In 1924, when Smith appointed Moses president of the Long Island State Park Commission, the Governor appointed Roosevelt chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission. The thin veneer of friendliness between Moses and Roosevelt thereupon flaked off abruptly and completely.
Moses would attribute the break to a single incident, revolving around gnarled, emaciated little Louis M. Howe, Roosevelt's devoted adviser, whom Smith's circle, because of his habitually dirty, sweat-stained collars and suits dotted with food stains and flecked with cigarette ashes, called "Lousy Louie."
When Roosevelt attempted to appoint Howe secretary of the Taconic Commission, Moses stepped in. If Roosevelt wanted a "secretary and valet," he said, he would have to pay him himself.
Getting Howe the secretary's job, which paid $5,000 per year, was important to Roosevelt. Unable to move around freely, he knew that he would be able to remain in politics only if he was able to delegate most of the tasks he had formerly performed himself. He therefore needed an organization, even if it was only two or three secretaries, but he had to have Howe to direct them and to represent him at political meetings he himself could no longer attend, and he was not financially able to pay Howe an adequate salary. Howe had been about to accept a lucrative offer from private industry when Roosevelt was stricken, but as soon as he had learned of the tragedy at Campobello, he had declined the job. Roosevelt had to find a place for him on some governmental payroll and the only governmental body on which Roosevelt held an official position in 1924 was the Taconic Commission. But Moses was adamant. The State Parks Council would veto any salary for Howe as secretary, he said.
Moses was always to contend that the bad blood between him and Roosevelt flowed from this single incident. Howe never forgave him for the "valet" insult, he said, and took every opportunity to poison Roosevelt's mind against him. "You see," Moses would tell the author, "Roosevelt was in such terrible physical shape that he was home at night a lot, and a person in that kind of condition is very susceptible to the people who are there with him in that house all night. And Howe was always there. And Roosevelt would listen to his stories. It was a result of his illness—he was susceptible to that kind of thing."
But the feeling between Moses and Roosevelt burned too deep to be attributable to a single incident. Personality may have had something to do with it. Moses, after all, was not the only one of the two men whom Albany had found arrogant. Moses was not the only one of the two men who had been given a sip of power, who had liked the taste and who wanted more. And much of the feeling was certainly due to the fact that during the early 1920's Moses was not the only one of the two men dreaming about parks and parkways. During the same years that Robert Moses was tramping the hills and beaches of Long Island, envisioning great parks and parkways
there, Franklin Roosevelt was tramping—in his imagination—the hills and rolling farmland of his native Dutchess County, envisioning great parks and parkways there. His ideas were on a scale as big as Moses'. And in the park system that Moses was building, there was room for only one man with big ideas.
Roosevelt had been interested in parks long before Moses, in fact. Both because of his own preoccupations and because of his interest in his famous cousin's campaign to conserve natural resources, he had, from childhood, "cared deeply about nature—about land, water and trees." For years, he had been planting yellow poplar and white pine seedlings by the thousands at the Roosevelt mansion at Hyde Park. Concerned about the destruction of New York's great forests by lumber companies, he proposed in 1922 the formation of a syndicate that would purchase a tract within a hundred miles of New York City and operate it as a park, as private interests operated forests for recreation in Europe.
