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THE USE OF POWER

The Taylor Estate fight also transformed a quiet, conservative stockbroker and connoisseur of antiques into a major New York State political figure. <> The stockbroker was W. Kingsland Macy... 'No man living excels Macy in the capacity for appreciating an outrage that has been perpetrated against his rights. He cherished and cultivated his wrongs as other men worship Old Masters.'

Assembly Speaker Joseph A. McGinnies said that the Legislature would strip the power of appropriation from the commission. And he said that the Legislature would certainly not segregate any money at all—ever—for the purchase of the Taylor Estate. <> In the Legislature and the courts, then, the issue appeared in February 1925 all but settled: To realize a dream of unprecedented scope, Robert Moses, by use of the law, had armed himself with unprecedented powers— and then, finding that these powers were still inadequate, he had deliberately gone beyond them, beyond the law. 'Entry and appropriation' was, even as defined in law, of questionable constitutionality in its negation of the individual's rights when his property was coveted by the state. And Moses had gone beyond the definition to use the power of the state with even less restraint than the law allowed.

But the ultimate court in which the fate of Moses and his dream was to be resolved would be the court of public opinion. And in this court, Robert Moses had close to hand three formidable weapons. <> One was the fact that, like motherhood, parks symbolized something good,... The second was the fact that it was possible to paint the issue, as Moses had already done, not only as park supporters vs. park deniers, but also as wealth vs. lack of wealth, privilege vs. impotence, influence vs. helplessness, 'rich golfers' vs. the sweating masses of the cities.

* Wait, Smith said. He had thought of something his advisers hadn't. New York City wasn't hot in April. It wasn't hot in May... In April and May, they hadn't yet reached the point at which they didn't care at all about the legal technicalities of park acquisition; they hadn't yet reached the point at which all that mattered was that someone was trying to provide them with a place to swim—and someone else was standing in his way.

And Al Smith wound up his speech as only Al Smith could. He was willing to leave the question to the people, he said. 'I am laying it before them in plain everyday language and I am leaving it to them to serve notice on their servants and representatives in the Legislature just exactly what their wishes are,' he said. 'The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. Let us battle it out right in the shadow of the capitol itself and let us have a decision, and let us not permit the impression to go abroad that wealth and the power that wealth can command can palsy the arm of the state.' <> In his speech, Smith avoided discussing the legalities or constitutionality of the appropriation.

Upstate New York in 1925 was a stronghold of Prohibitionism, of Protestantism, of prejudice, of Ku Klux Klannism—and of Republicanism. Opposing Smith's park policies could only help upstate Republican legislators, not hurt them.

The upstate park philanthropists were out working, too, old Judge Clearwater himself driving night after night to little villages to talk on their local radio stations, Franklin D. Roosevelt of Hyde Park assailing 'the invisible hand behind the . . . Republican . . . policy.' <> Then Smith and Mrs. Moskowitz conceived a master stroke: they told Moses to call a meeting of the seventy-three regional park commissioners and to hold it in the Executive Chamber at 2 p.m. June 22—just six hours before the opening of the special session—a move that insured that the influential commissioners would be on hand during the session, available to bring further pressure on wavering legislators, and to dramatize to press and public the contrast between the attitude of the Legislature and of men genuinely interested in parks... Smith had asked the Legislature for permission to have his speech broadcast; it had not dared refuse.

THERE WERE MANY complex reasons for the realization of Robert Moses' state park and parkway plan. But the key reason was simple: the further evolution of Robert Moses. The construction of parkways-like the construction of conventional highways-was a potential source of great wealth to politicians. Parkways meant construction contracts... And parkways meant development; sleepy countrysides long static because of their inaccessibility suddenly became desirable locations for factories and housing developments

Nassau County GOP leader G. Wilbur Doughty: Doughty had an almost visionary concept that rural Long Island would one day be a heavily populated suburban area and was always interested in suggestions for public works that could help open the Island to development. But his vision was heavily mortgaged to practicality: he ran one of the most corrupt political machines in the state

* Within two months after Moses and McWhinney began meeting, a lawyer who was a member of the Nassau GOP's inner circle formed a corporation with a group of associates. The only business the corporation ever transacted was the purchase and sale of land, and the only land it ever purchased and sold was 265 acres of undeveloped, all but worthless meadow and swamp land, 99.5 acres of which would become the right-of-way for the Meadowbrook Causeway, the remaining 165.5 acres of which would, when the causeway had been completed and the land's value enhanced, be sold by the corporation to private developers.

* And the Last of the Mohicans abruptly left the tepee of the commission's opponents and smoked the peace pipe with Robert Moses, supporting every one of Moses' Long Island proposals.

No sooner had the Legislature convened, therefore, than Wadsworth summoned the legislative leaders to an Albany hotel suite and told them a compromise on the park fight was in order... The Taylor Estate, the Republican leaders agreed, could be sacrificed. <> Smith, with his park plans stalled and the threat of the potentially embarrassing Taylor Estate court fight hanging over him in an election year, was not averse to a compromise.

But no sooner had they given Moses $170,000 for Southern State right-of-way, confident that that amount would allow him to purchase no more than a mile or two, than the Nassau County Board of Supervisors, now suddenly, and mysteriously, enthusiastic over Moses' projects, purchased additional miles and presented them to the Long Island Park Commission as a gift. Playing on the greed of real estate developers who owned land in the parkway's path, Moses persuaded them to donate right-of-way so that the rest of their property could be opened to development. Suddenly awakened to the fact that the New York City watershed property could be used as right-of-way, Hewitt and Hutchinson realized with a shock that the land for the Southern State was almost all in Moses' hands—all the way out to that magic point where it would trigger the start of work on the Northern State.

