Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 265
Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," by Robert Caro.
The whole life of Robert Moses, in fact, has been a drama of the interplay of power and personality.
Robert Moses' influence on the development of the expressway system in the United States was greater than that of any other single individual. He was America's greatest road builder, the most influential single architect of the system over which rolled the wheels of America's cars. And there was, in this fact, an irony. For, except for a few driving lessons he took in 1926, Robert Moses never drove a car in his life.
The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter.
This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.
Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.
In the beginning—and for decades of his career—the power Robert Moses amassed was the servant of his dreams, amassed for their sake, so that his gigantic city-shaping visions could become reality. But power is not an instrument that its possessor can use with impunity. It is a drug that creates in the user a need for larger and larger dosages. And Moses was a user. At first, for a decade or more after his first sip of real power in 1924, he continued to seek it only for the sake of his dreams. But little by little there came a change. Slowly but inexorably, he began to seek power for its own sake. More and more, the criterion by which Moses selected which city-shaping public works would be built came to be not the needs of the city’s people, but the increment of power a project could give him. Increasingly, the projects became not ends but means—the means of obtaining more and more 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. Not one of them had marched out of his mind into reality.
But during that decade, Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power.
And now he grabbed for power with both hands.
To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during the years of his idealism, he had fought so hard.
In politics, power vacuums are always filled. And the power vacuum in parks was filled by Robert Moses. The old men saw beauty in their parks. Moses saw beauty there too, but he also saw power, saw it lying there in those parks unwanted. And it picked it up–and turned it as a weapon on those who had thought it not important and destroyed them with it. Whether or not he so intended, he turned parks, the symbol of man's quest for serenity and peace, into a source of power.
Part of the explanation for Moses’ increased power was simply the breadth and depth of his knowledge of the government at whose head Roosevelt, with little preparation,suddenly had found himself. No one knew the vast administrative machinery the Governor was supposed to run better than this man the Governor hated. To a considerable extent, the machinery was his machinery; he, more than any other individual, had drafted the executive budget system, the departmental consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He,more than any other individual, knew the considerations—constitutional, legal and political—that lay behind wording in those laws that was otherwise so puzzling. He knew the precedents that made each point in them legal—and the precedents that might call their legality into question. He knew the reason behind every re When discussing a point of law with some young state agency counsel, Moses liked to let the lawyer painstakingly explain the legal ramifications involved and then say dryly: “I know. I wrote the law.” This store of knowledge, coupled with an intelligence capable of drawing upon it with computer-like rapidity, constituted a political weapon which no Governor could afford to let rust in his arsenal.
In building the West Side “Improvement,”he had, although he did not realize it, the choice of giving the city’s precious Hudson waterfront to either cars or people.And he had chosen to give it to cars. Cars were part of the essence of the city. He had brought cars to the city’s very edge. Concrete was part of the essence of the city. He had laid concrete at the city’s very edge. With a chance, a wonderful chance, to give the city’s people a way of escaping the city, he had, instead, sealed them within it.
For years, Robert Moses had sought executive power himself, hastily switching his party allegiance in 1928 when he thought he had a chance for the Democratic nomination for Governor, switching back to Republican in 1933 when he thought he had a chance for the Republican-Fusion nomination for Mayor, finally obtaining a nomination and running for Governor in 1934.
Each such clutch at executive office had been an attempt to obtain more power through normal democratic processes. After the 1934 debacle, however, it was obvious that this path to power was forever barred to him. His voter antagonizing personality meant that he was never going to be able to obtain that supreme power which, in a democratic society, only the people can, through their votes, confer.
But now he needed that power no longer. In many ways the amendments to the authority acts had given him, in his fields of operation, more power than he would have possessed as chief executive of state or city.
And Moses knew it. Prior to passage of the authority amendments, he had scrounged for elective office. After the passage of those amendments, he disdained it. For the next twenty years he would with regularity be approached by men prepared to back him for a gubernatorial or mayoral nomination, and he would firmly discourage them. Robert Moses was interested in money and power, and he no longer needed elective office to obtain those prizes. After the passage of his authority amendments, he had them already.
