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

by Caro, Robert A

  same—a maverick, a dissenter, based on this sense of social injustice," Mrs. Proper says. "And you only had to meet that mother once to know that that was a house in which very little dissent was tolerated." "She never did succeed in running me—that's what made her mad," Paul says.

  Paul paid a high price for his independence. He wanted to go into public service as much as his younger brother did, but instead, in 1913, the year in which Bella secured for Robert a coveted place in the Bureau of Municipal Research, it was announced to Paul one evening that a partnership had been arranged for him with Kuhn, Loeb & Co., the investment banking firm in which Bella's brother-in-law was a partner. Paul declined to follow the pattern his mother had laid down for his life. "What?" he recalls saying. "You don't expect me to go downtown and spend the rest of my life juggling pieces of paper, do you? Well, that's what the banking business is, isn't it? Juggling pieces of paper?" He says his father wanted to help him get started in public service, but did not. "Why?" he would say bitterly. "Because Father did whatever Mother directed, that's why."

  Shadows cover the next few years of Paul's life. According to several vague accounts, he spent them in South America, returning only when America followed the President he idolized into the war to make the world safe tor democracy. At any rate, at a time at which his brother was declining to serve in the war, Paul enlisted in the Navy. Mustered out in November 1918, he was in no worse shape than his brother, who in November 1018, almost thirty years old, dreams of civil service reforms crushed, was working at a humiliating job as little more than a clerk, with no place to turn for work in his chosen field.

  Looking back at this crucial point in the lives of these two remarkable brothers, another difference—an extension perhaps of Robert's willingness and Paul's unwillingness to bend to the woman they could not face down— looms larger. Robert may have previously refused to compromise with the practical politicians he scorned, but when, at the age of thirty, Belle Mosko-witz gave him one last chance, he compromised. Having learned he could not beat the Tammany politicians who had crushed him, he was not only willing but eager to join them; he had learned very well indeed the need to compromise. Paul never learned that lesson. Propelled up the Consolidated Edison executive ladder by his engineering brilliance (he was soon assigned, at a salary of S1 8,000, to find ways of harnessing the vast power of the St. Lawrence River, a plan that would later be thwarted by Al Smith's determination to have the harnessing done by a State Power Authority), he was hobbled by his refusal to tailor his liberalism to the ultraconservatism of the utility's executive suite; once, a top executive asked him if he didn't agree that Woodrow Wilson was a fool; Paul lashed out at him angrily. Robert Moses may have been the idealist who compromised his ideals; Paul Moses was the idealist who didn't.

  1 ooking back on the lives of the two Moses bovs. one difference looms largest of all. Robert went into public service, a field big enough to allow his unique vision and drive full range; a field in which funds were available on the same scale as his immense dreams, in which his arrogance was in part

  excused by the public need he was serving, and in part protected by the public powers that devolved on him, so that when he went beyond the law, the power of the state protected him from retaliation. Paul did not go into public service. Eager to do so, he thought he was going to have his chance in 1925, the year after his brother was appointed president of the Long Island State Park Commission, when, he says, his close friend Colonel Frederick Stuart Greene, the erudite, urbane head of the State Department of Public Works, offered him a top DPW engineering job. But, Paul says, at the last minute, "after everything was set," Greene told him that Al Smith had vetoed the appointment without explanation. (At the time, Paul told the author with his bitter smile, he did not even suspect that the explanation might have something to do with his brother, whom at the time he considered his friend.)

  Either through a quirk of fate or because of a spirit of competition with his brother—who was so quickly making a name for himself creating places to swim for the public—Paul purchased a large swimming club in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. At the same time that his brother was making grandiose plans for Jones Beach, Paul was making grandiose plans for his "Llanerch Pool," planning to turn it into a huge recreational complex by adding additional swimming pools, a huge dance hall, and different restaurants for different pocketbooks. "It would," recalls a friend to whom he enthusiastically broached his ideas, "have been something really unique for the time. He had some imagination, I'll tell you."

  But imagination on the Moses scale was feasible only on a public scale. Attempting to carry out his plans, Paul spent the pool's revenues as fast as they came in. Robert's grandiose plans cost far more than he had expected, but because his money came from the state treasury, though he spent on an unprecedented scale, overspent his budget, poured funds allocated for an entire bathhouse into its foundations alone, there was always more where that came from. For Paul there wasn't—particularly after his father died. Emanuel had helped with his ambitious project, but when, in 1925, he died he left all his money to his wife. This money was readily available to the younger of her two sons. Although Bella never gave Robert as much as he needed and he was habitually short on cash, she did support him and his wife and daughters for more than ten years; when, in 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, he was named Secretary of State, it was the first job at which he had ever earned more than a token salary. When, desperate for funds to complete the Jones Beach Causeway, he asked her for a loan of $20,000, she gave it gladly. But for her older son, help was limited and grudging, and he was not a man who could beg. Soon, in the midst of a divorce that ended an unhappy marriage, he was being humiliated by the hounding of his Llanerch Pool creditors. He was unable even to pay his lawyer, and was sued by him, too.

