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

by Caro, Robert A

  Dunne directed the jury to find that the first appropriation of the Taylor Estate had been illegal but that the second had been legal and the property therefore now belonged to the Long Island Park Commission. The only function of the jury, he told it, was to decide whether Pauchogue had suffered substantial financial damages as a result of the first seizure. If it had not, he said, the jury should fix the damages against the commission at six cents. The jury did so. Macy was to believe until he died that Smith's entrance in the case had played a role in the judge's removal from the jury's hands of the right to make a decision on the key point in the case: the legality of the second appropriation. "The Governor came down and took the judge out to lunch—what chance did we have?" he was to say.

  Whether Dunne's decision would have remained the binding legal word in the case if both sides had continued the legal battle on equal terms, if both sides had continued to make use of all their remedies at law—if the Pauchogue Corporation had been able to press through higher courts its appeals as the Long Island Park Commission had been able to press its appeals—is impossible to determine. For both sides weren't equal.

  Lawsuits take money. The state's supply of this commodity is comparatively bottomless. The private citizen's is not. And now W. Kingsland Macy was running out of money.

  Macy himself was not wealthy. Havemeyer was, but, saying "This . . .

  should be considered a business affair," he had told Macy he would have to pay all legal expenses over $25,000.

  At the time, Macy had thought that $25,000 would be ample. But as the commission's lawyers began to pile appeal on top of appeal, he wrote Havemeyer that, to a layman, "the ramifications of this litigation are almost beyond belief." And ramifications meant money. If Moses' lawyers were constantly filing new briefs, Macy's had to file briefs in reply. The briefs had to be printed in standard legal form, and they were running into thousands of pages. The printing bill for a single appeal ran to $3,652.63. The stenographic transcript for a single appeal cost $545. And finally, of course, there were the lawyers' fees. Lawyers like Tuttle and the experts required to handle appeals didn't come cheap. The first bill for "services rendered" was delivered to Macy on April 28, 1925. It was for $10,000. Even before the trial in Dunne's court began, the $25,000 mark had been reached. To Macy, the idealist, the case represented something that was more important than money. When Havemeyer wrote, "This ... is my limit," Macy replied that he would carry on alone. Appeals attorneys told him that if he was willing to press the fight vigorously, he would probably win, although the victory might not come until the case had been transferred out of the state courts and into the United States Supreme Court, which would focus on the basic constitutionality of the use by a state agency of one individual's money to seize the property of another. Macy authorized them to proceed. But Moses' attorneys continued to make motions and file briefs, and when Macy's appeal from Dunne's decision finally reached the Appellate Division in February 1928, his legal costs had mounted to $43,192.61 —a burden beyond his financial resources. By April 1928, his attorneys were dunning him for payment of a $1,100 bill. Although the case would eventually be brought before the Court of Appeals, which upheld Dunne's decision, and an attempt was made to bring it to the United States Supreme Court—Justice Louis Brandeis brought the legal fight to an end on January 21, 1929, four years after the Biltmore hearing, by refusing to issue a writ of certiorari which would have enabled the Court to hear the case—it was obviously not pressed vigorously in these last stages, as though the case were really over already.

  And, in fact, it was. Moses had never stopped developing the Taylor Estate—as if its acquisition were a fait accompli. By the spring of 1927, he had laid concrete for access roads and parking fields, set out scores of stone fireplaces and picnic tables, erected wooden bathhouses with showers and lockers and finished renovating the mansion and outbuildings, at a total cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. During the summer of 1927, it had hundreds of thousands of visitors. By the time the higher courts came to rule on the question of whether the Taylor Estate was a park, it was a park. What was a judge to do? Tell the state to tear up the roads and tear down the buildings, to destroy what hundreds of thousands of dollars of the public's money had been spent to build? Tell the people who had visited the Taylor Estate that they could visit it no more? In theory, of course, judges should not be influenced by such considerations. But judges are human. And their

  susceptibility to such considerations was undoubtedly increased by Moses' willingness to attack publicly those of them who ruled against him, as he had done to the "local judge," thereby letting the public know exactly who it was who was closing the park to them.

  The final hearing before the State Court of Appeals was the twenty-fifth separate appellate proceeding in the Taylor Estate case. The case was, the Herald Tribune said, "a landmark in eminent domain."

  It was also a landmark in the lifescapes of two men. W. Kingsland Macy, who had possessed before it a vague desire to enter politics, had been precipitated by it into the political arena—and had found he enjoyed fighting there. And Macy had learned in his first bout many tricks. After fighting Robert Moses, he was to say, fighting anyone else was easy. Becoming active in 1927 in"fhe Suffolk County Republican organization, within a year he threw out its leader and seized his place. When the Depression loosened for a moment the barons' stronghold on the state's GOP organization, Macy tore it from their grasp and by 1932 was Republican State Chairman. Although the GOP's Old Guard later re-formed and ousted him from the chairmanship, he was to rule Suffolk County, unchallenged, for more than thirty years. When there came a time when it would be useful to him to be in the State Senate, he sent himself to the State Senate; when he wanted to go to Congress, he sent himself to Congress. Macy's views were liberal, and he introduced progressive governmental innovations in Suffolk County, but to achieve his aims he ruled the county as an old-time political satrapy. Ruthless and cunning, he seemed to know every trick of bending men to his will, and he bent them so successfully that Kingsland Macy was called "the Little King of Suffolk County."

