Robert Moses, Glutton for Power
Cook, Fred J.
1 In New York City Robert Moses is the most prominent exponent of the credo that the end justifies the means; that he, "the great doer" always knows best; that the public should shut up, or in...
...and to submit to an audit of their accounts by the State Comptroller once every five years...
...Moses, as ruler of the empire, is in a position to see that the right people are accommodated with the rights blocs of investment...
...By the control of money in such unlimited quantities that even the lashed and berated prefer his favor to his enmity...
...In its first twenty years it gobbled up more than $100 million in tolls from the traveling public...
...but the setback he had received was purely temporary...
...Though the fair-haired boy of Al Smith, Moses was not at all a favorite of Smith's successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...His family background was one of comfortable wealth—private tutors, private schools, trips to Europe every other year...
...For a brief period during World War I, he worked on the shipbuilding program of the Emergency Fleet Corporation at Hog Island, found himself entangled in governmental redtape (ever after his pet aversion) and quickly resigned...
...Then the land would be turned over to private developers at a low price estimated to represent its worth in its barren estate...
...Opposed such civil rights measures as the Fair Employment Practices Law, fair educational practices legislation, laws to bar discrimination in public housing—stands which the NAACP denounced as "disastrous to the progress New York City is making in eliminating discrimination against minorities...
...ON A VASTER and more glaring scale were the repeated blunders of Moses in the administration of the Title I slum clearance program...
...One of its least appreciated aspects lies in the opportunities it gives Moses for the cultivation of friends on many diverse and influential levels...
...Occasionally, such high-handed Moses antics stir up a call for a look at the ledgers of his Authorities...
...For years Robert Moses could do no wrong—not even when he: • Sold a public street to private interests without consulting the public or the public's officials about it...
...He entered Yale before he was 17...
...but, though actually a street, it wasn't registered as such on city maps since it was under Triborough's jurisdiction...
...By the time he graduated in 1909, Moses had determined to devote himself to public service...
...His REAL RISE to prominence began with the election of Alfred E. Smith as Governor of New York in November, 1918...
...11 No doubt the memories of Moses will be varied and enduring...
...In New Deal days he described former Postmaster General James A. Farley as "that ineffable sand, mail and bag man...
...The brutal treatment of the city's masses was repeated in project after project until it became an undeniable city scandal...
...but it lost...
...But Moses insisted that the system that had worked elsewhere wouldn't work in New York...
...You're wasting my time as a public official by allowing too many people to talk," he snapped...
...This perhaps is the genuine, crowning achievement of Robert Moses...
...Some years ago it was conservatively estimated that he had presided over the expenditure of at least $5 billion of public and semi-public funds, and more billions have passed through his hands since...
...Using the public authority as his lever, Moses has wielded auto cratic power over billions of dollars—how many billions probably no one except himself exactly knows...
...reminded of this remark when Triborough sponsored his Coliseum, he shrugged his shoulders and said he'd changed his mind...
...THE CATALOGUE goes on and on...
...Any other public official who committed such blunders could hardly expect to survive the experience...
...The result was inevitable: the temptation to milk the slum dwellers for as long as possible before tearing down the tenements and rebuilding, proved irresistible...
...Whether or not he actually controls the New York City press, the fact is indisputable that he has been most generously treated by it...
...It is perhaps important, first, to stress that Moses's whole life has been divorced from too intimate contact with the common herd...
...One brief exposure to military school in Poughkeepsie proved unsatisfactory...
...Macy subsequently declared to The New York Times: "Mr...
...Virtually untarnished is the myth of his perfection and efficiency...
...III Moses reveals himself most clearly in his worship of things and contempt for people...
...In the contracting and construction fields, his influence is even more significant...
...Even in areas where competitive bidding is required by law, as in the slum clearance program, Moses's influence in the contracting field is such that the competition is not even a formality...
...He has cast too large and domineering a shadow for it to be otherwise...
...If anything, the more autonomous the public agency the more its operations and finances should be an open book...
...Lehman snowed him under by an avalanche of some 800,000 votes, the worst licking any gubernatorial candidate had ever taken...
...The land originally had been condemned by the city in 1938 for $158,525 and turned over to Triborough...
...Under the Moses lash, the Hults report was buried in the legislative files...
...He branded the Hults report "petty criticism and petty disparagement, followed by correction of non-existent evils...
...THE GovERNOR's SHOCK was registered after The New York Post disclosed that Moses had actually sold a public street to private interests without consulting anybody about it...
