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

by Caro, Robert A

  At first, determined to keep her son in school, Al's mother refused to let him work. The very evening of the funeral, holding her children by the hand, she went to an umbrella factory and got a job that she could start the next morning.

  Rising before dawn to get breakfast for her children and prepare their lunches, Al's mother would work until dark at the factory, and then come home to make supper and clean the flat. Since the salary she earned at the factory wasn't enough to support three persons, she asked for piecework that she could do at home and, when Al closed the door to his bedroom to go to sleep at night, he would see her bending over the work. A frail woman, within months her own health was affected, and she had to leave the factory. With the help of friends, she opened a tiny grocery and candy store in the basement of the building in which the Smiths lived, but it quickly became obvious that the store would never provide enough to support the family. She could get charity, she knew, but widows who were unable to support their children had the children taken away and placed in institutions. She had heard about the institutions. Anything was better than that. A few months after his thirteenth birthday, a month before he would have graduated from St. James, which had only eight grades, Al Smith left school and went to work.

  First he was a newsboy, then a "chaser" for a trucking firm, spending his days on the run, taking assignments for the firm's drivers from the main office and trying to find the drivers in the streets of the Lower East Side so that they would not have to waste time returning to the office. The job paid three dollars a week. In the evenings, he tended counter at the little store while his mother rested. After two years, with income from the store dwindling and the family desperate, he became a shipping clerk—for eight dollars a week. Two years later, with the intake from the store down to almost nothing, he looked for another job and finally found one that would pay him four dollars more. The job was at the Fulton Fish Market.

  Al Smith rolled heavy barrels of fish in and out of the market, put the fish on ice, cleaned them and wrapped them. He worked from four o'clock in the morning until five in the afternoon, except on Friday. On Friday, he started work at three. Returning home at night tired and dirty and reeking of fish, he scrubbed off the odor and went downstairs to the store. But in the 1890's twelve dollars a week was almost enough to support a mother and a sister. He stayed at the market for four years. Then, to increase his pay to

  fifteen dollars, he became a laborer, carrying heavy pipes at a pump works. It wasn't until 1896, when he was twenty-two years old, that he got his first political job.

  Moses and Smith came to public service not merely out of different backgrounds, but with different attitudes and for different reasons.

  Not even Al Smith's best friends ever said that he went into politics to help the lower classes. He went because, perhaps, he was gregarious and politics for a young man in the Fourth Ward without connections was, in its early stages, mostly hanging around the Downtown Tammany Club or Tom Foley's saloon with other young men, drinking beer, singing around a piano and telling stories while waiting for a contract from Foley. He went because, perhaps, it was a natural course for a young man with little education who wanted to get ahead in the ward's politics-drenched atmosphere—and because, perhaps, he saw no other way out of a life that for most of the years he could remember had been rolling heavy barrels and lifting heavy pipes.

  Moses prepared for his career by passing examinations and writing a thesis; Smith prepared for his by executing contracts. A "contract," to Tammany Hall, was something to be done, an assurance to a local undertaker that Tammany would pay for a loyal Democrat's funeral even if his family could not, a discreet visit to a brothel to warn of an upcoming police raid or to police headquarters to ease business-cramping parking restrictions in front of a liquor store belonging to a heavy campaign contributor.

  In the Fourth Ward, contracts were given out by Foley, one of the most remarkable of the Tammany district leaders who ran their districts—and looked after the welfare of the straight-ticket-voting Democrats in them—as English squires looked after the welfare of their country villages. "Big Tom" was a square-shaped mustachioed, quiet man who spent most of each day at the Downtown Tammany Club, listening to the cries for help— for a boy who had been arrested, for a process server who had been fired, for a policeman who had been shifted to a Staten Island beat—with unfailing patience. Although his saloons thrived, he was to die a poor man, their profits trickling, along with the payoffs and the campaign contributions, through his fingers into those of his constituents. The only payment he ever asked for the favors he dispensed was a straight Democratic vote—and so heartily were his constituents willing to make this form of repayment that his district regularly rolled up Democratic majorities that made him the most powerful district leader in the city.

  Born to wealth that he believed would make him always independent, Moses felt no compulsion to turn associates into friends: arrogance is, after all, one of the coefficients of money. Arrogance would have been an un-affordable luxury to Smith: the equation of politics as he knew it contained a factor of friendship that had at least as heavy a weight as the factor of respect. In the evenings, after work. Smith began to hang around the saloons or the Tammany Club, hoping that Foley would give him a contract, and

  when he was given one, he executed it with graciousness and tact. Some of the historians who would later analyze his career would speculate that, as one put it, "he made an effort, he trained himself, to be more than ordinarily helpful and obliging." Friends would deny it, saying that there had been something in his nature that had made him, even as a young boy, friendly and eager to assist someone in trouble. Whether it was natural or cultivated, as Al Smith executed the contracts, he displayed a gift for getting along with people that was so highly developed as to be almost genius. Joining the St. James Players, who put on plays to support the parish's orphanage, studying acting from the cheapest seats in the highest balconies at Broadway theaters, he became the parish's star villain, playing Corry Kinchela in Dion Bouci-cault's The Shaughraun so enthusiastically that children began jokingly to hiss him when they saw him on the street. Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to know the slim, clean-cut youth with the soft smile and the loud, happy laugh—and everyone seemed to like him.

