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

by Caro, Robert A

  Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when Moses (ostensibly to raise money for soaring park maintenance costs) further limited park use by the poor by instituting parking fees at all state parks, fifty cents at Jones Beach, twenty-five at the rest, in violation of the American tradition of free parks.

  There was a flood of letters to Roosevelt from Depression-impoverished citizens who said that they had to scrimp to get enough money for the gas to drive to the park, and that the extra quarter would be the straw that would sometimes make it impossible for them to afford the outing. Moses had announced that in some parks "there will be free parking space for those unable to pay . . . somewhat remote from the center." This, protesters said, would only make poor families pay a toll in pride instead of coin. "Who would wish to be classed among those 'unable to pay'?" one asked. "To come walking in from the remote parking fields would be to exhibit the badge of poverty." Roosevelt wrote Moses: "I was a good deal impressed by the complaint . . . I also think fifty cents is too high . . . Frankly, I think the people have a legitimate kick. Won't you seriously take up the question of reducing the Jones Beach charge?"

  No, Moses said, he wouldn't. And when Roosevelt pressed again, he brought out his resignation threat. Reducing the charge would force him to reduce Jones Beach maintenance standards, he said. "The entire character of the place would be changed," and if it was, "I do not care to be associated . . ." Roosevelt may have felt that "the people have a legitimate kick," but in the face of such a defense, the Governor punted. Not only did he drop his own request for reconsideration; when the Legislature passed a bill prohibiting fees in state parks, he vetoed it.

  Not only does a Governor not interfere with an official like Robert Moses; he heaps on him more and more responsibilities. No matter what the job was, it seemed, if it was difficult Roosevelt turned to the same man. During 1930, 1931 and 1932, Moses handled more than a dozen special assignments for Roosevelt and produced results on every one. And if increasing Moses' responsibilities meant increasing his power—giving him

  more money to work with, more engineers, architects, draftsmen and police to work with—well, the Governor simply had no choice but to increase that power.

  By 1932, with the Governor, running for President, less able than ever to afford a public controversy in his own state with so popular a figure, if one of the two characters in the Moses-Roosevelt drama was dominant, it was not the Governor but his appointee. The hatred between Roosevelt and Moses flared up only occasionally during the four years that the former spent in the Executive Chamber in Albany. But that passion—and the desire for revenge that it engendered—was only banked, not extinguished, and it never stopped smoldering. It was to blaze up into the open later, when Roosevelt was President.

  But Roosevelt was not President yet. And he could not yet afford to indulge such a passion. In his dealings with Moses during his gubernatorial years, necessity was the mother of accommodation.

  The uniqueness of Moses' relationship to the Governor of whose administration he was at least nominally a member was emphasized when Al Smith finally decided to run against him for the Democratic presidential nomination. Moses calmly informed Roosevelt that he would be taking a few weeks off—to work for Roosevelt's opponent.

  The Happy Warrior's last campaign was born, and was to die, in unrelieved bitterness.

  Smith had plenty to be bitter about. Roosevelt's systematic—and pointed—disregard of his predecessor had continued. Smith could not reconcile himself to the fact that the younger man, of whom he had been so fond and to whom he had given the gubernatorial nomination, had turned on him. Friends who visited him in New York found that Roosevelt was becoming almost an obsession with him. "Do you know, by God, that he has never consulted me about a damn thing since he has been Governor?" he said to one. "He has taken bad advice from sources not friendly to me. He has ignored me!"

  And Roosevelt was not the only younger man who had treated Smith with ingratitude. The treatment he had received from Jimmy Walker had wounded him even more deeply. At the request of Walker's father, an old friend, he had taken Walker under his wing when the young legislator had first come to Albany, rooming with him, steering him up the legislative ladder, helping him time and again out of the scandals in which he was constantly becoming embroiled because of his drinking, his compulsive philandering and his inability to pay attention to the job to which he had been elected. When Smith determined in 1925 to oust Hylan from the mayoralty, Walker had asked Smith to make him Hylan's successor. Smith had told Walker frankly that he felt too worried about his playboy antics to do so. Walker had tricked him into changing his mind. He disappeared completely from the night spots that were his usual haunts and began to be seen in more respectable establishments with his wife. When he told Smith

  he was on the wagon for good, Smith secured him the nomination. But what Smith didn't know was that Walker had been engaging in all his old activities, but had been doing so in a secluded penthouse rented for him by a friend who had reasons of his own for wanting Beau James to be Mayor. Safely installed in City Hall, Walker had shipped his wife off to Miami for an extended vacation, returned to his public habits—and when Smith had left the Governorship and lost power, Walker had begun ousting Smith's friends from key city posts to make way for his own men, called by one observer "the worst element in Tammany Hall." Then Walker began taking over the Hall. Smith could have stopped him but, determined to stay out of politics, he disdained to do so. When he realized the depth of the corruption pervading city government, he tried to reassert his authority, but by then it was too late. Walker was even able to force out Smith's man, Judge George W. Olvany, as Tammany leader, with Olvany attempting to save face by "resigning" because of "ill health." And then Walker publicly humiliated Smith. At the annual dinner of the Inner Circle, the press-room regulars at City Hall, Walker paused during his speech, turned to Olvany, and with a glance at Smith that no one in the room missed, said, "How's your health, George?" The reporters laughed, and Smith knew they were laughing at him as much as at Olvany. And when Walker hand-picked Olvany's successor, he chose Smith's enemy, John F. Curry. There was no place left for Smith in the party he had loved and led.

