English short Nobels

1915: World War I

Carl Ackerman ’13

Carl Ackerman, among the earliest graduates of the Journalism School and in later years the dean who transformed the school into a graduate institution, reported extensively from Berlin and London for United Press on the grueling grind of the Great War.

United Press – July 28, 1915
“As Seen in Germany”
By Carl W. Ackerman

[Note: This text is presented exactly as it was in the original 1915 printing. Copy-editing issues have been retained in the interest of journalistic and historical integrity.]

Berlin, July 28^th—Germany’s year of war in the west has crippled France and shamed the English. From the outset of the war, the Germans developed an initiative that gave them a superiority over their enemies, and since then, no effort of the French and British commanders, has been equal to the task of overpowering the numerically Teutons.

Only once has Germany been superior in numbers to her western opponents, according to the claim of Teutonic authorities. That was during the rush through Belgium and to Paris. The superiority at that time was due to the slow mobilization of the French and the breakdown of the English plans for hurrying a large army to the continent. From the days of the Battle of the Marne, the Germans have had to fight with weaker forces than their enemies, and yet never have they been overwhelmed.

The Germans taught the French and English the secrets of defensive entrenching; the Germans revealed the superiority of siege guns over the strongest fortresses; the Germans first discovered the modern necessity for high powered shells and machine guns. All these factors of warfare were introduced by the Germans in the west. The Germans have kept ahead of their antagonists as new problem after new problem has come in the front, and the year’s balance is, therefore, greatly in their favor.

Only once did the German military machine miscalculate. That was in the battle before the gates of Paris.  General von Kluek was not informed that a field army had been hidden away in Paris, prepared to strike at his flank, and the German General Staff did not suppose the French army had in General Foch a great military leader capable of splitting the Teutonics’ centre east of Paris and driving it back to the Aisne. General von Moltke, who was a sick man throughout the summer campaign, was later replaced as chief of the General Staff by General von Falkenhayn, and since then, Germany has been well satisfied with the progress of events in the west.

The retreat from Paris will go down in German history as a brilliant feat of arms because of the manner in which it was checked at the Aisne. So puzzled were the Allies by the German maneuvers that Sir John French actually reported in the early days of the Battle of the Aisne that it probably was only a reargued action on the part of the Germans. How the Kaiser’s panting troops, almost exhausted after the Marne fighting, were able to save themselves at the Aisne, will find a permanent place in the heroic tales which this war will give to history.

In the conflicts that followed the Battle of the Aisne, the Germans completely outmaneuvered their antagonists. It is customary in England to say the Germans are defeated because they didn’t get to Dunkirk and Calais. If those two towns had been captured, the English would not be proclaiming victories for themselves, say the Germans, because Dieppo and Harve were saved from the Kaiser’s grasp. As a matter of fact, while the capture of Dunkirk and Calais would have been welcomed by the Germans, the security of those seaports is not a strategic defeat for the Germans. England in the peace conference after the war will be sufficient for German’s purposes [sic].

The French and English were able to save Dunkirk and Calais, but their offensive plans were sadly overturned by the Germans. When General Joffre started northward after the Battle of the Aisne, it was his intention to outflank the Germans, or failing that to save western Belgium and to prevent the fall of Antwerp. Sir John French’s transfer of the British expeditionary force from Coissons to Ypres was for the express purpose of preventing the Germans advancing beyond Brussels. The Germans won the campaign, for although they didn’t reach Dunkirk and Calais, they captured Antwerp and Ostend and held the British in complete check. The story has yet to be told of how the British troops were defeated at LaBassee, and how the British government lied to its people and deliberately reported a defeat as a victory.

Elsewhere in the west, the Germans have more than held their own against superior numbers. They have delivered counter attacks for every offensive developed by the enemy, and in the minor exchanges that have occurred since the siege of trenches began, the Germans have fully held their own. The most satisfactory of all these encounters to the Germans was the recent battle—north and east of Ypres, at which the English were forced to give ground and were put on the defensive. This engagement followed soon after the date fixed by Lord Kitchener for the long promised English offensive to begin May 1st. The Germans believe this second battle of Ypres has done more to confuse the English and create discontent among them than any other event of the war. By every law of warfare the British ought greatly to have outnumbered the Germans, and yet the latter were able to drive the enemy back almost at will. Ypres itself was saved to the English by little more than an accident. The British newspapers were preparing the public for its evacuation when more pressing interests demanded the attention of the Germans elsewhere.

The loss of the western border of Alsace to the French is the only continental defeat the Germans must acknowledge at the close of the first year of the war. The sentimental importance to the French of seizing a part of Alsatian territory far outweighs the military value to Germany of driving the French across the Vosges. At present the French hold little more than the foothills of the Vosges. This they have been able to do because the Alsatian slopes of the Vosges are so precipitous that troops coming down hill have an immense advantage over those trying to go uphill. But if the war goes far into its second year, and if the eastern situation permits, the French will have to climb back again.

1917: The Russian Revolution

George Sokolsky ’58

George Sokolsky would later become a prominent foe of communism, but in early 1917 he was expelled from the Journalism School for socialist activism and did not receive his degree for 40 years. Unfazed, Sokolsky went to Moscow to cover the Russian Revolution for the Russian Daily News, where watching the Bolshevik coup in “Red October” shattered his idealism forever.

Russian Daily News – November 17, 1917
“Trotsky Fails to Deny Rumour of Rejection of Peace Offer, Attacks ‘Russian Daily News,’ 
Claims to have Influenced Foreign Ambassadors into Recognizing him”
By George Sokolsky

In the opening of his speech on Friday night Leon Trotsky spoke as Minister for Foreign Affairs, and explained how the Petrograd diplomats were being influenced into recognizing the Bolshevik Government. Representatives from Embassies and Missions, were coming to Smolny Institute, under the official pretext of procuring licences for automobiles, etc., but in reality they desired to get some opportunity of observing the workings of this peculiar Government machinery. Representatives from Allied Technical Missions are even trying to convince Trotsky, that they are in sympathy with the Soviet Government, and opposed to the attitude taken by the Embassies. During the anxious days when Kerensky’s troops were standing before Petrograd, the entire bourgeoisie, and with them the foreign diplomats, thought that the overthrow of the Soviet Government was a mere question of hours. Since Krasnoff’s troops had been defeated, respect for the Soviet Government among the Diplomats had increased fifty per cent, and the triumph in Moscow will raise it another fifty per cent.

The Diplomats are quite right in only recognizing force, but the force of the Soviets is at the same time, a force which will work exclusively for the people. The Government had not inspired much confidence while the gangs of Kerensky were in arms against it, but now it is becoming so solid that the Diplomats are liable to break their teeth if they try to bite it. All hopes of Kerensky’s resurrection have now vanished, therefore the Peace Proclamation will be presented to them officially, and will receive due consideration. Then Trotzky spoke about Ledebour, the German Socialist leader, who had sent his congratulations to the new Government. Ledebour was the organiser of the revolt in the German Navy and has in general an enviable revolutionary record. As regards secret Treaties, the veil from them cannot be completely lifted yet, as Neratoff, the assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Kerensky Government told Trotsky that he had handed them over to the British Embassy. Neratoff himself is now in hiding, and an order for his arrest and the detention of all the higher officials of the Ministry has been issued. Trotsky tried to relieve the disappointment apparent among the audience, owing to such sensational literature having been snatched away from them, by declaring that in accordance with the Peace Manifesto addressed to all nations, these secret treaties were binding only in so far as they were not concluded by the counter-revolutionists in contravention of the interests of labour, and the fact that they are being kept at one of the Embassies does not enhance their sanctity. When Trotsky was shown a copy of the Russian edition, of the “Russian Daily News,” which said that Germany would only talk peace with Russia after Monarchy had been re-established, he made the following comment:

“This only shows that the English papers printed in Russian publish just as many lies as the Russian papers printed in Russian.” When asked why such rumours are not being denied, he stated that the Government would have to devote all of its time to this, if it were going to deny all the false rumours which are being spread in the newspapers. The “Dielo Naroda” has become a reservoir for such baseless rumours.