If Moses knew Long Island as few men knew it, Roosevelt could, in the days when he could walk, say the same thing about Dutchess County and about the other three counties—Putnam, Columbia and Rensselaer— whose gently rolling hills made with Dutchess a continuous soft green border, broken only by the patchwork of cultivated fields, all along the east bank of the Hudson from Westchester to Albany. He had long had his eye on particularly beautiful tracts which he wanted preserved from commercial exploitation—he had, in fact, been negotiating on behalf of the Boy Scouts for one in Putnam County. He was especially enthusiastic about a plan to have New York build a tri-state park, in cooperation with Massachusetts and Connecticut, at the juncture of those three states. The Bronx River Parkway, just opened in Westchester County and a wonder of the world, was pointing at the Taconic region. Even before he was appointed to the Taconic Commission, Roosevelt had envisioned joining to the Bronx River Parkway a new parkway that would head straight north through the Taconic farm counties to parks that could be created there, thereby opening up the lovely Hudson Valley. The parkway as he envisioned it would eventually extend all the way to Albany, and thus make accessible to New York City the beauties of the Adirondack, Berkshire and White mountains. When Smith and Moses—badly needing his name in the Taylor Estate fight—offered Roosevelt the chairmanship of the Taconic Park Commission, whose jurisdiction would encompass the whole east bank of the Hudson from Westchester to Albany, Roosevelt asked if he would be able to build the parkway. Moses apparently gave him assurances on the point—Roosevelt was later to remind Smith that he had—and Roosevelt eagerly accepted.
Within months, he had old Clarence Fahnestock primed to donate his 6,169 acres at Lake Oscawana as a state park and he had completed arrangements for the transfer of three smaller tracts farther north. Having himself driven around the countryside, he had selected sites for "small camping parks" that he wanted built along the parkway. He was sketching himself picnic tables and fireplaces and thinking about which type of rock should
be used to face bridges over the parkway so that it would blend in most naturally with the landscape.
Roosevelt was impatient to get this "splendid project" under way; the price of the land for the Boy Scout camp had risen 30 percent in the two years he was negotiating for it. He was driven, as was Moses, by the knowledge that soaring land values were making land acquisition continually more difficult. "The securing of the rights of way for the state should," he wrote, "be immediately put through."
But there was insufficient money in the park allocations made by the Legislature even for Moses' Long Island park plan, and he didn't want any spent on a 125-mile parkway somewhere else. And, it may be, he didn't want within the park system he was so assiduously welding into a monolithic entity responsive solely to his command any opening wedges driven for a project that would be under the command of another vigorous, independent man. Repeatedly, Moses' State Parks Council slashed Roosevelt's budget requests to a level insufficient even to begin acquiring right-of-way for a parkway. The money allowed was not sufficient even for the Taconic Commission to hire an adequate executive staff, and Roosevelt charged that the lack of staff prevented the commission from making plans that would allow it to spend, on small parks, even the meager amount of money it was allotted. In addition, Moses now said a Taconic Parkway should not extend north to Albany but should end only a few miles north of New York City.
Matters came to a head in November 1926.
In submitting during that month his budget request for 1927, Roosevelt asked for funds for engineering plans for the Taconic Parkway, for right-of-way surveys and for salaries for an adequate staff (including Louis Howe). When the State Parks Council met to consider the regional commissions' budget requests (Roosevelt was in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he went every winter to try to coax his dead legs back to life), it disapproved those of the Taconic Commission, on the grounds that it had not spent all the money allocated to it in the past.
Returning north, Roosevelt had at least one bitter face-to-face confrontation with Moses, the details of which can only be imagined. Then Roosevelt tried to go over Moses' head. In December 1926, he wrote Smith asking the Governor to restore the funds he had requested. "It is an absurd and humiliating position to be put in, to be informe
d that we could have no money because through lack of an Executive we have not been able to properly expend the money we had and then to be informed that we cannot have an Executive because we have not been given more money," he wrote.
But Smith was taking Moses' word as to what was happening in park matters. He asked Moses about the Taconic situation and Moses wrote Smith: "I suggest you write him [Roosevelt] a letter along the line attached." The "attached" said that of course the parkway would go through—it did not say through to where—but that there was so much competition for the limited money available that it must be concentrated on those projects which were moving ahead fastest, and the Taconic Parkway was not one of those.
In fact, the "attached" said, "practically none" of the money already allocated to the Taconic Commission had been spent. Smith sent the letter to Roosevelt exactly as Moses had written it.
