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

by Caro, Robert A

  The most important development in American city planning has in recent years been the building of express highways on a large scale. New York City has led the way in the development of an outstanding system of express highways and parkways. These are so good that it would seem almost essential that England should study them. ... It is probably the outstanding example of democratic city planning in the world.

  In the years during which Americans wondered if Roosevelt would run for a third term, there were many media suggestions that Moses be the Republican nominee for the presidency. Life selected him as the Republican to write "The Case Against Roosevelt"; The Saturday Evening Post commissioned him to give "Advice to My Party." Moses never had any real

  * Another reaction was voiced by a Latin American diplomat taken on a tour by La Guardia himself. At each bridge and highway that the Mayor pointed out to him, the visitor asked, "And who was in charge of giving the contracts?" Each time La Guardia replied, "I was." "Ah, La Guardia," the diplomat said at last, with real admiration in his voice. "Ah, La Guardia. You must be a very rich man."

  chance of obtaining the presidential nomination, of course. But the frequent suggestions were a further indication of the extent of his popularity.

  Such popularity left little room for dissent. The press which was turning him into a legend in his own time had scant space to spare for critics. At the Hotel Pennsylvania dinner at which he was deluged with a Molasses-Niagara of sweet praise, a hundred pickets were marching outside the hotel protesting his treatment of WPA workers, but most of the city's newspapers never even mentioned them.

  The attitude of the press was reflected in the attitude of the public. At one Kiwanis Club luncheon, held in March 1934, the assembled Kiwanians applauded his speech, but during the question-and-answer period that, under Kiwanian tradition, followed the speech, one member of the audience said that he was disturbed by newspaper reports that Moses was intending to revoke all camping privileges at Orchard Beach immediately. "As one of the campers at Orchard Beach," he said, "will you grant us the privilege for a committee to interview you and put before you our story about the beach?"

  "No, sir," Moses replied—"calmly and finally," according to the Herald Tribune. "The camps are coming down." The camper tried to protest the arbitrariness of the decision, but he was drowned out—by the strains of the song sung by the rest of the audience to usher Moses out: "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

  Moses basked in his popularity. He wallowed in it. He boasted to his friends about it.

  And he felt it was no more than his due. He understood fully the importance of the press in creating it. In the introduction to the Park Department's 1940 brochure— Six Years of Park Progress —he wrote, "We owe much to the press, without whose constant interest and publicity it would be impossible to explain our program and to obtain public support for it." But he had not the slightest doubt that the press's support for his policies would continue. Once, explaining his feeling that a controversial project could be pushed through the Board of Estimate, he ended a conversation with an objecting McGoldrick by saying dryly, "We'll undoubtedly have the cooperation of the press, you know."

  No matter how busy he was, Moses always tried to find time in the late afternoon to drop in on Al Smith.

  The former Governor was a sad and bitter man now, old long before his time. Retired from public life at the age of fifty-six—too early for retirement for a man accustomed to action and applause and still healthy and strong— he had found in business only humiliation: he felt that all New York must know that he had had to beg Frank Roosevelt for help to rescue the Empire State Building—and that even after Roosevelt had moved federal agencies into the skyscraper, it was still not earning enough to meet the mortgage payments and they were being picked up almost as charity by John J. Raskob and the Du Ponts.

  And Al Smith wasn't interested in business anyway. He was interested in helping people. With the Depression, people needed help, needed it desperately. And he wanted—wanted desperately—to have a hand in bringing it to them. He was no businessman. He was the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield. And he yearned desperately, with all the desperation of a man who sees the sands of his life running low, to be part of that battlefield again before it was too late. As realization grew in him that Roosevelt would never allow him to play a part in his administration, that he was to be forever excluded from the public service in which he had spent his life by a man Smith felt owed him his career, he came to hate Roosevelt, with a hatred so unreasoning and blind that it was all too easy for him to hate the things Roosevelt stood for.

  The old friends, the friends who would have made him see that the social welfare programs Roosevelt was espousing were only extensions of the social welfare programs he had espoused as Governor, were gone. Mrs. Moskowitz was dead. Others were alive, but he didn't see much of them any more. Their field was politics, and he was no longer part of politics. In their places had come new friends—the ultrareactionary Raskob and William T. Kenny—who hated "that man in the White House." Al Smith had always been loyal to those who helped him, and these were the men helping him now. He had gotten his ideas from interaction with the ideas of associates, and these were the only associates left to him—these and Moses, who spent so much time with him, whom he respected so deeply, and who was as bitter about Roosevelt and the New Deal as any of them. There was no Mrs. M. to counterbalance their arguments. It was easy for Raskob and right-wing financier Jouett Shouse to use his bitterness for their own ends, to help him convince himself, as they were convinced, that the New Deal was "Communistic" and "Bolshevistic," that a spreading red-tinged bureaucracy was taking over America and destroying the principles that had made the country great. By 1936, the man who had once made being "regular" his First Commandment was ready to try to split the Democratic Party by lending his name to the right-wing Raskob-and-Du Pont-financed "Liberty League," and by giving a speech—Moses played a key role in its drafting—assailing Roosevelt and warning that "there can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow."

