Moses was in later years to attempt to alibi away his defeat by saying that he had simply been one of many candidates caught in the landslide vote by which the nation in 1934 expressed its approval of Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the day after the election he told an interviewer, "I said when I went into
* Until the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964.
this campaign that I did so knowing it was an attempt to swim up Niagara"; no one, he said, could have beaten a New Deal supporter in New York State in 1934.
This is true in part. The New Deal landslide of 1934 swept right-wingers to defeat all across the country. But Moses' explanation does not account for the size of his defeat. His previous popularity; the top-heavy GOP registration in the state; the lavish financing of his campaign—all these factors had led keen political observers like Baron Warn to predict at the time of his nomination a campaign that would be close no matter what the national trend. It was, these observers concluded after Election Day, the reaction of voters to personal, not party, philosophy, as well as to Moses' personality that had eroded the support with which he entered the campaign. Swimming up Niagara was one way of looking at Moses' campaign. In brilliance of strategy and execution, it was perhaps more comparable to the charge of the Light Brigade.
The definitive word comes from Joseph McGoldrick. McGoldrick was running on Moses' ticket—but since he was running for a city office, Comptroller, only in the city. At the beginning of the campaign, he was approached by a pollster named Harry Gordon Lynn whom politicians, including Al Smith, regarded as amazingly accurate.
"Lynn was doing the polling—secretly—for Lehman, but he came to me and said for $2,000, as long as he was doing it for Lehman, he would do it for me at the same time," McGoldrick recalls. "Lynn's first report to me was that Moses would lose the city by 550,000, but I would win it by 75,000. He said, 'Moses is going to be defeated, but don't worry, you'll win.' The second week, he said Moses would lose by 600,000, but I'll still win by 50,000. The third week it was 700,000 and 25,000. And on the Friday before election, he came in and said, 'Boss, you can't make it. Moses is going to lose the city by 800,000 and you can't overcome that: you're going to lose by about 25,000.' And that's approximately what happened. I lost by 23,000." Moses needn't have lost by nearly as great a margin as he did, McGoldrick says; in fact, if Moses had held his deficit in the city to the 550,000 figure at which it stood at the beginning of the campaign and had retained the normal GOP support upstate, he might well have won the election, for GOP candidates normally "came down to the city line"— compiled a margin above the northern boundary of the Bronx—with an edge of more than 600,000 votes. It was his tactics and personality, not national attitudes toward the New Deal, that persuaded tens of thousands of potential supporters to vote against him. "He booted that campaign himself," McGoldrick would say flatly. "If it was a disaster, he made it one."
On Election Night, Moses was careful to show an elaborate disregard of the vote. Reporters ushered into his apartment at 7 Gracie Square saw him poring over a map of the city, "outlining park and playground projects, while he whistled softly" and "giving only perfunctory attention, apparently, to the election returns relayed to him." "I haven't the slightest regrets in any way,
shape or manner," he said. "I've done the best I could. I've conducted an honorable campaign and adhered to my convictions. That's all there is to it." And he said that he was planning to return to his park work the next morning.
There was no question about his returning to his city job, of course, but the fact that he included in the statement his state park work showed that he knew Herbert Lehman much better than his campaign attacks on the Governor would have made it appear. For Lehman's treatment of Moses after the campaign was the definitive word on the Governor's character.
No sooner had the landslide aspects of his defeat of Moses become apparent than the Daily News, whose publisher was temporarily feuding with Moses, called on Lehman to oust his disloyal subordinate, and so did key legislators and a number of the Governor's most influential supporters—including Farley and Flynn and, according to some sources, President Roosevelt. Now—with Moses' prestige, his previously invulnerable armor against ouster moves, riddled with holes—was the time to bring pressure on the members of the State Parks Council to elect another chairman, they said.
Al Smith heard what was going on and hurried over to Lehman's apartment at 820 Park Avenue to urge the Governor not to move against Moses. He needn't have bothered. Lehman was bitterly hurt by Moses' charges, but he would not allow personal feelings to interfere with his duty. "We have differed in the past and probably will in the future, but in the planning and administration of parks, parkways and recreational facilities, Bob Moses has no superior on the face of the world," the Governor announced. Moses could continue to head the state park system as long as he was Governor, he said. "He was terribly sensitive because he said I called him a liar in the campaign," Moses would recall, but "I found him a very nice fellow to deal with. A very decent, honorable, honest fellow. He always supported me when he was Governor."
Moses should have known that Lehman would support him. After all, the "cowardly, sniveling, lying weakling" had always supported him before.
Why did Robert Moses, previously so talented at public relations, antagonize the public during the episode in his career in which he most needed its support?
In part, because his success in public relations had been due primarily to his masterful utilization of a single public relations technique: identifying himself with a popular cause. This technique was especially advantageous to him because his philosophy—that accomplishment, Getting Things Done, is the only thing that matters, that the end justifies any means, however ruthless—might not be universally popular. By keeping the public eye focused on the cause, the end, the ultimate benefit to be obtained, the technique kept the public eye from focusing on the methods by which the benefit was to be obtained. The technique was also especially advantageous to him because its focus on the cause kept his personality safely blurred.
