Robert Moses first obtained power, during the nineteen-twenties, by seeing the potential for power where other men had not—in the humble agencies of state government that administered state parks—and by creating out of them a single, unified body with immense power, power insulated from and thus, in its field, independent of the government to which it was ostensibly subordinate. Now, in the early nineteen-thirties, Robert Moses wanted to extend his influence into New York City, where he would need power of new, even greater dimensions. And he was beginning to focus on another humble institution—the public authority.
No one else saw what he saw—including, most significantly, Fiorello LaGuardia, who was elected to his first term as mayor in 1933. When, shortly after the election, LaGuardia invited Moses to join his administration, their discussions centered on parks, not public authorities. Moses told the Mayor-elect that he would be interested in taking over the city parks—but only under certain conditions. First, he must be allowed to keep his state jobs, the chairmanship of the State Council of Parks and the presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission. Second, as he has recalled, “I told the Mayor that I was not interested in taking the city job unless I had unified power over all the city parks, and even then only as part of the unified control of the whole metropolitan system of parks and parkway development.” The operative word was “unified.” There were five separate park departments in New York City, one for each borough, and each with its own borough park commissioner. If the five commissionerships were abolished and the five departments were consolidated into one, Moses said, he would be willing to become its commissioner—if the commissioner’s authority was extended to include not only parks but parkways.
Both these conditions would be precedents: as far as political observers could remember, no one had ever been allowed to hold state and city offices—certainly not upper-echelon offices—simultaneously, and there had never been a citywide park commissioner. But it was not these conditions that were, in the long run, most significant for the city but others that Moses also insisted on.
The key to a unified park-and-parkway program, Moses said, was the proposed “triborough” bridge, which would link Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens, thus making Jones Beach and his other Long Island parks more accessible to residents of the Bronx and Westchester County. The city had begun building the bridge in 1929, but it had run out of money and had been prevented from raising more by the Depression. Several months before LaGuardia’s election, Moses had been instrumental in the establishment of a Triborough Bridge Authority, which was eligible for aid from the newly established federal Public Works Administration, but he had been denied membership on the authority. Now he insisted on control of the authority. He also had plans to finance construction of a Marine Parkway and Marine Parkway Bridge to the Rockaways and of a Henry Hudson Bridge between the Bronx and Manhattan; the plans were to create two more authorities. He wanted control of them, too.
LaGuardia agreed to all these stipulations. When Moses suggested that he himself draft not only the bill consolidating the park departments and setting forth the powers he would possess as New York City Parks Commissioner but also bills establishing the two new authorities, LaGuardia saw no reason not to agree to that, too. They were among the first bills submitted to the Legislature by the LaGuardia administration.
LaGuardia did not consider the authority appointments particularly significant, because he thought of public authorities as people had always thought of public authorities—as nothing more than toll-collecting agencies that would each build a single public work and go out of business as soon as its cost was paid off. But Moses had begun to think deeper.
The public authority was not a new device. The first of these entities, which resembled private corporations but were given powers previously reserved for governments—powers to construct public improvements and, in order to pay off the bonds they sold to finance the construction, to charge the public for the use of the improvements—had been created in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. By the time Robert Moses went to Oxford University, in 1910, three and a half centuries later, there were eighteen hundred such entities in England, including the huge Port of London Authority (named “Authority” because each of the clauses in the Act of Parliament that spelled out its powers began with the words “Authority is hereby given”) and scores of highway-building boards, whose roads were named “turnpikes,” because they were blocked with horizontal bars, or “pikes,” that revolved on pillars and would be turned aside to let a carriage pass only after a toll was paid.
But the public-authority concept was new in the United States. The Port of New York Authority, the first large authority in America, modelled on its London counterpart and created by an interstate compact between New York and New Jersey, was not set up until 1921, did not float its first bond issue until 1926, and did not become financially successful until 1931—after it had, in 1930, following four years of near fiscal disaster, persuaded the two states to let it take over the highly successful Holland Tunnel, which had been constructed by an independent commission. It was not until the New Deal, when Reconstruction Finance Corporation and P.W.A. grants were made available to Depression-strapped municipalities for self-liquidating projects, that urban authorities began to be widely established. In 1933 and 1934, when Moses was playing the crucial role in setting up not only the Triborough and the Marine Parkway Authorities but also the Bethpage, Jones Beach, Henry Hudson, and Hayden Planetarium Authorities, and was playing a lesser but still key role in the creation of several other authorities, there were still only a few authorities in the entire country.
Almost every public authority created in the United States had conformed to a single pattern: each had been created to construct and operate one, and only one, public improvement, a bridge or tunnel or sewer system; to issue only enough bonds to pay for the construction of that improvement, and only bonds with a fixed expiration date; and, when that date arrived—or sooner, if revenue was collected faster than had been expected—to pay off the bonds, eliminate all tolls or fees, turn the improvement over to the city, and go out of existence. The Port Authority, empowered to construct and operate several improvements, had become America’s first multipurpose public authority, but each of its projects conformed to the traditional pattern, since each was financed by a separate bond issue and both the authority members and the public officials concerned expected that as soon as each issue was paid off the tolls on the facility financed by that issue would be eliminated. Motivated by the failure of several Port Authority projects to earn enough to meet the interest and amortization payments on their bonds, Julius Henry Cohen, the authority’s brilliant general counsel, was attempting in 1934 to break new ground by devising a new kind of bond and persuading bankers who held the authority’s outstanding bonds to accept the new one in their place. Under the plan Cohen had in mind, the individual bond issues would be combined into a single general issue supported by the revenues from all Port Authority enterprises—a move that would allow use of the Holland Tunnel surpluses to bail out such money losers as two of the authority’s bridges connecting Staten Island with New Jersey. The new issue would be open-ended: should there be an over-all surplus, the authority could use it to finance new projects. The bankers refused to consider open-end bonds for unspecified new projects, but in 1935 they did agree to a consolidation of outstanding bonds in a so-called General and Refunding Bond, which could be used for one new project—the proposed Lincoln Tunnel. And this bond, rather than any devised by Moses, was the first bond issue in the United States to be secured not by a single public improvement but by an authority’s general revenues.
But Moses, in drafting the 1933 Triborough act and a series of acts during the thirties amending that act and creating other authorities, went much further. The primary reason was money. The carrying charges—interest and amortization—on three million one hundred thousand dollars in bonds that had been sold to pay for the lower level of the Henry Hudson Bridge were about a hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars a year, and that sum could be collected, at ten cents per car, from 1,560,000 cars. But from the day the Henry Hudson Bridge opened—on December 12, 1936—the traffic counts that Moses found on his desk each morning indicated that the number of drivers handing their dimes to the bridge toll collectors each year would far exceed 1,560,000. In 1937, the bridge’s first full year of operation, the number was nearly 6,500,000; in 1938, it was more than 10,300,000. And maintenance costs on bridges were, Moses learned, gratifyingly small. Painting the entire Henry Hudson, for example, cost only eighteen thousand dollars, and a new paint job was needed only once in four years. The salaries of toll collectors, the only operating personnel required, totalled less than fifty thousand dollars per year. “Our bridge was fabulously successful,” Jack Madigan, Moses’ gruff Irish financial wizard, recalled several years ago. “We were earning—after the carrying charges—six hundred thousand dollars per year net!” And that was just one bridge. The revenues of the Triborough, which opened on July 11, 1936, were also running far ahead of expectations. By 1938, that bridge, on which the annual carrying charges were about one million eight hundred thousand dollars, and on which the toll was twenty-five cents for cars and more for trucks and buses, was collecting two million nine hundred thousand dollars in revenue, leaving a balance of over a million dollars. What was more significant still, the traffic volume on every one of Moses’ bridges was higher each month than it had been for the corresponding month the previous year; clearly, volume—and revenue—was going to be far higher than even those staggering figures.
Under the laws creating the bridge authorities—the acts that Moses himself had drafted—unexpectedly high revenues could be used in only one way: to retire the authorities’ bonds faster than had been scheduled, and thus speed the day when they would go out of existence and turn their bridges over to the city. With surpluses of such unprecedented size, the bonds of Moses’ authorities would be retired very fast indeed. At the rate the Henry Hudson Bridge was making money, for example, its cost would be amortized not in forty years but in ten years perhaps, or nine, or eight. In a decade or less, a bridge that the city had been trying unsuccessfully to finance for thirty years would have been built by Moses and completely paid for, to stand for centuries as a great free public improvement for its citizens. Using the surpluses in the way the law required would therefore make the Henry Hudson Bridge and the Triborough spectacular successes—all the more spectacular in a city in which public works always seemed to cost the public more, not less, than had been anticipated. But this was not the kind of success in which Moses, obsessed with accomplishment and power, was interested. Money—revenue, surpluses—was the key to accomplishment and power, but only if he could keep it and use it. It was of no use to him if he had to surrender it to bankers as fast as he got it. It was of no use to him if, as soon as he had paid off the bondholders, he had to surrender control of his bridges. Money was of use to him only if, in other words, he could use the bridge surpluses for other purposes than bond paying and if he could keep control of the bridges. And under the traditional pattern in which public authorities had been created, this was impossible.
But what if the pattern were changed? What if in some way he were able to keep the money?
Madigan and others close to Moses watched him explore and expand the possibilities. The actuality of the money, Moses began to realize, was not its most significant aspect. Its potential was what mattered. The traffic forecasts that Madigan was making—and continually remaking, as traffic swelled to unforeseen proportions—showed Moses that by 1938 the total annual income of his authorities would be four and a half million dollars. This amount was not insignificant to him; it was as large as his total annual Parks Department budget. But it was not as significant as eighty-one million dollars. And eighty-one million dollars was the amount of forty-year four-per-cent revenue bonds that could be floated—“capitalized” was the word in the bankers’ vocabulary that Moses was learning—with an income of four and a half million. If he could keep the authorities’ revenues and use them to float bonds, then, he would be able to float eighty-one million dollars’ worth, or thirty-five million more than the total of forty-six million in bonds that the three New York City bridge authorities had outstanding. He would have eighty-one million dollars to use to create and realize dreams.
Much more than eighty-one million dollars, in fact. The multiplier factor would be increased by the proved success of his bridges. When he and Madigan were originally attempting to persuade bankers to invest in the authorities, the ability of toll bridges to attract substantial amounts of traffic had been in doubt, and the bankers therefore demanded a coverage of 1.75 or 2 (anticipated earnings double the sum required to cover interest and amortization) and a return of 4 per cent on their investment. Now that toll bridges were a proved commodity, bankers might settle for a coverage of 1.5, or even 1.4, and an investment return of 3 per cent, or even 2.75, and any reduction in coverage or interest rates meant an increase in the amount of the bonds that the authority income could capitalize. More important still, if some of the money raised by the floating of new bonds were used to build new bridges on which tolls could be charged, the authorities’ income would be more than four and a half million dollars. Since each dollar of tolls could capitalize roughly eighteen dollars in bonds, there was an additional built-in multiplier factor at work: the more public works he built, the more money he would have with which to build still more public works. And this factor would work indefinitely—possibly forever.
