"The Power Broker, vol 1" I

[fiefoe]

Robert A. Caro's biography of Moses is rightly called 'monumental', and the first third of it is a surprisingly propulsive read. The (anti-)hero's journey follows the inescapable logic of 'power corrupts'.

• the quality that had most impressed Richards and the rest of '09 was his idealism. <> The poems that the olive-skinned, big-eyed Jew from New York wrote for the Yale literary magazines... were about Beauty and Truth.
• announced that he was skipping practice to go to New York and see Reid, and when Richards had expressed his doubts that the alumnus would contribute, Moses had smiled and said, 'Oh, that's all right. I just won't tell him it's going to an association. He'll think it's the regular contribution to the swimming team.' <> Now Richards said slowly, 'I think that's a little bit tricky, Bob. I think that's a little bit smooth. I don't like that at all.'
• Robert Moses possessed at the time of his confrontation with Ed Richards an imagination that leaped unhesitatingly at problems insoluble to other men—the problem of financing minor sports had been tormenting Yale deans for two decades—and that, seemingly in the very moment of the leap, conceived of solutions. He possessed an iron will that put behind his solutions and dreams a determination to let nothing stand in their way... And he possessed an arrogance which made him conceive himself so indispensable that, in his view, his resignation was the most awful threat he could think of. <> Robert Moses possessed the same qualities during his confrontation with Robert Wagner. But by then he also possessed something more. He possessed power... For power was the reason for the contrast in their denouements.
• The whole life of Robert Moses, in fact, has been a drama of the interplay of power and personality. For a time, standing between it and him was an interceding force, the passionate idealism he had expressed in the Yale bull sessions.
• Robert Moses shaped New York... Physically, any map of the city proves it. The very shoreline of metropolis was different before Robert Moses came to power... With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads... bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built... Robert Moses built every one of those bridges... still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. <> When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777... unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile... In those terms, Robert Moses was unquestionably America's most prolific physical creator. He was America's greatest builder.
• And by 1929, Moses had actually built the system he had dreamed of, hacking it out in a series of merciless vendettas against wealth and wealth's power that became almost a legend—to the public and to public officials and engineers from all over the country who came to Long Island to marvel at his work. When Jones Beach, capstone of the system, opened, it opened to nationwide praise of a unanimity and enthusiasm not to be heard again for a public work until the completion of the Tennessee Valley Authority project a decade later— ... Parks, highways, urban renewal—Robert Moses was in and of himself a formative force in all three fields in the United States.
• although its outward form was a loose confederation of four public authorities, plus the New York City Park Department and the Long Island State Park Commission—it was actually a single-headed, tightly administered monarchy, these men described it with a single name, derived from the bridge and the Authority that were its centerpieces: 'Triborough.'.. the surplus of just one of its four constituent public authorities, the Tri- borough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, ran to almost $30,000,000 a year.
• The wealth of the empire enabled Moses to keep many city officials in fear. With it, he hired skilled investigators he called 'bloodhounds' who were kept busy filling dossiers... There were men whose past contained not even a speck of grist for Moses' mill. This, however, was no guarantee against attack. Perhaps their fathers had committed an impropriety. If so, Moses would visit the sins of the fathers on the children... He practiced Mc-Carthyism long before there was a McCarthy.
• Prudent, efficient, economical? So incredibly wasteful was Moses of the money he tolled from the public in quarters and dimes that on a single bridge alone he paid $40,000,000 more in interest than he had to. Authority projects cost the taxpayers nothing? Covert 'loans' made to authorities by the state—loans designed never to be repaid—ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Moses was a political boss with a difference. He was not the stereotype with which Americans were familiar. His constituency was not the public but some of the most powerful men in the city and state, and he kept these men in line by doling out to them, as Tammany ward bosses once handed out turkeys to the poor at Thanksgiving, the goodies in which such men were interested, the sugar plums of public relations retainers, insurance commissions and legal fees. This man, personally honest in matters of money, became the locus of corruption in New York City.
• What Moses had succeeded in doing, really, was to replace graft with benefits that could be derived with legality from a public works project. He had succeeded in centralizing in his projects—and to a remarkable extent in his own person—all those forces which are not in theory supposed to, but which in practice do, play a decisive role in political decisions. <> Corruption before Moses had been unorganized, based on a multitude of selfish, private ends. Moses' genius for organizing it and focusing it at a central source gave it a new force, a force so powerful that it bent the entire city government off the democratic bias.
• As the idealism faded and disappeared, its handmaidens drifted away. The principles of the Good Government reform movement which Moses had once espoused became principles to be ignored. The brilliance that had invented a civil service system was applied to the task of circumventing civil service requirements. The insistence on truth and logic was replaced by a sophistry that twisted every fact to conclusions not merely preconceived but preconceived decades earlier.
• By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions... his 'slum clearance programs' created new slums as fast as they were clearing the old.

THE IDEALIST

• two of the tens of thousands of German-Jewish families made highly susceptible to 'America fever' by laws that segregated them in crowded Judengassen and forced them to pay the humiliating 'Jew toll' whenever they made a trip away from the ghetto.
