Book Review: Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker / Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

In mid-June, I took a deep breath and plunged into this 1,200-page bio. It was challenging and yet invigorating to learn about Robert Moses, the master builder of New York City (and, indeed, much of New York State) between 1924 and his forced retirement in 1968. He liked to say he was the man who got things done, and a largely adoring media repeated that theme countless times. I first came across Moses’ name a few years ago when reading about the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants for California in 1958. Neither wanted to go, but they needed new stadiums. A certain amount of civic cooperation was necessary, but Moses—no baseball fan—stubbornly refused; both teams fled west.

The Dodgers and Giants episode, significant though it is in a sports history context, merited a scant paragraph in Robert A. Caro’s book. And there was literally no mention of Jane Jacobs, which is baffling when we consider that this Pennsylvania-born grassroots activist went toe-to-toe with Moses. Author of The Death and Life of American Cities (1961), she resisted so-called urban renewal and slum clearance in Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown, the Bronx, Harlem and other parts of New York. Some lively and functional communities were mangled or ruined in Moses’ headlong drive to remake the city. Caro later explained that he did write about Jacobs but that portion had to be cut because the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, considered the manuscript too long. He suggested a two-part book, Knopf refused, and 600 pages had to go. I would submit that the story about Jacobs merited inclusion.

He attended the tony Horace Mann School, followed by Princeton, Rutgers, Harvard and Columbia. So Caro, still writing at age 85, obviously got a superb education. But he ought to have known the difference between the words “insure” and “ensure.” Dozens of times in this book, winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, he used the former when he meant the latter. I cannot believe that Knopf had no copyeditors at its disposal for such basic grammatical issues. One other pertains to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Why didn’t Caro, an indefatigable researcher—522 interviews for this book—and a stickler for detail, know that the family name of Giovanni da Verrazzano (first European to explore the coast of North America from Florida to Canada) has two “z”s? Every reference in the book to that 13,700-foot bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn named in his honor has just one.

Caro, who later solidified his stature as the best contemporary American practitioner of the biographical art with a penetrating four-volume look at the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, had many nice things to say about Moses. His physical energy, intelligence, drive, vision and ability to master technical and political problems were not short-changed. He did, however, cite countless examples of how Moses skirted the law, disregarded neighborhoods (“preservation” was not in his vocabulary), favored cars and highways over mass transit and most of all sought power. Moses was never elected to office, running once for governor of New York State and losing by 800,000 votes. His positions were appointed, or he appointed himself: chairmanship of the New York City Housing Authority, the Triborough Bridge Authority, the New York World’s Fair, the New York State Power Authority and the Long Island State Parks Commission are five of them.

Moses, who prevailed in bureaucratic battles with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Wagner and others (but finally lost to Nelson Rockefeller), was imperious and autocratic. Accustomed to having rose petals thrown at his feet, he just could not tolerate criticism. That is one reason he shut down previous attempts to write his life story. Caro, however, would not be dissuaded and so Moses gave him a series of interviews—later characterized by the author as didactic monologues. When the questions became too pointed, he halted them and sent Caro away.

The Power Broker is widely regarded as one of the best biographies of the 20th century, and some observers say it destroyed Moses’ reputation. Determined to have his say, he typed up a 23-page rebuttal. I read every word of it, and if rather self-righteous, it is wonderfully written with quotes of and witty references to Victorian poets, Chaucer, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Leo Durocher. His educational pedigree (Yale, Oxford and Columbia) is no less daunting than Caro’s.

In the last two decades, some New York academics have sponsored museum exhibitions and symposiums which sought to carefully alter Moses’ legacy. He was not the Darth Vader of urban builders, they insist. What if he had not planned, arranged funding for and overseen the construction of Jones Beach or the Lincoln Center or the Triborough Bridge or this highway or that park or some housing complex? He transformed Central Park and was primarily responsible for bringing the United Nations headquarters to its now-familiar spot on the West Side. His admirers opine that the comeback New York has made since its mid-1970s nadir can be attributed in some measure to Robert Moses. They also talk about Lower Manhattan in the wake of the death-dealing Mohammedans of September 11, 2001. Almost nothing happened at Ground Zero in the first five years after the attack. In his heyday, “RM” surely would have taken control and expedited the process.

Others, however, are just as intent on quashing any such revisionist ideas; they consider some of the projects he rammed through unforgivable. These critics also express relief that not all his plans were fulfilled, most notably the Lower and Midtown Manhattan Expressways. The presence of two huge elevated highways crossing the heart of Gotham would have been awful. Maybe that is why Bob Dylan composed a protest song entitled “Listen, Robert Moses.”

Written nearly half a century ago, The Power Broker is somewhat dated. The dire picture Caro drew of New York’s future in which safety, housing and transportation would be threatened by rising population does not match the reality of 2021. New York did not “fall,” as indicated in the book’s subtitle. At least in the case of Manhattan, the big problem now is gentrification—as middle-class and poor people can barely afford to live there. As with his LBJ series, Caro took on a towering figure and one of immense controversy. None can deny the many large-scale achievements of Moses, who died in 1981. But I find his often-repeated assertion that he was “above politics” and “never made a deal” dubious. Many contemporary New Yorkers recall him with ambivalence if not loathing. And if Caro intended to bloody his nose, was it not in most cases justified?

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