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

by Caro, Robert A

  Assailing Tammany and its mayors in a radio broadcast, Moses urged voters to remember "the strange characters they have seen occupying the places of Judge Gaynor and John Purroy Mitchel in City Hall—Hylan, the ranting Bozo of Bushwick; Walker, half Beau Brummel and half guttersnipe, and John P. O'Brien, a winded bull in the municipal china shop." Is it any wonder, he asked, that younger voters, who could not remember a non-Tammany mayor, "must think of the great office of Chief Magistrate with derision and contempt?"

  As for the Farley-Flynn candidate, Moses said, he was a "pious fraud" whose attempt to portray himself as a reformer would forever be known in the city's history as "the strange interlude of 'Holy Joe' McKee." Electing McKee mayor, and thereby giving power to Farley and Flynn, would bring to City Hall only "another kind of Tammany."

  "Do you think," he asked, "that the Currys, McCooeys, Farleys and Flynns are in any essential respect different from the Murphys, McCooeys, McCabes and McCalls of the cartoons of a generation ago? Do you think that the McCooey of today, who is the last living link between these two dynasties, is not the same old McCooey of the early 1900's? Let the younger voters ask the older voters this question. There can be no doubt of the answer."

  Each of Moses' statements had its own sharp bite. "The Great Statesman McKee," he said in one, "is a synthetic character which never actually existed on sea or land, puffed up by the press . . . and now in the process of deflation. There's a large amount of unfairness to the individual in this process, but in the end it arrives at the truth."

  And each statement contained praise for La Guardia couched in a prose that had to it a ring that sounded all the clearer above the dull clangor that is political strife in New York. "No one has ever questioned your independence," Moses told the Little Flower in a public statement. "You have no strings on you. You are not engaged in an obscure struggle for the con-

  trol of a rotten political machine. You are free to work for New York City. Go to it."

  "Moses' statements were no small help," Paul Windels recalls. "His support of La Guardia did more than any other single thing, I think, to give the impression that La Guardia did mean to give the city an independent administration." Moses' statements were front-paged, while others' were buried next to the bra and girdle ads. And their value was further enhanced because newspapers gave their readers the impression that he was speaking not only for himself but also for someone whose name was even more potent a political force in the city than his. Al Smith had not been able to bring himself to back either of his party's candidates. All during the election campaign the press pressed the Happy Warrior for a statement. When it was not forthcoming, reporters drew conclusions from Moses' statements. Pointing out that Moses was "one of Alfred E. Smith's closest friends," the World-Telegram said that his endorsement of La Guardia "has invoked a powerful, if silent, reinforcement to help La Guardia win." Moses, who was not speaking for Smith, tried to dispel the impression that he was. But La Guardia's advisers did all they could to foster that impression. When Moses was introduced to the crowd at a climactic Fusion rally at Madison Square Garden, the band played "The Sidewalks of New York." Before beginning his prepared speech, Moses said: "I have no desire to appear on this platform under false colors, much as I appreciate the implications involved in the instructions to the band. I do not come here as an emissary of my distinguished friend and former chief, who remains, in the affections of the people, the first citizen of this city." But at the end of Moses' speech, the band struck up the same tune.

  Within a week after the votes were counted, La Guardia invited Moses to join his administration. Whether he had promised, through Ingersoll, to do so in order to obtain Moses' support—the making of such a deal might explain Moses' sudden decision to break his silence on the campaign—is unknown; but there were plenty of other explanations for the invitation.

  Some of the explanations were rooted in personality. Fiorello La Guardia had an affection for his city. His wife recalls that when, after twelve years of trying, he finally became its mayor, "it was like he owned the United States. Nobody should do anything to it." With his romantic temperament, he wanted to beautify the city. He had a grand—if vague—conception of a metropolis whose citizens would pass their daily rounds in surroundings that uplifted the spirit. "Too often," he once said, "life in New York is merely a squalid succession of days; whereas in fact it can be a great, living adventure." And he thought of such beautification primarily in terms of public works. "He liked physical accomplishment," recalls Paul J. Kern, La Guardia's first law secretary at City Hall. "He liked to get things built for people; on Sundays, we used to drive around the city trying to think of things that should be built in the city."

