Caro versus Moses, Round Two: Robert Caro’s The Power Broker

Caro versus Moses, Round Two: Robert Caro’s The Power Broker

Jon C. Teaford

In 1974 Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York debuted to the applause and acclaim of those fed up with the superhighway and slum-clearance policies of the recent past. This massive 1,246-page tome chronicled the life of New York’s public-works master builder Robert Moses, examining his relentless pursuit of power as he supposedly dictated transportation, recreation, and housing policy from the 1930s to the 1960s. Portrayed as an arrogant bastard, Moses and his insatiable hubris purportedly wreaked irreparable damage on the city and precipitated its fall from glory and transformation into a bankrupt, decaying hulk.

Not only did Caro’s monumental volume go through twenty-seven printings by 2000, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize, awarded to works of history that achieve literary distinction. To the growing number of city dwellers opposed to the meat ax of highway programs slashing through neighborhoods and the bulldozers of urban renewal, it became a sacred text second only to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Those dedicated to preserving the inherited urban fabric had found their savior in Jacobs; Caro recorded the fall from paradise of their Satan. Together Jacobs and Caro established the Manichaean scenario that has influenced urban policy debates ever since.

The Power Broker’s appearance coincided with a general decline in faith in the public sector. Robert Moses was one of the false gods whose missteps ignited this apostasy.

Caro owed his success in part to fortuitous timing. The Power Broker appeared in the wake of the Watergate scandal, when investigative reporting aimed at toppling the powerful was at high tide. A disenchanted and cynical public was primed to enjoy hatchet attacks on the reputations of public officials. The Power Broker’s publication also coincided with the much-publicized burning and abandonment of the South Bronx and the city’s slide into financial disaster. Rather than blaming themselves for selfishly blocking subway fare increases necessary for improving service, for electing successive amiable but ineffectual mayors, and for advocating a social policy agenda that they could not or would not adequately fund, New Yorkers could, courtesy of Robert Caro, agree on a scapegoat for their city’s problems, targeting an irascible old man who had overstayed his welcome in public office. Instead of recognizing that older central cities across the nation no longer suited the lifestyle of a majority of Americans and that New York City was no longer the preferred mecca for youngsters seeking their fortune, New Yorkers could take solace that their city’s relative fall from grace was an aberration, not an inevitability. It was not preordained by larger social forces, but the product of Robert Moses’ misdeeds. New York City had been stabbed in the back, and Robert Moses was the assassin.

The Power Broker’s appearance also coincided with a general decline in faith in the public sector. Robert Moses was one of the false gods whose missteps ignited this apostasy. During his heyday in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s Moses represented the benevolent efficacy of government. Ahead of schedule and under budget, he created great public beaches, swimming pools, parks, bridges, and parkways, all monumental landmarks to what government could do for the people. Like his enemy Franklin Roosevelt, Moses demonstrated to Americans raised with a laissez-faire bias and a devotion to private enterprise that the public sector and the public bureaucrat could produce great good. The private industrialist Henry Ford manufactured the automobiles, but the public servant Robert Moses produced the pavements and park destinations for motorists eager to enjoy their Fords. By 1974, however, the New Deal–inspired faith in public endeavor had waned and disillusioned Americans were no longer true believers. The Great Society had not been so great, and Lyndon Johnson was the last president who dared to fashion a New Deal–type slogan for his administration and thereby promise the electorate a path to utopia. Given these new doubts about government’s ability to solve problems, Americans were ready and willing to find their villain in the public sector. Wall Street, greedy landlords, and rapacious bankers were no longer the primary targets of those seeking a scapegoat. Instead, Robert Moses, a public-sector bureaucrat who profited little from his works and died a relatively poor man, was the preferred choice of those seeking to personify New York’s decline.

Though the reading public and award committees generally embraced Caro’s work, the book did not initially receive universal plaudits. The 85-year-old Moses issued a lengthy and characteristically biting denunciation of the work. But other more detached figures also expressed reservations. In a New York Times review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt pronounced The Power Broker “vastly entertaining . . . as long as you don’t take it too seriously from the historical point of view.” He claimed that some of Caro’s accusations suggested “nothing so much as vindictiveness” and referred to his “devil theorizing.”{1} In another New York Times review, the distinguished urban historian Richard Wade contended that Caro had “little historical perspective in which to place Moses” and claimed that the master builder’s “great success lay in the fact that he was swimming with the tide of history.” What Moses did conformed to the prevailing American notions of city rebuilding. “Perhaps Moses pioneered” Wade argued, “but the physical shape of urban America would no doubt look very much the same whether Moses had lived or not.” If New York City suffered, the prevailing tides of history were to blame; Moses was just an instrument of the dominant perceptions of his age. Wade further criticized Caro for placing “too much emphasis on interviews and anonymous sources.” Moreover, Wade claimed to have talked to some of those interviewed by Caro and found that “important ones and none who could be described as friends of Moses” were “all generally skeptical about the author’s use of their recollection of events or his description of their views.”{2}

While generally praising The Power Broker, other scholars also noted that it “lacks historical depth” and embraced a great-man theory of history by attributing too much to a single figure rather than presenting him as representative of his generation.{3} One of the preeminent students of New York City government, Herbert Kaufman, complained that “the book is not a balanced appraisal; it is an indictment and a prosecutor’s brief, illuminated by hindsight and motivated by some values that were not abroad a generation ago.” He judged it “an instructive and stimulating book, but it is not the last word on Robert Moses.”{4}

Yet for over three decades Caro’s book was basically the last word on Moses. Caro’s indictment stood, and Moses remained a dirty word in the lexicon of urban scholars and observers. He was the Attila the Hun of urbanity, the symbol of all that was wrong with mid-twentieth-century urban policy. In New York City he was the public-sector bogeyman, a frightening specter haunting the metropolis which continued to suffer from his misdeeds. Caro had assigned him to the pantheon of arch-villains, and most New Yorkers seemed content to leave him there.

