surfaced most strongly the mixed strain of passionate idealism and overweening arrogance that she had inherited from her parents, Grannie and Bernhard Cohen. When the idealism died, the arrogance was already well rooted and strong. If it was given nourishment, it would expand. And power feeds arrogance. As Moses obtained power, therefore, the traits symptomatic of his arrogance became steadily more noticeable. The pattern's hue darkened.
His mother had always displayed—as a Madison House trustee and as a wife—a conviction of her own infallibility and a predisposition to impose her will on others, an unwillingness to listen to others, a burning impatience to see her solutions to problems implemented, to Get Things Done. Moses' imagination seemed most easily fired, as his mother's had been, by physical problems and physical solutions, problems that could be solved by construction, by the shaping of concrete and steel. And the resemblance in traits between mother and son went beyond that. As a staffer at the Bureau of Municipal Research, he had displayed the same dogmatism and the same impatience. Bob Moses had wanted his own way—and he had wanted it when he wanted it.
And now that he had power, he was going to see that he got it.
He had never wanted to listen to people who disagreed with him. Now, in the main, he didn't have to. "When he talked to you," recalls Leonard W. Hall, then a state assemblyman, "he'd just tell you what he was going to do. If you disagreed with him and tried to explain your feelings, or even started asking questions, he would cut right in, slash at you, without answering the questions, making you feel stupid for asking. And if you were talking to him on the phone, he'd just hang up on you. I remember talking to him on the phone and disagreeing with him about something and I was in the middle of a sentence and the damn phone was slammed down."
Moses had always displayed contempt for people he felt were considerably beneath him, the colored "subject people" of the British Empire, for example, or civil servants who hadn't attended Oxford or Cambridge. At the Municipal Civil Service Commission, his irritation at having to interrupt his work for public hearings indicated a tendency to feel that the public he was serving was beneath him, that its suggestions about its own destiny were not worth listening to. Now that feeling about the public was intensified. When the Governor's office received a letter making a suggestion about parks or criticizing one of the regional commissions, the letter was invariably referred by George Graves, Smith's secretary, to Moses for a suggested reply that could be sent back over the Governor's signature. Now, more and more frequently, Moses would suggest that no one bother to reply at all.
His contempt was not limited to the public. It included, apparently, most state legislators. If he wasn't hanging up on them in mid-sentence, he was treating them with extravagant disdain. "They didn't dislike him just because politically he was cutting them to pieces," Hall recalls. "They disliked him personally. He acted with a complete arrogance. He insulted those men to their face." Sniffing at the patronage possibilities at Jones Beach as though they were sea air, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jeremiah F. Twomey of Brooklyn asked Moses to drop around for a chat
before the Finance Committee hearings on a Jones Beach appropriation bill. According to Hall, to whom Twomey told the story:
"Twomey says, 'Bob, it looks like there'll be a lot of jobs out there, and I was wondering if we could get a couple.'
"Bob answers very softly, very gently, very politely. 'What did you have in mind, Jerry?' he asks. Jerry mentions one job, and Moses says very softly, very politely, 'Do you have anything else on your mind, Jerry?' Jerry, completely taken in, thinking that for once this fellow is going to be reasonable, mentions a couple of other jobs, and Moses says, 'Do you have anything else on your mind, Jerry?' Jerry says, 'Well, that's about all.' And Moses says, 'Jerry, you can take that bill and stick it up your ass!' "
Moses had always been impatient. Most men didn't move fast enough for him. Now he could do something about it.
The park philanthropists on the State Council of Parks didn't move fast enough for him.
There were many reasons. For one thing, most of the regional commissions whose chairmen comprised the council were made up of men with a different philosophy of parks from his. This was understandable. They were, in the main, elderly men, men out of the days when parks had meant "conservation" rather than "recreation." Even during the 1920's, of course, parks still meant "conservation" to most park experts; there wasn't one in the country who would lean as heavily as Moses to thinking of parks as baseball fields and tennis courts rather than as glades and forests and hiking trails. The regional commissioners, men of the older era, had become interested in parks to preserve as much of nature's beauties as possible from a ruthless civilization. When they saw the developer's bulldozer imperiling a favorite piece of woodland, they purchased the woodland with their own money and presented it to the state, and when they realized that the state would not provide sufficient funds to preserve it as it should be preserved, they put up the money themselves, year after year, and they put up their time, too, spending weekends and vacations on inspection trips, often making needed repairs with their own hands. In drawing up their wills, they chose carefully the men they wanted to administer the properties after they were gone—and these men, too, felt that preserving the properties in the condition in which they had received them was a sacred trust. Proposals for huge parking fields, for restaurants—these seemed to them to conflict with the ideals they had sworn themselves to preserve. If the state now wanted to "develop" those parks, well, certainly some development was necessary; as long as it was done slowly and carefully, it could be worked out—but they wanted to make sure that the development did not destroy the natural qualities they treasured.