As the second chief of the Soviet he spoke also about the internal policy of the Council of the People’s Commissioners. He made it very plan that he did not attach much importance to the negotiations which are going on among the Socialist parties for a coalition, he personally does not participate in them. The fundamental principle of the New Government is the power of the Soviets, and not the question of personalities. Any bargaining for seats in the Cabinet is repugnant to him. The final conditions of the Maximalists for an understanding have already been made known, and he knew that they are unacceptable to the right wing of the socialists. The negotiations are being continued in order to please the radical Social-Revolutionists, with whom the Bolsheviks want to avoid a break. As stated briefly in this morning’s communiqué, the conditions are as follows: The Central Body, before which the Government shall be responsible, shall consist of 150 members of the Central Soviet, 75 members of provincial Peasants’ Soviets who are not to be appointed by the present Central Peasants’ Soviet, headed by the “Black Hundred” Avksentieff, 80 members from Army and Navy Committees re-elected within the last three months, 50 members from Socialist groups of the Petrograd and Moscow City Dumas of whom 50% are Bolshevik and 40 members from Labour Unions. (2) At least one half of the Cabinet to be Bolsheviks, and the portfolios of Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Labour must be retained by Bolshevik Ministers. Lenin and Trotsky to be Cabinet members. (3) Recognition of the Bolshevik Peace Manifesto, abolition of private property on land, and labour control. (4) Red Guard to be formed all over Russia. This is necessary, as Kerensky was able to terrorise Petrograd with from 1500 to 2000 Cossacks, and such a situation is disgraceful for the proletariat.

An inquiry as to resignation of the Commissioner of Education Lunacharsky inspired Trotsky to make a declaration, which may realize Trotsky’s ambition of being mentioned in the same breath with Robespierre by future generations. Lunacharsky is eminently a litterateur and art critic, and he was so agitated by the destruction of art treasures in Moscow, that he temporarily felt unable to continue his work.

“During the world conflagration caused by the Capitalist rule, more art treasures had been destroyed, and no lover of art could think, without indignation, of the injury done to the Rheims Cathedral. And while we are deeply aggrieved at the destruction of every art treasure, we must keep it before our eyes that we are fighting for the liberation of labour from the yoke of capitalism, a cause to which everything must be sacrificed. The era of Socialism would release such wondrous creative forces, as would compensate in the sphere of art for everything that has been lost. We are now initiating this era, and when the establishment of a direct Government of the people, placing all power in the hands of the Soviets, is only possible after breaking the resistance of the bourgeoisie through civil war, then I exclaim: ‘Long live the Civil War.’”

A delegate from the Revolutionary Committee in Moscow reported that a complete victory had been gained there. He left Moscow on Nov. 15th, at 11 p.m., and when he announced that the Cadets had capitulated at 5 p.m., the audience went frantic with joy. He claimed that the struggle which lasted six days might have ended in two days, if it were not for the fact that the Cadets had fortified themselves at the City Duma, at various public buildings, and at the Kremlin, and artillery fire could therefore not be directed at them unsparingly. During these six days, the arsenal in the Kremlin had been in the hands of the Bolsheviks. The Moscow delegate accused the Cadets of having also occupied hospitals, and having used Red Cross cars for troop transportation. Besides they are alleged to have maltreated their prisoners. The feeling against them ran very high on this account, and the Moscow delegate had to concede the “deplorable fact” that 150 Cadets were killed by soldiers from the Dvinsk Regiment who were recently released from prison when the Metropol Hotel was taken. The Cadets were supported by the so-called White Guards, which is recruited from students, doctors, lawyers, and other members of the liberal professions. The entire garrison sided with the Revolutionary Committee. A battle only raged in the centre of town, while there had been few incidents in the outskirts. Drunken excesses were denied. During searches in private houses the Bolsheviks troops may have confiscated some wine, and drunk it, but there were no excesses on an extensive scale. If any outrages occurred, it was the work of the criminal elements and not of the Red Guard. In one district a detachment of French troops had participated in bombarding the Regional Soviet building, but all other reports about the participation of French troops in the fighting could not be verified. In Kaluga the Cossacks are in possession of the town, and a punitive expedition will have to be sent to the town. The agreement signed with the Cadets in Moscow provides the latter surrendering their arms.

A representative from the employees of the Petrograd City Duma read a resolution, in which they pledged their support to the Soviet Government. A similar resolution was read by the representative of the workers of the Military Port of Petrograd.

A sailor spoke in threatening tones about the negotiations going on between the Bolsheviks and other Socialist parties. The presidium were rather startled, and felt apparently uncomfortable when he shouted to the audience, which was almost unanimously with him, that the soldiers and workingmen will not tolerate any further bargaining, that for them it was not a party issue. They were Bolsheviks because the Bolshevik leaders were for a Soviet Government, they wanted this and nothing else. The revolution was made by the masses, the Bolshevik leaders had only placed themselves at its head. It is a lie that the peasants did not want a Soviet Government. He came himself from the peasants, and knew what he was talking about. If the Bolsheviks were also going to compromise, they would be thrown on to the rubbish heap along with the other Socialists. He proposed a resolution demanding that the Government should not make any further concessions. Volodarski, one of the Vice-Presidents, moved a resolution stipulating the terms on which an agreement with the other Socialist parties is possible, and it was passed unanimously. It is identical with the terms outlined.

1923: The Sunday Times

Lester Markel ’14

In more than 40 years as Sunday editor of the New York Times, beginning in 1923, Lester Markel created the Week in Review section, influenced the paper’s coverage of countless issues and shaped one of the great hubs of American discourse, the Sunday issue of the Times.

The Saturday Review – March 11, 1961
“Interpretation of Interpretation”
By Lester Markel

There is a great to-do these days in newspaper and TV circles about “interpretation” — a word that denotes (at least for me) an endeavor to define the significance of the news, to supply its background, to give meaning to the bare facts of events.

Arguments and counterarguments have been flung about. Some editors see in the process Great Promise; others, with a rating high in decibels if not in logic, discern in it Great Peril.

All this may strike the lay reader as a purely parochial dispute. Yet to my mind it is a paramount: issue, one of grave import to every citizen, even to the functioning of democracy itself.

The problem of American public opinion is of paramount importance. If American public opinion is well informed, our course is likely to be a sound one. If it is uninformed or badly informed, our course may well be disastrous. And we must keep in mind always that the world looks to us for leadership.

Whether we have an informed opinion depends in large degree on the job done by the mass media in making understandable the great issues of the day, in clarifying the ever-increasing complexities of global events. Other agencies obviously play major roles in the opinion operation. The President, for example, through his messages, speeches and press conferences, can influence opinion. But the day-by-day, the grass-roots job, is one that must be done by the mass media, especially the newspaper.

What, then, what is the Great Debate about?

Before setting out the argument, it might be useful further to define that moot word “interpretation.” There are, as I see it, three approaches in dealing with news; first, the basic facts; second, the interpretation of these facts; third, the comment on them. Thus:

What Mr. Khrushchev says about Mr. Kennedy is spot news.

Why Mr. Khrushchev says these things is interpretation.

Whether Mr. Khrushchev should have said these things and what we should do about him is opinion.