Moses' use of the technique was a totally conscious one. Knowing pre-
cisely what he was doing—"the first rule is to stay on the side of the angels" —he continually urged reporters, under the guise of modesty, to "stick to the parks and playgrounds and bridges, and don't write about me." And he had consistently made sure that his instructions were followed by furnishing only bare, carefully selected facts about himself. From the moment in 1925 when he dramatically propelled himself into the public consciousness by announcing that he was fighting for parks against a "little group of selfish millionaires," he had identified himself so thoroughly with the glowing cause of parks that for nine years the public had seen him always through that glow. Everything he did, he said, was in the name of parks (and, of course, of parkways and bridges that helped people reach parks), and the public believed this. After a while he began—also consciously—to identify himself with related battles against crooked politicians and red-taping bureaucrats— and so cleverly did he make this additional identification that the public accepted it, too. During those years, the public never saw Robert Moses the man.
But in a race for public office, the public focus is more on the individuals involved. Causes championed by a candidate are important to voters, but mainly as they help illuminate his personality and philosophy. It was a man they were voting for, not a constitutional amendment. They wanted to see the man.
And they did. Robert Moses' only campaign for elective office tore away from him the protective coloration in which he had always appeared before the public, and stripped him naked to its gaze. As a candidate for elective office he was no longer only Robert Moses the fighter-for-parks. For the first time, the public got a good look at Robert Moses the man—and it didn't like what it saw.
This explanation, of course, does not answer another question: Why couldn't a man as skilled as Moses at manipulating and charming people he needed, charm the voters now tha
t he needed them, conceal from them his philosophy and personality, persuade them—at least for a period of a few weeks—that he understood and sympathized with their aims and aspirations and wanted to help them achieve those aims? Why couldn't he keep the voters from knowing—at least for a period of a few weeks—what he thought of them?
The answer to this question lies somewhere deep in Robert Moses' nature.
In part, it lies in the arrogance that was that nature's most striking manifestation. Robert Moses' arrogance was first of all intellectual; he had consciously compared his mental capacity with other men's and had concluded that its superiority was so great that it was a waste of time for him to discuss, to try to understand or even to listen to their opinions. But there was more to his arrogance than that. Had it been merely a product of a consciously reasoned comparison, it would have been governable by reason, reason that must have informed him that if he hoped to win the prize he so desperately wanted he must for a period of a few weeks conceal his contempt for the public. Had his arrogance been merely intellectual, he could have
disciplined himself—this man with a will strong enough to discipline himself to a life of unending toil—for the few weeks necessary to give him a chance at the Governorship. But his arrogance was emotional, visceral, a driving force created by heredity and hardened by living, a force too strong to be tamed by intellect, a force that drove him to do things for which there is no wholly rational explanation. It wasn't just that Robert Moses didn't want to listen to the public. It was that he couldn't listen, couldn't—even for the sake of the power he coveted—try to make people feel that he understood and sympathized with them.
And there was something else behind Robert Moses' arrogance, a strange, flickering shadow. For not only could Robert Moses not help showing his contempt for others, he seemed actually to take pleasure in showing this contempt—a deep, genuine pleasure, a pleasure whose intensity leads to the suspicion that, in a way, he needed to display his superiority, with a need so great that he simply could not dissemble it. How else to explain the fact that, even when he was appearing before the public to ask for its support, he could not help ostentatiously flaunting condescension and boredom—boredom even at its applause? Robert Moses may, moreover, have understood that he had this need. He may have understood that he would not be able to appear before the voters without having to show them —so clearly that there could be no mistake about it—how much he despised them. For such self-knowledge would explain—and it is difficult to find another explanation—his decision to shun, to so perhaps unprecedented an extent, all public appearances save for a few formal speeches.
Such an explanation also helps to illuminate Moses' otherwise almost inexplicable treatment of the press.
Nobody understood the press and how to manipulate it better than he. And therefore he must have known, intellectually, that he would forfeit its support—support he both needed and wanted—if he attacked reporters personally and directly. Something far stronger than intellect, something stronger than considerations of strategy, stronger even than a chance for the Governorship, was driving him, something that made it simply impossible for him to accept criticism, even the discreetly implied criticism of the reporters' questions at his first press conference.
As for the vilification that he spewed over his opponent and everyone connected with him—former friends as well as enemies—it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the explanation for this, too, lay in character rather than campaign tactics. Since his earliest days in power, Moses had tried not just to defeat but to destroy anyone who stood in his way—by any means possible. The definitive word on Robert Moses' gubernatorial campaign may be an unconsciously revealing remark that Moses made years later to his friendly biographer, Cleveland Rodgers: "I made the only kind of campaign I knew how to make."
ington on direct orders from the President, informed the Mayor, on direct orders from the President, of the President's feelings, and demanded that La Guardia dismiss Moses from the board of the PWA-financed Triborough Bridge Authority. In Ickes' Secret Diary, he wrote that "La Guardia regretted the situation and said that if he had known it existed he wouldn't have thought for a minute of putting Moses on the board. He expressed the highest regard for the President and asked me to give him a few days to see what he might work out."
