Reflection on The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

               A masterpiece of the English language like Caro’s works on Lyndon Johnson, The Power Broker is an examination of power, urban development and design, and New York politics told through the life of Robert Moses, who dominated the development of New York from 1924 to 1968. Caro’s writing is, of course, excellent, and I cannot stress highly enough that he is a master of his craft. While many refer to him as a biographer, his biographies of Moses and Johnson are so much more than any biographies I have ever read. No other writer of biographies is as captivating and explanatory. No other writer is as poetic in his imagery and no other writer can so seamlessly weave in critical moral judgments into his stories. The most amazing thing about what Caro writes is that all of it is true. He is a non-fiction writer, yet his books read like the best of novels. The Power Broker is nothing short of excellent and now I only have one book left by Caro to read, his newest book, Working, which is about his writing process.

As A Man

               Caro is a big believer in character traits that are passed down through generations along with physical traits. In the Johnson books, Caro talks about certain Bunton and Johnson features that made it into Lyndon. In The Power Broker, the two main traits in Moses’ life come from his grandmother, Rosalie Cohen. They are idealism and arrogance. The intelligence goes without saying, as Moses was a student at both Princeton and Oxford. His intelligence is also less interesting to the author and the reader. The really interesting thing is the conflict that takes over much of Moses’ early life between his idealism, focused on improving the lives of New York’s citizens, and his arrogance, founded in classism, racism, and a feeling of individual, personal superiority over others. In this way, Moses is very different from LBJ, though you could say that they are two sides of the same coin. Both desired power to the point that it was nearly an obsession. However, Moses possessed an elitism that Johnson just couldn’t ever have. After all, as boys Moses was rich, and Johnson was poor. Johnson could be arrogant, but elitism was never his style.

               Moses’ idealism waned in the 1922 New York Governor election, when he supported the Democrat Al Smith of Tammany Hall. Moses had been a reformer and a member of the good government movement, so his choice was strange. Smith’s opponent was a member of that movement, so Republicans and reformers saw Moses as a traitor to the cause. Moses, after all, had been an opponent of Tammany hall, but now he was supporting their candidate as Smith’s victory offered him a taste of power. Caro writes that, “Bob Moses had changed from an uncompromising idealist to a man willing to deal with practical considerations; now the alteration had become more drastic… He was openly scornful of reformers whose first concern was accuracy, who were willing to devote their lives to fighting for principle…” As time went on, Moses became even less idealistic and more willing to engage in patronage politics as it meant that he could accomplish his dream projects. After all, building highways and parks put him in the construction business and soon he had a lot of jobs/patronage to give out, a source of power for him.

               Moses’ elitism manifested itself in the things he built. Frances Perkins, who knew him well before joining FDR’s cabinet, said that, “He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great amorphous mass to him…” Caro tells us that he cut off the parks he built from the poor and middle class by making them accessible only by car. For example, he vetoed an extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach. He also limited access by buses by making the bridges across his parkways too low for them to pass. He kept African Americans out by not granting permits to their buses. He stationed black lifeguards furthest away from the popular areas of the beaches and where there were pools, he kept the temperatures lower based on his theory that black and Latino people prefer warmer water temperatures. He also implemented parking fees in the midst of the Great Depression of up to 50 cents to keep the poor out.

               On a personal level, Moses was often brutal. While he would be extremely kind to his superiors as he came up through the ranks, he was a real asshole to his subordinates. He would work them hard and scream at them. By the 1940’s there was nobody left who worked for him that would disagree with him. Moses wanted yes men. Those who knew him in the thirties and forties said that he had “a sadistic joy in hurting other people.” There were several incidents where the 200-pound park commissioner engaged in physical bullying. He would hit his subordinates and lift them up by the scruffs of their necks. His targets were always old, skinny, weak, or inebriated. He would never attempt to physically intimidate anyone his own rank or size.

               In his relations with his family, Moses does not look good. As he dedicated himself more to his work, he separated himself more and more from his relatives. He had a wife and two daughters who he loved, though. His wife was mostly devoted to taking care of him. All of this is fine, but the big mystery is what his brother Paul did to deserve to much of Robert’s hate. Moses left Paul destitute and penniless when he cut him out of their mother’s will and he also spread some sort of rumor to the rest of the family about Paul. Caro details how Bob basically destroyed Paul’s life without remorse and took every cent he had.