It is crucial that the difference between interpretation and opinion be fully recognized. Interpretation is anobjective appraisal, based on background, knowledge of a situation, and analysis of the primary and related facts. Editorial opinion, on the other hand, is a subjective judgment; it is a definite taking of sides; it is likely to be exhortation; it is always an attempt to be a Solomon—even if it turns out to be a Sheba—pronouncement.

This difference is vital and it cannot have too much emphasis; opinion must be held, almost religiously, to the editorial page; interpretation is an essential part of the news.

Those who oppose interpretation in the sense in which I have defined it do so on three main counts:

First, they contend that the job of the newspaper is to confine itself to “factual reporting”; that some “background” is admissible but that it shall be only a statement of “what has gone before” and not at all an effort to supply meaning and to consider what is likely to come next. Thus a difference is made between what these critics call “reporting in depth” and “interpretation,” and the latter is passionately denounced.

Second, they assert that “interpretation” leads inevitably to editorializing. This is condemned as a reversion to old-time journalism, the journalism of the saffron days of the Pulitzers and the Hearsts when there was “personal bias in the reporting of the news.”

Third, they hold that the job is too tough and too dangerous. “You get into trouble, for there are many meanings.” And “to know the truth when there are many opinions is an attribute of the gods, not ordinarily given to man.” And there is peril that “interpretation may lose the confidence of the reader.”

Those, like myself, who have been crusading for more interpretation offer three arguments in rebuttal to the three counts set out above.

The first count—that interpretation is a sinful assault on “factual reporting”—I consider a huge illusion. These critics seem to beheve that the presentation of the “facts” is a simple and obvious process. I hold that it is not; I ask: what facts?

The reporter, the most objective of reporters, collects fifty facts. Out of the fifty he selects twelve to include in his story (there is such a thing as space limitation). Thus he discards thirty-eight. This is Judgment Number One.

Then the reporter or his editor decides which of the facts shall be the first paragraph of the story, thus emphasizing one fact above the other eleven. This is Judgment Number Two.

Then the editor decides whether the story shall be placed on page one or page twelve; on page one it will command many times the attention it would on page twelve. This is Judgment Number Three.

This so-called factual presentation is thus subjected to three judgments, all of them most humanly and most ungodly made. So I inquire: What has happened to this much-acclaimed “objectivity” which the critics blazon before us interpreters?

The second count in the indictment—that you cannot interpret without falling into the morass of editorializing—I consider another illusion. Because, as I have indicated above, interpretation is an objectivejudgment, whereas opinion is a subjective one; and so-called factual reporting requires as much selection as does “interpretation,” both involving judgments and editorial processes for which no simple rules and regulations can be set.

I believe in objectivity as far as it is humanly possible. Even if we can never attain it wholly, we should cherish it as an ideal. But I contend that objectivity is not the fundamental issue in this debate.

The definition of “reporting in depth” as the presentation of the spot facts plus a recounting of some of the antecedent facts, I do not accept. This may be reporting in width—that is, two-dimensional rather than one-dimensional presentation—but the third and all-important dimension is missing; genuine interpretation.

The third count in the indictment—that interpretation is tough and dangerous—I also reject, even though part of my case is necessarily personal.

As for the toughness of the job, it is being done every day by the best and the most admired reporters. (I am not speaking here of columnists. These are an entirely different breed of bird and their proper nest is on the editorial page where they can find the limbs on which they love to go out.) I concede that too many reporters, under the guise of interpretation, have been dishing up opinion instead of background and have thereby provided horrible examples with which the “factual” boys have been able to lambaste the cause of interpretation. But these transgressions do not negate the true facts.

In further refutation I point immodestly to the “News of the Week in Review” section of the New York Times, where for some twenty-five vears we have been doing a job of explanation without opinion, of interpretation without slant. I do not think we have any special tricks or fancy formulas. We apply our best editorial sense, trying to make the appraisal as stone-cold (but graphic) as any warm-blooded animal can achieve. Therefore I am convinced from personal experience that the job can be done effectively.

As for possible dangers, sure they exist—just as they exist in “factual reporting.” But are we to surrender to them? Are we to leave interpretation and illumination to harried news weeklies or hurried television? To the “Britannicas” or to the Winchells?

No, the job of explanation is primarily ours. And the reader should insist that we fulfill that assignment, that we do our best to inform all the people some of the time and at least some of the people all of the time, so that no one will be able to fool all of the people all of the time.

1929: Modern Art

Emily Genauer ’30

Beginning her career with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1929, Emily Genauer spent more than four decades championing then-controversial modern artists like Marc Chagall and Diego Rivera, shaping Americans’ perceptions of fine art, and resisting editorial pressure to ignore leftist artists like Pablo Picasso.

The New York World-Telegram – June 8, 1948
“Maybe The Blurb Man Blurs The Paintings”
By Emily Genauer

An advertising art director is a man who plans and puts together the illustrated advertisements, posters, leaflets, calendars, et al., which confront you practically every time you open your eyes. Or, if you want to be fancy about it, he is—I quote from a brochure handed out at the current Art Directors Club exhibition at the Grand Central Galleries—”the creative designer, economist, psychologist and sociologist… contouring product-purchasing points of view.”

His job is to hit the bull’s eye in a split second. He has got to make the casual passer-by stop, look, read his message and then go out and spend his money for a product he may or may not really want.

As the paid employee of the manufacturer of that product, the art director has no responsibility whatever to educate the public, despite the fact that he controls the one medium which reaches more of that public than any other, and consequently has the greatest education potentialities.

Art need have no place in his figuring. To begin with, the creative artist’s aim is opposed to his own. The artist is interested in saying his piece, not fast and loud, but profoundly and beautifully. If it never quite gets said completely, so much the better.

Yet more and more in recent years art directors have been incorporating the fine arts, either directly or indirectly, into their advertisements. Why? They have found that art, whatever its intrinsic character or however “deep” its message, can be so unhackneyed, so original, so arresting in its physical form as to capture the attention of the surfeited observer much more effectively than the slickest, time-tried optical trickery.

View is Indorsed.

Paul Smith, president of the Art Directors Club said as much in an address opening the Art Directors Club show the other day. Too much of advertising strategy has been based on the findings of the research agencies, he said. So-called readership devices have been used so frequently as to lose their power. The point of diminishing returns is being reached. It is a case, he said, of “putting the chart before the course.”

What course advertising is taking right now and—what concerns us more right here—what part art is playing in it, you can see from the exhibition. To be sure, there is less straight reproduction of paintings in the 330 examples of specially selected advertisements included in the show, than within the past few years. One finds work by Salvador Dali, Fletcher Martin, Julien Binford and a few others whose names are familiar on art gallery row, which looks as if it might have been acquired ready-made for use in ads.

On the other hand one comes more frequently that in the past on pictures by well-known artists who have executed special jobs for an individual client. For this the art director deserves special kudos. It took a lively imagination, for instance, on the part of one of them to know from Julio de Diego’s whimsical, surrealist paintings that he could execute exactly the sort of thing needed to project a message promoting a travel magazine. Ben Shahn, Bernard Perlin and others also have executed special assignments admirably.

Exceptional Cases.

But these are exceptions. The greatest influence of art on the ads this last year has been in the development of lay-out techniques and in ideas. The art directors clearly are keen admirers of Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and the Bauhaus school of non-objective painters. Any number of fabric advertisements are constructed according to the collage technique of the early abstractionists. Surrealism has strongly colored their thinking.

It’s safe to say that modern advertising would look completely different today from what it does, had not progressive, courageous, modern artists been content to forego the demands and assured income of advertisers over recent years to pursue instead their own lonely, largely unpurchased and even much ridiculed experiments with new art forms.