...One project furnished a graphic example of how one Moses hand washes the other...
...At the same time he remains the paragon without rival, an exemplar of vision and efficiency within the framework of democracy...
...Mothers in the area raised a storm of protest that echoed through City Hall and turned politicians' hair gray...
...He was New York City Commissioner of Parks at $25,000 a year...
...secondly, he intimated that people didn't matter anyway...
...This is power, raw and undiluted—the kind of power that, quite literally, can ruin men who stand in its way...
...to control vast networks of bridges and tunnels, collecting millions of dollars in fees that are never reduced, that serve as a tax on the traveling public over which that public has lost all control, that pile up surpluses used to bankroll other and more private enterprises of Czar Moses...
...He had the audacity—or perhaps one should call it the insensitivity—to propose a two per cent sales tax in the midst of the depression...
...In another Moses project, some fine and sound residential buildings were ruthlessly destroyed to make way for costly luxury apartments, crowned with penthouses renting for as much as $8,000 a year...
...Moses told me not only that he possessed this arbitrary power, but that he was able to control the press of New York City, so as to hold me up to such obloquy that I would not be able to stand it...
...He still represents, for Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, the ideal of an "exemplary" public servant...
...and throughout the years, he has expressed nothing but contempt for the public's elected representatives...
...Moses, of course, bludgeoned down all opposition in a battle that carried all the overtones of a crusade for the rights of the poor against high-society fox-hunters...
...Moses quickly became a caustic critic of Roosevelt, and later of the New Deal and all its ways...
...It was discovered that his Park Department contract with the Tavern proprietors called for them to pay the city 5.4 per cent on their gross, but that in actual operation they had paid only 1.6 per cent on a take of $5,866,861 for the years from 1948 through 1954...
...Despite such incidents, Moses remains the important man beloved by important men...
...Despite excesses of temper and the domineering ways of an autocrat, he has managed to retain the image of a paragon working wonders within the creaking framework of democracy...
...and President of the Jones Beach State Parkway Authority...
...The "street" in question serves as an exit roadway carrying northbound traffic from the Queens...
...It has grown to such an extent that, within recent years, a new estimate as startling as Macy's statement was made by Charles Abrams, former New York City Rent Administrator...
...Instead, he turned entire tenement areas over to private developers at knock-down prices, with buildings still standing, fully populated, producing hundreds of thousands of dollars in rents...
...The furor served in addition a useful public purpose...
...The kind of resources on which Moses has always been able to draw were shown in 1925 when his father died, leaving an estate of $322,763...
...It is seldom realized that Public Authorities like those over which Moses presides are not bound by the kind of regulations that restrict governmental agencies: they can confer multi-million dollar contract favors without competitive bidding...
...In other words, the servant is a law unto itself and has literally become the master of his creators...
...he began public service in unfettered roles very close to the top...
...Suddenly, in the spring of 1956, Moses decided to take over a children's playground area in the park and pave it for an expanded parking lot for his favorite tavern...
...The Senator either has deep-rooted prejudice against public authorities generally or a personal grudge against some of the men who run them so successfully [meaning of course himself...
...Returning to New York, he wrote a doctoral thesis on British civil service and received a PhD in political science from Columbia...
...and J. V. McKee, "a synthetic character which never actually lived on sea or land, puffed up by the press...
...In one case, insiders skimmed off $649,215 in fancy fees, salaries and "expenses" in 18 months without even making a gesture toward demolition...
...he turned it down, with a none-of-your-damned-business vehemence...
...Jimmy Walker was "half Beau Brummell and half guttersnipe...
...This first large project brought him into conflict with the gentry living on large Long Island estates...
...As long ago as 1925, W. Kingsland Macy, later a Congressman from Long Island, became embroiled with Moses over the seizure of some land Moses wanted for one of his projects...
...Never once has he been elected to public office...
...Under the corrupt Tammany Hall regimes that had preceded LaGuardia, the management of the parks and park concessions had become riddled with graft...
...for Moses, faced with a court test, abruptly backed down and surrendered unconditionally to irate motherhood, a rare and perhaps significant retreat on his part...
...In at least one major project, one of the largest and most experienced area redevelopment firms in the nation was frozen out and the contract awarded to a group that repre sented nothing but a paper corporation—an outfit that then proceeded to carve up some $2 million in rent receipts, milking its project, building nothing, finally moving out with its boodle and leaving the job to someone else...