New York Before Moses

               New York was sort of a shitshow at the turn of the century. The state had never passed a budget, so the finances were just not kept track of by anyone, especially not the legislators in charge of such a thing. When Moses got involved as a reformer in New York politics in the early 1910s, he was fresh out of Oxford, and he proposed several good government reforms, but was defeated by Tammany Hall and laid off from his job in 1917. He became disillusioned and had a bad time.

               However, thanks to Belle Moskowitz, he started to rise again in the world of city planning. Moskowitz was a political genius and the principal advisor of Al Smith. When Smith became governor, she was his chief of staff. Moskowitz took charge of a reorganization of state government, which in New York at the time was a mess of state departments and commissions that had come together piecemeal, never thought of as a whole. She had hired Moses to lead that effort. It was successful, but Smith lost the election of 1920 as Democrats were badly defeated everywhere, though Smith outperformed the presidential ticket of Cox and Roosevelt.

               Moses’ connection to Smith was the most important professional relationship of his life. It was though Smith that Moses would rise to major responsibilities in the 1920s. Spending 1921 and 1922 out of office, Smith had lots of free time and he started to spend lots of it with Moses. They developed a strong rapport and Smith invited Moses to dinner regularly. When Smith returned to the governorship after success in the 1922 campaign, Moses went with him.

Moses the Young Planner

               Bob Moses never got his driver’s license, but he did believe in the promise that automobiles offered the world, specifically the world of luxury. In the 1920s, there were still not many people with cars, and those that had them were rich. What Moses wanted to create were beautiful roads—roads that took drivers through forests and that were landscaped and had no traffic lights. That was the idea of the parkway. A parkway cuts through an area surrounded by a ribbon of park on either side so that the driver has a more pleasant experience. The whole idea is that the road is scenery in itself. This was the sort of road he would start to build all over Long Island.

               When it came to parks, Moses was a revolutionary. The earlier movements of conservation and preservation had focused on natural beauty. Theodore Roosevelt led a movement dedicated to keeping humans from destroying natural spaces and until the time that Moses rose to power in the 1920s, that’s what parks were. Moses had a different conception. Instead of serving as “breathing spaces,” Moses saw parks as places that could be used “to swing baseball bats, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and the implements of other sports…” Moses wanted to built playgrounds in parks as centers of recreation, not just contemplation of nature. No government of any state or city in the United States had begun to do this.

The Rise to Power From Long Island

               In the Smith administration, Moses was to be the president of the Long Island State Park Commission, a commission created by Moses in legislation drafted by Moses. He gave himself a six-year term, longer than that of the governor—even though he had previously written that in good government no appointed official should have a term longer than the governor. He also provided that the commission would propose its own budget and that no governor could remove the president of the commission just because he did not follow the governor’s orders—the only cause for removal would be if the president can be proven to have committed a crime. Caro writes about the act that created the commission that “almost every clause in the act contained a sleeper.” Moses said that the commission would operate parks, but then later on defined the term “parks” as meaning “parkways… boulevards and also entrances and approaches thereto, docks and piers, and bridges…” The term “parkways” was also key, as the State Highway Law gave each county veto power over highways within its borders, but not parkways. Moses also gave himself the ability to purchase real estate and to, as president of the Long Island State Park Commission, write his own laws for his land, hire his own police, and more. Moses was essentially made a dictator in all of the Commission’s territory.  

               Moses’ first big projects were the construction of major parkways in Long Island along with the construction of Jones Beach. In 1925, he faced huge opposition as he needed to take over lots of private land from owners who did not want to give it up, but within three years he would have it all. He did this through lots of trickery and was very clever. The man was good at his job and was able to use the press as a weapon as well, claiming that those who did not want to give up land were mainly wealthy people who wanted the beauty of Long Island all for themselves.

Sometimes, in the strategies he used, Robert Moses tread the line between genius and evil. For example, Moses wanted to create a truly luxurious experience at Jones Beach. He wanted everything to not just be functional, but beautiful. Therefore, he asked for a huge price—one million dollars—to build the bathhouses and the water tower at the beach. After some haggling, he got the legislature to give him $150,000. He told his men to “just go right on the way you were doing” and to lay the foundation for one bathhouse. Then, he turned around and told the legislature he needed more money. They were trapped because if they didn’t give him the money, they would have to admit that they approved the amount without seriously evaluating the costs. Let that be a lesson to legislatures to not just appropriate less money but to get a blueprint of how the plan will change.

