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

by Caro, Robert A

  Whether Moses wrote all of it or part, the Reconstruction Commission report was something of which a man could be proud. From the moment, on October 10, 1919, that it was published, it was hailed as a historic document, not only by Smith, who had sponsored it, and not only by the reformers, who saw in it the finest exposition of their philosophy, but. more importantly, by the men who Belle Moskowitz had hoped would hail it—the Republican "federal crowd." Charles Evans Hughes—former crusading investigator, Governor, Secretary of State, Justice of the Supreme Court and Republican nominee for the presidency, now returned to private life as a lawyer and "first citizen" of New York State—and Congressman Ogden Livingston Mills, a noted authority on taxation and government finance, volunteered to head a City Club study of the report, which concluded that it was "deserving of unreserved approbation." When a Philadelphia reformer solicited suggestions from Colonel Henry L. Stimson on reorganizing Pennsylvania's archaic governmental structure, Stimson replied with a copy of the report and an attached note that said, "This paper is, I think, the most helpful one that I could put in your hands ... to give you an idea of . . . what I believe to be the correct principles of state government."

  An informal "citizens committee" was formed to back efforts to implement the report, and a little money was raised for the fight. Moses was named secretary of the committee and given a small salary that, with Bella's subsidy, enabled him to continue working full time for reorganization, and, in January 1920, when Smith publicly announced that he would push during the upcoming legislative session for adoption of the report's recommendations, he was assigned the job of making the committee an effective force to assist the Governor.

  The first step was to "get the names," to enlarge the committee by adding members whose prestige would lend it political clout. With Hughes, Mills and Stimson already aboard, the job was easy. As the letterhead of the Citizens Committee o& Reorganization in the State Government was continually reprinted so that the names of the latest joiners would be on it, the list above "Robert Moses, Secretary" came to include a cross-section of elements of the state who normally would have had nothing to do with a Governor who bore the stamp of Tammany.

  The second step was to get money for the fight, and Moses wrote the members of the Citizens Committee for help. Their responses were smaller than their names—Stimson would scribble to his secretary on each of Moses' appeals, "Send $25"—but numerous enough to enable Moses to move the committee's files out of his apartment and into a small office at 305 Broadway. When the three constitutional amendments were introduced in the Legislature on February 9, 1920, Moses wrote again: "The campaign for adoption must now be pushed with the greatest energy. ... It will be necessary to raise about

  $2,000." When, in May, legislative committee chairmen refused to let the amendments come to the floor for a vote and Smith announced that he was considering calling a special session to force a decision, Moses wrote, "We need $1,500." "This budget," he added, "presumes the minimum of expenditures. To date, the expenses of this committee have been kept down by volunteer assistance and maintenance of an extra office at the home of the secretary without expense to the committee." The plea so moved Stimson that he scribbled: "Send $50."

  For "executive support," Moses—for the first time in his life—did not have to plead. You just get the facts and come up with the recommendations, Al Smith had told the commission staffers. He would fight for them. And now, he fought, stumping the state to remind the voters that the commission's recommendations were supported oy the GOP's most prestigious members and should be treated as nonpartisan proposals instead of as bills being pushed on a Republican Legislature by a Democratic Governor trying to curb its powers.

  Al Smith on the stump was a political weapon of the highest caliber. "I believe that I enjoy some little reputation for keeping my word," he said in one speech. "I will give it—I will give it to this Legislature—that if they will come with me, take this report, do the best that they can with it, I am not going to be the fellow who insists on getting his bill the way it is printed [without compromise, in the form it is first introduced] because usually that fellow doesn't want the bill. . . . And I will promise them now that at no time in the future will it ever be referred to by me, or anybody over whom I have any control, as any program of mine. The fact of the matter is: It is not my program. The real truth about it is I could not think that all out myself."