Robert Moses, whose aim was not economic but political power but whose power would have to rest not on political but on economic factors, had understood that competition was a threat to his aims. He head schemed for ten years to remove that threat, to obtain over all modern water crossing within New York - the water crossings that were a key to all automobile transportation within the city - an absolute monopoly.
Robert Moses' influence on the development of the expressway system in the United States was greater than that of any other single individual. He was America's greatest road builder, the most influential single architect of the system over which rolled the wheels of America's cars. And there was, in this fact, an irony. For, except for a few driving lessons he took in 1926, Robert Moses never drove a car in his life.
The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter.
This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.
Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.
In the beginning—and for decades of his career—the power Robert Moses amassed was the servant of his dreams, amassed for their sake, so that his gigantic city-shaping visions could become reality. But power is not an instrument that its possessor can use with impunity. It is a drug that creates in the user a need for larger and larger dosages. And Moses was a user. At first, for a decade or more after his first sip of real power in 1924, he continued to seek it only for the sake of his dreams. But little by little there came a change. Slowly but inexorably, he began to seek power for its own sake. More and more, the criterion by which Moses selected which city-shaping public works would be built came to be not the needs of the city’s people, but the increment of power a project could give him. Increasingly, the projects became not ends but means—the means of obtaining more and more 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. Not one of them had marched out of his mind into reality.
But during that decade, Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power.
And now he grabbed for power with both hands.
To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during the years of his idealism, he had fought so hard.
In politics, power vacuums are always filled. And the power vacuum in parks was filled by Robert Moses. The old men saw beauty in their parks. Moses saw beauty there too, but he also saw power, saw it lying there in those parks unwanted. And it picked it up–and turned it as a weapon on those who had thought it not important and destroyed them with it. Whether or not he so intended, he turned parks, the symbol of man's quest for serenity and peace, into a source of power.
Part of the explanation for Moses’ increased power was simply the breadth and depth of his knowledge of the government at whose head Roosevelt, with little preparation,suddenly had found himself. No one knew the vast administrative machinery the Governor was supposed to run better than this man the Governor hated. To a considerable extent, the machinery was his machinery; he, more than any other individual, had drafted the executive budget system, the departmental consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He,more than any other individual, knew the considerations—constitutional, legal and political—that lay behind wording in those laws that was otherwise so puzzling. He knew the precedents that made each point in them legal—and the precedents that might call their legality into question. He knew the reason behind every re When discussing a point of law with some young state agency counsel, Moses liked to let the lawyer painstakingly explain the legal ramifications involved and then say dryly: “I know. I wrote the law.” This store of knowledge, coupled with an intelligence capable of drawing upon it with computer-like rapidity, constituted a political weapon which no Governor could afford to let rust in his arsenal.
In building the West Side “Improvement,”he had, although he did not realize it, the choice of giving the city’s precious Hudson waterfront to either cars or people.And he had chosen to give it to cars. Cars were part of the essence of the city. He had brought cars to the city’s very edge. Concrete was part of the essence of the city. He had laid concrete at the city’s very edge. With a chance, a wonderful chance, to give the city’s people a way of escaping the city, he had, instead, sealed them within it.
For years, Robert Moses had sought executive power himself, hastily switching his party allegiance in 1928 when he thought he had a chance for the Democratic nomination for Governor, switching back to Republican in 1933 when he thought he had a chance for the Republican-Fusion nomination for Mayor, finally obtaining a nomination and running for Governor in 1934.
Each such clutch at executive office had been an attempt to obtain more power through normal democratic processes. After the 1934 debacle, however, it was obvious that this path to power was forever barred to him. His voter antagonizing personality meant that he was never going to be able to obtain that supreme power which, in a democratic society, only the people can, through their votes, confer.
But now he needed that power no longer. In many ways the amendments to the authority acts had given him, in his fields of operation, more power than he would have possessed as chief executive of state or city.
And Moses knew it. Prior to passage of the authority amendments, he had scrounged for elective office. After the passage of those amendments, he disdained it. For the next twenty years he would with regularity be approached by men prepared to back him for a gubernatorial or mayoral nomination, and he would firmly discourage them. Robert Moses was interested in money and power, and he no longer needed elective office to obtain those prizes. After the passage of his authority amendments, he had them already.
