About book The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall Of New York (1975)
At nearly 1,200 pages of text (not including endnotes and the index), Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is a big book. And despite its uniformly excellent quality – its Pulitzer Prize is well deserved – I felt every single one of those pages. This book came to dominate my reading time, to the extent that I started using my reading time to do other things, like watching erotic thrillers on Netflix streaming video. Like I said, it’s not a bad book. Actually, it’s a great book. Therefore, as I plodded along, I started to question why it was taking me so long to read this damn thing. The answer, I think, lies in Caro’s subject: Robert Moses. Before I picked up The Power Broker, I’d never heard of the man. Unless you are a New Yorker or an urban planning student, I’m guessing you haven’t heard of him either. So who was Robert Moses? I can tell you what he wasn’t. Moses wasn’t a president or a governor or a mayor. In fact, he was never elected to any office whatsoever. He wasn’t a general or a soldier or a happy-go-lucky mercenary. He never explored an unexplored region or climbed a mountain or mapped a river or wrestled a shark. He never held his breath for more than a minute or made a name as an outlaw in Peru. He was not a poor man who became rich or a rich man who became poor. He did not invent a fitness routine that is guaranteed to get you ripped in 90 days with a full money-back guarantee. He did not commit the crime of the century or the crime of the month or even jaywalk. He never ran away to join the circus. He did not win the Boston Marathon, the Super Bowl, or the World Cup. To put it another way, the words “action packed” are not applicable to the life of Robert Moses. Instead, Robert Moses was known for building parks and expressways. He was known as the man who shaped and (according to Caro) destroyed (at least for a time) New York City. But he wasn’t a builder or an architect or an engineer. Rather, Robert Moses was that most fascinating species of men: a bureaucrat.That’s right. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is a 1,200 page tome on the life of the ultimate bureaucrat. You want red tape? You want zoning rules? You want arcane statutes? You want to learn everything you need to know about the semi-public, semi-private nature of City Authorities? Brother, read this book! If you are a normal person, you’ve already stopped reading already. But that’s not my intent. Because The Power Broker is more than Robert Moses. It’s the story of a city.Still, Caro begins and ends with the man. So who was the man? The best way to describe Moses, I’ve decided, is in recipe form: How to Bake a Robert Moses (Serves 8 million)1.t2 cups of Lesley Knope from NBC’s hit show Parks and Recreation: Like that show’s hero, Moses loved parks and the Parks Department. He was also, like Knope, a tireless worker and master bureaucratic infighter; 2.tA pinch of David Duke: Though Moses loved parks, he hated Puerto Ricans and blacks, and intentionally made his roads unusable for busses;3.tTwo tablespoons of Sim City: Moses spent ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculously extravagant public works projects, to the detriment of things like schools and hospitals. It’s just like when you play Sim City and you start out by building a stadium, the Statue of Liberty, and the Hollywood sign, and then realize you have no money left to build any houses; 4.tOne teaspoon of the Grinch from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas before his heart grew two sizes; 5.tOne gallon of piss, vinegar, and old motor oil;6.tMix in a blender;7.tAllow him to remain in power for over 40 years. Robert Moses did not begin life as a massive douche bag. Rather, as Caro shows us, young Bob Moses was a reformer and an idealist. He was a man who had big dreams and who wanted to help people. Born into modest wealth, he attended Yale and Oxford and studied city planning. When he returned to New York City from overseas, he took a job trying to reform the City’s patronage system. Though he made little money and had little power, he was tireless and undaunted and dedicated. All in all, he seemed a good sort. The kind out to change the world for the better. That all ends around page 200. Moses’ talents were recognized by Belle Moskowitz, an advisor to eventual New York Governor Al Smith. Moses goes to Albany where he attains a talent for drafting legislation. He uses that talent to craft laws creating Commissions with extremely powerful Commissioners. And then he got himself appointed to those Commissions. The rest…is a very long book. Suffice it to say, the title of this book says it all. As he’s shown with his triumphant volumes on Lyndon Johnson, Caro is an author obsessed with the attainment and use of power. He structures the The Power Broke like a three act play, highlighting Moses’ rise to power, his exercise of power, and his loss of power. I’d like to explain what that all means in more specific terms, but frankly, I can’t. Explaining the career of Robert Moses literally takes 1,200 pages. In the simplest terms, Moses used his various Commissionerships, imbued with authority that he wrote into the laws himself, to undertake massive public projects, such as Jones Beach and