Like platinum, efficiency in government is highly
prized but hard to find. Yet it can be overvalued, too; think of Mussolini making
the trains run on time. If you think a fascist analogy is out-of-place in
reviewing a biography of a parks commissioner, you probably haven’t read Robert
A. Caro’s The Power Broker.
From farmers and shellfishers on Long Island losing their livelihoods to parkways, to residents of lower-class communities suddenly evicted, to Manhattan’s last vestige of unspoiled woodlands gutted by an overpass, acres of damage were left in Robert Moses’ wake. Caro calls Moses “America’s greatest builder,” noting he was responsible for the construction of over $200 billion in public works from the 1920s to the 1960s. But The Power Broker focuses on cost of a different kind:
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 governance 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.
The word “power” carries totemic force to Caro in his telling to Moses. The word “corruption” suggests personal
enrichment, but Caro makes clear Moses was not corrupt in that way. He lived
humbly, paid for his meals, and struggled to give his daughters the same
education he enjoyed.
His preferred coin lay in his ability to get
things done, no matter what anyone else said. “Some men aren’t satisfied unless
they have caviar,” John A. Coleman, a Wall Street tycoon, told Caro. “Moses
would have been happy with a ham sandwich – and power.”
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| Moses at his apex, with a commanding view of a Manhattan already transformed by his vision, and holding plans for future development. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker. |
This is the second time I read The Power Broker, and as much of a slog
as I found it to be 11 years ago, it was more so now. A brilliantly written,
often engaging slog, but a slog all the same. Perhaps it is because Caro, for
all his gargantuan research laid out over the course of 1,162 densely-written
pages, has trouble getting past his own disdain for his subject or uncovering
what made Moses tick.
Moses loved cars too much (though he never had
a license). He was colossally arrogant. He was brilliant beyond belief. He had
a hearing problem. He treated mayors like manservants. He became so accustomed
to adulation from the media that he was unprepared for the fallout in 1959 when
he paved over a playground in Central Park to create parking for an upscale
restaurant, Tavern On The Green.
At the same time, a sense of Moses as a man is
largely missing, especially as the book goes on. What you do get of Moses’
vision, as interpreted by Caro, is defined in a singularly negative way. His
disdain for black and Latino residents of New York City (or “Negroes and Puerto
Ricans,” to employ the dated parlance of Power
Broker) made him unsympathetic to the need for affordable housing and for a
mass-transit system that didn’t rely on crowded highways or internal-combustion engines.
I don’t think Caro was wrong to take this stand
and run with it. His facts are solid, at times heartbreakingly so. A shorter
work would have been a masterpiece. But that’s where The Power Broker has a problem. It’s too long, and makes its points
with a repetitiveness that becomes a weight over time. Either Caro doesn’t trust
the reader to take Moses “achievements” with the same helpings of salt he does,
or he is too besotted by the facts at his command to lay them out with more
writerly care. Caro doesn’t just spell out the damage of Moses’ oversight, he
wallows in it for 50 pages at a time.
After a while, Caro achieves the impossible:
you begin feeling sorry for Moses, long before he makes one last play for
power, running the 1964-65 World’s Fair, which leads to his downfall.
The Power Broker builds up
its credit early, when describing Moses’ rise to power. He was relatively young
when he made it big, still in his 30s, but it was a hard climb. The product of
a well-to-do, secular Jewish family educated at Yale, Oxford, and Columbia
University, Moses took an early interest in city politics, and aligned himself
with the burgeoning reform movement struggling without much success to take
power from the city’s Tammany Hall monopoly of greedy leaders.
Moses was arrogant even then, but saw value in
a merit-based system of civil service, dedicating himself to this end. He would
be cruelly disappointed. Caro is at his best bringing out the poverty and corruption
of New York City after World War I, its powerful bosses who impoverished the growing
metropolis with graft and make-work jobs.
Yet a dream still burned. Caro describes Moses
looking out over the Manhattan shoreline, seeing in its pre-Depression disarray
of hobo towns and wasteland a place to build not only a highway but a park
where people could take in some natural beauty.
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| Moses as a young man, finding his way in the big city. Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Moses. |
“He
was always burning up with ideas, just burning up with them,” a fellow city
reformer and future Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, would later recall.
“Everything he saw walking around the city made him think of some way it could
be better.”
The big turn in Moses’ fortunes came when he
got a call to help a politician he had thought just another cog in the Tammany
machine, Al Smith. Unlike Moses, Smith had grown up poor, and wanted
to help people living in the same conditions he knew too well.
As Caro explains it, Smith as New York’s governor gave Moses a fresh
start in his public career, and with it, a lesson he never forgot, for better
and for worse:
An idea was no
good without power behind it, power to make people adopt it, power to reward
them when they did, power to crush them when they didn’t. If he still had no
position and no power of his own, if his only power was the confidence of one
man, still, in Al Smith’s Albany, when that one man was Al Smith, that was a
not inconsiderable amount of power.
Moses would later explain his alignment with
Smith in practical terms, “Al Smith listens
to me.”
Smith’s star would eventually fall, and his
successor as governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, disliked Moses keenly. But by
then, Moses’ place in New York State affairs was secure. He had consolidated
state government along more efficient lines and rammed legislation through the
New York State Legislature. At the same time, as chairman of the state Council
of Parks, a post he held for 40 years, he began his makeover of the state, and
indirectly of New York City, too:
He looked at Jones
Beach with eyes that had looked at crowded New York City and had seen a hundred
ways of improving it – and he realized that the emptiness of the strand, its
endless, untouched vistas, was a clean canvas on which he could draw whatever
he chose. And, looking at it that way, he realized that all the landscape
needed was the painting in of people to make it a bathing beach, a great
bathing beach, a bathing beach such as America had never seen. Moreover, the
people, the masses of New York City, were amazingly close. Jones Beach had
seemed so cut off from the world, but, he realized with a start, when he stood
on its western end he was less than twenty-five miles from Times Square.