By 1936, Moses had already built public works on a scale unmatched by any man in the history of America. But all the highways and parks and bridges he had built were little more than nothing next to the highways and parks and bridges that he wanted to build. He had turned into reality his dream of a great Henry Hudson Parkway along Manhattan’s shoreline, but there was still the Brooklyn shoreline, and the Staten Island. He wanted parkways there, too—a “Circumferential,” or “Belt,” for Brooklyn, a “Shore” for Staten Island—and he had wanted them, and been arguing for their creation, for more than ten years. He was reshaping to his own vision an urban park system that dwarfed any other urban park system in the United States, but the parks he had created in New York were, in turn, dwarfed by the parks that he dreamed of creating. Even those parks that he had been able to create in the city, moreover, had not been created as he wanted; he had been forced to scale them down, to use inferior materials, to compromise. And that was just in the city. He had built eleven thousand acres of parks, the greatest state park system in the country, on Long Island, but he could foresee all too clearly the day when there would be so many people living in the metropolitan area that eleven thousand acres would not be nearly enough. After more than a decade of building public works, the public works he had not yet built loomed before him larger than ever. The chances of building them seemed—particularly in the city—to be growing steadily more remote. LaGuardia may have pulled New York back from the door of fiscal death, but not even LaGuardia could restore the city to fiscal health; the corruption that preceded him had weakened the body politic far too seriously. Moses could see no reasonable possibility of the city’s being able to finance his dreams. If he wanted to remake the city, it was clear, he was going to have to do the job without its money. And if he was able to keep the authorities’ revenues, keep them indefinitely, he would have the money.
He would, moreover, have money that was free of the customary governmental restrictions. For years, he had been attempting to build up what he called a “stable planning force”—a large group of engineers, architects, and draftsmen who would be in his employ permanently, who could be used to design not just the projects for which the city or state had allocated construction funds but those that only he was planning. The Legislature had never allowed him the money to design any but current projects, but let him keep control of the authorities’ revenues and he would be able to study the transportation needs of the city and its surrounding counties before the city or the counties studied them. He would be able to determine by his own criteria which transportation facilities should be built and in which order. He would be able to determine by his own criteria how these facilities should be built—what their design, size, and precise site should be. He would be able to translate these general plans into blueprints and specifications. And then, when the time was right—when a large new grant of money from the federal government or some other source outside the city became available, or when public demand for a solution to a particular transportation problem or to the transportation problem as a whole mounted to a point at which politicians were frantically searching for some solution—he could present these plans to the politicians as the solution: a solution already engineered and already designed; a solution whose costs had already been estimated and whose planning was a fait accompli; a solution that awaited only their approval before being put into effect; a solution for which, in many cases, money was already available. What politician would be willing to risk public antagonism by withholding that approval?
And if a politician did dare to suggest an alternative, what good would it do him? The city possessed neither an engineering corps capable of planning large-scale public works nor the money to hire such engineers in sufficient numbers. For that matter, the city had no money to build an alternative large-scale public work if it wanted to; it would be dependent upon the federal government or upon Moses’ authorities to provide the cash. Federal money might well be lost by the delay that additional studies would entail; as for the authorities’ money, cross the man who was offering it and he might withdraw the offer, and the politician could then be accused of having cost the city a great public improvement. Let Moses keep control of the authorities’ revenues and there would be no more nonsense about having the mayor or the Board of Estimate study alternative routes for a highway or alternative methods—mass transportation instead of highways, for example—of solving transportation problems. In the fields he had carved out for his own, the city would have to build public works where and how he chose.
When Moses drafted the bills and amendments to make his authorities self-perpetuating and free from outside interference, he knew that the public officials whose approval was necessary would never give it if they realized what they were approving. Those who were thinking men would realize that if they gave it they would be adding, without sufficient consideration by themselves or by the public, a whole new layer to urban government in America. The rest of them, concerned with power and patronage, would realize that to the extent they gave away power they would be diminishing their own. The key body whose approval was necessary—the Legislature, which under the state constitution alone had the power to create most types of public authorities—would never approve the bills that Moses was drafting if it understood them. So Moses would have to keep it—and all the state and city officials involved—from understanding them. He would have to persuade may or, City Council, Legislature, and governor to approve his bills before they realized what was in them.
The safeguards included in previous New York State legislation on authorities restricted the life span of each authority through provisions setting a time limit on its bonds and a date by which it had to redeem all its bonds, surrender control of all its facilities, and go out of existence. Moses, drafting amendments in 1937 to the Triborough Bridge Authority Act, knew that the Legislature would never agree to the elimination of these safeguards. So he didn’t eliminate them—he just made them meaningless.
Right at the beginning of the original Triborough act—in Section 1, which dealt with the authority’s existence—the act said explicitly that the Triborough “board and its corporate existence shall continue only for a period of five years and thereafter until all its . . . bonds have been paid in full,” a provision that, when coupled with a provision setting the maximum life of the bonds at forty years, limited the maximum life of the authority. The amended Triborough bill that Moses was proposing said the same thing—in the same place, right at its beginning, in Section 1. But it also said something else. Not at its beginning but long, legalistic pages later, in a subdivision of Section 9—a subdivision and a section that ostensibly had nothing to do with the authority’s existence—there was a new sentence:
“He had figured out a gimmick,” Reuben A. Lazarus, chief bill-drafter for both Jimmy Walker and LaGuardia, and himself a master of the gimmick, recalled several years ago. As Lazarus spoke, a smile broke over his old, wrinkled face despite his attempts to conceal it, and his voice was filled with admiration—the admiration of a master of a difficult craft for a man who was more than a master. “That sentence looked so innocuous. But it changed the whole act completely. With that sentence in there, he had power to issue forty-year bonds and every thirty-nine years he could call them in and issue new bonds for another forty years. LaGuardia had thought that authorities would be temporary creations that would build something and then turn it over to the city and go out of existence as soon as it was paid off. But with that gimmick in there it would never be paid off.”
Never. The existence of the Triborough Bridge Authority “shall continue only . . . until all its . . . bonds have been paid in full,” the act said. But because of Moses’ amendment the authority no longer had to pay its bonds in full. Every time it had enough money to pay them in full, it could instead use the money to issue new bonds in their place. The amendment meant that, unless it wanted to, the authority would never have to turn its bridges over to the city. It could, if it desired, keep the bridges—and stay in existence—as long as the city stayed in existence.
The safeguards included in previous New York State legislation on authorities restricted their scope through provisions setting a limit on the amount of the bonds each could have outstanding—a limit sufficient to pay only for the specific project or projects that the Legislature wished it to build. The original Triborough act contained such a provision; this was a clause stating that the authority could not have outstanding more than thirty-five million dollars—an amount sufficient to cover its share of the cost of the Triborough Bridge. (The eighteen-million-dollar cost of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge was added in a later amendment, bringing the total limit to fifty-three million.) But Moses’ gimmick made that restriction meaningless, too. For by empowering the authority to issue new bonds not only to pay off old ones but also for “any other corporate purpose,” it was empowering the authority to keep its indebtedness at fifty-three million dollars even though it had money available to pay off part, or even most, of that sum. For example, if the income was high enough to pay all the carrying charges and also accumulate a surplus that after five or ten years amounted to twenty million, the authority could then call in twenty million dollars’ worth of its outstanding bonds, pay them off, and therefore have only thirty-three million outstanding. Its legislatively authorized borrowing capacity would still be fifty-three million. Its revenues would support bonds in that amount. So the authority would have twenty million dollars of borrowing capacity. It could issue twenty million in new bonds and use the proceeds of the sale for “any corporate purpose.”
And what might such a purpose be? Moses’ Triborough act empowered the authority to acquire land for and construct not only bridge approaches but “new roads, streets, parkways, or avenues connecting with the approaches,” and to widen “existing roads, streets, parkways, or avenues . . . connecting with the approaches.” The word “connecting” was innocuous—until one began to think carefully about what it would mean if Moses expanded its definition (as he had earlier expanded the definition of “approach,” by persuading the P.W.A. that “approach” could mean the four miles of the Grand Central Parkway leading to the Triborough Bridge). If an approach was miles long—the Bronx approach to the Triborough Bridge, for example, was six miles long—scores of roads, streets, parkways, or avenues intersected (“connected” with) it. Under his act, the Triborough Bridge Authority would have the right to widen any or all of them. It would also have the right to build a new thoroughfare that would connect with the approaches anywhere along their length. And how long could that thoroughfare be? A block? A mile? Five miles? Ten? Could it be a highway that ran clear across the city? Under his act, it certainly could. And suppose he wanted to build another—a third—highway, to intersect the one he had built to intersect the approaches? Since the third road would connect with the second, and the second would connect with the approaches, why could not the third be said to connect with the first? Under a liberal definition—a definition such as Moses had long since proved himself adept at making—it probably could. In fact, one could probably say that any major thoroughfare in the city “connected” with any other. And if one could say that, one could say that the bill that Moses so carefully drafted meant that the Triborough Bridge Authority would have the right to construct highways throughout the city, in many respects exactly as if it were the city government.
And not just highways. In the act as he amended it, a clause gave the authority power “to construct and develop for the purpose of public parks” lands acquired “in connection with the Whitestone Bridge project and with new or existing roads, streets, parkways, or avenues connecting with such project.” Thanks to this clause, the authority would be able to build parks along any of the highways it was constructing. Since the authority would be able to build highways throughout the city, it would be able to build parks throughout the city, too.
And not just highways and parks. Buried deep within the original Triborough act was a clause giving the authority the right to build and operate any “facilities for the public not inconsistent with the use of the project.” Not with the project—with the use of the project. Since the project now consisted of bridges, roads, and parks, why, under that clause, would it be inconsistent for the authority to build housing nearby, which would allow more members of the public the convenient use of those bridges, roads, and parks? Why, for that matter, would the construction of any public facility be inconsistent with the use of the project? An aggressive authority chairman, anxious to stretch to the limit the powers conferred by the act, could well find in that phrase legal authorization to build any type of public facility he chose anywhere along the authority’s bridges, roads, streets, parkways, avenues, and parks—anywhere, in fact, in the city.