  As soon as he had given the speech, Smith knew that he had made a terrible mistake. But what hurt worse was the attitude of the public, the public of whose support he had once been so confident. The speech had caused a flurry in the press, but the flurry had been brief; Roosevelt had been able to laugh it off. To laugh him off! The old Governor knew he was still an immensely popular figure among New Yorkers. The drivers of the Fifth Avenue buses he took to get home every day recognized him, and on rainy days they would make a special stop in front of the awning at No. 820 so that he could get out without getting wet—and often other riders on the bus would stand and applaud the figure in the brown derby as he walked, somewhat stooped and stiff now, down the steps. But he was afraid that popularity no longer meant respect.

  When he got upstairs, his daughter Emily Smith Warner, his confidante and friend, would be there—her devotion to her father brightens the gloomy last pages of his life—and often so would other members of his family. But a family's devotion was no substitute for the roar of a cheering crowd or for a late afternoon in the Executive Chamber, with a dozen associates helping him veto bills or waiting to see what the Republican legislative leaders up on the Third Floor were going to come up with so that he could draft the strategy that would confound them. He was a natural genius in the art of leading multitudes of men toward great goals—and he was being given no chance to use that genius. In the late afternoons, when Moses came to Al Smith's apartment, he would often find the old Governor sitting, alone except for Emily, in the darkened living room, sunk deep in an easy chair, a glass of whiskey in his hand, staring in silence out at the sunset behind Central Park.

  One afternoon in 1938 or 1939, Moses came in and began discussing some project—Emily cannot recall which one—that he was planning to propose, and Smith pointed out that there would be opposition. Emily recalls vividly Moses' reply. He would "undoubtedly" have the support of the press and of the public, he said
, just as he always did. And Emily recalls vividly what her father said then.

  "That's a slender reed to lean on, Bob," Alfred E. Smith said. "A slender reed."

  "He meant that it could break at any time, that you could lose the public support," Emily explains. "Bob didn't say anything but you could tell by looking at him that he was sure that he never would."

  and their mother. If the strain was clear in Robert, it was just as clear in his brother, born, in 1887, a year before him. If the two "Moses boys" were in their youth a matched pair, a stunning matched pair, physically—both tall, both slim, both graceful, both haughty, their olive-skinned, high-cheekboned faces not only remarkably handsome but so similar they might almost have been twins; two quick-minded, quick-tempered, passionate young Spanish grandees—the passing years, in which, while his brother stayed slim, Robert's neck, and the face above it, became bulky, made clear that the resemblance was more than physical.

  Robert Moses was charming. So was his brother. Inquire about Paul Moses of a dozen women who are old now and who have not seen him since they were young, and a dozen wrinkled faces light up with almost involuntary smiles as they remember him. "Paul was a very good-looking man," says Mrs. Carl Proper, widow of an official in Ed Flynn's Democratic machine. "He was tall and very elegant and very bright—he had a mind. But the big thing about him was that Moses charm—it just washed over you like a wave." His life was to be filled with beautiful, sophisticated women, because, Mrs. Proper says, "they absolutely threw themselves at him. From the moment he walked in the door at a party, you could see women—the most beautiful, elegant women—watching him out of the corner of their eye. ... He was scintillating."

  Robert Moses was arrogant, equipped not only with the "Moses charm" but with a spigot that could turn off charm at the mere hint of disagreement. So was his brother. Each of the two Moses boys was totally convinced that he was intellectually superior to others, each was totally contemptuous of the products of others' intelligence. From his youth, Robert Moses seemed driven, moreover, by some need—some compulsion, almost—to demonstrate this contempt to those for whom he held it. With Paul Moses, this compulsion came later, the product perhaps of the tragic circumstances of his life. But it came. Says Mrs. Proper, who knew both the brothers: "[Paul] was opinionated—my God! When someone disagreed with him, you have no idea! He could argue you right back against the wall. And just as often he couldn't even be bothered arguing. There was this disregard of someone else's point of view, this brushing aside. This was from the mother, of course. I never saw this thing so strongly in any other individual as I did in Bob Moses— except maybe for Paul Moses." The brothers' arrogance was, moreover, more than intellectual. Not only Robert but Paul was to reveal throughout his life a feeling that the laws that governed other men were not meant to govern him. The drive to dominate, to relate to others from a commanding position, was strong in both, as a minor but significant characteristic they shared made obvious: even as a youth, Robert insisted on picking up checks for friends, even wealthy friends—he displayed a real need to be not a member of a gathering but the host. So did Paul.

  Robert Moses was brilliant and more than brilliant, possessed of a mind not only quick and supple but broad enough in reach to encompass a great metropolitan region and see its thousand diverse parts in a single, unified relationship.