Coincidentally with the Art Directors Club show there is an exhibition on at the Society of Illustrators of leisure-time paintings by members. Many of these men have been responsible for the illustrations which appear in the ads hung at the large show. It might have been expected that in their off-hour works they would throw off the shackles of direction and prescriptions of space and message. The majority of them, however, have executed proficient, sharply realistic studies of landscape revealing little or no freedom of imagination or technique. (There are a few exceptions, among them Howard Handy, Lester Beall and Stahl.)

One shouldn’t, however, be too quick to criticize this rigidity. It is not easy for one who year in and year out works according to assignment suddenly to throw off his bonds and become “creative.”

1929: The Great Depression

Merryle Stanley Rukeyser ’17

As one of America’s most well-known financial journalists and most popular syndicated columnists, Merryle Stanley Rukeyser wrote extensively on the Crash of ’29 and the Great Depression, the worst economic catastrophe of the 20th century. He was also the first to teach courses in economic and financial writing at the Journalism School.

Nation’s Business, December 1929
“When Stock Buyers Go On Strike”
By Merryle Stanley Rukeyser

The day after prices on the Stock Exchange collapsed so suddenly and completely, the staff of NATION’S BUSINESS was besieged with questions from outsiders and from each other. Who or what caused the collapse? Why did the bankers’ consortium come to the rescue and how? What is the significance of this panic—if it was a panic—and what results may be expected? Some of these we had difficulty answering to our own or others’ satisfaction so we turned them over to Merryle Stanley Rukeyser. This article is his reply.

The utter collapse of prices on the Stock Exchange on Black Thursday, October 24, and the following Tuesday, October 29, was ascribable to the temporary repeal of the law of averages.

Banks, life insurance companies and exchanges are conducted in the belief that human beings on the average will act normally in accordance with past experience. The Stock Exchange is a weather-vane reflecting sentiment but having no opinion of its own. Its operations normally rest on past experience which teaches that there will always be some who wish to sell what others want to buy.

The price level at the Stock Exchange is a barometer measuring the ebb and flow of optimism concerning American business prospects. When optimists are more eager to buy than pessimists are to sell, security prices rise. Conversely, when pessimists are more eager to sell than optimists are to buy, the price level recedes.  In normal times, the price level perpetually vacillates reflecting quick shifts in the winds of opinion.

Unless buyers and sellers were animated by a vast diversity of objectives, the market could not operate smoothly. If, in times of prosperity, everybody wanted to buy and, if at the approach of a recession, everyone desired to sell, orderly markets would be impossible.

What caused the collapse

On those two October days the market suffered temporarily from the lack of cleavage of opinion concerning stocks. From a mechanical standpoint, it is immaterial whether bids (orders to buy) and offers (orders to sell) flow from logical reasoning, hunches, emotions, or necessary liquidation. They affect prices equally whether they come from analysts or suckers. On Black Thursday before the afternoon rally, speculators and investors temporarily were all sellers, with no articulate buyers to take what they were clamoring to sell.

The explanation of the collapse is as simple as that.

The New York Stock Exchange, in its legal form, is a private club, which provides a meeting place where brokers may buy and sell stocks and bonds for themselves and for their clients. The Exchange is interested only in assuring that transactions are made in accordance with “just and equitable principles of trade.” It is a non-profit-making institution, supported by initiation fees, members’ dues, and listing fees.

The Exchange permits dealing only in 1279 selected stocks which have met its austere listing requirements. These stocks have to do with the genuineness of representations made by companies, rather than valuations.

For convenience trading in a listed stock is confined to one of 18 trading posts. At each post cluster “specialists.” They are members who confine their operations mainly to four or five stocks.

The specialist keeps a separate book for each stock in which he specializes, and in this book he lists all the bids that have been made for the stock, and all the offers to sell. If the bids and offers do not match, the next sale usually is made between the highest bid and the lowest offer.

Bids far below the last sale can be entered in the specialist’s book, where they may remain for months until someone is willing to sell stock at that price. Likewise, optimistic sellers can list offers far above the prevailing market price, hoping that in time someone will be willing to bid that much. However, in practice there are natural price areas above and below the current price beyond which the public imagination, as reflected in orders, does not go. On Black Thursday, prices broke below those natural limits.

On normal days, there are numerous bids and offers at each rung of the price ladder above and below recently prevailing prices. The more active the stock the more numerous are the bids and the offers. These bids and offers, which have been placed with the specialist in advance, are supplemented on active trading days by a continuous current flow of current bids and offers which come over direct telegraph wires and cables throughout the country and the world.

Time is the essence of brokerage machinery.

An order and the report of its consummation have accomplished a round trip across the continent within 60 seconds. Such requests to buy and sell shares at fixed prices are reinforced by a huge volume of orders to buy and sell “at the market.” A market order means that the buyer stands willing to accept the lowest “offer” whatever it may be, and that a seller is willing to accept the highest available bid, whatever it may be.

The law of averages tends to balance bids and offers, though of course not precisely. In normal times, the disparity between the buying urge and the selling urge is offset by activities of professional operators. These operators are of two general classes. First, in and out speculators, who want to buy and resell on the same day. And, second, investment houses, pools, and syndicates interested in sponsoring the market behavior of a particular stock.

Buyers not always at hand

Especially in the less active stocks, there is not always an investor at hand to buy when another investor wishes to sell. If no satisfactory bid for the stock is available, the specialist in normal times will take the stock himself slightly below the natural price. The specialist in this role serves the economic function of making the market continuous, instead of intermittent.

He expects to be rewarded as soon as a real investor comes along, to whom he can sell the stock just bought at its natural price. Of course, if the specialist, who assumes the risk of ownership, misjudges the situation, he is likely to sustain a loss. Besides the specialist, there are free lance floor traders among the other members who also try to scalp fractional profits by trading in and out of the same stock on the same day, supplying a demand when the outside demand has momentarily ebbed. The federal and state stock transfer taxes have reduced the profit in scalping and thus cut down the number of floor traders, who were more effective in keeping the market orderly in previous panics.

Moreover, non-member professional traders, who develop round shoulders over the ticker each trading day, also attempt to amass a profit by dexterously going in and out of the market, supplying bids and offers when more permanent holders are temporarily inarticulate.

The second type of supplementary aid given to market activity comes from the interested bankers and syndicates. In sponsoring a stock, they will supply bids and offers above and below the market. Such operations constitute manipulation, which is an unpopular word. When manipulation is intended to make stocks rise far above their worth for the purpose of unloading them on gullible amateurs, it is a dangerous, unworthy, and antisocial form of financial activity.

On the other hand, some manipulation is merely for the purpose of assuring orderly markets.

A torrential flow of stocks

 By 11 o’ clock Thursday, October 24, it was apparent that the usual machinery of the Stock Exchange had broken down. There was a torrential flow of stocks to the market place. It was super-induced by mob psychology and by defects in the marginal system under which one layer of marginal accounts after another became impaired by the very decline of the market itself.

The psychology of the moment which possessed the collective mind, paralyzed the normal buying demand. For a time it seemed that everyone had turned seller. Accordingly, the usual quota of bids for stock on the books of specialists was soon filled by the frantic offers to sell at the market. Furthermore, as the hysteria spread, many who had bids outstanding cancelled them. Accordingly orders to sell at the market were matched against the lowest bid on the specialists’ books.

Sponsoring groups carried their schedule of bids and offers down to a level below the previous day’s close beyond which they estimated that the stock would not break. But stock prices rapidly fell far below these computed boundary lines. When they did, so-called “air pockets” were covered—price areas where there were no bids whatsoever.

Such a situation occurred in Standard Brands, and for a time the specialist informally placed his book under his arm, and walked away from the post. Similar situations occurred in United Gas Improvement, American Telephone and Telegraph, Columbia Carbon, and elsewhere throughout the list.