• 'The way Grannie Cohen treated Grandfather Cohen was quite striking,' the granddaughter recalls. 'She absolutely sat on him.' Many of the more intellectual members of Our Crowd became impressed during the 1870's with the philosophy of a German rabbi's son named Felix Adler, who was talking about substituting ethics for religious piety. Rosalie Cohen became one of Adler's most enthusiastic supporters.
• the Jews of Eastern Europe felt that their only hope was escape to America. They poured into New York at a rate of ninety thousand a year. By 1907, there would be close to a million Jews in the city, by 1915 a million and a half—28 percent of its population.
• the German-Jewish press lamenting the 'un-American ways' of the 'wild Asiatics.' The German Jews even coined a word for their coreligionists, a word based on the fact that many Russian names end in 'ki.' The word was 'kikes.' Yet, despite their efforts to make clear the difference between themselves and the newcomers, they realized that non-Jews were lumping them all together,... For this reason, the early settlement houses, while working tirelessly to give the newcomers a better life, to provide free lodging, meals and medical care, also emphasized lectures on manners, morals and the dangers of socialism. Many German Jews seemed to feel, as one commentator put it, 'as if [they were] assuming the white man's burden'; their philanthropy was that of 'patron lords doling out funds to the poor, the miserable, the dependent and the patronized.'
• her soft voice would begin to inundate the other trustees with a flood of ideas. It was not long before the trustees came to realize that for a gray-haired housewife and mother, Bella Moses had a most unusual interest in physical construction. Behind her spectacles were the eyes of the builder.
• Grannie Cohen might rent a summer place in Elberon, one of the expensive resort towns along the New Jersey shore that had become known collectively as the 'Jewish Newport.'
• If Paul was quicker to smile, both boys were equally quick to anger; they had tempers that went with the haughtiness. They looked like two young, handsome, passionate Spanish grandees set down by mistake in the stodgy red damask of Forty-sixth Street. <> And the boys' minds were as remarkable as their looks.
• Whatever it was that made Robert Moses the way he was, they knew, whatever the quality that had shaped an unusual—in some ways unique— personality, the quality was one that they had watched being passed, like a family heirloom, from Robert Moses' grandmother to his mother to him.
• 'as soon as you got to Yale, you found out that its structure was a social pyramid.' its base the select Sophomore Societies, its next step the even more select Junior Fraternities, its apex the three Senior Societies-Skull and Bones. Scroll and Key and Wolfs Head. Sixty years later, surviving members of the class of 1909 could still remember watching classmates burst into tears on Tap Day when they realized that they were not to be selected for a Senior Society... there were five in Moses' class-listed as 'Hebrews' in the Freshman Blue Book and lumped with the class's eighteen Roman Catholics under 'Miscellaneous Denominations.' In the seventy-three years that the Senior Societies had been in existence they had never tapped a single Jew.
• very handsome in the required high, rounded collar, who had the huge, emotional eyes and earnest, passionate manner of the idealist, the poet, the lover (in the phrase they learned in a popular course on Walter Pater) of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
• the 'Mona Lisa': When he got back to Yale in the fall, he wrote poems about it, including one, apparently done in the style of Swinburne's 'Dolores,' that called her 'Our Lady Divine.' In literature his greatest enthusiasm was for Samuel Johnson.
• in the fight of his later career, what is most interesting is that when he realized that, because of the handicap of his religion, his brilliance and idealism would not take him to the top in the world of Yale, he made, within Yale, a world of his own, and a world, moreover, in which, in collegiate terms, he had power and influence... He never went out for a major sport but he was active in a minor one... Alongside the massive cathedrals of Yale's traditions, buttressed by prejudice and pride, Bob Moses had erected his own small but sturdy structure. 'In our little world . . . ,' Bacon was to say, 'he made himself a position of power.'
• The strain of brilliance, idealism and arrogance had surfaced in a daughter, Lady Bountiful, and had been passed on through her—undiluted, strong but somewhat formless—to her son Robert. Oxford, using the brilliance as catalyst, was to refine the other two ingredients in the strain. Two years among her spires and statue-crowned columns, her quadrangles and cloisters, her towers that had whispered to Matthew Arnold 'the last enchantments of the Middle Ages,' would boil the fattiness out of the idealism, rendering out of a vague desire to 'help people' not only a clear, definable concept of public service but also a specific means of performing that service... distill the arrogance, potent though it already was, and make it still more potent by adding to its essence a philosophical base, the British belief, firm indeed in the early twentieth century and epitomized in the trappings and teachings of Oxford, in the duties—and the rights—of those born to wealth and privilege... As strong as Oxford's conservatism was its emphasis on public service.
• In Switzerland, the youths tried out a sport that was just beginning to attract the attention of American tourists: skiing.
• Short, hard sentences must have carried his professors through the intricacies of parliamentary in-fighting and regulation rewriting with refreshing ease. He displayed not only a complete familiarity with a bewildering array of bureaucratic technicalities but a gift for the felicitous phrase. Describing Carlyle's appeal to Parliament to muck out the 'Augean stables of bureaucracy,' Moses wrote that Carlyle appealed with 'excremental eloquence.' Macaulay's speech on the need for promotion by merit was, he said, 'the most masterly vindication of the principles of competition ever left unanswered.'
