In terms of personal conception and completion, no other public official in the history of the United States built public works costing an amount even close to that figure. In those terms, Robert Moses was unquestionably America’s most prolific physical creator.

When Robert Moses began building state parks and parkways during the 1920’s, twenty-nine states didn’t have a single state park; six had only one each. Roads uninterrupted by crossings at grade and set off by landscaping were almost nonexistent. Most proposals for parks outside cities were so limited in scope that, even if they had been adopted, they would have been inadequate. The handful of visionaries who dreamed of large parks were utterly unable to translate their dreams into reality. No one in the nation seemed able to conceive of proposals—and methods of implementing them—equal to the scope and complexity of the problem posed by the need of urban masses for countryside parks and a convenient means of getting to them. New York City residents heading for Long Island’s green hills and ocean beaches, for example, had to make their way, bumper to bumper, along dusty rutted roads the most modern of which were exactly eighteen feet wide. Those who made it to the Island found that the hills and beaches had been monopolized by the robber barons of America, who had bought up its choicest areas with such thoroughness that there was hardly a meadow or strip of beach within driving distance of New York still open to the public. So fierce was their opposition—and so immense their political power—that New York park enthusiasts had stopped thinking of putting parks on Long Island. 

But in 1923, after tramping alone for months over sand spits and almost wild tracts of Long Island woodland, Robert Moses mapped out a system of state parks there that would cover forty thousand acres and would be linked together—and to New York City—by broad parkways. And by 1929, Moses had actually built the system he had dreamed of, hacking it out in a series of merciless vendettas against wealth and wealth’s power that became almost a legend—to the public and to public officials and engineers from all over the country who came to Long Island to marvel at his work.

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

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

And if he was not included in the more select social circles of the class, he created a circle of his own, a small coterie of persons with like interests, a coterie within which he was the acknowledged leader.

The enforcement of Moses’ system was in their hands. And these were men from the old Tammany regime who, too smart to give Moskowitz and James “grounds for dismissal” by openly defying them, undermined the system by the subtle but effective tactic of slowness in learning and laxness in enforcing the new rules.

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

“There was a real divergence of opinion there,” staffers recall. “Moses was very theoretical, always wanting to do exactly what was right, trying to make things perfect, unwilling to compromise. She [Belle Moskowitz] was more practical; she wanted to do the same things as Moses, but she wanted to concentrate on what was possible and not jeopardize the attaining of those things by stirring up trouble in other areas.”

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

Those who cannot endure the medicine because it is too strong must be content with waste, inefficiency and bungling—and steadily rising cost of government. The system here proposed is more democratic, not more “royal,” than that now in existence. Democracy does not merely mean periodic elections. It means a government held accountable to the people between elections. In order that the people may hold their government to account they must have a government that they can understand. No citizen can hope to understand the present collection of departments, offices, boards and commissions, or the present methods of appropriating money.

When the reformers were finished with all their hollering and were back in their comfortable homes, the widows of the Fourth Ward would still be forced to give up their children before they could get charity. What good was courage if its only effect was to hurt those you were trying to help? So Smith despised the noncompromisers, the starry-eyed idealists.

Knowing that Moses was working on Smith’s campaign staff, they pointed them [misstatements] out to him. “We were,” recalls one, “absolutely shocked at Bob’s reaction. He threw back his head and laughed at us and said, ‘Why, we know that. But it sounds a hell of a lot better this way, doesn’t it?’ Bob had always been so truthful. Now Bob was telling us that Smith was telling a deliberate lie—and Bob was condoning it.”

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

Moses had a taste of power now, and he liked the taste—so obviously that, to some observers, it seemed as if he liked the taste in and for itself.

“when I first used to see Moses in Albany, before he had any power, he was a striking figure, dark and handsome, tall and gangly, striding down the corridors with those long strides of his, but he was withdrawn, he was within himself. But then, when Smith brought him up there, he began to be, quite suddenly and quite noticeably, a lot more arrogant, stiff-necked and self-assertive.” [Reuben Lazarus]

Before World War I, a seventy-hour factory week had been common; in 1920, the average was sixty hours; in 1929, just before the Crash, it would be forty-eight. The Saturday half holiday was becoming a part of American life; the full holiday was becoming more common; small-town businessmen who hadn’t yet forgotten what was the devil’s handmaiden were muttering at Kiwanis Club luncheons about Henry Ford’s institution of annual vacations—with pay!—for his workers. Before the eyes of America a bright new world of mass leisure was unfolding. […] Their newly acquired leisure time and the mobility to use it to conquer space meant, to the urban masses of America, something very particular. The countryside was no longer inaccessible.