In the emergency, specialists, floor traders, and outside scalpers were, except in a few instances, afraid to fulfill their usual role of intermediate holders of securities. They were not only saturated with the psychology around them, but they recognized their inability to stand up and buy stocks from millions of excited investors. Outside speculators, too, were discouraged by lack of current information as to what was taking place.

On Black Thursday, the tape was as much as 248 minutes late, and on Tuesday as much as 152 minutes late. The breakdown of the machinery, (which has a capacity of about five million shares a day under present conditions) added to the fear waves.

In describing the breakdown of the law of averages, Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, the bull economist, pointed out:

“During the recession from the September high my index of 225 industrial common stocks moved from 209 ½ to 139. Yet this drop of more than one-third in the price level of stocks was accompanied by no disturbance of the nation’s high-record prosperity.

“I would compare it rather to a run on a bank.

“It should not be taken as commentary on a bank’s management, necessarily, that there should be a run on it. It often means merely that people have got panicky. When they all simultaneously wish to draw out their deposits the bank is unable to pay.

“That is the psychology that prevailed in the stock market. The prime fault lay in the credit structure. There had been an undue eagerness to invest, and people tried to do business on a shoestring.

“They had speculated with margin accounts (putting up a third or less of the purchase price and borrowing the remainder through the broker) which were unsafe, hence when the bear raiders began their final drives of the last week in October, they caught thousands of small holders who had to sell at a sacrifice. After the general level had been reduced, a new crop of forced sales was harvested, and then, with still lower prices, the same thing happened over and over again.”

Sought help from bankers

In times of crisis, groups instinctively turn to their natural leaders, and on Black Thursday pleas for help were rushed to the House of Morgan. Thomas W. Lamont, acting head of the House in the absence of J.P. Morgan, at once summoned the foremost commercial bankers of the city for a conference—George F. Baker, Jr., Charles E. Mitchell, Albert H. Wiggin, Seward Prosser and William C. Potter.

By noon, they had formed a consortium, which agreed to buy pivotal stocks for which there were no other buyers. They agreed to put bids in below the market so that liquidation could go on. Accordingly, they not only assured continuity at the market place, but also by making their intentions public temporarily turned the tide, and declining prices were momentarily checked. Before the gong was run at 3 o’ clock, prices had recovered sharply from the lowest level of the day.

The banking intervention steadied the market on Friday and Saturday, but by Monday the stream of uncompleted liquidation again flowed freely and reached its maximum violence and volume on Tuesday, when more than 16 million shares passed from sellers to buyers, a larger number than ever before in the entire history of the Stock Exchange.

Although the bankers’ motive was to bring order out of chaos in the interest of all, their technique was that of manipulation. The manipulation was four-fold in character. They sought to influence supply and demand by adding to the demand for stock. They sought to allay the panicky fears in the lay mind by setting a public example of sanity and courage, and through reassuring public statements. They sough to turn back the economic forces of destruction by enlisting moral and financial cooperation from wealthy individual outside capitalists, including John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and Jr. And they influenced the situation by cutting down marginal requirements on bank loans to brokers at the height of the panic and by increasing by 992 million dollars in a single week the loans of the New York banks to brokers, rapidly replacing the funds withdrawn from the loan market by frightened out-of-town banks and by corporations, investment trusts, wealthy individuals, and others who had been lending money.

Short sellers encouraged

The support maneuver encouraged profit taking by short sellers who had been operating in the hopes of profiting from a decline. Such short sellers had previously sold at higher prices stock which they did not own. Instead of delivering their own stock to the buyers at 2:15 the next afternoon, in accordance with the rules of the Stock Exchange, they borrowed stock from a third party, and delivered the borrowed stock.

They induced the holder of the borrowed stock to accommodate them by advancing him a fuller cash loan against the stock than any bank would give. Accordingly, these pessimists, bears, or short sellers were on the lookout for an opportunity to rebuy the stock at lower prices, and repay with stock the person from whom they had borrowed certificates.

The bear wanted of course to buy back the stock as cheaply as possible, but when he saw that the bankers were supporting the market he got nervous and tended to join the buying forces, adding to the velocity of the upturn in prices. The extent of the decline suggested an inadequate short interest in the market.

Although they did brilliant and courageous work in turning back the destructive forces of passion and fears, the big bankers were roundly criticized. The shorn lambs, who had lost what they had staked, hated to see the so-called rescue forces buy up stocks below their value at prices which seemed destined to net them a handsome profit.

1934: Eleanor Roosevelt

John Hohenberg ’27

As a young reporter with the New York Evening Journal, John Hohenberg covered the controversial “trial of the century” in which Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son. Hohenberg later returned to the Journalism School, where he became a legendary professor and an administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

The New York Evening Journal – February 14, 1935
“Flares Gleam as 10,000 Cheer Death Verdict”
By John Hohenberg

FLEMINGTON, Feb. 11 – The Main Street that sprang into being under the fierce white light of a thousand flares, that resounded in the wolfish cries of close-packed throngs impatiently awaiting a death chair verdict, that heard a great bell mournfully tolling the knell of a murderer—that Main Street vanished today.

In its place remained a drab and dirty thread of concrete flanked by a few rambling old buildings and small, stuffy shops—the sparsely populated Main Street Flemington always has known.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s arrest brought a new, wild, throbbing spirit to the little thoroughfare, and with Hauptmann under sentence of death that spirit also died.

CROWDED HOUR.

But Main Street had its hour last night—an hour that will never be forgotten in this old town, and an hour that will never come again to any of its 2,700 souls.

All through the day a black and spattered cavalcade of automobiles from all parts of the State had poured sensation-seekers into Flemington.

And all through the early evening some 10,000 persons had waited with grim patience in front of the century-old Hunterdon County Courthouse.

Discouraging rumors seeped from the closely guarded courtroom, but minute by minute the crowds pressed forward until it had almost engulfed the sparse blue-coated army of State troopers desperately trying to hold their ground.

VERDICT FORECAST.

They would not believe the jury had been locked up for the night. They could not believe, after more than 11 hours, that the jury would return anything less than a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree.

This, then, was the night that was to wipe out that other night of March 1, 1932, when the world was aghast at the news that the infant son of Col. Charles A. Lindbergh had been kidnapped.

This was the death watch.

This was retribution.

The first sign that something was afoot came when a few newspapermen, snatching a hasty meal at the Union Hotel, dashed from their supper tables and, hatless and coatless, fought their way to the courthouse door.

NERVES FRAYED.

Restlessly, silent, the crowds stirred. Here and there a spectator shouted. Nerves were on edge. Even the iron resolution of the morbid cracked.

Then suddenly, like the thunderous crack of sledge hammer on a stout black anvil, the bell in the slender steeple of the courthouse clanged its warning with solemn, measured strokes.

“The bell!” came a hundred cries. “The bell! The bell!”

State troopers put their heads down and mowed a path through the waiting thousands—a path down which attorneys for the defense and for the State hurried to hear the verdict.

In a few moments flares burst like glaring daylight over Main St. and a great cheer was heard.

The lights wavered, hissed and leaped higher and higher, etching the wolf-pack into jagged outline, picking eager, grinning faces from the mob, exposing the bitter and unruly passion of the curious.

Another cheer.

A flare spluttered and the night snuffed it out. Another burst with a roar and spattered the ancient courthouse in garish relief. The newsreel operators, straddled atop their trucks, busily ground away at their cameras and the newspaper photographers set off flash after flash as they went about their work.

“Jury’s coming,” some one yelled. “Jury’s coming in.”

NEWS SIGNALLED.

The cry was taken up and it sped from mouth to mouth. Those in the rear shoved forward and those in the front catapulted themselves into the stalwart and unyielding line of State troopers.

