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

by Caro, Robert A

  Just as his idealism grated against Tammany, so did his ambition, which was also strong. His bearing and a rare, stern eloquence made him stand out among the crowd of young reformers. Winning a plurality that for a Citizens Union Party candidate was unprecedented, he was elected a judge over his fellow men at the age of twenty-eight. Soon his fairness and firmness awed even his Tammany colleagues on the City Court into assigning him the most difficult cases. His prematurely white hair, parted in the center, his ruddy complexion, his flowing black robes, his pince-nez—and his bearing—made him a striking figure on the bench. He needed no gavel to quiet spectators, a biographer wrote—"His mien alone served to silence the courtroom." He sat through one long case, according to the New York World, "as if his face had been carved out of stone." At thirty-three, he was elected to the State Supreme Court, at forty-one to the Court of Appeals, at forty-three he was running for Governor.

  Tammany ordered its braves, in voting for the Democratic state ticket, to ignore the man at its head, and he lost.* He hoped the nomination would come his way again in 1918, but that was the year Silent Charlie Murphy saw that it was handed to Al Smith. Embittered, Seabury retired to private life and a series of monumental legal fees and for more than ten years kept silent on public issues until, suddenly swooping out of the past to take on Tammany Hall in 1930, he revealed that prosperity had not blunted his zeal for reform and that he was still a man against the machine.

  There was no telling how far Seabury might have climbed in politics if he had become Governor. The terminus he had in mind was the White House—in 1932, on the strength of the publicity he received from his investigations, he authorized the launching of a try for the Democratic presi-

  * Another element in his defeat—which took place in 1916—was Theodore Roosevelt. TR, whose Progressive Party had joined reform Democrats in support of Seabury's run for the Court of Appeals, persuaded Seabury to resign from the bench and run for Governor in the first place, promising to support him against the GOP nominee, Charles S. Whitman. But after Seabury had won the Democratic nomination, Roosevelt, breaking his word, rejoined the GOP and commanded the Progressives to back Whitman. (Seabury paid a visit to Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt started to say something, but Seabury interrupted. "Mr. President, you are a blatherskite!" he said, and stalked out.)

  dential nomination—and the hatred for Tammany that had been ignited by his idealism was fueled by the wreckage the Tiger had made of his ambitions. Much of his bitterness centered on Al Smith: While most other reformers felt that Smith had risen above the organization, Seabury felt, as he had always felt, that Smith had simply put a respectable smile on the face of a tiger that was as voracious as ever. If anything, he felt, Smith was more inimical to the public interest than the depredations of the most corrupt ward leaders, because his popularity provided them with protective coloration. And, of course, it was Smith who, by winning five times in a row the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, had insured that Seabury would not be able to follow the gubernatorial road back to the public eye. "He had a real conviction about Smith," Moses told an interviewer. "It amounted to an actual hatred. He felt that Smith had prevented him from being Governor and if he had been Governor he would have been President. Seabury hated the Governor, really hated him." By 1933, wrote a Seabury biographer, "his anti-Tammany stand was not merely a cause. It was a mania." The narrowness of his perspective made him feel that the most significant fact about Moses was that he was Smith's protege. If Moses became mayor, Seabury thought, the ex-Governor would have an opportunity to move Tammany quietly back into control of City Hall. Reform's great opportunity to cleanse the city, the opportunity he had given it, would be lost.

  When Joseph Price, following the Fusion Conference Committee meeting, told Seabury its members were for Moses, Seabury refused to approve the choice. And he strongly hinted—he would "reserve all personal liberty of action" was the way he put it—that if the committee nominated Moses, he would enter his own candidate in the race. Recalling his own feelings, Moses said later: "Nobody could be elected without Seabury. With Seabury on his side, anyone running on a Fusion ticket could have won that year. Without him—no, it would have been absolutely impossible to win." Moses issued a statement saying: "I am not a candidate for the Fusion nomination for mayor and should not accept the nomination if it were offered to me." The Fusion leaders agreed that Seabury's support was crucial. And even if they hadn't felt that way, they would have been reluctant to go against his wishes. They began looking for other candidates. Price drafted an angry statement of resignation from the committee. "The best equipped and most able man considered for the Fusion nomination, a man fearless and independent, was objected to by Judge Seabury upon the narrow-minded reason that he is a close friend of Alfred E. Smith, the most popular man in New York City," the statement said. "The Fusion Conference itself was practically unanimous for Mr. Moses. . . ." But Price was persuaded to withdraw his resignation, to leave unpublished his statement—and to join with the rest of the committee in a search for another candidate.

