All through November and December, the drama of revenge and power played on. Its cast included some of the most colorful characters in American politics. On one side, jaw jaunty, cigarette holder cocked, face open and friendly, the Master Politician in the White House. Beside him the Old Curmudgeon of Interior, the scarred, doughty reformer from Chicago ("almost the incarnation of lonely, righteous and inexhaustible pugnacity," one reviewer was to call him) who in less than two years on the national stage had proven himself a character actor of the first magnitude, winning the public's heart with the dour, skeptical but kindly glare that he flashed at it over the top of the rimless spectacles that were forever slipping down along his nose, and with his flawless performance as the tart-tongued, terrible-tempered but invincibly honest defender of the public interest. On the other side—"a modern Horatius on another unfinished bridge," one reviewer was to call him—Robert Moses, seriously ill and confined for most of the drama to his home with an influenza which had deepened into an illness variously described as "pneumonia" or "nervous exhaustion." In the middle, glowering out from under his big black Stetson, the prickly Little Flower of City Hall. Circling around these stars, spear carriers perfectly type-cast: the burly, bald, gregarious Postmaster General; the lean, sharp-eyed, sardonic City Chamberlain; and the wizened little gnome whose proposed appointment to a minor state park post a decade before had been the drama's prologue. Any audience would have been delighted at the show. But no audience got to see it. It played day after day and week after week behind closed curtains. Not a word of the dispute, not a hint that there was one, was uttered over the airwaves or printed in a newspaper. Moses' grim fight went on in absolute secrecy.
On November 21, the PWA board was scheduled to meet at two o'clock to approve a long list of projects. Shortly before the meeting began, Ickes slashed off the list every one located in New York City. Then he telephoned La Guardia to tell him what he had done. There are indications that Moses' loss of popularity in the gubernatorial campaign was weighing heavily in the scales on which the Mayor was weighing the alternatives; Windels had told him he couldn't oust a man "who the public thinks is wonderful"—but apparently much of the public no longer thought Moses was wonderful. In conversations with him, the Mayor, if he did not ask him to resign in so many words, apparently pressed more forcefully the suggestion that the whole city should not be made to pay for his seat on the Triborough board. In reply, Moses apparently pointed out that there was no way he could be removed from Triborough except on charges. Telephoning Ickes, La Guardia pointed this out. As Ickes recalled in his Secret Diary: "I told him that was his funeral not mine."
La Guardia huddled daily with Windels now, and with C. C. Burling-ham, the grand old man of the reform movement whose opinion the Mayor valued so highly that "from him and from no one else would he take a scold-
ing." Both men argued—Windels on political grounds, Burlingham on grounds of principle—that he should not knuckle under to Roosevelt. The Mayor was torn. On the one hand, Windels. believes, "he realized that it would have painted an indelible picture of him in an unfavorable light." On the other hand, there were his dreams for remaking New York, dreams which would be impossible of realization without the federal funds which Roosevelt alone could provide. Shrewdly calculating politician that he was, Fiorello La Guardia was weighing the alternatives, always weighing.
Then, on December 26, 1934, Roosevelt and Ickes threw on those delicate scales something that weighted them to the President's side. It was an official general PWA order—Administrative Order Number 129 was its title— and it stated flatly: "Hereafter no funds shall be advanced to any authority, board or commission constituting an independent corporation or entity created for a specific project wholly within the confines of a municipality, any of the members of the governing body of which authority, board or commission holds any public office under said municipality."
The order obviously applied to Triborough and to Moses. (By coincidence, it also applied to another New York City official, Tenement House Commissioner Langdon W. Post, who was a member of the Municipal Housing Authority, which was also receiving federal funds, but Ickes privately assured La Guardia that the order would not be enforced in Post's case. Post stayed out of the controversy because he was away on an ocean cruise.) It had almost the full force of law. It had the full force of an official regulation of the agency financing Triborough—and, Ickes told La Guardia, it embodied in those official regulations what he had previously said privately: that no more money would be given to Triborough until Moses was off the Triborough board. Most important, it gave La Guardia a public excuse for ousting Moses: an official PWA rule forbade Moses to serve. Its issuance was the move of a fox. "The President helped me draft this order," Ickes diaried.