  And when, after Macy had fought his way to power, Robert Moses, needing his help, made overtures of friendship, Macy accepted them. Although the strength of their personalities often made them clash, the two one-time "amateurs in politics" were for more than thirty years the closest of political allies, allies so close, in fact, that when, in 1962, cancer-ravaged King Macy knew he was about to die, Moses was the only person outside his immediate family whom he wanted to see.

  Robert Moses had also learned from the Taylor Estate fight, his first use of power, lessons that would govern his behavior for the rest of his life.

  One, hammered home in his consciousness by the results of his accommodation with G. Wilbur Doughty, was that the simplest method of accomplishing his aims was to use the power he possessed in all its manifestations, even those that as recently as a year previously he had shrunk from using. So thoroughly did he embrace this lesson—and the "creature of the machine" that was its embodiment—that when, in 1927, a vacancy occurred on the Long Island Park Commission, he had Smith appoint McWhinney to it.

  The simplicity—combined with the feeling of accomplishment—might well have made Moses ask himself if it really made any difference whether

  he worked with Tom McWhinney. What difference did it make if the state purchased the right-of-way for the Meadowbrook Causeway from a bunch of farmers or from a bunch of Republican insiders? What difference did it make if he gave a road-building contract to Uncle Andy Weston? What difference did it make to the public—and what difference did it make to him? What did he care if Doughty's friends made money from his dreams? If they did, he had learned, the dream would become reality. If they did not, he had learned, it wouldn't. And the dream was the important thing; the dream was what mattered.

  This lesson Robert Moses translated into phrases that began to appear in his letters and, according to associates, his conversat
ion after the Taylor Estate fight: "The important thing is to get things done." "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." "If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?"

  Another lesson Moses learned was that, in the eyes of the public, the end, if not justifying the means, at least made them unimportant. Al Smith had succeeded in blurring in the public's mind the legal technicalities of the fight—by focusing the public's mind on the end of the fight: parks.

  The value of parks as an issue was another lesson. As long as you were fighting for parks, you could hardly help being a hero. When the Taylor fight started, he himself had been all but unknown. During the fight, he had been portrayed in a hundred front-page stories and a hundred editorials as a hero, as a man "acting in the interest of the people at large and of all future generations."

  This lesson Robert Moses would often recite to associates. He would put it this way: As long as you're fighting for parks, you can be sure of having public opinion on your side. And as long as you have public opinion on your side, you're safe. "As long as you're on the side of parks, you're on the side of the angels. You can't lose."

  There were other lessons, too. Whatever the motivation that had impelled him to take the risk of starting to transform the Taylor Estate into a park while the courts had still seemed likely to rule that it was not a park —a fearless determination to do what he knew was right regardless of the consequences, a blind faith in Smith's ability to rescue him from consequences, a desperation to see at last the beginning of the realization of at least one of his dreams, or, perhaps, an insight, the insight of a political genius, that physical development would help rather than hurt his cause— the risk had been magnificently justified. And he had understood the significance of that justification. Once you did something physically, it was very hard for even a judge to undo it. If judges, who had to submit themselves to the decision of the electorate only infrequently, were thus hogtied by the physical beginning of a project, how much more so would be public officials who had to stand for re-election year by year? If he had needed a gift from August Heckscher to make victory certain, what did that prove? Only that once you physically began a project, there would always be some way found of obtaining the money to complete it. "Once you sink that first stake" he would often say, "they'll never make you pull it up."

  li

  These lessons had other implications. If ends justified means, and if the important thing in building a project was to get it started, then any means that got it started were justified. Furnishing misleading information about it was justified; so was underestimating its costs.

  Misleading and underestimating, in fact, might be the only way to get a project started. Since his projects were unprecedentedly vast, one of the biggest difficulties in getting them started was the fear of public officials— not only upstate conservatives but liberal public officials as well—concerned with the over-all functioning of the state that the state couldn't afford the projects, that the projects, beneficial though they might be, would drain off a share of the state's wealth incommensurate with their benefits.

  But what if you didn't tell the officials how much the projects would cost? What if you let the legislators know about only a fraction of what you knew would be the projects' ultimate expense?

  Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you had spent it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. How could they? If they refused to give you the rest of the money, what they had given you would be wasted, and that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been misled, that would mean that they hadn't investigated the projects thoroughly, and had therefore been derelict in their own duty. The possibilities for a polite but effective form of political blackmail were endless. Once a Legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it. The stakes you drove should be thin-pointed—wedge-shaped, in fact—on the end. Once you got the end of the wedge for a project into the public treasury, it would be easy to hammer in the rest.

  Another lesson Moses learned from his first use of power was the latitude given him by its possession.

