* Snell was only one of a group of reactionary congressmen from upstate which included Hamilton Fish, Jr., John Taber and James W. Wadsworth, who became a congressman after losing his United States Senate seat to Robert F. Wagner, Sr., in 1926 despite his successful mediation in the Taylor Estate fight. (Key reason for Wads worth's loss: his refusal to temper his opposition to the radical notion of women's suffrage.)
utility funds for political lobbying and—in a step the utilities viewed as particularly ominous—allowing municipalities to construct their own plants and distribute power at low rates. Only the Legislature stood between Lehman and still more radical anti-utilities measures he was proposing; it was vital to the Old Guard, more vital than ever, that the GOP control the Legislature—and that they control the GOP.
But control of the party had been snatched away from the Old Guard —by the former amateur in politics they had once betrayed but who had acquired from his bitter fight with Robert Moses a professionalism that made him their equal: W. Kingsland Macy.
Macy had lost the Taylor Estate fight, his first political battle; he had not lost another one. Having learned the hard way the importance of public opinion, he purchased a string of weekly newspapers that blanketed Suffolk County and by 1927 had ousted the county GOP chairman, installed himself in his place and purged the county organization with a ruthlessness so complete that his control of it would not be seriously challenged for a quarter of a century. Then he turned his attention to wider spheres. Before the barons quite realized what was happening, he had seized the Republican state chairmanship.
Once in power, Macy proved that pince-nez, starched high round collars and blue suits with vests—the outfit he was to affect until he died in i960—were no guarantee of conservatism. Attempting to reverse his party's blind obstructionism to progressive policies that had been largely responsible for the repeated victories of Smith, Roosevelt and Lehman in a state in which voter registration was heavily Republican, Macy excoriated GOP legislators who opposed Roosevelt's attempt to blunt the effects of the Depression through increased spending and embarrassed enough of them into supporting the state's Temporary Emergency Relief Administration to give the measure the votes it needed to pass. Dismissing the fear of the Old Guard leaders that, if they authorized an investigation of corruption in New York City, Roosevelt would authorize investigations of corruption upstate, Macy called GOP legislators into closed-door caucuses in Albany and, using every ounce of patronage at his command, broke the power of grim old William Ward and forced the tyrant of Westchester to release his legislators to vote as they wished, thereby allowing the passage of the bills initiating the Seabury investigation. And it was pressure from Macy that persuaded Republican fusionists to bow to Seabury's demand and, over Old Guard objections, give the nomination for mayor to the dangerous rabble-rouser La Guardia.
Astounded and antagonized by the course on which Macy was leading their party, the Old Guard was thrown into panic by his next announcement: pointing out—accurately—that the GOP's identification with the Power Trust was a political liability, Macy proposed to end the Trust's domination of the party by making Seabury, who had long attacked utilities as "monopolists and exploiters of the people," its next gubernatorial nominee.
"Well, that was all we had to hear," Trubee Davison would growl three decades later, sitting with one gouty leg propped on a foot stool in the thirty-foot-high study of his mansion on Peacock Point, topping off with cherries
jubilee a light lunch served by a white-coated butler and staring out across the Davison compound's half-mile-long terraced croquet court. "Seabury was a Democrat for one thing—that was enough. And he was full of this honesty-in-government thing that was so teeing these guys [Davison's Old Guard colleagues] off. He was calling everybody crooks, just like Macy."
The Old Guard hastily began looking for a candidate of its own to run against the implacable old idealist.
The qualifications required (in addition to respect for the sanctity of holding companies) were quite explicit: What was needed, said an Old Guard-sponsored magazine, was "a candidate who symbolizes the spirit of uncompromising courageous opposition to the whole Roosevelt socialistic program." There was a catch, however. While the Old Guard was determined to have a candidate who shared its views, 1934 was no year to have a candidate who was publicly identified with those views; what was wanted, in short, was a candidate who was actually a reactionary conservative—but who the public believed was a radical liberal. What was wanted was a front man, someone whose reputation would give protective coloration to their attempt. They turned to Robert Moses.