And Moses made sure that, in building and operating its projects, the authority, despite the limitations set on other authorities by previous Legislatures—limitations that he was well aware the present Legislature would never agree to waive for Triborough—would nevertheless possess powers virtually without limit, powers equal to those possessed by a sovereign state, or by the city of which, in theory, it was merely a creature.
By the time Moses had finished drafting his bills, his authorities had not only all the powers of “bodies corporate” but many of the powers of “bodies politic.” His authorities had the right to do all things that a business corporation could do—for example, to sue, to make contracts and bylaws, to acquire real estate and use it or lease it or dispose of it, and, of course, to issue bonds—and they had the right to do many things that private corporations could not do. They had the power to operate public facilities, to require the public to pay tolls for their use, and to prevent the construction of competing facilities, so that the public had no choice but to pay those tolls. They had the right to govern their domain by making their own laws and by maintaining their own police force to enforce those laws. They could have their own great seals and set their own statutes of limitations. They had the sovereign power of eminent domain. They had, in fact, some powers that sovereign states—at least the sovereign state of New York—did not have. They could let contracts without competitive bidding. Their officials could be removed only for cause; they were immune from the pleasure of the governor.
And Moses made sure that these powers, these powers corporate and politic, would be embodied, ultimately, not in the authorities but in him. In the case of the single-member authorities, of course, the authority was Robert Moses. The legislative acts creating the Henry Hudson and Marine Parkway Authorities said flatly, “The powers of the authority shall be vested in and be exercised by the member.” The Triborough, Jones Beach, and Bethpage authorities had three-member boards, but the other members of these boards deferred to Moses, and while the enabling act creating each of these authorities said, “The powers of such corporation shall be vested in and exercised by” a majority of the members of the board, it continued, “Said board may delegate to one or more of its members . . . such powers and duties as it may deem proper.”
And Moses made sure that no one would ever be able to take those powers away. In the Triborough act, he did it in Section 9, Subdivisions 2 and 4, Clauses A through I. Subdivision 2 authorized the authority to pass resolutions governing the sale of its bonds. The various clauses of Subdivision 4 said, when taken together, that these resolutions could contain provisions dealing with toll rates, authority rules and regulations, and “any other matters, of like or different character, which in any way affect the security or protection of the bonds.” And Subdivision 4 also said that any such resolution “shall be a part of the contract with the holders of the bonds.”
“Contract.” In that word was the clue to the new, immense potentiality that Robert Moses saw in public authorities. Any legislation can be amended or repealed. If legislators were in some future year to come to feel that they had been deceived by the wording of the Triborough act ipto granting Moses wider powers than they had intended—the right to maintain tolls on a bridge even after the bridge was paid for, for example—they could simply revoke those powers. But authorities can issue bonds, and a bond is a legal agreement, or contract, between its seller and its buyer, and under the Constitution of the United States a contract is sacred; no state—and no creature of a state, such as a city—can “pass any . . . law impairing” its obligations. Section 9, Subdivisions 2 and 4, Clauses A through I gave Moses the right to embody in the Triborough Bridge Authority’s bond resolutions all the powers he had been given in the legislation creating the authority. Consequently, from the moment the bonds were sold (thereby putting into effect the contract they represented) the powers he had been given in the legislation could be revoked only by the consent of both Moses and the bondholders. If, for example, he copied into the bond resolutions the legislation giving him the right to charge whatever tolls he wished, for as long as he wished, that power, from the moment the bonds were sold, could never be revoked without his consent. If he copied into the bond resolutions the legislation giving him his other new, broad powers, those powers, too, could never be revoked. The elected representatives of the state and the city might have given Moses those powers, but they would never be able to take them back. Moses had previously needed, to a considerable extent, the support of the city’s mayor, its other elected officials, and, perhaps most of all, its people. Now, to a considerable extent, he didn’t need them anymore. And he let them know it.
LaGuardia’s awakening came with jolting rapidity. In 1938, exactly one month after the Mayor, on the strength of his trust in Moses’ earnest representations, had assured Governor Herbert Lehman that the city was retaining ample control over Moses’ authorities, and had thereby persuaded the Governor to sign one of Moses’ new authority bills, a dispute arose between LaGuardia and Moses over Triborough’s hiring practices, and Moses wrote the Mayor, “It is silly to force a court test of such a matter, but I shall have to take this up with attorneys for the bondholders and with the trustees unless the matter is adjusted.”
The Mayor thought he knew how to handle so outrageous an attempt at intimidation. “Now, there is one matter I want to make perfectly clear,” he replied, and he continued:
Moses’ reply was blunt. “I think you had better read the agreements and contracts,” he wrote.
As poor F. Trubee Davison had done years before, after introducing Moses’ state-park bills in the Legislature, Fiorello LaGuardia sat down, too late, to study documents drawn up by Robert Moses that he had approved because he had relied on Moses’ word concerning what was in them. Then he called his legal advisers in to read them.
“Well, that was the day of the great awakening,” recalls Paul Windels, who served as corporation counsel under LaGuardia. He and Reuben Lazarus told the Mayor that, as Windels was to put it, “of course, under the bond resolution, the authority did have the power to employ its own counsel, and it had all these enormous other powers as well.” The Mayor, of course, had powers, too. On some of his authorities Moses served ex officio, because he was the city park commissioner. The Mayor could fire Moses as park commissioner, and thereby divest him of his membership on those authorities. But this power existed in theory only; political realities made it meaningless. Remove him from the authority undertaking the Rockaway Improvement, for example, and he might drop his attempts to get state money for the Atlantic Avenue and Rockaway grade-crossing eliminations. The city had no funds to do the work itself. LaGuardia would find himself in the untenable position of sacrificing a great public improvement for the sake of personal revenge on a faithful and immensely popular public servant. LaGuardia might, of course, attempt to make clear the fact that the issue was not personal. He might attempt to make the public understand that public authorities had been given too much power. But the Mayor was only too well aware of the futility of attempting to explain the technicalities of bond-resolution contracts to an electorate that wanted Things Gotten Done—and that idolized the Man Who Got Them Done.
Furthermore, while the Mayor could remove Moses from some authorities, he could not remove him from the Triborough Bridge Authority—he had no charges of specific wrongdoing to bring against him—until his term expired, in three years. During those three years, Moses would still have immense powers in the city. He would still be in charge of huge public works that were being constructed within the city’s borders. Making an open enemy of Moses would lead to an immensely embarrassing situation—a situation that, moreover, would continue to be embarrassing for what was in political terms a lifetime.
And these considerations combined with the others that always hamstrung LaGuardia in his dealings with Moses: Moses’ popularity; Moses’ immense influence with a governor and a Legislature from whom the Mayor constantly needed favors; Moses’ ability to ram through the great public works that the Mayor desperately wanted rammed through. LaGuardia knew that Moses could ram them through—scandal-free and in time for the next election. With good reason, he doubted whether anyone else could. The powers that the Mayor possessed over Moses’ authorities in theory he did not possess in practice. Political realities gave him no choice but to allow Moses to remain at their head. And the Mayor knew it.
Moses knew it, too. After reading the bond agreements and contracts, LaGuardia dropped all further discussion of the authorities’ powers. Moses never raised the matter again. But thereafter he treated LaGuardia not as his superior but as an equal. In the areas in which he was interested—transportation and recreation—Robert Moses, who had never been elected by the people of the city to any office, was thenceforward to have at least as much voice in determining the city’s future as any official the people had elected—including the mayor.
Before the Second World War, Moses employed his leverage with New York State—a force not responsible to New York City’s voters but possessed of considerable influence over the city’s government—to compel the city to give him a free hand in certain areas of public works. Hardly had the war ended when another outside force, the federal government, began to loom larger and larger over the city. And Moses, with his aims for the city now enlarged—enlarged to a point at which they involved, in effect, the reshaping of its entire public estate—employed that force, too, to compel the city to accept his aims as its own.
The scale of the new federal involvement in urban America was unprecedented. Before the war—during the entire Depression—the federal government had financed nationwide a total of one hundred thousand low-income housing units. Within the first four years after the war, the federal government authorized the financing of more than eight hundred thousand low-income housing units. In 1949, Title I of the National Housing Act codified a new concept—urban renewal—which insured that Washington’s role would thenceforward be as crucial as City Hall’s not only in low-income housing but in most major urban reshapings. Before the war, the highways that federal aid built had been mainly in the open countryside. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944 authorized the first substantial arterial-highway mileage within city limits, and with each postwar federal highway act the proposed urban mileage soared: since the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the federal government has financed the construction, within the cities of America, of eighty-three hundred miles of roadway. Most Depression-era federal aid had, moreover, been funnelled into the cities through the cities’ governments or through new agencies, such as housing authorities, set up and controlled by the cities’ governments. And this had been particularly true in New York, where LaGuardia’s alliance with President Franklin Roosevelt had insured that Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration grants would be funnelled through the city’s highest elected official. Moses had been able to obtain a disproportionate share of such grants, but only by working with and on that official. As federal grants to cities increased after the war, however, so did the power of the federal bureaucracy—at the expense of the cities’ power.
In New York, as the city’s control over federal grants decreased, Moses’ control over them increased. It increased partly because of Moses’ bill-drafting genius, and what that genius enabled him to make of a new post—that of City Construction Coordinator—which he obtained in 1946, from Mayor William O’Dwyer. The post lay outside the established structure of the city’s government. Nowhere in the forty-nine chapters of the city charter was there any mention of it.
To some men, this might have represented an obstacle. To Moses, it represented an opportunity: since there was no definition of the position’s powers, he could write the definition himself. As O’Dwyer had conceived the powers, they would be substantial. The coordinator, though he was an appointed official, would in the construction field possess authority over all other appointed officials, even major departmental commissioners. But this power would last only as long as the postwar adjustment period and would be subordinate always to that of the elected officials to whom the voters had entrusted the power to make decisions for the city; the coordinator would be merely an instrument for carrying out those decisions. Moses drafted an amendment to the city’s administrative code to create the position—delivering it to the incoming administration in the midst of the inaugural confusion—and ostensibly the amendment was faithful to O’Dwyer’s conception. The Board of Estimate and the City Council passed it unanimously after the most cursory discussion, and O’Dwyer quickly signed it into law as Local Law No. 1 of 1946—the first legislative act of his administration.
