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

by Caro, Robert A

  "Fred," Smith said, "I've got to pull out on you in this debate." As Tanner recalled it later:

  I said, "What's the matter?" And he said, "Well, I had a telephone call from the old man last night."

  I said, "Do you mean Fourteenth Street?" And he said, "Yes." Of course this meant that Mr. Murphy had decided that the Democratic organization would oppose the Constitution when it "Was finally submitted on Election Day, and that it would not do for . . . Smith to give [his] support to a bill in the convention when the party would oppose it in its submission.

  After the convention, Smith campaigned against the proposed new, reorganized Constitution. First and foremost, he was a party man.

  Even though Smith felt that times—and people's needs—were changing, he did not try to break away from the party but to change it to meet the times. Every Friday evening, Tammany's sachems would meet for dinner in a private room at Delmonico's Restaurant. Now, in those meetings, Smith began to try to persuade the older men that the party should begin taking a different stance. Tammany had always held the allegiance of the lower classes with the turkey baskets at Christmas and the outings and the civil service jobs, but now people were becoming better educated, he said. Their needs were broadening and increasing. They were beginning to ask for more—and to look to government to provide that more. Tammany should become the champion of social welfare legislation. It should do so because it was the party of the people and the new needs of the people were real needs. And it should do so because it was good politics. Why should Tammany take a chance of losing the massed votes of the Lower East Side to uptown reformers who even now were sponsoring such legislation?

  From the head of the table, Silent Charlie listened silently to Smith and other young sachems like Wagner. Murphy knew that Tammany must change. He knew it because of the reasons the young men gave—and he knew it because of a consideration of his own. Never had one of their own kind risen to Governor or senator; never, despite the power of Kelly and Croker before him, never, despite his own power, had a Tammany man ever come even close to the top prize in the Democratic Party for which Tammany supplied so many of the votes. Always Tammany was thought of as the party of Tweed and Kelly and Croker, of the poor from the Old Country who might be fit to sweep the streets but not to sit in the Governor's Mansion or the White House. Becoming identified with Progressivism, becoming known as the party of social progress, would be a way to shatter that image forever. Pushing to the forefront bright young men identified with such causes rather than with the ancient rituals of Tammany would be a way to spawn candidates who would shatter forever the unseen but heavy chains that weighed down the Irish Catholic in America. Why, already, wasn't at least one of his bright young men, as true to Tammany, as loyal, as regular as even he, Charlie Murphy, could wish, also an object of praise by the Good Government organizations which habitually damned anyone who sat around the table in Delmonico's? Hadn't the young man, once assailed by the Citizens Union,

  recently received one of its highest ratings? Hadn't he been praised in the Herald? Charlie Murphy looked down the table at the young man. He gave the okay for Tammany to sponsor the legislation the man wanted. He built up the young man's reputation by running him for sheriff of New York County in 1915 and for president of the New York City Board of Aldermen in 1917. And in 1918, he wrenched from the grip of the upstate Democratic leaders the Democratic nomination for Governor and handed it to Alfred E. Smith.

  When Smith won—it was the sixteenth time he had run for public office and the sixteenth time he had won—the inaugural parade up Albany's State Street was led by the Sixty-ninth Regiment of the National Guard, New York City's own Fighting Sixty-ninth. The sidewalks along the route—and the steps of the capitol at its end—were packed with Smith's neighbors from the Fourth Ward. All the night before, arriving by the thousands on trains from New York, they had tramped the streets of Albany and jammed the restaurants, hoisting beer steins in toasts to the new Governor and singing a new, catchy two-step, "The Sidewalks of New York." Their presence was symbolic. Smith's election was the triumph of the immigrants, the oath he took on the capitol steps the next morning, as his mother stood in the place of honor at his side, the first ever taken in America for a state's highest office in the accent of Ireland.