There were other reasons, too, for Moses' impatience with the regional commissioners. At bottom, the philosophy of government on which they had been weaned emphasized the rights of the individual. They believed, therefore, that governmental power should be used with the utmost restraint. They were, frankly, dismayed by the way Moses had used entry and appropriation against Havemeyer and Macy, by the way he had threatened to use
it against the North Shore barons. And they didn't intend to use such techniques themselves, even if using slower techniques meant that parks and parkways in their areas wouldn't be acquired as*fast as Moses wanted.
A more important source of conflict in their dealings with Moses, however, had nothing to do with philosophy. It was simply that the old men wanted to remain in charge of the parks they loved.
Moses had let them believe that they would remain in charge. He had given them no hint of his true purposes. For Moses had needed them. He had needed their prestige, their reputation (as strong with legislators as with the public) for uprightness, for unselfishness and for devotion to the cause of parks. He had needed the backing of their names.
And they had given him that backing. During the debate over the $15,000,000 bond issue, they had made use of their influence in their home counties to mute upstate resentment toward such a large spending proposal. Judge Ellis J. Staley of Albany had spoken night after night to civic groups in Albany, Troy and Schenectady. Judge Alphonse Trumpbore Clearwater, elderly and ailing, had climbed out of a sickbed in Kingston to tour Ulster County so successfully that that bastion of conservatism had, to Al Smith's astonishment, actually given the referendum a majority. During the Taylor Estate fight, the old park men had let Smith invoke their names—"everyone knows Judge Clearwater"—to dramatize the fact that even these dyed-in-the-wool Republicans could not support the Republican legislative proposals for parks. GOP leaders had told them that Smith was using them to destroy their party. Many of the park men had felt there was some truth in this. But parks came first with them. And when Smith, through Moses, had asked them to come to Albany, they had come.
They had given Moses the help he asked because they believed what he had told them. When he assured them—as he did over and over both in letters and to their faces—that under his park plan t
hey would "continue their duties and powers," that they would continue to administer the parks they loved, that the State Parks Council was merely an "advisory agency," they believed him. And when the bill creating the State Parks Council was signed, their leaders had elected him its chairman.
But now Moses didn't need them any more.
Not a month after his election, Judge Staley, who administered John Boyd Thacher Park near Albany for the American Scenic and Historical Preservation Society, routinely sent to the state a request for $15,000 to build a new caretaker's cottage. State officials told the astonished judge that all such requests now had to go through the State Parks Council, through Moses. And Moses disapproved the request. "The height of impertinence," Staley told the society's trustees. They agreed. "It is highly desirable," they said in the minutes of their meeting of May 26, 1924, "that there be a clear understanding of the difference between the powers of the Council as 'a central advisory agency' and the executive powers of 'the existing commissions, boards and organizations governing the . . . parks.' "
They got their clear understanding. When, during the summer of 1925, they submitted to the council their budget requests for 1926, Moses curtly
disapproved many of them. When they tried to circumvent Moses by sending them to state budget officials as they had in the past, the officials sent them back telling them that under the new Parks Council law, all park budget requests had to be transmitted to the state through the council. At a council meeting at 261 Broadway, Judge Clearwater "reminded" Moses that the council's powers were "advisory," not "supervisory." Really? Moses replied coldly. Might he suggest that the judge read the law?
The old park men read the law—and began to realize what they had done.
The realization grew.
Moses had written the Parks Council bylaws. At the first meeting after he had been elected chairman, when he was still charming the old park men, they had approved them, believing them only a formality. Now, reading the bylaws, they realized that all power in the council was centralized in its chairman. The council's finance committee, the key unit which would weigh the requests of the regional commissions, was not elected by them but appointed by him—and he had appointed to three of its five places council staff members hired by and responsible only to the chairman. The whole council staff was responsible to the chairman. And this staff was empowered in the bylaws to draw up the plans for all state parks, including their state parks.
The old men reluctantly decided they would have to deny Moses a second one-year term—and suddenly realized, when they tallied up votes, that while their commissions controlled a majority of the state parks, they did not control a majority of the State Parks Council. Six of its eleven votes were in Moses' hands: Moses' own; two cast by Smith appointees not directly connected with parks, the State Conservation Commissioner and the director of the State Museum; three cast by the presidents of three new regional commissions which did not at the moment have any parks to administer but which Moses had insisted—for reasons the old park men now understood—be represented on the council and to which Smith had appointed men who would take Moses' orders. The old park men had many reservations about Moses' over-all park policies as well as about his plans for specific parks. For one thing, they were concerned about his eagerness to develop parks that were far outside city limits— Heckscher was fifty miles from Times Square, Letchworth fifty miles from Rochester—without providing any means of transportation to them other than auto; the truly poor masses of the cities didn't own automobiles, they pointed out; how were they to reach these parks? But every time they raised such points, they were voted down. And Moses was re-elected to the chairmanship in 1925, 1926, 1927 and 1928.