• Moses saw only one real hope for his country—the fact that a man who met his highest standards, Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, had just been elected President.

THE REFORMER

• In all American history, in fact, it would have been hard to find a better time. The young idealist entered public service in the very year in which there came to crest a movement—Progressivism—that was based, to an extent greater perhaps than any other nationally successful American political movement, on an idealistic belief in man's capacity to better himself through the democratic process. <> An outgrowth of the agrarian Populist crusade of the 1880's and 1890's, the Progressive movement had been swelled before the turn of the century by the enrollment of America's urban middle class, its conscience awakened by Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis and other muckrakers who dramatized the poverty of the slums
• the Bureau of Municipal Research: But this trio—known among reformers as 'the ABC'— added to the reform ethos new elements derived from two other passions of the era, natural science and scientific management. The emphasis of natural science on empiricism, on firsthand observation, on the obtaining of facts, led them to conclude that it was vain to talk about changing the philosophy of government before learning the facts of government, and they said therefore that the first step toward reform should be analysis of government operations. From scientific management—the age was marveling at the assembly-line techniques introduced by Henry Ford—they concluded that after government operations had been analyzed, the next step should be not a change in philosophy but an improvement in such operations to make them 'efficient' and 'economic,'
• 'Budget,' for example, was only a dictionary word; in turn-of-the-century America, not a single city possessed one... Scientific accounting techniques, only recently incorporated into American business, had never been adapted to government, so departmental requests for appropriations were not itemized and therefore items could not be compared with comparable expenditures in the past... Departmental requests to the Board were lump-sum requests which showed in only the most general way how the departments proposed to spend the money they were asking for. Unable to analyze these requests, the Board simply cut each by the same, predetermined percentage, a procedure which some departments circumvented by requesting five times as much money as they really needed.
• Tammany Hall called it the 'Bureau of Municipal Besmirch'—but its exposes led to the election in 1909 of anti-Tammany reformer William J. Gaynor as mayor... they talked in terms old soldiers reserve for old battles. 'How would I sum up what we were doing?' one would say. 'We were fighting to make democracy work, that's what we were doing!' They were very proud of their position in the army of idealism. They idolized their leaders; Allen, Bruère and Cleveland, they knew, were the very men who had charged through a hail of public abuse and private threats to pull down three Tammany chieftains.
• With him were some college friends and their dates, one of whom was Frances Perkins, later to be United States Secretary of Labor. As the ferry pulled out into the river, Moses leaned on the rail, watching Manhattan spread out behind the boat. Miss Perkins happened to be standing beside him and suddenly she heard Moses exclaim, 'Isn't this a temptation to you? Couldn't this waterfront be the most beautiful thing in the world?'.. 'he had it all figured out. How you could build a great highway that went uptown along the water. How you'd have to tear down a few buildings at Seventy-second Street and bring the highway around a curve. ... He wanted places where people could leave their boats safely, public clubs . . . like private clubs.'
• There were, in 1914, 50,000 city employees and this meant 50,000 men and women who owed their pay checks—and whose families owed the food and shelter those pay checks bought—not to merit but to the ward boss. Patronage was the coinage of power in New York City. And reforms of the civil service such as Moses was to propose were therefore daggers thrust at the heart of Tammany Hall.
• Making an evaluation system precise was perhaps the most difficult job in civil service, Moses explained; each job had to be broken down into component parts, so that each part could be graded, and in totaling the grades each part had to be given a mathematical weight corresponding to its importance in the job as a whole. But he knew how to do it, he said... To obtain more accurate ratings, he wrote, department heads must be required to give each employee arithmetical grades in dozens of categories. In addition, there must be a complete 'reclassification' of the civil service, adding many new levels, to insure that employees would be given the precise salary and authority they deserved. There must be a complete 'standardization' of salaries so that employees doing the same type of work would be getting the same pay even if they were working in different departments.
• It was the proposal of a fanatic. John Calvin specifying permissible arrangements for women's hair in sixteenth-century Geneva was not more thorough than was Bob Moses enumerating the 'functions' and 'responsibilities' of New York's civil servants... The idealism was harsh and uncompromising. In judging the ability of an examining officer, said one of Moses' aides, echoing Moses' views, a 'pretty fair clue' is the number of 'below standard' ratings given: the more 'below standard' ratings, the better the examining officer. If there could be such a thing as a Calvinistic civil service efficiency-rating system, Moses had devised it.
• Neither Mary nor Bob had much interest in the things that forced other young couples to be concerned with money, anyway; they were perfectly happy, for example, to furnish their living room with only Bella's old sofas and their own shiny idealism.
• Civil service reorganization was a subject so complicated that it was difficult to interest even civil service workers in it. What was needed was a single, visible object on which the workers could focus their hatred. And now Moses had given them such an object—himself. <> He was the perfect target. Tall, in a white suit, elegant, haughty, arrogant instead of conciliatory when challenged, he stood before the thousands of sullen, clerkish men like the very epitome of the efficiency expert they feared and hated.