“Judge is on the bench” came the word. “Judge is on the bench.”

The pack fairly shivered with apprehension. Suppose, each asked his neighbor, just suppose they let him go. Suppose, just suppose, they only give him life.

But the pack might as well have saved its fears.

In two minutes the verdict arrived.

“DEATH IN CHAIR.”

 Feet trampled the courthouse stairs in mighty confusion. Voices roared requiem inside the closed doors. At a front window a disheveled figure bent over a radio microphone, yelled and gestured, turned away and rushed back, yelling still.

“What is it?” they demanded outside.

And from a point near the courthouse steps the answer rushed back:

“Guilty of first degree murder—death in the electric chair.”

All the rest—the polling of the jury, the sentencing—was lost in the throbbing fury of the pack until the courthouse door opened and the figures of four women and eight men, led by State troopers, trailed slowly down the steps.

Once more the pack cheered—not for the work well done that is required of all good citizens—but because its cry had been heard, its demand satisfied.

VERDICT HAILED.

“I won my bet,” a woman squealed.

“Good work,” a man shouted at the jurors.

“You put him in the hot seat.”

A woman in blue stood in a doorway and wept.

“The poor man,” those close by her say. “The poor wife.”

The jurors looked neither to the right nor to the left and vanished inside the Union Hotel, where they remained for the night. Soon afterward out came Edward J. Reilly, chief counsel for the defense. Perhaps two hundred wild men tried to follow him.

But others, restraining these brave spirits, yelled:

“Let him go.”

“LAST KIDNAPING.”

There was a lonely shout of “Yea, Reilly,” from a man in an automobile.

Another, almost directly in the attorney’s path, loudly proclaimed:

“That’s the last kidnaping that guy will ever do.”

Reilly, too, went on.

The other personages of the trial appeared and were greeted with much the same treatment, whether they had aided the prosecution or the defense. Little by little, the pack that for more than an hour had blocked Main St. completely, dwindled until only a few hundred, still keeping their faithful death watch outside the jail house door, remained.

But in the little shops, the restaurants, the homes and the wayside resorts, the great news was mulled over and over again.

Perhaps the greatest gathering was in “Nellie’s Bar,” inside the Union Hotel, made famous by newspapermen and taken away from them by the bustling and scratching tourist trade.

The mob in the bar was jammed from one wall to the other. There was laughter. There was song. There were cheers. And more laughter. Glasses were lifted. Toasts drunk.

“We did for Hauptmann!” cried the pack.

And upstairs, just two flights above, a woman member of the jury that had sentenced Hauptmann to die in the chair sobbed her heart out because she had done her duty to her town, her State and her nation.

1963: The Movies as Art

Judith Crist ’45

Beginning at the New York Herald Tribune in 1963, and serving for decades as one of America’s pre-eminent film critics, Judith Crist offered hard-hitting film criticism that explored the medium with the care and respect afforded to other art forms. Crist has taught at the Journalism School for more than 50 years.

The New York Herald Tribune – June 13, 1963
“Cleopatra: A Monumental Mouse”
By Judith Crist

Long months – if not years – ago, I suspect, the majority of movie-goers made up their minds either to seeCleopatra no matter what or to avoid being caught dead in its vicinity. It’s for the undecided minority, therefore, that I must report that this film is at best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium. 

It depends, of course, on what you have been waiting for. Certainly if you want to devote the best part of four hours to looking at Elizabeth Taylor in all her draped and undraped physical splendor, surrounded by elaborate and exotic costumes and sets, all in the loveliest of colors, this is your movie.  And if you are able to adjust your focus from time to time, you will get two fine performances by Rex Harrison and Roddy McDowall, the lilting speech of Richard Burton and a couple of parades and divertissements that Flo Ziegfeld or Busby Berkeley might well have masterminded. 

But I think a bit more has been expected of this 1958-1963 Cleopatra under the aegis of Walter Wanger, with script and direction by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. We were led to anticipate a fresh and sophisticated character-oriented approach to the story of Caesar, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, courtesy of Mr. Mankiewicz’s past performances; a spectacular epic to take the breath away with panoramic scope and eye-filling extravaganza, courtesy of the thirty-four-million-dollar production cost; a vital history of turbulent times, alive with the excitement and fever of the politics and passions that framed them, courtesy of Mr. Mankiewicz’s coauthors’ researches and the breadth Todd-AO can give to near-global events. ButCleopatra is none of these. 

And I might note at the outset that an even greater disappointment awaits those whose interest has been titillated almost exclusively by the Taylor-Burton real-life parallel to their Cleopatra-Antony romance.  They should be warned that Mr. Burton does not appear for the first hour and twenty minutes; that another hour and fifteen minutes elapses before their first embrace and that, beyond much love talk and soulful ogling, their physical encounters are scarcely five degrees warmer than the Caesar-Cleopatra liaison – and that’s a cool one.  Perhaps the sexy bits ended up on the cutting-room floor.

I should prefer, in fact, to blame much of the film’s inadequacies on the fact that it was cut from six to four hours. This might well account for the choppy incoherence of the action (at times we have to search for columns and hieroglyphics and uniforms to discover whether we’re in Rome or Alexandria), for the sketchy portrayal of the pre-Cleopatra Antony (we know him only as a besotted, vain weakling – scarcely a man whose dying “should be shouted from the corners of the earth”), for the strangely abbreviated spectacle of the battles on land and sea and even of the “orgy” aboard Cleopatra’s barge. 

But cutting would not account for the level of the film’s dialogue, provided principally by Mr. Mankiewicz, hitherto one of our most adult and literate screenwriters.  Certainly he faced stiff comparison with Shaw and Shakespeare – but the resultant mélange or clichés and pompous banalities is unworthy of him.  “Nothing like this has come into Rome since Romulus and Remus,” Antony remarks of Cleopatra’s spectacular arrival; “A woman that cannot bear children is like a river that has run dry,” Cleopatra notes, adding, “I will bear many sons – my breasts are filled with love and life.”

Times and tides, the characters keep telling each other, are either running out or waiting for no one; “One world, one people, one nation” is Cleo’s political plea, apparently making her a World Federalist at heart; “The way to prevent war is to be ready for it,” she assures her generals.  “Antony—what has happened?”  “To me?  You have happened to me.”

And you want to weep for Rex Harrison – or, at least, to get some of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra lines into his mouth.  He is so good an actor, however, that in spite of the script he manages to make Caesar the larger-than-life creature he must be to be believed.  Slightly amused, always superior, steadily approaching the ultimate ambitions that would destroy him, he conveys both the intelligence and the stature of an emperor, particularly in the subtle suggestion that, though he might succumb to her charms and ambitious chatter, he still regards Cleopatra as not too much more than a serviceable doll. 

And Miss Taylor makes little more of her than that, her accents and acting style jarring first with those of Harrison and later with those of Burton.  She is an entirely physical creature, no depth of emotion apparent in her kohl-laden eyes, no modulation in her voice, which too often rises to fishwife levels.  Out of royal regalia en negligee and au naturel, she gives the impression that she is really carrying on in one of Miami Beach’s more exotic resorts rather than inhabiting a palace in ancient Alexandria or even a villa in Rome.  And strangely, in the course of this eighteen-year history, she seems to reverse the aging process, looking a well-groomed thirty-plus when she rolls out of the rug at Caesar’s feet and a lovelorn twenty in her death throes. 

Miss Taylor’s costumes are nothing short of sensational and her doing without any at all in a couple of scenes is equally impressive.  But the fallacy is, alas, that neither her costumes nor her performance leaves anything to the imagination.  We have on hand a rather unsubtle siren, a blatantly ambitious beauty in search of a man to conquer the world for her, with not even the illusion or suggestion of that eternally mysterious woman whose fascination would outlast the centuries. 

