October 05, 2024
This book lived up to the hype. It’s meticulous yet engaging; it’s about deathly serious matters like slum clearance and yet hilarious at points (LaGuardia writing up a form for the next time Moses threatened to quit; Wagner being clowned by the newspapers for failing to find and talk to his Park Commissioner during the Battle of Central Park). It’s got everything. There are minor complaints—Caro repeats himself, takes liberties with chronology so that it’s hard to tell when things exactly happened—but none diminish the accomplishment. As people have said, the book has become a New York establishment, much like Moses himself.
The central question is, of course, how Robert Moses got all that power (at one point, twelve simultaneous appointments in state and city offices). Part of the answer is that Moses “Got Things Done”—he was fiercely intelligent, workaholic, and ruthless at eliminating obstacles that impeded his projects. He carefully cultivated a public image of himself as a selfless public servant who wanted nothing more than to build parks and other amenities for everyone, and he was skillful at manipulating the press whenever some revelation might tarnish that image.
From a higher, systems-oriented vantage, the other reason for his iron grip on power is that Moses organized corruption in New York City to flow through him. His empire, built from the nickels and dimes from toll fare to cross Triborough’s bridges and tunnels, had something for everyone: vast (and therefore visible to the regular voter) public works for city officials eager to add something to their resumes in time for the next election cycle; underwriting fees and interest payments for the bankers buying and handling Triborough Authority bonds; jobs to dole out to the Tammany machine; construction opportunities big enough to keep the ranks of labor unions working. Moses made himself indispensible to powerful people, and from this his power stems.
Moses’ arrogance, despite his unparalleled track record of construction projects, makes his legacy Janus-faced. He had an unparalleled ability to build parks, playgrounds, bridges, highways, and so much more; but the way he did so made him unable to take criticism or really any meaningful input from others, his literal deafness in his later years being a rather apt physical manifestation of his staggering arrogance. Despite the warnings from many people that his car-oriented highway projects would make the traffic problem in the New York metropolitan area worse, Moses refused to integrate mass transit in his projects; and such warnings became prophecies that have only been proven truer and truer ever since.
As well, Moses’ elitism and disdain for the poor made him callous towards the destruction he wrought upon the residents of New York City. He found no object to destroying thriving neighborhoods like Sunset Park in Brooklyn and East Tremont in the Bronx to make way for his highways, as he did not see them as such, only as “slums” that stand his in way. His mismanagement of Title I slum clearance projects enriched his cronies in at the expense of evicting thousands of residents out of affordable apartments, whom he falsely promised a smooth resettlement process into new, similarly affordable residences.
Because of this arrogance and callousness, it is not hard to see Moses as a villain, a cautionary tale of what happens when a very capable and ruthless person acquires immense power. But times have changed. There is a sense that ours is a sclerotic and decadent society, that things are slowly falling apart and we have forgotten how to build. We cannot build enough housing; we cannot build railroads; we let other countries leap ahead of us in important future technologies. Because of this, weary as we might be to let someone like Moses run roughshod over our cities again, Ross Barkan cautions in a recent op-ed that we must resist to “overlearn” the lessons of The Power Broker:
Still, as megalomaniacal as Mr. Moses could be, he proved the public sector could be a tangible force for civic improvement in America, delivering monumental public works that could stand for the rest of the century and beyond.
But it’s not clear what to make of this sentiment. Our public officials (at least some) do have grand ambitions, and see the government as a force for good. So what Barkan might fondly look back on Moses’ career is his unparalleled track record of delivering on his ambitions. But we must remember that Moses’s success is inextricable from his bullying personality. Even if he could stand to be less brusque, his deafness to the concerns of others and his ability to navigate around people’s opposition to his projects is what made him such an effective builder. We can wait for the second coming of Moses to break through the red tape of bureaucracy and deliver us monumental public works again, but is that what we really want—someone who knows how to pull the levers of power so that they can impose their designs on us, whatever we might think of them?
I am reminded of the old quip from Churchill, that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried. The ability for people to challenge public projects is an important lever of democracy, one that Moses ignored and fought hard against, to great success. No doubt, this lever can be weaponized; but on the whole, perhaps preserving this ability is worth the price of not being able to build on the scale that Moses did. Yes, we can do with being less sclerotic, with some cutting of red tape, but we do not need to romanticize a man whose wildly successful career was built on the inability to hear anyone but himself.