• Moses worked endlessly revising them—only to find when he resubmitted them that the aldermen had still other objections which they had somehow neglected to mention before. There was again no open opposition, nothing that Moses' supporters could seize on as evidence of Tammany opposition to reform; instead, there was again stalling and obfuscation and confusion— and, for Bob Moses, defeat.
• The forms that had been distributed were not being used properly. Most of the department heads who had accepted them were reluctant to do the vast amount of work that would be necessary if their many squares and blanks were to be filled in with precise arithmetical grades.
• Moses' idol had developed a case of galloping clay feet. John Purroy Mitchel's elegance had worked against him. Wearer of the dress suit, winner of the one-step contest at costume balls of the Four Hundred, the Boy Mayor had given himself the image of a friend of the wealthy. His independence had worked against him, too. Scornful of public relations, he refused to change his friendships—or even to go to the public with explanations of many of his actions as mayor, so that many of the notable reforms he initiated never got the publicity they deserved.
• When Red Mike Hylan swept into City Hall—Mitchel, who had been elected in 1913 by the largest plurality in New York's history, was turned out in 1917 by an even larger plurality—Progressivism in the city was dead...: all Bureau staffers who had been working with city agencies were to be dismissed at once... Hundreds of positions previously competitive were made exempt because of their 'exceptional and sensitive' nature. The exemptions covered lifeguards, chauffeurs—and, as a final sprinkle of salt in Moses' wounds, a very highly paid 'special examiner' to the Civil Service Commission itself.
• Trying to analyze the maneuvers which had bound his system in parliamentary red tape and then, with the red tape holding it helpless, had hacked it to death, Bob Moses finally stopped and said simply, 'It is futile to attempt to establish beyond doubt who of the many agencies involved ... is responsible. ...' His dream, a dream for which he had fought with all the strength, brilliance and purity of purpose of youth and idealism, was dead—and he couldn't even be sure who had killed it. <> The net result of all his work was nothing. There was no civil service standardization, no great highway along the Hudson, no mothers' shelters in Central Park.
• But Moses had failed in his calculations to give certain factors due weight. He had not sufficiently taken into account greed. He had not sufficiently taken into account self-interest. And, most of all, he had not sufficiently taken into account the need for power. <> Science, knowledge, logic and brilliance might be useful tools but they didn't build highways or civil service systems. Power built highways and civil service systems. Power was what dreams needed, not power in the hands of the dreamer himself necessarily but power put behind the dreamer's dreams by the man who had it to put there, power that he termed 'executive support.'
• There was a new Governor in New York State, elected in an upset—Alfred E. Smith— but Smith was a Tammany man, one of the Tammany men, in fact, who had been most vociferous in scorn of Moses' civil service proposals... And then, one day, Bob Moses got a call from Henry Moskowitz's wife, Belle.

THE RISE TO POWER

• * Belle Moskowitz: All but unknown to the public but an almost legendary figure among politicians, she would be possessed of more power and influence than any woman in the United States. She would be called 'Mrs. M' by the man who had given her that power and influence, Alfred Emanuel Smith, and by the young social workers and reformers she had recruited to Smith's service... then beckoned to her someone whose work had caught her eye—a Sam Rosenman or a Howard Cullman or a Frances Perkins
• previous clean-up efforts had followed the familiar pattern: investigations which caused newspaper furor and loud demands for change, verbal acquiescence by Tammany, and then, after the furor died down, business as before. <> Belle altered the pattern. Instead of loudly denouncing conditions at the academies, she quietly checked incorporation certificates to learn the names of their owners—and found that they included both Tammany leaders and community pillars. Instead of giving the names to the newspapers, which would have brought headlines but not results, since all her ammunition would have been used up, she went to the leaders and pillars and told them she would keep their names secret if they saw to it that regulatory legislation was passed—and strictly enforced.
• When Smith asked for ideas on how to start a drive for administrative reform, Belle had one ready. Even before he took office in January, she said, he should form a Commission for Reconstruction, Retrenchment and Reorganization in the state government... Slipping the word 'retrenchment' into the commission title would be a great public relations device, Mrs. Moskowitz had said quietly, connoting as it did economy and prudence.
• The state's Republicans, as they all knew, were divided into two branches. One was the GOP's 'regular' organization, bossed by arch-reactionary William ('Big Bill') Barnes of Albany, which ran the state in an atmosphere of such corruption that GOP legislators were known as the 'Black Horse Cavalry' because of their looting expeditions against the state treasury. The other branch was the GOP's 'federal crowd,' which contained most of the party's impulse to public good and had earned its title by the distinguished service rendered in Washington by Charles Evans Hughes and a cadre of stalwarts of the Progressive Republican movement that had swept Theodore Roosevelt .. The 'regular' Republicans, who would see in talk of 'reconstruction' a threat to their control of the state government, could be expected to oppose the commission's work. Its creation, therefore, would have the dual effect of splitting the Republican Party and lining up with Smith those Republicans who exemplified Progressivism and reform to independent voters. The support of such Republicans would help negate Smith's greatest handicap, the Tammany label he bore. In addition, she reminded the leaders, the 'federal crowd' were heavy campaign contributors.