  During Smith's first term, it was not that he broke loose from his party but that the party freed him. Shortly after the election, Murphy summoned him to his Long Island estate, Good Ground. Tammany would be asking him for many things, Tammany's leader said, but he had been thinking of what it meant to have a boy from the Old Neighborhood in the Governor's chair. Should Tammany ever ask for anything Smith felt would stand in the way of becoming a great Governor, all Smith had to do was tell him so and the request would be withdrawn. There were to be no strings attached to the job. Smith was to be his own man. And for a start, Murphy said, Smith would not have to worry about patronage considerations. He and Foley would keep the job hunters off the Governor's back.

  Smith reappointed deserving Republicans to their judgeships and administrative posts and brought into his inner circle reformers like Belle Moskowitz, Frances Perkins, tall, olive-skinned, mustached Joseph Proskauer, and, to head the Highway Department, that trough of fatty contracts at which Tammany had been hoping to feed, Colonel Frederick Stuart Greene, an urbane engineer who wrote short stories and who displayed a complete indifference to the demands of politics in the administering of his department. The Governor did so not only because he shared Murphy's dream and not only because he genuinely wanted to help the state's urban masses but also because it was good politics. Grover Cleveland, he pointed out to his friends, had become a national figure because "the idea got around the country that he was independent of everybody."

  Smith's policies were Progressive—in his first term, he bludgeoned the Legislature into restoring the Workmen's Compensation Law, increased the state's contributions to teachers' salaries by $22,000,000 and fought for

  governmental reorganization and for shorter hours and better working conditions for women and children—for the same mixture of reasons.

  Smith had no patience for those who didn't understand those reasons. He had no patience for reformers who, unlike Belle Moskowitz, didn't understand the importance of practical politics in getting things done, who refused to compromise, who insisted on having the bill as it was written, who raged loudly at injustice, who fought single-mindedly for an unattainable ideal. Their pigheadedness had the effect of dragging to political destruction politicians who listened to them, of ruining careers men had taken years to build. He had seen it happen. And, more important, what was the inevitable result of their efforts? Since they refused to compromise and operate within the political framework—the only framework within which their proposals could become reality—the laws they proposed were never enacted, and therefore at the end of their efforts the people they had wanted to help, the people who he knew so well needed help, hadn't been helped at all. If anything, they had been hurt; the stirring up of hard feelings and bitterness delayed less dramatic but still useful reforms that might have been enacted. When the reformers were finished with all their hollering and were back in their comfortable homes, the widows of the Fourth Ward would still be forced to give up their children before they could get charity. What good was courage if its only effect was to hurt those you were trying to help?

  So Smith despised the noncompromisers, the starry-eyed idealists. He despised, in other words, most reformers. He coined words to describe them: "mush brains," "double-domes," "crackpots," "Goo Goos." Al Smith despised, in short, what Bob Moses had been.

  But he didn't despise Moses.

  There were other reformers who were personally friendly to the Governor and who were vital to his political future—men his own age like wealthy Abram Elkus and men Moses' age like Proskauer—but Elkus and Proskauer were seldom if ever invited up to the Oliver Street flat for dinner. For Moses, during 1921 and 1922, the invitations came more and more
often. If, after dinner, old cronies from the Neighborhood would drop by and take Smith out to the local taverns for a drink and a song or two around the backroom piano, Smith always insisted that Moses come along. In fact, discovering that Moses had a passable bass to go with his tenor, he insisted that Moses be a part of whatever quartet was hastily arranged for the evening's barbershopping, and when Moses tried to beg off, Smith would drag him out of his seat and make him stand beside him and harmonize.

