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

by Caro, Robert A

  But in late 1925, the dream all but dead, Moses held a series of private meetings with Doughty. There is, of course, no record of what transpired at these meetings, and no proof that any deal was entered into. But certain developments ensued:

  • Moses announced that future planning for Jones Beach would be conducted in conjunction with a delegation from Hempstead Township, which would, of course, have access to commission plans showing the precise location of the proposed Meadowbrook Causeway to Jones Beach, and the chairman of the Hempstead delegation turned out to be Assemblyman Thomas A. McWhinney. And Moses was soon meeting regularly with "the creature of the machine" on an extremely friendly basis.

  • Within two months after Moses and McWhinney began meeting, a lawyer who was a member of the Nassau GOP's inner circle formed a corporation with a group of associates. The only business the corporation ever transacted was the purchase and sale of land, and the only land it ever purchased and sold was 265 acres of undeveloped, all but worthless meadow and swamp land, 99.5 acres of which would become the right-of-way for the Meadowbrook Causeway, the remaining 165.5 acres of which would, when the causeway had been completed and the land's value enhanced, be sold by the corporation to private developers.

  • When the contracts for the causeway, and for other Park Commission projects on Long Island, were awarded, a substantial number went to Uncle Andy Weston and Hendrickson Bros., Inc.

  • And the Last of the Mohicans abruptly left the tepee of the commission's opponents and smoked the peace pipe with Robert Moses, supporting every one of Moses' Long Island proposals.

  Doughty's friendship was to give Moses his first real hold on Jones Beach. After the meetings between the two men, the Republican boss told Moses to resubmit, with some minor revisions, the proposal so soundly defeated in the November 1925 referendum. Moses did so in November 1926, and the three-to-one margin against the proposal magically became a three-to-one margin in favor, Hempstead Town voting, 18,872 to 5,076, to cede to the Long Island Park Commission "all right, title, interest and jurisdiction ... to all that certain town land . . . commonly known as Jones Beach."

  More immediately, the friendship altered the balance of power in the over-all state park fight. On December 21, 1925, ten days after Moses agreed to cooperate with McWhinney and the Hempstead Town delegation, the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution asking the Legislature to abolish the Long Island Park Commission. They sent it to the Nassau Board of Supervisors, expecting that body to concur in the request, as it had the year before. To the shock of the Suffolk officials, Nassau declined to do so. The two counties in which the Park Commission was operating were no longer united in opposing it.

  The GOP front in Albany was no longer solid, either, because of the votes Doughty controlled in the Senate and Assembly.

  Republican ranks were already under severe pressure over parks. In New York City, Al Smith, taking command of Tammany Hall in fact if not in title after Charlie Murphy's death, had snatched the Democratic mayoral nomination away from Red Mike Hylan and handed it to Jimmy Walker, and Walker, at his inauguration on January 1, 1926, had announced support of the vast program of city park-land acquisitions prepared by the city's Park Association with Moses' help. There would be a referendum in November to authorize the necessary bonds, and women's clubs and a reformers' Committee of One Thousand had already launched a mammoth public education campaign. All in all, 1926 was not the year to be opposing parks.

  Upstate Republican legislators might be insulated in their rotten boroughs, but it wasn't only legislators whose names would be on the ballot in 1926. Al Smith would be campaigning for re-election, and Republican strategists were determined to knock him out of the Governorship. They had already persuaded the man they regarded as their strongest candidate, Ogden Livingston Mills, to leave Congress and run against him. And there was a United States Senate seat up for grabs, too, and the present occupant of the seat was James J. Wadsworth himself, the former Assembly Speaker and one of the state's most powerful Republicans.

  No sooner had the Legislature convened, therefore, than Wadsworth summoned the legislative leaders to an Albany hotel suite and told them a compromise on the park fight was in order. The compromise could not be over the Northern State Parkway, he said; the interests of too many of their friends were involved there. But the Taylor Estate was a different story;

  Havemeyer, the only Timber Pointer with real influence, didn't seem really interested; Macy did—but Macy had little influence of his own. The Taylor Estate, the Republican leaders agreed, could be sacrificed.

  Smith, with his park plans stalled and the threat of the potentially embarrassing Taylor Estate court fight hanging over him in an election year, was not averse to a compromise. In a secret meeting with Hewitt and Hutchinson, the Governor agreed that he would not ask for funds to acquire right-of-way for the Northern State Parkway until Moses came up with a route acceptable to the barons, and he agreed that, even after the right-of-way had been acquired, he would not ask for funds to begin construction until the Southern State Parkway had reached the point at which it would connect with the Jones Beach causeway, a point about fifteen miles into Nassau County. In return, Hewitt and Hutchinson agreed that the Southern State Parkway could be built and that the entire $15,000,000 proceeds of the park referendum would be segregated in 1926; work could therefore begin immediately on Moses' upstate park program and his Long Island projects, including Jones Beach, the causeway leading to it from the Southern State Parkway—and Deer Range (soon to be August Heckscher) State Park.