They found that the landscaping was being financed out of 'routine' 1926 Conservation Department requests for 'tree nurseries.' The Lloyd Neck lighthouse property was being developed with a Conservation Department appropriation for 'oyster culture.' When they waxed indignant, they were told blandly that the lighthouse property could certainly be used for oyster culture.

'The Governor came down and took the judge out to lunch—what chance did we have?' he was to say.
Whether Dunne's decision would have remained the binding legal word in the case if both sides had continued the legal battle on equal terms, if both sides had continued to make use of all their remedies at law... —is impossible to determine. For both sides weren't equal.
Lawsuits take money. The state's supply of this commodity is comparatively bottomless. The private citizen's is not. And now W. Kingsland Macy was running out of money.

after Macy had fought his way to power, Robert Moses, needing his help, made overtures of friendship, Macy accepted them... the two one-time 'amateurs in politics' were for more than thirty years the closest of political allies

The simplicity—combined with the feeling of accomplishment—might well have made Moses ask himself if it really made any difference whether he worked with Tom McWhinney. What difference did it make if the state purchased the right-of-way for the Meadowbrook Causeway from a bunch of farmers or from a bunch of Republican insiders?... What did he care if Doughty's friends made money from his dreams? If they did, he had learned, the dream would become reality. If they did not, he had learned, it wouldn't. And the dream was the important thing; the dream was what mattered.

an insight, the insight of a political genius, that physical development would help rather than hurt his cause— the risk had been magnificently justified. And he had understood the significance of that justification. Once you did something physically, it was very hard for even a judge to undo it.

* These lessons had other implications. If ends justified means, and if the important thing in building a project was to get it started, then any means that got it started were justified. Furnishing misleading information about it was justified; so was underestimating its costs. <> Misleading and underestimating, in fact, might be the only way to get a project started... if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been misled, that would mean that they hadn't investigated the projects thoroughly, and had therefore been derelict in their own duty. The possibilities for a polite but effective form of political blackmail were endless. Once a Legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it. The stakes you drove should be thin-pointed—wedge-shaped, in fact—on the end. Once you got the end of the wedge for a project into the public treasury, it would be easy to hammer in the rest.

But a more basic one was that power—specifically, the power that came with the money he could dispose of as a state official—insulated him from the law's retribution. He had been able to employ lawyers numerous enough and clever enough to utilize the technicalities of the law to frustrate the intent of the law, to throw enough sand into the machinery of justice to slow its gears sufficiently so that they could not mesh and produce the conclusion which its spirit demanded... If there was one law for the poor, who have neither money nor influence, and another law for the rich, who have both, there is still a third law for the public official with real power, who has more of both. After the Taylor Estate fight, Robert Moses must have known—he proved it by his actions—that he could, with far more impunity than any private citizen, defy the law.

Let them be designed to complement it, not dominate it. The panorama was long, low lines of sand and dunes and the sweep of the ocean. Let the lines of the bathhouses be long, low and sweeping, he said, horizontal rather than vertical. One other thing, he said. The bathhouses were going to have at least one innovation never included in any public or private building in America: diaper-changing rooms.

here was this guy drawing X's on the back of an envelope and talking about bathhouses like palaces and parking lots that held ten thousand cars. Why, I don't think there was a parking lot for ten thousand cars anywhere in America. And landscaping? Landscaping on a sand bar? We weren't even sure anything would grow on a sand bar.

'he pulled out another one of his envelopes and sketched the campanile in Venice right there—and that's how the water tower was done. And that's the way 'most everything was done. He had the architects and engineers there, but he was the architect and the engineer of Jones Beach.

The architects hastened to explain to him that Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick were simply not used on public buildings. They were among the most expensive of all facing materials. Why, by using them on structures as large and elaborate as those he had in mind, each bathhouse would cost alone what Moses had originally said would be the cost of the entire Long Island park system: a million dollars.

But iron wouldn't blend in with a rustic setting, Moses said. Guard rails and light poles would have to be made of wood... Moses sent them back to ponder the problem again, and this time one thought of drilling holes in wooden rails and inserting strong steel cable—and now all the rails on all the parkways could be wood... The dunes, he said one day, were a natural protective wall for an archery range, so archery should be included as one of the sports offered at the beach. And why just have ordinary targets? he said... Let some of the targets be cutouts in the shape of enemy bowmen crouching behind castle turrets.

If the political difficulties involved in creating a park on Jones Beach were enormous, the physical difficulties were of a size to match. Building on a barrier beach proved to be a very different proposition from building on the mainland... None of Moses' engineers had expected work on the barrier beach to continue in winter because drifting ice packs that kept boats off the Great South Bay for days at a time could maroon anyone caught on the strand. But with Smith's time as Governor running out, winters could not be wasted. Moses told the engineers taking surveys for the causeway to cache emergency supplies of food in a shack on the beach and keep working.