the Long Island Expressways. In the beginning, these projects were hugely popular with the public. With the populace and the newspapers behind him, Moses felt comfortable taking bigger risks and funding bigger projects. And no one could stop him. Due to the staggered terms of these various posts, Moses found himself able to leverage his authority in such a way that he outlasted dozens of mayors and governors, none of whom could afford to anger him. From the 1920s to 1968, Moses reigned supreme as the shaper of New York City. His vision of New York City became the vision of New York City. He drove expressways through neighborhoods; he built bridges and roads rather than subways; he ran the Triborough Authority like an emperor, chauffeured about in a black limousine. He wasn’t a crook and he never used his power to enrich himself. For him, the power was the juice (of course, that didn’t stop him from wrongfully enriching hundreds and thousands of others at the taxpayers’ expense, but that’s just semantics). Moses was a tyrant of the worst sort: a petty tyrant, a dictator in miniature. He never killed anyone or raped anyone or started a war or kicked a bunny. Yet he still managed to be an absolutely reprehensible human being. He was arrogant and rude and myopic; he destroyed careers and lives and homes without a second thought. Some of the things he did and tried to do are all the more awful because they are so small and petty. He may have been a man who wanted to rise to great heights, but he never hesitated to stoop to slug-level, just to show that he could. I suppose part of the trouble I had with this book is that I had to spend so much time with Moses. Unlike Caro’s other biographical subject, Lyndon Johnson, Moses never used his power for a greater good. He had no Great Society. Instead, Moses becomes a worse human with each turn of the page. In the beginning, at least, as State Park Commissioner, Moses actually worked for the common man, breaking the grip on Long Island of the wealthy estate owners. As time went on, however, Moses lost all compassion for the common man; lost all compassion whatsoever. He seemed to exercise power only for the sake of power. He did things because he had it in his mind to do them. The story is enlivened a bit by the historical personages in Moses’ orbit. Caro is a master of context; his descriptions of supporting characters have as much life as that of the lead actor. Here, we get to meet the canny Belle Moskowitz, the good-hearted Al Smith, the snobbish Franklin Roosevelt and the tough little flower, Fiorello La Guardia. Caro is talented enough to bring real insight to even those, such as accidental mayor Vincent Impellitteri, who are barely given any space. To be sure, Caro’s achievement and Moses’ “achievements” need to be separated. I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like The Power Broker simply because Robert Moses was an enormous ass. That’s not the case. To the contrary, The Power Broker may be the best one-volume biography I’ve ever read. There are so many superlatives, I don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with the fundamentals: the quality of the writing. Caro is a great writer. I don’t know how to put it better than that. He writes with elegance, he writes with clarity, and he structures his sentences and his paragraphs in such a way as to heighten the dramatic effect. Caro packs in so much detail, without confusing the reader, that I got exhausted imagining the effort it took to maintain this style. His writing is helped by his sensitivity; he manages to find and inject humanity into his subjects. No matter how awful Moses seemed at times, Caro always found the essentials of the man beneath the layers of jerkiness. I also loved Caro’s literary set-pieces. In most books, if there’s a problem to be solved by the protagonist, the author would simply say: “here’s the problem.” Caro is too imaginative for that. He does an amazing job describing the paradigm in which Robert Moses created his public works. For instance, early in the book, Caro is describing Moses’ attempts to create public beaches on Long Island, even though Long Island was under the stranglehold of rich estate holders who didn’t want the hoi polloi anywhere near them. In order to describe the difficulties of a middle class family attempting to get to a Long Island beach in the 1930s, Caro writes this incredible section in which he takes you – the reader – into an imaginary car, and drives you every mile of that trip. As the families drove, they could see on either side of them, through gates set in stone walls or through the openings in wooden fences, the beautiful meadows they had come for, stretching endlessly and emptily to the cool trees beyond. But the meadows and trees were not for them. The gates would be locked and men carrying shotguns and holding fierce dogs on straining leashes would point eastward, telling the families there were parks open to them “farther along.” There was no shade on Northern Boulevard and the children became cranky early. In desperation, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING – PRIVATE PROPERTY signs that lined the road, fathers would turn onto the narrow strip of grass between the boulevard and the wall paralleling it and, despite the dust and the fumes from the passing cars, would try