But among the lines of convoluted legalisms the amendment contained a phrase—concealed at the end of a long sentence whose other clauses all purportedly limited his powers—allowing the coordinator to “represent the city in its relations with cooperating state and federal agencies.” Moses used this phrase, so innocent in appearance, as authorization to write into contracts between the city and the state and federal governments provisions designating him as the city’s sole representative with whom these agencies agreed to deal—thereby making certain that it would be he, and he alone, who would present the city’s position, or his version of the city’s position, on the design and relative desirability of construction projects to the two “outside” governments that would be providing the lion’s share of the funds for such projects. The phrase also empowered Moses to negotiate with federal and state officials, learn their position, and present his version of their position to the mayor, the Board of Estimate, and the City Council. Moses’ version was not always strictly accurate. For twenty years, for example, he hoodwinked successive mayors, telling them that the Bureau of Public Roads was unalterably opposed to building the Lower Manhattan Expressway as a tunnel. But for twenty years—until 1965, when Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., went to Washington to find out about the expressway for himself—no mayor or other city official questioned that. During those years, the city’s elected representatives heard only Moses’ version of what the federal government was “insisting” on.
Moses took over housing by indirection. The harried Mayor O’Dwyer, faced as soon as he took office with a need for competent housing administrators, found Moses ready with recommendations. Before the Mayor realized what he was doing, he had filled three of the five places on the City Housing Authority—and several top authority staff positions—with men loyal not to him but to his construction coordinator. Though Moses never had any formal connection with the Housing Authority, he controlled it absolutely for a decade. As late as 1955, Warren Moscow, on being appointed its executive director that year by Mayor Wagner, reported to Wagner that its chief engineer regarded Moses, not the Mayor, “as his boss.”
In 1948, Moses had a visit from a Yale classmate who wanted to discuss details of a new type of federal slum-clearance program—“urban renewal”—that he was considering sponsoring. It was United States Senator Robert A. Taft. Months before Congress approved the National Housing Act of 1949—months before the public had even heard the phrase “urban renewal”—Moses had persuaded O’Dwyer to appoint a Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee (Robert Moses, chairman). Through that committee, Moses controlled urban renewal in New York—by far the largest program in any city in America—for a decade. The Mayor and the Board of Estimate—according to Jacob Lutsky, an adviser to three mayors—“never even knew what was going on in that committee until a project was presented to them for approval.”
While using the new force of the federal government, moreover, Moses did not neglect the old force of the state government. His control of the Legislature, cemented by patronage and favors, remained as solid after the war as it had been before. As for the governor’s chair, it was occupied for the first fourteen years of the postwar era by Republican Thomas E. Dewey and Democrat W. Averell Harriman. Dewey liked to boast that “Bob discovered rather quickly that he couldn’t push me around,” but the words rang distinctly hollow to men like the G.O.P. politician who once heard Moses on the phone with the Governor: “I walked in and he was cursing and shouting—‘You God-damned son of a bitch! Don’t you tell me what to do, you stupid son of a bitch!’ Then he hung up, and I said, ‘Bob, was that the Governor?’ And he said, with that big grin, ‘Yeahhh.’ ” Harriman, a crusty aristocrat whose lack of awe even for Presidents was to become legendary, stood in awe of Moses, because he had been so impressed by the scope of Moses’ accomplishments in the creation of public parks. But Harriman had some ideas, rather novel among public officials of the time, about the need for increased concern for individuals and for community participation in the planning of public works. Convinced that Moses was not the final word on the construction of urban expressways that he had been on the construction of suburban parkways, he installed a new superintendent of the Department of Public Works, John W. Johnson, of Buffalo, gave him several liberal young aides, and told them to “get tough” with Moses. But Moses got tough with them—and with Harriman—instead.
James Truex, a Harriman aide, has described the facts of political life that the Governor began to learn. “If you began to fight with Moses,” Truex says, “you’d have to fight with him on so many fronts. You’d have to fight with him on parkways and on parks. He had so much potential for trouble because of the many directorships he had. He could always cause you so much trouble by calling you ‘a dirty politician’—he was above politics, of course. Governors were always nervous about this. You knew that if he said something, the newspapers would pick it up big.” Moses disciplined Harriman not only by using publicity but by withholding it—by not inviting the Governor to speak at the public-works ceremonies that public officials need in order to create an aura of accomplishment. In 1957, for example, Moses staged a day-long series of ribbon cuttings to celebrate the completion of a string of grade-crossing-elimination projects for which Nassau County communities had long been clamoring. The Governor, who had authorized the projects and provided the funds for them, didn’t even know that the ceremonies were being held until he read newspaper stories about them—stories and pictures of Moses and the other official participants, all Republicans. On another occasion, Harriman called in Truex and another aide and, according to Truex, “the Governor said he was getting reports from the local people up on the St. Lawrence that Moses was going to tear out lots of the homes of little people along the St. Lawrence for his parkways, and the little people had to be protected, and we should get right up there to ascertain if the reports were true.” The two aides found out that the reports were true. “There were cottages lining the shore near Massena,” Truex says, “nice-looking cottages, too—cottages into which you could tell loving care had gone. Moses was just obliterating them. But about ten minutes after we got back to Albany there was a letter from Moses to Harriman: These people—us—had been up in his territory, and we had been talking to people we shouldn’t have been talking to, et cetera. And that was the last we heard of the little people. It was never brought up again.” The Governor had backed down. Shortly thereafter, he suggested that the huge centerpiece of the St. Lawrence project be named the Robert Moses Power Dam. Soon he was not only being invited to ribbon cuttings but being afforded star billing and, occasionally, the opportunity to make the only major speech—besides Moses’, of course.
As important as his relationship with the governor was his relationship with the state’s administrative machinery. It was, of course, largely his machinery—the governmental apparatus that the State Reconstruction Commission, under his direction, had designed in 1919. He, more than any other individual, knew which of the tens of thousands of administrative positions in that government were crucial to his purposes, and after a quarter of a century of power in the state he had “Moses men” in most of these posts. He had taken measures to minimize the threat to his purposes posed by key officials who were not Moses men; some of these officials would have been astonished to learn (most of them never did) that their secretaries, in transcribing confidential memoranda and minutes of secret meetings devoted to blocking a Moses project or to curbing Moses’ power, made extra carbons that were delivered nightly to Moses’ representatives in Albany.
The superintendent of the Department of Public Works was generally a Moses man. In an arrangement at least tacitly approved by three governors—an arrangement that lasted for about seventeen years after the Second World War—Moses had the absolute power to decide not only who would design and build all highways in the metropolitan area but which highways would be built, when they would be built, and where they would be built. The state had in effect turned over to him—intact and complete—its control over the construction of arterial highways in and around New York City. And since the state, not the city, was the partner with the federal government in the construction of the interstate highway system, Moses had control of all federal funds spent on arterial highways within the city.
It was not only forces outside the city’s government that Moses used to bend the city to his will. He used forces inside its government as well—greed, for example. Greed had always been the force that drove the city’s five-county Democratic political machine. But during LaGuardia’s twelve years in office the machine’s influence in the city’s government had been all but eliminated. Moses, in Getting Things Done, had been able to deal almost entirely with LaGuardia during those twelve years, and only occasionally with the spiritual descendants of the Tammany mayor Red Mike Hylan.
With the election of O’Dwyer, however, the machine was back in power. At first, it was not dominated, as it had been before LaGuardia, by the Manhattan Democratic organization housed in Tammany Hall, at Union Square. Weakened in relation to its allies by the citywide population shift, which sharply reduced Manhattan’s once commanding share of the city’s registered Democrats, the Manhattan organization had been cut off from patronage and contracts at City Hall by LaGuardia, at the Statehouse by Lehman, and at the White House by Roosevelt, who, taking revenge for its defiant support of Alfred E. Smith’s candidacy at the 1932 Democratic National Convention, had funnelled whatever federal largesse LaGuardia didn’t get through the boss of the Bronx, Edward J. Flynn, and through the Brooklyn Democratic organization. By 1945, Tammany’s Union Square headquarters no longer belonged to the Manhattan organization, which, finding it increasingly difficult to meet the mortgage payments, had had to sell the building, and neither did control of the city’s five-borough Democratic machine. Journalists, rhetorical traditionalists, were still referring to that machine as a whole as “Tammany Hall.” However, if the catch phrase was misleading in political terms, it was accurate in moral terms: the controlling structure of the postwar Democratic machine was different from the pre-LaGuardia model but the ethics were not. As the Herald Tribune said in an editorial in 1945, “A vast, corrupt organization, starved through twelve long years, is panting for its revenge.” New York was again a city in which “scandal” and “graft” and “fraud” glared bold and black out of the headlines on newsstands. New York was a city in which public office was increasingly a means to private profit. The Democrats shrewdly made enough key Republicans a part of the arrangement by which the city was governed—putting them on the public payroll, giving them a share of the judgeships and a cut of the lucrative city contracts, taking them in as business partners—so that the G.O.P. wouldn’t try too hard to disrupt those arrangements. New York was the city of the fix, of “protection,” of the shakedown—a city in which everything had its price.
The price was highest in Moses’ fields. Ever since the post-Civil War years in which the Tweed Ring took fixed percentages—five per cent for the mayor, ten per cent for the parks commissioner, twenty per cent for the comptroller, twenty-five per cent for William Marcy Tweed—of the padding in contractors’ padded bills, public works had been the main ingredient in the graft on which Tammany battened.
Now the techniques were different: subtler, smoother. Charlie Murphy, boss of Tammany Hall from 1901 until his death in 1924, had taught his men that it was stupid to take cash—that it was too easy for some prying reporter or rebel district attorney to trace it, too easy to prove that it had been taken in exchange for a favor, too easy to subpoena a contractor’s books and haul the contractor’s timid little bookkeeper before a grand jury and frighten him into telling what the items listed as “cash disbursements” really represented. By precept, if not by preachment (for Silent Charlie had not received his nickname for nothing)—for example, by having his Board of Aldermen hold up street-closing permits for the construction of Pennsylvania Station until the railroad awarded the excavation contract to a firm in which he had a hidden financial interest—he showed Tammany that there were safer ways of making money from public works. By 1905, George Washington Plunkitt, who as a state senator had ridden at the head of the Black Horse Cavalry (a squadron of influence-peddling state legislators), was sitting, resplendent in handlebar mustache and gleaming stovepipe hat, on Graziano’s boot-black stand in the old courthouse off Foley Square during noon hours expansively explaining how cavalry was obsolete and how he was making millions from the “coincidences” surrounding “big improvements”—coincidences that he called, in a phrase he may have coined, “honest graft.”