  When, at a Women's City Club debate between Smith and Lieutenant Governor Seymour Lowman, a Republican, Lowman charged that the reorganization program was "Governor Smith's attempt to make himself a king," Smith arose and, after alluding—just long enough to bring tears to the women's eyes—to his poverty-stricken youth in an Oliver Street tenement, pointed to himself with a deprecatory gesture and said, with plenty of sarcasm and just the right little touch of bitterness: "Behold the King, the King of Oliver Street."

  To get the maximum use out of the big names on the Citizens Committee, Mrs. Moskowitz wanted them—and their support of Smith's proposals—kept in the public eye. But they were under pressure from furious Republican regulars who told them, correctly, that their financial contributions and prestige were being used to build the career of a Tammany man at the expense of their own party. Many, in fact, were on the verge of resigning. Tact had to be used in handling them. Tact had never been one of Moses' long suits, but now he had been taught by Belle Moskowitz. When he arranged luncheons of the committee and asked its big names to make speeches at the luncheons, speeches that the press would report, he made the requests, and pressed for answers, persistently but gently. He displayed a willingness to compromise that was also new to him. When some members of the committee, expressing doubts that all the report's recommendations were correct,

  threatened to resign, Moses wrote assuring them that "these amendments are not final, but are subject to correction after consultation." There were few resignations—none from significant "names"—and, month after month, Moses directed an almost daily fusillade of support for Smith's position from Hughes, Stimson, Wickersham and even, in what amounted to the most impressive coup for Smith, from former State Republican Chairman Frederick C. Tanner.

  Under this onslaught, the Legislature reeled. Republican assemblymen and senators assured the public that they were interested in reorganization too, and introduced bills of their own which they said had the same objectives as the commission's. This put the battle on a technical level. Smith needed rapid analyses of the Republican bills to determine whether their sponsors' claims for them were true. Mrs. Moskowitz summoned Moses to Albany and, with Mary making sure he had the $5.42 for the fare in his pocket, he left the apartment at 6 a.m. to catch the early train to the capital.

  At first, Moses worked in a small office in the recesses of the capitol, but as the legislative session moved toward a climax, he was called more and more frequently to the Executive Chamber. Having him at hand saved everybody time. If the Governor and his advisers wanted to know how many jobs a proposed GOP bill would eliminate and whose jobs they were, or whether the wording of a bill conflicted with seemingly contradictory wording in the Constitution, or whether there was any precedent to back up a proposal of their own, or how many secretaries there were in the Public Works Department, or how much was spent annually on printing by the Insurance Department, or under what act the Conservation Commission was empowered to bottle and sell water from Saratoga Springs, it was easier to ask Moses than to try to find out the answer themselves. Because Moses always knew. "He thought fast and he answered quickly," says one who observed him at this time. "He seemed to know the makeup of every department in the state and what its powers were and exactly which sections of law it got those powers from. And he almost seemed to know it all by heart."

  Moses' technical expertise gave Smith the ammunition he needed. When Republican legislators introduced bills that appeared to consolidate all public works construction into a single department headed by a "Public Works Commissioner," it was Moses
who discovered—and enabled Smith to announce to the press—that the bills did not specifically mention any method of appointment for the commissioner and that, under parallel sections of the State Constitution, he would therefore be an elected official rather than one appointed by and responsible to the Governor. When Republican legislators introduced bills that created the sixteen new departments which the commission had recommended, it was Moses who discovered—so that Smith could announce—that the bills contained no provision that all state agencies be placed in one or another of the departments and, therefore, under existing provisions of the Constitution, all existing agencies would continue to be independent of the departments. A furious Republican senator strode into the Executive Chamber one day and asked Smith. "Who is this

  fellow Moses anyway?" The Governor leaned back and laughed. "Why," he said, "he's one of your crowd. He's a Republican." (The senator, checking, found that Moses did, indeed, call himself an "independent Republican.") By the time the session ended, the Legislature had been bludgeoned into passing bills incorporating most of the Reconstruction Commission's "statutory changes" and the sixteen-department constitutional amendment, although the amendment would have to be repassed by another Legislature. And although the Legislature voted down the executive-budget and four-year-term proposals, Moses felt confident that the whole program would be passed during Smith's next term.