...When a board member asked Moses whether, if he were running a meeting, he wouldn't let the people talk, Moses retorted: "No, I would not...
...These are as zealously guarded by the master as are the most secret files of the FBI by J. Edgar Hoover...
...That was in 1934 when he ran for Governor on the Republican ticket against Herbert H. Lehman...
...his terrible temper and arrogance have been glossed over as idiosyncracies of genius—and all the while his power has grown...
...but then Moses, though giving lip-service to democracy, has never pretended to adhere to its methods...
...The estate owners objected to the invasion of their sylvan retreat by hordes of New Yorkers, and protested bitterly that Moses's expressways would ruin their fox-hunting...
...A long succession of New York's Mayors has taxed Moses's ingenuity in epithet...
...1 In New York City Robert Moses is the most prominent exponent of the credo that the end justifies the means...
...Operating from this position of appointive power, Moses was soon planning the great Jones Beach State Park on the Long Island oceanfront and the network of expressways that would carry visitors to it...
...He is accountable to no one...
...He can't be bothered arguing with people who get in his way, and he doesn't really give a damn about what happens to them...
...Lawrence Seaway project...
...Only once in his lifetime has Moses submitted himself to a test at the polls...
...Moses was born on Dec...
...Moses took two tacks: first, he denied the obvious and insisted with his usual vehemence that nothing in his projects fell seriously short of perfection...
...It is no mean achievement...
...Not unreasonably, it would seem, Hults argued: "Autonomy does not connote secrecy...
...The Post took its case to court, contending that the records of Public Authorities should be public documents...
...When Fiorello LaGuardia swept into office as Mayor of New York at the head of a reform administration, he promptly called upon Moses to be the city's Park Commissioner...
...How much padding there was, if any, in these seemingly extravagant bills is the untold part of the story...
...Ever since, Moses has shunned the electoral process and concentrated on collecting those official hats that can be donned by appointment and that give him a colossal power unchecked by the public whose life his actions so greatly affect...
...but it still exacts its tariff, piling up a financial reservoir to bankroll other Moses enterprises...
...And Moses continued on his free-wheeling way, with a result that this year left even his arch supporter, Governor Rockefeller, admittedly "aghast...
...It is operated under a lease arrangement by concessionaires evidently very much in Moses's good graces...
...Instead, the banking concession went to the Federation Bank and Trust Company, whose President was Thomas J. Shanahan, Moses's vice chairman on the Slum Clearance Committee, and one of whose directors was George E. Spargo, secretary and general manager at $40,000 a year of Moses's Triborough Authority...
...The claque of fulsome admiration that has enshrined Robert Moses and all his works is, then, little more than the concomitant of awesome power...
...a colossus untarnished, unsullied, inimitable in his indispensability and perfection...
...The image that emerges is hardly that of a leader of democracy...
...Once at a Board of Estimate meeting, he gave vent to his scorn and impatience at the dilatory processes of democracy...
...chairman of the State Council of Parks...
...During the mass destruction of homes that accompanied his slum clearance activities, callous developers whom he sanctioned let victims freeze in apartments for lack of heat, ignoring every rule that provided for their relocation in adequate housing...
...John P. O'Brien, "a winded bull in the municipal china shop...
...Eventually, Shakespeare won and Moses lost, but the whole tempest was typical of the autocratic Park Commissioner...
...Botched up New York's $1.5 billion Title I slum clearance program by tearing down not only tenements but fine residential buildings, and erecting in their place costly luxury apartments, out of reach of the millions who needed new homes—a program so perverted that it provided fewer apartments than it destroyed and succeeded only in intensifying the slum problem...
...Highly recommended to Smith, Moses became chief of staff of a bi-partisan committee which aimed at reforming the cumbersome machinery of state government...
...and now in the process of disintegration...
...ANYONE WHO HAS any idea of what such concentrations of power mean can begin to appreciate the stranglehold Moses has clamped on New York City...
...Under the plan municipalities would condemn slum areas...
...Moses prepared the committee's report...
...Used millions of dollars in excess toll fees collected from the users of his Triborough bridges and tunnels to build New York's new exhibition hall, the Coliseum, criticized by some experts as an architectural monstrosity and a financial white elephant—but a project that did at least provide a spanking new headquarters for a bank run by a couple of Moses's principal aides...
...to condemn and demolish entire neighborhoods and rebuild a great part of New York City to his own taste...
