The Power Broker

The action is the juice

“Law? What do I care for law? Hain’t I got the power?”

— Commodore Vanderbilt

“I owe the public nothing.”

— J. P. Morgan

I’ve done it — I’ve read The Power Broker. Where’s my ‘I’ve read all of Robert Caro’s books’ badge?

More Robert Caro kvetches: Coke Stevenson, JFK, Suffering Wives

I’m afraid the whiners are right: The Power Broker really is about twice as long as it should be. The meticulous biography of a power connoisseur, it’s an unwieldy compendium of Robert Moses’ maneuvers to gain, retain, and exercise power over New York. I couldn’t put all four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson down, but in The Power Broker Robert Caro is obsessive to a fault. He cares more about thoroughness and revealing the innards of municipal maneuvering than story itself. And yet, what a story it is.

In Caro’s portrait of the rise of New York City and its greatest Pharaoh¹ he gifts us another study of greatness. Without ever being elected to office, Moses cudgelled the city’s machinery into an empire at the heart of the greatest city in the greatest nation in history. This empire had its own flag and seal, distinctive licence plates, proprietary communications network, its own constitution and laws. Through it flowed golden rivers of tribute. It had its own fleets of yachts and motorcars and trucks, and its own uniformed constabulary. Atop this empire sat Robert Moses, its singular emperor. Moses worked indefatigably. He was loyal to his men and rewarded his courtiers richly, making many of them wealthy. From this seat of power, he built. Over 40 years he built highways and bridges and tunnels. He built parks and playgrounds and pools. He built housing. He evicted 250,000 people to build his monuments. He defeated the great barons of upstate New York as well as crushed underfoot countless hard-working men and women who lost their homes and livelihoods to his schemes. King of the parks, to the public and the press he stood on the side of angels. With this public adulation, he wove his preternatural genius for the grand and minute details of design and construction with a lust for power into reshaping the greatest city in world history. Savagely vindictive, he razed his enemies’ monuments out of spite. Physically powerful, he still hurled himself into big Atlantic breakers at 79.

But most of all, the story of Robert Moses is about a man trapped within his own insatiability. All he had accomplished, all he had defeated, were inadequate to his ambition, his lust for power, his cravings for adulation. There was no bottom to Moses’ ferocious appetites. There was no escaping the prison of his character. Character is destiny. Legacy is fake. Contra The Gladiator, what we do in life does not, in fact, echo in eternity. We are all Ozymandias.

This is how Caro’s story of the great Robert Moses ends:

Still he lived on—year after year, vital and alert, imaginative and energetic, but with nothing to do with his vitality, his imagination and his energy except to bottle them up, feeding on himself.

His name had faded from the headlines in New York City long before. For a while after Newsday no longer published his column, its reporters still telephoned him for comment on stories involving public works on Long Island, and played his statements prominently, as did the Long Island Press. But as time went on that all but stopped, too. This man who for decades had read the newspapers first thing every morning no longer found his name in them except on rare occasions— and on those occasions almost invariably in a derogatory context, as a man who had been responsible for housing and highway mistakes. He had built Jones Beach and Sunken Meadow State Park, and Heckscher, and the Massena and St. Lawrence power projects— but no one remembered those. He was forgotten—to live out his years in bitterness and rage.

In private, his conversation dwelt more and more on a single theme— the ingratitude of the public toward great men.

But before Caro ends on this bitter note, with sand swirling around the fallen statue of Moses, he compounds our sense of loss in Moses’ life, hinting at a broader tragedy:

Robert Moses, preoccupied with immortality, had no sons. He had three grandsons, two by his daughter Barbara, one by his daughter Jane. The one Barbara had named after him was mentally retarded. For her other son, John Olds, a Princeton graduate who married an heiress and became a banker, he had no use.

Jane’s son, Christopher Collins, was a tall, handsome youth with a broad, engaging grin and an easygoing nature... “He’s too goodlooking for his own good,” Jane said.

But Robert Moses loved Chris. He doted on him, taking him with him everywhere. He taught him to fish and sail…

On December 11, 1968, driving home to Long Island from California as a passenger in a car driven by a Stanford friend, Christopher Collins, twenty-one, was killed when the car veered off the road and smashed into a concrete culvert.

Perhaps, Caro hints, Moses could find immortality in his progeny? Perhaps he even did find a measure of it in his dotage of Christopher, before that was snuffed out.

Maybe legacy and greatness are mirages. Caro doesn’t say that, and perhaps can’t say it, having dedicated the last half century to the study of two great men (7 years to The Power Broker and 45 years (so far!) to his LBJ series).

In Michael Mann’s epic classic Heat one of the loyal crew is asked if he’s in for their last hit, a big and dangerous score. He doesn’t need the money, he can ride off into the sunset. But he’s in. The action is the juice, he says. Maybe the best you can hope for in this life is the brush of fear, the wrangle with a rival, the love of a woman, the loyalty of men, the scent of a newborn, the laughter of a brood. The action is the juice.

