1928
But Smith himself felt the cheers were no more than Roosevelt deserved—and in September theGovernor asked Roosevelt to be his successor in Albany.Moses had argued against the choice. There are indications that he half-expected Smith to name him instead, to try to force him on the DemocraticParty. Although he had always identified himself as an "independentRepublican" when reporters asked him his political affiliation, he quietlyenrolled as a Democrat when he registered to vote in 1928—a bit ofopportunism that did him no good, since his name was never seriouslymentioned for the Governorship that year by Smith or anyone else.Moreover, among those men whose names were seriously considered,Roosevelt was the one Moses least wanted to get the post. He told theconclaves of Democratic leaders to which Smith brought him thatRoosevelt did not possess either the mental capacity or the application to beGovernor. To Frances Perkins, he said that Roosevelt's only asset was asmile. "It's a pity to have to have him and that Al has set his heart on him,"he told her. "It's un-doubtedly a good name to carry the ticket with . . . but, of course, he isn'tquite bright." The other Smith aides agreed with this view, but mentalcapacity was not as important to them as political realities. With "Rum,Romanism and Tammany" rapidly becoming the overriding issue of thepresidential campaign, they feared that only Roosevelt's name on the ticketcould keep New York's upstate Protestant Drys from stampeding into theRepublican camp—and denying Smith the forty-five electoral votes of hisown state. Estimating that Roosevelt was a full 200,000 votes stronger thanany other candidate, they felt that he was the only man with a chance todefeat the attractive GOP gubernatorial nominee, Attorney General AlbertOttinger. As for his ability, Smith's advisers felt he didn't need much; theyfelt that Moses' reorganization had so streamlined the state government thatRoosevelt's lack of administrative experience would not be serious. AndSmith himself had a higher opinion of Roosevelt's ability than his aides, and
he emphasized that Roosevelt's nomination would assure the party ofhaving a candidate of integrity.Roosevelt was genuinely reluctant to run—he and Howe had decided thatwith the nation prosperous under a Republican President, 1928 was notgoing to be a Democratic year and that their original timetable, calling for agubernatorial run in 1932, was correct. To stay out of the reach ofpersuasion while the State Democratic Convention was convening inRochester, he took himself off to Warm Springs. But he could not escapethe telephone, and over it Smith persuaded him to run. The next night, hewas nominated by acclamation. Moses turned to Emily Smith and said,shouting so she could hear him above the uproar: "He'll make a goodcandidate but a lousy Governor”
1932
Smith had plenty to be bitter about. Roosevelt's systematic—and pointed—disregard of his predecessor had continued. Smith could not reconcilehimself to the fact that the younger man, of whom he had been so fond andto whom he had given the gubernatorial nomination, had turned on him.Friends who visited him in New York found that Roosevelt was becomingalmost an obsession with him. "Do you know, by God, that he has neverconsulted me about a damn thing since he has been Governor?" he said toone. "He has taken bad advice from sources not friendly to me. He hasignored me!"
But in early 1932, Smith's bitterness spilled over. His intimates would longdebate whether Smith entered the presidential race because he wanted thenomination himself or because he wanted to deny it to the man who hadtreated him so cavalierly. Probably both elements were mixed. Certainly,Smith was motivated by personal ambition: in 1932, he was, after all, onlyfifty-eight years old, still vigorous and bored with the life of a businessman.He was motivated also by the fact that the Depression made election of theDemocratic candidate, even a Catholic Democratic candidate, a virtualcertainty, and he desperately wanted to prove that being a Catholic and anIrishman did not disqualify a man from the presidency. One visitor,listening to Smith recount how it had been the religious issue that haddefeated him in 1928, said, "He felt so terribly hurt, so outraged by that, andthe point that he was making was that having been defeated on that issue ina year in which he was bound to be defeated, everybody, including FDR,should have stood aside to let him have the nomination in a year in whichhe could have been elected! He was very much wrought up about it, hepounded his fists and his voice got loud. He shouted at times in that