  But the next term was not Smith's. With the backing of many of the old-line reformers, independents and Republicans who normally would have supported his opponent, Nathan L. Miller, the Governor ran 1,090,000 votes ahead of his ticket. But the head of the ticket was presidential candidate James M. Cox, and Cox, along with the Democratic vice presidential nominee, young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was caught up in the Harding landslide and lost New York State by 1,200,000 votes. In an era in which ticket splitting was far more unusual than it would be a half century later, more than a million New Yorkers had split their ballot to vote for Al Smith. The phenomenon was considered unprecedented in American politics. Elderly reformer William Church Osborn wired Smith, "Even in defeat, you came closer to swimming up Niagara Falls than any man I have ever seen." But the man the wire was addressed to was, nonetheless, a loser—and, Moses was afraid, so was the Reconstruction Commission program.

  For a while, dreams had seemed near to realization. Genuine accomplishment had seemed close. Moses had, after all, been the moving force in the drafting of a plan to remake the machinery by which more than ten million people were governed, and he had watched the bills that embodied a substantial portion of that plan move tortuously but steadily along the road to reality. But without at least the sixteen-department constitutional amendment, the statutory changes were meaningless, and, in 1921, Miller opposed the amendment's repassage and the Legislature never let it, or the executive-budget and four-year-term proposals, out of committee. The Citizens Committee on Reorganization in the State Government—with its "extra office at the home of the secretary without expense to the committee" —was disbanded.

  To anyone who was, at the time, watching the career of the secretary, these developments must have seemed just another defeat in a life already crammed with defeats. In reality, however, something new had happened, something that would not only insure that the Reconstruction Commission's proposals would eventually become law but that would also change the shape of Bob Moses' life.

  Out of public office in 1921 and 1922, Al Smith was back in New York, working as president of a large trucking company. The company's owners were Irishmen from the Old Neighborhood, men who were not only the

  friends of Al Smith's youth but who, in his maturity, idolized him. Since the company's offices were on Canal Street, only eight blocks from City Hall, a continual stream of city officials, men who had risen through the Tammany organization with Smith, walked the eight blocks to drop in on "the Governor" and pass the time of day. Hoping that Smith would accord them the supreme honor, an invitation to walk home with him across the Neighborhood to his apartment on Oliver Street, the company's owners and the city officials would often find excuses to hang around his office.in the late afternoon.

  Moses, meanwhile, was working (for a new reform organization, the New York State Association) in a shabby cubicle at 305 Broadway barely large enough for his desk and that of a part-time secretary. He was close to being out of even quasi-official touch with government. Occasionally, he would have lunch with one of the few people he knew in the City Hall area, former Bureau or Reconstruction Commission staffers like Ernie Willvon-seder who were now lower-echelon city employees, but more often he had to eat alone. He had few visitors. But, in the late afternoon, the phone would often ring. Moses would pick up the receiver. "Bob," Al Smith would rasp, "how about walking home with me?"

  The two men made an odd pair as they walked through the winding, narrow streets of the Lower East Side in the twilight, one of them tall, slim, handsome and aristocratic in bearing, the other, short, potbellied, florid. The taller man, striding out with long, springing steps, continually had to shorten his stride to let the other, who walked with a slow, extremely pigeon-toed gait, catch up. Their progress was further slowed by Smith's popularity. He seemed to know almost every man and woman who passed, and when one of them stopped to chat, he would stop, too, and talk with him without appearance of impatience while his companion would stride restlessly in little circles, or, trying desperately to stand still and listen politely, would nervously clench and unclench his fists.

  But between the chats with passers-by, there was plenty of time for talking between Moses and Smith, and not all the talking was done by the former Governor. In fact, as twilight walk succeeded twilight walk, more and more of it was done by Moses. The ideas on government which he had poured forth for almost a decade, the theories, proposals, plans, advice—the dreams—with which he had bored staffers at the Bureau of Municipal Research, examiners at the Municipal Civil Service Commission, borough presidents, park commissioners and a legion of minor city officials, now were poured forth again.