A year later, the State Parks Council eliminated from the Taconic Commission's request all funds except those needed for bare maintenance of existing parks. Roosevelt wrote Smith that "the other members of the Commission and I feel very strongly that" the elimination "ends the necessity for the usefulness of the Commission. We have practically no function left." Moses simply used us, Roosevelt said. "The enormous appropriations for . . Long Island while, perhaps, necessary, prove merely that we have been completely useful [to] other people." And we won't be used any more: "Unless something is done, the Commissioners do not feel it is worth while to continue."
This was serious; there was a presidential election coming up and Smith needed Roosevelt; in fact, he wanted Roosevelt to nominate him again. He apparently intervened; the commission's operating funds were increased. And Roosevelt was assured, apparently by Moses, that when the Parks Council submitted to the Smith-Hewitt-Hutchinson committee requests for additional allocations out of a new $10,000,000 park bond issue that had been passed in 1927, it would ask for $200,000 for Taconic Parkway right-of-way.
But when the three-man committee met, on January 23, 1928, and approved all regional allocations except one, that one was the Taconic. On January 30, 1928, Roosevelt wrote Smith a letter that was as revealing— in the depth of the bitterness it displayed toward Moses—as it was remarkable, coming as it did from the pen of the man who would later shepherd his country through depression and war.
"I wasn't born yesterday!" Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the Governor. "You see I have been in the game so long that I now realize the mistake I made with this Taconic State Park Commission was in not playing the kind of politics that our friend Bob Moses used. . . . You know, just as well as I do, that Bob has skinned us alive this year—has worked things so beautifully that his baby on Long Island is plentifully taken care of and that all the other Park Commissions up-state, except ours, are getting practically what was approved by the State Council of Parks. When the State Council of Parks approved appropriations to the Taconic State Park Commission of nearly $200,000, Bob knew perfectly well that it would not go through and had his tongue in his cheek when he tried to tell us that he was trying to get it through. ... As a matter of practical fact, I am very certain in my own mind that we could have got at least some appropriation for acquisition of land this year if Bob and you had gone after it. The money is there—within the total of the budget. For instance, Bob told me himself the other day that on the contract for the New York State Office Building, a couple of hundred thousand dollars will be saved."
As park men like Ansley Wilcox and Judge Clearwater had charged before him, Roosevelt charged that Moses had lied about him to Smith when he was not around to refute the lies. "I am sorry to say it is a fact that Bob Moses has played fast and loose with the Taconic State Park Commission since the beginning," Roosevelt wrote. "I give him great credit for many
accomplishments and for his fine vision of a complete State Park system, but he has been guilty of making so many false statements about the Taconic State Park Commission which I have checked up and know all about, that I am very certain that you have been given a very erroneous lot of information about the Commission."
As Wilcox and Clearwater had charged before him, Roosevelt charged that Moses had lied about him to the other members of the Parks Council when he was not around to refute the lies. "One example is sufficient!" he wrote. "Bob told the State Council of Parks that the Taconic State Park Commission had done nothing to cooperate with Massachusetts and Connecticut authorities. As a matter of fact we have not only cooperated with them from the beginning, but are in close touch with them at all times and can tell you or him at any moment just what the situation is in both those states."
Moses will have a chance to lie about me no more, Roosevelt said. "The Commissioners do not want to be the first to make a break in your splendid State-wide Park program, but they have been put in a position where I do not see that they can in any decency" do anything but resign.
Al Smith, who so seldom wrote personal letters, now sat down and wrote one to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"I know of no man I have met in my whole public career who I have any stronger affection for than for yourself," he wrote. "Therefore, you can find as much fault with me as you like. I will not get into a fight with you for anything or for anybody."
The letter had its effect. Roosevelt did not resign. But the letter did not change the Taconic Parkway situation—or the Moses-Roosevelt situation.