  Older men were watching him now. Father Kean liked to tell how Smith had tried to refuse to play any more villains. The hisses in the street were becoming louder, he had complained, and in the last production, when he had snarled at the girl who refused him, "You will yet be mine," the boos and catcalls from the gallery had annoyed him. He was going to be a hero or nothing next time, he had said. But all that had been necessary was for the Father to call him in and say, "Alfred, we have over two hundred little girls in the orphanage and it is getting harder every year to feed and clothe and care for these girls," and Alfred had said simply: "Give me the part." When touchy matters—such as visits by respectable parish girls to neighborhood saloons with their dates—had to be brought up with the young people, the Father began to look to Smith to do it; somehow, when Smith handled it, not only did the visits stop but nobody became hurt or angry. He had joined the Seymour Club, a social organization founded by a wealthy old grocer and Tammany financial backer named Henry Campbell. Campbell began looking to Smith to organize club excursions, then he began inviting him home for Sunday dinners—and, in 1896, when there became available a city job as a server of jury notices that paid $900 a year, Campbell saw that Smith got it.

  In 1900, after promising her parents that he would never become a professional actor, Smith married Katherine (Katie) Dunn, and the couple took a flat in the neighborhood, Smith's mother moving to Brooklyn to live with Mary and her husband. The children—there would be five—came quickly, and Smith's devotion to his family became a joke, a fond joke, among the people in the ward who saw him wheeling one child and holding the hand of another as he and Katie walked across the Brooklyn Bridge every Sunday after church, rain or shine, to vi
sit his mother.

  But in the evenings, after supper, Al Smith left his family and went down to the clubs and saloons. And now another man was watching the youth whom everybody liked—Tom Foley. Signing him up as a campaign speaker, Foley soon saw that even in this heartland of Irish platform eloquence, Smith was something special. And, more important, he saw that

  Smith could be counted on; his praise of a Democratic candidate's personal qualifications was just as fervent whether he knew the candidate or not. To the other adjectives with which men described Smith, Foley added one that, in the lexicon of the Democracy of New York City, had a special significance —Smith was, he said, "regular." In 1903, he offered him a nomination for state assemblyman. Proving to be a remarkable campaigner even though, in Foley's districts, remarkable campaigning was not a necessity for Democratic candidates, in November 1903, a month before his thirtieth birthday, Al Smith won his first election.

  Katie tied two brooms upright on the iron railings that lined the six steps to the doorway of the tenement in which the Smiths lived. It was a traditional gesture in the neighborhood, symbolizing a clean sweep by Tammany. Inside, in his living room, holding his mother's hand as he accepted congratulations, Alfred E. Smith, red-faced and loud in victory, resplendent in a new suit with wide-set, broad pinstripes, a tie that matched his voice, and a pearl stickpin, a big black cigar tilted cockily up from the corner of his red, wet lips, seemed the typical, "regular" Tammany brave.

  Yet what lurked behind the war paint? Al Smith went to Albany unprepared to be a legislator—or even to sleep away from home. On his first night in the capital, he noticed a large fire blazing in the fireplace of his hotel, saw that the room to which he and another new Tammany assemblyman, Tom Caughlan from "Battery Dan" Finn's district, had been assigned was not near any exits, and was so worried that the hotel would burn down and they would be trapped that he made Caughlan spend the night playing pinochle so that they would be awake for any emergency. Arriving in the Assembly Chamber the next morning, he was bewildered by the formalities of the opening session and was shunted by leaders who had no time even to talk to him to a desk so far from the Speaker's podium that he often couldn't hear the rulings. When he did hear, he often didn't understand. Overcome by the intricacies of the legislative process, he sat day after day in the high-ceilinged chamber in silence. During the whole session, he did not make a single speech. He was not appointed to a single committee.

  Worst of all were the bills. Every morning when he arrived at his desk, there would be a pile of new ones a foot high. He would try the one that looked simplest, perhaps an act setting the maximum size of vehicles using public highways. "The provisions of this subdivision," he read, "shall not apply to vehicles and implements or combinations thereof not over thirteen feet in width and designed and intended for use solely for farm purposes when owned or in the possession of a dealer in farm implements and equipment and within a radius of fifty miles of the principal place of business of such a dealer, including transportation of such vehicles, implements and combinations thereof as a load on another vehicle, such vehicle or load not to exceed thirteen feet in width, during the same period and under the same conditions and restrictions as hereinbefore in this subdivision provided for such vehicles and implements and combinations thereof when used solely for farm purposes."