  La Guardia admired men who built. Lawyers, to lawyer La Guardia, were bad. He often remarked that a lawyer was like a prostitute: a man hired a prostitute to use her body and he hired a lawyer to use his brains and knowledge of the law. And, he would say, he didn't know but that the man who hired the prostitute got the better of the bargain. Engineers were good. "Engineers fascinated him," recalls Joseph D. McGoldrick, his Comptroller. "Lawyers were always getting in his way, telling him things he couldn't do. La Guardia didn't like people who told him what he couldn't do. But engineers could do things. They got things built for people." Says Kern: "He stood like a child in front of the simplest engineering feat." La Guardia's favorite evening watering hole was the Engineers Club at 32 West Fortieth Street, where he was an honorary member. Reuben Lazarus, who often watched him sitting in the club bar listening raptly to the club's non-honorary members talk about their achievements, says, "Engineers were his gods." And, although he hardly knew Moses, Moses' achievements especially awed him. He told Windels that he had, more than once, driven over the Long Island parkways "for inspiration."

  Other explanations for La Guardia's invitation to Moses were rooted in politics.

  La Guardia had won with only 40 percent of the vote; he was still a Republican in a Democratic town, a Republican who had been enabled to win largely because Democratic votes had been split between O'Brien and McKee. He could not count on another split, or on another Fusion-boosting Seabury investigation, in 1937; he knew that his political future depended, as one of his biographers has written, "on his giving New Yorkers the spectacularly good government he [had] promised them."

  Specifically, La Guardia had promised to staff the city's government with nonpolitical, nonpartisan experts. To the public, Robert Moses epitomized the nonpolitical, nonpartisan expert. His appointment would prove that La Guardia was keeping his promise. And his immense popularity could not help rubbing off on the mayor who brought his talents to the city.

  There were other reasons rooted in politics.

  La Guardia feared Al Smith. He well knew that if Smith had been running against him, he would not be mayor, and he knew what would happen if Smith decided to run in 1937, or even to lend his immense prestige to some other candidate who would unify the overwhelming Democratic majority in the city. Making Smith's favorite a part of his administration would do much to keep the Happy Warrior happy—and off the warpath.

  La Guardia knew that if he was to produce good government in a bankrupt city, the first requirement was money. "You know," he told a reporter earnestly, "I am in the position of an artist or a sculptor. ... I can see New York as it should be and as it can be. . . . But now I am like the man who has a conception that he wishes to carve or to paint, who has the model before him, but hasn't a chisel or a brush." The only source of money to purchase a chisel or a brush of the size La Guardia had in mind was the federal government. Its President was not of La Guardia's party. He knew

  that Moses had enjoyed great success on Long Island in obtaining federal funds—and he did not know of the hatred between Roosevelt and Moses.

  Furthermore, La Guardia knew that a key reason for Moses' success in obtaining federal money was that Moses had plans for huge public works ready at the moment the money became available. To get plans, you
needed first a large staff of engineers trained in building such works. He knew that the city departments did not have such staffs and he knew that Moses did. Moses needed La Guardia if he was to realize his great park and parkway plan for New York City—but La Guardia also needed Moses.

  Moses knew it. To La Guardia's invitation, he replied with conditions. "I told the Mayor," he was to recall, "that I was not interested in taking the city job unless I had unified power over all the city parks and, even then, only as part of the unified control of the whole metropolitan system of parks and parkway development."