Murphy and Plunkitt were uneducated men; they had never been to law school. If they had, they would have found the making of honest graft safer and easier still. Al Smith, as always, phrased it best. Strolling through a law-school library one day, the Governor noticed a student poring intently over his books. “There,” he said with a smile, “is a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee.” By the twenties, most honest graft was being worked through fees—mostly through legal fees (more politicians belong to the legal profession than to any other) but also through real-estate and insurance brokers’ fees, called “commissions,” and public-relations fees, called “retainers.” Jimmy Walker’s crew, overconfident and careless, forgot the teachings of the Master, but Samuel Seabury, chief counsel of a legislative committee investigating the affairs of New York City, uncovered their hidden bundles of cash (one official testified lamely that he had found three hundred and ninety thousand dollars in “a wonderful tin box”) and drummed those teachings into Tammany anew, strongly enough so that they would never be forgotten again. In the post-LaGuardia era, there was no more Tin Box Bugade. It was the Retainer Regiment now. Corrupt public officials who were lawyers would support or oppose a bill according to the wishes of a business firm, and later the firm would retain the official in his private capacity as an attorney, paying him a fee for “services rendered.” Corrupt public officials who were insurance brokers would be allowed to write the policies of a firm they had obliged, and thereby obtain the commissions attached. In the interaction of politics and public works, cash was now the medium of exchange only on the lowest levels. If some investigator found that a firm’s books included a ten-thousand-dollar payment to a city councilman, next to the payment would be the notation “legal fee,” and who could prove that the services the councilman had rendered to earn the fee were anything other than legal—that the councilman’s vote in favor of a bill the firm also happened to favor was anything but coincidence? In any event, the presence of a councilman’s name in a firm’s books would be unusual—an indication that either the firm or the councilman was still ignorant of the higher refinements of honest graft, one of which was to have the firm pay the fee not to the councilman but to another law firm, which would take out a small handling charge for itself and pass the rest along.
The profit in public works in New York had long been huge; with the postwar building boom, fuelled by vast infusions of federal money, it reached new dimensions. “It’s a king’s ransom in a city this size,” Reuben Lazarus has said. And if there was subtlety now in the making of this profit, its making was still the machine’s motive for all it did. The greed was only refined, not eliminated. The Tammany Tiger, starved for so long, was more voracious than ever. Every public work, it sometimes seemed, and particularly, it seemed, every large-scale public work of the type with which Moses was concerned, had to have its arrangements, its payoffs, its deals—its coincidences. Until the coincidences were arranged, there would be no public work. If Board of Estimate or City Council approval was required, that approval would not be forthcoming. If it was necessary for a city agency to put an announced policy into effect, such action would be endlessly delayed. The great Mayor was dying, almost penniless, in a little house in Riverdale; now, in the City Hall he once had ruled, everything had a price. And to Get Things Done in the city one had to pay it.
Moses had the money to pay it, partly because his control of the City Housing Authority gave him control of close to a billion and a quarter dollars, mostly federal and state funds, dispensed through that agency; partly because his control of the state Department of Public Works gave him control of another billion and a quarter dollars in federal and state funds dispensed through that agency; and partly because his control of the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee gave him control of a billion dollars more dispensed through that agency—a total, during the first fifteen years after the Second World War, of close to three and a half billion dollars dispensed through agencies that were largely beyond the control of the city’s government. But he had the money to pay it mainly because of his control of an agency that was largely beyond the control of any government, federal, state, or city: the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (as Triborough was called after its merger, in 1946, with the New York City Tunnel Authority). With the end of the war, and of gasoline and tire rationing, and with automobiles pouring off the assembly lines again, the volume of automobile traffic in New York soared. The authority’s annual income had been seven million dollars in 1941; in 1951, with the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel’s thirty-five-cents-per-car charge swelling the toll receipts, the authority’s annual income was twenty-six million; in 1961, with the Throgs Neck Bridge open and operating, it was forty-three million; in 1967, with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge open and operating at fifty cents per car, it was seventy million—a thousand per cent higher than it had been before the war. These receipts—less, of course, the relatively minor operating expenses and the interest payments—were capitalized through the issuance of revenue bonds. During the first fifteen years after the Second World War, Triborough provided Moses with more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to spend on public works in New York City. So during those years agencies controlled by Moses and largely independent of any supervision by the city’s government spent on public works within the city close to four and a half billion dollars. The city’s government—mayor, Board of Estimate, City Council—was able during that period to spend on public works a total of less than three and three-quarters billion dollars. Robert Moses spent on public works within the City of New York more—far more—than the city itself spent.
A significant aspect of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority revenue was the secrecy in which its spending could be cloaked. Federal and state expenditures were matters of public record, subject to public disclosure. But Triborough’s—because Triborough was a public authority—were not. Therefore, it was safer to take money from Moses than from the city. A politician or a public official could accept a legal fee or insurance business from Triborough in the knowledge that no reporter or reformer would ever be able to discover that he had done so. In theory, the state or city comptroller could make the discovery, for the legislation that created Triborough and the Public Authorities Law authorized in-depth audits of its books by these two officials, but there was no precedent for any in-depth audit; only the most cursory had ever been undertaken.
And there were reasons both practical and political to doubt whether one ever would. One was the very size of Triborough: auditing the authority would require a huge staff working for a long time (one estimate was fifty accountants working for a year), and no comptroller had that kind of manpower to spare, so the job would require a sizable appropriation from either the Board of Estimate or the State Legislature—and it was highly unlikely that members of the Board or the Legislature who had accepted fees from Triborough would appropriate money to open books that would have their own names in them. (The comptroller’s party designation was irrelevant; members of both parties were in those books, so his audit would inevitably embarrass members of his own party.)
Edward N. Costikyan was a reform Democrat who suddenly found himself able to observe the machine as no other reformer had ever observed it—as its leader. New York’s political convulsions of the nineteen-sixties catapulted him—to his own amazement and that of Tammany Hall—into the Hall’s chairmanship and kept him there for more than two years. And Costikyan, upon descending from his unique vantage point, reported, “The magnet which attracts corrupters . . . the natural locus of corruption is always where the discretionary power resides.” In New York City in the postwar era, the discretionary power resided principally in Robert Moses, and, like flies to a sugar bowl, the corrupters, the men who possessed influence over the city’s political or governmental apparatus and were willing to sell that influence for money, were attracted to Moses, and to the seemingly bottomless sugar bowl whose lid only he could lift. And Moses did not send them away disappointed. Were Moses’ projects free from political considerations, as he and the newspapers often asserted? Political considerations were in fact the basis—often the only basis—on which Moses dispensed his millions. With the power to distribute those millions according to any criteria he chose, during the entire postwar era he chose mainly a single criterion: how much influence a man had, and how willing he was to use that influence on Moses’ behalf.
The distribution of the insurance on a single Moses slum-clearance project demonstrates the use of this criterion. During the mayoralty of Vincent R. Impellitteri, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, the insurance was handled by one of Impellitteri’s backers, Robert Blaikie. No sooner had Impellitteri lost his bid for reelection—to Robert F. Wagner, Jr., the hand-picked candidate of the Tammany boss, Carmine DeSapio—than Blaikie lost the insurance account to a broker associated with DeSapio. And so goes the over-all pattern of the distribution of Triborough’s insurance—a pattern to be discerned only in records that the public has never seen. The authority’s policies carried premiums of more than half a million dollars a year, which meant a yearly profit to brokers of more than a hundred thousand. And the brokers who received this profit had to do almost nothing in return for it; George E. Spargo, Triborough’s general manager, noted in an internal Triborough memo that once “the big insurance”—the policies insuring Triborough’s bridges and tunnels against collapse or destruction—had been placed with insurance companies, “little if any work on the part of the broker” was required. In 1954, almost twenty years after some of those policies were written, Spargo could say, “To my knowledge, the authority has spent millions of dollars on premiums and has never filed or collected a claim.”
During the LaGuardia era, there was little political profit to be reaped through the sowing of such insurance policies. What there was was reaped through the Democratic machine, and some of Triborough’s insurance was therefore given to a brokerage firm whose office was in midtown but whose connections were on Union Square.
(The company’s general practice was to parcel out its business, and the profits attached, to key Tammany figures.)
But another major hunk of the insurance was given to the State Insurance Fund, without any brokers being involved, and still another was given to a broker with no political connections, for no other reason than that he had been an old Army buddy of Spargo’s predecessor, Brigadier General Paul Loeser. With the machine back in power, all this changed. The Triborough insurance formerly handled by General Loeser’s Army buddy and the State Insurance Fund was snatched away and given to a new broker. In a frank—frank because he believed it would remain secret forever—internal Triborough memo, Spargo gave a key reason for the choice of the new broker: “He was a friend of Tom Shanahan’s.” Shanahan was Tammany’s chief behind-the-scenes financial manipulator for more than a decade, until 1958 or 1959. And as long as Shanahan remained in power, the insurance was left with Shanahan’s friend. The midtown company was allowed to keep its share of the insurance, but a closer watch was instituted, to make sure that its farming out of business resulted in the maximum political influence for Triborough.
By 1954, Carmine DeSapio had solidified his control of Tammany, centralizing in himself more power than had been enjoyed by any boss since Charlie Murphy. He called the shots for the machine and, it sometimes seemed, for Wagner. Sometime in 1954 or 1955, DeSapio was invited to lunch at Moses’ headquarters, the Triborough Authority building, on Randall’s Island. On returning to his office that afternoon, he told a friend that he had found only two men present when he arrived—Moses and Spargo. And, so DeSapio told his friend, after mentioning that they knew he was connected with a certain insurance firm they offered that firm all of Triborough’s insurance—the half million a year in premiums and one hundred thousand a year in profit. DeSapio told the friend that he turned the offer down. “He told me,” the friend recalls, “that he was not prepared to exert the degree of influence over the administration and the Mayor that he felt would be required of him in return.” That he was prepared to exert a lesser degree of influence is indicated by the fact that some Triborough insurance was given to a new broker, whom key Democrats considered close to the leader. Moses used insurance to make sure that his influence in the Legislature would be exerted not only indirectly, through the legislators controlled by DeSapio, but more directly, through at least one of a small group of leaders who really ran the Legislature—D. Mallory Stephens, a poor farm boy from Putnam County who in 1942 became chairman of the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee and a little while later began receiving Triborough insurance business. Stephens continually pressed Moses and Spargo for more business, telling them frankly that the influence he was using on their behalf entitled him to it, and no matter how much he was given he was never satisfied. So insistent did his demands become that in a secret memo in the early fifties Spargo told Moses, “The only way you can satisfy Mallory Stephens is to give him the business now handled by [Shanahan’s friend].” If many of the key Democratic politicians in New York City seemed organized now into a Retainer Regiment, it was Robert Moses who was leading the regiment out, in lockstep. Moses’ fees did not come without strings. He was buying men’s influence, and for each dollar he spent he made sure he received full value. The price was not demanded outright. Moses did not directly ask a recipient of one of his fees to return the favor by voting in the Legislature or the City Council for one of his proposals or by persuading legislators or councilmen to vote for the proposal. He did not ask a recipient directly for support of any kind. Asking would have placed both men in violation of the law and of various codes of ethics. And he neither performed any illegal act himself nor asked anyone else to perform one. Few of the recipients of Moses’ fees were as blunt about the services they were expected to render in return as Mallory Stephens, who, on being asked late one night by his Albany suitemate, Reuben Lazarus, why he invariably supported Moses’ legislation and opposed that backed by Austin Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority, replied, “Because Tobin doesn’t give me anything.” Moses did not operate by demanding a direct quid pro quo. Rather, it was a case of being on his team or not being on it. Politicians and officeholders who consistently supported his proposals were considered to be on the team, and men who were on the team were generally also on the payroll. The over-all record is very clear. When a mayor or a governor turned to a man on Moses’ payroll for advice, often not knowing that the man was on that payroll, the advice given was invariably the advice that Moses wanted given. When a Moses proposal was before a city or state legislative body, legislators secretly on Moses’ payroll, or controlled by men secretly on Moses’ payroll, were generally the legislators pushing hardest for adoption of Moses’ proposal. If Moses was buying influence, these men were peddling it.
