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

by Caro, Robert A

  Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn's estate, south of Winthrop's and Mills's estates, south of Stimson's and De Forest's. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot. Robert Moses had offered men of wealth and influence bridges across the parkway so that there would be no interference with their pleasures. But he wouldn't offer James Roth a bridge so that there would be no interference with his planting.

  In years to come, James Roth would talk often about the injustice that had been done him. "My father was really rocked by this; he talked about it until the end of his life," says his son, Jimmy, who had watched his father and mother sweating side by side over their land. "And I don't know that I blame him. I'll tell you—my father and mother worked very hard on that place, and made something out of it, and then someone just cut it in two. To have someone take away something you have ..." The farm never really paid again. There just wasn't enough fertile acreage left. And the Roths found that it took fully twenty-five minutes to drive their team to the nearest road that crossed the parkway and then to get back to plow the other side of the farm. Each round trip took about fifty minutes, and these were fifty-minute segments slashed out of the life of a man to whom every minute was necessary. "It was quite a ways," Mrs. Roth recalls. "It was quite a ways for a man who was working hard already." The condemnation award "never came to much," Mrs. Roth says. And because there were two separate, rather small pieces of property instead of a single big one, she says, they couldn't even sell the farm.

  The situation was the same for the other Cold Spring Harbor farmers whose farms were ruined by the Northern State Parkway. To the end of their lives most of them would remember the day on which they heard that "the road was coming" as a day of tragedy. There was only one aspect of the tragedy that alleviated their bitterness. That was their belief that it was unavoidable, that the route of the parkway had indeed been determined by

  engineering considerations, and therefore really could not be changed. Forty years later, when the author asked them about the possibility of the parkway being built through the big estates to the north, not one of those farmers thought that such a possibility had ever existed.

  Moses was given a further increase in power as a result of Smith's bid for the presidency in 1928.

  No associate of the Governor was more enthusiastic about the bid than Moses. On the June night when the Democratic Party was balloting at its convention in Houston and the Executive Mansion in Albany was overflowing with reporters, well-wishers and hangers-on, the porches and the grounds outside filled with throngs, Moses was one of the handful who were invited to join the Smith family in the big second-floor room in which the Governor was trying to listen to the balloting over the static. When Ohio's votes gave Smith the nomination and Emily Smith ran to her father and threw her arms around his neck, it was to Moses that Belle Moskowitz turned and said, almost crying, "Bob, it's over!" And other people in the room were to say that they had never seen Moses happier than at that moment.

  Belle's remark was, after all, understandable; Al Smith had run in twenty-two elections and he had won twenty-one, and in the one he had lost he ran almost a million votes ahead of his ticket. She—and Moses and the other members of the Smith inner circle in the room with the Governor —didn't see how he could lose. (Al Smith got up from the big armchair in which he had sat for hours, his attention on the radio, motionless except for the grinding of his lips against his big cigar and the stroking of one hand on the neck of his Great Dane, Jeff, walked over to a small bar, grabbed two handfuls of ice cubes, began dropping them into glasses and said, "Now, all of yez! Come aboard!")

  But Moses did not play a major role in the Smith presidential campaign. The Governor had long since stopped using him as a speech drafter —"He had a great respect for Bob's viewpoint on everything except speeches," Howard Cullman says. "The Governor said Bob would just murder him on those. He said Bob had no idea of the public pulse on most issues"—and the campaign was run by Mrs. Moskowitz and by a group of wealthy Irish Catholics who had recently become close to Smith.

  So Moses was spared being with his Gamaliel when he went down to defeat in what Oscar Handlin has called "a dark episode in American history." He wasn't with him when, on his tours of a South and a West that he hardly knew, Smith realized that the gay renditions of "The Sidewalks of New York" were being drowned out by whispers that were the surface hissing of what Handlin has called "the dark secret prejudice against the urban foreigners," including Catholics "held in subservience to a foreign despot by an army of priests and bishops." Moses never saw the fiery crosses that burned on the hills of Kansas and Oklahoma—and on the Shinnecock

  Hills of Suffolk County—as Smith's campaign train passed. Moses wasn't on the train when the realization spread through it that the prejudice and intolerance could not be licked and that even if it could, 1928, with the "Hoover Market" booming and the nation prosperous and complacent, just wasn't a Democratic year.

  Moses' contribution to the Smith campaign was twofold. First, his accomplishments provided the ammunition for the most successful of Smith's speeches, those which concentrated on his record as Governor. Second, while Smith was campaigning, Moses ran the state for him.

  This was no minor task; voters in 1928 were far less tolerant than those in 1974 are about officeholders neglecting their duties to seek higher office, and Smith realized that the Republican legislators would take full advantage of any opportunity to charge him with laxness. To make sure that there was no opportunity, Smith gave Moses full authority over all state departments during the months he spent on the campaign trail. He even told Moses to use his office and sit in his big chair in the Executive Chamber. Moses did so. He presided over the drawing up of the 1929 state budget, the first in the state's history to be drawn up under his executive budget plan. He handled the Governor's mail, screening it for important letters that should be sent on to him—and making sure that he never saw the obscene threats that terrified Smith's wife, Katie, when she read them. While Smith was campaigning, Moses ran New York. And the measure of his success in the job was that there wasn't a single Republican charge of laxness in that period.