Moses may have antagonized them once, when he threatened to run the Northern State Parkway right past their manor houses. But in the intervening years, they had come to know him better. His aggressiveness had, after all, turned out to be not the hostility of the radical, idealistic reformer to property and power but something quite the opposite, an expression of his regard for power, an acknowledgment of the fact that he had on his side, in the person of that uneducated, practically illiterate demagogue from the Fulton Fish Market, the one man in the state with power equal to theirs and therefore did not have to compromise with them. As soon as he no longer had this power behind him, he had changed, suddenly, dramatically and, to them, satisfyingly. He had proven understanding—sympathetic, in fact—to their desire to keep the rabble away from their estates; he had proven his sympathy, in their view, by his agreement to make the parkway not an accessway to parks on the North Shore but a "traffic bridge," a chute, similar in principle to a cattle chute, on which the public would be shunted across the Gold Coast without being allowed to get off and contaminate it. His receptivity to their demands for private parkway entrances and bridges had proven him to be what they called a "practical man," a man willing to make accommodation with power. His deal with Otto Kahn had been further testimony to this (after all, a man who would turn a highway aside to save a private golf course couldn't be all bad)—as had his relationship with the politician who most directly represented them in state affairs. J. Russel Sprague, G. Wilbur Doughty's nephew, had succeeded the Last of the Mohicans as head of the Nassau County Republican organization and by 1934 had displayed all of his uncle's ability to obtain wampum for his braves. And Sprague told the barons that Moses was a man "you can get along with." Moses had cemented his relationship with the barons by entertaining them in reserved portions of Jones Beach and by displaying during dinner parties at their mansions a hatred for the President equal to
theirs. Reported The North Shore Almanack, a weekly newspaper that echoed the political views of the Gold Coast: "He is not a New Deal radical. He doesn't believe that the New Deal is working or can work. Finally, his friends say that he doesn't like Mr. Roosevelt at all." Moses' view of the "people," they found, was, in fact, as strikingly similar to theirs as was his view of the people's President.
Just as important to the Old Guard as this facet of Moses' personality was the fact that the public didn't know about it. Thanks to his genius for public relations, to the people he was still the fighter for parks and against privilege. And therefore if he was the Old Guard candidate against Seabury, the press would not be able to charge that the Old Guard—and the scandal-scarred utilities—were trying to keep control of the GOP. No one would believe Macy if he charged that Robert Moses was a front for the "power lobby." Asked three decades later why he had wanted Moses to run, Davison would admit to the author: "No one questioned Moses' honesty. Macy had been calling everybody crooks and he certainly couldn't say this about Moses. My thought was if we could get somebody like Moses they couldn't say that."
There were still some obstacles between Moses and the nomination. A number of Republican leaders simply couldn't stomach the thought of giving it to a man who had spent so many years humiliating them. But the Old Guard knew how to handle such scruples. Relentless economic pressure was applied. When the opposition had been whittled down to a few diehards, Davison called a Sunday-
afternoon meeting of party leaders in the Fifth Avenue apartment of his mother, Mrs. Henry P. Davison.
"Well, this meeting was just like an 'Of Thee I Sing,' " Davison would recall. "It was the kind of thing you put on the stage. We had all the leaders there, but some of them—that fellow from Queens [Queens leader Warren Ashmead] and the Syracuse bunch—wanted to run out on us, and I had to tell them they had better come back, and they did, but I knew we had to get this thing wrapped up or the agreement would fall apart. I sent out to the Links Club for sandwiches and I gave the elevator man five dollars not to stop at our floor so nobody could go down, and we wrapped the thing up. Then I wanted Bob up there, so the whole thing would be made final and he was out fishing on the Great South Bay. We got the State Police and they got him off the Great South Bay and brought him to New York. Then Bob and Russ Sprague and I went down to the other end of the apartment to a bedroom and we said, 'Now the fellows are willing to support you and we've got the votes.' He said, 'Well, this is like swimming up Niagara Falls in a coonskin coat,' meaning this was a very hard election to win, but he agreed to accept the nomination."