Robert Moses, whose aim was not economic but political power but whose power would have to rest not on political but on economic factors, had understood that competition was a threat to his aims. He head schemed for ten years to remove that threat, to obtain over all modern water crossing within New York - the water crossings that were a key to all automobile transportation within the city - an absolute monopoly.
And now he had that monopoly. Henceforth, for the remaining quarter of a century in which he would be in power, no motorist would be able to use a modern bridge or tunnel in New York City without paying his authorities tribute.
He mobilized economic interests into a unified, irresistible force and with that force warped the city off its democratic bias. During his decades of power, the public works decisions that determined the city’s shape were made on the basis not of democratic but of economic considerations. During most of his reign — the post-LaGuardia portion of it—the city’s people had no real voice at all in determining the city’s future. He and he alone—not the city’s people, not the government officials 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.
In any assessment of their motivations, their age is important. Everyone in the circle was in his late twenties or early thirties. Recalling those days, years later, Haddad would say with a rueful smile: “Our motives? It was us against the world, us against them—the city, corruption, unmovable forces. We were young enough to breathe that kind of air then.” Moreover, these young idealists hadn’t even been born when Robert Moses had been on the front pages battling the robber barons to open Long Island to the masses. They had been only infants when Jones Beach was dedicated. In 1934, when Robert Moses had revitalized New York City’s park system, to the city’s cheers, Gleason had been only seven years old, Haddad six. The Robert Moses they knew was not the Robert Moses of the beautiful parks and the beautiful parkways—the parkways that were going to solve traffic problems. The Robert Moses they knew was the Robert Moses of the Tavern-on-the-Green and Manhattantown and those damned expressways he insisted on building even though everybody knew the city should be building subways instead, and for which he evicted thousands of helpless families; their impression of him was of an arrogant, dictatorial old man who, if not corrupt himself, had certainly managed to surround himself with a lot of corrupt people; like the Newmans, they were too young to have seen him as great; they saw him only as crotchety, old—and wrong; their perception of the Coordinator was unclouded by the preconceptions that had clouded reporters’ eyes in the Twenties and Thirties, that he was the selfless, incorruptible, apolitical public servant sans peur et sans reproche. They saw him as he was.
The members of this journalistic cabal were also too young to be afraid. Those rare reporters of the Thirties and Forties who might have contemplated investigating the Moses empire had been very conscious of what had happened to reporters who had tried it before. But it had been a long time now since Robert Moses had broken a reporter, so long that Haddad and Gleason didn’t even know that he ever had. Haddad, the spiritual heir of Milton Racusin, a Herald Tribune reporter who a decade earlier had investigated the Moses empire and written a series on it but had seen the series killed (and had been forced to personally apologize to Moses to boot), had never even heard Racusin’s name, much less the story of how his career had been wrecked.
If the age explanation was simple, the psychological was not. The motives that inspired these young reporters to take on “the most powerful SOB” in the city were as mixed as are the motives of all investigative reporters. One cannot talk to some of them for long without knowing that competitiveness was a spur, and in varying degrees there was present also at that table the desire for personal self-glorification, as well as the simple desire to drag down someone bigger than they. But, with most of them at least, so was a spur of a purer metal. “Can’t somebody do something about the son of a bitch?” Gleason had shouted to Cook in frustration one day, and behind that shout was the outrage, the “sense of injustice,” that had built up in him and in his partner over what Moses and the city’s other power brokers were doing to “the little human beings …who get trampled in their game.” “To me,” Kahn says, “he was the personification of a certain arrogance against the average man. I don’t think he ever cared about how many hearts he had to break to Get Things Done. And so I felt he had to be stopped. And there wasn’t anyone else to stop him but us.” If most young men of intelligence and drive are ambitious, not all of them put that intelligence and drive at the service of justice as had a Gene Gleason or a Bill Haddad. And they kept chipping away at the image of Robert Moses. After thirty years of building up that image, the press had begun chopping it down.
Comments