But approximately forty million cubic yards of fill would be required. The job would take months—and it would be expensive. Even Smith quailed at this, and Moses had to talk fast and hard to persuade the Governor to go along. But he did persuade him, and the largest floating dredges in the United States were brought to the bay

'beach grass' (Ammophilia arenaria), whose roots, seeking water in the dry sand, spread horizontally rather than vertically and thus held sand around it in place... In the summer of 1928, on the desolate sand bar on the edge of the ocean, amid half-completed building skeletons that looked like ancient ruins, was a panorama out of the dynasties of the Pharaohs: hundreds, thousands, of men, spread out over miles of sand, kneeling on the ground digging little holes and planting in them tiny bundles of grass.

'And he said, 'I remember a story my father told me once. You know the whole question of the ownership of the bay bottom in Babylon Town came up a long time ago and my father and another judge, a fellow in Amityville named Samuel Hildreth, were appointed to pass on it. And I think you'd be interested in what was found. You'll never find the decision in Riverhead because the supervisors will have made sure it's missing. But Hildreth is alive.'.. 'I said, 'Do I gather then that half the bay bottom belongs to the state? That Babylon doesn't own its bay bottom at all?'

issue a ruling that would give Moses a real chance of winning it: the voting would not be restricted to the town's taxpaying property owners but would be open to anyone who lived there— including the several hundred state employees who had recently moved into apartments. This ruling would violate common sense and common practice... Realtors had cars out, too, rounding up voters known to favor the proposal and transporting them to the polls.

On Jones Beach, two years before a desolate sand bar, there stood now, awaiting only the finishing touches that would be added in 1929, a bathhouse like a medieval castle, a water tower like the campanile of Venice, a boardwalk, a restaurant and parking fields that held ten thousand cars each. In the history of public works in America, it is probable that never had so much been built so fast.

The lionization was on a scale as vast as the achievement. The Twenties was an age for heroes, of course, and if 1927 was Lindbergh's year in the New York press, 1928 was Moses'. Albert Einstein, who announced his theory of relativity in that year, was all but ignored in the city's thirteen daily newspapers, but New York's reporters strove for new adjectives to describe the park builder,

When he had the parks, Moses built roads to link them with the nearest highways, and suddenly families in Rochester and Syracuse and Albany were visiting places they had hardly heard of before—not only Letchworth Gorge and Watkins Glen but Boonville Gorge, Rudd Pond, Roaring Brook and Ore Pit.

For once Bob Moses came into possession of power, it began to perform its harsh alchemy on his character, altering its contours, eating away at some traits, allowing others to enlarge. <> The potential for these changes had always been there, like a darker shadow on the edge of the bright gold of his idealism. With each small in- crease in the amount of power he possessed, the dark element in his nature had loomed larger, becoming prominent enough for sharp-eyed men to begin to notice it... power feeds arrogance. As Moses obtained power, therefore, the traits symptomatic of his arrogance became steadily more noticeable. The pattern's hue darkened.

The park philanthropists on the State Council of Parks didn't move fast enough for him... They had given Moses the help he asked because they believed what he had told them. When he assured them—as he did over and over both in letters and to their faces—that under his park plan they would 'continue their duties and powers,' that they would continue to administer the parks they loved, that the State Parks Council was merely an 'advisory agency,' they believed him.

without providing any means of transportation to them other than auto; the truly poor masses of the cities didn't own automobiles, they pointed out; how were they to reach these parks? But every time they raised such points, they were voted down. And Moses was re-elected to the chairmanship in 1925, 1926, 1927 and 1928.

Ansley Wilcox, who had served as a Niagara park commissioner for forty years... But when the Parks Council met on July 24—with Wilcox, exhausted by the earlier trip to New York and the strain of the hearing, again confined to bed and absent—Downer's report was not distributed. Neither was its summary, which contained the exoneration. Instead, its list of 'recommendations,' which concentrated on the technicalities

An astounded Wilcox realized that Moses had sent a copy of his, Moses', letter to the seventy-two other regional commissioners without sending them a copy of Wilcox's letter—and therefore the commissioners could have no way of knowing that Wilcox's letter had not in fact been unpleasant, and they could not know the events that had led up to it. <> Since Wilcox's letter was not insulting, why did Moses say it was? In Wilcox's view, Moses realized that the Downer report would not make the Niagara commissioners look bad to the other regional commissioners and would not justify to Smith what he had almost certainly told Smith about them, that he therefore needed another issue to divert attention from the main one

* It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Moses had determined to hound from the state park organization a group of elderly men whose only crime was their refusal to allow him to exercise unbridled power in that organization and to remove them from control of the park they loved, the park that one of them had created, the park to which they had given so much of their lives.

Wilcox's letter, which detailed his 'transactions and relations' with the power company, covered ten single-spaced typewritten pages. 'That it is too long, I know well,' he concluded. 'Few will read it and probably none will appreciate it.' <> The old man was right. His letter lay unread in an unopened folder in a dusty Albany warehouse for forty-two years. And although, in the forty-third year, the folder was opened (by the author) and the letter was read, and although it provided the first detailed account of the changes wrought in Robert Moses by his hunger for power, it could not right the worst of all the injustices Moses perpetrated on Ansley Wilcox... By the time Moses' reign was over, it would be impossible to find anywhere in Niagara State Park even a single hint that anyone except Moses had been responsible for its creation.

He convinced the Governor not to sign any appropriations for the Niagara Park unless the old commissioners gave the new one this power. In order to realize their dream, in order even to keep functioning the park they loved, the old men were forced to turn it over to someone else. At the end of the fight for control of Niagara State Park, Robert Moses had won. <> He won every fight in the State Parks Council.