  In the Taylor Estate fight, Moses had broken the law. On this point there had been no judicial disagreement; no court had ruled that his first appropriation of the estate was legal; every court that had ruled on it had ruled it illegal.

  But what had happened to him as a result? He had been fined six cents —two cents, actually, if he wanted to insist that the other two Long Island park commissioners pay their share of the fine.

  Part of the reason was the Heckscher gift, of course. But a more basic one was that power—specifically, the power that came with the money he could dispose of as a state official—insulated him from the law's retribution. He had been able to employ lawyers numerous enough and clever enough to utilize the technicalities of the law to frustrate the intent of the law, to throw enough sand into the machinery of justice to slow its gears sufficiently so that they could not mesh and produce the conclusion which its spirit demanded. Even an opponent as determined as W. Kingsland Macy—and as well equipped with money as Macy was—had had to abandon his search for ultimate justice. Justice delayed, the Taylor Estate case proved, was truly justice denied. And, Moses must have realized (for he demonstrated

  the realization in subsequent actions), as long as he had public power, as long as he was representing the state, he would have the means of employing as many lawyers as he needed, of delaying, and thereby denying, justice to his opponents, of shielding himself from its punishments. If there was one law for the poor, who have neither money nor influence, and another law for the rich, who have both, there is still a third law for the public official with real power, who has more of both. After the Taylor Estate fight, Robert Moses must have known—he proved it by his actions—that he could, with far more impunity than any private citizen, defy the law. He gloried in the knowledge; he boasted and bragged about it. For the rest of his life, when a friend, an enemy—or one of his own lawyers—would protest that something he was doing or was proposing to do was illegal, Moses would throw back his head and say, with a broad grin, a touch of exaggeration and much more than a touch of bravado: "Nothing I have ever done has been tinged with legality."

  There was one more lesson. It was one he had started learning years before, and now it had finally sunk in. Would dreams—dreams of real size and significance and scope—the accomplishment his mother had taught him was so important, ever be realized by the methods of the men in whose ranks he had once marched, the reformers and idealists? He asked the question of himself and he answered it himself. No. The method he had adopted to turn his Long Island dream into reality was the way to accomplish something. It was the way to get things done. It was, he concluded, the only way.

  One million dollars was the amount available to Long Island out of the $15,000,000. He had told the Legislature that one million would be the cost of the Long Island program. He knew that actually the million would pay for only a fraction—a small fraction—of the program. But he had learned how to get things done. With the million, he drove a lot of stakes.

  Instead of spending the million to complete a few parks, he spent it to acquire the land for many—for Montauk Point State Park and Hither Hills State Park and Wildwood State Park and Sunken Meadow State Park and Belmont Lake State Park and Hempstead Lake State Park and Valley Stream State Park—and to at least begin development of all of them, as well as the Fire Island State Park and Jones Beach State Park he had previously acquired. By the end of 1926, the beaches of Long Island, once reserved for the rich, were dotted with wooden bathhouses open to all. Families who weren't interested in ocean swimming had to travel along Merrick Road only two miles beyond the city line before they came to the Valley Stream Park's wooded ninety-seven acres and calm blue lake, and in the woods hiking trails, picnic tables and firepla
ces, and on the lake floats, diving boards, sliding ponds and rowboats were awaiting their use. By the end of 1926, moreover, the road was begun that would free city drivers from the tyranny of Merrick Road. By the time surveying of the route for the Southern State Parkway was completed, it was August. DPW engineers

  protested that it was too close to the cold, damp Long Island winter to begin construction, but there was plenty of time to drive stakes. To show the public quickly how beautiful his parkways would be, he decided that the first segment would be the 2.78-mile loop around the huge reservoir in Hempstead Lake State Park, the prettiest portion of the whole route.

  On August 28, 1926, with only a handful of engineers and an uninterested construction gang as an audience, Robert Moses dug a spade into the soil near the reservoir and jerked it out. The earth that came up with it was the first ever turned for a Robert Moses road. His talk with Frances Perkins about the highway below Riverside Drive had taken place in 1914, a full twelve years before. He had been planning roads ever since. As he stood there still holding the shovel, a foreman gave a signal and laborers began to shovel dirt into the small, spoke-wheeled dump trucks that in the 1920's served as earth-moving machines. Robert Moses stepped back and watched the work begin.

  Hutchinson and Hewitt were amazed and angry over Moses' progress in 1926. Counting the DPW and Conservation Department funds he had used, he had already spent on Long Island parks far more than the million dollars that was supposed to pay for the whole Long Island park and parkway system, and now he submitted park-improvement requests that totaled a million dollars more. And who knew what innocent-appearing items in 1927 DPW and Conservation Department budget requests concealed additional funds Smith was planning to make available to Moses? A wholly disproportionate share of the state budget was being spent on Long Island. In a private confrontation with Smith and Moses, they said that Moses' plans were too grandiose. Their cost was beyond the ability of the state to pay, they said, and parks were simply not needed on the scale he proposed.