  Since the 1925 Taylor Estate fight had revolved around the question of whether an outside agency, the Republican-controlled State Land Board, should have authority over the State Parks Council, a face-saving device had to be worked out on that point so that it would appear that neither side had surrendered. On January 26, 1926, Smith and the GOP legislative leaders announced that they had agreed that expenditures of the $15,000,000 would be supervised, as the GOP had insisted—but, as Smith had insisted, not by the Land Board. Instead, it was announced, expenditures would be supervised by a committee of three: Smith, Hewitt and Hutchinson.

  Macy got his first hint of what was happening when he learned that the segregations of the $15,000,000 included an item of $25,000 for "Deer Range Park, permanent improvement of buildings," and $170,000 to begin the purchase of right-of-way for the Southern State Parkway, that strip of concrete Macy had always been afraid would reach out toward East Islip. Rushing to Albany, he confronted Hutchinson, and the assemblyman answered his questions evasively. The amateur in politics realized that the professionals had betrayed him.

  Hewitt and Hutchinson had been pleased with the compromise with Smith. By postponing work on the Northern State Parkway until fifteen miles of the Southern State were built, they thought they were consigning the former road to some far-distant limbo; construction of the fifteen-mile-long Bronx River Parkway, after all, had taken fourteen years. And since they could outvote Smith two to one on the committee set up to supervise park expenditures, they assumed they could keep the pace of construction on the Southern State slow.

  Economy, moreover, was as important to them as delay; their upstate

  conservatism had been affronted by the thought of spending even a million dollars on parks and parkways in a single section of the state; they could see that the actual amount involved would eventually be far higher than the million, but they wanted to keep it down to the bare minimum that they felt was all the state could afford.

  But no sooner had they given Moses $170,000 for Southern State right-of-way, confident that that amount would allow him to purchase no more than a mile or two, than the Nassau County Board of Supervisors, now suddenly, and mysteriously, enthusiastic over Moses' projects, purchased additional miles and presented them to the Long Island Park Commission as a gift. Playing on the greed of real estate developers who owned land in the parkway's path, Moses persuaded them to donate right-of-way so that t
he rest of their property could be opened to development. Suddenly awakened to the fact that the New York City watershed property could be used as right-of-way, Hewitt and Hutchinson realized with a shock that the land for the Southern State was almost all in Moses' hands—all the way out to that magic point where it would trigger the start of work on the Northern State.

  Although no funds had been appropriated for surveying and engineering, there were suddenly surveyors and engineers out on the right-of-way, men furnished by the State Department of Public Works—whose Long Island office just happened to be located at the former August Belmont Estate near Babylon that Moses had acquired and turned into a state park, making the old Belmont Mansion his headquarters. And these men, they were told, were drawing up plans with unprecedented speed. Even as they digested this news, a bill was introduced in the Legislature providing for a million dollars for "the construction, reconstruction and widening of highway routes in Nassau and Erie Counties"—including $350,000 for "construction of the Southern State Parkway." They had no trouble understanding why Erie, a Republican stronghold, had been given even more money than Nassau in the bill—Erie's legislators would be even more determined than Nassau's that the bill should pass, and an alliance of the GOP legislators from these two counties with the Democrats would make it impossible for Hewitt and Hutchinson to prevent its passage.

  The parks on Long Island were also being developed at a rate they could hardly believe, since they had kept appropriations for such development small. When they checked, they found that park roads were being constructed by DPW crews and park buildings refurbished by Conservation Department crews.

  They took a look at the bills Trubee Davison had introduced for Moses* in 1924 and found in them a specific provision stating that while the Long Island Park Commission would have final say on the design of parkways— as well as full control of them when completed—their physical construction could be financed out of DPW allocations. They found that the landscaping was being financed out of "routine" 1926 Conservation Department requests for "tree nurseries." The Lloyd Neck lighthouse property was being developed with a Conservation Department appropriation for "oyster cul-

  ture." When they waxed indignant, they were told blandly that the lighthouse property could certainly be used for oyster culture. There was nothing the slightest bit illegal about anything Moses was doing. The best bill drafter in Albany, they realized, had been at work again.

  And when they protested to the Governor, he bourbon-coated the pill he was making them swallow. Inviting them to see for themselves what Moses was doing, he suggested they come to New York City first, sleep over at the Biltmore and then go on to Long Island in the morning. At the Biltmore, as Moses would later recall, "the Governor got Hewitt and Hutchinson to stay overnight in his apartment. They were drinking bozos, you know, and they were really putting it away. As the evening wore on, the Governor put some records on and he was teaching these two fellows to dance. I left at 2 a.m. [Henry] Lutz [a Moses aide] stayed until five and he told me that it was about then that the Governor and he and Hewitt put Hutchinson to bed. Hewitt got up at seven the next morning and ordered a big breakfast for himself and the Governor and they went in to ask Hutchinson what he wanted and Hutchinson sort of groaned, lying there in bed, and said, 'Governor, go away. The stomach revolts at the thought of food.'" During the tour, Smith was at his friendliest. "You see," Moses would say, "in so many cases, things come down to personalities, to the human factor. And they loved the Governor." And even if they hadn't, what, after all, could they do? The Highway and Conservation Department budgets had already been approved. Money was being spent under them. If they tried to reopen the budgets, it would be a mess. And what would the press say? After all, there was the election coming. They decided not to interfere with the program.