  So was his brother, who was fluent in Greek and Latin (he loved to spend evenings with a massive Greek lexicon, leafing through it as if it were a popular novel), and, an electrical engineer by profession, was considered the most knowledgeable man in New York in the complex field of utility property assessments. While interviewing Paul about his brother—who at the time had rejected requests for an interview himself—the author was, by coincidence, simultaneously researching a series of articles on regional planning. He had been searching for a unifying concept of the metropolitan region as a whole, some sort of overview that would bring at least a measure of coherence to its development, that would suggest some vision of the past and present that could contain clues to—and suggestions about—the future. The search had been in vain. He could spend days, he found, interviewing the region's highest elected public officials—mayors, county executives, freeholders and presiding supervisors—and scores of urban planners without ever obtaining even a glimpse of such a vision. In talking with Paul Moses, the reporter wanted to talk about Robert Moses' boyhood; Paul was constantly lapsing into discussions of housing and recreation and transportation. The reporter was irritated by the digressions until, one day, caught despite himself by his companion's eloquence, he started listening. And then he suddenly realized that he was hearing at last what he had been seeking for so long—a shaping vision of how to plan the most heavily populated and densely congested metropolitan region in the world—hearing it pouring out of a man who had never in his life held any official or unofficial planning position. The author continued interviewing planners and public officials. Eventually he was to hear such a vision—conflicting, of course, but of similar grand scale and scope—from two men: elderly Lewis Mumford and young Lee Koppelman, a brilliant planner from Long Island. He was never—in a hundred interviews—to hear it again.

  Except when, months later, he finally got to interview Paul Moses' brother.

  During his young manhood Robert Moses was the uncompromising idealist, specifically anxious to "help" the "lower classes." So was Paul— although there were differences between his idealism and his brother's. Robert's concept of help was that of the mother he imitated, the patronizing "Lady Bountiful" who never forgot that the lower classes were lower. It was the concept of rigid class distinction and separation that would later be set in concrete by Robert Moses' public works. Paul, doted on by Grannie Cohen (and by her husband, Bernhard; on Saturdays, the gentle old man and the bright-eyed, handsome little boy would walk from the Moses brownstone on Forty-sixth Street down to the tip of Manhattan Island, where the grandfather would reward him with a nickel), understood exactly what the nickname "Lady Bountiful" implied. "Don't you see that settlement-house attitude of hers in everything Mr. Robert does?" he would demand. "This 'You're my children and I'll tell you what's good for you'? " It was not his attitude. His brother wanted class distinctions made more rigid; Paul wanted them eliminated. His brother despised "people of color"; Paul's attitude, in Mrs. Proper's words, was "a genuine feeling of real indignation over the way Negroes were

  treated, and don't forget, this was at a time when it wasn't fashionable to have such feelings." His brother's attitude toward members of the classes Bella called "lower" was, like Bella's, markedly patronizing; perhaps in reaction, Paul, says a friend, "was a person who would talk to some menial and be on fine terms with him. He could be impossible—opinionated, arrogant—with people on his own social plane. But he would never, never, act like that with anyone who couldn't talk back to him. He was very much aware of the moral responsibility to the lower classes—he was like Robert in that. But his attitude towards these classes was genuinely friendly." He had the ability— which Robert did not—to see people not as members of classes but as individuals. When they were well into their seventies, the two brothers would be asked about the maids, cooks and laundresses who had worked in the Forty-sixth Street brownstone. Robert could remember exactly one: "old Annie." Asked to "tell me something about her," he responded by listing her duties— and stopped. About this woman whom he saw almost every day of his boyhood, he knew nothing more—not even whether or not she was married. Paul remembered an even dozen who passed through the Moses household at one time or another—and, fifty years after he had last seen most of them, he could relate details of their personal lives to an extent that revealed he had talked to them as a friendly equal.

  Looking back on the youth of these two remarkable brothers, one difference looms large. Robert Moses would bend to his mother's fierce will. Paul Moses would not. Paul says—and relatives agree—that on many issues he and his younger brother shared views that were oppo
sed to Bella's ("She was very conservative, and neither of us was, not in the terms of that time") but that in the face of her displeasure Robert would draw back, hastening to agree with the plain little woman with the steely eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles, while Paul would continue to disagree. And Bella Moses, daughter of a woman who bullied underlings, herself a woman who bullied her husband to a point where, to accommodate her own wishes, she forced him to leave the city and the career in which he was happy, was not a woman who brooked disagreement—not even from her own son. Says Mrs. Proper, who saw them together: "It was no joke to that mother that she was a Republican and her son was a Democrat. That was apostasy to her." There was, moreover, Paul's romance at Princeton with a Philadelphia girl who was not only beautiful but first in her class at the University of Pennsylvania, who also had a habit of saying what she thought—and with whom Bella did not get along at all. Relatives say Paul and his mother had a violent falling out over her. Also at Princeton, Paul became leader of a 1910 version of a Reform Democratic club. Whether or not it was because of the romance and/or the political squabble, Paul left Princeton for four years, four years about which he never talked—these episodes are some of those obscured by shadows —and returned to major no longer in classics and literature but in electrical engineering. The conflict between Paul and his mother was more basic than specific issues: it was as fundamental as the fact that when the family discussions grew especially lively, Robert knew where to stop, and his older brother didn't—or, if he did, refused to act on the knowledge. "Paul was always the