In terms of money—the terms in which corruption is usually measured—Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was, in fact, as uninterested in obtaining money for himself as any public servant who has ever lived. In the politicians’ phrase, he was “money honest.” But in terms of power Moses was corrupt. Coveting it, he used money to get it. And because he had so much money (in his fields, far more than the city) and so much freedom in spending it (in his fields, far more than the city), within the city he became the locus of corruption—money corruption.
Consider his relationship with Tom Shanahan. In 1932, at the age of thirty, Shanahan became an officer of one of the youngest banks in the city, Federation Bank & Trust Company. He moved Federation into a field from which more conservative bankers shied: loans to construction contractors. The age of huge construction companies was still in the future; during the Depression, most of New York’s contractors were small and broke. “Tom would take a contractor who didn’t have the salary to pay his workers that week and back him,” an associate has recalled. “He went on face value, and he very seldom went wrong.” He backed Pete DiNapoli, head of Tully & DiNapoli (the story around Federation in later years was that when DiNapoli first came in to see Shanahan he had to borrow a nickel for carfare home to Queens), and the Slattery Contracting Company (which was better off, but barely), and a half-dozen others, who later made immense profits—and deposited those profits with Federation. By 1944, Federation had thirty million dollars in assets. And, increasingly, Federation’s assets were Shanahan’s assets. For years, he had been quietly buying up the bank’s stock. When he was elected president of the bank, in 1944, he owned tens of thousands of shares.
It was not for principle but for profit that Shanahan entered politics. His dealings with contractors had shown him that their dependence on government contracts could be turned to personal financial advantage. The contractors owed him much; he transferred part of that debt to the Democratic Party, raising so much money from them for the Party’s 1941 mayoral candidate, William O’Dwyer, that when O’Dwyer decided to run again in 1945 he gave Shanahan a major role in the campaign. And soon after O’Dwyer was sworn in, a pattern in which politics and profit were intertwined began to emerge on Shanahan’s loom: the contractors he had persuaded to contribute to the Democratic Party were being handed lucrative construction contracts by Democratic government officials and were depositing the profits from those contracts in his bank.
In 1948, when Shanahan was forty-five, O’Dwyer appointed him—with an absolute minimum of publicity—to the City Housing Authority. Memberships in the Housing Authority were “non-paying,” but in Shanahan’s case that adjective applied only to salary. Within a remarkably short time after he was sworn in, the word was out around town, not only among contractors but among architects, landscape architects, engineers, insurance brokers, and real-state appraisers, that you had to “do business with Tom Shanahan”—do your banking at Shanahan’s bank and give a portion of your anticipated profits to Shanahan, presumably for the Democratic Party—or forget about chances of getting any work from Housing Authority. And even after you had obtained a Housing Authority contract, the word had it, your business with Shanahan was not finished; when you submitted the bill for your work, further payoffs would be required, or somehow the bill would keep getting lost in the Housing Authority’s files. The banker quickly became, in the words of one reform Democrat, “one of the most notorious boodle boys around town.”
Little publicity attended Shanahan’s rise in banking and less his rise in politics. For years, there was scarcely a mention of his name in political stories in New York newspapers; there is no mention of it at all in “Tigers of Tammany,” by Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, the supposedly definitive history of Tammany Hall. But for more than a decade Shanahan was Tammany’s moneyman—the man who, more than any other, greased the wheels of the machine. He was the hub of political payoffs and influence peddling in New York And for most of that time he was Robert Moses’ closest associate in the city’s government. The fees to Shanahan’s bank for banking services—fees for acting as paying agent for Triborough bonds, for example, which required little work and which other banks would have liked to have but had no opportunity to bid for—amounted to tens of thousands of dollars on a single issue of Triborough bonds. But these were minor items. The payoffs that really mattered in the Moses-Shanahan relationship were figured not in thousands of dollars but in millions. In 1948, Triborough deposited fifteen million dollars in the Federation Bank & Trust Company—which at the time had assets of only thirty-nine million dollars—thereby increasing the bank’s capital assets by nearly forty per cent at a single stroke. Some of this money, moreover, was placed in accounts on which Federation paid no interest, so the bank had the use of the money—to lend out and earn interest—without paving a cent for it. And it was left in those accounts for the entire decade that Shanahan remained on power. In the fifties, on Moses’ order, Triborough shipped to Federation $48,963,000 in authority-owned investment securities—a violation of every prudent business principle, because at the time it did so the bank did not have resources sufficient to cover that amount if the securities were lost.
Moses placed at Shanahan’s disposal not only his money but his power, which Shanahan used to make more money. During his first five years on the Housing Authority, Shanahan, with the help of two men who had been appointed to the five-member authority on Moses’ recommendation—the chairman, Philip J. Cruise, and William Wilson—dispensed certain authority contracts as he wished. Naming Shanahan vice-chairman of the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee in 1955, Moses delegated to him virtually absolute power over certain of its projects. Shanahan used his vice-chairmanship as a lever to force prospective slum-clearance sponsors to do business with him. “A part of my deal was that I had to do my banking at Shanahan’s bank,” one subsequently related. Federation’s assets, already on the climb, began to climb faster: between 1948, the year in which its president was appointed to the Housing Authority, and 1958, the year which he resigned from the post, they increased from thirty-nine million to a hundred and sixty-four million. Shanahan, already a millionaire, became much richer; at the time of his death, in 1963, his holdings in Federation stock figured in the millions of dollars,
And while Moses put his vast reserves of money and power at Shanahan’s disposal, Shanahan put his vast reserves of influence at Moses’. The banker was interested in who got Housing Authority and urban-renewal contracts; unconcerned with the aims and principles of government, he wasn’t interested in where Housing Authority and urban-renewal projects were situated, why they were situated there, or how they were built—the factors that interested Moses. The banker ran the Housing Authority for Moses. The Housing Authority projects built were the projects Moses wanted built—on the sites where Moses wanted them built, to the specifications Moses desired. In 1953, when Shanahan’s term expired, Moses wrote Mayor Impellitteri, “It [is] of the greatest importance” that “Tom” be reappointed. It was—to him. The influence that Shanahan exercised for Moses was not limited to Housing Authority and urban-renewal projects. Time and time again when the city’s government officials were divided on proposals made by Moses, the banker’s power helped tip the scales in Moses’ favor.
Moses did not extend his field of force only over individuals, of course.
One cannot dip a toe into the waters of New York politics without sensing somewhere deep beneath the surface the presence of an enormous force, a power unseen but immense: the power of banks. Banks control the dispensing of huge amounts of title insurance, and they can dispense it to politicians. The activities of banks generate huge amounts of legal work, and they can dispense the least onerous and most lucrative aspects of that work—local real-estate closings, for example—to politicians. A bank can give a politician a fortune in a number of ways—by electing him to its board of directors, which gives him inside financial information; by letting him buy bank stock at favorable prices; by giving him an unsecured, low-interest loan, which allows him to make investments without risking his own money. The acceptance of these and other favors puts a politician in a bank’s debt. Some political analysts speak of the influence of New York’s banks as influence exerted almost entirely on the Republican Party, but anyone who believes that believes that it is only Republicans who are interested in money. The power of the great banks of New York crosses party as well as county lines. Within the over-all political structure of New York—city and state—it is pervasive and immense. And Moses enlisted it behind his aims.
Banks themselves have one aim: making money. Moses made sure that their aim and his coincided. He made sure that banks would make money—quick money, easy money, safe money—from his public works, Revenue bonds, which were the key to his authorities’ existence and power, were also the key to the alliance. Of all possible investments legal for banks, public-authority bonds were the most desirable. In selecting investments, bankers had three objects: to keep their money safe, to make as much money as possible with it, and to keep the money they made. Keeping money meant, in postwar America, tax exemption. Corporate bonds were dependent upon corporate profits, which were much more risky than bridge tolls. The yield of such bonds was higher—in 1971, in the neighborhood of eight per cent—but because banks had to pay half of their profits to the government in taxes, in terms of money kept the yield of a corporate bond would be only about four per cent. So tax-exempt authority bonds assured both greater safety and a higher return than corporate bonds. United States government bonds were as safe as authority bonds, and their yield was as high, but that yield was subject to federal taxes, so their net yield was lower. State and municipal bonds, which were exempt from taxes, had about the same net yield as authority bonds, but in the view of the hard-eyed men on Wall Street they were not as safe. Higher-yielding than any other safe investment—higher-yielding, in fact, than most risky investments; higher-yielding, even, than those riskiest of investments, personal loans—a public-authority bond was simply the best investment a bank could make. By far. A high return on the banks’ money was already assured by the tax-exempt status of authority bonds. But Moses provided a still higher return. The interest rates on his bonds were higher than they needed to be to attract buyers—so much higher that over the life of a single bond issue bondholders would receive tens of millions of dollars more than they would gladly have settled for.
And favored bankers didn’t have to wait for years to make money on Moses’ bonds. He enabled them to make money in a single day. Banks make quick profits on bonds through underwriting—a procedure in which they agree to purchase bonds from the issuing agency in the hope of reselling at a profit those they can’t afford themselves. In the case of Triborough’s bonds, of course, “hope” was an inaccurate term. No matter what the state of the market, every postwar Triborough bond issue was sold out—with many buyers still clamoring for them—within twenty-four hours after the underwriting banks offered them for sale. In the case of Triborough’s bonds, therefore, the underwriters’ “risk”—the possibility that the bonds couldn’t be sold—was negligible. And Moses made sure that the underwriters’ profits would be huge. He allowed the Verrazano underwriting syndicate, for example, to purchase three hundred million dollars’ worth of bonds from Triborough for $295,760,851, and these bonds were sold—on the same day they were issued—for $300,570,851. Thus, the syndicate reaped a one-day profit of almost five million dollars.