Since the traditional function of park commissions had been to preserve the land in its natural state, the later developments—construction contracts, jobs—that made parks a source of power had never been a significant consideration. Parks were a source of power now, but the old park men didn't want power... Politicians failed to grasp the new reality until too late... In politics, power vacuums are always filled. And the power vacuum in parks was filled by Robert Moses.

Smith won a fourth term—the first Governor to do so since De Witt Clinton a century before— and he credited a large part of his 257,000-vote plurality to the parks issue... In the simple Tammany code, the first commandment was Loyalty. Smith's loyalty to his appointees was legendary.

Robert Moses himself was conspicuously uninterested in social welfare reforms. But these reforms would have been impossible of attainment without the executive budget and departmental consolidation and reorganization. Even more impossible of attainment would have been another Smith achievement: while expanding manyfold the state's role in helping its people meet their needs, he succeeded, over the course of his four terms, in substantially cutting state taxes... 'New York is the great classic of the reorganization movement.' In that classic, Robert Moses played the leading role.

'I don't want to discuss what he said to me,' one executive said quietly. 'I don't want to discuss it ever.' But one thing was certain: earlier Robert Moses had led men; now he drove them.

So he taught them to write. Like a high-school English teacher, ... 'The first thing you've got to learn,' he said, 'is that no one is interested in plans. No one is interested in details. The first thing you've got to learn is to keep your presentations simple.'

If a man wasn't making what Moses thought he should be, he would put the man's wife on the payroll in some job that required no work... He early hit on the idea of using Park Commission labor and contractors to build homes—generally, comfortable, spacious two-story Colonial houses—for his top executives on park property so that they would be spared the expense of rent,

What was remarkable was Moses' tone, his remarkable self-confidence. When he said, 'The form of government you have will not solve your problems here,' he added: 'That is not a theory; I am sure of it.' And this was no servant of the people trying to persuade. The opposition to parks on Long Island, he told the Long Islanders, was 'stupid opposition.'

While building bathhouses on Long Island, he ran afoul of the State Industrial Commissioner. The commissioner was Frances Perkins... The ordinance specified that union labor be used on the job,... Well ... he treated me to . . . vituperation . . . although we were on the most intimate of personal terms.

Disregard for law, of course, implies regard for that which law is a barrier against: naked force, power sufficient to bend society or individuals, if not protected by law, to its will. And this, too, now became noticeable in the character of Robert Moses.

Moses was playing by the rules of power now and one of the first of those rules is that when power meets greater power, it does not oppose but attempts to compromise. He had met power invulnerable to him-—in the barons of Long Island's North Shore. And where once, in laying out the original route of the Northern State Parkway exactly where he believed it should ideally go, laying it out without compromise, running it right past the massive porticos of the barons' castles, he had spat in the eye of power, now he hastily administered eyewash.

he gave his solemn oath that state troopers patrolling the parkway would be under orders to keep automobiles from the city moving, not allowing their occupants to picnic, or even to stop, by the side of the parkway within their borders. Publicly, Moses never stopped excoriating the Long Island millionaires. But in private, many of them were coming to consider him quite a reasonable fellow to deal with.

Regard for power implies disregard for those without power as is demonstrated by what happened after Moses shifted the route of the Northern State Parkway away from Otto Kahn's golf course. The map of the Northern State Parkway in Cold Spring Harbor is a map not only of a road but of power—and of what happens to those who, unwittingly, are caught in the path of power... For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther.

So Moses was spared being with his Gamaliel when he went down to defeat in what Oscar Handlin has called 'a dark episode in American history.'.. Moses wasn't on the train when the realization spread through it that the prejudice and intolerance could not be licked and that even if it could, 1928, with the 'Hoover Market' booming and the nation prosperous and complacent, just wasn't a Democratic year.

to a point where 'dislike' is not so fitting a name for it as 'hatred.' In discussing two such men. one assemblyman will say to another, with a knowing shake of his head: 'They go back a long way.' <> Robert Moses and Franklin Delano Roosevelt went back a very long way.

Franklin Roosevelt found himself physically unable to campaign against his cousin, he sent his wife to do it. (To remind voters of Theodore Jr.'s connection, peripheral at worst, with the Teapot Dome oil scandal, Eleanor Roosevelt constructed a huge cardboard cutout of a teapot blowing steam, tied it on the top of a car and with it trailed her cousin-in-law around the state, a maneuver which she later ruefully admitted had been a 'rough stunt')

But Roosevelt was never really part of the Smith inner circle. As Oscar Handlin put it, he 'had been brought up in an atmosphere that stressed the compulsive understatement. ... It was inevitable that he should feel awkward in Smith's suite at the Biltmore.

Belle Moskowitz, who had seen in the thirty-year-old failure Robert Moses something no one else had seen, was watching 'harmless' Franklin Roosevelt. And, by 1924, she had come to the conclusion that he was a threat, a very dangerous threat, to her dream that Alfred E. Smith would one day sit in the White House.

