was usually the first to point out. He was friendly with the staffers, seeming to spend as much time during the day out in the big room in which their desks were located as in his office, hunting up luncheon companions with an easy and charming air that brought together large groups to accompany him to the German rathskellers that lined the street back of the Hall of Records. Over lunch, he was a good listener and, with his vivid accounts of his latest hassle with Mrs. Moskowitz, and his vivid descriptions of the big shots on the commission to whom she had introduced him, a good talker.

  His personality, his knowledge and his application inspired the young men under him. Many of them would go on to distinguished careers, but they would look back across the decades at the time they spent working for Moses as one of the high points of their lives.

  " 'Dedication' has become sort of a phony word," staffer John Gaus said shortly before he died in 1969, "but that's what Moses had. People who are terrifically hard workers you have got to respect anyway, but it was more than just how hard he worked. He was a vibrant and driving person—you just knew that if you wanted to work for him, you had to be on your toes, but on the other hand that you would be treated with complete frankness, and you also knew that here was one person who was really thinking of the public interest above everything else. He talked to you hard and direct, but he made you feel that you were both on the same side, fighting for the same things. He made you want to work for him."*

  * Moses so fascinated Gaus that for more than two decades, while the young social worker was carving out a reputation as an author of books on public administration and as a professor of government at Harvard University, never seeing Moses during all that time, he collected every newspaper clipping about Moses that he saw, just so he could keep track of his career. After he retired, in 1961, Gaus began collecting clippings on Moses again, filing them in cartons which he kept in the attic of his Utica, New York, home, and he kept filling those cartons until the day of his death.

  With the state's coffers closed to the commission by the Legislature, money was constantly tight. Salaries were very low. But the young men said it didn't matter. In the spring of 1919, funds ran out entirely, and while Smith and Mrs. Moskowitz scrounged for private contributions, the young men received neither salary nor expenses for six weeks. Gaus and Morris Lambie, another young reformer, researching in Albany, were able to keep eating only by borrowing money from relatives. Once Gaus wrote Schweitzer, "Since the wolf is approaching so near that I can hear his howls distinctly, I wonder if you can find one of those precious valentines lying around signed by Belle Moskowitz and assuring the bearer that the Guaranty Trust will do its damnedest to trade it in for good U.S. notes. If last month's salary is in the offing, why I want to be there, too." But when Gaus at last got hold of the pieces of information he needed to complete his report on the State Labor Department, money was forgotten. Mailing the report to Schweitzer, with a special-delivery stamp that cost him a substantial portion of the last change in his pocket, Gaus attached to the report a note: "Happy Days! Let the people rule!"

  Moses' jubilation matched Gaus's. None of the staffers found any reason to complain about their chief's enthusiasm over their successes. He had, they said, no "side," no pomposity. He was, they said, very "democratic." If they noticed a difference between the manner in which he treated them, men who were almost his equals, and the manner in which he treated men a step lower on the commission's totem pole, they didn't think it important. But the difference was there. The memos Moses addressed to lower-echelon personnel were different in tone from even the most peremptory of those he sent to the staffers. In a memo addressed to a chart maker, for example, Moses laid out his assignment in the tone of an army drill sergeant, un-softened by a single "please" or courteous adverb. "In connection with your assignment," he wrote, "you will do the following. . . . You will prepare a chart showing the present departments. . . . You will prepare a chart showing the proposed organization. . . . You will keep in touch with Mr. Gaus, Mr. Buck and myself. . . . You will consult other members of the staff before putting the chart in ink."

  Moses' energy seemed inexhaustible. For the summer of 1919, he and Mary, along with two other couples with small children, the Henry Brueres and Frances Perkins and her husband, Paul Wilson, rented bungalows near a beach in Douglaston, Queens. Moses never caught any train out from Manhattan but the latest available, which arrived in Douglaston about eight-thirty. Darkness would be falling, but Moses would always go for a swim? Plunging into the water, he would strike straight out Little Neck Bay, his arms windmilling rhythmically and powerfully, his head growing smaller and smaller in the distance. His friends would joke that he didn't seem likely to stop until he had crossed Long Island Sound and reached the shore of Westchester County, which, on clear days, was a low black line on the horizon.

  "He was a wonderfui swimmer," Frances Perkins would recall. "I never saw a man who could swim so long, so easily, so far, with such confidence and security. We used to get nervous. He'd go way out where you

  couldn't see him. It being dark, we'd finally lose sight of him entirely. . . . One night he must have been gone an hour and a half before he came back." The watchers thought he had drowned. "Henry was discussing how we should break the news to Mary. 'What shall we tell her?' We were all urging each other, 'Let's wait a little while. Don't call the police yet.' " It wasn't until long after dark that the anxious viewers on the beach saw Moses returning.