Moses’ generosity to banks had to be paid for out of the pockets of New York’s motorists, of course. If bondholders received tens of millions of dollars extra in interest, users of Triborough’s facilities would have to pay tens of millions of dollars extra in tolls. But Moses wasn’t concerned with the cost to the public. His concern was to enlist in his cause the banks that could use their power to push behind-the-scenes political leaders, state legislators, city councilmen, borough presidents, mayors, and governors into approving a public work that they might otherwise not approve. Open bidding would have defeated this purpose. Banks would not push hard for a public work if they knew that after it was approved they would have to bid against other banks for its bonds and might not get them. Banks would push hard only if they knew before the work was approved that they would profit from it. So Moses let them know. He inserted in the acts creating his authorities a phrase that permitted them to sell their bonds either at “public or private sale,” and, of course, he invariably selected private sale.
It wasn’t just bankers’ grays that Robert Moses had marching behind him; it was blue collars and hard hats, too. Contemning workingmen and their organizations, and desiring to drive men, to hire and fire them as he pleased, to hold their economic fate at his mercy, he had naturally contemned labor unions in the thirties; let her invoke whatever laws she chose, he had told Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins then, no union bricklayer would ever work at Jones Beach. But by the postwar forties labor unions had acquired vast power in New York. Their membership, which ran to a million plus, formed the base of the Democratic Party’s popular support, and their campaign contributions—contributions not only of money but of manpower to perform the vital doorbell-ringing and Election Day transportation services once performed by ward heelers—were indispensable. In Moses’ fields of operation, the key union figures, Harry Van Arsdale, president of the city’s Central Labor Council, and Peter J. Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council (later President Nixon’s Secretary of Labor), had substantial power to influence government. Moses’ contempt for workingmen and the unions that represented them had not changed, but emotions like contempt had long since been subordinated to the desire for power; invited to lunch at Randall’s Island, Van and Pete, as their host was soon calling them, found themselves the object of Moses’ easy, gracious charm.
Moses and the unions had a fundamental identity of interest. The hunger that drove the construction workers could be satisfied only by the satisfaction of the hunger that drove Moses. Postwar pay in the construction industry was good, but construction workers are paid only when they work. And it takes a lot of construction to keep two hundred and fifty-five thousand construction men working in the city. When there is no work, construction workers blame their union officials, so the incumbent leaders are constantly worrying about where next year’s work, and the next year’s, and the next, is going to come from. Thinking as they must in terms of employment for tens of thousands of men, they think only peripherally of private construction projects. Putting up even the largest private office building will require the labor of only a few hundred men for a year or so. And, besides, union leaders have little, if any, influence over private construction. But the construction of a large public work—a suspension bridge or a highway—will require thousands of workers for substantial periods of time. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—just the bridge proper, apart from its access roads—employed a daily average of twelve hundred men for five years. And union leaders, thanks to their political muscle, have vast influence over public construction. Union leaders, therefore, are constantly pressing for the scheduling of new public works. When employment is low, they press for immediate ground-breaking for new projects. When employment is high, even when employment is full—even, in fact, when employment appears likely to be full for some years to come—they press, having learned how long a “lead time” a large-scale public work requires, for planning, scheduling, and the letting of contracts. It was just as important to the union leaders as it was to Moses that government accomplish, build, Get Things Done, on a big scale.
The city government couldn’t build on that scale. It couldn’t afford it. Neither, in general, could the state. And those projects that the city or state did decide to build were constantly being delayed by the red tape of bureaucrats and by what the Van Arsdales and Brennans regarded as the timidity of public officials—men they saw as so “scared” of offending voters that they listened to “the nuts, the protesters” instead of “pushing ahead” with the laying of concrete and the erection of steel that meant “progress.” Only Moses and the Port Authority and the federal government had the financial resources to build on the desired scale. And the Van Arsdales and Brennans knew that Moses, as city construction coordinator, controlled the flow of federal funds into the city, and that for almost a decade after the war he possessed enough power so that the Port Authority needed his O.K. on most major projects within the city. And the Van Arsdales and Brennans were impressed not only by his money but by his will. “When he got mad, he was a raving maniac,” Brennan says. “I’ve seen him say to an employee of his, ‘Now, God damn it, you get this done or don’t come back’—like, you know, he’d stare at you and he’d raise the arms . . .” Brennan and Van Arsdale loved that. In him they found—and, at their very first meeting at Randall’s Island, recognized—a man who understood what was really important.
The contractors recognized the same thing. Their down-to-earth speech grew almost lyrical when they talked of Robert Moses. They thought of themselves as builders, and they thought of him as the greatest builder of all. One had only to sit under the chandelier of the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria at an annual dinner of the Building Trades Employers Association, a dinner at which, even in mod 1968, it was difficult to find a single shirt that wasn’t white (or a single face), to see that to these men he was a hero, and to see also the frame of reference that made him a hero. One had only to watch the packed ballroom, not previously stirred to enthusiasm by anything except the rendition of the national anthem, rise, table by table of burly, white-haired, red-faced men, applauding furiously, after short, squat Roger Corbetta, a bull in black tie, introducing the guest of honor, said, “This great master builder . . . Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into the construction business by this great dirt-mover, as he likes to be called. . . . Two power projects . . . One billion three hundred million dollars . . . A great man, a great builder, a man of history . . . serving the public for years: the Honorable Robert Moses.” One had only to watch them rise and cheer again, time after time, as the guest of honor, graceful and poised and easy in his dinner jacket, his presence filling the dais even at seventy-nine, delivered, in a harsh, nasal monotone, his diatribe against “crackpots” who opposed “progress.”
They admired—idolized—him, and they also needed him, urgently and continuously. They had built up big organizations, and big organizations mean big overhead. They had acquired vast amounts of heavy earthmoving and construction equipment—equipment so expensive that the purchase price was often borrowed from banks, with the equipment itself as collateral, so that, in effect, there was on each earth mover and crane a mortgage, on which a payment had to be met every month. New York’s big contracting combines needed to keep working, and they needed to keep working on big projects. Moses controlled such projects. If his favor had made these contractors, they knew, his disfavor could break them. So he controlled them, and he controlled their political contributions.
The power that Moses could mobilize behind his plans for the city was evident in his relationship with the city’s five borough presidents—the officials through whom the city’s five Democratic county organizations had for decades exercised much of their political influence—and in his relationship with the Board of Estimate, on which they sat, and which was supposed to be the heart of the city’s legislative system. The borough presidents were traditionally the keystone of the system by which the county machines held power; the five borough halls over which they presided were storehouses of the public-works contracts and individual jobs that during those decades could be translated into political power. With a few exceptions—most notably parks and parkways, which had been turned over to Moses by the Legislature in 1934—each borough president controlled every public work in his borough, from bridge to catch basin. In addition to being able to tell contractors whom to hire, borough presidents had direct appointive power over hundreds of laborers’ jobs and hundreds of administrative and bureaucratic positions as well. The county machines were embedded in the community. On Primary Day, Democratic voters would find on the ballot the names of neighbors, for four or five county committeemen would be elected from each election district, and a district might be no larger than a single heavily populated city block; in Tammany’s heyday, there were more than thirty thousand Democratic county committeemen in the City of New York. One of the committeemen from the district would be named district captain. At a meeting in the local clubhouse, he and other captains would elect a district leader. The district leader would, in turn, elect the county leader—an Ed Flynn or Frank Kelly or Jim Roe. This system was, of course, hardly the democratic pyramid it appeared to be. The county leader at its top could, for example, employ his power to force the district captains to elect the district leader he wanted; that is, power ran downhill as well as up. The democratic shape of the pyramid was further distorted by the fact that a principal ingredient in the mortar that held it together was graft. But there was a pyramid, and its base was the people. And, through the hierarchy of county committeeman, district captain, district leader, county leader, and borough president, the people’s voice was heard—even in public-works matters. The district captain had to produce votes in his district to keep his job, so he not only had to do small favors for voters—obtain jobs or loans for them, intercede with a grocer who had cut off their credit—but also had to be his district’s champion at City Hall: to be able to obtain a neighborhood playground and see that it was situated where the neighborhood wanted it, or to kill a plan to run a highway through the neighborhood. The district leader who wanted to remain a district leader had to be responsive to his people, and he had to be willing to fight for them—and to be able to win. The borough presidents, the titular heads of the county machines, placed in their jobs by the county bosses and relying for their support on those bosses and on the district leaders, had to be just as responsive to the people. Other pressures—private, subtle, and strong—were, of course, always working upon them. But the pressure of public opinion was at least as strong as any of the others, and far stronger than most.
For two reasons—a desire for increased efficiency in city government (which backfired) and a desire to curb the powers of the corrupt machines—the reformer-drafted city charter of 1936 shifted the responsibility for many municipal services, notably street-cleaning and construction and operation of public buildings, from the borough presidents to centralized city departments reporting to the mayor. This shift dealt a body blow to the small contractors who had played a vital role in providing the jobs and campaign contributions that the machine needed. “All at once,” says Charles Rodriguez, a former deputy borough president of the Bronx, “the individual contracts, per-diem employees, snow-removal jobs that had been a source of strength were gone.” As for major public works, the borough presidents’ authority was eroded by the charter and by the new scale of construction made possible by the entrance of the federal government into the field; under the W.P.A. and P.W.A., the emphasis shifted continually away from the block to the neighborhood, from the neighborhood to the borough, from the borough to the city. Because the federal programs were so big, they were administered on a citywide basis, and federal officials were predisposed to select as the local administrators of such programs officials who represented the whole city rather than one of its segments. In New York, this predisposition was reinforced by the Roosevelt-LaGuardia alliance, which resulted in the funnelling of all federal public-works contracts through City Hall instead of the borough presidents’ offices. Handling the new scale of construction demanded a new breed of contractor—industrial giants with enough financial resources to fulfill cities’ bonding requirements and enough technical expertise to handle previously unprecedented engineering, architectural, and construction problems. And since such corporations received their contracts through City Hall, not a borough hall, they gave their campaign contributions to City Hall, not a borough hall, and hired outside architects, engineers, and bonding firms that City Hall recommended. The 1961 charter transferred most of what remained of the borough halls power over public works to the mayor, so that the borough presidents no longer had charge even of the signs that identified their streets or the sewers that ran beneath them. The borough presidents’ access to individual jobs was limited still further by charter revisions that step by step pared away the number of administrative jobs over which they had direct appointive power. The borough presidents found it increasingly difficult—and, in the postwar era, impossible—to give satisfaction to their constituencies. They could not provide jobs for individuals, could not give work to local architects or engineers, could not oversee the dispensing of orders to local businessmen or of policies to local insurance brokers and bonding firms.