And, it may be, he didn't want within the park system he was so assiduously welding into a monolithic entity responsive solely to his command any opening wedges driven for a project that would be under the command of another vigorous, independent man. Repeatedly, Moses' State Parks Council slashed Roosevelt's budget requests to a level insufficient even to begin acquiring right-of-way for a parkway... As park men like Ansley Wilcox and Judge Clearwater had charged before him, Roosevelt charged that Moses had lied about him to Smith when he was not around to refute the lies. 'I am sorry to say it is a fact that Bob Moses has played fast and loose with the Taconic State Park Commission since the beginning,'

When puzzled reporters asked Roosevelt whether he was going to continue the Smith policies, his evasive answer was: 'Generally, for that is what we said all through the campaign.' <> Explanations for Roosevelt's treatment of Smith vary from historian to historian, depending on whether the historian has received most of his information from intimates of Roosevelt or of Smith... But political considerations alone seem inadequate to account for Roosevelt's actions. One is forced to take into account another side of his complex character, the side which Raymond Moley was to call a 'lack of directness and sincerity,' and of which Robert Sherwood was to say that 'at times he displayed a capacity for vindictiveness which could be described as petty.' This side was frequently to be on display when Roosevelt dealt with people he had needed once but needed no longer... 'Roosevelt . . . was deeply sensitive to the fact that so many among the people who knew him . . . believed, for one reason or another, that he lived beyond his intellectual means.'

As he had done in the little world of Yale, Robert Moses had erected within New York State a power structure all his own, an agency ostensibly part of the state government but only minimally responsive to its wishes. The structure might appear flimsy but it was shored up with buttresses of the strongest material available in the world of politics: public opinion. A Governor—even a Governor who hated the man who dwelt within that structure— would pull it down at his own peril.

At first, Moses' new executive gave him support, backing the Wheatley Hills route. But Clark began hinting that any attempt to push that route would result in the disclosure to the public of the Moses-Kahn deal, which, he said, if 'finally brought to light will not make a creditable chapter in the history of this State.'... it meant that a commuter who lived anywhere east of Dix Hills and who used the parkway to get to his job in New York City was condemned to drive, every working day of his life, twenty-two extra and unnecessary miles.

* legislators would say, 'We deal in writing'—a phrase which, in Albany, was the ultimate insult. Al Smith could say, 'When I give my word, it sticks.' Now, in the corridors of the capitol, many men were saying of the new Governor, 'We deal in writing... ; and I'm going to demand a bond on your signature.''

Moses may have obeyed Al Smith's patronage suggestions without question, but he wouldn't even listen to Roosevelt's... And the explanation for the increase in Moses' power during Roosevelt's Governorship certainly wasn't that he gave in like a good subordinate

And when, on August 4, 1929, the Wantagh Causeway opened the way to Jones Beach, the hosannas became a hallelujah chorus... the nautical theme had been carried out everywhere. Walking along the mile-long boardwalk connecting the two bathhouses, they noticed that the boardwalk railing was a ship's railing. Bending down to drink from a water fountain, they found that the fountains were turned on and off by ships' pilot wheels... He even issued the Courtesy Squaders large cloths so that they could wipe from the boardwalk gobs of spittle. His methods worked. As one writer put it: 'You will feel like a heel if you so much as drop a gum wrapper.'

During the fall of 1930, the two-mile-long Ocean Parkway extending along the barrier beach from Jones Beach eastward toward Fire Island was opened. When he had asked the Legislature for money for the parkway, Moses had said that two miles of an ocean drive was all he had in mind. Now he revealed that he actually had been concealing a few other miles— ninety-eight, to be precise. Why, he demanded, shouldn't there be a continuous road, bordered by the rolling Atlantic, all the way from Breezy Point on the Rockaway peninsula in New York City to Montauk Point at the tip of Long Island, a distance of one hundred miles?

Thinking of his national image, not yet aware that liberal public spending might be a way to cushion the effects of the Depression, the Governor was anxious not to give opponents the chance to portray him as a big spender. By the end of 1930, moreover, state revenues had been so slashed by the Depression that the state budget was quiveringly taut.

Al Smith was present at every dedication, too—as long as Smith lived, Moses would never hold a cornerstone laying, a ribbon cutting, or any public ceremony of any type anywhere in the state without inviting the 'Governor' and offering him a prominent spot on the program—but Roosevelt couldn't even bridle at this. There was, in regard to the Long Island park system, more than enough credit to go around.

Certainly Moses was willing at least to share the credit for the work he had done with the man he needed if he was to get more done... the accomplishment helped explain this contradiction in other ways, too. <> One way is that no Governor could sit in the Executive Chamber long without discovering just how hard—how incredibly hard—it was, even for a Governor, to get things, big things, done.

It is no good still to be laying cornerstones on Election Day. By then, a public official in executive office must have ribbons he can cut, monuments to which he can point with pride. This is a requirement established by democracy as it has evolved in America, yet the realities of the democratic process in America make it almost impossible to get a road, a bridge, a housing project, a bathhouse or a park approved and built in two years—or four. The Governor who finds a man who can inject into the democracy-public works equation a factor of personality so heavy as to unbalance it and get public works built during the span of a single term of office has little choice, if he is ambitious for political success, but to heap on that man more and more responsibilities, even though the giving of responsibilities carries with it the grant of more power.

Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with 'shock,' deep distaste for the public that was using them. '

* Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently 'dirty,' there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits,

And Roosevelt was not the only younger man who had treated Smith with ingratitude. The treatment he had received from Jimmy Walker had wounded him even more deeply. .. And when Walker hand-picked Olvany's successor, he chose Smith's enemy, John F. Curry. There was no place left for Smith in the party he had loved and led.

who thought for a few brief hours that they actually had Roosevelt stopped and would be able to force the party to turn to Smith, and whose hopes were finally dashed when the ex-Governor's old adversary, William Randolph Hearst, used his influence with California's William G. McAdoo and John Nance Garner, Governor of Texas, to force the California and Texas delegations to switch to Roosevelt... He was one of those who sneaked out of the Congress Hotel by a side door with Smith at the moment that crowds were jamming the front entrance to greet the arriving Roosevelt,

a quotation from Shakespeare that he selected for an epigraph on the menu's cover: Politics is a thieves' game. / Those who stay in it long enough are invariably robbed.

* corruption in the city: Then Seabury turned to the Magistrates Courts. Witnesses revealed that hundreds of innocent housewives and working girls had been framed as prostitutes and, if they could not raise the cash to buy their freedom, had been jailed, sometimes for months, by a cabal of crooked vice-squad policemen, court clerks and magistrates.

Year in and year out between January 1, 1918, and December 31, 1932, the city's debt increased at a rate equal to $100,000 per day, until, on the latter date, it had reached the staggering total of $1,897,481,478—a figure that was almost equal to the combined debt of the forty-eight states and that required an annual appropriation for debt service... of $209,960,338, almost a third of the entire budget.

it was a misleading oversimplification to blame the Depression for all of New York's problems. The truth was that the city had been falling further and further behind in the race to meet the needs of its people in good times as well as bad, and under reform as well as Tammany administrations... The concern of the people's tribunes during the Low and Mitchel reform administrations had been for the people's welfare, but that welfare had been conceived of primarily as a lessening of the burden on taxpayers through governmental economy

For its single major public improvement, the construction of the Independent Subway System, the Walker administration paid $800,000,000—approximately twice what outside experts said the job should have cost... And since the hands which city inspectors held out, palms up, to contractors could not easily be doubled into hard fists of regulation, the quality of public works in New York City was more than slightly suspect.

The city had created two additional lanes on the Queensborough upper roadway in 1931, but when the lanes were opened, it was discovered that there had been a slight miscalculation: the lanes were too narrow; cars were constantly skinning their tires on the granite curbs. The lanes had to be closed while workmen laboriously chipped away the edges of the curbstones—and the workmen would be chipping, and the lanes would be closed, for three years.

As for New York's parks, they were scabs on the face of the city.

* Central Park: from a distance the sheep who grazed opposite it on the Green or Sheep Meadow, under the care of a resident shepherd who twice a day held up traffic on the park's West Drive to herd his flock across, made a picture as pretty as Olmsted had envisioned. But a closer look disclosed that, because for generations the sheep had been allowed to inbreed, every one of them was malformed.

And from the proposed Bronx terminus of the Triborough, red lines radiated out northwestward along the Harlem River to the Saw Mill River Parkway he was building in Westchester County and northeastward along Bruckner Boulevard to the Hutchinson River Parkway Extension. These, Moses said, would be other parkways—and as he said it, the reform leaders sitting on the dais suddenly realized that the lines behind Moses formed a whole series of rough but concentric rings that would provide a whole series of possible bypass routes around the city and at the same time would make the parks and parkways Moses had built on Long Island easily accessible to any family in the city with a car.

Moses assured Price that he would accept the Fusion nomination if it was offered to him. As soon as Seabury turned down a renewed offer of the nomination, Price brought Moses' name before the Fusion Committee and received an almost unanimously favorable response. <> But Seabury had not been present at the meeting. And Seabury's opinion of Moses was markedly different from that of other reformers... Its root lay in the judge's hostility to Tammany Hall— and in his conviction that Moses' election would allow Tammany to retain control of the city.

Another element in his defeat—which took place in 1916—was Theodore Roosevelt. TR, whose Progressive Party had joined reform Democrats in support of Seabury's run for the Court of Appeals, persuaded Seabury to resign from the bench and run for Governor in the first place, promising to support him against the GOP nominee, Charles S. Whitman. But after Seabury had won the Democratic nomination, Roosevelt, breaking his word, rejoined the GOP and commanded the Progressives to back Whitman. (Seabury paid a visit to Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt started to say something, but Seabury interrupted. 'Mr. President, you are a blatherskite!' he said, and stalked out.)

Nathan Straus: Jews were accused by Hitler of endeavoring to encompass the control and government of the whole world. Ridiculous and absurd as those charges were, Nathan Straus refused to accept a nomination for Mayor at a time when Herbert Lehman was Governor because it might give credence in some quarters to Mr. Hitler's charges. He felt that in the interest of the welfare of his own people of the Jewish faith and in order not to handicap the success of the reform movement in New York it was up to him to subordinate any and all personal ambition in the interests of the public good and he, too, therefore declined.'

La Guardia, a nominal Republican too liberal for most Republicans, had already lunged for the prize twice before... half Jewish and half Italian, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran of German descent, himself a Mason and an Episcopalian, he was practically a balanced ticket all by himself.

La Guardia's personal style was screaming, ranting, fist-shaking and more than a little irresponsible... These men who distrusted excess distrusted him. And he did not hesitate to play melting-pot politics, to wave the bloody flag, to appeal, in one of the seven languages in which he could harangue an audience, to the insecurities, resentments and prejudices of the ethnic groups in the immigrant district he had represented in Congress. ('I can outdemagogue the best of demagogues,' he told one aide. 'I invented the low blow,' he boasted to another.)