to picnic there. But there guards were vigilant and it was never long until the fathers had to tell the kids to get back into the car. Later, in Oyster Bay Town and Huntington, they would come to parks, tiny but nonetheless parks, but as they approached them they would see policemen at their entrances and the policemen would wave them on, explaining that they were reserved for township residents. There were, the policemen shouted, parks open “further along…”Later in the book, when Moses is trying to plow under a neighborhood for one of his expressways, Caro tries to show you what that meant for the people who lived in the bulldozer’s path. Instead of giving you cold hard facts – the number of people, the number of apartments, the basic demographics – Caro devotes an entire chapter to one square mile slated to be destroyed. He interviews the residents, describes their lives, and tells the story of their ill-fated fight against Moses. This case study is an incredibly effective way to personalize the stakes between Moses the Builder and the People. This dovetails with my next point: Caro can explain anything. And he can explain it in an interesting way, making you care about stuff you never thought you’d be interested in. In Master of the Senate, Caro managed to find riveting drama in the parliamentary tactics of the US Senate. Here, he does the same thing with bureaucratic enabling laws and public authorities. He imbues this arcane field with as much excitement as is possible (it’s not much, but it’s not boring), and is careful and methodical in relating the complex interactions that gave Moses his power. Finally, Caro is a great researcher. He conducted hundreds of interviews, including hard-to-get face-time with Moses himself. This was no small thing, especially in 1975, when this book was published. At that time, Moses was still alive, and his cronies, the Moses Men, were a tight-lipped group. Indeed, while The Power Broker is a historical artifact, at the time it was published, it was just as much an exposé as a traditional biography. It was Caro who helped strip away the Moses myth and show how much destruction he’d wrought (I wasn’t alive to see New York in the 70s, after Moses strangled it with concrete and steel. Judging it solely based on the film The Warriors, it wasn’t a great place). One of the problems I had with The Power Broker is that Caro didn’t have enough room. He crammed all his research into this one-volume work, instead of giving the story space to breathe (as he’s doing with Lyndon Johnson); as such, there’s a lot of scrimping of certain aspects of Moses’ life. For instance, the farther along you get, the less you hear about his family life, such as it was (I, for one, would’ve enjoyed more elaboration on the string of mistresses Moses kept). The other problem I noticed, which was a bit more serious, is the constant time shifting. Caro doesn’t take a strictly chronological approach to Moses’ life. Instead, he looks for the stories within the story. For example, Caro will devote an entire chapter to a single public works project, while excluding reference to all the other things going on at that time. This can be a good thing for the reader, as it adds these dramatic mini-narratives within the book’s overall arc. However, the result is that you might move forward several decades within a single chapter, only to be thrust back in time when a new chapter begins. There were long sections of The Power Broker when I wasn’t quite sure what decade I was supposed to be in. Caro attempts to remedy this situation with a chapter devoted to Moses’ relations with various New York mayors, but this only muddied things up. I finally had to go to Wikipedia and print off a list of mayors, so I could keep the succession straight (for the record, as it pertains to Moses, it goes: Walker, McKee, O’Brien, La Guardia, O’Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner, and Lindsay). Caro’s decision to structure the book like this – event-based rather than chronology-based – leads to The Power Broker’s most surprising elision: that of Jane Jacobs. Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was an activist who, in the words of Caro himself, became the only person to ever beat Robert Moses, when she helped stop his Lower Manhattan Expressway. Caro devoted an entire chapter to this battle royal. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, it was removed from the book by the editor. Thus, due to Caro’s compartmentalization of events, there is not a single mention of Jacobs in 1,200 pages!I spent much of The Power Broker loathing the petty brutishness of Robert Moses. Part of the reason I wanted the Jane Jacobs chapter reinstalled was because I wanted to see Moses get his butt kicked. That never happens in this book. Caro writes that Moses lost his power, but I don’t see it that way. Moses never got beat; he simply got old. And it’s a testament to Caro’s skills and fairness that by the end, as Moses saw his name start to fade, you actually feel a bit of sympathy for the guy. Like all great builders, Moses strove for immortality. However, by the end of his own life, he must have realized that he’d written his name upon the sand. Most people today don’t know him, and I’m fine with that, because it would have pissed Moses off. So just forget I ever mentioned him.