By the 1930’s, Moses, who was associated with all the improvements of parks, was extremely popular in New York. No governor could afford to fire him, so even after Smith left the governorship, FDR renewed Moses’ term as the president of the Long Island State Park Commission in 1932. Moses thought of moving into public office at this time. In 1933, Republicans vetted him for the mayoralty of New York, but ended up giving it to Fiorello La Guardia. Moses gave his support to La Guardia and he won. La Guardia still feared the popularity of Al Smith, so the fact that Smith’s protégé Moses (who himself was very popular) had endorsed him was a relief.

To pay Moses back for his support, La Guardia was about to make him extremely powerful. He wanted Moses as the leader of parks for New York City, and Moses said yes, but only on the condition of complete control, and so it was. He allowed Moses to draft the legislation, much as Smith had allowed regarding the Long Island parks a decade earlier, and Moses gave himself a big job. He unified the five parks departments (one for each borough) into one and became commissioner. He extended the unified department’s authority to include parkways and allowed himself to keep his old jobs. He also got control of the Triborough Bridge Authority as well as a new Marine Parkway Bridge Authority. It was a huge amount of power that put Moses in charge of nearly every major public works project for the next three decades. Throughout the thirties, Moses made huge improvements to parks, repainting walls and benches, reshaping golf courses, resurfacing playgrounds, and reequipping play areas with jungle gyms.

The 1934 New York Governor Election

               In 1934, Moses was to run for governor of New York. It was the first and last time he would run for public office and it was a total failure. He was nominated by the “old guard” of the Republican party in 1934, men who bitterly opposed the New Deal that they saw as socialism. Despite the fact that Moses was a huge spender like FDR, his personal hatred of FDR and his disdain for “the people” convinced the old guard to hand him the nomination. They were able to do so due to their huge amounts of money.

               Moses ran a terrible campaign, making few public appearances and antagonizing the audience in each one. He was seemingly determined to piss people off, and even the slightest criticisms sent him into an unseemly rage. The campaign showed him for who he really was, which was very unpleasant to most people. He threw tantrums essentially and put no effort into really trying to convince people of his candidacy. Simply put he was a terrible candidate and he lost terribly in what was already a terrible year for Republicans. It was then that FDR (then president) tried to get La Guardia to fire Moses as a condition of federal funds. La Guardia would have done it, but legally he couldn’t, as Moses had written the legislation himself that made him un-fireable except for if he committed a crime. When it became public that the feds were trying to fire him, public opinion returned to Moses’ side, as people may not have wanted him for governor, but they recognized all the improvements he had made in charge of parks.

Enjoying His Power

               Moses and La Guardia had an interesting relationship. La Guardia is widely considered the best mayor New York ever had, but even he was not all-powerful. He really wasn’t even as powerful as Robert Moses. The thing is that Moses could get things done that nobody else got done. The man worked constantly and was in such positions of authority that he always had solutions for La Guardia—and quickly.

               That said, Moses’ solutions were not for everyone. He continued to build thinking only of the upper classes, focusing on improving playgrounds and parks in areas where the “best” people lived. Caro points out that Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the thirties but only built one in Harlem. He continued to build parkways and highways focused on leisure even though fewer and fewer Americans were driving for the purpose of pleasure. Some started to criticize him for caring about cars more than people. For example, in the area of Riverside Park, he built a highway along the river so that drivers could enjoy the view while the park was placed back. People in the park could barely see the Hudson River at all while drivers didn’t really care about the view anyway. All of this is so ridiculous because MOSES NEVER DROVE A CAR IN HIS LIFE. He never drove in a traffic jam. He was always chauffeured in a custom limo where he sat far back with no window next to him to see out of. Despite that, he was totally dedicated to an image of “the driver” that he had established in the twenties that bore less and less resemblance to reality.

