Moses the roadgiver

As I was drafting my previous post about the changes that the middle of the 20th century brought about, I realized that it was long past time for me to read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. So now I have read it, and it is as great as everyone says — or almost everyone anyway. Some of those who have criticized the book write as though it merely denounces everything Robert Moses did, but while the book is indeed fierce in its exposure of Moses’s arrogance, cruelty, and short-sightedness, it’s not a hatchet job.

What Caro shows is a man whose desire to improve life for the residents of his native city was sincere and genuine — as was his belief that he knew better than anyone else in the world what improvements were needed and how they might be implemented. Over time, his compassion and desire to serve the public gradually withered as his arrogance metastasized. After many years in power, Moses lost the ability to distinguish between what he wanted to do and what needed to be done, and became completely unreflective about such questions – a thoughtlessness best manifested in his mantra-like recital of the cliché that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

As Caro points out, even if Moses had wanted to take time to reflect he could not have done so, simply because he had so many obligations, held so many positions, ran so many organizations. Of course, he only carried so many burdens because he sought the power that they made possible, so what you see in The Power Broker is the precise way in which a brilliant and at least initially compassionate man drives himself into a doom-loop of libido dominandi. But even as Caro describes the spiral of this doom-loop, he nevertheless always also shows the great benefits that accrued to many from Moses’s endeavors. He shows you both those who benefited from what Moses built and those whose lives were effectively destroyed by it, and allows you to draw your own conclusions about how much of what Moses did was justified, and how much we would keep if we could.

For instance: Moses built a series of state parks that gave pleasure to countless millions and became models for parks in many other states — and built roads that enabled city-dwellers to get to those parks — but could only do so through an astonishingly complex set of legal and political and administrative maneuvers to appropriate the relevant land from the mega-rich who were hoarding it, from feckless and clueless local administrators who had no clue what to do with it, and, yes, from farmers who made a living from it. Would you wish those parks unmade, and the land still held by plutocrats, or turned into subdivisions?  The question has to be asked because no one other than Moses would have or could have achieved what Moses achieved. No one else had the necessary combination of skills, coupled with endless energy and determination.

Some of the best passages in The Power Broker capture both sides of the story at once. For instance:

During the 1930’s, Robert Moses reshaped the face of the greatest city in the New World. He gouged great gashes across it, gashes that once had contained houses by the hundreds and apartment houses by the score. He laid great swaths of concrete across it. He made it grayer, not only with his highways but with parking fields, like the one on Randall’s Island that held 4,000 cars, the one at Orchard Beach that held 8,000 and the one at Jacob Riis Park that held 9,000, that together covered with asphalt a full square mile of the 319 in the city. And he made it greener, planting within its borders two and a half million trees, shrubs and vines, bringing a million others back to bloom, reseeding lawns whose area totaled four square miles and creating a full square mile more of new ones. He filled in its marshes and made them parks. He yanked railroad trestles off its avenues, clearing an even dozen from Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue alone as part of a grade-crossing elimination program he considered so minor that he seldom mentioned it.

And:

Part of Moses’ Long Island formula — the vision and the viciousness, the imagination and the ruthlessness, the drive, the urgent, savage thrust, the instinct for the magnificent and the jugular that overrode purely selfish opposition, shortsightedness and red tape to turn vision into reality — was needed in the city, needed desperately, for without it the city would never be able to build parks and roads and bridges — or, for that matter, housing or hospitals, sewers or schools — on the scale its citizens needed. But Moses’ formula could be successful in the city only as the basis of a new, vastly more complicated and subtle and sophisticated formula, one that would turn public works into a far truer reflection of the subtle and complicated human needs they had to serve in the city. A whole new input — a factor of humanity — would have to be added. And Moses would not allow it to be added.

Caro constantly keeps these two visions before our eyes.

The method that Caro develops in The Power Broker is continued and improved — I am tempted to say perfected — in his biography of LBJ. To take but one example: Many readers have been moved by Caro’s admiring and heartwarming portrait of Coke Stevenson, the immensely popular governor of Texas who lost to LBJ in a Senate race in 1948 – or rather, had the election stolen from him by LBJ. There is absolutely no doubt at this point (partly because of Caro’s deep research) that the election was indeed stolen, and that a nasty, dishonest, manipulative, and power-hungry man stole it from an honest and upright public servant. But Caro portrays the character contrast between the two men so in such contrastive terms because he wants us to understand that if Coke Stevenson — who was an honorable man, but also was a garden-variety Southern racist — had won that campaign it almost certainly would have meant the end of LBJ’s political career, which in turn would have meant that the civil-rights legislation that helped to overcome centuries of structurally-embedded racism in this country would not have happened — or would have been delayed perhaps for decades. (It was precisely because powerful Southern Senators profoundly committed to segregation recognized LBJ as one of them that he was able to bring them around to supporting, or at least accepting, massive changes in the segregationist system.)

Both Moses and LBJ were nasty men who did terrible things — but also did great things. And there was no way to get the great things without the terrible things coming along for the ride. Do you accept the deal? That’s the question Caro presses on all his readers, and that’s the key to his greatness as a biographer and historian.

P.S. Denunciation of Robert Moses has often been accompanied by reverence for Jane Jacobs (no relation), but in this outstanding essay Philip Lopate shows why those paired assessments need to be complicated.