  On Sundays, Moses didn't go into his office but, as if unable to relax, would spend the days energetically teaching the three sets of children to swim, the evenings telling them stories he made up himself. "He was so good with children," Miss Perkins recalled.

  By the latter part of the summer, Moses was forced to work even harder. The commission's funds were running out, and the private contributions which had sustained its work were falling off. With his usual disregard for financial considerations, Moses had paid little attention to this state of affairs. If Gaus and Lambie were living off relatives, so was he —the major part of his income was still coming from his parents—but this didn't seem to bother him, and as for the work of the commission, he vaguely assumed that with all those wealthy men interested in its success, whatever was needed would somehow be raised. They had so much money they'd never miss a little of it, he would say. And anyway, fund raising was not his province but that of the commission's executive committee. In July, however, Mrs. Moskowitz told him that he must begin laying off his staff at once. He had to let some of the young men go with only a week's notice. By Labor Day, the staff had been disbanded Some sections of the report existed only in recommendation memos, others only in rough-draft form. Only a few sections were actually completed. Lugging the commission's files to his already cramped apartment, Moses wrote the rest of the report alone. By October, it was finished.

  The Report of the Reconstruction Commission to Governor Alfred E. Smith on Retrenchment and Reorganization in the State Government contained little that was startlingly original. It didn't have to. In that government, little had changed. The Bureau of Municipal Research, in presenting its report to the 1915 Constitutional Convention, had concluded that the state's administrative organization "has nothing in common experience or human reason to commend it." But in the intervening four years, the situation had only worsened. The Bureau's investigators had counted with shock 169 separate and independent state agencies; in 191
9, Moses' investigators counted 187. The organization chart of the sovereign state of New York still looked like a web spun by a drunken spider, and the man elected to represent all the people of the state was still trapped in the web, unable to exercise power or leadership.

  What made the report written in the small apartment on Eighty-seventh Street a remarkable document was its clarion tone and its clarity. Viewed as part of the long reform movement in New York State, which set much of the tone for Progressivism in the United States, it was the summing up of

  this movement. The essence of the spirit of reform was captured in its 419 pages, so completely did the words they bore synthesize both its philosophy and its passion.

  The prose with which Moses prefaced the report had in particular the ring of the battle trumpet. The 5,200-word opening declaration of "Underlying Principles," written almost entirely by Moses and left untouched by Belle Moskowitz, contained hard, lucid, driving reasoning that reduced complexities to fundamentals. Dealing with a point that reformers generally tried to avoid because of their fear that it was a weak spot in their argument, Moses plunged instead to its heart and found there complete compatibility with the basic reform belief in an increased participation by the citizen in government.

  "The only serious argument advanced against . . . [the] proposed reorganization and budget system is that it makes the Governor a czar," he wrote.

  The Governor does not hold office by hereditary right. He is elected for a fixed term by universal suffrage. He is controlled in all minor appointments by the civil service law. He cannot spend a dollar of the public money which is not authorized by the Legislature of the State. He is subject to removal by impeachment. If he were given the powers here proposed he would stand out in the limelight of public opinion and scrutiny. Economy in administration, if accomplished, would redound to his credit. Waste and extravagance could be laid at his door. Those who cannot endure the medicine because it is too strong must be content with waste, inefficiency and bungling—and steadily rising cost of government. The system here proposed is more democratic, not more "royal," than that now in existence. Democracy does not merely mean periodic elections. It means a government held accountable to the people between elections. In order that the people may hold their government to account they must have a government that they can understand. No citizen can hope to understand the present collection of departments, offices, boards and commissions, or the present methods of appropriating money. A Governor with a cabinet of reasonable size, responsible for proposing a program in the annual budget and for administering the program as modified by the Legislature, may be brought daily under public scrutiny, be held accountable to the Legislature and public opinion, and be turned out of office if he fails to measure up to public requirements. If this is not democracy then it is difficult to imagine what is.

  As in Moses' Oxford thesis, the tone of "Underlying Principles" was often lecturing and dogmatic. Refusing to debate whether the consolidated state agencies should be under Governor or Legislature, he wrote: "The Constitution says that the executive power shall be vested in the Governor. . . . There is no other way." But, as in the thesis, the tone was also evangelistic. "A consolidation of a hundred or more offices . . . affects political patronage vitally," he wrote, "and it requires considerable courage and intelligence"; nevertheless, state after state was taking steps toward such reorganization. A steadily more informed citizenry, demanding efficiency and economy in government, was pushing them forward, he said. It was time for New York to join the march.