In theory—the theory of government in New York that political scientists, to judge by their writings, adhered to—the borough presidents, by sitting ex officio on the Board of Estimate, possessed (at least until the charter revisions of 1961) substantial legislative as well as administrative powers: the power to control the city’s departments and agencies by approving or disapproving every single agency expenditure; the power to control city employees by authorizing or refusing to authorize their hiring and their individual salaries; the power to make any changes they wished in the mayor’s executive budget; and all “residual powers” not specifically delegated to the mayor, the City Council, or the Planning Commission. The most detailed and comprehensive analysis of the city’s government ever written—“Governing New York City,” by Professors Wallace S. Sayre, of Columbia, and Herbert Kaufman, of Yale—concludes that “on the chessboard of the city’s politics, the Mayor may be king, but the Board of Estimate is queen . . . the single most powerful participant in the distribution of the stakes of city politics.” Over public works, which did so much to give a city its permanent shape and to mold the lives of its inhabitants, the Board’s powers were, on paper, particularly strong. And the votes on the Board jointly controlled by the borough presidents enabled them, if they stuck together and cast the votes as a bloc, to prevent the Board from acting without their consent on any of the many public-works decisions that required a two-thirds or three-fourths majority.
They did stick together, under an informal agreement that none of them would vote for a public work unless the president of the borough in which it was to be situated approved. So absolutely did they honor this agreement, year after year and decade after decade, that the pledge, which the borough presidents themselves called “borough courtesy,” became known to frustrated agency administrators as “the unwritten law.”
But new realities in public works made the borough presidents’ legislative powers as meaningless as their administrative powers. One new reality was the wealth of Moses’ public authorities and the fact that the Board of Estimate had no control over either the source or the expenditure of that wealth. The Board’s control over conventional city agencies rested ultimately on the fact that those agencies had no money except what the Board chose to give them, and that the Board could dole it out to them item by item, scrutinizing every line in an agency’s budget request. But Moses’ authorities had an independent income. They didn’t need the city’s money, and therefore they didn’t need the city’s approval in spending money. Another new reality was the poverty of the city’s government, which was both absolute (LaGuardia’s worst nightmares paled before the realities of New York’s postwar finances) and relative—relative to the new needs created by the city’s growth and by the fact that the growth consisted of an inpouring of impoverished immigrants in need of more help than the city was accustomed to give, and relative to the new needs of the county Democratic organizations that controlled its politics. The city simply did not have the money to build public works on the scale now required by the public—or by the greed of the political machines. But Moses’ authorities—the authorities, and the state and federal governments, whose expenditures in the city he controlled—had the money. The borough presidents, through their seats on the Board of Estimate, had power—power to withhold street-opening permits, for example—which could stop authorities from building. But since the 1936 charter the borough presidents did not have the power to build substantial public works themselves. Their power was negative only. They could not provide what the people—and the county machines on which their own careers depended—were demanding. They became, in Rodriguez words, “incapable of giving political satisfaction to their clientele.” The old system by which they had lived was dead. In its place was a vacuum.
And into this vacuum stepped Robert Moses. To a borough president agonizing because he could see no way of solving his borough’s traffic or housing problem, or of providing the jobs that his local unions wanted or the contracts, insurance, and “coincidences” of honest graft that his county organization wanted, the Coordinator would suddenly appear bearing wondrous gifts. He would present to the borough president a proposal for a highway or an urban-renewal development that would “solve” the problems. He could assure him that the financing was all arranged—that the Bureau of Public Roads or the Federal Housing Administration or the Department of Public Works had agreed to provide it as soon as he requested it. When the borough president asked how long it would take to draw up the plans, Moses could tell him that they were already drawn up, and that the project was awaiting only one thing: his O.K. The borough president could see that the proposal would provide, at one swoop, jobs, contracts, and architectural and engineering fees. Knowing Moses’ reputation as a man above politics, he might wonder who would be getting the contracts, jobs, and insurance. But he would soon become aware—if not from Moses himself, then from Stuart (Mustache) Constable, executive officer of the Parks Department, or clever little George Spargo—that, reputation or not, the jobs, contracts, and insurance would go where the borough president wanted them to go. And if he inquired among politicians who had previously worked with Moses, he would also be told—not in so many words, perhaps, for such things were not discussed flat out, but in enough words to get the idea across—that Moses was, as J. Russel Sprague, the Republican boss of Nassau County, had commented many years before, “a practical guy, a guy you can talk to”: a guy who, in other words, would have no objection if friends of the borough president began buying up quickly, before even a word of the proposal had leaked to the papers, the land that would have to be condemned; a guy who would accept the borough president’s recommendations on who should get the contracts. “What he was doing was giving them a package,” Rodriguez says. “He was giving them a finished product. If a borough president accepted the proposal, there would be a resolution of every demand.” And when the county organization gave its annual dinner, the borough president would be able to look down from the dais and see that all the tables were filled, and the dinner advertising journal lying beside his plate would be satisfyingly thick. What Moses was doing, of course, was creating a new system, which revolved around him, and substituting his public works for the traditional means whereby political machines existed and grew fat. Whether the politicians he was dealing with understood this or not is doubtful. “But,” Rodriguez says, “they knew it was an advantage.” ‘They may have simply seen it as a “package,” but they knew it was an attractive package.
It was even more attractive because it would be popular with the public. “There was nothing in the public mind that was unpopular about Moses’ performance then,” Rodriguez says. “He was a giant.” There would be a satisfaction not only of the demands by the unions for jobs and by the contractors for contracts but of the demands by the press and the public for action. The borough president “would be able to go back to his community as an accomplisher of really big things.” And, perhaps just as important, he would know that when the time came—during a campaign or at the end of a career, or over a Thanksgiving-dinner table, with his grandchildren sitting listening—for summing up his accomplishments in life, for telling what he had done for his borough, he could say that during his administration this great road had been built.
There was, of course, a price on the package. The price was that if you wanted it, you had to take it as it came. You couldn’t ask for even the smallest alteration. The borough president knew his borough better than Moses or Moses’ engineers did. He knew its people, and where they went to shop, to worship, to play, to walk in the evening. He knew the neighborhoods in which they lived. Therefore, he might know that putting a highway where Moses wanted it would isolate a neighborhood from its shopping area or its churches, while a route just two blocks away would neatly divide two neighborhoods that had little social intercourse anyhow. Moses didn’t know, and he didn’t care to learn. He would not even discuss such considerations. He would allow no analysis of community feelings, of planning considerations—no discussion of alternative routes based on such considerations. There could be no discussion of the worth of a citywide program as a whole, or of whether your borough might have greater need for other projects—schools, perhaps, or health clinics, or neighborhood public libraries—and whether those should be built first. What happened when a borough president sought to raise such considerations is described by an official who spent many years working for one who occasionally did: “All Moses had to do was push a button and the phone calls and telegrams would pour in: you were holding up work, you were holding up progress. ‘We need jobs—do you have any other jobs to offer us? Have you got a better idea for solving the transportation problem? Where is the money gonna come from? You’re holding up progress.’ Let me tell you—until you’ve sat on the other end of those phone calls for a while, you have no idea how hard it is to stand in the way of ‘progress.’ ”
When, as occasionally happened, a borough president persisted in raising such considerations, Moses used the power of money to discipline him—so effectively that he was not likely to try it again. In late 1952, for example, a dispute arose over a proposed elevated expressway along Bruckner Boulevard. It was to cost twenty-three million dollars. Triborough would pay. Bruckner Boulevard, drawing customers from the residents of pleasant neighborhoods nearby, was one of the most thriving commercial areas in the Bronx. Businessmen who owned stores along it were aghast. It had been proved that elevated structures brought ineradicable blight to the streets along which they ran; the city had been tearing down its ancient elevated railway lines for that very reason. Could not the expressway be built below the surface of the boulevard—in a tunnel, preferably, or, if this was too expensive, in an open cut? There might be some additional cost, but surely it would be worth something to avoid the destruction of the most thriving area in the borough. At least, should not the below-surface solution be considered? Under intense pressure from the merchants, who together constituted a formidable lobbying bloc, Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons made the mistake of insisting that Moses consider the alternative plan. Moses’ response was to call in reporters and announce that he was reallocating three million dollars of the twenty-three million for a highway project in Manhattan, ten million for a highway project in Queens, and the remaining ten million for a highway project in Brooklyn. (The Brooklyn project, ironically, was the widening of Third Avenue beneath another Moses elevated highway, the Gowanus Expressway, which had destroyed another pleasant neighborhood without alleviating any problems; Moses wanted to widen Third Avenue now because traffic along it was worse than ever.) During the very next battle—over the route of the Cross-Bronx Expressway—Moses remarked in a letter to Mayor Impellitteri (which was released to the press) that “in recent months, Borough President Lyons lost some twenty million dollars” for the Bronx. And, Moses added, “precisely the same thing” would happen with the Cross-Bronx Expressway if Mr. Lyons didn’t change his tactics. Lyons, red-faced and sweating beneath his plastered-down, shiny black hair, changed them in the very next Board of Estimate executive session. Although he had been delaying approval of the expressway because of local protests, and promising consideration of alternative routes, he approved the route Moses wanted. And he never again, during his eight remaining years on the Board, seriously questioned any Moses proposal.
New York’s old political system, the system under which the borough presidents were key figures, had never been even close to truly democratic. The ideal one-to-one equation between the people’s will and the government’s action had been distorted, by the addition of graft, corruption, and other factors, long before Moses came to power. But, imperfect as that equation may have been, the factor of the public will was never insignificant within it. The borough presidents and the other elected officials who exercised power under it had been kept in power only by the public’s votes, and they had therefore been responsible and responsive to the public. But Moses was not responsible to the public. Its votes had not put him in office, and its votes could not remove him from office. He despised its opinion. The considerations that he took into account were the considerations that mattered to him personally: the project, in and for itself; the engineering considerations that would Get It Done the fastest and cheapest way; and the economic considerations that mattered to the forces he was using to impose his will on the city. By giving the leaders of these economic forces—the bankers, the union leaders, the politicians—what they wanted, he did not have to give the people what they wanted. The old system, imperfect as it was, had been responsive to the public. The new system—Moses’ system—was not. In the postwar era, many forces were coming together to destroy democratic processes in New York. But he was the most important force of all. ♦
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