Seabury hardly knew O'Ryan—and since he knew his ignorance was shared by the voters, he believed O'Ryan could not win. Seeing by now a tiger behind every bush, the Judge told the reporters that this was the reason O'Ryan had been nominated. Tammany...

after midnight on August 4, CC persuaded the committee members, with the exception of Price and Davidson, who held out for Moses to the last, to authorize Seabury to call a waiting La Guardia and tell him the nomination was his. <> The reform movement of New York City had wanted Robert Moses for mayor... it is hardly an overstatement to say that only one man had stood between Moses and the mayoralty, between Moses and supreme power in the city. But that man had stood fast; at the last moment, as Moses must have felt the prize securely within his grasp, it was denied him.

For Moses' radio speeches and printed statements burst above the murk of the city's political battlefield like a Roman candle whose sparkle, coming from a shower of glittering, sharp-pointed barbs flung off by a graceful and witty malice, was both hard and brilliant.

Furthermore, La Guardia knew that a key reason for Moses' success in obtaining federal money was that Moses had plans for huge public works ready at the moment the money became available. To get plans, you needed first a large staff of engineers trained in building such works. He knew that the city departments did not have such staffs and he knew that Moses did.

Concentrating in a single individual authority over both state and city parks and over most major road-building projects in the New York metropolitan region would give too much power to that individual, no matter who he was, some legislators said... The best bill drafter in Albany told La Guardia not to worry. Buried deep within the bill he drafted—it was Section 607, to be precise—allowing him to accept the park commissionership was the apparently innocuous phrase 'an unsalaried state officer shall not be ineligible to hold any other unsalaried office filled by appointment of the Mayor.' The camouflage worked. Unsalaried offices generally referred to meaningless honorary positions; not one legislator appears to have realized that it could also refer to an authority commissionership.

Harry Hopkins' federal Civil Works Administration, set up in November 1933, had 68,000 men working on park clean-up projects in the city by Christmas. But Moses and his top Long Island park administrators, driving around to the parks to see what those men were doing, found that the city had given them neither adequate tools, materials, supervision nor instructions... they saw men chopping up shovels and using their handles as firewood. Adding a poignant detail to the scene were a few men who had kept their tools and who obviously wanted to work; they spent hours 'raking' the frozen ground or building little fences out of stone they found in the area, 'just so,' as one of them was later to recall, 'I could feel I was doing something to earn my money.'

'Everything he saw made him think of some way it could be better'—and then that crew would go back to Babylon and translate his ideas into general engineering plans while another would head out with him to other parks. <> Relays were needed to keep up with him. 'His orders just poured out,' recalls the engineer. 'Bam! Bam! Bam!

The weeding out would be accomplished by making all employees work at that pace-immediately. <> Unlike the commissioners and their personal secretaries, most headquarters employees were protected by civil service, but that didn't help them much. Men who lived in the Bronx were told that henceforth they would be working in Staten Island; men who lived in Staten Island were assigned to the Bronx.

they would find that the work crews had already begun, or finished, digging ditches for pipes and foundations, or other preliminary work, and they would have to sit down on the spot and draw new plans to fit in with the work that had already been completed. The team of fifteen architects working at the Arsenal under Embury's personal direction to design a new Central Park Zoo-—were, Latham recalls, 'working [while] looking out the window to see what had already been done.'

At that signal, water gushed from the fountain's five dolphin spouts for the first time in a decade, and a speaker said that Robert Moses had outdone his biblical namesake because while the Moses of the Israelites had smote a rock in the desert and brought forth water, Moses of New York had 'smote the city's parks' and brought forth not only water but trees, grass and flowers.

Moses had believed that by forcing landlords to dump real estate on the market at a fraction of its former value, the Depression had given the city at last a chance to acquire and tear down slum tenements and use the space thus gained for play space... the idea was: 'All right, then, goddammit, we'll get land without money.' <> Moses instructed Latham to set his surveyors to making an 'inventory' of every piece of publicly owned land in New York City, every tract or parcel owned by any city department, and to determine, not by asking departmental officials but by personal inspection, whether every piece of that land was actually being used... throughout all the city's slums were scores of small triangular 'gores,' where streets angled together or bits of land had been left over from street-widening condemnation proceedings, that were now just unnoticed pieces of dirt or concrete and that were too small to be used for play but that were, if planted with grass and a tree or two, large enough to add a touch of green to the drabness around them.

unable to agree on details of a smaller memorial and in 1922 turned the money over to the City Chamberlain's office for safekeeping until the dispute was resolved. It never was, and during the intervening twelve years the sponsoring committee stopped meeting, and the existence of the money, which the Chamberlain had deposited in banks, was all but forgotten—and when Adolf Berle.., looked for it at Moses' request, he found that accumulating interest had swelled it to $338,395. <> The people who had contributed the money had intended it to be used for a war memorial. But Moses persuaded Berle that the definition of 'war memorial' could be extended to mean 'War Memorial Playgrounds'

* Moses appeared before its board of trustees, several of whom were directors of the bank, and talked to them so movingly about the need of slum children for recreation that they agreed to use the foundation's few remaining assets to pay off the small balance remaining on the mortgage—and default instead on the taxes, so that the city could take it over rather than the bank.

Most of the animals had been moved out, but not all, and the lions, shunted from one animal house to another as the buildings were torn down and kept awake by the glow of the carbide flares and the pound of the pneumatic drills, roared through the night, while a reporter who visited the site early one morning found the Menagerie's old polar bear pacing 'restlessly up and down in bewilderment, pausing occasionally to peer out at the grimy, torch-lit laborers.'