conversation." But no consideration was stronger than Smith's feelingstowardRoosevelt in pushing him at the last moment into a race foredoomed by thefact that Roosevelt had a four-year head start.Moses saw at once that the effort was hopeless. "The Smith movementnever had a chance," he was to recall. "It started very late, and really had noorganization to speak of." He never let himself be deluded by thosereminders of past glories which gave Belle Moskowitz, Henry Moskowitz,Judge Proskauer, Herbert Bayard Swope and George McLaughlin flashes ofhope: the rallying of Walker and Tammany to Smith's side after Roosevelthad authorized Samuel Seabury to investigate corruption in New York City;the defection to Smith's banner of big-city organizations and the consequentraising of his delegate count to 201; the wild cheers of the tremendousthrong that lined his route from the La Salle Street Station in Chicago to theCongress Hotel, where a Smith-for-President headquarters had been hastilyestablished. But practical realities did not weigh with Moses where AlSmith was concerned. Moses was one of those who struggled to the end inconvention maneuvering so bitter that Ed Flynn called it "a fight to thedeath," who fought to hold together an alliance of dark horses that deniedRoosevelt the nomination until the fourth ballot, who thought for a fewbrief hours that they actually had Roosevelt stopped and would be able toforce the party to turn to Smith, and whose hopes were finally dashed whenthe ex-Governor's old adversary, William Randolph Hearst, used hisinfluence with California's William G. McAdoo and John Nance Garner,Governor of Texas, to force the California and Texas delegations to switchto Roosevelt. Moses was one of the small group of friends who sat downwith Smith in front of a radio in the Congress Hotel to listen to the lastballot, who watched the former Governor haul himself wearily out of hischair as soon as McAdoo began the speech that signaled the Californiaswitch and with a wave of his hand direct them to start packing so theycould leave Chicago. He was one of those who sneaked out of the CongressHotel by a side door with Smith at the moment that crowds were jammingthe front entrance to greet the arriving Roosevelt, who listened to the ex-Governor, cornered by reporters, refuse to say he would support his party'schoice and who watched anxiously as Smith sat silent on the long train ride
home with his face marked by what one observer called a "tired sadness."And if Moses accepted Smith's defeat with his mind, he never accepted itwith his heart. A month after the convention, with "Happy Days Are HereAgain" drowning out the strains of "The Sidewalks of New York" forever inthe Democratic Party's consciousness, Smith's campaign staff held its firstand only reunion, complete with a menu featuring "Nuts McAdoo," "CeleryFarley" and "Branchless Olives Roosevelt" in the Empire State Club in theEmpire State Building. And Moses' contribution to the occasion reflectedhis bitterness. It was a quotation from Shakespeare that he selected for anepigraph on the menu's cover: Politics is a thieves' game.
1933
"He had a real conviction about Smith," Moses told an interviewer. "Itamounted to an actual hatred. He felt that Smith had prevented him frombeing Governor and if he had been Governor he would have been President.Seabury hated the Governor, really hated him." By 1933, wrote a Seaburybiographer, "his anti-Tammany stand was not merely a cause. It was amania." The narrowness of his perspective made him feel that the mostsignificant fact about Moses was that he was Smith's protege. If Mosesbecame mayor, Seabury thought, the ex-Governor would have anopportunity to move Tammany quietly back into control of City Hall.Reform's great opportunity to cleanse the city, the opportunity he had givenit, would be lost.When Joseph Price, following the Fusion Conference Committee meeting,told Seabury its members were for Moses, Seabury refused to approve thechoice. And he strongly hinted—he would "reserve all personal liberty ofaction" was the way he put it—that if the committee nominated Moses, hewould enter his own candidate in the race. Recalling his own feelings,Moses said later: "Nobody could be elected without Seabury. With Seaburyon his side, anyone running on a Fusion ticket could have won that year.Without him—no, it would have been absolutely impossible to win." Mosesissued a statement saying: "I am not a candidate for the Fusion nominationfor mayor and should not accept the nomination if it were offered to me."The Fusion leaders agreed that Seabury's support was crucial. And even ifthey hadn't felt that way, they would have been reluctant to go against hiswishes. They began looking for other candidates. Price drafted an angrystatement of resignation from the committee. "The best equipped and mostable man considered for the Fusion nomination, a man fearless andindependent, was objected to by Judge Seabury upon the narrow-mindedreason that he is a close friend of Alfred E. Smith, the most popular man inNew York City," the statement said. "The Fusion Conference itself waspractically unanimous for Mr. Moses. . . ." But Price was persuaded towithdraw his resignation, to leave unpublished his statement—and to joinwith the rest of the committee in a search for another candidate.Five reformers were to be offered the nomination during the hectic weeksthat followed.
