The Power Broker

In the evening of Robert Moses’ forty-four years of power, New York, so bright with promise forty-four years before, was a city in chaos and despair. His highways and bridges and tunnels were awesome — taken as a whole the most awesome urban improvement in the history of mankind — but no aspect of those highways and bridges and tunnels was as awesome as the congestion on them. He had built more housing than any public official in history, but the city was starved for housing, more starved, if possible, than when he had started building, and the people who lived in that housing hated it — hated it, James Baldwin could write, “almost as much as the policemen, and this is saying a great deal.” He had built great monuments and great parks, but people were afraid to travel to or walk around them.

Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? Any critic who says so ignores the fact that both before and after Robert Moses — both under “reform” mayors such as John Purroy Mitchel and John V. Lindsay and under Tammany mayors such as Red Mike Hylan and Jimmy Walker — the city was utterly unable to meet the needs of its people in areas requiring physical construction. Robert Moses may have bent the democratic processes of the city to his own ends to build public works; left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required. The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting, where such works impinge on the lives of or displace thousands of voters, is one which democracy has not yet solved.

Convinced he was right, he had refused to soil the white suit of idealism with compromise. He had really believed that if his system was right — scientific, logical, fair — and if it got a hearing, the system would be adopted.

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.

He had always scorned the considerations of “practical” politics. Practical politicians had crushed and destroyed his dreams and had come near to crushing and destroying him. They had done it with an ease that added humiliation to defeat. And now, given a chance to learn their methods, Bob Moses seemed almost enthusiastic about embracing them.

Watching Smith banter with reporters, seeing how much time he devoted to winning their friendship, Moses learned how important the press was in politics. Seeing that Smith used the banter to cover up the fact that he wasn’t telling the reporters anything he didn’t want them to know, Moses learned how the press could be used. He could learn to keep things simple. The Governor wanted no technicalities in his speeches: he himself, with the genius that made him the greatest campaigner of his time, reduced every argument to its most basic terms.

An Albany reporter watched the awareness grow on the Governor and his circle. “You could see them beginning to realize that doing what Moses wanted would be politically advantageous,” he recalls. “One of them told me that supporting parks meant that the Governor would be helping the lower- and middle-class people, and thereby winning their support, and that the intellectuals would be for him because they saw parks as part of the new pattern of social progress. So you’d have all three groups supporting you. And besides, ‘parks’ was a word like ‘motherhood.’ It was just something nobody could be against.”

And he wanted the bathhouses designed with as much care as the finest public buildings in America. With this difference: most public buildings in America were too heavy and stodgy, designed only to impress and awe. The bathhouses would have to be quite large, of course, but they were buildings for people to have a good time in; the architecture must encourage people to have fun. It must be airy and light, gay and pleasant. There must be a thousand little touches to make people feel happy and relaxed. And he didn’t want the bathhouses to spoil the panorama. 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. He had designed them himself, he said.

But even sharp-eyed men could not be prepared for the extent of the transformation. For adulthood was, after all, only a part of the pattern of Moses’ life, and they had not seen the other part of the pattern. They could not know, therefore, how far back in the over-all pattern the dark thread ran. They could not know how inextricably it was knotted into the pattern’s most central design. They had seen Moses’ fingers drum impatiently on a table when someone dared to disagree with him, but they had never seen drumming impatiently another set of fingers. They had seen Bob Moses tilt back his head and look down his nose in the prosecutor’s stance, but, not having known Moses in his boyhood, they couldn’t know where the tilt came from. They may have known Bob Moses, but they did not know Bob Moses’ mother. They did not know Bob Moses’ grandmother. And therefore they could not know the origin — or the depth — of his susceptibility to the infection of power.

The rewards Moses offered his men were not only power and money. If they gave him loyalty, he returned it manyfold. Moses might criticize his men himself, but if an outsider tried it — even if the outsider was right, and Moses privately told his aide so — Moses would publicly defend him without qualification. And the most valued reward — the thread that bound his men most closely to him — was still more intangible. “We were caught up in his sense of purpose,” Latham explained. “He made you feel that what we were doing together was tremendously important for the public, for the welfare of people.” The purposes were, after all, the purposes for which they had been trained. They were engineers and architects; engineers and architects want to build, and all Moses’ efforts were aimed at building. Men who worked for him had the satisfaction not only of seeing their plans turned into steel and concrete, but also of seeing the transformation take place so rapidly that the fulfillment was all the more satisfying. Moses’ men feared him, but they also admired and respected him — many of them seemed to love him.

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. “He doesn’t love the people,” she was to say. “It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people…. He’d denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. ‘I’ll get them! I’ll teach them!’…He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons — just to make it a better public.”