• taxes, for example, being collected by seven different agencies, public works being carried out by ten. Some agency heads were responsible to the Governor, some to the Legislature and some to officials who were themselves elected by the people and were hence not responsible to either Governor or Legislature. Some agency heads appointed by the Governor were removable only by the Legislature, and there seemed to be almost as many different procedures of removal as there were men who could be removed.
• Most important, the study found that the Governor possessed little real authority. Not he but the chairmen of the various committees of the reactionary and corrupt Legislature controlled the state's purse... Even after the document was formally printed, individual legislators continued to introduce their own 'private' bills, generally for pork-barrel public works projects, which required public expenditures, and these, when passed, did not even appear in the 'budget.' No one bothered to add them up, so that, when the Legislature adjourned, no one could be sure how much money it had appropriated.
• To get power into the hands of the executive, the Bureau recommended a centralization of governmental functions. The 169 agencies should be combined into twelve departments headed by men appointed by, and removable by, the Governor, whose term should be lengthened to four years.
• Reform attempt: But Tammany and the upstate bosses outwitted the reformers by persuading them to combine all the proposed constitutional amendments in a single package, and distaste for one or two unimportant but unpopular amendments, combined with a quiet mobilization of Tammany and upstate machines, resulted in the defeat of the package in a November 1915 referendum.
• When Moses submitted a preliminary outline of suggested commission goals, he included a phrase straight out of the reform textbooks and his Municipal Civil Service Commission days: 'Elimination of unnecessary . . . personnel.' Mrs. Moskowitz struck the phrase out. Personnel, she said, were voters. You didn't antagonize voters... is conversation began to include the phrases of practical politics as well as those of scientific management textbooks. His analysis of a state job began to take into consideration not only whether the position was necessary for the betterment of mankind but also who had appointed the man who now held the position.
• The Report of the Reconstruction Commission to Governor Alfred E. Smith on Retrenchment and Reorganization in the State Government: Moses assumed a proprietary attitude toward the report. Certainly he was the driving force in its preparation, wrote its brilliant introduction himself and rewrote many other sections. Yet he was not the only person who had contributed to it, and he seemed unwilling to admit that fact. 'I wrote the report, no question about it,' he insisted in later years. 'I wrote or rewrote everything in it.' ... they were even more bitter that the Bureau, which they revered and on whose principles and 1915 report on the same subject this report was based, was not mentioned even once in the document they regarded as the historical climax of all its work, not even in those sections for which the Bureau had, at Moses' request, done all the work.
• The second step was to get money for the fight, and Moses wrote the members of the Citizens Committee for help. Their responses were smaller than their names—Stimson would scribble to his secretary on each of Moses' appeals, 'Send $25'... kept down by volunteer assistance and maintenance of an extra office at the home of the secretary without expense to the committee.' The plea so moved Stimson that he scribbled: 'Send $50.'
• charged that the reorganization program was 'Governor Smith's attempt to make himself a king,' Smith arose and, after alluding—just long enough to bring tears to the women's eyes—to his poverty-stricken youth in an Oliver Street tenement, pointed to himself with a deprecatory gesture and said, with plenty of sarcasm and just the right little touch of bitterness: 'Behold the King, the King of Oliver Street.'
• Moses' technical expertise gave Smith the ammunition he needed. When Republican legislators introduced bills that appeared to consolidate all public works construction into a single department headed by a 'Public Works Commissioner,' it was Moses who discovered—and enabled Smith to announce to the press—that the bills did not specifically mention any method of appointment for the commissioner and that, under parallel sections of the State Constitution, he would therefore be an elected official rather than one appointed by and responsible to the Governor.
• But the man the wire was addressed to was, nonetheless, a loser—and, Moses was afraid, so was the Reconstruction Commission program. <> For a while, dreams had seemed near to realization. Genuine accomplishment had seemed close. Moses had, after all, been the moving force in the drafting of a plan to remake the machinery by which more than ten million people were governed, and he had watched the bills that embodied a substantial portion of that plan move tortuously but steadily along the road to reality. But without at least the sixteen-department constitutional amendment, the statutory changes were meaningless,
• Al Smith: he grew up in the narrow compass of a neighborhood whose life revolved around two institutions, St. James Roman Catholic Church and the Downtown Tammany Club, and in which, as one who worked there put it, morality was simple, 'virtue was virtue, vice was vice,' and the views' of the parents were the views of the children as to which was which... Al Smith never went to Central Park; that was regarded by the neighborhood as a preserve for the wealthy—'uptowners,' the Fourth Ward called them
• Fulton Fish Market: Al Smith rolled heavy barrels of fish in and out of the market, put the fish on ice, cleaned them and wrapped them. He worked from four o'clock in the morning until five in the afternoon, except on Friday. On Friday, he started work at three.
