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.