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

by Caro, Robert A

  Robert Moses had built public works on a scale unmatched by any other individual in the history of America. But all the highways and parks and bridges he had built were little more than nothing next to the highways and parks and bridges that Robert Moses wanted to build. He had turned into reality his dream of a great parkway along Manhattan's shoreline, but there was still the Brooklyn shoreline, and the Staten Island. He wanted parkways there, too—a "Circumferential" or "Belt" for Brooklyn, a "Shore" for Staten Island—and he had wanted them, and been arguing for their creation, for more than ten years. He had built fifty miles of highways in the city, but there were a hundred more miles that he wanted to build. He had reshaped to his own vision an urban park system that absolutely dwarfed any other urban park system in the United States, but the parks he had created in New York were in their turn dwarfed by the parks that he dreamed of creating; it had been 1930 when he had proposed a Soundview Park and a Flushing Meadows Park and two Marine Parks and a park— the greatest of all urban waterfront parks—in Jamaica Bay, and now it was 1938 and these parks were still only proposals. Where was the Rockaway Improvement? Even those parks that he had been able to create in the city, moreover, had not been created as he wanted; he had been forced to scale them down, to use inferior materials, to compromise. As for bridges, he had built in the city three, including one that was the greatest traffic-moving machine in the history of civilization, but he wanted to build at least four more— including one even larger than Triborough.

  And that was just in the city. What about the areas around it? There were parkways on Long Island, all right, but not his greatest parkway— the ocean- and bay-bordered Fire Island masterpiece. There were parks— 11,000 acres of parks, the greatest state park system in the country—on Long Island but he could foresee all too clearly the day there would be so many people living in the metropolitan area that 11,000 acres would not be nearly enough. After a decade and a half of building public works, the public works he had not yet built loomed before him larger than ever.

  Moreover, the chances of building them seemed to be growing steadily more remote. Only the New Deal had enabled him to make even as much of a start as he had on his plans for New York City. Now, in 1938, the New Deal well was running dry, and La Guardia was insisting with a new firmness that he stop trying to lap up the city's share all by himself. Albany was drying up, too; each year Herbert Lehman was finding it more difficult to obey the law that required him to balance the state's budget. As for the city, La Guardia may have pulled it back from the door of fiscal death, but not even La Guardia could restore it to fiscal health; the corruption that had preceded him had weakened the body politic far too seriously. Political realities, moreover, made it unlikely that health could ever be restored. Existing taxes could support an annual budget—the budget out of which the debt service for new bonds for new public works would have to be paid —of about $575,000,000, and the debt service and salaries loaded on by Tammany ate up $500,000,000 of that even before other necessary expenses were figured in. As for the so-called "capital budget," there was no leeway in that, either: the city was constantly bumping up against the state-imposed ceiling that limited its borrowing capacity to 10 percent of the total assessed valuation of real property; the city's fiscal inability to construct public works was so pronounced that by 1940 La Guardia, who had dreamed of carving out a beautiful new metropolis, would have no choice but to limit new capital spending for the year to a symbolic one dollar. Because the city was a creature of the state, city taxes could be increased and the city budget ceiling raised only by the State Legislature, and not only the Legislature's conservatism but the influence wielded within it by the city's own propertied interests, which wanted the key property taxes kept down and, to protect the bonds they held, as few new bonds as possible issued, made the Legislature as reluctant to take those steps as La Guardia was to ask it to do so; desperately anxious to reshape his city La Guardia might be, but he was not anxious enough to court political disaster by asking for new taxes. Surveying such realities, Moses could see no reasonable possibility, in any foreseeable future, of the city being able to finance his dreams. If he wanted to remake the city, it was clear, he was going to have to do the job without its money.

  But if he was able to keep the authorities' revenues, keep them indefinitely, he would have the money.

  He would, moreover, have money he would be free to use as he chose.

  Tens of millions of dollars had been placed in his hands already, of course—by Governors and Legislatures, by Mayor and Board of Estimate, by federal alphabet-agency administrators. But these had been millions hedged about by all the safeguards—the rules and regulations and established procedures, the technicalities—that had been established by generations of legislators and bureaucrats and that made it so difficult to Get Things Done.

  Tens of millions of dollars had been given him to hire men, but he had been required to hire them according to civil service regulations which