  The court fight still loomed ahead of Moses, but Smith was able to help him with that, too.

  During 1926, Moses continued his technique of stalling the trial while talking as though there were not the slightest doubt about its outcome. In an article he wrote in May outlining the over-all progress of the state park plan, he said blandly, "The state has acquired Deer Range Park." All through May, Moses' attorneys continued filing motions and, when judges overruled the motions, appealing their decisions to higher courts, and when the higher courts threw out the appeals, taking them to still higher courts. Three separate dates were set for trial—and on each of them appeals were still pending and judges had to grant the commission postponements. All through May, Moses' laborers were converting the ballroom of the old Taylor mansion into a cafeteria, the sitting room into a comfort station, setting up tents on the beach to serve as bathhouses and hacking rough roads through the woods so that motorists could reach them. By mid-May, "Deer Range State Park" was opened to the public.

  On May 25, State Supreme Court Justice Selah B. Strong received word from Albany that the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, had thrown out the last of Moses' appeals, in a decision which supported every one of Macy's contentions, even to the point of saying that if the commission's

  right to peremptory appropriation was upheld, "the conclusion logically follows that it has a charter wide as the wind, withal, and might seize for park purposes all the lands in Nassau and Suffolk counties." Scheduling the trial for June 4, Justice Strong told Walter H. Pollack, who was heading the team of five attorneys handling the case for the commission, that he would not postpone it again for any reason.

  On June 4, Pollack was not in court. One of his four colleagues told Strong—falsely—that Pollack was occupied in another courtroom. Strong said the trial was going on anyway. "We will not participate," Pollack's colleague said—and all four commission attorneys walked out of the courtroom, leaving the commission without counsel.

  Strong adjourned the trial for a day to give Pollack a chance to appear. On the next day, Pollack and his colleagues were again absent. Strong adjourned it again—and again no attorneys appeared. On the fourth day, the judge allowed a jury to be chosen and told Macy's attorney, Charles H. Tuttle, to present his case. The jury found that both appropriations of the Taylor Estate had been illegal, the first because the commission did not possess $250,000, the second because while it had the money, the money came from a private gift instead of from a legislative segregation, the only legal source of funds for a peremptory appropriation. The jury assessed each of the three commissioners—Robert Moses, Townsend Scudder and Clifford Jackson—$22,000 apiece in punitive damages. Strong "perpetually enjoined" the commission from entering the Taylor Estate and ordered the state troopers removed forthwith. Watching the judge sign the injunction and hand it to the Suffolk County sheriff, watching the sheriff leave the courtroom to serve the injunction on the troopers, Macy thought he had won at last. Declared Tuttle: "The vindication is now complete."

  Bella and Emanuel Moses were at their summer lodge at Camp Madison. Every morning a Madison House social worker delivered a New York Times to their door. When he handed it to them on the morning after the verdict, and they leafed through it—all the trial stories were on the inside pages now —and learned of the $22,000 judgment against their son, they groaned, and Bella Moses said, "Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life and now we'll have to pay this." The social worker recalls: "It was just assumed that they would pay it. They always paid all his debts."

  The day after the verdict, Pollack, suddenly free of other court engagements, appealed on the grounds that the Long Island State Park Commission had not been represented by counsel. A Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice denied the appeal, calling the lack of representation a "deliberate and intentional" attempt to delay the proceedings. But the Appellate Division agreed to hear the appeal—at its fall term—and invalidated Strong's injunction until then. The troopers returned to the property and, during the summer, Moses took reporters on trips to "Deer Range Park," and the reporters rhapsodized about the families enjoying its facilities. In the fall,

  the Appellate Divi
sion upheld Pollack's appeal and ordered a new trial. And this trial, which was to be the closest thing to a legal showdown that was to occur in the case, was to contain a new factor: Al Smith's appearance as a witness for Moses.

  Smith's appearance marked the "first time in a generation, probably longer, that a chief executive of the state has appeared in court in the role of a witness." Platoons of reporters followed the Governor as he, Moses and Mrs. Moskowitz boarded a Long Island Rail Road train for the three-hour trip to Riverhead. At the station, he was met by an American Legion band which played "The Sidewalks of New York" as it accompanied him to the courthouse. There, he was escorted to the chambers of Justice James A. Dunne. The Governor talked with Dunne in private and then the judge escorted him into the courtroom so that he could give his testimony—he was on the stand for only fifteen minutes, spent most of the time recounting the Biltmore hearing and was not cross-examined—and as soon as he stepped off the stand, the judge adjourned court. The Governor joined him in his chambers for lunch.

  In the newspapers, Smith's appearance dwarfed the legal issues involved in the trial. Whether it had the same effect in the mind of Justice Dunne is unknown, which is unfortunate because the judge, not the jury, decided the case, and his directions to the jury, which precluded it from making a decision on the essential point at issue, were rather sharply at variance with those of the many other judges who had been involved with the case.