  In 1929, there was a reconciliation between Paul and his mother. She asked him to handle her business affairs. Con Ed hired him back on a part-time basis as a consultant, the swimming pool began to earn money, and, appearing nightly in winter at the theater or the opera and at New York's most fashionable restaurants, he was again an elegant, cheerful man-about-town.

  Between two men as opinionated as Paul and his brother, there were bound to be frequent arguments, but in the past they had always been friendly; Paul had been a frequent visitor at Robert's home. But since his brother had become a powerful man in state government, Paul felt, his attitude had changed. He no longer, Paul felt, would tolerate anyone—even his brother—disagreeing with him. Looking over the aides his brother had selected, Paul recalled thinking: "Why, he's surrounded himself entirely with behind-kissers." During one heated discussion, his brother adopted an attitude that there was no sense discussing the matter any further since he knew best. "By God," Paul said, "I believe you're beginning to believe what these behind-kissers tell you." But, Paul says, there was never any particularly momentous clash with his brother; he believed they were still friends.

  Then, in January or February 1930, Paul and his mother had another falling out. He left in a huff for Philadelphia, staying there for several months. The reason for the falling out is not known; but Paul said that it was no more serious than the other rights he had had with his mother, fights after which they had become reconciled.

  But this time, something new happened, something he would never be able to understand—although he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand it. When he came home to make up with his mother this time, she refused even to see him. The other relatives on whom he dropped in, always so happy to see him in the past, were suddenly cold and distant. "They all seemed to think I had done something awful, you could tell from the way they were acting," Paul would say. "But I didn't know what the hell it was supposed to be." Much too proud to ask, Paul reacted by avoiding these people who had suddenly turned against him.

  In March 1930, Bella Moses learned that she had cancer. Paul did not know at first. Whether he ever knew can no longer be determined. According to
one story prevalent in the family, Paul never went to see his mother at Mount Sinai Hospital until the last few days before she died. According to another, he had gone earlier, but she had refused to see him. And when, on May 22, 1930, after weeks in which she lay semi-comatose in intense pain, she died of cancer, her will divided her estate between two of her children, Robert and Edna (although Robert's share was bigger than Edna's because to it was added, in effect, $50,000 for the education of his children). To Paul Moses, her eldest son, Bella Moses left only $100,000, and she left it in trust, so that he would receive only the interest from it, never the principal. He had to receive that income through his brother, who was named a trustee of the trust fund as well as an executor of the will. And there was an additional clause: if Paul ever contested the will, he would automatically lose even the trust fund, whose principal would then be divided between his brother and sister.*

  * Upon Paul's death, half the principal was to go to Edna's children, half to Paul's— should he have children. If he did not, that half would go to Robert's children, Barbara and Jane.

  Paul Moses was to be tortured by his mother's will for the rest of his life.

  Financially, it changed his life, of course. Previously his earnings had always been supplemented by gifts from wealthy parents. Now he would have only the interest—so meager compared to those gifts—on his trust fund. More, he had always had security, the assurance of protection against any real hardships, as well as the assurance that one day a share of his family's wealth would be his. He had been raised among servants and tutors, in an atmosphere of snug luxury. He had spent his later life in variations of that atmosphere, and he had never had any reason to doubt that he would be able to live out his life against such a background. Now, suddenly, with a single blow, that security had been stripped from him—irrevocably and forever. It was the Depression: consulting engineers were a luxury companies could no longer afford; at the time he learned the contents of his mother's will, he had just learned that his retainer from Con Ed would soon be terminated. The swimming pool had not been doing badly, but its income would never be anything near a substitute for that security, even if it, too, was not affected by the Depression. He had saved nothing; there had never been any reason to save. He had always been a man who had much and the prospect of more. Now, all in an instant, at the age of forty-three, he had nothing.

  But it was not financial considerations that hurt Paul most deeply. What his mother's will did to him cannot be computed on any tally sheet. He was to have to live for the rest of his life not only in straitened circumstances but with the question of why his mother had forced him into them. Thirty-seven years later, a man of eighty, he told the author, "I'm trying all this time to divine what was in my mother's mind. What kind of performance was this? Why did she do this thing?"

  He was to have to live also with alienation from the rest of his family, an alienation that hurt him the more because he could not understand the reason for it. "I don't know what was in their minds," he would say. "What was I supposed to have done that was so terrible? Nothing that I know of. But they seemed to think I had." He was to spend the rest of his life tormented by these questions. And the conclusion that, after years of wondering, he finally reached was one that would not have been illogical to Ansley Wilcox or Judge Clearwater or Paul Kern—or any one of a score of men who had, in one way or another, stood between Robert Moses and something he wanted. His brother, Paul Moses felt, had lied about him when he was not around to defend himself, had poisoned his mother's mind and the minds of other members of his family against him, had exaggerated the details of his divorce and his financial difficulties until they seemed like vicious, unforgivable misdeeds. Paul even had a specific explanation for his mother's decision to virtually cut him out of her estate. "I wasn't present, but I know that Mr. Robert must have had something to do with that," he would tell the author. There had been another will, Paul would say, one that had divided his mother's estate equally among her three children. "How do I know?" he

  would sav. "Because I saw it - several times. I was handling my

  mother's 'affairs, you know. It was just a simple thing—divided into three parts after charitable deductions." But Robert Moses had gone to the hospital where his mother lay dying, in a drugged state, Paul said, awaiting an emergency operation that was to be performed that night at ten o'clock, with a new will in hand, and. at six o'clock, had persuaded her to sign it. Paul could even advance a reason for his brother to do such a thing: Robert needed money badlv, Paul said. And it was also his brother, Paul said, who was responsible for his difficulty thereafter in obtaining either public or private employment in his profession.