  All through 1931, Smith refused to run for the presidency. One by one, the state's key Democrats, Farley and Flynn notable among them, came to him and said that Roosevelt was asking them to join his campaign but that their first loyalty was to Smith; all he had to do was ask them to stick with him and they would do so. And all through 1931, Smith told them that he would never be a candidate for the presidency and that they were free to join Roosevelt, which they did.

  But in early 1932, Smith's bitterness spilled over. His intimates would long debate whether Smith entered the presidential race because he wanted the nomination himself or because he wanted to deny it to the man who had treated him so cavalierly. Probably both elements were mixed. Certainly, Smith was motivated by personal ambition: in 1932, he was, after all, only fifty-eight years old, still vigorous and bored with the life of a businessman. He was motivated also by the fact that the Depression made election of the Democratic candidate, even a Catholic Democratic candidate, a virtual certainty, and he desperately wanted to prove that being a Catholic and an Irishman did not disqualify a man from the presidency. One visitor, listening to Smith recount how it had been the religious issue that had defeated him in 1928, said, "He felt so terribly hurt, so outraged by that, and the point that he was making was that having been defeated on that issue in a year in which he was bound to be defeated, everybody, including FDR, should have stood aside to let him have the nomination in a year in which he could have been elected! He was very much wrought up about it, he pounded his fists and his voice got loud. He shouted at times in that conversation." But no consideration was stronger than Smith's feelings toward

  Roosevelt in pushing him at the last moment into a race foredoomed by the fact that Roosevelt had a four-year head start.

  Moses saw at once that the
effort was hopeless. "The Smith movement never had a chance," he was to recall. "It started very late, and really had no organization to speak of." He never let himself be deluded by those reminders of past glories which gave Belle Moskowitz, Henry Moskowitz, Judge Proskauer, Herbert Bayard Swope and George McLaughlin flashes of hope: the rallying of Walker and Tammany to Smith's side after Roosevelt had authorized Samuel Seabury to investigate corruption in New York City; the defection to Smith's banner of big-city organizations and the consequent raising of his delegate count to 201; the wild cheers of the tremendous throng that lined his route from the La Salle Street Station in Chicago to the Congress Hotel, where a Smith-for-President headquarters had been hastily established. But practical realities did not weigh with Moses where Al Smith was concerned. Moses was one of those who struggled to the end in convention maneuvering so bitter that Ed Flynn called it "a fight to the death," who fought to hold together an alliance of dark horses that denied Roosevelt the nomination until the fourth ballot, who thought for a few brief hours that they actually had Roosevelt stopped and would be able to force the party to turn to Smith, and whose hopes were finally dashed when the ex-Governor's old adversary, William Randolph Hearst, used his influence with California's William G. McAdoo and John Nance Garner, Governor of Texas, to force the California and Texas delegations to switch to Roosevelt. Moses was one of the small group of friends who sat down with Smith in front of a radio in the Congress Hotel to listen to the last ballot, who watched the former Governor haul himself wearily out of his chair as soon as McAdoo began the speech that signaled the California switch and with a wave of his hand direct them to start packing so they could leave Chicago. He was one of those who sneaked out of the Congress Hotel by a side door with Smith at the moment that crowds were jamming the front entrance to greet the arriving Roosevelt, who listened to the ex-Governor, cornered by reporters, refuse to say he would support his party's choice and who watched anxiously as Smith sat silent on the long train ride home with his face marked by what one observer called a "tired sadness." And if Moses accepted Smith's defeat with his mind, he never accepted it with his heart. A month after the convention, with "Happy Days Are Here Again" drowning out the strains of "The Sidewalks of New York" forever in the Democratic Party's consciousness, Smith's campaign staff held its first and only reunion, complete with a menu featuring "Nuts McAdoo," "Celery Farley" and "Branchless Olives Roosevelt" in the Empire State Club in the Empire State Building. And Moses' contribution to the occasion reflected his bitterness. It was a quotation from Shakespeare that he selected for an

  epigraph on the menu's cover: 1

  Politics is a thieves' game.

  Those who stay in it long enough are invariably robbed.

  week in 1928, were averaging $16 in 1933; Woolworth's was paying full-time salesladies $7 per week.

  Parents skimped for their children—by December 1932 many parents could hardly remember a time when they hadn't been skimping—but skimping was only forestalling the inevitable. There was meat on the table twice a week and then once—and then not at all. Then there were no eggs. Parents could make their children feel it was an honor that they didn't have to drink milk any more and could drink coffee instead, but the lack of proper diet took a toll. "Looking back, we can see quite a change," said one schoolteacher. "The children haven't any pep; they don't seem like the same youngsters they were a year ago." They seemed tired; they didn't seem to learn as fast. Said a school nurse: "When you go into a classroom you notice a different expression on [their] faces. . . . There is a strained, anxious look not natural in children at all."