This is a book about power...And parks.For forty-four years Robert Moses through the control of different institutions, often whose formal authorities he had designed and drafted into legislation, created a power base that enabled him to escape the constraints laid upon bureaucrats and elected officials and to stamp his vision upon the developing city of New York. If the Bonfire of the Vanities is the shock book of 1980s New York then The Power Broker Robert Moses and the Fall of New York tells the story of some of the factors that made the city that way.Robert Moses was energetic, ambitious, hugely gifted but deeply arrogant, a bully and prejudiced. Initially enthusiastic for public service reform to break the power of Tammany Hall over New York politics and government and from a prosperous German-Jewish background involved in charitable works, he became a master of manipulation, building support through public relations, disbursing jobs and patronage, keeping files on public figures and carrying out revenge with a thoroughness that makes burying a rival in the foundations of a building seem amateur and unimaginative.Mayors and governors were successively seduced by his ability to complete massive public works before the following election but also successively learnt that his power base made him virtually invulnerable. Moses' vision was of sweeping roads, bridges and parks. His work reshaped the city. Unfortunately his vision was of a New York designed to be middle class and white. Roads and bridges in some cases were designed to be suitable for cars only and were deliberately set to low to allow buses to pass under them. Attempts to provide mass transit links either to the parks or the World's Fair or even to allow for the possibility of others providing such links in the future were explicitly blocked or prevented. His ideal for Long Island in particular was striking - to be a suburban area of low density housing with no industry.The outcome of all this was a city congested with car traffic (which in turn necessitated the early adoption of multi-storey car parks). Neighbourhoods with all their existing networks of employment and local commerce were broken up and either degenerated into slums or were replaced with higher cost housing. The massive building projects swallowed up city, state and federal funds to the extent that there was not even the money available for the maintenance of the new parks let alone for non-Moses approved transport development. However since a key source of Moses' power was the money raised from toll bridges it was a situation that at least worked to the advantage of one man.The giant swimming pools that Moses had built in New York show the workings of his mind to both good and ill. On the one hand he and his team developed new systems of underwater lighting and the system of disinfecting foot baths that are ubiquitous in public swimming pools today. At the same time because he believed that black people prefer to swim in warm water he had the temperatures of certain pools kept low and to further discourage non-whites from swimming would only employ white staff (the same policies were also used at his beach developments and parks) to signal the type of users who would be welcomed. At the same time the financial drain on the city from paying for these public amenities which through management and placement were targeted at white middle class users meant that spending on schools and hospitals was inadequate.As befitted a man educated at Yale and Oxford he didn't offer patronage in the obvious Tammany Hall method of jobs with inflated salaries with the city but in a subtle way. This included cut price concessions, advance information about road building plans, consultancy jobs, lavish entertainments, long-term relationships with banks and even effectively creating a bank run by a leading member of the New York Democratic party Thomas Shanahan by depositing large sums of money with him at zero percent interest and obliging contractors he worked with to bank with Shanahan. Cronies had businesses created for them to manage the relocation of people dispossessed by building works, in turn sub-businesses were created to drain out money, for example by buying the fixed appliances in apartments for a nominal sum and leasing them back to the main company for sums which were not nominal. The main company itself would be funded by the city to manage the relocation process, while dispossessed residents were largely left to fend for themselves.Essentially Robert Moses became an Augustus and created step by step an Empire for himself. The legislation that he had drafted protected him, almost totally, from political interference. Toll incomes and increasing car traffic allowed him to raise enormous sums on the money markets. Massive building works provided masses of patronage to disburse. Association with public parks won him widespread support and the mistaken impression that he had the public's interests at heart and was opposed to the vested interests, whose interest was entirely vested in Moses until he was finally deposed. (An arrogant man, the one time he stood for election he managed to lose the support of the press by insulting them at his first press conference and managed to speak against the particular local concerns of voters where ever he was on the campaign trail).This is a book about the realities of power. It is full of politicking, intrigues, machinations, deals, law making, the importance of effective law drafting, the exploitation of the naive, dealings with politicians and interest groups alike. Also power over the environment, marshes drained, rivers bridged, moved and channelled, beaches created, land created. It is virtually a history of New York in the middle of the 20th century as seen through the work of one man. The paperback edition is 1.7 kilos of fascinating, audacious and breath-taking undertakings few of which were ever tainted with legality as Moses himself liked to say.