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The anatomy of greatness is what Caro is all about. But always interwoven in his tales of singular men are the stories of their worlds. LBJ’s arc mirrors the arc of America’s rise from backward agrarian society to global industrial hegemon. And Moses’s reign is a long and important episode in the strange, gritty, beautiful, singular story of the greatest city in history, New York.²

The Power Broker is full of the colourful asides that comprise the city’s history and characters. Here is the comically decrepit state of the Central Park zoo before Moses transformed it:

Because the Menagerie did not adequately care for its animals or dispose of them when they grew old, its exhibits included such old pensioners as a senile tiger, a puma with rickets and a semiparalyzed baboon. Its most fearsome exhibits were rats, which roamed it in herds and had become so bold that they were stealing food from the lions’ feeding pans. The most vivid memory carried away by many visitors was of the sickening stench that rose from the dung-heaped Barbary sheep pen.

But a closer look disclosed that, because for generations the sheep had been allowed to inbreed, every one of them was malformed.

Or the grim lifeguard shacks of city beaches before Moses created Jones Beach:

Parents who took their children to city beaches on Sundays learned not to allow them near the shacks on the beach labeled “First Aid Station.” The shacks were invariably filled with prostitutes sleeping off the effects of their Saturday-night parties with the lifeguards, (“Those whores were as unbelievable as the guys,” White recalls. “They were some of the ugliest women I have even seen.”)

Or how one of the city’s poor Irish migrants rose to become one of its great financiers, from bank teller to owner:

Shanahan’s nostrils twitched to a single aroma: the smell of money. Even as a boy at the turn of the century, one of seven children of a poor Irish boilermaker, he had followed that scent to its source: the noses of his Waterbury, Connecticut, playmates may have been flattened against candy-store windows; Tom Shanahan’s nose was pressed against the glass front door of Waterbury’s Colonial Trust Company; reminiscing forty years later, he would recall vividly passing that building almost every day of his youth and staring inside almost every time he passed; it had been, he would say, a place of “august halls”; from as far back as he could remember, he would say, he had wanted to be a banker.

He followed the scent down to the great city after high school, but for long years he seemed to have followed it into a trap: the tall, strong young man spent seven years behind the barred windows of tellers’ cages. He went to NYU at night, in 1926 earned a degree, but five years later still had a job only slightly better—assistant cashier—at one of the smallest and shakiest banks in the city, the eight-year-old Federation Bank and Trust Company. But when, in 1931, the Depression forced the infant institution to shut its doors, it was the assistant cashier who, with Federation’s despairing officers ready to liquidate, thought up a complex refinancing plan that reduced the bank’s obligations, personally talked a financier into loaning it the money to pay them off, and saved the bank. When it reopened, Shanahan, at twenty-nine, was its vice president and treasurer.

Big men

This is the stature of men that Moses defeated, and in the end, was defeated by (a Rockefeller, no less):

They were the men who had blackmailed state legislatures and city councils by threatening to build their railroad lines elsewhere unless they received tax exemptions, outright gifts of cash— and land grants so vast that, by 1920, the elected representatives of America had turned over to the railroad barons an area the size of Texas. They were the men who had bribed and corrupted legislators—the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it—to let them loot the nation’s oil and ore, the men who, building their empires on the toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt’s “Law? What do I care for law? Hain’t I got the power?” and J. P. Morgan’s “I owe the public nothing.”

Baker was old now—eighty in 1920—but not too old to lift his sword; in 1930, when he was ninety and America was in the Depression, he climbed out of bed, pushed aside his doctors, strode to his office and, in a series of incredible stock manipulations, increased his fortune in that year alone by $50,000,000.

Small men

If the greatness of a single man can imprint itself upon a city and upon history, so can a man’s smallness. The pettiness of men, their foibles and insecurities and vindictiveness, is an inevitable accompaniment to their power.

During his second term, La Guardia, sensitive about his Italian immigrant ancestry and unable to forget that during his youth playmates, seeing an organ grinder, had jeered, “A dago with a monkey! Hey, Fiorello, you're a dago, too. Where’s your monkey?,” banned organ grinders from the streets. Moses thereupon began referring to La Guardia in private as “the little organ grinder.”

And if men can imprint themselves upon cities, so they can imprint themselves upon other men. You want to be charming? You must only will it:

Shapiro, for example, was painfully shy. Moses would take him to social gatherings and order him to charm a particular official. Before long, Shapiro was charming.

So ferocious was Moses’s ambition that even a brutal dictator recognized it instantly:³

The measure of his arrogance was taken by a dictator. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was considering commissioning Moses to propose public works for his Dominican Republic when, after one long afternoon’s discussion with Moses, he abruptly told him he had decided not to hire him after all. According to Moses, the dictator told him: “You’d want my job.”

