Robert Moses, Glutton for Power

In New York City Robert Moses is the most prominent exponent of the credo that the end justifies the means; that he, “the great doer” always knows best; that the public should shut up, or in any event not be heard, while the genius he personifies works for it generously. The image that emerges is hardly that of a leader of democracy; but then Moses, though giving lip-service to democracy, has never pretended to adhere to its methods. Never once has he been elected to public office; and throughout the years, he has expressed nothing but contempt for the public’s elected representatives.

Gifted with a forked tongue, Moses has indulged in the life-long pastime of shriveling with invective all officials who have had the temerity to get in his way, a list that includes virtually every prominent figure in the city and state. In New Deal days he described former Postmaster General James A. Farley as “that ineffable sand, mail and bag man….” A long succession of New York’s Mayors has taxed Moses’s ingenuity in epithet. Jimmy Walker was “half Beau Brummell and half guttersnipe”; John P. O’Brien, “a winded bull in the municipal china shop”; John F. Hylan, “the raging Bozo of Bushwick”; and J. V. McKee, “a synthetic character which never actually lived on sea or land, puffed up by the press … and now in the process of disintegration.”

Despite excesses of temper and the domineering ways of an autocrat, he has managed to retain the image of a paragon working wonders within the creaking framework of democracy. How has he been able to accomplish this miracle? Very simply. By the control of money in such unlimited quantities that even the lashed and berated prefer his favor to his enmity.

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