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This is a six star book. I read it after having hoovered up Caro's LBJ series, and while nothing to me can equal those for sheer writing power, this comes damn close. Like those books, this is exhaustively researched and sourced from an unimaginable number of archival documents and personal interviews. Like those books, it is the study of a man who loved power more than anything, and whose most minor whims have consequences that echo to this day. Like those books, its depth seems to encompass the whole world, with innumerable fascinating asides and brief sketches of tangents that could be turned into book in themselves. Like those books, it is incredibly well-written; the cause of many sleepless nights trying to get in "just a few more pages". I'll say that while it took a bit longer to get sucked into the Northeastern world of this guy who built bridges and parks than it did into the more familiar Texas of LBJ, Caro is such a great writer that I was glad I stuck with it. There are so many great themes at work here: the power of will and determination and genius in a world of mediocrity, the conflict between democracy and "getting things done", the effects of power on the powerless, the sad longing for (literally) roads not taken, the difference between Carlyle's and Hegel's versions of history... it's the story of how America became the car-addicted, sprawl-infested society we are today and what happens to little people when powerful people treat their homes and their lives like Monopoly pieces. This is one of those books that takes such a deep look at society that no matter what you thought about our country before, you'll think something different after you're done. This is the book to read if you're interested in Robert Moses, the history of New York City, or of urban planning, or the creation of the idea of suburbia, or a million other details of life in the first half of the twentieth century, when the whole world looked to New York as the place where the future had just arrived ten minutes ago.
—Aaron Arnold
A massive, magisterial work on the man who built the roads, parks, etc. in New York. I'd been meaning to read this book for a long time because the author's continuing books on Lyndon Johnson are superb. The Power Broker did not disappoint. At times this bordered almost on too much information and there were certainly some thematic redundancies. But these are mere quibbles. There is a real sense of 'being in the room' while events are occurring. Caro, likewise, is able to explain legal, structural and political nuance so that they become a moving part of the narrative. There are some side mini-biographies that are wonderful, most notably the portrait of Al Smith. Yet, this is a story, after all, of Robert Moses and if I had to recommend one book about evil genius, it would not be The Prince, but, instead, The Power Broker. Highly recommended.
—Tony
I think reformers who back slum clearance plans fall into two categories. One is cynical politcos like Mugabe who just want to kill the poor. The other is the old school american progressive who harbors a deep distrust for the city and city life, the same 19th century demographic that got women the vote, invented breakfast cereal, and founded hundreds of strange small private liberal arts colleges. Please don't think that I am against universal suffrage or anything. I just think there's a current in American politics that springs from that well. "I don't hate immigrants or negros, I just hate the neighborhoods they live in. If we could just force them to live in the mountains with me and my nudist proto-hippie friends, I'm sure we could all enjoy Ralph Waldo Emerson and Grape Nuts together."
—Mjackman