• Foley, one of the most remarkable of the Tammany district leaders who ran their districts—and looked after the welfare of the straight-ticket-voting Democrats in them... The only payment he ever asked for the favors he dispensed was a straight Democratic vote—and so heartily were his constituents willing to make this form of repayment that his district regularly rolled up Democratic majorities that made him the most powerful district leader in the city.
• * Moses felt no compulsion to turn associates into friends: arrogance is, after all, one of the coefficients of money. Arrogance would have been an unaffordable luxury to Smith: the equation of politics as he knew it contained a factor of friendship that had at least as heavy a weight as the factor of respect.
• Smith's education: He would try the one that looked simplest, perhaps an act setting the maximum size of vehicles using public highways. 'The provisions of this subdivision,' he read, 'shall not apply to vehicles and implements or combinations thereof not over thirteen feet in width and designed and intended for use solely for farm purposes when owned or in the possession of a dealer in farm implements and equipment and within a radius of fifty miles of the principal place of business of such a dealer, including transportation of such vehicles, implements and combinations thereof as a load on another vehicle, such vehicle or load not to exceed thirteen feet in width, during the same period and under the same conditions and restrictions as hereinbefore in this subdivision provided for such vehicles and implements and combinations thereof when used solely for farm purposes.'
• * Al Smith would begin reading them. Not only the bills which bore on a subject in which he was interested, and not only the bills which dealt with his Assembly District, and not only the bills which dealt with New York City. Sitting at the rickety desk in the furnished room, Smith read all the bills,... the annual appropriations measure, hundreds of pages long, containing tens of thousands of items, was published. No one, so far as anyone in Albany could remember, had ever read the entire appropriations bill. In 1906, Al Smith read it. <> Now, he was to say later, Albany began to make some sense to him.
• No one would have seemed less likely to get along with the aristocratic upstate Republicans, born into families that controlled the great utilities and banks of the state and educated among the Ivy, than Al Smith, but his jokes had them roaring, too.
• (A Buffalo assemblyman once tried to correct Smith's grammar. The Assembly, well aware of Smith's lack of education, waited silently for his reply. Slowly he arose. 'I will,' he said with dignity, 'refer the gentleman from Buffalo to the rule that says, 'When a pluperfect adjective precedes a noun, insert a plus.' ')
• Smith's speak on widows' pensions: We are pledged to conserve the natural resources of the State. Millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money, untold and uncounted millions, have been poured into that channel. We have been in a great hurry to legislate for the interests. We have been slow to legislate along the direction that means thanksgiving to the poorest man recorded in history—He who was born in the stable at Bethlehem.
• 'Does the working man want it? No! Does the Legislature want it? No! Does the compensation commission want it? Then what other interested party is there? The Casualty Company! That's who you are working for. . . . The agent can shake the long green before the widow or suffering laborer and tell them if they sign away their rights they can get so much but if they wait they can take their chance on getting something months hence. That carries us back to the good old days when we had no compensation law. Be honest and repeal the whole law and stop faking.'... The compensation law might be lost but they knew the Republicans would never dare to touch the others now. Great advances had been secured. And, more important, at last they had their champion. Smith, the Tammany man, had made their dreams come true.
• When he had in some instances to drop either the banner or the mace, it wasn't the mace that fell. In the 1915 Constitutional Convention, he fought for the Municipal Research Bureau's recommended reorganization of the state government... After the convention, Smith campaigned against the proposed new, reorganized Constitution. First and foremost, he was a party man.
• Murphy knew that Tammany must change... Becoming identified with Progressivism, becoming known as the party of social progress, would be a way to shatter that image forever. Pushing to the forefront bright young men identified with such causes rather than with the ancient rituals of Tammany would be a way to spawn candidates who would shatter forever the unseen but heavy chains that weighed down the Irish Catholic in America.
• During Smith's first term, it was not that he broke loose from his party but that the party freed him. Shortly after the election, Murphy summoned him to his Long Island estate, Good Ground. Tammany would be asking him for many things, Tammany's leader said, but he had been thinking of what it meant to have a boy from the Old Neighborhood in the Governor's chair. Should Tammany ever ask for anything Smith felt would stand in the way of becoming a great Governor, all Smith had to do was tell him so and the request would be withdrawn. There were to be no strings attached to the job.
• The Governor did so not only because he shared Murphy's dream and not only because he genuinely wanted to help the state's urban masses but also because it was good politics. Grover Cleveland, he pointed out to his friends, had become a national figure because 'the idea got around the country that he was independent of everybody.'... Smith's policies were Progressive
• When the reformers were finished with all their hollering and were back in their comfortable homes, the widows of the Fourth Ward would still be forced to give up their children before they could get charity. What good was courage if its only effect was to hurt those you were trying to help? <> So Smith despised the noncompromisers, the starry-eyed idealists... Al Smith despised, in short, what Bob Moses had been. <> But he didn't despise Moses.
