The Minstrel Show

The man who holds the title of New York City construction coordinator is an incorruptible, incorrigible individualist named Robert Moses, who has spent a lifetime improving cities and hating city planners, reforming sectors of government and detesting governmental reformers. This week he expressed a minority personal opinion of Estes Kefauver and his Senate Crime Investigating Committee: "the greatest minstrel show on earth," Moses called them. Switching on his freewheeling prose style, Moses said:

"The incentives [for better executives in government] become less rather than greater when investigating committees from Washington, dominated by men like Senator Tobey . .. . imply that men like Costello and Erickson, whom most of us never saw until the Kefauver committee televised them, run the city's business.

"That the standards of government, the levels of public morality and the ambitions of the young will be permanently elevated by the sworn testimony of such ineffable characters as Virginia Hill ... is a proposition which professional believers in good clean fun will advance. Miss Hill was no more relevant in the Kefauver investigation than Morgan's midget at the stock market investigation.

"To paraphrase the sapient words of the immortal bard, there will be cakes and ale, wagering and other sports after Senators Kefauver and Tobey have returned to the hills of Tennessee and New Hampshire from whence, as the Bible says, cometh our help. Wise reformers don't give too many cathartics. A few more doses of Senator Tobey and the town will be thirsty for another Jimmy Walker."

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