But in the next few days, La Guardia was able to work out nothing. For Moses did not prove «?t all cooperative.
The Mayor may have expected Moses to quietly resign. After all, Moses was his appointee and it is traditional in American politics for an appointee to resign when the appointer wishes him to. Moreover, there was so much at stake here: a vital project for the city which could be built only if the federal government was willing to pay for it. One man surely could not think of standing in the way just so he could be in charge of it. And while Moses could not be forced to resign from the Triborough post—he had drawn the Triborough law so that Authority commissioners could be removed only on stated charges after a formal hearing—he held his park commissionership, a post both men then considered much more important, only at the pleasure of the Mayor, and the Mayor therefore possessed a powerful weapon: he could threaten to remove Moses from the more important post unless he resigned from the less important.
But Moses had learned—from his dealings with Roosevelt when FDR was Governor—that he could force a Governor to back down by threatening to publicize certain matters, such as requests for patronage. He had learned that he could force a Governor to back down on more complex issues by simplifying them through a threat to resign over them, a threat which reduced the issue to the question of whether or not the public wanted him to continue in office. And now Moses employed the same technique on a mayor. He told La Guardia that if the Mayor insisted on his resignation, he would resign, all right—but he would resign not just from the Triborough post but from the park commissionership as well, and would issue a public statement disclosing why he was resigning, a statement making clear that the Mayor had bowed to outside pressure to remove a city official who had done nothing to justify such treatment.
La Guardia had picked up Windels on the day after his conference with Ickes to ask the Sage of Pineapple Street for advice. Recalls Windels: "I said, 'Now, look, you've been elected mayor on the theory that you are going to run an absolutely independent administration. . . . You can't start off by knuckling under to outside dictation. If you do, your name is going to be mud.' I told him that if he ousted Moses, the public would believe that he could be pressured in a situation like this and throw out a man who the public thinks is wonderful, and I told him, Tf you do that, you'll never be able to erase that from the public's mind.' " From others—including City Chamberlain and New Deal Brain Truster Adolf A. Berle, Jr., the link
between the city and federal administrations—La Guardia received the same advice.*
La Guardia stalled. Repeatedly he promised Ickes that Moses' resignation was imminent—and repeatedly he came up with excuses for new delays. But Roosevelt was, Ickes wrote in his diary, "implacable." The President was determined to have his revenge, and in case that determination flagged— and there is no reason to believe it ever did—little Louis Howe and big Jim Farley were there to keep it fresh, both of them urging him on. He instructed Ickes to take a more forceful tone. The PWA chief, who hardly knew Moses, was to confess later that "from the beginning I had had no stomach for this whole affair. ... I was in the unhappy position of having to admit to myself that Moses was an efficient administrator and a public-spirited citizen." But, he said, "my loyalty ran to the President and I was determined to work it out to his satisfaction if I could." He told La Guardia that he would not approve new Triborough requisitions until the Mayor had obtained Moses' resignation from the Triborough board. La Guardia stalled. Then Ickes said that he would not approve a single new PWA project of any type in New York City—not hospital, school or subway—until Moses resigned. Still La Guardia stalled. "He would make promises and then h
e would break his promises," Ickes wrote. "It was 'Give me this payment and I'll get rid of him next week'—that kind of thing," Windels recalled. And the stalling succeeded in keeping payments coming for Triborough and the other projects.
Then came the gubernatorial campaign, with Moses running as a Republican. "Naturally I had to declare a truce during that period in order to avoid a charge that I was playing politics," Ickes said. More requisitions were approved.
But as soon as the votes were counted, the truce was off. On November 7, the day after the election, Moses sent to Washington new Triborough requisitions totaling $8,100,000. The requisitions reached Ickes' desk on November 8, and on that date the PWA Administrator telephoned La Guardia and told the Mayor that they would stay on his desk, unsigned, until Moses' resignation lay there beside them. Furthermore, Ickes said, no new PWA projects would be approved for New York City. And the Administrator apparently made a further threat. In his Secret Diary he wrote: "I am considering refusing to honor requisitions for funds" for projects already under way in the city—an action that would throw out of work the tens of thousands of men now employed on them.
* Berle telegraphed: the president: personal: moses matter probably will become
A NATIONAL INCIDENT WITHIN A FEW DAYS. ... I THINK THIS IS ONE OF THE THINGS YOU CANNOT DO UNLESS THERE ARE REASONS OTHER THAN PERSONAL GIVING GROUND FOR PUBLIC DEFENSE. MOSES WILL CERTAINLY RESIGN NOT MERELY FROM TRI-BOROUGH BUT FROM CITY ADMINISTRATION STATING HIS POSITION OF WHICH OUR OPPOSITION FRIENDS ARE PREPARED TO MAKE THE MOST. I HARDLY KNOW MOSES BUT SUGGEST THERE MIGHT BE MORE REAL DEVILS TO FIGHT. REMEMBER THE EXECUTION OF THE DUKE [sic] D'ENGHIEN BROKE NAPOLEON.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 64