Sexlessness

One thing notably absent from Moses’s ferocious appetites was one for women. Unlike LBJ or JFK, Moses was faithful to power, his true mistress. The details dedicated to his wife and two children in this mammoth and obsessive portrait are scant. The sexlessness of power-maniacs is a thing. In service of his ambition he worked relentlessly (like LBJ who almost died a couple times on campaign trails from overwork):

The amenities of life dropped out of his. He and Mary had enjoyed playing bridge with friends; now they no longer played. Sundays with his family all but disappeared. He did not golf; he did not attend sporting events; he was not interested in the diversions called “hobbies” that other executives considered important because they considered it important that they relax; he was not interested in relaxing. Since he left to Mary the paying of bills and the selection of his clothes, even the hiring of barbers to come to his office and cut his hair, his resources of energy were freed for the pursuit of his purposes. His life became an orgy of work.

Build Build Build

I suspect we respect Moses’ drive today and read him more sympathetically in an era of total Californian and New York public administrative scleroticism. Here is Moses completing something in weeks that would otherwise have taken at least a year then (never now?):

[T]he speed with which the West Side Improvement was driven to completion was symbolized by the construction of the bridge that carried the Henry Hudson Parkway over Broadway at 253rd Street in Riverdale, a job that would normally have taken at least a year to complete. The legislation authorizing construction of the bridge (by the State Council of Parks) was signed at 1 p.m., May 1, 1935. At 5 p.m. that same day, Moses opened bids on the job and let the contract; at 7 a.m. the next morning, laborers were working on the site; one midnight a few weeks later, while most Riverdalians were asleep, the six seven-foot-wide steel spans that would hold the roadbed of the bridge rumbled up Broadway on huge flat floats pulled by tractors and at 5:55 a.m. the last rivet securing them in place over Broadway was set; when Riverdalians went to work in the morning there before them was a bridge where none had existed the night before.

Maybe muscular public authorities overbuilding and running roughshod over their constituents is better than the alternative of building nothing and $128bn high speed trains that don’t exist. Maybe we’ll take one great man over countless needling interest groups vetoing action. Maybe we yearn for the strongman…

It was no accident that most of the world’s great roads—ancient and modern alike—had been associated with totalitarian regimes, that it took a great Khan to build the great roads of Asia, a Darius to build the Royal Road across Asia Minor, a Hitler and a Mussolini to build the Autobahnen and autostrade of Europe, that during the four hundred years in which Rome was a republic it built relatively few major roads, its broad highways beginning to march across the known earth only after the decrees calling for their construction began to be sent forth from the Capitol by a Caesar rather than a Senate. Whether or not it is true, as Moley claims, that “pure democracy has neither the imagination, nor the energy, nor the disciplined mentality to create major improvements,” it is indisputably true that it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to take the probably unpopular decision to allocate a disproportionate share of its resources to such improvements, far easier for it to mobilize the men necessary to plan and build them; the great highways of antiquity awaited the formation of regimes capable of assigning to their construction great masses of men (Rome’s were built in large part by the legions who were to tramp along them); at times, the great highways of the modern age seemed to be awaiting some force capable of assigning to their planning the hundreds of engineers, architects and technicians necessary to plan them. And most important, it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to ignore the wishes of its people, for its power does not derive from the people. Under such a regime it is not necessary for masses of people to be persuaded of an improvement’s worth; the persuasion of a single mind is sufficient.

Corruption vs Patronage

One of the tools Moses wielded was patronage. He transformed the grimy, backdoor cash political economy of Tammany Hall into one of official patronage. There’s a deeper question here about the place for ‘good’ corruption in aligning incentives to get things done.

What Moses had succeeded in doing, really, was to replace graft with benefits that could be derived with legality from a public works project. He had succeeded in centralizing in his projects—and to a remarkable extent in his own person—all those forces which are not in theory supposed to, but which in practice do, play a decisive role in political decisions.

Corruption before Moses had been unorganized, based on a multitude of selfish, private ends. Moses’ genius for organizing it and focusing it at a central source gave it anew force, a force so powerful that it bent the entire city government off the democratic bias. He had used the power of money to undermine the democratic processes of the largest city in the world, to plan and build its parks, bridges, highways and housing projects on the basis of his whim alone.

The other Moses lessons to wielding political power and getting things done:

1. Be on the side of angels. It’s very hard to oppose ‘building parks’ — like motherhood, who doesn’t like parks? Australians are very used to this kind of grift dressed up as righteousness.

2. Misleading decision makers and underestimating costs is key to building anything. No decision maker goes through the engineering detail, and they’ll happily approve a lower number. And once you come in over budget, what are they going to do? Confess they weren’t across the detail and eat the sunk cost?