• they couldn't help noticing that, in discussing Smith, Moses was talking less and less about the great issues of the time with which Smith had been involved and more and more about political maneuvers which the former Governor had described to him. 'Why, when he got enthusiastic about something now.. it was more than likely something that..., was really nothing more or less than some cheap political trick,'
• * He threw back his head and laughed at us and said, 'Why, we know that. But it sounds a hell of a lot better this way, doesn't it?' Bob had always been so truthful. Now Bob was telling us that Smith was telling a deliberate lie—and Bob was condoning it.' <> Under Belle Moskowitz's tutelage, Bob Moses had changed from an uncompromising idealist to a man willing to deal with practical considerations; now the alteration had become more drastic. Under her tutelage, he had been learning the politicians' way; now he almost seemed to have joined their ranks. <> Bob Moses was scornful, in short, of what he had been.
• Pixie smile, the 'vivacity of a song and dance man.' a charm that made him arrive in the Senate Chamber 'like a glad breeze.' Well-timed pauses, head cocked to preface the witticism, brow raised to indicate disbelief, hands tugging at waistcoat or briefly caressing it with upward flicks of expressive palms, fore- head dabbed by handkerchief plucked from left-hand breast pocket by left hand instead of by right hand crossing over the chest because a crossed-over hand separates an actor from his audience. The Prince Charming of Politics... The Honorable James J. Walker strutting his stuff.
• And, always, sitting apart, knitting, saying nothing until the Governor turned to her and asked, 'What do you think, Mrs. M?' the plump, matronly little woman—a woman whose qualities astonished the capital more each day. She could mother reporters and bring them chicken soup when they were sick and call them at midnight with the inside tips that they treasured, but when one wrote something about Smith that she didn't like, she knew how to persuade his editor to transfer him from the Albany beat.
• 'Governor Miller says he saved the state fourteen million dollars,' Smith said. 'All I want to know is—where is it, and who's got it?' Then he sat down. For a moment the farmers were silent, puzzled. Then Moses, seated by the speaker's platform, heard the crowd begin to murmur, then to laugh, and finally to break into applause and cheers.
• * An expert bill drafter had to know thousands of precedents so that he could cull out the one, embodying it in the bill he was working on, that would make the bill legal, or so that he could, by careful wording, avoid bringing the new act within the purview of an old one that might make it illegal. He had to know a myriad ways of conferring, or denying, power by written words. He had to know how to lull the opposition by concealing a bill's real content. For years, everyone had known the identity of the best bill drafter in Albany: Alfred E. Smith. And Smith had never been shy about accepting that accolade. But now, when someone brought up the subject, Smith said, 'The best bill drafter I know is Bob Moses.'
• Henry Ford's institution of annual vacations-with pay!- for his workers. Before the eyes of America a bright new world of mass leisure was unfolding. <> And along with time the new technology brought a means by which the time could be used to conquer space.
• Long Island: when the ice had melted, its sharp edges softening and retreating, the north shore of Long Island was fjords and coves, harbors and bays, straits and peninsulas, an endless, beautiful coastline. The melted ice ran south, flooded a huge low-lying meadow on the south side of the Island and left on the ocean side of the meadow just enough low sand bars and dunes to form a barrier beach that checked the force of the Atlantic rollers before they smashed on the Island and then let them continue as gentle waves that washed the Island's shore. The ocean deposited on it gleaming white sand that gave it long horseshoes of beaches... The ridges lay along the flatness like a pair of scissors, with the bolt holding the blades in a place called the Wheatley Hills... the North Shore of Long Island became 'a fresh, green breast of the New World,' and, looking at it, F. Scott Fitzgerald would think that 'for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.'
• he Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose venom was directed in the 1920's not only against Negroes but also against Jews and Catholics, as numerous as in Suffolk County. Three successive chairmen of Suffolk's Republican Party had been members of the Klan,
• the robber barons: to turn that growth into personal wealth, had stationed themselves at the 'narrows' of production, the key points of production and distribution, and exacted tribute from the nation. They were the men who had blackmailed state legislatures and city councils by threatening to build their railroad lines elsewhere unless they received tax exemptions, outright gifts of cash—and land grants so vast that, by 1920, the elected representatives of America had turned over to the railroad barons an area the size of Texas. They were the men who had bribed and corrupted legislators—the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it... Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt's 'Law? What do I care for law? Hain't I got the power?' and J. P. Morgan's 'I owe the public nothing.'
• George F. Baker, the chop-whiskered, taciturn Sphinx of Wall Street: in 1930, when he was ninety and America was in the Depression, he climbed out of bed, pushed aside his doctors, strode to his office and, in a series of incredible stock manipulations, increased his fortune in that year alone by $50,000,000.
• Mrs. Oliver Belmont, a cold-eyed grande dame famed for her priceless parure of emeralds and for her 'Marble House' at Newport, a white marble structure whose pilasters and capitals were modeled on, although somewhat larger than, those of the Temple of the Sun at Baalbek,
• And the barons of the North Shore knew how to keep it impregnable. Accustomed to dealing in the political marketplace (so many of the largest contributors to the Republican Party came from the North Shore that during the 1920's the GOP's National Finance Committee contained forty-nine members—one from each of the forty-eight states and one from Nassau County)
• asked a clerk in the Department of Water Supply if the city used those properties. Why, no, the clerk said, it never had. There had never been any need. And, come to think of it, now that New York had acquired the huge Croton and Ashokan reservoirs upstate and built aqueducts from them to the city, there probably never would be. <> And suddenly, the eyes that had looked at the mud flats below Riverside Drive and seen a great highway and a great park were looking at something else. The eyes that 'burned with ideas' were burning again—and they were focused on Long Island.