  The late-afternoon calls from Smith became more frequent. With regularity now, when the two men had arrived at the old red-brick tenement in which the former Governor lived, he would invite Moses up for dinner.

  And one day Bob Moses barged into Ernie Willvonseder's office. He was striding fast, almost running, more excited than Ernie had ever seen him before.

  "Ernie," he said, "Al Smith listens to me."

  for them. Bob Moses was neither circumcised nor bar-mitzvah, but young Al Smith was a faithful St. James altar boy, awakening early on bleak, cold winter mornings—with his mother always up even earlier to prepare his breakfast—and trudging up Cherry Hill in the dark to serve at the six-o'clock mass.

  At the age at which Bob Moses was being led on horseback along Dwight Street and taken for walks in Central Park, Al Smith was scampering along the hectic Lower East Side waterfront, playing hide-and-seek among the bales and crates that cluttered the East River piers, dangling daringly from the sailing ships' bowsprits that made a line of spears over the horse-drawn trucks clattering along the cobblestones of South Street, playing tag, during an era in which the city didn't build playgrounds in slums, in narrow side streets or in the wider cleared spaces alongside the big, smelly fish market at the foot of Fulton Street, and tobogganing in winter down streets left uncleared of snow by a city that didn't bother to plow the slums. When he learned to swim, he learned in the river, with the spars of the sailing ships looming overhead and garbage floating on the water. Al Smith never went to Central Park; that was regarded by the neighborhood as a preserve for the wealthy—"uptowners," the Fourth Ward called them—who would send their Eton-collared children to its quiet glades with private tutors. His idea of an outing was the Downtown Tammany Club's annual picnic, for which hundreds of sweating neighborhood families—and cases of beer, candy, ears of corn, ice cream and cheap toys—were loaded into huge wagons for the nine-mile trip to Sulzer's Harlem River Park at 126th Street
.

  At the age at which Bob Moses was being taught by private schools and private tutors, Al Smith was being taught by the good nuns of the St. James Parochial School and trying to avoid Father Kean's stern eye. And while Moses' tutors reported that he was brilliant, the nuns had a very different story to tell about the Smith boy. As one chronicler put it: "The boy had no great fondness for books . . . and showed no inclination to study. ... He never cared much for school. A passing mark was all he ever desired —and all he ever achieved." And he didn't always achieve that. Al Smith had bright, cheerful eyes and an appealing smile, but there was only one characteristic that set him apart from his classmates—his unusually loud voice. It was no surprise to the nuns that he won medals in citywide parochial-school public-speaking contests.

  At the age of thirteen, he didn't have to worry about school any more. Moses' father retired young, but Smith's, a large, powerful Civil War veteran of thundering voice, an inexhaustible supply of funny stories and many friends, had to work too hard. Driving his own truck, loading and unloading heavy cargoes, he would come home no matter how cold the day so wet with sweat that his first move'would be to peel off his shirt and undershirt and plunge his face and arms into a tub of cold water to cool off. He worked six or seven days a week and often he got home so late that there would be days and nights on end when Al would not see the father who liked to put his little boy on his knee during family excursions to the beer gardens along the Bowery, regale him with stories and let him sneak sips of his beer. In 1885,

  the father's health broke, and, unable any longer to do manual work, uneducated and with no skills, he was forced to take work as a night watchman. One by one, he had to sell his horses and finally his truck, but the proceeds of the sales were soon eaten up by doctors' bills and medicine. In November 1886, he died. All he left his son was his self-assurance; it was only through the charity of his friends that funeral expenses were paid. Al's mother was left almost penniless. Walking back from the funeral to the small flat, alone except for Al and his ten-year-old sister, Mary, she muttered, half to herself, "I don't know where to turn." Mary heard her brother say, "I'm here. I can take care of you."