With the mystique of Cleopatra missing, Antony loses heroic stature and winds up as a pathetic Caesar-ridding sot, given to occasional pangs of conscience, but a ninny.  There’s nothing grand about this passion for Cleopatra and no grandeur in his destruction.  There is grandeur in Richard Burton’s way with a line and a fit of remorse, but the monotony and inconsequence of his role limit this very able actor. 

As Octavian, however, Roddy McDowall does bring to Caesar’s heir an underlying shrewdness and strength under an impassive exterior that is fascinating.  Kenneth Haigh is briefly interesting as Brutus, but of the other “names” scattered in the cast Hume Cronyn seems oddly uncomfortable as Cleopatra’s adviser and Pamela Brown is strictly from Fu Manchu as her high priestess.  There’s the usual hodgepodge of accents, as in all made-abroad spectaculars, with the ludicrous achieved by the small boy, depicting Caesar’s and Cleopatra’s son at the age of four, who bursts out with a ripe Italian dialect. 

While there are the thousands of extras, the hundreds of Nubians, the dancing girls, the barges, the palaces, the statues, the sphinxes, Mr. Mankiewicz’s heart is obviously not in the large-scale action that a film of this subject and physical scope demands.  Aiming above, as he has put it, “the Taras Bulba crowd,” he has attempted to emphasize the main characters rather than the panorama.  But so grand and grandiose are the sets that the characters are dwarfed, and so wide is his screen that this concentration on character results in a strangely static epic in which the overblown close-ups are interrupted at best by a pageant or dance, more often by unexciting bits and pieces of exits, entrances, marches or battles. 

Mr. Mankiewicz frustrates the requirements of the wide screen by reducing the naval engagement of Actium, after a few disjointed clips of the actual fighting, interrupted by static close-ups of his various character, to a moving around of models on a map by Cleopatra’s admiral aboard her barge.  Given, at the outset, magnificent views of the battlefields at Pharsalia and Caesar’s camp after the battle, we hunger for more than the brief clash, clatter and fireworks at Moongate, the mere marching of legions, even Antony’s abortive one-man attempt against Octavian’s legions. 

We are cheated of a sense of size and power in the Roman Senate; Caesar’s assassination is downgraded by having it splotchily seen through the augury fires set for Cleopatra by her priestess, and not even his funeral pyre on the Forum steps, with Romans throwing what look like old pieces of furniture on it, achieves significance. 

The orgies?  A bit of wild dancing aboard the barge, with a suddenly drunken Antony joining in, is strangely skimpy – and not helped one bit by having one of the dancing girls decked out as a double for Cleopatra.  We should not be reminded that other girls can look just like Elizabeth Taylor, particularly when she is trying to portray the Queen of Queens. 

Certainly Cleopatra’s multimillion-dollar parade into Rome does beat the advent of Romulus and Remus; it’s a mishmash of cavalry, burlesque-show girls and Ballets Africains – Hot Mikado performers, topped by Cleo and son, in cloth of gold, riding an arch-high sphinx on wheels.  Unfortunately, the climax is dimmed for us by the unnerving but not illogical expectation that somewhere a tenor should burst out with “A pretty girl is like a melody.”

The Queen’s barge is impressive on the outside, what with pretty girls playing boatswain and lookout and all – and it’s deceiving, because inside it’s like the whole Hotel Manhattan laid out on one floor.  And the banquet!  Flaming shish kebab the Ambassador East never dreamed of, whole stuffed and fully feathered peacocks – “Fabulous feast,” says Antony.  “One is so limited when one travels by ship,” replies Cleo. 

A painstaking attention to tiny details makes it all too obvious that nothing has been spared on the sets and costumes.  There are indeed some beautiful and impressive photographic effects, with transitions made by having faded frescoes slowly brighten into a live scene or a scene free and dim into a fresco.  But the sets themselves never create an illusion of permanence.  The cardboard and paint are there.  Even in their most dramatic moment, when Cleopatra and Antony are slapping each other around in her tomb, one’s most immediate image is of Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton having it out in the Egyptian Wing of the Metropolitan Museum. 

All is monumental – but the people are not.  The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse.

1974: The Power Broker

Robert Caro (Carnegie Fellow ’68)

Robert Caro (Carnegie Fellow ’68) wrote “The Power Broker,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Robert Moses and the making of modern New York City, based on years of intensive research. It was selected by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest non-fiction books of the 20th century.

1971
“The Power Broker,” Introduction: Wait Until The Evening
By Robert Caro

Moses was able to shape a city and to build an empire because the supple mind that had conceived of a Minor Sports Association for Yale and innovations in the civil service system for New York City—and also of substantial portions of the New York State Constitution—had focused on the possibilities of an institution still in its infancy as an urban force when he came to it in 1934: the public authority. He raised this institution to a maturity in which it became the force through which he shaped New York and its suburbs in the image he personally conceived.

Operating through an authority, Moses could keep the public from finding out what he was doing, and this was an important consideration with him. If, throughout his half century and more in the public eye, he displayed an eagerness and a flair for publicizing certain aspects of his career and his life, he displayed an equal eagerness and flair for making sure that only those aspects—and no others—were known. There were, for example, men and women who knew Robert Moses for half a century who never knew that he had a brother, or that in the city in which Robert Moses lived in luxury, that brother spent the last thirty years of his life in a poverty so severe that he lived in a fifth-floor walkup flat in an old tenement huddled against the piers of South Ferry.

The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter.

This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.

Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.

The lie had to do with the nature both of the man and of the public authority. Moses said that he was the antithesis of the politician. He never let political considerations influence any aspect of his projects—not the location of a highway or housing project not the award of a contact or an insurance commission, he said. He would never compromise, he said. He never had and he never would. That, he said, was the way politicians got things done, but he was no politician. He knew what should be done and he intended to do it the right way or not at all. He said this at the beginning of his career and he said it at the end; in 1961, at the trial of a borough president who had received favors from an urban renewal contractor, Moses, on the witness stand, was asked whether the contract had not been awarded as part of a “deal.” Moses’ face paled with rage. “In forty years of public life,” he said, “I have never made a deal.”

Public authorities are also outside and above politics, Moses said. Their decisions are made solely on the basis of the public welfare, he said. They have all the best features of private enterprise. They are businesslike—prudent, efficient, economical. And they are more. They are the very epitome of prudence, efficiency, economy. And they have another advantage over conventional governmental institutions as well. Since they finance their projects through the sale of revenue bonds to private investors, they therefore build these projects without using any public funds. Projects built by authorities, he said, cost the taxpayers nothing.

These statements were believed implicitly for almost forty years by the public to which they were made. And this is not surprising. For Robert Moses repeated his contentions a thousand times and for four decades they were repeated, amplified and embellished by a press that believed them, too.

Because of the forty years of adulation of the newspapers—and of the public that read the newspapers—for forty years nothing could stand in Moses’ way. No Mayor of Governor dared to try to breast the wave of public opinion in whose curl Moses rode. One President tried. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most bitter enemy that Moses ever made in public life, attempted as President to exact vengeance for humiliations previously received at Moses’ hands. But although he made his move at the very zenith of his own popularity and prestige, the President found himself forced to retreat by a storm of acclaim for Moses that rolled not only through New York but across the country and that, ironically, left Moses embedded more firmly than ever in the public consciousness as the fearless defier of politicians. For forty years, in every fight, Robert Moses could count on having on his side the weight of public opinion.