  The reason for the attachment was uncertain. As one of Smith's cronies put it, "They were opposites, two exact opposites, opposites all the way down the line." Was it, as some Fourth Warders, given to cliche, speculated, a "father and son" relationship? Given the affection Smith bore for his own three sons, this seemed too pat an explanation, although it was not difficult to understand why some believed it. Emily Smith would recall how, one night after dinner, her father, who had been making pointed remarks for weeks about the pale-blue Brooks Brothers shirts that seemed to comprise Moses' entire shirt collection, suddenly heaved himself out of his chair at

  the dinner table and strode into the bedroom. Returning with a large box, he said to Moses, "I'm tired of looking at your blue shirts, so I bought you some." And, opening the box, he spilled out, in striped and silken profusion, a dozen of Sulka's best. The Smiths certainly began to treat Moses like one of the family. "He was like an artist in a way," Emily would recall. "He was dressed, not dirtily, but as if he didn't care. His suits might be okay, but they were obviously quite old or not very well pressed. We always kidded him about his clothes. One night after dinner he started to leave and Dad said, 'Emily, you go down with Bob and see he doesn't take one of my hats and leave his here.' And I can still see Dad and Bob laughing there." Or was the reason for the attachment, as other old acquaintances speculated, that Al Smith, who outwardly laughed at his lack of formal education and never seemed to mind his lack of money, actually felt both lacks keenly and was thus ready to be impressed by a man he thought had such a wealth of both? Was it, as some reformers thought, that, since Smith preferred to get his information from people rather than from books and memos, he needed around him advisers who could talk fluently on concepts of government and who could describe situations and projects so vividly that he could see them in his mind's eye—and that Moses, with his gift for words, was simply the most fluent and descriptive of talkers? Or was it that the man who had worked so hard to learn the art of government was able to tell exactly how hard another man had worked to learn that art—and knew that Bob Moses had, in different circumstances, worked as hard as he? Was it that the man who had learned the art so thoroughly that it must have been boring for him to talk with even the most knowledgeable of his advisers had found a man who had learned it as well as he?

  Only one thing was certain. Whatever the reason for the feeling, it was there.

  And therefore, if the man who despised what Bob Moses had been liked Moses so much, Moses must have greatly changed.

  He had.

  For the first part of the Smith interregnum, Moses seemed to be the reformer he had always been.

  The Reconstruction Commission, of course, went out of existence with the ouster from power of the Governor it had been advising. Within days after the 1920 election, Mrs. Moskowitz had to tell Moses that there remained in the commission's exchequer only enough funds to pay his very small stipend and the rent on the very small office at 305 Broadway until the end of the year. Moses faced the prospect of being out of a job again on January 1, 1921. But in late November 1920, a tall, elegantly dressed, cheerful and charming man walked into the little office. He was Richard Spencer Childs, whom Moses had heard of but never met, although Childs had graduated from Yale just a year before him.

  Richard Childs was the very model of the scientific management reformer. Seeing politics in terms of "good" and "evil"—the latter was a term

  he used in connection with Tammany Hall—he had determined to remove the possibility of evil from municipal government in the United States and make it efficient, economic and businesslike. Having inherited the public relations genius that had enabled his father to clean up millions with a new soap powder named Bon Ami, he had already succeeded in cheerfully forcing down the throats of more than a hundred astounded municipalities a nonpartisan "city manager" form of government. Finding that a single cause did not quench his thirst for reform, he had become concerned by the fact that while New York City had a Citizens Union to rate the city's legislators, act as a watchdog over city spending and publish a bulletin that gave civic-minded citizens the information they needed to play their proper role in city government, there was no similar organization that covered the state as a whole and could exert a statewide influence for good. Childs decided to put up the money to start one, but found he had a personnel problem. With his own time fully occupied, he would have to leave the new organization almost entirely in someone else's hands, and, reviewing the list of his reform acquaintances, he concluded that none of them could handle the job. Then, one evening, doing his nightly reading of publications dealing with government that poured into his apartment from every part of the United States, he turned to one he had put aside for several months because of its length, the Report of the Reconstruction Commission to Governor Alfred E. Smith. Richard Childs had read thousands of such reports; he had written dozens himself. He knew exactly how good this one was. He spent most of the night reading it and, in the morning, walked directly from his breakfast table to 305 Broadway. "I needed no recommendations," he would recall. "I had read the work." Finding Moses at his desk in the little office, Childs introduced himself, announced that he was about to form a statewide Good Government organization and offered him a post, which he explained would unfortunately carry only a small salary, as its secretary and executive officer.