  Five reformers were to be offered the nomination during the hectic weeks that followed.

  But these were men to whom politics was something more than an avenue for the realization of personal ambitions. Two of the five—judges—

  said that they were happy being judges; a third, a business executive, preferred a career in private life to one in public. And if they did have political ambitions, they subordinated them to principle. Raymond Ingersoll, fifty-eight, a wealthy respected social worker who had served as a park commissioner in the Mitchel administration and as a campaign manager in Smith's 1924 gubernatorial campaign, wanted to be mayor but was afraid his health would not allow him to do the job properly, and so he declined the nomination. Then Seabury and Maurice P. Davidson, chairman of the City Fusion Party, taking a room in the Hotel Commodore to avoid reporters, offered the nomination to Nathan Straus. Wrote Davidson: "I remember how he came into the room; slim, well-groomed, and how he removed his gloves, laid down his hat and cane, and how delighted he was with the offer, and how he said 'nothing has occurred in my lifetime or would ever occur which would bring me greater happiness than the opportunity to serve as mayor of the City of New York, but I ask forty-eight hours to consider.' We met again several days later, and he said that he had discussed the matter with some of his advisers and had decided to decline. . . . The ill-fated star of Adolf Hitler was rising. . . . Jews were accused by Hitler of endeavoring to encompass the control and government of the whole world. Ridiculous and absurd as those charges were, Nathan Straus refused to accept a nomination for Mayor at a time when Herbert Lehman was Governor because it might give credence in some quarters to Mr. Hitler's charges. He felt that in the interest of the welfare of his own people of the Jewish faith and in order not to handicap the success of the reform movement in New York it was up to him to subordinate any and all personal ambition in the interests of the public good and he, too, therefore declined."

  There was a politician who wanted the nomination, wanted it desperately. "Fiorello H. La Guardia was standing in the wings—not standing, but moving around very, very rapidly," Davidson was to write. "He would send for me every once in a while and say, 'How are you getting on?' . . . He would say, 'Well, who's your latest mayor?' and I would tell him. He would jump around and shake his fist and he'd say, 'Well, there's only one man going to be the candidate, and I'm the man. I'm going to run. I want to be mayor.' "

  La Guardia, a nominal Republican too liberal for most Republicans, had already lunged for the prize twice before. In 1921, president of the Board of Aldermen, he had sought the nomination from the Fusion committee of which Moses was secretary, but the reformers had turned instead to Henry Curran, one of their own, and when La Guardia ran against Curran in the Republican primary, he had failed to carry a single borough. In 1929, the Little Flower had received the Republican nomination, and the only remarkable aspect of his campaign against Jimmy Walker, then at th
e height of his popularity, was the size of his defeat: failing to carry a single assembly district, La Guardia received only 367,675 votes to Walker's 867,522. Then, in 1932, after five terms as a congressman from Latin East Harlem, where he had constructed an aptly named personal Italian-American

  political machine—the Gibboni (apes)—La Guardia had been defeated by a Tammany hack. Out of a job at the age of fifty, branded a loser, only by winning the mayoralty could he resuscitate a political career that seemed to be gasping out its last breath.

  La Guardia possessed qualifications for making the run beyond the fact that, half Jewish and half Italian, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran of German descent, himself a Mason and an Episcopalian, he was practically a balanced ticket all by himself. Campaigning for mayor in 1929, he had made charges—many of the city's magistrates were corrupt; except for Al Smith, "there isn't a Tammany politician that would care to have his bank account examined"—that the city had thought exaggerated until the Seabury investigations, which began just a month after the election, had proved that most of them were understatements. As the Tin Box Parade swung into full stride, the Times commented that La Guardia was the only man with the right "to stand up in New York City today and say: 'I told you so.'"