               Moses loved his power. He guarded it jealously and wanted to be in charge of every infrastructure project in New York. He even tried to sabotage projects he was not in charge of, like the Battery Tunnel, which he wanted to lead as a bridge. When he could not get his way, he shut down Battery Park, which locals had managed to save from him, for five years. Of the things he was in charge of, he wanted charge for perpetuity. Take the Triborough Bridge Authority as an example. To limit the lifespan of an “authority,” which is an organization with government license that acts independent of the government to build some infrastructure, governments set dates at which “each authority must redeem all its bonds, surrender control of all its facilities and go out of existence.” The state of New York of course included these provisions in the legislation of the Triborough Bridge Authority, but legislators must not have noticed that in drafting the legislation, Robert Moses made them meaningless. Hidden deep in the bill’s legalese, Moses included a sentence that altered the meaning of the legislation. It read, “The authority shall have the power from time to time to refund any bonds by the issuance of new bonds, whether the bonds to be refunded have or have not matured and may issue bonds partly to refund bonds then outstanding and partly for any other corporate purpose.” This sentence changed everything! The drafter of the original act said that, “With that sentence in there, he had the power to issue forty-year bonds and every thirty-nine years he could call them in and issue new bonds, for another forty years.” Everyone had thought the authorities would be temporary bodies, but Moses had just made his permanent.

               Now, using the tolls from the bridge and also rerouting other money from his other offices, Moses was starting to accumulate huge sums of money. He never took money for himself. He had no interest in getting rich as he was already very comfortable. On the other hand, he wanted to constantly reinvest it and build more to achieve his dreams.

Disconnect from Reality

               The sad thing about Robert Moses was that this was a man whose talents, by the end, were wasted. I would say that his early career was good. Setting up Jones Beach and creating parks was excellent. The state needed a man like him to do it and it was good to set up the highways, parkways, and bridges that he built, too. However, as he clung to power decade after decade, he lost touch with reality. He didn’t understand, especially after World War Two, that the use of the automobile had changed. People didn’t use their cars just to cruise around and see scenery anymore, they were using them to get to work in the morning and get back home at night.

               Most of all, he didn’t understand what is indeed counterintuitive to most of us—that building more roads does not relieve traffic congestion and can even make it worse. When the Van Wyck Expressway opened up, it illustrated this phenomenon well. Going to the airport later named JFK used to take twenty minutes to cover four miles, yet when the Van Wyck opened, it took half an hour! You would think that with supply and demand that adding more roads would reduce congestion, but really, increasing the supply of roads decreases the cost in time of driving, encouraging more people to drive. People will get on the roads so long as they’re not slower than the alternative mode of transportation. However, Robert Moses had planned New York (and since then many more urban planners have done the same) to run on highways. There was no alternative transportation. Since 1933, New York had not made any improvements to its subway and it was getting bad. Without extensions into new neighborhoods as they developed, people had no choice but to get in cars as long as it was faster than walking. And therefore, since walking four miles at four miles an hour takes an hour, people will get in their cars and sit in traffic for half an hour instead, gumming up the roads.

               Moses spent forty years making this problem worse. From 1955 to 1965 alone the metropolitan area of New York spent $1.2 billion on new highways without spending a cent on mass transportation. The massive imbalance this created was reflected in the traffic jams all over the region. Moses’ ideological commitment to highways and cars condemned millions of New Yorkers to countless time lost in traffic jams. He even locked it in for future generations by building highways in such a way that it would cost millions more to put trains on them rather than making small investments up front to make it possible to add trains later. All he needed to do was sink heavier foundations into the center mall of the highway. He knew it could be done since proposals to do so had sat on his desk. But he did not. Robert Moses purposefully killed mass transit in New York.

The Fall of Robert Moses

               Before Moses fell from power, he first fell in the eyes of the people of New York. It came from an attempt to increase the size of the parking lot at the Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant in Central Park. What a mundane issue! Moses had torn down hundreds of city blocks and displaced thousands upon thousands of people! Yet this tiny parking lot would be a watershed moment in his career. The difference between this time and all the other times is that first, this is where rich kids played, with parents who would cause a fuss, and second, that Central Park has more special meaning than any other park in New York, drawing more media attention. When the famous actors and writers who lived nearby got involved, the press attention grew. Moses had always had the press on his side, but now a new generation of reporters was digging deeper into his works.

