At over 1200 pages, Robert Caro's The Power Broker stands as a benchmark of modern non-fiction. Its subject, Robert Moses, shaped the infrastructure and dominated New York City politics for over forty years. The amount of detail Caro packed into the book is staggering, as are the various narrative strategies he employed to tell the story. Caro returns often to the central question of the book: How could a man who was never elected to office command so much power?
To arrive at an answer to that question, we learn about the machinations of city and state government, the nuances of navigating bureaucracy, the power of personality and interpersonal relationships, the cultivation of public opinion, the Byzantine flow of money, and the nature of power itself. For one can chase power for noble or selfish reasons, yet for anyone who attains it for a long period of time, the relationship becomes something else entirely.
Robert Moses, the son of a middle-class Jewish family, began his career as a reformer. He attended Yale and Oxford, studied government and set out to make life better for everybody - and a cultural arrogance that would drive his projects. Moses came of age during the Progressive Era, an urban reform movement to make government more efficient to meet the demands of an exploding population. As a young man, working for a statistical bureau, Moses would walk the streets of New York and imagine great highways, arterial systems of the future. By age 30, his ideas about reform fell on deaf ears and his arrogant personality rubbed many the wrong way. But he found a patron in Al Smith, Democratic governor of New York who instituted many reforms. They were an odd couple, alter egos, who forged a lifelong friendship. Moses lobbied to be put in charge of parks, and Smith gave him full rein.
Before he reshaped New York City, Moses focused on Long Island. He developed the beaches and built roads so people from the city could drive to their destination. The 1920s was the start of car culture, and city infrastructures were primitive. A trip to the beach was nothing but traffic jams and crowds. His determination to build roads extended to repossessing the property of many small farmers. Many of America's wealthiest families, "the barons", owned the shore properties, but Moses left them alone. Appeasing the wealthy would become recurring thread throughout his career. But the beaches were a huge success, with massive bathhouses and sharply dressed workers picking up litter. The public relations campaign was brilliant.
With Smith as Governor, Moses was given extensive powers on highway and bridge planning, transforming New York into a modern metropolis. Moses also had a brilliant legal mind; he carried an encyclopedic knowledge of past legislation and was a master at drafting his own bills. His dominant personality inspired fear and reverence, he answered only to the Governor, in time Mayors and Governors deferred to him. Even Franklin Roosevelt as President tried to break Moses and failed, they had a long running rivalry that Caro depicts in exquisite detail.
As Moses consolidated power, he wowed the nation with his projects (city planners from all over the world observed his methods). The Triborough Bridge, completed in 1936, was maybe his crown jewel, a massive complex of four bridges linking Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. More major projects moved forward. He built his own political machine that operated with impunity, an entire staff of lieutenants as enforcers, and wealthy friends in powerful positions, the NY Times served as his own personal propaganda machine.
By the 1950s, there were the stirrings of backlash. Caro devotes an entire chapter to the Tremont area of the Bronx; city blocks that were cleared out for a six-lane expressway. A community of mostly Irish and Jewish families, the people were given 90 days to clear out. Moses's further encroachment on city properties led to more grassroots protests, spurred by his attempt to build a parking lot in Central Park at a popular park location. Investigative reporters, New York had many newspapers at the time, began to unearth the extent of his corruption. By 1968 Moses was finally stripped of his powers by Governor Nelson Rockefeller (highly dramatic stuff), but not after shaping the city for decades to come.
Caro highlights the class bias and racism of Moses, who believed a city should benefit the most well off. He built hundreds of parks, but most of them for white middle class neighborhoods, while Black and Puerto Rican sections got a paltry few. He made sure his beaches were unofficially segregated through various means. So much of the state's resources were poured into his projects, while schools and hospitals languished. His preference for highways over mass transit condemned most of Long Island to stressful commutes for decades (persisting to this day), as opposed to mass transit rails which were affordable to build and would ease pressure off the highways. His solution to crowded traffic was always the same - more highways and bridges.
As a feat of writing, The Power Broker is not only exhaustive in detail but reads like literature. Caro's long intricate paragraphs on toll both revenues and bureaucratic processes pulse with energy, while other sections unfold like a political thriller. There's a Dickensian flare to the early sections, others with the insight of a New Yorker profile. An entire chapter on Moses's brother Paul, who was just as brilliant but had biblical streaks of bad luck (and betrayal), he ended up living in decrepitude, plays like a Saul Bellow family drama. Rhetoric is deployed with the pinpoint precision of Lincoln when describing the fate of Long Island:
The time was now, before the expressway was built, to insure not only that rapid transit would be provided but that it would be used by enough people to ease the transportation burden from the backs of all the people of Long Island. It would not be possible once the expressway was built. Build the Long Island Expressway with mass transit - or at least provision for the future installment of mass transit - and Long Island might remain a good place to live and play. Build the Long Island Expressway without mass transit and Long Island would be lost - certainly for decades, probably for centuries, possibly forever. (945)
The Power Broker is also a modern example of muckraking with a humanistic strain and a stealth critique of political science, revealing the long-term effects of unchecked power and cults of personality. Relying on statistical data and models that reduce politics down mathematical equations can be illusory. Knowledge of people and relationships, and the application of deep research can reveal the shrouded ways of power. And unlike most biographies of larger-than-life figures, Caro's democratic approach never loses sight of how people were directly affected by his actions.
Lessons from the book still apply. We still live in a world at the mercy of powerful men. The cults of personality surrounding figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk echo the patterns Caro diagnosed. The Power Broker endures because it transforms power from an abstraction into something visible and human. As a manual for the uses and abuses of power, it stands alone.
Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Vintage, 1974.
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