  In those 5,200 words—and in other sections of the 22,000-word "Sum-

  mary of Recommendations" with which the report began—was distilled the essence of the philosophy of Progressivism in general and the Bureau of Municipal Research in particular. It was all there, the bywords which New York's reformers had been chanting for twenty years—"executive budget," "longer terms," "consolidation," "responsibility," "commensurate power"—the incantation, like a drum roll underlying the chant, of "efficiency and economy," the idealistic belief that citizen knowledge of the intricacies of government and participation in those intricacies was the panacea for democracy. At one point, defending the imposition of an income tax, Moses wrote, "One of the possible benefits [because of people's interest in the spending of their money] will be the development among . . . citizens of . . . a more vital interest in state organization and expenditures."

  In specific recommendations, Moses followed the Bureau's creed, except where practical considerations introduced by Mrs. Moskowitz intruded, commandment by commandment.

  The 187 agencies should be consolidated into departments—sixteen instead of twelve because of Mrs. Moskowitz—and each department headed by a single officer except in certain cases where considerations—Mrs. Moskowitz's—dictated the retention of a council or board.

  The Governor should be given the power to appoint—and remove—all department heads and key administrative officials, with the exception of the comptroller, whose independence is necessary because his function should be to act as a watchdog on expenditures, including those of the Governor.

  The Governor should be given the power to designate certain of his appointees as a "Cabinet," which would meet regularly to advise him.

  The Governor's term should be extended to four years.

  The long list of elected state officials should be reduced to the Governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and comptroller.

  An "executive budget" system—including not only expenditures but a plan for raising the revenues necessary to pay for them—should be drawn up by the Governor, and only then submitted to the Legislature; it should be safeguarded, at every step, by public hearings to doubly insure that the financial policy of the state would not be decided upon behind the closed doors of either Executive Chamber or committee room.

  The commission's recommendations, which took 44 pages to summarize, were backed up with 375 pages of remarkable detail. The governments of other states—every other state—were analyzed. So were every one of New York State's 187 agencies. Included were descriptions of each agency's powers, tabulations of the laws which had, over the years, given them those powers, analyses of how their powers overlapped those of other agencies, descriptions of the power they would be given under the proposed reorganization plan, lists of the personnel of every existing and every proposed agency, the salaries and duties of the personnel, the organization charts (some of which, folded for inclusion in the bound report, opened out to a full five feet in length). Lists were made of the personnel each of the departments should have—down to the precise number of clerks a specific commissioner might need.

  For internal changes within agencies or departments—and thousands of them were recommended—only new laws, "statutory changes," would be required, the report concluded. For three of the proposed major governmental changes—creation of the sixteen departments with provision that all existing state agencies and any that might be established in the future would be placed in one of them; institution of the executive budget system; and extension of the Governor's term to four years—the state's constitution would have to be amended, each amendment requiring passage by two Legislatures, elected in different years, and approved by the state's voters in a referendum.

  Moses assumed a proprietary attitude toward the report. Certainly he was the driving force in its preparation, wrote its brilliant introduction himself and rewrote many other sections. Yet he was not the only person who had contributed to it, and he seemed unwilling to admit that fact. "I wrote the report, no question about it," he insisted in later years. "I wrote or rewrote everything in it."

  It was the practice at the time to list at the beginning of such reports the names of all individuals and organizations who had worked on them, but most members of Moses' staff found that their names were mentioned nowhere. Unhappy about that, they were even more bitter that the Bureau, which they revered and on whose principles and 1915 report on the same subject this repo
rt was based, was not mentioned even once in the document they regarded as the historical climax of all its work, not even in those sections for which the Bureau had, at Moses' request, done all the work. Moreover, Moses' boast that he "rewrote everything" in the report was not strictly correct. Comparison of staffers' rough-draft recommendations for two departments—the only such rough drafts available today—with the finished versions published in the report show that they are practically identical.

  Moses' attitude led to one particularly bitter episode. Parts of the "Summary of Recommendations," the second half of the introduction, were written, at Moses' request, by Charles A. Beard, then director of the Bureau's Training School and already a noted historian. In particular, Beard wrote the summary of reorganization advances in other states. Whether Moses did any rewriting at all of Beard's work cannot be determined, but Bureau staffers who saw the historian's original copy feel it was included in the final report substantially as written. They were astounded, therefore, to hear that after Beard had written a magazine article on reorganization advances, Moses had accused the author of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of plagiarism.

  "A bunch of us walked into Beard's office one day and there he was, just ready to spit he was so outraged, waving this letter from Moses," recalls one staffer. "The letter said Beard had, in effect, plagiarized from the commission's report. We were astounded; in the academic world, there are few sins as bad as stealing another fellow's work and that was what Moses was accusing Beard of—and we all knew Beard had written that section, not Moses.

  And as we were reading the letter, Beard kept muttering, 'Well, what do you think of this? What do you think of this?' He was so angry he didn't know what else to say."