And when it was finished, on December 2, he turned the reopening into a surprise party for Al Smith. <> It was quite a party. Some observers said New York had never seen anything like it. To emphasize that he was trying to make the zoo not so much a great animal museum like its counterpart in the Bronx but a place of delight for young children, Moses had already dubbed it a 'picture-book zoo,'

* until the end of his life, Smith would delight in this privilege. The doormen at No. 820 would become accustomed to seeing him walk out the front door in the evenings and across Fifth Avenue under the street lights, a somewhat paunchy figure with a big brown derby set firmly on his head and a big cigar jutting out from his face, and disappear down the steps of the darkened zoo, not to reappear for hours. The former Governor and presidential candidate would walk through the animal houses, switching on the lights as he entered each one, to the surprise of its occupants, and talk softly to them.

And the zoo buildings were adorned with little touches that, as at Jones Beach, scaled down the architecture 'to the size of a good time.' Tiny, delicate cast-iron birds perched atop the lamps that flanked the doors of the animal houses... The lamps hanging in rows in the animal houses were glazed balls, but around each ball was a slanted copper ring that made the fixtures look like a long row of Saturns whirling in the sky.

the weathervanes atop each building were comic depictions of one of the building's inhabitants, done by the unknown designers who had caused architects from all over the world to exclaim at the weathervanes at Jones Beach; the one over the bird house, for example, showing a spindly-legged heron jutting its long bill under water in search of food, was a miniature masterpiece of angularity silhouetted against the sky.

these weren't ordinary refreshment carts. They were adorned with painted animals and garlands of flowers in colors that were intentionally gaudy—replicas of gay Sicilian carretinas. Their operators were dressed in costumes that were extravagantly Sicilian.

the Triborough Bridge was finally being built.
Here was a project to kindle the imagination.
In size, its proportions were heroic... Its anchorages, the masses of concrete in which its cables would be embedded, would be as big as any pyramid built by an Egyptian Pharaoh, its roadways wider than the widest roadways built by the Caesars of Rome. To construct those anchorages and to pave those roadways (just the roadways of the bridge proper itself, not the approach roads) would require enough concrete to pave a four-lane highway from New York to Philadelphia, enough to reopen Depression-shuttered cement factories from Maine to the Mississippi... Triborough was really not a bridge at all, but four bridges which, together with 13,500 feet of broad viaducts, would link together three boroughs and two islands...The last of the four bridges—a causeway connecting Randall's and Ward's islands—would have stood alone as an engineering feat of no mean magnitude, but so huge was Triborough that the causeway was a mere incident in its construction
Because the Legislature would not and the city could not extend his Westchester parkways into the city, the Triborough project was the only hope of doing that, also... Build Triborough, he felt, and the Long Island parks would at a stroke be made easily accessible from the entire New York metropolitan area.

the bulk of the bridge traffic—85 percent by one estimate—would be coming from, and going to, destinations south of 100th Street. Placing the Manhattan terminus at 125th Street condemned most motorists traveling between that borough and Queens to drive twenty-five totally unnecessary blocks north and then, once on the bridge, twenty-five totally unnecessary blocks south—to thus add two and a half totally unnecessary miles to their every journey over the bridge... Moses took almost no time to find out why the Manhattan terminus had been placed at 125th Street: William Randolph Hearst had owned deteriorating real estate there and he had wanted the city to buy it.

He persuaded Civil Works Administration officials to permit him to list some of the road-building work as 'park' projects—and thereby obtain hundreds of CWA laborers. Then he obtained hundreds more by diverting CWA-paid laborers on other Park Department projects to the Triborough project without CWA permission. (It always took a few days for CWA officials to find out what their laborers were doing, and by then Moses could tell them that since the work had been started, it would be silly not to allow it to be completed.

And the bloodhounds found something. The title to some of the lots contained a covenant more than a century old, dating back to a time when the lots had been owned by the city itself, they told Moses. And in the covenant the city reserved the right to reclaim a sixty-foot strip along the waterfront in case it ever wanted to build a street there. Moses could have sixty feet of right-of-way along a considerable stretch of his riverfront highway for nothing.

And rising from behind the little buildings on the left of Ward's Island and curving off to the right across the island in a gigantic curve, a highway was being bolted into place in the sky. <> The highway, carried across Ward's Island on the piers, climbed in a long, slow, powerful line. Across the river—to the right as the watchers looked north—they could see its steel roadbed slanting unhurriedly down behind the first line of factories... so were the bridge's steel towers, which loomed over the river like the facades of twin cathedrals. And even as the watchers watched, new portions of the roadbed paraded past them. Pushing aside the sullen gray of the East River would come a squad of barges, lashed together side by side to bear a weight measured in thousands of tons and pushed along by a whole covey of panting tugboats, bearing to the waiting cranes the specially fabricated steel girders that would hold the bridge roadbed girders—some of which were as big as a ten-room ranch house.

He tore down Jimmy Walker's Casino... The considerations which motivated him were not historical, aesthetic or financial. To a large extent, they were hardly rational. 'It was a case of revenge, pure and simple,'.. The Casino case marked the first significant defections from the solid ranks the city's Good Government movement had previously formed behind Moses in every encounter.

"The Power Broker, vol 1" II

"The Power Broker, vol 1" II

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