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| Moses (just off-center in white) celebrates Jones Beach's 10th anniversary. To his right, smiling, is Al Smith, the governor who helped him make the beach a reality. Image from http://collections.mcny.org/Collection/[Al-Smith-and-Robert-Moses-at-the-10th-Anniversay-of-Jones-Beach-State-Park.]-24UAKVMVW2T.html. |
The realization of this vision became the apex
of Moses’ career, and in a way, of Caro’s book. After this, the more he built,
and build he did, the more the result became a case of diminishing returns.
Take his management of New York City’s road
system, something he began in 1934, in the wake of his success with Jones
Beach. The Triborough Bridge, connecting Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx, was Moses’
pride and joy, designed to relieve the city’s congestion problems, but as Caro
relates, only exacerbated them instead. More bridges and highways followed,
adding to the logjam.
“What
have man and Moses wrought? Answer? A boomerang,” opined The New Yorker in March, 1951. But the press largely remained loyal
to Moses, too much so in Caro’s telling.
Moses
was efficient, yes, but efficiency for him was a one-way street. He made no
accommodation in his highway or bridge plans for subways, and the clearances
were often made too low to accommodate bus traffic. One senior aide of Moses’
even crowed about this to Caro, who notes how, under Moses, people living and
working in the city would lose years from their lives stuck in its engineered
congestion:
In 1974, people
using subways and railroads in and around New York were still riding on tracks
laid between 1904 and 1933, the last year before Robert Moses came to power in
the city. Not a single mile had been built since.
Sure,
Moses was great at building playgrounds; he is credited with 658 of them in the
city alone. But Caro notes a racist aspect to this achievement: building them
in white neighborhoods almost exclusively, and designing pools without heating, as Caro claims with much attribution, in order to discourage blacks, whom he believed were less likely to swim in chilly
water.
All
this went under the radar among the opinion-makers of Manhattan; especially
with The New York Times, whose
publisher, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, adored the man. The paper’s editorial
writers were in the habit of excusing his strongarm tactics, writing after one
fight of his to dispossess some Long Island property owners: “It seems not
unlikely that Chairman Moses has exceeded his legal authority. But he is acting
in the interest of the people at large and of all future generations…”
Yet
even Iphigene admitted to Caro that Moses could be a pill: “I had a feeling
that he liked to fight, that if someone just agreed with him, he was
disappointed. He liked to beat them.”
That
arrogance would eventually be Moses’ undoing.
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| A June 1964 issue of Time magazine spotlighted the New York World's Fair, as well as its boss, Robert Moses, on its cover. “I think Bob thought the World’s Fair would be the crowning achievement of a long career,” a deputy mayor told Caro. Instead, it became a financial sinkhole that further exposed the aging Moses to public derision. Image from http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19640605,00.html |
The
fight over the playground in Central Park hurt Moses, Caro explains, by
revealing his arrogance to people whose good wishes had been central to his
power: Manhattan’s upper class. They saw his handling of Tavern On The Green’s
parking situation as nothing less than an atrocity, especially when he sought to end debate by tearing up the playground in the dead of night. The papers, formerly
aligned with Moses except for the New
York Post and Herald Tribune, now
ran front-page photographs of crying children until Moses himself cried uncle
and restored the playground. It was too late for him; after that the gloves
came off and he became a frequent target of public scorn.
Caro
notes: But fighting the press is a battle
that no public official can win, for the battleground is not just of the
press’s choosing – it is the press.
Caro’s
retelling of “The Battle Of Central Park” is a highlight of the book’s second
half, otherwise weakened by his relating in depth a petty fight Moses had with
producer Joseph Papp when he tried to shut down Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park, or the
toil of reporters struggling to get straight answers from Moses’ power machine.
Caro was one of those reporters, so it makes sense he finds such detours
worthwhile. But related in the same grand scale as the rest of the narrative,
it makes a long book longer.
 |
| As Caro notes, Moses got away with his draconian demolition practices when it affected the poor. But the mothers of Central Park posed in front of a bulldozer proved to be his Waterloo. Image from https://medium.com/@jacklule/on-reading-the-power-broker-part-vii-d6271953669d |
Caro was able to interview Moses for a while, until Moses shut down his grudging
cooperation when the writer’s questions got too pointed. It’s a shame, because
the little we see of Moses the person is a lot pleasanter than he appears in
the public record. He is a grouch, but his blinding work ethic, passion for
swimming (he still swam in the ocean into his 80s) and love for a grandson who
died ironically in an accident on a highway, give Caro’s fact-heavy
analysis some badly needed warmth.
There
has been something of a resurgence of respect for Moses, in light of his
impressive achievements in the fields of construction and recreation. Count me
out. Caro makes a convincing case for Moses being a product of public-power
overreach, of the danger of leaving the hopes and aspirations of millions in
the hands of one person:
In the ultimate
analysis, it was the public’s money. But Robert Moses was not accountable to
the public. He was not accountable to anyone. He had $750,000,000 to give away.
And no one would ever know to whom he gave it. And this made politicians and
public officials – at least those politicians and public officials interested
in retainers – all the more anxious to make sure that he gave some of it to
them.
Good
liberal that he is, Caro has his public-service heroes, men like Al Smith and
Fiorello La Guardia, who are presented as beacons of a better way, of energetic
public spending for people’s welfare. But Moses got into the game with similar
ideals. For me, The Power Broker suggested
what New York really needs, and never quite got, is a good dose of healthy libertarianism
and civic distrust of those who tell you what they are doing is in your best
interests.
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