  made it difficult for him—in most cases made it impossible for him—to hire the kind of men he wanted: the best men, the best engineers, the best administrators, the best ramrods, the best laborers. Under those regulations, he couldn't pay them enough to attract them to his service. He couldn't even hire whom he wanted of the men available at the salaries he could pay; he had to hire off civil service lists. These regulations could sometimes be circumvented, of course—no one circumvented them as cleverly as he, as was proven by the quality of his "Moses Men"—but they could be circumvented only with difficulty and delay, the delay he hated. And they could not be circumvented wholesale: the "Moses Men" were a prize cadre, but a cadre was not an army, and he was constantly raging at the quality of the main body of his troops, noncommissioned officers as well as enlisted men; once the Depression eased, civil service salary limits had made it impossible to keep loyal to his colors more than a handful of the prized seven hundred and fifty ramrods he had recruited during its depth. Civil service regulations made it impossible for him even to drive men as he wished to drive them: to drive men mercilessly you have to have threats to hold over their heads; the ultimate threat—dismissal—was all but denied him by the regulations; and dismissal for even a legitimate cause was a cumbersome and tedious procedure that had none of the efficacious effect on other workers of a snappy "Pick up your time and get out" from Art Howland or Earle Andrews. Civil service regulations had prevented him from using his men flexibly and efficiently; because he had to hire men out of allocations for a specific upstate or Long Island park commission or the New York City Park Department, and civil service regulations required him to use an employee of a public agency only on that agency's work, it was illegal for him to assign an upstater to a city job even if he was best qualified for it. Most important, civil service regulations required him to hire men only for specific purposes approved by Legislature or Board of Estimate, and these purposes had never included the one most vital to his aims: long-range planning. For more than ten years he had been scheming, scraping and saving to build up a "stable planning force"—without success.

  But changing the law would give him one. The Legislature had placed public authorities under civil service, of course, but the power of Civil Service Commissions to enforce their edicts rested, as Moses had learned from the bitter experience of his youth, on the power to disapprove salary payments—on the commission's control of the purses out of which municipal and state agencies drew their "personal service" funds. It rested on the power of money. Let him have the money—let him keep control of the authorities' revenues—and he, this man who had mastered the intricacies of civil service as well as any man who ever lived, would be able to devise a hundred ways to manipulate Civil Service Commission rulings to his own ends. He would be able to attract to his service the men his sharp eyes had picked out of the herd, to hire and fire them as he pleased, to provide them with material rewards huge enough to make them endure his driving and his demands and to guarantee their absolute l
oyalty. And he would be able to hire men not only for specific but for general

  purposes. He would be able to have, at last, his stable planning force. Let him keep the control of the authorities' revenues and he would be able to study transportation needs before elected local officials studied them. He would be able to determine by his own criteria which transportation facilities should be built and in which order. He would be able to determine by his own criteria how these facilities should be built—what their design, size and precise location should be. He would be able to translate these general plans into detailed blueprints and specifications. And then, when the time was right —when a large new state or federal grant became available, or when the public was demanding a solution to the transportation problem—he could present these plans to elected officials as the solution, a solution already engineered, already designed, already costed out, a solution feasible engineer-ingly and economically, a solution whose planning was already a fait accompli, a solution that awaited only their approval for implementation, a solution for which, in many cases, money—the money of his public authorities— was already available. What official would then be willing to risk public antagonism by withholding that approval?

  And if an official did dare to suggest an alternative, what good would it do him? The city possessed neither an engineering corps capable of planning large-scale public works nor money to hire in sufficient numbers engineers who did possess such capability. For that matter, the city had no money to build an alternate large-scale public work if it wanted to. It would be dependent upon the federal government or upon Moses' authorities to provide the cash. Federal money might well be lost by the delay additional studies would entail; as for the authorities' money, cross the man who was offering it and he might (bearing in mind that the man was Robert Moses, he probably would) withdraw the offer, and the official then could be accused of having cost the city a great public improvement. Let Moses keep control of the authorities' revenues and there would be no more nonsense about the Mayor or the Board of Estimate studying alternate routes for a highway or alternate locations for a bridgehead or alternate methods—mass transportation instead of highways, for example—of solving transportation problems. In the fields he had chosen for his own, the city would have to build public works where and how he chose.

  Additional tens of millions of dollars had been given to him for non-salary items—construction costs, mainly—but he had been allowed little leeway in the spending of that money either. Much of it he had had to give to contractors—under strict regulations which not only required him to award contracts to the lowest qualified bidders, thereby preventing him from making awards to firms he personally favored, but also set many conditions designed for economy, a saving of taxpayers' money, rather than for the speed he wanted; strict restrictions on overtime had been especially irritating to this supreme ramrod, this archetypal top sergeant, who wanted his projects driven forward around the clock.