At the 1928 Democratic convention, Roosevelt was again Smith's floor manager. Observers noted that at times during his nominating speech, the cheering seemed to be as much for him as for Smith, and there were some suggestions that Roosevelt—a bearer of TR's name, a Protestant and an attractive vice-presidential candidate even in defeat in 1920—would make a better presidential candidate than the Governor. Belle Moskowitz's comments about Roosevelt began to be more caustic. But Smith himself felt the cheers were no more than Roosevelt deserved—and in September the Governor asked Roosevelt to be his successor in Albany.
Moses had argued against the choice. There are indications that he half-expected Smith to name him instead, to try to force him on the Democratic Party. Although he had always identified himself as an "independent Republican" when reporters asked him his political affiliation, he quietly enrolled as a Democrat when he registered to vote in 1928—a bit of opportunism that did him no good, since his name was never seriously mentioned for the Governorship that year by Smith or anyone else. Moreover, among those men whose names were seriously considered, Roosevelt was the one Moses least wanted to get the post. He told the conclaves of Democratic leaders to which Smith brought him that Roosevelt did not possess either the mental capacity or the application to be Governor. To Frances Perkins, he said that Roosevelt's only asset was a smile. "It's a pity to have to have him and that Al has set his heart on him," he told her. "It's un-
doubtedly a good name to carry the ticket with . . . but, of course, he isn't quite bright." The other Smith aides agreed with this view, but mental capacity was not as important to them as political realities. With "Rum, Romanism and Tammany" rapidly becoming the overriding issue of the presidential campaign, they feared that only Roosevelt's name on the ticket could keep New York's upstate Protestant Drys from stampeding into the Republican camp—and denying Smith the forty-five electoral votes of his own state. Estimating that Roosevelt was a full 200,000 votes stronger than any other candidate, they felt that he was the only man with a chance to defeat the attractive GOP gubernatorial nominee, Attorney General Albert Ottinger. As for his ability, Smith's advisers felt he didn't need much; they felt that Moses' reorganization had so streamlined the state government that Roosevelt's lack of administrative experience would not be serious. And Smith himself had a higher opinion of Roosevelt's ability than his aides, and he emphasized that Roosevelt's nomination would assure the party of having a candidate of integrity.
Roosevelt was genuinely reluctant to run—he and Howe had decided that with the nation prosperous under a Republican President, 1928 was not going to be a Democratic ye
ar and that their original timetable, calling for a gubernatorial run in 1932, was correct. To stay out of the reach of persuasion while the State Democratic Convention was convening in Rochester, he took himself off to Warm Springs. But he could not escape the telephone, and over it Smith persuaded him to run. The next night, he was nominated by acclamation. Moses turned to Emily Smith and said, shouting so she could hear him above the uproar: "He'll make a good candidate but a lousy Governor."
The man Smith assigned to brief Roosevelt on campaign issues and draft his speeches, Belle Moskowitz's discovery, Samuel I. Rosenman, was at first not altogether enchanted with his assignment. "I had heard stories of his being something of a playboy and idler, of his weakness and ineffectiveness," he recalled. "That was the kind of man I had expected to meet." But he began almost instantly to wonder if such unfavorable views of Roosevelt were correct. "The broad jaw and upthrust chin, the piercing, flashing eyes, the firm hands—they did not fit the description. ... He was friendly, but there was about his bearing an unspoken dignity which held off any undue familiarity." During the campaign, Rosenman watched Roosevelt pull himself laboriously to his feet as his car arrived in a town, snap his steel braces to hold his body erect, and then, chin up, cigarette holder tilted at the most nonchalant of angles, the cane on which he leaned the only visible sign of any disability, laughingly reassure the crowd that newspaper speculation about his health was exaggerated. By the end of the campaign, Rosenman knew that the Smith camp's assessment of Roosevelt had been very wrong.
But Moses had not changed his opinion. "I don't like him," he told Frances Perkins during this period. "I don't believe in him. I don't trust him."
His comments became more vicious. Miss Perkins recalled Moses saying to her about Roosevelt, " 'He's a pretty poor excuse for a man.' ... He said
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 43