• Lilies floated in them. Pickerel and trout flickered beneath the pads. Huge oaks, beeches, birches and pines surrounded him. And as he tramped steadily north, there seemed no end to them. He was not in a small woods, he realized, but in a forest—it would survey out at more than seven hundred acres—that lay untouched in the heart of Nassau County.
• And behind him, not a quarter mile from the road but unknown to all but one in a thousand of the drivers on it—and closed to even that one— was land, a vastness of land, overflowing with the fruits they sought. Land that didn't have to be purchased. Land that didn't have to be condemned. Land that was owned not by the governments of Long Island, which viewed the masses of New York City as foreigners, but by the government of New York City. Land that could be opened to the city's people merely by turning a key.
• Jones Beach, he could not see another human being. In front of him would be nothing but a wide, straight strip of the whitest sand he had ever seen, stretching unbroken until it disappeared at the horizon, sliding on one side beneath the ocean surf, rising on the other into dunes covered with tufts of beach grass, little gnarled bushes and stunted trees, with, between the dunes, marshes of a peculiar, striking grayish-green color from which swooped up herons and gulls.
• The problem, of course, was to get the people out there, and now in the evenings, in his Babylon bungalow, Bob Moses began to study maps of Long Island. One night he suddenly noticed that the water-supply properties off Merrick Road lay in a row. A straight line could be drawn through them. Therefore, so could a road. If a road were built out from New York so that it traversed those properties, a substantial part of the right-of-way would not have to be purchased or condemned... And since the bay was so shallow, it ought to be easy to construct a causeway from the end of the road to the beach. 'That was the idea behind Jones Beach and the Southern State Parkway,' Moses would recall years later. 'I thought of it all in a moment.'
• the Bronx River Parkway: the parkway would be the first highway in the country to eliminate traffic lights and intersecting traffic by lifting all crossroads above it. The bridges that carried the crossroads would be faced with stone to blend in with the scenery, and the bordering right-of-way would be completely landscaped.
• The mind leaped on. It took as its compass not an island but a state. <> The state's other large cities—Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Schenectady, Syracuse, Troy, Utica—were growing, not as fast as New York but fast enough. So was their need for state parks.
• Having no authority over private individuals or organizations, the Legislature was reluctant to give them money. And since no central body of any type unified their activities, they presented to the Legislature the spectacle of separate agencies competing with each other for funds. <> This lack of unified administration also meant that a considerable potential source of power for parks was dissipated. In many cases, the trustees of the parks
• * Mark Antony, shrewd politician, knew the potency of parks as an issue. Rousing the mob to fury against Caesar's 'honorable' slayers, he reserved for a climax the reading of Caesar's will. 'Let but the commons hear this testament,' he cried, 'and they would go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds.' And it was not the revelation that Caesar had left each Roman citizen, 'every several man,' seventy-five drachmas that sealed Antony's victory over the citizens' emotions but rather his revelation that . . . he hath left you all his walks, / His private arbors and new-planted orchards,
• But now Moses was interested in parks, and parks were to be an exception. Not on the surface, of course... the bill provided, the Council Chairman from whom he would be receiving the budget would be elected by the council—not appointed by him or by the Governor. Within the reorganized framework of state government, therefore, parks would be a separate, self-governing, very independent duchy. <> As a reformer, Moses had fought for the principle of executive power commensurate with executive responsibility, and, believing in the principle, he had recommended in his Reconstruction Commission report that appointed officials should never have terms longer than the Governor's term and that they should always be removable by the Governor... It was not, moreover, the violation of stated principles for the purpose of cementing himself in office that most clearly revealed the change in Moses. Rather, it was the method by which he insured that, once in office, he would have specific powers sufficient for his purpose. For the method was that of concealment and deviousness.
• In 1924, 'appropriation' had only one meaning in a legislative context: an allocation of funds by the Legislature. Most legislators—probably all legislators—would, if asked, have said that was the only meaning the word had ever had. And since section fifty-nine of the conservation law had been passed in 1884, most legislators had not read it. But the best bill drafter in Albany had read it—and he knew that in that section 'appropriation' had quite a different meaning... defining 'appropriation' as a procedure in which a state official could take possession of the land by simply walking on it and telling the owner he no longer owned it—and that if he wanted compensation, he would have to apply to the condemnation commission himself. <> The 'appropriation' method had never been used anywhere except in remote forests. It had never been intended for use in city, suburban or farm areas.
• Section eight, for example, entitled 'General Powers,' supposedly enumerated the powers of the Long Island State Park Commission over its land, and the powers enumerated in this section seemed innocuous enough. But in succeeding sections of the act, each power was 'defined,' and each successive definition broadened the commission's authority... because parkways hadn't existed when the provision was written, the Highway Law didn't mention parkways—and there was no local check over their location.