               Some of them found that Tavern-on-the-Green was paying nothing to the city for its location in Central Park. In return for the excellent location, they would cater Moses’ special events, something that is clearly illegal, as it circumvented budget appropriations. As they dug deeper, another scandal popped up a few years later, when one of Moses’ subordinates removed actors who were performing Shakespeare from the park as he suspected that the director was a Communist. Moses’ reputation was tarnished not only by these scandals, but then by the new critical press environment. When Moses led the World’s Fair in 1965, all of his mistakes (and there were many) were ridiculed in the press.

               Moses was finally brought down by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller could afford to get rid of Moses since as Governor he was stronger than any mayor and since as a Rockefeller he had an unlimited supply of money to use as he pleased. Basically, Rockefeller was able to get him due to New York laws requiring governor approval for state employees over 70 to continue working. Rockefeller basically told him that he wasn’t going to keep Moses on for one of his jobs when he hit another birthday, so Moses pulled his classic move of resigning all his positions. To Moses’ surprise, Governor Rockefeller accepted the resignations. He then took Moses out of the leadership of the Triborough Bridge Authority somewhat easily. Normally, bondholders would sue, or in this case, the agent of the bondholders, since they all had the same agent. They would normally win. That was why no one had done it before. However, the agent/trustee of the bondholders was Chase Manhattan Bank, the only large bank left in the United States to be controlled by a single family—the Rockefellers.

               By the end, Moses was easier to take down without public opinion on his side and then without his many positions to help him. He stopped being as indispensable later on and it didn’t help him that he was mostly deaf, making meetings difficult. It’s hard to say that Moses really got beat, as spending 40 years ruling over the largest city in the most powerful country on Earth only to yield at 80 years old is impressive by any standard. He never lost his desire to keep building though, even in his non-consensual retirement.

Conclusion

               I’ll just say again that this is a great book. Caro is a genius and one of the best writers ever in any genre. Below is a passage I really liked from the book talking about the people who rode the Long Island Railroad in the early seventies when the book was written. The railroad was slow, crowded, and generally terrible due to a total lack of state funding. Robert A. Caro wrote the below:

               A young man might say, as twenty-six-year-old Michael Liberman of Dix Hills did one evening, “People’s lives revolve around the railroad. You can spend five hours a day on it, and then you’re just too tired to work.” He might say, as thirty-six-year-old Allen Siegal of Roslyn did one evening, “I think we’re out of our minds to do this. The trip home is worse than eight or nine hours at the office.” Men who have been commuting for years, however, generally do not go into detail. Nor do they complain much. Their standard reply—one so standard that the questioner can hear it a dozen times in a dozen conversations—apparently sincere, is: “Oh, you get used to it after a while.”

               The implications of this reply should be considered.

               “Get used to it!” Accept as part of your daily existence two or three—or more—hours sitting amid dirt, crammed against strangers, breathing foul air, sweating in summer, shivering in winter. Accept that you will be doing this for a substantial portion of every working day of your life, until you are old. “Get used to it!” One has to think about what those words, so casually uttered, really mean. One has to realize that the man uttering those words has accepted discomfort and exhaustion as a part—a substantial part—of the fabric of his life. Accepted them so completely that he no longer really thinks about them—or about the amount of his life which they are, day by day, robbing. We learn to tolerate intolerable conditions. The numbness that is the defense against intolerable pain has set in—so firmly that many of the victims no longer even realize that the pain is pain. [The italics are Caro’s)

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Something so important that is not just true of the Caro books I’ve read but really all books on great leaders is that they know when to shut up. James (?) Foley said of Al Smith that, “He would never admit that he knew anything about a subject until he knew everything about it.” It is really good leadership to not talk out of your ass since that exposes you as a fool.
• Al Smith was a really smart politician. There’s a good story in the book about a time when Smith was going to give a speech to an audience at a county fair and Moses had given him a speech detailing dollar by dollar how Governor Miller’s claims to have saved the state $14 million were untrue. Instead, Smith said just two sentences: “Governor Miller says he saved the state fourteen million dollars. All I want to know is—where is it, and who’s got it?” After a moment the farmers listening were silent, then murmured, then laughed, and then broke into applause and cheers. That’s a ballsy speech.
• Moses’ signature move was to threaten to resign. He did it so much during La Guardia’s administration that the mayor had a pad of memos printed up that said, “I, Robert Moses, do hereby resign as ________ effective __________.” That shut him up for a while.
• Tammany Hall has a presence in this book until the 1940s, having lost a lot of power under the Republican Fiorello La Guardia and being broken thereafter.