  One of Paul's char£es h demonstrably false. Bella did sign her final will daring her last illness in Mount Sinai Hospital, but. according to the date on the will, she signed it on April 4. 1930. seven weeks before she died. The truth of his charge that his brother lied about him to their mother and their relatives cannot be determined—although it is clear, from a series of interviews with surviving relatives, that although they regard Paul almost as a criminal not one of them has any clear idea of what his crime—if there was one—was supposed to be. Cousin Hilda Hellman, for example, says, "He was bad. I think he must have done something pretty awful." What exactly did he do? "I really don't have any idea at all." she says. Well, then, why does she think he did anything 0 Mrs. Hellman savs it was just "an impression" she had. .Asked the source of the impression, she was unable to remember. But at least one other relative, searching her memory, believes it was Robert.

  Paul insisted that the will be read in the light of Robert's financial situation at the time his mother died—1930.

  It was certainly serious. Having been ousted as Secretary of State by Governor Roosevelt in 1929. in 1930. Robert Moses was not earning any salary at all from his remaining jobs. Aside from expenses for which he was entitled to reimbursement, Roben Moses, at the age of fortv-one. had no income at all except what his mother gave him. Now. with their two girls growing up—Barbara was thirteen in 1929. Jane eleven—Robert Moses' financial situation was complicated by the fact that for him it was unthinkable that his children attend public school, and he therefore had to pay tuition at -.pes' The family had a nice place to live—Bella had bought him not only the Babylon summer house but a brownstone at 261 West Seventieth Street—but he was sc 5-.rapped that in 1929 he did not have sufficient funds to pay the next term's tuition, or to make necessary repairs on the Babylon house Moses had always made a point—both publiclv and privately—of in-ng that he be a public servant working without pay, refusing Smith's offer of a salary for his Long Island Park Commission job. His disregard for money

  a vital part of the public image he had so assiduouslv cultivated, and the maintenance of this pose in private was no less important to him. But in September 1929. he took what for him was an unprecedented step—in the light of his previous actions, almost a desperate step. On completion of the City

  Trust report he had written as Moreland Commissioner, he submitted a bill for his services of ten thousand dollars plus expenses. This was an unprecedented amount to ask for about two months' work, and Roosevelt, of course, would not have been disposed to grant Moses even a reasonable request. He turned Moses down flat. Moses was constantly being offered high-salaried jobs in industry, but that would mean leaving his public career and his public power. In early 1930, with the mother on whom he had always depended for money dying, he needed money desperately.

  His mother's own resources, moreover, had been shrinking—largely because she had the same extravagant, prodigal attitude toward money as her two sons. Following her husband's death in 1925, she picked up more checks for Madison House. She made generous contributions to other charities, largely ones that produced some sign of physical accomplishment. How Robert Moses felt about this would be revealed later by a remark he made to La Guardia in a memo about the Children's Aid Society: "Every year my mother contributed more than she co
uld afford to this organization because of her interest in playgrounds."* Although about $1,200,000 of her husband's money had been added to her own substantial inheritance, at the beginning of 1929 her net worth was down to little more than $1,000,000. Sometime during this period, moreover, she told Paul to begin entering future gifts to her children on her books as "advances." This, Paul says, was proof of a growing awareness that her resources, while great, were not inexhaustible—and of her determination to be "fair" in dividing up her estate; the purpose of this method of entering "advances," he said, was to make clear that they were advances against her estate, and that, to keep the total amount each child received from her the same, they would be deducted from each one's share of her estate. (At the time she died, the advances to Robert Moses on her books totaled $37,200.t) Half of her assets were in stocks; the 1929 crash further slashed her assets. In mid-1929, the worth of her stocks was about $500,000; when her estate was appraised after her death the next year, the value of those stocks was found to have shrunk to $293,649. Her total net worth was down to $690,422. She made no secret of her intention to leave about $50,000 to charity. In Paul's analysis, there no longer existed a fund of family capital large enough so that there was, as the Moses children had always supposed, plenty for everyone. A "fair"—one-third—share of Bella Moses' estate would, after the charitable deduction and inheritance taxes and the subtraction of $37,200, give Robert Moses about $170,000. The income from $170,000 would certainly never amount to enough to support in any decent style a man, without a cent of other income, with two houses and two children in private school. In Paul's analysis, Robert Moses realized that if he was to continue his precious career and protect his precious image, he needed for himself every cent of his mother's estate that he could get.