But the fox was growing reckless. Previously, the President had been careful, always letting Ickes do the talking with La Guardia, not letting himself become directly involved. Now "he discussed it [the order] personally with La Guardia," Ickes wrote. And Roosevelt made another move; either he himself or Ickes—and probably both—told La Guardia that if he felt he could not force Moses to resign, they would be satisfied if the Mayor promised Ickes—in writing—not to reappoint Moses when his term expired on June 30, 1935, well before the bridge would be finished.
This combination of moves stripped La Guardia of excuses that he could make to the President—if in fact he still wanted any. It gave him the public rationale he would need to justify ousting Moses, and it gave him a private rationale to make to Moses. When he received a copy of the order— it had not been released publicly, of course—he showed it to Moses, apparently to prove to him that he had no choice but to give in. Then the Mayor headed for Washington, where he met Ickes, and, on Thursday, January 3, 1935, secretly swore to the PWA Administrator that he would put the promise in writing as soon as he got back to New York.
But the Mayor had miscalculated, as had Roosevelt and Ickes. They may have believed that Moses' loss of popularity had stripped him of his armor, and that Order Number 129 had left him weaponless, but they were wrong. For Moses still possessed a weapon more valuable even than his popularity: his mind. He conceived a masterstroke that simultaneously won him back his popularity and turned the tables on his great enemy. While La Guardia was in Washington, he did the one thing that no one involved in the closed-curtain drama had expected. He leaked the order to the press—and thereby pulled the curtain up.
There, suddenly spotlighted before the public, stood the President of the United States of America—caught in a most unbecoming posture. And the President was only one figure in a tableau that might have been lifted intact out of that traditional melodrama "The Old Homestead." In that melodrama, a villain used the power of money, the mortgage he held on the old homestead, to force the proud beauty to yield to his dishonorable advances. In the drama that Moses suddenly revealed to the public there was also a villain (the President) using the power of money (federal relief funds) to force the Mayor to perform a dishonorable act (ousting from his job a faithful public servant). And this drama had a hero, too—for now that La Guardia had agreed to side with the President, the faithful public servant was seen by the audience as a man standing alone without a single ally and fearlessly fighting for his rights against the two most powerful men in the country. Since, moreover, the critics and the audience didn't know— and never were to learn—the long background of the Roosevelt-Moses feud, their imagination supplied the traditional motive: press and public assumed that the President was attempting to force Moses out of his job simply because he was a Republican and had criticized the New Deal in his election campaign. And just in case anyone missed the point of the drama, Moses supplied a narration—written with the brilliance that characterized his efforts when he had a legitimate point to make.
"There are certain facts which should be known to the public," he said. The sole purpose of Order Number 129 was to force him out of his job; Ickes had admitted as much to La Guardia. And Ick
es had also admitted "that I was honest and competent," and that the sole reason for the order was that "I was . . . not sufficiently friendly to the administration."
He had refused to leave quietly, Moses said. "When the Mayor explained this situation to me I told him that I should be glad to retire from his administration entirely if he wanted me to, but that I would not take a back door out of the Triborough Authority merely because there was pressure to get me out for personal or political reasons." He had refused, he said, because he wanted the American people to know what was happening— because there was a principle involved that was more important than himself. "The Federal appropriations for public works and work relief are the funds of all the people of the country. ... If personal or political considerations are to govern the expenditure of public works and relief funds by the Federal Government, this fact should be known to the public."