  Allocations directly to his agencies allowed him even less leeway; such

  appropriations were made "line by line" for specific items. And members of the Legislature or Board of Estimate—accountable to the voters and therefore anxious not to make any appropriations that appeared to waste their money (and anxious as well not to let Moses further expand his empire)—resisted especially making any appropriations to him for the PR items which would seem blatantly wasteful to taxpayers but which Moses knew were vital to Getting Things Done: the printing of impressive, persuasive brochures and pamphlets; the creation of large-scale dioramas and scale models ("It never ceases to amaze me how you can talk and talk and talk to some guy about something you've got in mind, and he isn't very impressed, and then you bring in a beautiful picture of it or, better yet, a scale model with the bridge all in white and the water nice and blue, see, and you can see his eyes light up," Jack Madigan says); the hiring of public relations men to visit publishers, editors, reporters and radio commentators as well as nonmedia influentials, sell them on a project in advance, escort them on pre-opening limousine or yacht tours, leak them information that would place Moses' views in a favorable light (and his opponents' views in an unfavorable light); the rental of the necessary limousines; the hiring of the "bloodhounds" to dig up facts about an opponent that could induce him to cease his opposition, or, should he prove stubborn, could be leaked into print to discredit him; and, especially important to Moses because it gave him a chance to exercise his matchless charm as host, the laying on of hospitality—intimate luncheons for key individuals or lavish buffet luncheons for influentials by the hundreds— at which he could drape a big arm over a recalcitrant borough president's shoulders and use the glow induced by good food and fine wine to win him to his cause. He had, of course, used his ingenuity, and his skill at circumvention of the spirit if not the letter of the law, to publish brochures, hire public relations men, purchase limousines and host luncheons in the past. But he had never had enough money to do all this as lavishly and effectively as he wanted. But let him keep the authorities' revenues and he would have enough.

  Changing the law might give him more than money. Changing the law might give him power, more power than he had ever attained before. Money itself is power, of course, but the power he was thinking about now was power of far greater dimensions.

  A public authority, he had learned, possessed not only the powers of a large private corporation but some of the powers of a sovereign state: the power of eminent domain that permitted the seizure of private property, for example, and the power to establish and enforce rules and regulations for the use of its facilities that was in reality nothing less than the power to govern its domain by its own laws. The powers of a public authority were vested in the board of that authority. If there was only one member of that board in fact (as in the case of the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority: Robert Moses, Sole Member) or in practice (as in the case of the Triborough Authority, whose other members would routinely rubber-stamp Moses' ac-

  tions), the powers of the authority would be vested in that member—in him, Robert Moses.

  And there was another dimension to his thinking, too. Keen as always in discerning the potentialities for vast power in humble institutions, he had glimpsed in the institution called "public authority" a potentiality for power whose implications no one else—no one in City Hall or the Albany State-house for certain and, so far as research can determine, no one anywhere in the United States—had noticed, but that were exciting and frightening and immense.

  Authorities could issue bonds. A bond was simply a legal agreement between its seller and its buyer. A legal agreement was, by definition, a contract. And under the Constitution of the United States, a contract was sacred. No state—and no creature of a state such as a city—could impair its obligations. No one—not Governor, not Mayor, not State Legislature, not City Board of Estimate—could interfere with its provisions. If Robert Moses could write the powers which had been vested in him into the bond contracts of his authorities, make those powers part of the agreements under which investors purchased the bonds, those powers would be his for as long as the authorities should remain in existence and he should control them. If he could keep the authorities in existence indefinitely and could keep his place at their head, he would hold those powers indefinitely—quite conceivably, until he died. The powers might have been given him by the Legislature and the Governor at the request of the Mayor and City Council, but if he embodied those powers in bonds, neither Legislature, Governor, Mayor nor City Council would ever be able to take them back.

  Giving public authorities indefinite existence and such vastly expanded powers would not be easy. In proposing to give the institution substantial governmental powers and a lifespan at least of decades, possibly of centuries —in proposing to make it an institution that might endure as long as the Republic endured—Moses was in effect, whether or not he thought in such terms, proposing to create, within a democratic society based on a division of powers among three branc
hes of government, a new, fourth branch, a branch that would, moreover, in significant respects, be independent of the other three.

  The public officials whose approval was necessary would never give it. Those who were thinking men would realize that if they gave it they would be adding, without sufficient thought and consideration by themselves or by the public which should have the final say on matters of such significance, a whole new layer to urban government in America. The rest of them, concerned with power and patronage, would realize that to the extent they gave away power, they would be diminishing their own power. The key body whose approval was necessary—the Legislature that under the State Constitution alone had the power to create new authorities—had been fighting for years to keep Moses from gaining more power, from building his own

  empire within the state government. The Legislature would never approve the bills Moses was drafting if they understood them.

  So Moses would have to keep them—and all the other officials involved—from understanding. He would have to persuade Mayor, City Council, Legislature and Governor to approve his bills before they realized what was in them.

  In 1924, he had faced a similar problem—and had solved it successfully, persuading a naive assemblyman to introduce, and hostile Republican legislative leaders to accept, bills that appeared innocuous but gave the Long Island State Park Commission vast new powers. This time, however, the job would be harder. His aims now were far more ambitious, the powers which he wanted now were far broader than those he had wanted then. And in 1924, he had had the Governor on his side. Now he had no one on his side. If a single person in Albany or New York—Democrat, Republican, Governor, Mayor, assemblyman, councilman, any one of the thousand sharp-eyed lawyers who prowled the Capitol and City Hall— caught even a glimpse of his true aims, and sounded the alarm, he would never be able to accomplish those aims. He had to conceal his purposes from everyone.