Why did Robert Moses, previously so talented at public relations, antagonize the public during the episode in his career in which he most needed its support?
In part, because his success in public relations had been due primarily to his masterful utilization of a single public relations technique: identifying himself with a popular cause. This technique was especially advantageous to him because his philosophy — that accomplishment, Getting Things Done, is the only thing that matters, that the end justifies any means, however ruthless — might not be universally popular. By keeping the public eye focused on the cause, the end, the ultimate benefit to be obtained, the technique kept the public eye from focusing on the methods by which the benefit was to be obtained. The technique was also especially advantageous to him because its focus on the cause kept his personality safely blurred.

Therefore, unlike a public work on Long Island, a public work in the city had to be planned not only in terms of itself but in terms of its environment, the neighborhood in which it was located. It had to be judged not only in physical terms — highway as highway, park as park — but also in social terms: in terms of its effect on the human beings who had to live around it. If in creating public works on Long Island, one could paint on a clean and empty canvas, in creating public works in New York City one had to paint over an already existing mural, a mural whose brush strokes were tiny and intricate and often, when one looked closely, quite wonderful, lending to the vast urban panorama subtle shadings and delicate tints and an endless variety, so that if it was crowded and confused and ugly it was also full of life and very human, so much so, in fact, that while the painting as a whole might lack beauty, order, balance, perspective, a unifying principle and an over-all effect commensurate with its size, it nonetheless possessed many charming little touches and an over-all vitality, a brio, that made it unique and should not be lost. If Moses attempted to employ on the canvas of New York City the same broad brush strokes that he had used on the canvas of Long Island, he would be obliterating the city’s intricacies indiscriminately instead of working around those that were worth keeping and preserving them—and while this method might result in the creation of something beautiful and good, adding to the mural new values, it would also almost certainly destroy many existing values.

If Moses refused to accept ideas from public, experts or aides — from, in general, anyone at all — the source of his ideas, his concept of public works for New York City, could be only his own mind. The mind was brilliant, but even a brilliant mind is only as good as the material — the input — fed into it.

It was in transportation, the area in which Robert Moses was most active after the war, that his isolation from reality was most complete: because he never participated in the activity for which he was creating his highways — driving — at all. Insulated in the comfortable rear seat of his limousine, unable to experience even once the frustration of a traffic jam, unable, unless he made an effort and put his work aside and leaned forward to look out the window, even to look at a traffic jam, Robert Moses did not know what driving in the modern era was. He did not know that the sheer weight of numbers of new cars had changed the very nature of the activity for which he was creating facilities, had introduced — or, to be more specific, re-emphasized, since even before the war planners had seen the first signs of the change — new realities into the outlook for metropolitan transportation. He was making transportation plans based on beliefs that were not true any more.

Psychologists know what happens to rats motivated by mild electric shocks or the promise of a food reward to get out of a maze when the maze is made excessively difficult to get out of; for a while, their efforts to find an escape become more and more frantic, and then they cease, the creatures becoming sullen, then listless, suffering apathetically through shock or hunger rather than making further efforts that they believe will be useless. People caught in intolerable traffic jams twice a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, began after some months to accept traffic jams as part of their lives, to become hardened to them, to suffer through them in dull and listless apathy. The press, responding to its readers’ attitude, ran fewer hysterical congestion stories, gave fewer clockings.

So superbly engineered and maintained had the system been previously (New York had once been enormously proud of its subways) that it took years for this systematic neglect to take its toll, but, every year after 1956, every criterion of subway performance — on-time runs, individual car breakdowns — disclosed that the toll was steadily mounting. By the late 1960’ s, the day of full reckoning had arrived: 17,070 runs had to be halted during a single eight-month period; forty-five cars were breaking down on an average day; forty trains were derailed in a single year.

To save Long Island, it was not absolutely necessary for rapid transit to be built into the Long Island Expressway in 1955. But it was absolutely necessary for provision for rapid transit to be built in. The right-of-way for the tracks had to be acquired and the necessary heavier foundations had to be sunk beneath the center mall. As long as those two steps were taken, tracks could be installed on the expressway with a minimum of expense and inconvenience in the future.

There was nothing unique or even unusual in the “Battle of Central Park.” But because the site of this battle was Central Park, the press had begun looking at it — and had seen elements so sensational that it couldn’t, even if it wanted to, tear its fascinated eyes away. The tactics Moses was using were the tactics he had been using for thirty years — but now the press was reporting them, and a whole city was watching them. The things Stanley Isaacs was saying now were the same things he had been saying for thirty years. The only difference was that now people were listening to them.

His intelligence was still a creative, shaping intelligence. Still roaming vigorously the length and breadth of the metropolitan region, it still saw in everything, as it had seen on the walks with Frances Perkins almost sixty years before, “ways to make it better.” Moreover, freed at last of the crushing day-to-day political and administrative responsibilities, that intelligence was free to contemplate, to reflect.