  This was the simplest. The one underneath it might be eleven pages

  long, beginning: "Without limiting the generality of the following provisions of this section, property owned by the city and property used for transportation purposes exclusively pursuant to the provisions of a joint arrangement or of a joint facilities agreement or trackage rights agreement shall all be exempt from special ad valorem levies." The next one might be thirteen pages and it might start: "Paragraph (h) of subdivision six of section two hundred thirty-five of the banking law, as last separately amended by chapters forty-six, fifty-one and five hundred eighty-five of the laws of eighteen hundred ninety-nine, is hereby amended to read . . ."

  As he sat there staring down at the desk, a page boy would deposit another pile of bills on it. The wording was difficult enough for the expert. It might have been designed to mock a man whose schooling had ended in the eighth grade, who had never liked to read even the simple books of childhood, who, he had said once, had in his entire life read only one book cover to cover: The Life of John L. Sullivan.

  As far as the course of the Empire State was concerned, it did not seem to matter if Al Smith understood the bills or not. The Democrats, a badly outnumbered minority in the Senate and Assembly, a party that had not elected a Governor since 1893, had no real say in the state's affairs. Most of the Democratic legislators, understanding this, and understanding that in the rare instances in which their votes were important they would be told how to cast them by their leaders back in New York, took their jobs with the lightness they felt they deserved. They spent their evenings in "The Gut," a strip of whorehouses and cheap saloons down the hill from the capitol.

  Smith, whose devotion to Katie was—and remained always—legendary as long as he lived, had no interest in the whorehouses, but he loved to sit with his fellow assemblymen in the saloons and drink beer and sing and, when he worked up his nerve, tell a joke or two. As often as they, rousted out of a saloon by the Assembly sergeant-at-arms for a vote, he would appear in the Chamber with his derby over one ear. His clothes were of the same cut, his voice as loud, his language as crude. In appearance, he was one of them.

  But late in the evenings, when the parties were still loud, Al Smith would leave the saloons, and as he left his steps would quicken.

  Hurrying back to his tiny furnished room in a cheap boardinghouse, he would sit down at a rickety desk. On the desk he would earlier have piled the bills that had been introduced that day. Al Smith would begin reading them. Not only the bills which bore on a subject in which he was interested, and not only the bills which dealt with his Assembly District, and not only the bills which dealt with New York City. Sitting at the rickety desk in the furnished room, Smith read all the bills, even those which concerned the construction of a side road or a tiny dam in some remote upstate district. And as he read them, he tried to understand them. Why had one legislator included in a bill a provision that the dam be built by the Conservation Department rather than by the Department of Public Works? What had been in the mind of another that led him to specify that the side road must be

  surfaced with a specific type of asphalt? Later in the night, Smith would hear bursts of song and laughter as the other legislators left the saloons. One by one, if he looked out the window in his room which faced the capitol, he could see the lights in the huge gray building go out. Still the man who had never liked to read read on.

  It must have seemed like the most useless of exercises. In his second term, he was appointed to two committees, but they were the Committee on Banks and the Committee on Public Lands and Forests and, as he remarked in later years, "I had never been in a bank except to serve a jury notice and I had never seen a forest." Again, he did not make a single speech during the entire session. The Democratic leaders had no interest in him except for his nod of assent at the end of a discussion. And the expenses of living in Albany—for which legislators received no reimbursement—ate up an assemblyman's $1,500 salary. By May, all except $250 was gone and seven incomeless months stretched ahead of him. In despair, he told Foley he didn't want to run again. "Meet me at Holtz's for breakfast tomorrow morning," Foley said.

  Over ham and eggs, Foley offered Smith another job, New York City Superintendent of Buildings. Smith's eyes lit up.

  Foley's were narrow. Watching the younger man closely, he said, If you take the job, of course, you'll never be a big man in this town. I gave you a start toward being one. It's tough for a beginner in Albany. You can't learn what you need to know up there in a couple of years. But you're learning. And you've got great popularity in the district. I think you're on the right track. And I'm willing to stick with yo
u if you want to go back. But maybe you ought to chuck it. "Maybe," Big Tom Foley said, "you're right in thinking that Albany is too tough for you."

  Foley said he would give Smith a week to think it over.

  In a week, Smith said he wanted to go back.

  When he went back, he read harder. Since most of the bills amended or referred back to other bills passed years before—and not described in the new bills—he took to spending evenings in the Legislative Library reading those old bills. Since some of the most confusing wording was based on legal technicalities, Smith began to borrow lawbooks from law libraries and take them back to the furnished room with him. Sometimes, leafing through the thick volumes, he thought wryly that their very appearance would have intimidated him a few years before. Tired of listening to speeches he couldn't understand, he would pay clerks for transcripts and study the transcripts. Near the end of the session, the annual appropriations measure, hundreds of pages long, containing tens of thousands of items, was published. No one, so far as anyone in Albany could remember, had ever read the entire appropriations bill. In 1906, Al Smith read it.

  Now, he was to say later, Albany began to make some sense to him. But he kept that fact to himself. Years later, Foley would say, "He would never admit that he knew anything about a subject until he knew everything about it." To his fellow legislators, he was still the typical Tammany regular. He cleared his votes with Foley, never argued with the leaders—