3. Endless lawfare against opponents.

Littering

Love this.

Never, observers agreed, had any park been kept as clean as Jones Beach. College students hired for the summer were formed into “Courtesy Squads.” Patrolling the boardwalk, conspicuous in snow-white sailor suits and caps, they hurried to pick up dropped papers and cigarette butts while the droppers were still in the vicinity. They never reprimanded the culprits, but simply bent down, picked up the litter and put it in a trash basket. To make the resultant embarrassment of the litterers more acute, Moses refused to let the Courtesy Squaders use sharp-pointed sticks to pick up litter without stooping. He wanted the earnest, clean-cut college boys stooping, Moses explained to his aides. It would make the litterers more ashamed. He even issued the Courtesy Squaders large cloths so that they could wipe from the boardwalk gobs of spittle. His methods worked. As one writer put it: “You will feel like a heel if you so much as drop a gum wrapper.”

Race

There’s a dark matter to some of the most poignant of Caro’s tales. A powerful, terrible darkness that sits just outside his purview. Here Caro describes the apocalyptic ruins of one fine, working class neighbourhood:

And in the midst of this landscape of destruction, a handful of apartment buildings still stood. From the outside, the East Tremont committee saw that most of their windows were boarded up. Going inside, they found the lobbies littered with shards of broken glass that once had been big ornamental mirrors and with the stuffings from the armchairs and sofas that had once been their decoration, and smeared with excrement not only animal but human, from winos and junkies who slept in them at night. Stumbling upstairs, the committee found the doors to many apartments ajar; through them, they could see empty rooms, walls ripped open by vandals who had torn the plumbing pipes out of them. Other doors, however, were closed and locked; on them, especially around the keyholes, were scratches and gouges that showed where someone had tried to break through them. And behind these doors the committee found people, not winos but respectable Irish or Jewish families like themselves.

Caro is an old-school liberal. He is deeply sympathetic to working class migrant and predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods wanting to maintain their character and their community. He traces the arrival of Irish migrants and Italian migrants and Jewish migrants to New York in their different waves, running from their different crises. But the final wave of migrants was not like the others, and whilst Caro focuses on the Moses evictions and their effects on the neighbourhood, it was not Moses who smattered human excrement on apartment walls. Caro traces the waves of black migrants, from the south and the Caribbean, and he treats with mixed feelings the white flight that resulted. According to Caro, the failures of black assimilation and the persistence of slums comes down to failures of policy. And Moses made housing and parks policy, and he largely excluded New York’s blacks from his designs on the city. But whilst Caro’s meticulousness peels away at the ruthless machinations of Moses’s power, blacks don’t tend to have agency in Caro’s telling. Waves of poor Irish, Jewish and Italian migrants fought and strove and lived together in poor neighbourhoods. But the war-like destruction wrought by black ghettoisation? Caro blames anyone but its residents.

Also, did you know… this?

‘Don’t you have this problem with the Negroes overrunning you?’ He said, ‘Well, they don’t like cold water and we’ve found that that helps.’ … Moses told him confidentially that while heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable seventy degrees, at the Thomas Jefferson Pool, the water was left unheated, so that its temperature, while not cold enough to bother white swimmers, would deter any “colored” people who happened to enter it once from returning.

Picturing European ancestors grimly rinsing in the North Sea in ages past.

Final thoughts

We’ll tolerate a lot of a man if he gets things done. The bridges and highways still stand as the men and women they quashed are forgotten to history. We mythologise men like Moses because deep down we worry we’ll never see his kind again — and maybe that’s good, and maybe it’s a tragedy. Caro won’t say. But The Power Broker is his monument too, a thousand-page act of preservation for a man who razed everything in sight to preserve nothing but himself. In the end, Moses got what he wanted: power without love, empire without memory, immortality without meaning. The action was the juice.

1. I can’t help but point out that rather than Pharoah, he resembles Joseph as Viceroy more. Consciously or not, Caro mimics the language and the plot of Genesis. From 7 years of plenty to moving the people around en masse (Genesis 47:20):

For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, the seven years of plenty in public construction in the city, seven years marked by the most intensive such construction in its history, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Robert Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city’s people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command.

2. By the way, US history is always so shockingly grand and grandiose. Brutal war with native empires, bloody revolution and civil war, shocking boldness in political theory. Australian history is always low-key comical. Sheep taking over a continent and making some men wealthy? Gold rush, with Chinese prospectors crossing deserts to avoid the license fee? Rum rebellion? Australia’s price in blood during WWI was serious enough, but never forget the Battle of Wozza where Aussie troops burned down a brothel district in Cairo in protest of exorbitant prices and little too much venereal disease.

3. A tid bit for Australian readers: Robert Moses once hosted Australian Prime Minister Menzies is his Royal Box to the theatre at the beach he built on Jones Beach.