  But La Guardia, son of immigrants, raised in tenements, possessor of neither a high-school nor an undergraduate college degree,* was from a different background than the reformers, and this was not an unimportant point with them. The members of the Fusion Conference Committee, and much of that segment of New York for which the committee spoke, were, as one of La Guardia's biographers put it, "educated at the best colleges, financially secure, eminent in the professions and business, and primarily old-stock American Protestant but also significantly Jewish. . . . The fusion-ists came, in short, from Gotham's gentry." And the attitude of many of them was, if not bigoted, at least parochial. "They preferred one of their own kind as Mayor or at least a type more like themselves" than the swarthy little Italian-American.

  La Guardia's personal style was screaming, ranting, fist-shaking and more than a little irresponsible. (Learning that a family had been burned to death while the mother tried unsuccessfully to telephone the Fire Department, he insinuated that the telephone company was guilty of murder. Testifying before a legislative committee on rent controls, he said, "I come not to praise the landlord but to bury him.") These men who distrusted excess distrusted him. And he did not hesitate to play melting-pot politics, to wave the bloody flag, to appeal, in one of the seven languages in which he could harangue an audience, to the insecurities, resentments and prejudices of the ethnic groups in the immigrant district he had represented in Congress. ("I can outdemagogue the best of demagogues," he told one aide. "I invented the low blow," he boasted to another.) His naked ambition for high office, his cockiness, truculence and violent temper—while he was president of the Board of Aldermen, Curran once had to restrain him physically from striking the City Comptroller—repelled them.

  * He had earned an LL.B. from New York University Law School by attending classes, mostly in the evening, from 1907 to 1910.

  Furthermore, although the reformers considered themselves liberals, their definition of the term was decidedly pre-Depression, and La Guardia was far too liberal for them. A New Dealer before the New Deal, he made a career for himself as a leader of the have-nots against the haves—and they were haves. His efforts in Congress might have made him, in his biographer's words, "the plumed knight of organized labor," but organized labor, militant, aggressive organized labor, was not precisely what reformers had in mind when they spoke moist-eyed of the working man. La Guardia lashed out, moreover, at the city's businessmen who were Fusion's financial cornerstones, charging, without offering proof, that big property owners were receiving low assessments on their property. When in 1929 he attempted to falsely persuade voters that he was a Fusion as well as a Republican candidate, the Citizens Union replied with a statement characterizing him as an opportunistic, excitable, unpredictable radical. Many reformers, La Guardia's biographers say, were happy that his ouster from Congress had apparently put an end to "an obnoxious career propelled by unstable and dangerous ambitions." The fact that in 1933 La Guardia was "the only professional Republican politician in the city who could dramatize both himself and an issue" did not move them. Moreover, Republican leaders detested this Republican whom they considered a radical. They flatly refused to accept him. Seabury, while not committing himself, noted that La Guardia was an excellent campaigner; the judge wanted to win. But every time La Guardia's name was brought up, it was greeted with open hostility by most other members of the Fusion Conference Committee. Running out of candidates, they began again to lean to Moses. Price asked him to reconsider his withdrawal. Seabury began pushing more strongly for La Guardia, possibly because he saw him as the only remaining viable alternative to Moses, but on July 26 Price took an informal telephone poll of the Fusion Conference Committee. The vote was eighteen for Moses, five for La Guardia. Moses agreed to let Price present his name again. He felt that Seabury, confronted by the fait accompli of the nomination, would not split the movement and would back him.

  The Fusion leaders felt the same way. A meeting of the committee was scheduled for the following afternoon at the Lawyers Club, 115 Broadway, at 3 p.m. A room was reserved. Reporters were alerted that an important announcement would be made. Everything was in readiness to offer Moses the Fusion nomination for Mayor of the City of New York. As late as noon on July 27, Moses must have felt confident that he had it.

