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I
Alan Strauber
April 2, 2006 Prof. KC Johnson Literature of American History II The Power Broker: Robert Moses and
the Fall of New York – Robert Caro One Sunday afternoon, as Robert
Caro relates, a young Robert Moses was ferrying
across the Hudson River to picnic with
a group of friends in New Jersey, a group of
friends that included FDR’s future
Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins. Moses, the young
municipal staffer, proceeded to
elaborate to Perkins about a vision that had occurred to
him for the development of the
Manhattan waterfront, which included a major highway
that stretched up along the west side,
a marina, parks, tennis courts and more. Perkins
later remarked that the young man was
talking about an integrated public works project
on a scale that had little precedent in
the cities of this period. It was an early glimpse of
the kind of visionary imagination that
burned inside the mind of Robert Moses. The extent of Moses’ powers of
vision were comparable to his ego and his arrogance.
It was these qualities that made him
comfortable confronting the likes of the Whitneys,
Morgans, Vanderbilts and other old
money landowners on Long Island – sending surveyors to their estates to mark the
path of an imminent Northern State Parkway through their lands, sometimes marking
a line directly through their luxurious homes.
Moses spoke condescendingly to their
lawyers, knowing that state law and Governor Al
Smith were on his side, ready to
support his efforts to appropriate the land necessary to
realize his ambitious visions. Even the
biblical nature of the name “Moses” holds an
ironic significance given his mercurial
personality and his visionary conception of public
works projects and urban planning.
Robert Caro’s biography
concentrates on Moses’ rise to political power – from an
increasingly powerful aid riding the
coattails of Governor Al Smith, to the Chairman of
the autonomous State Parks Council with
approval authority over all New York State parks project funding, to New York City
Parks Commissioner in the LaGuardia administration, a position he
stipulated would include “unified control of the whole
metropolitan system of parks and
parkway development” in the New York City area. Five
separate borough park commissionerships
were merged into one, under Moses’ stewardship. And, naturally, in order
to unify the public works of all the boroughs, he
needed to control the Triborough Bridge
Authority in order to regulate a bridge that
joined three boroughs and provided
links to highways that extended to the remaining
two. And, as it turned out Moses did a
bit more than control the Authority. He was the
Triborough Bridge Authority, exercising
his dominance over the other two commissioners. There were now a total
of seven agencies in the New York metropolitan
area that regulated major roads,
parkways and all other major public works: the
Triborough Bridge Authority, the New
York City Park Department, the New York State
Council of Parks, the Long Island State
Park Commission, the Jones Beach State Park
Authority, the Bethpage State Park
Authority and the Marine Park Authority. By 1934
they were all under the control of
Robert Moses. Moses turned his attention from
Long Island, where his crowning achievement was
Jones Beach, to projects for
metropolitan New York City. He envisioned a network of
roads, highways and bridges that would
allow a motorist to travel from New England or
the Bronx to the parks and beaches of
Long Island without encountering a single traffic
light or having to drive through
Manhattan. Moses’ plan resulted in roads such as the
Major Deegan Expressway, Long Island
Expressway, and the Northern and Southern State Parkways as well as the
completion of the Triborough Bridge along with the Bronx- Whitestone and, later, the Throgs Neck
Bridge. As Caro points out, the crucial
factor in planning public works in Long Island was the
abundance of space. In New York City,
the most significant factor was a density of
people and a lack of space. And
yet, Caro suggests that Moses used the same kinds of
broad strokes while implementing his
projects in and around New York City that he did in
Long Island. An example of this lack of
sensitivity for the needs of people were Moses’
playground designs. In the 1930’s, Moses built 255
playgrounds throughout the city. He did not consult
people in the neighborhoods, he did not
consider or observe their needs or habits affecting the play spaces of their
children. Caro contends that the designs were banal
and felt unwelcoming to children. The
playgrounds were subject to vandalism. To remedy the latter problem, Moses had
high fences erected around them that could be
locked at night, giving the playgrounds
the look and feel of cages. The parkway concept had also
become suspect. By the middle of the twentieth
century most people were more
interested in getting to work on time than taking a
leisurely drive with their families to
admire the scenery at 8 AM on a Monday morning.