Davison's strategy worked. Moses' acceptance of the nomination made him the reactionaries' ally but most newspapers responded as did the Buffalo Evening News, which said: "None can say that Robert Moses is a . . . tory . . . His every act since entering public life has been dedicated to the best
interests of the many." Even Baron Warn of the Times could only express puzzlement at the alliance; "one of the odd turns of politics," he mused. Macy was robbed of the chance to portray the nomination struggle as one between an honest liberal and a candidate of the Power Trust. The battle at the GOP convention, held in Rochester in September, was bitter—"The convention will go down in history as one of the most hectic the GOP has ever held," commented the Rochester Times-Union —but the result was foreordained and Moses' nomination was cheered by both press and public. "At last! An idealist in politics!" said one typical letter-to-the-editor. Under cover of the cheering, the state committee was able to meet immediately after the nomination and oust Macy as state chairman. (The depth of the misunderstanding of Moses' philosophy was exemplified by an editorial in the World-Telegram. Noting that the platform adopted by the convention was "an uncompromising denunciation of the New Deal," the World-Telegram said: "Mr. Moses may be able to fit himself to such a platform. We doubt it. With the reputation and record Mr. Moses has as a liberal we don't see how he can." The World-Telegram didn't know that Moses had written much of the platform himself.)
If the press was puzzled by Moses' nomination, it was to be dumbfounded by his campaign. For Robert Moses as a candidate was a phenomenon of a type not seen very often on the American political scene.
"It seemed as if he was trying to set some kind of record for antagonizing people," Windels recalls. The time at Moses' disposal was limited— in keeping with the custom of the era the campaign ran for only five weeks —but he didn't waste a day of it. The element of the GOP most enthusiastic about his nomination was the Young Republicans. The very evening after the convention, Davison hosted a cocktail party for them so that Moses could convert their enthusiasm into active support. But things didn't work out quite as Davison expected. "They got into this argument and he started calling them names, and they started calling him names," Davison recalls. "My God, it ended up in a fearful row!"
Having thus rallied young Republicans to his standard, Moses turned his charm on their elders. Davison raised a massive war chest for the campaign—but, he recalls, "Moses wouldn't consult with me. I must have been the most inactive campaign chairman in history as a result. Once the campaign started, we never saw him. He locked himself up in an ivory tower someplace and we never saw his speeches until he gave them. And then he put Ray McNulty in our office [the state committee office]—to keep an eye on us, I think. Well, didn't that just sit well with the boys!"
With his own party taken care of, Moses turned to the opposition. The fact that he was running as a Republican and against Lehman meant that he had to forfeit the support of the men and women he had worked with in government. Most of them, veterans of the Smith, Roosevelt and Lehman administrations, were Democrats. All of them were believers in increased government activity to promote social welfare—precisely the cause most
hated by the Old Guard with which Moses had allied himself. Moses should not have expected their backing. But he did. And the way in which he asked for it—or, rather, demanded it—and his reaction when it was not forthcoming, were not particularly gracious.
There were a succession of unpleasant endings to pleasant dinner parties at which Bob and Mary were guests. One occurred at the Manhattan townhouse of Aaron Rabinowitz. Rabinowitz, a fabulously successful realtor turned philanthropist, was Lehman's partner in the state's first limited-dividend housing corporation, which the two men had formed, at a cost to each of them of about $375,000, in an attempt to attract private capital to low-income housing. "I was Moses' friend, too," Rabinowitz recalls. "We were very close. Until one day he was at the house for dinner. He had just been nominated for Governor." As the two men chatted outside the dining room after dessert, Moses asked, "You're going to help me become Governor, aren't you?" Rabinowitz recalls: "I said, T can't!' I was Lehman's partner. I was a Democrat. He turned and walked out without a word and for fifteen years, whenever we met, he wouldn't talk to me." Henry Mosko-witz, Belle's husband and Moses' old boss on the Municipal Civil Service Commission, traditionally "handled" the foreign-language press for the Democratic Party. Now Moses asked Moskowitz to do the same job for him—the Republican candidate. "Henry said what I said: 'I can't,' " Rabinowitz recalls. "Moses never talked to him again. He owed that man a lot, but the lousy no-good wouldn't even go to his funeral." The friendship of Moses' old associates—men like Joseph Proskauer and Bernard Shientag— might have kept them from taking an active role in the campaign. But after one visit apiece from Moses, all of them were out working for, and lending their powerful names to, Lehman's re-election bid, and thereby emphasizing that Moses was opposing the liberal causes with which he had so long been identified.
