The Power Broker

 

Robert A. Caro, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” Vintage Books (Paper Back), 1975, 1162 pp. .

After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker, a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses.  This book was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century and I believe that anyone majoring in Political Science must read it. It is especially important to observe Moses’ obstruction to mass transit and his dedication to roads for use of cars (not buses).

At the height of his power, Robert Moses was emperor of nearly all New York State public works—bridges, highways, housing, parks, electrical power, the World's Fair and the United Nations—without ever holding elected office.

In his chairmanship of twelve agencies from 1924 to 1968, Moses spent at least 27 billion dollars with immense inefficiency, utter disregard for opponents and maximum reward for friendly banks, contractors, and political allies. Caro documents Moses’s arrogance and vindictiveness, exemplified by his penchant for bulldozing residents' homes. At the same time, Caro's fascination with Moses, a prerequisite for writing this 1296-page biography, produces a Last Hurrah undertone right up to Moses' old age: "forgotten to live out his years in bitterness and rage."  Caro spent seven years researching and writing this book.

Moses in his old age could not understand how there was not appropriate gratitude to the man who had built mighty Triborough, far-­stretching Verrazano, who had made possible Lincoln Center and the United Nations?

Maybe it was because of the bridges he built that embodied racism in concrete? When he opened his Long Island parks during the 1930s, the only way for many poor people, particularly poor people of color, to reach them was by bus, so he built bridges over his parkways too low for buses to pass. Or of the “slum clearance” projects he built that seemingly created new slums as fast he was clearing the old, or of the public housing he placed in locations that cemented the division of New York by race and class? Or maybe the more than half a million people he dispossessed for his projects and expressways, using methods that led one observer to say that “he hounded them out like cattle”?

Maybe how he systematically starved New York’s subways and commuter lines for decades and blocked proposals to build new ones, exacerbating the region’s dependence on the automobile?

My Notes:

Pg. 405: discussion of Moses’s 1934 disastrous campaign to become governor.  His nastiness and proclivity to lie reminded me of Trump, but in Moses’ case it doomed him as a candidate.

Wikipedia Link

This is the story of Robert Moses, the idealist who initially put his faith in truth and reason, to the pragmatist who put his faith in power.  This power, once acquired by Moses, began eating away at some traits, allowing others to enlarge.  Power certainly does corrupt even though useful things are accomplished.

Pg. 9:  Moses entered government in 1924.  Al Smith depended on Moses.  Moses' power lasted until 1968 when Nelson Rockefeller, and Moses’s arrogance, finally ended it.

Pg. 12:  In 1949, the federal government enacted a new approach to housing problems of cities: urban renewal.  For the first time in America, government was given the right to seize an individual’s private property, not for government use but for reassignment to another individual for his use and profit. 

Pg. 453:  By 1936, New York City was receiving one-seventh of the WPA allotment for the entire country.  La Guardia, the mayor, attributed this to Moses and his group who were always prepared to present plans to the government while other cities were not prepared.  Of course, while Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930s, he built only one playground in Harlem. (Pg. 510).

Pg. 546:  Moses' construction of the Parkway bridges had ensured that buses would never be able to ruin the beauty of the Long Island parkways or carry poor people along them to his state parks.  The bridges were planned so low that it kept buses with poor people out.

Pg. 585…ff:  Entire section discussing Moses’s brother.  Interestingly, until this present biography, there had only been one other ever written, and in its 300-plus pages there is no mention that Moses had a brother and a sister. 

Pg. 610f:  1936 saw a change in Moses’s behavior.  Before that year he had always conceived a public work and then had sought the power to bring it into reality.  In the 1936 Tunnel Authority, the motivation became his quest for power. 

Pg. 624:  The main reason Moses was able to wield so much power was his realization that creating Authorities along with the Authority’s right to issue bonds would give him power.  A bond was simply a legal agreement between its seller and its buyer.  A legal agreement was by definition, a contract.  And under the Constitution of the US, a contract was sacred.  No state—and no creature of a state such as a city—could impair its obligations*.  No one—not Governor, not Mayor, not State Legislature, not \City Board of Estimate—could interfere with its provisions. If Moses could write the powers which had been vested in him into the bond contracts of his authorities, make those powers part of the agreements under which investors purchased the bonds, those powers would be his for as long as the authorities should remain in existence indefinitely and could keep his place at their head, he would hold those powers indefinitely.

*US Constitution: Article 1 Section 10, it is written that a State is not allowed to pass any law that “impairs the obligation of contracts”. This is known as the Contracts Clause.  Moses' use of this was the key to his unelected power.

Pg.715:  During the fifteen years after WWII, Moses had control of close to three and a half billion dollars which he dispensed in the city on behalf of federal and state agencies largely beyond the control of the city’s government.  He did this through his control of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

Pg. 722:  In terms of money, the terms in which corruption is usually measured, Moses was not himself corrupt.  He was, in fact, as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived.  But in terms of power, Moses was corrupt.  Coveting it, he used money to get it. 

Lost my notes after pg. 722 and did not begin notes again until page 1105.  I had to check this book out from the library three times to finish it.

Pg. 1105:  Governor Nelson Rockefeller had his accountant check Moses’s books regarding the 1964 World’s Fair; using standard accounting procedures they found not the reported $12,700,000 surplus but a $14,000,000 deficit.