The parkway idea became largely
impractical for a modern society. Moses’ parks were constructed for
sports activities on a mass scale or, as Caro
curiously puts it, on a “Third Reich
scale.” He argues that it is important for parks in a city
to contain preserved wooded areas with
trails conducive to solitary walking, as a refuge
from hectic city life. According to
Caro, natural elements in Moses designed parks
remained undeveloped and neglected for
these purposes. Furthermore, public transportation was banned from larger
parks such as Jacob Riis and Alley Pond, located
at the fringes of the city. This made
access for blacks and other lower income minorities
of the period who did not own
automobiles difficult at best. Smaller parks located within
the city were also designed for use by
children of Moses’ own white, upper economic
class. The portion of railroad tracks
that extended along the west side of Manhattan
were covered by roads and parkland as
part of the West Side Improvement project, but
only up to 125th Street, so
that the white inhabitants of the city who lived below that point
could benefit from the greenery and the
muffled sounds of the railroad, while blacks
living in Harlem were denied the added
park land and bore the brunt of the noisy railroads. Moses spent millions on
landfill to enlarge Riverside Park; below 125th Street,
and also banned commercial businesses
on the waterfront, but only below that demarcation line. Lower income
minorities, who comprised an increasing portion of the
city’s population, were not the people
that Moses bore in mind when building his projects. Moses’ autonomous fiefdom, which
grew into the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, was the agency by which he
would finance and exert much of his power. The
income of the Authority reached
$75,000,000 annually with the opening of the
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1967, with
the Authority’s reported surplus amounting to as
much as $30 million annually. Most of
these funds were used with an astonishing secrecy. As of the writing of Caro’s
book, noone knows what Moses did with the majority
of the Authority’s earnings. One thing
we do know, is that the money helped buy Moses
influence when he needed favors to
bring his projects to fruition. In Caro’s view, the
wealth of this agency allowed Moses “to
exert a power that few political bosses in the
more conventional mold ever attain.”
Caro glorifies Moses as a larger
than life character, grandiosely proclaiming that his
subject “influenced the destiny of all
of the cities of twentieth-century America.” Moses
may have indeed had an enormous effect
on urban and suburban planning for generations to come, and certainly
effected the shape of the New York City area, but it
may be an occupational hazard of some
biographers to glorify their subjects while in the
process of examining them. Examination
can easily turn into magnification, making the
subject larger than life in the
process. It is a line that Caro often crosses. At his best, Caro is an engaging
story teller, relating compelling anecdotes and sub- plots, such as the incident over FDR’s
order number 129 which, in effect, ordered Mayor
Fiorello LaGuardia to fire Moses from
his municipal positions or risk losing all federal
financing for New York City public
works projects. The episode highlights the animosity
between FDR and Moses as well as the
relationship between the latter and LaGuardia.
FDR refused to compromise on his
position until Senator Huey Long threatened to have
Moses provide testimony concerning
FDR’s edict on the floor of the United States
Senate. At his weakest, Caro can
resemble a tabloid journalist, as when he dwells
on the tribulations of Moses’ older
brother, Paul, and Robert Moses’ less than honorable
treatment of him. At each end of the
spectrum and areas in between, questions can
certainly be raised concerning the
reliability of Caro’s source material, often consisting of
interviews conducted by Caro himself.
Recollections derived from oral accounts can
easily be tainted by the passage of
time and the fallibility of memory or through personal
bias for or against Moses. Robert Moses cared about his
highway, bridge, park and housing projects as
extensions of his accumulated power at
the expense of truly serving the needs of all
New Yorkers regardless of economic
class, race or ethnicity. While, undeniably, many of
his public works projects were
magnificent in design and scope, they were sometimes
implemented at the high cost of
displacing thousands of people and the destruction of
their neighborhoods. “You can’t make an
omelet without breaking eggs,” Moses once quipped as he spoke about opposition to
his Long Island projects and their effects on
inhabitants. Equally as significant,
The Power Broker is a cautionary tale of political
power gained by a single man whose sole
decisions were uncontestable by a succession of governors, mayors, and
even a president, until he met his match in the
person of Governor Nelson Rockefeller,
who effectively brought Moses’ autonomous reign to an end. The electorate had not
chosen Robert Moses to his position or bestowed on him his power. How Moses
was able to reach such a degree of concentrated political influence, able
to make decisions at a whim that affected millions
of people for generations to come is
certainly an area worthy of examination. It is no
wonder that Caro felt it necessary to
write such a large book in his treatment of Moses.
In fact, this book could have been even
larger or splintered into many books, covering in
depth the wide range of public works
and political activities that Robert Moses left his
mark upon. |