  Sometimes the things that outsiders didn't see were worst of all. Teachers didn't see the children whose families were poorest; such children had dropped out of school because they had no money for carfare, lunches or suitable clothes. Staffers at the city's free health clinics were encouraged by the fact that the number of malnutrition cases they handled was rising only gradually (although by 1934 such cases nevertheless would account for 60 percent of all clinic work). Then the staffers realized that many people suffering from malnutrition simply weren't going to the clinics because they knew perfectly well what was wrong with them—and also knew that they would be unable to do anything about it. And no one could see a state of mind; all one could do was try to describe it, as Martha Gellhorn did: "Everywhere there seemed a spreading listlessness, a whipped feeling. ... I find them all in the same shape—fear, fear ... an overpowering terror of the future."

  The city's government did little to help its people.

  The will to help was not the force that drove that government. That force was greed. During the fifteen years in which Red Mike Hylan and then Beau James Walker had been Chief Magistrate of America's greatest city, the Tammany leaders who served under them had seemed motivated primarily by the desire to siphon the city's vast resources into a vast trough on which they could batten.

  Former Judge Samuel Seabury's invesigation of corruption in the city, which had begun in 1930, had revealed how successfully this siphoning had been accomplished, exposing the bank accounts, running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, of literally dozens of city officials, who followed one another to the witness stand in a seemingly endless procession that was dubbed "The Tin Box Parade" after one testified that he had found $360,000 in his home in "a tin box ... a wonderful tin box." Then Seabury turned to the Magistrates Courts. Witnesses revealed that hundreds of innocent housewives and working girls had been framed as prostitutes and, if they could not raise the cash to buy their freedom, had been jailed, sometimes for months, by a

  cabal of crooked vice-squad policemen, court clerks and magistrates. Shocked by the strangling in Van Cortlandt Park of one scheduled female witness— her teen-age daughter committed suicide a week later—the city listened in horror to the others Seabury paraded to the stand. One told of helping vice-squad patrolmen trail a young married woman as she inspected houses with a male real estate agent. When they had returned to her home and were waiting for her husband to arrive and conclude the transaction, the police broke in, frightened the real estate agent out of testifying and arrested her. Other witnesses testified that, when business was slow, the vice squad simply "raided" flats in Negro Harlem and made wholesale arrests at random. When Mayor Walker took the stand—"Don't look him straight in the eye," warned a Seabury aide familiar with Beau James's charm, and the former judge stood sideways to Walker as much as possible while questioning him—Seabury revealed that the Mayor had personally accepted more than a million dollars in "beneficences" from firms doing business with the city. On September I, 1932, while Governor Roosevelt was pondering whether or not to remove Walker from office, the Mayor resigned and sailed for Europe to join Betty ("Monk") Compton, last and loveliest of his paramours, thereby following a traveling precedent established by Robert C. Van Wyck, the first mayor (1898-1901) of the consolidated city, who had died in Paris, and the man who had hand-picked Van Wyck for the job, Tammany boss Richard Croker, who had died in England. Surrogate John Patrick O'Brien won the special election to fill the remaining year of Walker's term, but he proved to be as much a creature of Tammany as his predecessors. While Tammany leaders were trying to persuade the electorate that they had no control over him, O'Brien was replying to reporters who asked him who his Police Commissioner would be, "I don't know. They haven't told me yet." And during O'Brien's administration local Tammany relief administrators would siphon off a big chunk of federal relief payments before they reached their intended recipients—and the city would continue to do nothing to supplement federal programs, although a supplement would have been helpful, since federal payments averaged seventeen dollars per week per family. Tammany would try to use federal payments to build its political power, putting ward heelers on relief payrolls under several different names so that they could draw several salaries for themselves. And the federal payrolls -did not show whether the men receiving its money were the men who most needed it. In New York City under T
ammany Hall, the test for employment on a federal project was generally politics rather than need; most applicants had to be cleared by their local Tammany leader; one leader boasted, "This is how we make Democrats."

  Even had the city wanted to help its people, it would have been unable to. The Depression had forced New York to total up at last the cost of its Rake's Progress under the Hylan and Walker administrations.

  When Hylan became mayor of New York on January 1, 1918, the city's population was 5,872,143. Fifteen years later, when Walker resigned, it

  was 6,930,446—an increase of 15 percent. During that same period, the city's budget rose from $240,519,858 to $631,366,298—an increase of 250 percent. The per capita cost of the budget increased by 200 percent. Year in and year out between January 1, 1918, and December 31, 1932, the city's debt increased at a rate equal to $100,000 per day, until, on the latter date, it had reached the staggering total of $1,897,481,478—a figure that was almost equal to the combined debt of the forty-eight states and that required an annual appropriation for debt service (the payment of interest and amortization) of $209,960,338, almost a third of the entire budget.