Then there was the press.
Most candidates attempt to woo reporters covering the campaign. It took Moses exactly one press conference to turn them icily frigid toward his candidacy.
This might have been surprising to those who had observed his long love affair with the press. But that love affair had endured only because he had never been exposed to the probing questioning to which reporters subject most public officials. His aides, who knew his sensitivity to even the most discreetly implied criticism, could have predicted what would happen when he was.
Moses entered his first press conference smiling broadly and clasping the hands of old acquaintances in the press corps as he strode into the room. But practically the first question asked was the natural one, considering the confusion over how a "liberal" could be nominated by the most conservative elements of the Republican Party: "Mr. Moses, are you a protege of the Old Guard?"
Said the World-Telegram that afternoon: "The gubernatorial candidate drew his breath sharply, and there was a glitter in his eyes." Jumping to his
feet, jabbing his finger at the reporter who had asked the question, he "heatedly" declared, "Nobody has any strings on me!" and demanded, "Have you asked the same question of Governor Lehman? Did you ask him if he is a protege of Tammany Hall?" In what the World-Telegram called a "display of temper," he began lecturing the reporters on how to do their job and then "announced belligerently that he would 'not take laying down' anything that was said against him ... by newspapers." Moses carried out this threat with a vengeance; by the end of the campaign he was spending a substantial part of his press conferences berating the press—and he had completely forfeited the sympathy with which most reporters had been prepared to view his candidacy.
If there was a blunder that could be made, Moses made it. He wanted La Guardia's support and assumed he would have it; after a
ll, he was a member of La Guardia's administration and the Mayor was a Republican. So Moses told the press he had it—and announced a City Hall meeting with La Guardia at which, he told reporters, the Mayor would announce it.
Unfortunately, Moses hadn't bothered to check with La Guardia. The Mayor had been under pressure from President Roosevelt, with whom he was negotiating for federal relief funds, to stay out of the gubernatorial campaign but had indicated to Corporation Counsel Windels that he would campaign for Moses nonetheless. But Moses' taking his support for granted infuriated him. After the City Hall meeting, which lasted almost an hour, La Guardia said blandly, "He'd make a good Governor, gosh, yes," but refused to say he would make a better Governor than Lehman—and he remained seated firmly on the sidelines throughout the campaign. Moses had quietly ducked out of City Hall while reporters were questioning the Mayor, but they cornered him later at 80 Centre Street and he could do nothing but admit that, as the Sun put it, "he did not expect Mayor La Guardia to make any campaign speeches in his behalf as the Mayor probably would be too busy with city affairs."
Moses chose a tour of the upstate Republican heartland, where voters were bitterly opposed to any increase in governmental spending or power, to advocate the imposition of a state sales tax. And he didn't make the suggestion in just any upstate city; he did it in Bingham ton, where the Chamber of Commerce had just finished collecting tens of thousands of names on anti-sales-tax petitions. He chose Syracuse, center of Onondaga County farm country, as the place to attack Macy, a hero to farmers because of his battle against the utilities that forced them to pay exorbitant rates for hookups to power lines. Then Moses moved on to Rochester. Reported the World-Telegram: "Upstate audiences were surprised by the advocacy by Mr. Moses of a sales tax, and startled when he struck at Mr. Macy, but they were left speechless last night at Convention Hall in Rochester, when he casually gave his opinion that . . . Herbert Hoover, still technically the party's national leader, failed to realize the need for action in fighting the Depression and had lost his strength of war days." As Moses moved on to Buffalo, fifth city on his itinerary, the World-Telegram reported that he "left behind him a trail of bewildered and frightened party leaders. In four days,
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 61