Reaction proved as violent as Moses had gambled it would be. Un-
luckily for Ickes, the PWA Administrator held a press conference every Thursday, and, not knowing that Moses had leaked the story, he held one as usual this Thursday shortly after La Guardia-had left his office. To the Administrator's shock, reporters began questioning him about Order Number 129, which he had believed was secret. As he later wrote in his diary: "I was asked whether Farley had ever spoken to me about Moses. To that question I could honestly say No. Then I was asked whether the President had ever done so. There I had to lie, but again I said No." The lie was to force the press to link Roosevelt with the order only in hints for a day or two—although the hints were broad indeed—but it did nothing to cool its ardor for the story. La Guardia had boarded his train back to New York confidently believing that the affair was still secret. Sealed off from the world in a private compartment, he made the trip with that confidence unimpaired. But when he swung off his train at Pennsylvania Station at 9:30 p.m., he saw a pack of reporters running toward him along the platform. Luckily for the Mayor, an aide, Lester B. Stone, had been telephoned by a reporter for a statement, had thus learned that the story had broken and had hurried to the station. Stone reached the Mayor a few steps ahead of the reporters, pulled him aside and told him what had happened, giving him a moment to think. No one ever accused Fiorello La Guardia of needing more than a moment. When the reporters engulfed him, he did not admit that he had agreed to dismiss Moses. Instead, when he was asked, "What are you going to do?" he replied, "I'll think it over." And he decided that night to postpone writing Ickes the letter he had promised.
That proved to be a wise move. For the next day, as one of his advisers was to put it, "the shit hit the fan." The public, that most fickle of lovers, embraced Robert Moses in January as fervently as it had pushed him away in November.
With the exception of the Daily News, there wasn't a newspaper in New York that didn't carry an editorial message to the Mayor on Order Number 129 on Friday, January 4, or Saturday, January 5. The ones in the Herald Tribune were a fair sample. Friday's said: "If Mayor La Guardia allows one of the ablest of his public servants to be dismissed by a Washington official, without shadow of cause, through a secret ukase so extraordinary and so contemptible that the official himself is ashamed publicly to admit it, then it seems to us that Mr. La Guardia might as well resign his Mayoralty right now." That was Friday's editorial. Saturday's said: "If Mr. La Guardia gives in, he will find that he has sold his soul, sold his administration and sold the people of New York. It is not worth it." Let the federal politicians cancel the city's contracts; show them "who's charged with the conduct of the public business of the people of New York City." Was the Herald Tribune a Republican paper? The American, the Brooklyn Eagle, and the World-Telegram were Democratic. "Bureaucracy! Patronage! Politics!" the American raged. "If the order stands it will be a lasting stain on the record of the Administration," the Eagle said. "Secretary Ickes is jeopardizing public confidence in the nonpartisan honesty of the national Public Works Administration," the World-Telegram said. And the inde-
pendent New York Times, normally so dispassionate and restrained, chimed in: "If he [La Guardia] has the backbone of a lamprey, he will stand by Bob Moses, right through to that Judgment Day which he is himself so fond of invoking."
And outrage was not confined to the press. The public was reacting to the press interpretation of the drama—bureaucrats and "patronage politicians" playing politics with its money—as the American public always reacts to bureaucrats and patronage politicians. Before his gubernatorial campaign, Robert Moses had been a hero because the public had seen him less as an individual than as a symbol of resistance to politicians and bureaucrats. His conduct during the campaign had, by forcing the public to see him as an individual, stripped him of that cause. But now he was once again basking in its aura—and he was once again a hero. In a display of indignation that proved how completely the Moses masterstroke had restored its author to public favor, on Friday, the day after the storm broke, the Long Island Chamber of Commerce, the Conference on Port Development of the City of New York, the Park Association of New York City, the City Club, the Bronx Board of Trade, the New York Board of Trade and the Merchants' Association of Sheepshead Bay all held separate meetings and passed resolutions backing Moses and denouncing Ickes. On Saturday, it was the Elmhurst Manor Community Council, the Jackson Heights Taxpayers Association, the North Woodside Community Association, the Astoria Property Owners' Association, the Madison Manor Civic Association, the Atlantic Avenue Business Men's and Taxpayers' Association, the Automobile Club of New York, the Corona Community Council and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architecture.
