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

by Caro, Robert A

  And then, of course, there was another factor, one at which Florence Shientag hints by saying: "Mary became too old, physically, for him, I think. He continued to be so vibrant, so vital ..."

  Mary had what Hilda Hellman, Moses' cousin and a perceptive confidante, describes as "an awful horror of growing old." But she was four years older than Robert, and the difference seemed to increase each year between her and the husband who seemed as impervious to time as the grandmother he so strikingly resembled in other respects (and who remained youthful and vital until her death at ninety-three), still working his incredible daily schedule tirelessly, still swimming far out to sea in all weather, still energetic and dynamic in appearance at forty and fifty, his added weight making him look more powerful only, not older. Mary, on the other hand, aged hard—in the opinion of some friends because of the strain of not only bringing up two daughters and running two households, for years without maids, when money was always tight, but also managing every detail of her husband's life ("I think it drained her," Becky Vollmer says); in the opinion of other friends because of what Mrs. Hellman describes as "the strain of trying to live up to someone like Robert," who was "almost larger than life."

  Her husband was, of course, fascinating to women. In part this was

  because of his charm. Joan Ganz Cooney, later producer of Sesame Street, met him in 1954 at the scintillating Sunday talkfests at the Herbert Bayard Swopes mansion at Sands Point. At the time, she was twenty-four and he was sixty-five, but, she says, "after I had spent the evening with him I was in love with him." "It crossed all generational lines—that charm of his," Joan Cooney says. "What he has is this fantastic recall. He'd tell me what he thought of Tom Dewey and FDR ... He has that ability to tell you a story so you can just see the people in the room . . . And he's just got that magnetism. Everybody in that room was interesting. He was probably the least rich man in these gatherings because he was a public servant and something about that came through that he had spent his life in public service. I saw him mostly with his contemporaries—when their careers were on the wane. And they had changed in physical appearance. But his appearance hadn't changed at all." (His wife? Oh, says Joan Cooney, she didn't talk at all: "she was just like a little bird who tried to worship him.")

  In part, Moses' appeal was based on his power and fame. In part, it may have also been based on other considerations. Justice Florence Shientag, talking about Moses in general, stopped in the midst of a thought, sat thinking for a few minutes and then said, musingly, "He must have been a wonderful lover. He's so direct. No underlying doubts . . ." As a young man, he had been in love only once—with the fresh, clean-looking girl, as passionately idealistic as he, whom he met among the books of the Municipal Research Bureau library and whom he loved with an intensity so vivid that his Yale classmates would remark about it decades later. By the 1930's, Robert Moses' affairs were openly gossiped about in New York political and society circles —particularly his friendship with one of the city's most remarkable women, a North Shore baroness with whom his name became linked at the time he was subordinating his idealism to an accommodation with the power of the North Shore barons. She was the witty and sophisticated Ruth Baker Pratt, widow of one of the Standard Oil Pratts of Glen Cove, who was not only an accomplished violinist, golfer and tennis player but a behind-the-scenes power in Republican politics, the first woman ever to sit on New York City's Board of Aldermen, the first woman ever to represent New York in Congress—and possibly the only politician of either sex ever to best Jimmy Walker in repartee. Recalls Paul Windels: "They were rather affectionate in their attitude toward one another in public—to an extent that was rather shocking to me when I saw it. She was quite taken with him. It was well known in those circles that if they didn't get married it wouldn't be Ruth's fault."

  Moses still spent as much time with Mary as possible under the circumstances: his scrupulous courtesy toward her was as noticeable as ever. He never went on vacation without her. But the glow from the man she had made her "sun" grew more and more dim. She began to drink—and the drinking rapidly became very heavy, so heavy that people began to refer to her as "an alcoholic." After several embarrassing incidents at parties she had to be forbidden to drink anything but Dubonnet. At one Park Department Christmas party at the Arsenal, obsequious Moses Men, anxious to

  ingratiate themselves with the boss's wife, kept coming up to her and asking if she'd like one, and she had so many glasses of the light cordial that when Mrs. Hellman arrived and asked where she was, she was told, with a sneer, "Oh, she had to be taken home." She was hospitalized several times— in an attempt to cure either her drinking or the increasingly serious attacks of what Moses aide General Harry L. Meyers refers to as "nervous trouble" —at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, once for what Meyers says was "quite a long time."

