The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) by Robert Caro

Arguably one of the greatest biographies written in the twentieth century, Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” is an epic piece of historiography on municipal government and urban planning. At roughly 1,200 pages in length, it is not, needless to say, for everyone.

Born into a well-to-do, socially conscious, nonobservant Jewish family in New York, Robert Moses was a brilliant youth – both idealistic and arrogant. Like all men, he would lose his youth, and like most his idealism, too. But the arrogance only grew. Educated at Yale and receiving his doctorate from Oxford, he was one of the country’s leading authorities on civil service reform when still in his twenties. His early and ambitious efforts for the progressive reform of New York City’s bloated civil administration was frustrated by the still formidable Tammany political machine. Meanwhile, Moses played the part of the selfless public servant uninterested in money (he needed his wealthy mother to subsidize his meager salary to support his family, which she continued to do until he was 38-years-old).

By the mid-1920s, he had transformed from a starry-eyed idealist into a steely-eyed political pragmatist and top advisor to the ever-popular New York Governor Al Smith, where Caro says Moses learned his most important lessons in wielding power. “Dreams – visions of public works on a noble scale – had been marching through Bob Moses’ mind in almost continuous procession for a decade and more,” Caro writes. He’d finally reached a position to make them a reality. He began with state parks. He personally crafted arcane legislation that put unprecedented power to acquire and develop parks and parkways into the hands of a small, independent council that he as chairman would control. “At the age of 35,” Caro says, “Robert Moses had power.” He would immediately violate every principle of centralized, merit-based, open and accountable government that he had fought ten years trying to institute. But he would deliver results. When Moses became president of the Long Island State Park Commission in April 1924 there was one measly 200-acre park on the Island. By the summer of 1928, there were 14 parks totaling 9,700 acres, most of them, such as Jones Beach, were lavishly equipped with modern amenities and exquisite architectural details. Never before had public works been built with such speed and elegance and on such a grand scale. Moses would remain chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission until 1962.

Al Smith’s unwavering support for Moses’ projects had been absolutely critical during the 1920s. In 1928, the jovial Franklin D. Roosevelt, a progressive Democrat, succeeded Smith as governor, and he hated Robert Moses with a passion. The feelings were mutual. Nevertheless, Moses retained his key positions of power despite the ill will because, according to Caro, he was just so effective in getting things done.

In January 1934, recently elected and reform-minded Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Moses New York City parks czar (he still retained all of his state level posts). Within a year Moses completed an around-the-clock refurbishment campaign and increased the total number of city parks by 50 percent (Caro notes that black sections of the city, however, never received new parks or upgrades). The one thing New York City’s thirteen daily newspapers could agree upon was that Robert Moses was a hero. His somewhat irrational response to that adulation was a disastrous gubernatorial campaign on the GOP ticket in 1934, which lost by the greatest margin of any campaign in 157 years. But that slowed him down not at all. “Moses’ ability to complete public works fast enough to provide a record of accomplishment for an elected official to run on in the next election; his ability to build public works without scandal; his willingness to serve as a lightening rod to draw off opposition from the elected official – most of all, perhaps, his matchless knowledge of government,” made him an invaluable political resource to any ambitious mayor and allowed him unprecedented independence. The legend of Robert Moses was that of a selfless public servant uninterested in money, a man who ignored bureaucrats and politicians, who was above political considerations. And the media loved him for it. “If the city’s press made him a hero,” Caro writes, “the nation’s magazines made him a folk hero, a figure larger than life, almost mythical, shrouded in the mists of his own legends, a Paul Bunyan of Public Works, a John Henry of Highways…” His popularity made him politically untouchable; a simple threat of resignation was enough to bend even the most powerful mayor to his will.