  Childs had expected the man across the desk to say that he would consider the offer, that he would let him know in a day or two. At the least, he had expected to be asked some questions. Instead, without even a pause, Moses replied in a single word: "Yes."

  Moses' acceptance of the offer elevated him instantly to a position of new importance in the reform movement. A statewide association of leading reformers from both parties would automatically become the rallying point not only for a continued fight for reorganization but for the state's reform sentiment as a whole, which had always dissipated its strength among too many local organizations. Moses dealt on a day-to-day basis with the old giants of the New York City reform movement—Hughes, Root, Stimson, Wickersham, Elkus, the legendary Charles Culp ("CC") Burlingham, Albert S. Bard, and William Jay Schieffelin, fighter against Tammany and the sweatshop, who in 1920 was completing the first decade of a thirty-two-year term as chairman of the Citizens Union (Childs would be his successor). He also dealt with the young lawyers and social workers who were coming up through

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  reform ranks in the city and would one day take the places of the older men: Stanley Isaacs, Morris Ernst, Nathan Straus, Jr., Raymond V. Ingersoll, Henry H. Curran, Robert S. Binkerd, Charles C. Lockwood, three young matrons who stood out from the mass of broad-hatted luncheoneers, Frances Perkins, Mary Simkhovitch and Mrs. William P. (Jen) Earle, and the one of the younger men who had already made a citywide name for himself with his courageous championing of John Purroy Mitchel's first investigative efforts—George McAneny. Joining them on the New York State Association's "advisory council" were upstate reform leaders never before associated with their New York City counterparts in one group.

  Inviting these men to contribute to the association's monthly sixteen-page State Bulletin or to speak at luncheon meetings at the Whitehall Club on Battery Place or the Ten Eyck Hotel in Albany, soliciting their appearance at public hearings before legislative committees considering bills in which the association was interested, Moses became well known to all of them. And as they heard him speak at the Whitehall Club or the Ten Eyck and read his work in the State Bulletin, many of these men
, old and young, Democrat and Republican, saw in him the embodiment of the finest qualities of the reform spirit. During this period, he stayed true to the aims of reform. Working out of another small downtown office, he campaigned through the Bulletin for reform's hallowed causes: social welfare legislation, a "direct primary" system that would end the nomination of candidates by boss-dominated party conventions, the publication of a "state journal" similar to the Congressional Record so that interested citizens could study legislative debates and thus obtain information on which to base intelligent judgments of state activities and, of course, for the repassage by the new Legislature of the reorganization amendments that would foster efficiency and economy in state government. He campaigned against special-interest bills, against the subservience of legislators of both parties to their local bosses. Lauding legislators whose work he approved, he did not hesitate to admonish those he felt had strayed from the path of righteousness, lamenting, for example, that "Senator [Frederick M.] Davenport [of Oneida County] seems to us to be losing some of the almost religious fire which made him an unusual and significant figure in state politics. The truth is that the Senator is back on the bandwagon with the regulars. ... He is not by nature or at his best a rural conservative. To get the most out of himself and for his supporters, a man must act in character." He enshrined the worst of the party hacks in his own "Legislative Hall of Fame." Every issue of the Bulletin devoted a full page to the "objects" of the New York State Association: "To press for progress toward responsive, responsible, efficient and democratic government in the state, to increase the number of citizens and local organizations which understand and influence state government ..." And the Bulletin's other pages were written in the same tone. Denouncing a legislative proposal he felt had been introduced only as a matter of expediency, Moses concluded flatly: "The principle is the important thing."