But these were men to whom politics was something more than an avenuefor the realization of personal ambitions. Two of the five—judges—said that they were happy being judges; a third, a business executive,preferred a career in private life to one in public. And if they did havepolitical ambitions, they subordinated them to principle. RaymondIngersoll, fifty-eight, a wealthy respected social worker who had served as apark commissioner in the Mitchel administration and as a campaignmanager in Smith's 1924 gubernatorial campaign, wanted to be mayor butwas afraid his health would not allow him to do the job properly, and so hedeclined the nomination. Then Seabury and Maurice P. Davidson, chairmanof the City Fusion Party, taking a room in the Hotel Commodore to avoidreporters, offered the nomination to Nathan Straus. Wrote Davidson: "Iremember how he came into the room; slim, well-groomed, and how heremoved his gloves, laid down his hat and cane, and how delighted he waswith the offer, and how he said 'nothing has occurred in my lifetime orwould ever occur which would bring me greater happiness than theopportunity to serve as mayor of the City of New York, but I ask forty-eighthours to consider.' We met again several days later, and he said that he haddiscussed the matter with some of his advisers and had decided to decline. .. . The ill-fated star of Adolf Hitler was rising. . . . Jews were accused byHitler of endeavoring to encompass the control and government of thewhole world. Ridiculous and absurd as those charges were, Nathan Strausrefused to accept a nomination for Mayor at a time when Herbert Lehmanwas Governor because it might give credence in some quarters to Mr.Hitler's charges. He felt that in the interest of the welfare of his own peopleof the Jewish faith and in order not to handicap the success of the reformmovement in New York it was up to him to subordinate any and all personalambition in the interests of the public good and he, too, therefore declined."There was a politician who wanted the nomination, wanted it desperately."Fiorello H. La Guardia was standing in the wings—not standing, butmoving around very, very rapidly," Davidson was to write. "He would sendfor me every once in a while and say, 'How are you getting on?' . . . Hewould say, 'Well, who's your latest mayor?' and I would tell him. He wouldjump around and shake his fist and he'd say, 'Well, there's only one man
going to be the candidate, and I'm the man. I'm going to run. I want to bemayor.' "La Guardia, a nominal Republican too liberal for most Republicans, hadalready lunged for the prize twice before. In 1921, president of the Board ofAldermen, he had sought the nomination from the Fusion committee ofwhich Moses was secretary, but the reformers had turned instead to HenryCurran, one of their own, and when La Guardia ran against Curran in theRepublican primary, he had failed to carry a single borough. In 1929, theLittle Flower had received the Republican nomination, and the onlyremarkable aspect of his campaign against Jimmy Walker, then at the heightof his popularity, was the size of his defeat: failing to carry a singleassembly district, La Guardia received only 367,675 votes to Walker's867,522. Then, in 1932, after five terms as a congressman from Latin EastHarlem, where he had constructed an aptly named personal Italian-Americanpolitical machine—the Gibboni (apes)—La Guardia had been defeated by aTammany hack. Out of a job at the age of fifty, branded a loser, only bywinning the mayoralty could he resuscitate a political career that seemed tobe gasping out its last breath.La Guardia possessed qualifications for making the run beyond the factthat, half Jewish and half Italian, married first to a Catholic and then to aLutheran of German descent, himself a Mason and an Episcopalian, he waspractically a balanced ticket all by himself. Campaigning for mayor in1929, he had made charges—many of the city's magistrates were corrupt;except for Al Smith, "there isn't a Tammany politician that would care tohave his bank account examined"—that the city had thought exaggerateduntil the Seabury investigations, which began just a month after theelection, had proved that most of them were understatements. As the TinBox Parade swung into full stride, the Times commented that La Guardiawas the only man with the right "to stand up in New York City today andsay: 'I told you so.'"But La Guardia, son of immigrants, raised in tenements, possessor ofneither a high-school nor an undergraduate college degree,* was from adifferent background than the reformers, and this was not an unimportant
point with them. The members of the Fusion Conference Committee, andmuch of that segment of New York for which the committee spoke, were, asone of La Guardia's biographers put it, "educated at the best colleges,financially secure, eminent in the professions and business, and primarilyold-stock American Protestant but also significantly Jewish. . . . The fusion-ists came, in short, from Gotham's gentry." And the attitude of many ofthem was, if not bigoted, at least parochial. "They preferred one of theirown kind as Mayor or at least a type more like themselves" than theswarthy little Italian-American.La Guardia's personal style was screaming, ranting, fist-shaking and morethan a little irresponsible. (Learning that a family had been burned to deathwhile the mother tried unsuccessfully to telephone the Fire Department, heinsinuated that the telephone company was guilty of murder. Testifyingbefore a legislative committee on rent controls, he said, "I come not topraise the landlord but to bury him.") These men who distrusted excessdistrusted him. And he did not hesitate to play melting-pot politics, to wavethe bloody flag, to appeal, in one of the seven languages in which he couldharangue an audience, to the insecurities, resentments and prejudices of theethnic groups in the immigrant district he had represented in Congress. ("Ican outdemagogue the best of demagogues," he told one aide. "I inventedthe low blow," he boasted to another.) His naked ambition for high office,his cockiness, truculence and violent temper—while he was president of theBoard of Aldermen, Curran once had to restrain him physically fromstriking the City Comptroller—repelled them.