The beliefs on which that opinion was based were never disproved or even seriously questioned, not even during the final, bitter decade of Moses’ career, a decade during which his policies were subjected to steadily increasing criticism. For even during that decade, the criticism was of Moses’ projects more than of the methods by which he accomplished those projects. The reason for this was simple. The vast majority of the public accepted the legend as fact. And even those skeptics who were disposed to test its truth had no facts with which to make the test, because the records of Triborough and the mouths of its ministers were so effectively sealed. If, however, they had been able to see the records and open the mouths, they would have learned that the legend was a gigantic hoax.

Prudent, efficient, economical? So incredibly wasteful was Moses of the money he tolled from the public in quarters and dimes that on a single bridge alone he paid $40,000,000 more in interest than he had to. Authority projects cost the taxpayers nothing? Covert “loans” made to authorities by the state—loans designed never to be repaid—ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of city-purchased land on which authority facilities were built ran into the hundreds of millions. The cost of taxpayer-financed toll roads leading to authority facilities ran into the billions. And the loss in tax revenue because authority-controlled land was removed from the tax rolls drained the city year after year.

Most important, had the records of the authorities been open, they would have disproved another aspect of the lie: the legend that Robert Moses was no “politician,” that he operated at a higher level than that implied in the derogatory connotations attached to that noun, that he managed to create his public works at a remove from politics. Actually, as these records prove, Robert Moses’ authorities were a political machine oiled by the lubricant of political machines: money. Their wealth enabled Moses to make himself not only a political boss who in his particular bailiwick—public works—was able to exert a power that few political bosses in the more conventional mold ever attain.

Even had the records been available, of course, the public might not have understood their significance. For Moses was a political boss with a difference. He was not the stereotype with which Americans were familiar. His constituency was not the public but some of the most powerful men in the city and state, and he kept these men in line by doling out to them, as Tammany ward bosses once handed out turkeys to the poor at Thanksgiving, the goodies in which such men were interested, the sugar plums of public relations retainers, insurance commissions and legal fees. This man, personally honest in matters of money, became the locus of corruption in New York City. Robert Moses made himself the ward boss of the inner circle, the bankroller of the Four Hundred of politics. Far from being above the seamier aspects of politics, he was,–for decades—the central figure about whom revolved much of the back-stage maneuvering of New York City politics. Triborough’s public relations retainers ran to a quarter of a million dollars a year, its legal fees to a quarter million, its insurance commissions to half a million—a total of a million dollars a year. Moses parceled out retainers, fees and commissions to city and state political leaders on the basis of a very exact appraisal of their place in the political pecking order. And an examination of the records of the recipients leads to the conclusion that, year after year, it was the men who received Moses’ turkey baskets who fought against any diminution in Moses’ power—and for whatever public works project he was pushing at the moment.

Beyond graft and patronage, moreover, Moses also displayed a genius for using the wealth of his public authorities to unite behind his aims banks, labor unions, contractors, bond underwriters, insurance firms, the great retail stores, real estate manipulators—all the forces which enjoy immense behind-the-scenes political influence in New York. He succeeded in mobilizing behind his banner economic forces with sufficient weight to bend to his aims the apparatus so carefully established in City Charter and State Constitution to insure that, in deciding on such projects, the decisive voice would be that of the people. He used economic power for political ends—so successfully that in the fields he carved out for his own, fields in which decisions would shape the city’s future for generations if not for centuries, he made economic, not democratic, forces the forces that counted in New York. And because he spoke for such forces, it was his voice that counted most of all.

“He gave everybody involved in the political setup in this city whatever it was that they wanted,” one official recalls. “Therefore they all had their own interest in seeing him succeed. The pressure that this interest all added up to was a pressure that no one in the system could stand up against, because it came from the system itself.” And since the mayor’s power and career rested on this system, he was as helpless to stand against the pressure Moses could exert as was anyone else. When Robert Moses walked into Wagner’s office on that Inauguration Day in City Hall and shoved the appointment blank across Wagner’s desk, Wagner had no choice but to sign it. Given the circumstances of the Democratic Party in New York City, hecouldn’t let Robert Moses resign. What Moses had succeeded in doing, really, was to replace graft with benefits that could be derived with legality from a public works project. He had succeeded in centralizing in his projects—and to a remarkable extent in his own person—all those forces which are not in theory supposed to, but which in practice do, play a decisive role in political decisions.

Corruption before Moses had been unorganized, based on a multitude of selfish, private ends. Moses’ genius for organizing it and focusing it at a central source gave it a new force, a force so powerful that it bent the entire city government off the democratic bias. He had used the power of money to undermine the democratic processes of the largest city in the world, to plan and build its parks, bridges, highways and housing projects on the basis of his whim alone.

In the beginning—and for decades of his career—the power Robert Moses amassed was the servant of his dreams, amassed for their sake, so that his gigantic city-shaping visions could become reality. But power is not an instrument that its possessor can use with impunity. It is a drug that creates in the user a need for larger and larger dosages. And Moses was a user. At first, for a decade or more after his first sip of real power in 1924, he continued to seek it only for the sake of his dreams. But little by little there came a change. Slowly but inexorably, he began to seek power for its own sake. More and more, the criterion by which Moses selected which city-shaping public works would be built came to be not the needs of the city’s people, but the increment of power a project could give him. Increasingly, the projects became not ends but means—the means of obtaining more and more power.

As the idealism faded and disappeared, its handmaidens drifted away. The principles of the Good Government reform movement which Moses had once espoused became principles to be ignored. The brilliance that had invented a civil service system was applied to the task of circumventing civil service requirements. The insistence on truth and logic was replaced by a sophistry that twisted every fact to conclusions not merely preconceived but preconceived decades earlier.

Robert Moses was America’s greatest builder. He was the shaper of the greatest city in the New World.

But what did he build? What was the shape into which he pounded the city?

To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons—more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.

By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be—perhaps forever—an area in which transportation—getting from one place to another—would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.

For highways, Moses dispossessed 250,000 persons. For his other projects—Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Fordham, Pratt and Long Island University campuses, a dozen mammoth urban renewal projects—he dispossessed tens of thousands more; there are available no accurate figures on the total number of people evicted from their homes for all Robert Moses public works, but the figure is almost certainly close to half a million the one detailed study by an outside agency shows that in a ten-year period, 1946 to 1956, the number was 320,000. More significant even than the number of the dispossessed were their characteristics: a disproportionate share of them were black, Puerto Rican—and poor. He evicted tens of thousands of poor, nonwhite persons for urban renewal projects, and the housing he built to replace the housing he tore down was, to an overwhelming extent, not housing for the poor, but for the rich. The dispossessed, barred from many areas of the city by their color and their poverty, had no place to go but into the already overcrowded slums—or into “soft” borderline areas that then became slums, so that his “slum clearance programs” created new slums as fast as they were clearing the old.

When he built housing for poor people, he built housing bleak, sterile, cheap—expressive of patronizing condescension in every line. And he built it in locations that contributed to the ghettoization of the city, dividing up the city by color and income. And by skewing city expenditures toward revenue-producing services, he prevented the city from reaching out toward its poor and assimilating them, and teaching them how to live in such housing—and the very people for whom he built it reacted with rage and bitterness and ignorance, and defaced it.

He built parks and playgrounds with a lavish hand, but they were parks and playgrounds for the rich and the comfortable. Recreational facilities for the poor he doled out like a miser.

For decades, to advance his own purposes, he systematically defeated every attempt to create the master plan that might have enabled the city to develop on a rational, logical, unified pattern—defeated it until, when it was finally adopted, it was too late for it to do much good.

“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.

For all these reasons, this book attempts to tell two stories at once: how New York, forty years ago a very different city from the city it is today, became what it has become; and how the idealistic Robert Moses became what he has become. It must try to be a book about what happened to the city and what happened to the man. For, to an extent few people have really understood, these two stories are one story. 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.

Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.

It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.