...One of the most serious threats in recent years was posed by the State Little Hoover Commission, headed by Senator William S. Hults...
...The State Supreme Court ruled that Triborough was within its rights to keep its records closed...
...In his trouble, the developer applied to Moses's Triborough Authority for help, and Triborough sold him the north-bound exit road for $115,000...
...The tavern is a swank, highpriced rendezvous in Moses's demesne in Central Park...
...New York State Power Authority Chairman at $10,000 a year, with control over the tremendous power resources of the St...
...to give data on rates, revenues, sources of revenues and contracts...
...his use of the tremendous financial resources placed in his hands may not be questioned or checked by any governmental body, not even by the State Legislature itself...
...48,300 for a new corridor...
...Of this more than $200,000 later came to Moses after the death of his mother in 1930...
...and he has kept himself and his power isolated from check or restraint by the public...
...18, 1888, in New Haven, Conn., the son of Emanuel and Bella Moses...
...He began life at the top...
...Under the circumstances, it becomes intriguing to trace his career...
...The great man responded with a roar of outrage...
...Roosevelt retained Moses as head of the state park system, but failed to reappoint him as Secretary of State, a post to which Smith had elevated him...
...One of the most revealing pieces of evidence is the now-celebrated Tavern-on-the-Green imbroglio of 1956...
...Such logic has no place in the Moses scheme of things...
...Hence it was technically legal for Triborough to sell it, with the understanding that the traveling public could continue to use it as a tunnel exit...
...When a man is building expressways and tunnels and bridges, when he is demolishing and rebuilding huge square-block areas in the heart of the greatest city in the nation, and when he has virtually complete control over the issuance of contracts running into billions of dollars, it is obvious that he has the power to confer, or to withhold, enormous favors...
...it lifted the lid on some of Moses's weird financial arrangements with the concessionaires...
...Moses told me personally that his power was such that he could seize any house, put me out of it and arrest me for trespassing if I tried to get into it again...
...The sale enabled the private developer to get around the zoning laws and build his tower—a construction chore that happened to go to the company that had just hired Olds, Moses's son-in-law...
...65,100 for alterations to the cocktail lounge...
...Throughout most of the nation, municipalities condemned the land, moved off the people and razed the buildings before turning the sites over to private developers who then had no choice except to build as quickly as possible...
...A graphic example of this was the action of Moses's Triborough Authority in awarding a $20 million contract for work in connection with the new Narrows Bridge, without bidding, to a construction company that happened to employ his son-in-law, Richard J. Olds...
...Authorities, said the court, are legal entities separate and apart from the state which creates them and the cities and counties they serve...
...Just a listing of the ten official hats under which Moses stored his power indicates the scope of his activities...
...Only Robert Moses could stumble so obviously and yet not be touched by a speck of soot...
...chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, operating a network of vital tunnels and bridges including the Triborough Bridge, the Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel...
...This cash reserve of millions was tapped by Moses when he decided to have his Triborough Authority sponsor his Coliseum under the aegis of Title I. Some years before, Moses had needled the rival Port Authority for expansionist tendencies, saying that if it had excess revenues it ought to cut its tolls...
...Since that time Triborough has paid for itself many times over...
...Contractors who had been tarred in FHA windfall scandals and had had to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars to the federal government, received the blessing of Moses, and became sponsors of new, tax-subsidized housing in his Title I developments...
...He has created and successfully defended within the fabric of American democracy an island of unbreachable, untouchable despotism...
...It had been erected at comparatively small cost to the city with the aid of a $44 million PWA loan...
...President of the Long Island State Park Commission...
...Not for him the humbling give-and-take of political wars...
...How has he been able to accomplish this miracle...
...director of planning and construction for Civil Defense...
...When this raised a storm, he tried to win his point by circulating a vicious letter reflecting on the political opinions and character of the producer...
...The workings of this power are revealed in many ways...
...It asked Moses to let it look...
...The events of the next thirty-five years have served only to prove that Moses was not exaggerating...
...In 1959 he banned free Shakespeare performances in Central Park because they were injurious to the grass...
...On the theory that private capital needed encouragement to invest in slum clearance, Congress passed the Title I clause to the Housing Act of 1949...
...Moses, with a great burst of efficiency, swept out the grafters, and so another strand was woven into the legend of the energetic and incorruptible public servant...
...to establish parks, playgrounds and public beaches, works of great good, but works in which private contracts and concessions mean veritable fortunes...