  Moses had no opportunity to take pleasure from either his power or his success as Smith's surrogate. Time, which had for so long panted hungrily at his heels, had drawn close enough to nip them now.

  Smith had been prevented by law from running for Governor at the same time he was running for President, and while a new Governor could not oust Moses as Long Island Park Commission head—his six-year term, after all, did not expire until 1930—he could effectively kill any of his park projects that were not well under way when he was inaugurated. And while Moses had accomplished so much during his four years in office, the accomplishments were as nothing beside his dreams. There was, in 1928, so much yet to do. Although the entire right-of-way for the Southern State Parkway had been acquired and construction started on much of it, not a single section had been completed. Without that section, the public would not see how great it was going to be and would not be ready to support him against any Governor who tried to keep him from completing it up to the same—expensive—standards. The Wantagh Causeway to Jones Beach was not completed, and since the public could not see the strand, how could it know he was justified in the expenditure of whatever millions were needed to make it the greatest bathing beach in the world? The Northern State Parkway was not even begun. Unless he could announce that a substantial

  portion of the right-of-way had been acquired, how could he force a new Governor into building the road? So in November and December of 1928, construction crews were out on the Southern State and the Wantagh, and the surveyors were out along the route of the Northern State.

  Those c
lose to Robert Moses knew that there was justification for his urgency, a reason for the desperation which now seemed to underlie his haste. "Without his loyalty to me," Moses was to say about Al Smith, "I could have done nothing." He had had Al Smith—and his loyalty—for ten years. But now he was to have Al Smith no more. And the man who was to follow Moses' greatest friend into the Governor's chair was Moses' deadliest enemy.

  Cousin Teddy into the New York Legislature and an Assistant Secretaryship of the Navy, had commented that if TR's sons proved unable to carry the old Rough Rider's banner back up the steps of the White House, there was another member of the family who might do it for them.

  His every intervention on Smith's behalf had been immensely helpful. Striding, athletic and graceful, to the speaker's podium at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, he had seconded the Governor's token presidential nomination in an effective speech. In July 1922, with Smith, out of office, taking his evening walks home with Moses, Roosevelt, crippled now, got Smith's gubernatorial candidacy off the ground with an open letter calling on him to run. Floor manager for Smith at the 1924 national convention, he had been his nominator, too, swinging to the platform on crutches and delivering a speech that, using a phrase from Wordsworth, dubbed the Governor "the Happy Warrior of the Political Battlefield"—a speech that historian Mark Sullivan called "a noble utterance." Among Smith's happier moments during the convention's interminable 103 ballots were Roosevelt's appearances at the microphone to rally his supporters. So enthusiastic a Smith supporter was he that when the Governor ran in 1926 against Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the new Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Franklin Roosevelt found himself physically unable to campaign against his cousin, he sent his wife to do it. (To remind voters of Theodore Jr.'s connection, peripheral at worst, with the Teapot Dome oil scandal, Eleanor Roosevelt constructed a huge cardboard cutout of a teapot blowing steam, tied it on the top of a car and with it trailed her cousin-in-law around the state, a maneuver which she later ruefully admitted had been a "rough stunt")

  But Roosevelt was never really part of the Smith inner circle. As Oscar Handlin put it, he "had been brought up in an atmosphere that stressed the compulsive understatement. ... It was inevitable that he should feel awkward in Smith's suite at the Biltmore. All those people! He may never actually have dined at the Tiger Room, but he must have heard stories of the goings-on. He could not, without denying his own background, fail to disapprove of the kinds of people Al and his friends were."

  And yet, as Handlin added, "mingled with the disapproval was a touch of envy at being left out of the fun." Roosevelt obviously wished he had Moses' gift for blending in easily with the Governor and his hard-drinking, hard-talking friends. Wanting to be part of the Biltmore scene, feeling awkward about going there alone, Roosevelt would, in 1923, often telephone Moses in the late afternoon from his office at 120 Broadway and ask if he might stop by, pick him up and go up to the hotel with him.

  Moses took Roosevelt along, but the latter's appearances at the Biltmore were always touched with restraint. Smith appreciated Roosevelt's help and felt a genuine affection for him and Eleanor. Shy about his lack of grammar, the Governor almost never wrote personal letters, but he wrote many to the Roosevelts after Campobello, short, gruff notes full of sympathy and cheer. But, despite the Governor's efforts to erase it, the line between

  the Fourth Ward contract executor and the Ivy Leaguer—the line which Moses had so thoroughly erased in his own case—always remained drawn between Smith and Roosevelt. Once, with regret in his voice, Smith told a friend: "Franklin just isn't the kind of man you can take into the pissroom and talk intimately with."