The language of the resolutions was indignant, and so was the language of the letters-to-the-editor that flooded into the city's newspapers— the Herald Tribune running nine in a single day under the headline "Politicians vs. Public Servant," the Brooklyn Eagle running eleven. New York's parks are "the sign and signet of Robert Moses, a man I do not know but whose hand I should be proud to shake," said one. "Our Mayor has repeatedly crawled on his belly before Washington in abject supplication. Are we, as citizens of the sovereign State of New York, to have a political mongrel from the Middle West instruct us as to who shall build our bridges and who shall plant our gardens?"
Confiding in his diary, Ickes blamed the uproar on La Guardia. "La Guardia has followed a crooked course in the whole proceeding," he raged a week after the storm broke. "He let Moses see the letter that I had written him, in which was incorporated my order. ... I called La Guardia on the telephone on Monday and before I got through with him I told him very clearly and distinctly just how accomplished a double-crosser he in fact is. He equivocated and evaded, but I know that I had him dead to rights. This was a great disappointment to me. I had felt that La Guardia was a man of real courage and substance, but in this matter he has acted like the cheapest kind of double-crossing politician."
The Mayor was frantically steering between the Scylla of losing federal
funds and the Charybdis of losing the confidence of his constituency. And he had to steer small indeed. He attempted to make reporters see his predicament; when one asked how Ickes could hold back Triborough Authority funds he had signed a contract to furnish, La Guardia replied, "That's like a lawyer telling his client that he can't be put in jail for something and the client answering that he is in jail. I can't build on litigation. I need steel girders and brick, mortar and labor to build." But these attempts only made the storm in his city rage more fiercely. Then the Mayor tried alternately to ignore the controversy and to deny one existed. He avoided reporters as much as possible—once, finding a crowd of them outside his office door when he left one afternoon after a day of refusing their requests for an interview, he shouldered violently through them—and when, on another occasion, they cornered him, he said blandly, "Everything is susceptible of being straightened out by reasonable men. There is complete harmony between City Hall and Washington." But Moses kept the controversy alive with such devices as weekly accountings o
f the steadily dwindling balances in Triborough bank accounts and tours of the bridge site for platoons of civic leaders—much to La Guardia's displeasure; when a reporter asked "How would Ickes' order affect Commissioner Post?" the Mayor snapped back, "At least Post is on the high seas and he can't issue any statements." The Mayor was stalling; in the face of such a gale of public opinion, he apparently felt, either Moses or Roosevelt would have to turn and run for harbor. Ickes felt the same way, although he felt the man who would have to retreat would be the President. "This enterprise ... is a great mistake on the President's part," the PWA Administrator diaried. "By making a martyr out of [Moses] we are only serving to build him up."
But it wasn't La Guardia's or Ickes' feelings that counted. It was Roosevelt's and Moses'. And when these two men were dealing with one another, they were not "reasonable men" at all. Not normal political considerations but personal animosity, "real hatred," hatred that had been boiling between them for years, governed their actions. Neither one would give an inch. Chauffeured in from Babylon on January 9 for a two-hour meeting with La Guardia and Windels behind closed doors at City Hall, Moses emerged, noticeably pale and tired, to find reporters waiting. "Are you going to leave the bridge authority?" one asked. "No," Moses snarled. Without another word or a backward glance, he strode out of the building. When Ickes, after a week of trying and, as he put it, "taking it on the chin" on behalf of the President, finally secured an appointment with Roosevelt on January 10, he half expected that, in view of "all the turmoil," the President would try to work out a face-saving compromise. But, the Administrator wrote in his diary the next day, "he told me very firmly that he wanted me to go through along the lines of the order that I have issued." No Triborough requisitions were to be honored "unless the Moses matter is settled to the President's satisfaction."
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 65