...The control of such vast sums have enabled Moses to tear down homes and businesses so that great concrete arteries may be slashed across the countryside...
...he was a good athlete on the track and swimming teams, won prizes in mathematics, Latin and public speaking, made Phi Beta Kappa and was a big wheel in campus affairs...
...You come closer to being the irreplaceable man than any other in the history of our city government," the Mayor wrote his departing commissioner...
...His good works have been lavishly praised...
...John F. Hylan, "the raging Bozo of Bushwick...
...In project after project, when the day to open bids came, there was just one bidder—the one, naturally, on whom Moses had bestowed his blessing in advance...
...to supply the state with budgetary information...
...Very simply...
...The loss sustained by tearing down existing structures would be borne by the taxpayers, two-thirds by the federal government, one-third by the city...
...Paternalism comes to him naturally...
...Hults urged the Legislature to require Public Authorities to report annually on their operations and finances...
...Until early this year, when he decided to devote his talents to running the 1964 World's Fair at a salary of $100,000 annually, Moses held ten such important posts, only two of them salaried...
...To one critic he said bluntly: "Look, in 10 years, you'll have forgotten all about the people, and you'll just thank me for the projects...
...His father was a successful businessman, his mother the daughter of another successful merchant...
...and anyone who doubted the Governor had only to listen to Mayor Robert F. Wagner this past spring, when Moses found it advisable to surrender a few of his official hats...
...The Public Authority has made Robert Moses a law unto Robert Moses...
...When the Coliseum was completed, one of New York's largest banks, which previously had had a branch on the site, didn't re-establish itself in the massive new structure...
...a member and the dominant power on the City Planning Commission, the City Construction Coordinator and the Chairman of the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance, a network of interlocking positions that gave him almost dictatorial say over what sections of the city should be torn down and redeveloped— and how...
...Moses rebelled at the discipline...
...When one of his recommendations, a unified state park system to be financed by a $15 million bond issue, was approved by the Legislature, he was appointed by Smith to head the new setup as chairman of the State Council of Parks...
...that the public should shut up, or in any event not be heard, while the genius he personifies works for it generously...
...A neater parlay of public power and private interest would be difficult to envision...
...He enrolled at Oxford, where he received a BA with honors in 1911, an MA in 1913...
...This is in any event a government-financed bonanza for private enterprise...
...THE KEY TO MOSES'S power lies in a public-private hybrid of which he has been the chief architect—the Public Authority, object of the almost slavish veneration of the American people, who worship its supposed efficiency, oblivious of the fact that they control it not, it controls them...
...It may well be that the state should have such powers in reserve for use as a last resort, but it should not be the plaything of an arrogant and arbitrary-minded man...
...residents would be relocated and existing run-down buildings razed...
...He was, however, mentally brilliant...
...Such solid family finances permitted the young man to ground himself for his future career with academic thoroughness...
...No open books for him...
...When Moses's Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority opened the Triborough Bridge in July, 1936, it was understood that tolls would cease, or at least be drastically cut, when the span was paid for...
...It was a choice made easier by the fact that he never had any serious money worries...
...Gifted with a forked tongue, Moses has indulged in the life-long pastime of shriveling with invective all officials who have had the temerity to get in his way, a list that includes virtually every prominent figure in the city and state...
...The image so born has endured for most of Moses's lifetime despite the fact that abundant evidence indicates it is far from accurate...
...Having uncovered this luscious tid-bit in Triborough's manipulations, The New York Post not unnaturally sought to discover what else might be hidden in the secret archives...
...A private developer wanted to put up a tall new officebuilding tower on adjacent land, but he didn't own enough property to meet zoning restrictions, prescribing the size of the base area that must be left around the bottom of such a sructure...
...OBVIOUSLY, the man who wields such make-or-break power is a man to be courted, a man to be politely venerated, not criticized or angered...
...In my opinion, under present redevelopment laws," Abrams said, "Macy's could condemn Gimbels'—if Robert Moses gave the word...
...Midtown Tunnel...
...For instance, the bond issues of his various authorities, like the State Power Authority, are gilt-edged investments, much sought after, usually selling at a premium...
...Moses, with lordly generosity, had permitted the tavern to deduct from the city's share the costs of some extremely lavish improvements—items like $248,000 for an addition to the kitchen...
...This myth endures, is endlessly repeated—though there is evidence enough that Moses often falls far short of perfection, far short of even ordinary competence...
...Not for him the hard scrabble up the road of success...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