  "Unified" was the operative adjective. There were five separate, independent park departments in New York City in 1933, one for each borough, each with its own borough park commissioner. If the five commissionerships were abolished and all five departments were consolidated into one, Moses said, he would be willing to be its commissioner—if the commissioner's authority was extended to include not only parks but parkways and if he was allowed to keep his state jobs. And since the key to a unified parkway program was the Triborough Bridge, he must also insist on control of the independent agency charged with the construction of that bridge, the Triborough Bridge Authority. He had a plan to finance construction of a "Marine Parkway Bridge" to the Rockaways: the plan was to create another authority to accept the necessary $10,000,000 federal contribution. He wanted control of that authority, too. La Guardia agreed. The Mayor-elect could hardly restrain himself from blurting out the news before the arrangement was finalized. Seated at a dinner party next to Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, who was bemoaning the state of the city's parks, he told her, "Don't worry. I'm appointing the best man in the United States as park commissioner!" In fact, when Moses suggested that he himself draft the bill consolidating the park departments and setting forth the powers he would possess as New York City Park Commissioner, La Guardia had seen no reason not to agree to that, too. It was the first bill submitted to the Legislature by the La Guardia administration. Neither man considered the Triborough appointment particularly significant; both still considered the Authority nothing more than a toll-collecting agency that would finish building a single bridge and then go out of business as soon as its cost was paid off. But they anticipated opposition in the Legislature, whose permission would be required for a state official to take a city job. The upstate Republicans who were the Legislature's leaders felt that Moses already possessed too much power, and would resist giving him more. Democratic legislators from the city would be opposed to his appointment because of the contracts and patronage it

  would cost the party. And there were philosophical as well as personal and political objections. Concentrating in a single individual authority over both state and city parks and over most major road-building projects in the New York metropolitan region would give too much power to that individual, no matter who he was, some legislators said. Furthermore, in his state job, that individual would be the Governor's appointee; in his city job, the Mayor's. If the city's elected officials were to veto one of the projects he proposed to them in his capacity as a city official, he would be able to use his influence with the Governor to bring the state's influence to bear on the city officials to force the city into compliance with his will. The situation could also work in reverse. This line of reasoning could be carried on indefinitely, said one state senator: "No man is big enough to serve two masters." This was one reason why there was a law against the simultaneous holding of state and city jobs. And, some legislators attempted to remind the public, there were other, equally persuasive reasons. "Dual officeholding," they said, weakened the constitutional provision that the city should be a separate, independent entity within the state.* There would be plenty of legislative opposition just to his proposed appointment as Park Commissioner; there was no sense in letting the Legislature know that La Guardia actually intended to appoint Moses to three city jobs, but permission was necessary for him to take each of them. The best bill drafter in Albany told La Guardia not to worry. Buried deep within the bill he drafted—it was Section 607, to be precise—allowing him to accept the park commissionership was the apparently innocuous phrase "an unsalaried state officer shall not be ineligible to hold any other unsalaried office filled by appointment of the Mayor." The camouflage worked. Unsalaried offices generally referred to meaningless honorary positions; not one legislator appears to have realized that it could also refer to an authority commissionership.

  The opposition that boiled down from Albany anyway was blasted by the press—and by reformers who normally would have been the first to oppose a violation of the separation of state and city that they had always viewed as vital, and to oppose giving one man such power. They were not opposed now because the man was the one official they were confident would not abuse that power. And the reformers had considerable influence over the Republican legislators from the city. Soon Herbert Brownell, Jr., already, at twenty-nine, not only a state assemblyman but also a partner in a prestigious Wall Street legal firm, was speaking on behalf of the "Moses bill." Another GOP legislator from the city, Jay E. Rice, was arguing against

  * The courts had always emphatically upheld the law against dual officeholding. One memorable case, in fact, had enlivened the political vocabulary with a new phrase. In 1924, Murray Hulbert, the president of the city's Board of Aldermen, had innocently accepted membership on the Finger Lake State Park Commission, believing that because the park post was unsalaried it did not fall within the law's purview. But the City Comptroller, disagreeing, stripped Hulbert of his more important, salary-paying city job and the courts upheld the action—a circumstance which thereafter led Albany wags to refer to any suggestion that a city official be given a state job as an attempt to give the man "the finger."