  Recalls Lazarus: "I had a helluva row with Moses over that. It started off very temperate, with Moses asking me why I did it and couldn't it be changed so he could be on it. I said, 'I had direction on it.' He said, 'That guinea son of a bitch asked you to do this, didn't he?' I said, 'Bob, he's my client. You're not.' "

  Moses then attempted to have his upstate Republican friends in the Legislature kill the bill, but Lehman, who knew how badly the tunnel was needed, added his support to La Guardia's, and the measure passed. And La Guardia named as Authority commissioners three businessmen—two personal friends, William H. Friedman and Albert T. Johnston; and Alfred B. Jones, a mild-mannered Quaker who not coincidentally was a cousin of RFC chairman Jesse Jones—whom Moses had never even met.

  Unable to obtain control of the new authority directly, Moses tried indirection, sending aides to discreetly ask Singstad, who had been appointed the Authority's chief engineer, if he would "cooperate" with Triborough. But Moses was trying his wiles on the wrong man. Singstad, fiercely independent, despised Moses' aides, who he felt violated engineering ethics every time they subordinated their own objective views of an engineering problem to tell the Triborough chairman what he wanted to hear. One morning, after other approaches had failed, millionaire Jack Madigan himself dropped by Singstad's office and invited Ole to the Downtown Athletic Club for lunch. On the way, Madigan said: "Ole, I want to be helpful. You and the Tunnel Authority would both be better off with a strong man like Moses in charge." "I figured Moses was trying to get me on his side as a talking point to La Guardia for a takeover," Singstad says; Moses, he felt, wanted to be able to tell the Mayor that the chief engineer had said his commissioners were not competent to run the job. "I said I was sticking with my commissioners and I was happy with them."

  Unable to control the new authority directly or indirectly, Moses set out to destroy it.

  It was under tremendous pressure to produce results fast. Nineteen thirty-six was a presidential election year and Harold Ickes, whose PWA was financing the tunnel, wanted the President to be able to break ground well before November. "They didn't want to have $58,000,000 lying idle in an election year," Singstad says. Assembling an engineering and administrative staff from scratch and producing in a matter of a few months plans for a huge and complicated engineering job—Singstad had to draw more than 125 separate studies before he hit on a feasible plan for the Manhattan entrance—was immensely difficult. And Ickes was adamant. If work was not under way well before Election Day, he said, the grant would be rescinded and there would be no tunnel. The PWA Administrator was demanding weekly progress reports, and every week his impatience grew more noticeable. Any delay might kill the project.

  And Moses sought delay.

  His legislative allies introduced a bill that would have rescinded the Authority's authorization to construct the tunnel and provided instead for a year-long, state-financed study of whether the crossing should be a tunnel

  a bridge, which, under the terms of the act creating the Triborough Authority, only Triborough could build. Enactment of the new bill into law would have meant the end of the tunnel no matter what the study's resul
t. "Ickes was constantly threatening to take the money away from us if we didn't get started," Singstad says. "Moses knew damn well that if another year was spent [on the state-financed study], the money [the PWA grant] would be gone to some other state."

  There was no real chance of enactment, of course, since Lehman would veto the bill if it passed the Republican-controlled Legislature. But Moses didn't need enactment to accomplish his purpose. He needed only delay. And he used all his vast influence in Albany to obtain it, keeping the bill bottled up in committee—and off Lehman's desk, where it could finally be disposed of—week after week. "And all the time," Singstad says, "Ickes was hammering: Tf you don't do it now, I'm going to withdraw the money.'"