  Furthermore, Smith and his circle had something less than respect for Roosevelt's abilities. This attitude was understandable. Roosevelt's Harvard classmates had felt the same way. Mocking his propensity for hopping into, and out of, different interests in quick and shallow succession, they called him "the featherduster." After college, because of the same propensity, Roosevelt had not been a particularly successful lawyer or businessman. An acquaintance would recall that when, at the age of twenty-eight, he decided to enter politics, running for state senator from Dutchess County, "everybody called him 'Franklin' and regarded him as a harmless bust." In Albany, his haughty manner, accentuated by "his habit of throwing up his head so as to give the appearance of looking down his nose, his pince-nez—all this, combined with his leadership in the anti-Sheehan fight, stamped him as a snob and branded his ideas, in the outraged language of one regular Democrat, as 'the silly conceits of a political prig.' " Frances Perkins was to remember him arguing with two or three colleagues, "his small mouth pursed up," saying, " 'No, no, I won't hear of it!' " Tammany's Big Tim Sullivan was only summing up the prevailing opinion in Albany when he said, "Awful, arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt." Moreover, as Handlin notes, to the hard, shrewd men around the Governor, who had clawed their way up through a tough world and who knew state government in detail, Roosevelt, with his airy plans, his many hobbies and "his glittering, sweeping discourses, seemed a hopelessly impractical intellectual."

  For some reason, Smith's advisers overlooked the fact that not Silent Charlie Murphy but the "political prig" had been the winner of the Sheehan fight. And, after his polio attack in 1921, they did not seem to consider what it had taken for Roosevelt to decide to go back into politics at a time when, Eleanor Roosevelt was later to recall, he was lying in bed and working for hours to try to wiggle one toe. Roosevelt's head had always been tilted at that gay, confident angle; they didn't seem to think of the strength that had had to be found somewhere to keep it tilted now. The agonizing steps he had taken to the podium to give his Happy Warrior speech were the manifestation* of an indomitable spirit, but Smith's intimates never thought of the speech without giggling over what had preceded it. The story as they knew it would be somewhat different from that recounted by historians, or by Dore Schary, who in Sunrise at Campobello portrayed FDR as saying, when Smith asked him to let Joseph Proskauer help write the speech, "I won't mind the addition of a few phrases. But, Al, what I say will have to be what I want to say." Actually, when Smith and Proskauer walked into Roosevelt's office at Smith campaign headquarters and asked him to make the nominating speech, Roosevelt replied, "I'd like to, but I'm so busy with the delegates—Joe, will you write me a speech?"

  "I had already written a speech, the Happy Warrior speech," Pros-kauer would tell the author. "I waited a few days and then sent it to him. He asked me to come in and talk about it. He said, 'Joe, I can't make that speech. It's too poetic. You can't quote a Wordsworth poem to a bunch of politicians.' "

  Proskauer told the author—and so did Smith's daughter Emily and two other Smith intimates—that he kept insisting on retaining the Happy Warrior line while Roosevelt kept insisting that it be removed. Otherwise, Roosevelt said, he would refuse to give the speech. Roosevelt even wrote a speech of his own.

  "Finally," Proskauer recalled, "I said why didn't we get a third person to come and take a look and try to reconcile the two speeches. I said, 'I was thinking of [Herbert Bayard] Swope.' He said, Tine.' That night we went to Frank's apartment. Swope made a faux pas. We hadn't told him who had written them and he read Frank's speech first, threw it on the floor and said, 'Joe, this is the goddamnedest, rottenest speech I've ever read!' Then he read mine and he said, 'This is the greatest speech since Bragg nominated Cleveland!'* Roosevelt continued to argue and to say he refused to give my speech. Finally about midnight, I got up and said, 'Frank, we're all exhausted. I have just enough authority from the Governor to tell you you'll either make that speech or none at all.' And he said, 'Oh, I'll make the goddamned speech and it'll be a flop!' "

  The laughter which boomed out at the Tiger Room or the Biltmore suite when Swope or Proskauer repeated the story—and they repeated it often—helped to blind the men sitting in those jovial watering holes to developing traits in Roosevelt's character. And, more important, it blinded them also to the fact that, while
he was completely loyal to Smith, he was using his position as a campaigner for a presidential candidate to keep in touch with key Democrats across the country in preparation for a presidential bid of his own. They never guessed that he even had a timetable— a run for the Governorship in 1932 and the Presidency in 1936. As one Roosevelt biographer put it, the Smith advisers regarded their acquisition as "no more than a showy but harmless piece of window dressing."

  All the advisers, that is, except one. Sitting off in a corner of the Biltmore suite, away from the laughter, Belle Moskowitz, who had seen in the thirty-year-old failure Robert Moses something no one else had seen, was watching "harmless" Franklin Roosevelt. And, by 1924, she had come to the conclusion that he was a threat, a very dangerous threat, to her dream that Alfred E. Smith would one day sit in the White House.

  The other advisers didn't take this view seriously^For once, they said, Mrs. M was wrong.

  ♦At the 1884 Democratic National Convention, General Edward S. Bragg seconded (not nominated) Grover Cleveland for President in a speech that was so eloquent —it included the memorable phrase "They love him for the enemies he has made"— that the galleries stood and urged him on with shouts of: "A little more grape, General! A little more grape!"