…and headed out of New York City. They headed into disappointment. Most of the land around the city was in private hands and closed to them.

The officials they [robber barons] controlled allowed all public roads not needed for their own access to their estates to fall into disrepair to discourage public use. Lest the public turn instead to rail transportation, a group of them led by Charles Pratt, who had learned how to handle annoyances from his mentor, Rockefeller, bought sufficient stock in the Long Island Rail Road to control its policies—and saw to it that the railroad’s North Shore lines were kept especially antiquated and rickety.

Thanks to the barons and the baymen, the sandy beaches of the South Shore were as thoroughly closed off to New Yorkers as the rocky beaches of the North.

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

and more beautiful than any roads the world had ever seen, landscaped as private parks are landscaped so that they would be in themselves parks, “ribbon parks,” so that even as people drove to parks, they would be driving through parks.

The commission had the right to operate parks, section eight said. But section nine said that “the term…parks as used in this act…shall be deemed to include…parkways…boulevards and also entrances and approaches thereto, docks and piers, and bridges…and such other…appurtenances as the…commission shall utilize…” And the term “parkways” was significant. The Legislature had specifically written into the State Highway Law provision that the supervisors of each county had veto power over the location of highways within its borders. But, because parkways hadn’t existed when the provision was written, the Highway Law didn’t mention parkways—and there was no local check over their location.

Just to make sure he wouldn’t have much time to even if he wanted to, Moses delayed giving him the bills until the last week of the session. “I never realized what the word ‘appropriation’ meant,” Davison recalls. “I thought it meant what it had always meant, so far as I knew: appropriation of money to be spent. Whenever someone asked me what it meant, I told them that’s what it meant.”

But Macy was handicapped by principles. When a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune asked him to show him around the Taylor Estate so that he could see if it was really inaccessible and unsuitable for a park, Macy disdained to seize this opportunity to sway the press. No, he told the reporter, he did not want to influence his thinking. He was sure the truth would be obvious. He would not accompany him. “Macy,” Moses was to say, “was the amateur in politics.” Once, Moses had been the amateur. But he wasn’t any longer. And he knew how to take advantage of someone who was—as became apparent on January 8, 1925, on the front page of The New York Times.

But the ultimate court in which the fate of Moses and his dream was to be resolved would be the court of public opinion. And in this court, Robert Moses had close to hand three formidable weapons. One was the fact that, like motherhood, parks symbolized something good, and therefore anyone who fought for parks fought under the shield of the presumption that he was fighting for the right—and anyone who opposed him, for the wrong. The second was the fact that it was possible to paint the issue, as Moses had already done, not only as park supporters vs. park deniers, but also as wealth vs. lack of wealth, privilege vs. impotence, influence vs. helplessness, “rich golfers” vs. the sweating masses of the cities. The third was the ultimate political weapon: Alfred Emanuel Smith.

The young Robert Moses, the idealist of Yale and Oxford and the Municipal Civil Service Commission, would not have even considered trading contracts or information for approval. Even the older Robert Moses of the New York State Association, a Moses more admiring of the ways of politicians, would not have done it … .

But in late 1925, the dream [of Jones beach] all but dead, Moses held a series of private meetings with Doughty. There is, of course, no record of what transpired at these meetings, and no proof that any deal was entered into. But certain developments ensued … .

By the time the higher courts came to rule on the question of whether the Taylor Estate was a park, it was a park. What was a judge to do? Tell the state to tear up the roads and tear down the buildings, to destroy what hundreds of thousands of dollars of the public’s money had been spent to build? Tell the people who had visited the Taylor Estate that they could visit it no more? In theory, of course, judges should not be influenced by such considerations. But judges are human. And their susceptibility to such considerations was undoubtedly increased by Moses’ willingness to attack publicly those of them who ruled against him, as he had done to the “local judge,” thereby letting the public know exactly who it was who was closing the park to them.

Once you did something physically, it was very hard for even a judge to undo it.

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