* He had earned an LL.B. from New York University Law School byattending classes, mostly in the evening, from 1907 to 1910.Furthermore, although the reformers considered themselves liberals, theirdefinition of the term was decidedly pre-Depression, and La Guardia wasfar too liberal for them. A New Dealer before the New Deal, he made acareer for himself as a leader of the have-nots against the haves—and theywere haves. His efforts in Congress might have made him, in hisbiographer's words, "the plumed knight of organized labor," but organizedlabor, militant, aggressive organized labor, was not precisely whatreformers had in mind when they spoke moist-eyed of the working man. LaGuardia lashed out, moreover, at the city's businessmen who were Fusion'sfinancial cornerstones, charging, without offering proof, that big propertyowners were receiving low assessments on their property. When in 1929 heattempted to falsely persuade voters that he was a Fusion as well as aRepublican candidate, the Citizens Union replied with a statementcharacterizing him as an opportunistic, excitable, unpredictable radical.Many reformers, La Guardia's biographers say, were happy that his ousterfrom Congress had apparently put an end to "an obnoxious career propelledby unstable and dangerous ambitions." The fact that in 1933 La Guardiawas "the only professional Republican politician in the city who coulddramatize both himself and an issue" did not move them. Moreover,Republican leaders detested this Republican whom they considered aradical. They flatly refused to accept him. Seabury, while not committinghimself, noted that La Guardia was an excellent campaigner; the judgewanted to win. But every time La Guardia's name was brought up, it wasgreeted with open hostility by most other members of the FusionConference Committee. Running out of candidates, they began again tolean to Moses. Price asked him to reconsider his withdrawal. Seabury beganpushing more strongly for La Guardia, possibly because he saw him as theonly remaining viable alternative to Moses, but on July 26 Price took aninformal telephone poll of the Fusion Conference Committee. The vote waseighteen for Moses, five for La Guardia. Moses agreed to let Price presenthis name again. He felt that Seabury, confronted by the fait accompli of thenomination, would not split the movement and would back him.
The Fusion leaders felt the same way. A meeting of the committee wasscheduled for the following afternoon at the Lawyers Club, 115 Broadway,at 3 p.m. A room was reserved. Reporters were alerted that an importantannouncement would be made. Everything was in readiness to offer Mosesthe Fusion nomination for Mayor of the City of New York. As late as noonon July 27, Moses must have felt confident that he had it.But at noon on July 27, three hours before the meeting was to convene,Seabury invited Davidson to lunch at the Bankers Club and demanded thenomination for La Guardia. When Davidson told him that the committeehad decided to give it to Moses, Seabury struck the table with his clenchedfist so hard that dishes rattled loudly in the suddenly hushed dining room."You sold out to Tammany Hall," the judge shouted. "I'll denounce you andeverybody else. You sold out the movement to Tammany Hall." Leaving hisguest at the table, he strode out of the dining room to theelevator. Davidson, remonstrating, followed, but Seabury, in the elevator,turned and said, "You sold out. Goodbye"—and the door shut in Davidson'sface.Striding back to his office, which was located at 120 Broadway, directlyacross from the Lawyers Club where the Fusion Committee was to meet,Seabury issued a statement broadly hinting that he would run another ticket.The Fusion leaders, realizing that they had miscalculated, began to searchfrantically for a new candidate. Moses, learning of these developments bytelephone from Price, told him that he didn't want his name placed innomination.In an attempt to placate Seabury while not alienating the Republicans, whostill refused to nominate La Guardia, the committee nominated independentDemocrat John F. O'Ryan, former member of the City Transit Commission.The reporters covering the Fusion meeting ran across Broadway toSeabury's office to learn his reaction. Seabury hardly knew O'Ryan—andsince he knew his ignorance was shared by the voters, he believed O'Ryancould not win. Seeing by now a tiger behind every bush, the Judge told thereporters that this was the reason O'Ryan had been nominated. Tammany, hecharged, had forced Republican leaders, some of whom "have long been the
owned and operated chattels of Tammany Hall," to nominate a weakcandidate. O'Ryan withdrew for the sake of unity. A new "harmonycommittee" was formed. It included not only Seabury but the one man whocould match him in prestige among the reformers, Charles Culp ("CC")Burlingham, who at eighty-two still had the gift of making men forget theirdifferences and remember their common cause. When Seabury began toroar "sellout" during one harmony committee meeting, Burlingham said,"Sit down, Sam, sit down." While the other members goggled at hearing theBishop called by his first name, he sat down. And after midnight on August4, CC persuaded the committee members, with the exception of Price andDavidson, who held out for Moses to the last, to authorize Seabury to call awaiting La Guardia and tell him the nomination was his.The reform movement of New York City had wanted Robert Moses formayor. Of all the influential reformers, only one had been firmly opposed tohim. Given the almost certain success in 1933 of a Fusion ticket headed byso popular a candidate, it is hardly an overstatement to say that only oneman had stood between Moses and the mayoralty, between Moses andsupreme power in the city. But that man had stood fast; at the last moment,as Moses must have felt the prize securely within his grasp, it was deniedhim