  But La Guardia understood that he was in a power struggle now, and while the Mayor may have deferred to Moses on questions of park administration, he deferred to no one on questions of power. Traveling to Washington week after week, he kept the grant alive until the last day of the legislative session, when the bill was finally brought to the floor and defeated, and on October 2, 1936, President Roosevelt was able to break ground for the tunnel.

  "Why did Moses try to wreck [the Tunnel Authority]?" Singstad says. "Because he couldn't take it over, that's why, dammit. He couldn't take it over so he wanted to wreck the whole damned project." Lazarus and Corporation Counsel Paul Windels, who were on the inside of the battle from beginning to end, thinking it over independently came to the same conclusion. "I kept trying to understand what his reason was [for trying to take over the Authority]," Lazarus says, "and I just couldn't make sense out of it—unless he wanted to take over every construction job in the city."

  And in fact Moses' actions in his fight with the Tunnel Authority in 1936—particularly when coupled with his actions in the struggle with the Authority over the next decade—make it difficult to ascribe to them any other motivation. Search as one may through the record—not only the public record, which is scanty indeed, because the fight was carried on largely in secrecy, but through confidential memoranda and letters culled from La Guardia's files and files of other principals involved—one is unable to identify a single real difference of opinion between Moses and the Authority on any point of substance relevant to the planning, construction or administration of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Moses agreed that a crossing was needed. His argument that the crossing should be not a tunnel but a bridge was never presented with any of the thoroughness that marked his serious proposals; it was never really presented seriously at all—possibly, in the view of at least one of his aides, because it couldn't be presented seriously, since building a bridge at Thirty-seventh Street would have meant condemning so many office buildings and apartment houses that the condemna-

  don cost alone would have been ridiculously high. Moses never even com missioned a preliminary engineering survey of the bridge proposal. His onl real difference of opinion with the Tunnel Authority was over who shoul

  control it.

  And this difference made the 1936 Tunnel Authority fight a watershed in Robert Moses 1 life. Always before, Moses had conceived a publi work, and then had sought the power to bring it into reality. In the Tunne Authority fight, someone else conceived the public work. Moses sought th power to take it over. Before, his motivation had always been the work-the project, the achievement, the dream. Now the motivation was powei

  And the Tunnel Authority fight also revealed the lengths to whicl Robert Moses was now prepared to go to gain power. Wrecking the Authorit would have cost the city not only $58,000,000. money which would provid a lot of jobs in Depression-wracked New York, but also the tunnel, a publi work badly needed in terms of Moses' own aims—the elimination of tram congestion in New York City. But these considerations did not deter hirr If he couldn't build the tunnel, his actions said, no one was going to buil it. If he couldn't take it over, he would destroy it.

  Thwarted by La Guardia in one attempt to grab more power, Moses madt another—only to have the Mayor thwart him again.

  Money, as Moses was well aware, was a key to power, but, by 1938 the great wellspring of federal work relief money at which he had beer drinking for five years was almost dry. A new spring had begun welling out of Washington and Albany, however. Moses set out to bottle it righ under La Guardia's nose.

  Its sources were the United States Housing Act of 1937 (co-sponsorec by Representative Henry B. Steagall of Alabama and Al Smith's old Albam buddy, U. S. Senator Robert F. Wagner) and a New York State constitu tional amendment approved in 1938.