  But at noon on July 27, three hours before the meeting was to convene, Seabury invited Davidson to lunch at the Bankers Club and demanded the nomination for La Guardia. When Davidson told him that the committee had decided to give it to Moses, Seabury struck the table with his clenched fist so hard that dishes rattled loudly in the suddenly hushed dining room.

  "You sold out to Tammany Hall," the judge shouted. "I'll denounce you and everybody else. You sold out the movement to Tammany Hall." Leaving his guest at the table, he strode out of the dining room to the

  elevator. Davidson, remonstrating, followed, but Seabury, in the elevator, turned and said, "You sold out. Goodbye"—and the door shut in Davidson's face.

  Striding back to his office, which was located at 120 Broadway, directly across from the Lawyers Club where the Fusion Committee was to meet, Seabury issued a statement broadly hinting that he would run another ticket. The Fusion leaders, realizing that they had miscalculated, began to search frantically for a new candidate. Moses, learning of these developments by telephone from Price, told him that he didn't want his name placed in nomination.

  In an attempt to placate Seabury while not alienating the Republicans, who still refused to nominate La Guardia, the committee nominated independent Democrat John F. O'Ryan, former member of the City Transit Commission. The reporters covering the Fusion meeting ran across Broadway to Seabury's office to learn his reaction. Seabury hardly knew O'Ryan—and since he knew his ignorance was shared by the voters, he believed O'Ryan could not win. Seeing by now a tiger behind every bush, the Judge told the reporters that this was the reason O'Ryan had been nominated. Tammany, he charged, had forced Republican leaders, some of whom "have long been the owned and operated chattels of Tammany Hall," to nominate a weak candidate. O'Ryan withdrew for the sake of unity. A new "harmony committee" was formed. It included not only Seabury but the one man who could match him in prestige among the reformers, Charles Culp ("CC") Burlingham, who at eighty-two still had the gift of making men forget their differences and remember their common cause. When Seabury began to roar "sellout" during one harmony committee meeting, Burlingham said, "Sit down, Sam, sit down." While the other members goggled at hearing the Bishop called by his first name, he sat down. And after midnight on August 4, CC persuaded the committee members, with the exception of Price and Davidson, who held out for Moses to the last, to authorize Seabury to call a waiting La Guardia and tell him the nomination wa
s his.

  The reform movement of New York City had wanted Robert Moses for mayor. Of all the influential reformers, only one had been firmly opposed to him. Given the almost certain success in 1933 of a Fusion ticket headed by so popular a candidate, it is hardly an overstatement to say that only one man had stood between Moses and the mayoralty, between Moses and supreme power in the city. But that man had stood fast; at the last moment, as Moses must have felt the prize securely within his grasp, it was denied him.

  During the first two months of the mayoral campaign—which had been turned into a three-way race by the entry, with support from President Roosevelt, James A. Farley and Bronx Boss Edward J. Flynn, of anti-Tammany Democrat Joseph V. McKee—Moses declined to participate. His

  visceral hatred of Roosevelt had been intensified by his philosophical antipathy to the President's social welfare policies, which he referred to in private as "socialistic." And the liberal La Guardia, who as a lame-duck congressman had introduced in early 1933 several bills favored by the incoming administration, was identified in Moses' mind with the New Deal.

  But tough-minded reformer-politician and key Fusion strategist Paul Windels, believing in late October that La Guardia's campaign was losing momentum and needed a lift, asked Raymond Ingersoll to ask Moses to endorse the Little Flower.

  Moses agreed. With less than two weeks remaining before Election Day, he suddenly abandoned his role as bystander. And his entry into the campaign had an impact even more dramatic than Windels had foreseen. For Moses' radio speeches and printed statements burst above the murk of the city's political battlefield like a Roman candle whose sparkle, coming from a shower of glittering, sharp-pointed barbs flung off by a graceful and witty malice, was both hard and brilliant.