  Brownell when, as the Herald Tribune noted, "Mr. Rice was called on the telephone from New York and returned to the Assembly Chamber to withdraw his objection." The string-pulling Long Island barons who had come to see Moses as a friend pulled their strings. La Guardia gave assurances that the city was not surrendering any of its independence. "The city retains complete control through its properly constituted authorities over every cent it spends and everything it does." Governor Lehman, admiring Moses, sent the Legislature an emergency message to rush the bill through. Both the Mayor and the Governor—the two most powerful men in the state—were on Moses' side. So was the most popular; Al Smith publicly supported the appointment. While the press was still playing up the pledges by Tammany legislators to fight the bill to the finish, Moses knew that the fight was already finished— and that he had won. When a reporter called him for comment after one heated debate, Moses said, "There's nothing to get excited about." On January 19, 1934, Lehman signed the "Moses bill." That same day Moses joined a line of minor city officials waiting outside La Guardia's office. When his turn came, he entered the office and was sworn in as New York's first city-wide Park Commissioner.

  Tammany's three Triborough commissioners held six-year terms, but the financial manipulations of two of them had been so blatant that La Guardia's investigators quickly uncovered them; one resigned and the other was dismissed. On February 4, at 11:57 a.m., a certificate of appointment as Secretary and Chief Executive Officer of the Triborough Bridge Authority, signed by the Mayor, was brought to the city clerk's office by one of the Mayor's secretaries and filed there. The name on the certificate was "Robert Moses." With the appointment to the second vacancy of George V. (the Fifth) McLaughlin, the bluff, red-faced Brooklyn banker and friend of Al Smith's who had long been Moses' friend and ally, control of the Authority was his. As soon as it was, a new bill was introduced, providing for the creation of a Marine Parkway Authority. Its powers were in general the same as those of the Triborough Bridge Authority. But there was one innovation. Those powers would not be exercised by a three-man board; the Authority would have only a "sole member." And that member, the man in whom all the powers of the Authority were lodged, would be "the Park Commissioner of New York City." On April 9, with scarcely any
debate, the bill was passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor.

  There were now seven separate governmental agencies concerned with parks and major roads in the New York metropolitan area. They were the Long Island State Park Commission, the New York State Council of Parks, the Jones Beach State Park Authority, the Bethpage State Park Authority, the New York City Park Department, the Triborough Bridge Authority and the Marine Parkway Authority. Robert Moses was in charge of all of them.

  The New Deal's attempts to combat the Depression had apparently already given New York an opportunity to refurbish existing city parks. Harry

  Hopkins' federal Civil Works Administration, set up in November 1933, had 68,000 men working on park clean-up projects in the city by Christmas. But Moses and his top Long Island park administrators, driving around to the parks to see what those men were doing, found that the city had given them neither adequate tools, materials, supervision nor instructions. Crews were laying asphalt roads and paths without adequate foundations—and even as they laid one section, another, completed a week earlier, was already heaving and cracking behind them from frost action. Six thousand men, assigned to "move ash dumps" in Riverside Park, were standing on the banks of the Hudson pecking at frozen cinders; two thousand were standing on truck beds on a little reef off Staten Island "building up" the reef by dumping out sand—which was washed away, at a cost of five dollars per cubic yard, almost as fast as they could dump it. Fifty-four hundred more were assigned to Brooklyn's Marine Park, purchased during the Mitchel administration and allowed to remain undeveloped for twenty years. Moses' engineers sneaked into the cupola of an old mansion in the park so that they could watch the work unobserved—and found that there was nothing to watch. Spread out over expanses of sand wastes and marshlands, in a scene more reminiscent of a French bivouac during the Retreat from Moscow than a park reclamation project, all but a handful of the fifty-four hundred sat huddled around small fires built against the freezing wind whipping out of Jamaica Bay. Some were passing around wine bottles held in brown paper bags. Others were throwing dice. Most had no tools—and Moses' men understood why when they saw men chopping up shovels and using their handles as firewood. Adding a poignant detail to the scene were a few men who had kept their tools and who obviously wanted to work; they spent hours "raking" the frozen ground or building little fences out of stone they found in the area, "just so," as one of them was later to recall, "I could feel I was doing something to earn my money."