Some of Moses' fights with the elderly park philanthropists could be viewed as conflicts of philosophy—as his determination not to allow his dreams to be thwarted by other men's smaller-scale vision—although the closer one
examines their details, the more it appears that the crucial conflict in each was between his demand for speed and their feeling that since once nature was altered by man, it could never be restored to its original condition, any changes in the magnificent gorges and mountains which had been entrusted to them must be considered with painstaking care and designed to blend in with the existing topography; the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, for example, did not object to making Letch worth State Park more accessible to the public and to furnishing accommodations for families wanting to stay overnight; they just wanted the proposed inn—and large adjoining parking garage—built on the rim of the beautiful Genesee River Gorge rather than right in its heart, as Moses proposed. On other battles between Moses and the old park men, however, it is more difficult to place any philosophical interpretation. The nature of these fights hints that power was now, for the first time in his life, becoming an end in itself, that he was beginning to crave it now not only for the sake of dreams but for its own sake, that although, through his bill drafting, he had given himself much of the power in the field of parks, he was no longer satisfied with much of the power, that he now wanted all the power in the field.
The suspicion is aroused most strongly by his treatment of the commissioners of the state park at Niagara.
There were five Niagara commissioners—all of them elderly men—but the two most active had long been Judge Clearwater and Ansley Wilcox.
"Everyone knows Judge Clearwater," Smith had said, and, in regard to the Central Tier at least, the Governor may have been very nearly right. At seventy-seven Alphonse Trumpbore Clearwater of Kingston was a legend throughout the band of thinly populated counties that stretched three hundred miles across the middle of the state. Tall and thin, with a face that would have been cold were it not for the upward turn of the corners of his mouth, he was a wing-collared embodiment of devotion to the public good. He had been both district attorney of Ulster County and a lawyer who, in an era in which the poor often went unrepresented in court, represented the poor—and as both prosecutor and defender his brilliance and, despite a dry and precise speaking style, his remarkable oratorical ability made him a lawyer other lawyers feared to oppose. While still young, Judge Clearwater had been president of the State Bar Association and a Justice of the State Supreme Court; men said he could, had he wished, been Governor. But he did not so wish. Instead of a politician, he became a historian, and he served his state by studying its history—scholars regarded his knowledge as un-equaled—and by selecting from appointments proffered by its Governors not those that would have brought him fame but those that would enable him to help preserve its locales of history and beauty, such as Niagara State Park. His selflessness was widely known; although he had renounced politics, his voice was regarded by politicians as the most influential in the Central Tier. When in 1925 a desperate Moses, assuring Clearwater that the Parks Council would be only an "advisory" body, had asked the judge to help him in the Taylor Estate fight, he had come, old and ill, to Albany to stand before a hostile Republican caucus and argue in Moses' behalf. When legis-
lators had begun criticizing Moses' spending proposals for Niagara as extravagant, Clearwater had written him a letter saying "Your views ... are just"—and that line of criticism had abruptly stopped. Of all the old park men, Clearwater had been Moses' most effective supporter.
Ansley Wilcox, who had served as a Niagara park commissioner for forty years, was a chubby old gentleman with a white walrus mustache. A successful attorney, he lived in a stately Georgian mansion on Buffalo's fashionable Delaware Avenue. But Ansley Wilcox had been a brilliant student at Yale and after graduation he had gone on to Oxford. Then, attracted by the ideals of the municipal reform movement, he had spent years campaigning, fruitlessly, for a civil service merit system for Buffalo. Then he began to fight for parks. While still in his twenties, he determined to rescue the gorge overlooking Niagara Falls from the factories, mills and cheap rooming houses that were creeping along its edge. Spending two years of his own time appraising
the land, he had determined that it would take $1,500,000 to condemn it and, in 1885, after a courageous and bitter fight, had persuaded the Legislature to appropriate the money and create Niagara State Park, which by the 1920's was nationally known, the single most famous park in the country. If Moses had studied Wilcox's life, he might have noticed more than a few resemblances to his own.
But Moses wasn't interested in studying Wilcox's life. And he didn't need Clearwater any more. The two old men—the entire Niagara Commission in fact—were a constant irritant to him. Why? No one could accuse the Niagara commissioners of excessive conservatism or of being too limited in their aims for improving the Niagara Park, long allowed by the Legislature to deteriorate, and for extending the park—along with connecting parkways and bridges—all along the Niagara Frontier. Their aims were, in most important respects, identical with Moses'. So was their insistence on speed.
Ansley Wilcox, in fact, had even more reason to want speed than Moses. In 1925, Wilcox was dying of what his obituaries would call "the wasting disease"—cancer. And Wilcox knew he was dying. He wanted desperately to see before he died at least the beginning of the refurbishment of the park he had created as a young man and had administered, frequently with his own money, for forty years, and at least a start on the park extension and parkway that would preserve forever the gorge he loved.
To speed the refurbishment, which included the acquisition of a new elevator to carry tourists down the cliffs near the falls to the famed Cave of Winds, Wilcox had persuaded another commission member, Paul A. Schoell-kopf, president of the Niagara Falls Power Company, to have power-company engineers draw up plans for the elevator so that construction could begin as soon as funds were allocated. And he had done everything he could to enable the commission to get a fast start on the parkway along the edge of the Niagara gorge. Knowing that the $1,000,000 allocated to Niagara in the park referendum would pay for only a fraction of the necessary right-of-way, he asked Schoellkopf, whose power company owned much of the land along the gorge, to agree to donate easements if the commission acquired the rest of the right-of-way. Schoellkopf, who knew the
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 36