  Prior to passage of the Wagner-Steagall Act, Moses had never had much interest in public housing. "Public housing" meant, in the terms of the day, housing exclusively for the poor. Moses had never had the slightest interest in building anything for the poor. But the amount given by the Wagner-Steagall Act* to the newly created United States Housing Authority for loans to local municipal authorities was $800,000,000. The amount the state constitutional amendment authorized the Legislature to make available to local housing authorities was $300,000,000. Obviously public housing was going to be a great new—perhaps the great new—source of outside money for the city. Hastily recruiting architects from the State Housing Board, Moses set them to work secretly drawing up a public housing program for New York and himself secretly drew up a proposal for "reorganization" of the City Housing Authority, under which the Authority would be reorganized right out of existence and replaced with a board

  ♦Together with a subsequent Congressional amendment in 1938.

  onsisting of himself and six other members, four of whom he believed he, ather than the Mayor, could control.

  The Mayor possessed an intense private interest in public housing, ^iorello La Guardia believed that it had been the dampness and congestion Df the tenements in which she had been raised that had given his beloved irst wife the tuberculosis that had killed her and their baby; he had vowed o friends that one thing he was going to do "personally" as mayor was to nake sure that the city started at last to give poor people in the city a lecent, healthy place to live. The vast amounts of money and power that vere obviously going to be involved made him even more determined to ceep the program firmly in his own hands. So Moses drew up his proposal n absolute secrecy—and presented it not to the Mayor but, in a bold ittempt to circumvent him, to influential private citizens; the very day after /oters approved the constitutional amendment, he persuaded several real estate and reform organizations to jointly rent the auditorium in the Museum )f Natural History for an evening ten days later and to invite several hundred key realtors and reformers to hear him give a speech. And he arranged to bring the program dramatically to the public at the same time by persuading WNYC, the city-owned radio station (which, at the time, boasted a considerable audience), to carry the speech live.

  All Moses' previous public works had been basically concerned with recreation and parks and with the means—roads and bridges—of getting people to parks. He may have realized that without protective coloration his attempt to move into a new, unrelated field would look like the barefaced power grab it was. So he gave it protective coloration; he titled his speech "Housing and Recreation," and in asking realtors and reformers to sponsor the speech and WNYC to broadcast it, he told them it was merely a discussion of coordination of public housing and parks. No one in the audience suspected the truth; even such intimates of the Mayor as Adolf Berle and Paul Windels, applauding with the rest of the audience as the Park Commissioner strode briskly onstage, had no inkling of what was coming until Moses' aides began passing out attractive, four-color brochures and, opening them, they saw in amazement that Moses was proposing in detail—ten projects were proposed, sites specific down to precise boundary lines, costs of land and construction for each already figured—a complete new housing program. The unifying principle behind the proposal was spelled out: only "genuine slum clearance" on the "large scale" would make a real dent in the city's housing problem, so La Guardia's efforts to rehabilitate old tenements should be scrapped; whole blo
cks of slum tenements should be razed to the ground and replaced with new housing; only genuine slum dwellers should be allowed in the projects, and, to insure this, tenants should be selected by the Welfare Commissioner. The financing was worked out: the program would cost $245,000,000 and it should be financed by "large-scale government subsidy" ($200,000,000 from state and federal funds and a sales tax on cigarettes to raise the balance); it should not be financed, as had been proposed, by an increase in the city's real estate tax, for the real estate tax was too high in the city already. Staring at each other

  in disbelief, the two officials realized that they were witnessing a public relations blitzkrieg—a lightning-like move by Moses to mobilize the opinion of the public in general and of the influentials in the audience in particular (his opposition to a real estate tax increase was a clever move to insure the support of the city's powerful real estate lobby) behind his plan so that the Mayor would not be able to overrule it.

  But a copy of the brochure had, that afternoon, somehow fallen into La Guardia's hands, and the Mayor had summoned WNYC director Morris S. Novick to his office.

  Unaware of this, Moses had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss when he began speaking. As he spoke, there right in front of him, attached to the lectern, was a WNYC microphone and, looking down below the stage, Moses could see two WNYC technicians sitting at a table full of broadcasting paraphernalia busily twiddling dials and going through all the motions of technicians making a broadcast. When they saw him glancing down at them, in fact, they made him a thumbs-up signal to indicate that all was going well.