The indefatigable Moses possessed tremendous power as parks commissioner, but he thirsted for more. Much more, according to Caro. He found it by transforming how public authorities operate. Traditionally, an authority was a semi-private organization designed to build public works by issuing bonds, which were to be paid down by the tolls collected by the new bridge or tunnel. Once the bonds were paid off, the authority went away and the construction went to the city. Moses’ ingenious design was to create a permanent authority that used ongoing toll revenues to float new bonds to create new public works in a cycle that was potentially never ending. Moreover, the details of construction would be included in the bond covenants and were unalterable, ensuring that politicians couldn’t interfere in his management of projects once they were funded. Caro claims that with the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority it were as if Moses created an entirely new and completely independent fourth branch of government answerable only to him. At its height, Moses was collecting over $200 million in annual toll revenue, which could be capitalized at a billion dollars.

In addition, he was named the City Construction Coordinator, allowing him to be the sole interface in acquiring federal and state funding. At one point, Robert Moses, who never once held elective office, held simultaneously 12 high level city and state positions over public works. One commission he controlled would develop plans that another commission he controlled would review and approve. In Caro’s words, “He and he alone – not the city’s people, not the government officials that the people elected to represent them, not the power brokers who dominated some of these officials – decided what public works would be built, when they would be built and to what design they would be built. He was the supreme power broker.”

Moses liked to build on a grand scale, specifically great bridges and magnificent highways that supported auto transit, which meant that other critical municipal infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals and mass transit, as well as general upkeep and maintenance, were largely ignored in order to fund his dream projects. He built 13 expressways and 627 total miles of roads in and around New York while systematically starving mass transit. To fulfill his dreams, Moses cut swaths through vibrant neighborhoods as though he were emperor with a meat ax. “Democracy had not solved the problem of building large-scale public works,” Caro writes, “so Moses solved it by ignoring democracy.”

His dreams completely reshaped the city of New York. “In sheer physical impact on New York and the entire New York metropolitan region,” Caro writes, “he is comparable not to the works of any man or group of men or even generations of men. In the shaping of New York, Robert Moses was comparable only to some elemental force of nature.” But that is not to say that he was any sort of urban planning genius. Far from it, according to Caro. In fact, Caro fairly accuses Moses of making a complete and total mess of things. He was “America’s, and probably the world’s, most vocal, effective and prestigious apologist for the automobile,” Caro writes. His overemphasis on automobile traffic at the expense of mass transit led to crippling congestion on New York’s highways and streets. As soon as one of his new bridges or tunnels were built they were jammed to capacity without alleviating traffic elsewhere in the network. Meanwhile, the city’s subway system was falling apart and completely neglected by Moses. “When Robert Moses came to power in New York in 1934,” Caro says, “the city’s mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968, it was quite possibly the worst.”

By the late 1950s, Caro says, Moses’ carefully crafted image as a selfless, apolitical and incorruptible public servant had begun to unravel. In several seemingly minor affairs, such as the building of a parking lot for Tavern-on-the-Green and his resistance to free Shakespeare productions in Central Park, Moses was for the first time cast as the villain by the press. Suddenly, people began asking how and why one man – evidently answerable to no one, not even the mayor – had acquired so much power over public affairs. The chips in his reputation became full blown cracks by 1959 when the press began investigating his management of Title I housing for slum clearance, which revealed a vast system of political patronage at work. The downfall of Robert Moses had begun. When he again threatened resignation from his state posts in 1962, powerful New York governor Nelson Rockefeller quietly accepted them. The public just shrugged its shoulders at the news. As a swan song, Moses accepted leadership of the 1964-65 World’s Fair, primarily because he wanted the investment to help create a permanent city park at Flushing Meadows. It would turn out to be a financial and public relations disaster. “The great universal exposition that had been supposed to rehabilitate his popularity instead destroyed the last of it – and destroyed it beyond repair.”

“The Power Broker” is a phenomenal book. It is also phenomenally one-sided. Robert Moses was a great builder; there’s no question about that. But was he a great man? Was he even half the selfless public servant that he claimed to be? That is less clear, at least in Caro’s telling of the story, of which there is undoubtedly another side.