In 2007, however, Columbia University professors Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson forced a reconsideration of the master builder, organizing an exhibition titled Robert Moses and the Modern City at three New York museums, conducting a symposium on his legacy, and compiling a book of essays on Moses and his work that included a catalog of Moses’ projects in New York City. As the criticisms from 1974 indicated, the reevaluation was long overdue, but Ballon and Jackson made up for lost time with a stimulating reassessment that raised the ire of many diehard Moses haters. In his opening essay in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, Jackson quickly reconsiders Moses’ vision and his place in the national context and examines Caro’s claims that Moses was corrupt and racist. Jackson contends that “we should acknowledge that Robert Moses was a dedicated public servant in the best sense of that term” and that “the evidence does not support Caro’s claims that racism was a defining aspect of Moses’s character, so that his actions had a disproportionately negative effect upon African-Americans.” He concludes with a judgment sure to stir the anger of Caro and the true believers of the hate-Moses cult: “Robert Moses will be remembered as a key actor in the rise of New York, not its fall.”{5}

Hilary Ballon’s superb essay, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” presents a nuanced and informed account of the realities of Title I implementation, a useful corrective to Caro’s black-and-white journalistic morality play.{6} Title I was a classic public-policy debacle. It was hampered by an obstructive federal bureaucracy which seemed to believe that renewal proposals should age like fine wine. Moreover, it was dependent on a partnership between local government and private developers at a time when such public-private alliances were rare and could not benefit from the corrective hand of long experience. Across the nation Title I blighted the careers of public officials, bankrupted private developers, and produced little that is appreciated today. But one of the few figures who could make the program work, a near miracle in itself, was Robert Moses. Ballon accurately records the restraints facing Moses and how he was forced to maneuver around federal policy, local politics, the demands of lending institutions, and the complaints of citizens groups. She makes a good case for the limitations on Moses’s power and demonstrates how these limitations restricted his options. Rather than an unfettered dictator as portrayed by Caro, Moses was an adroit implementer of a program that required an administrator who could dodge the quicksand and land mines lining the path to ultimate success.

It is time, however, to recognize that Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology. Notions of right and wrong are not static, and the perceived virtues of one age can appear abhorrent to a later generation. Attitudes toward both democracy and technology shifted markedly during the twentieth century, and Robert Moses’ reputation was a casualty of this shift.

Some of the other contributors to the Ballon and Jackson volume are not so supportive of Moses. Urban historian Robert Fishman’s essay “Revolt of the Urbs: Robert Moses and His Critics” discusses those who rose up against the master builder, focusing specifically on opposition to Moses’ proposal to build a roadway through Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Seemingly a reluctant recruit to the Ballon-Jackson reassessment, Fishman concludes: “It would be deeply satisfying to end this essay with the observation that Robert Moses fully merits the obloquy that has become the conventional response whenever his name is mentioned. But perhaps he deserves a brief attempt at fairness that he so seldom accorded to others.”{7}

Fishman’s reluctant admission that perhaps fairness is in order sums up the feelings of many other urban observers. Moses is a man many love to hate, and to yield that reassuring hatred is a difficult and unwanted sacrifice. Caro’s book was a simplistic journalistic account lacking in appropriate historical context. But for many readers it was highly satisfying. When faced with debacle, there is solace in identifying the demon responsible and shifting blame to that convenient figure. Caro’s The Power Broker fits the bill.

Yet the efforts of Ballon and Jackson fit the bill for others viewing Moses from the perspective of the early twenty-first century. Since Moses left the scene, major public-works projects have proceeded slowly if at all. Obstruction and delay seem the order of the day, and Moses’ success in getting things done seems to warrant a reconsideration of his methods and legacy. “In the twenty-first century, after a long period when the city’s infrastructure has been ignored,” Ballon and Jackson explain in their introduction, “the desire for governmental actors that can tame the bureaucracy and overcome the opposition is projected onto Moses, who, we imagine, would have capitalized on the opportunity to rebuild lower Manhattan after 9/11.” For Ballon and Jackson, Moses “has become a symbolic figure in discourse about the future of the city, its capacity to think and build big.”{8} A frustrated Alexander Garvin, past planner for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, expressed much the same sentiment when he asked, “New Yorkers are asking if our city needs another Robert Moses.” “In truth, Moses was not omnipotent,” Garvin correctly observed, “but rather an unusually gifted public servant who had mastered the Art of Getting Things Done. That art deserves attention more than ever.”{9}

Today few people would argue that New York City fell. Abandonment is largely a phenomenon of the past, the population is rising, and the crime rate has plummeted. The city has not become a reservation for the very poor, but rather much of Manhattan is off-limits to any but the wealthy, with the zone of affluence annexing new territory each year. Thus today many are not searching for an answer to why New York City declined; instead they want to know why a city of such wealth and talent cannot realize big projects and accomplish big dreams. Hence the Ballon-Jackson reassessment. Though for many New Yorkers Moses is still a dirty word, for others it is the talisman that might open the door to a greater city.

Moses was the product of the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era and its notions of democratic rule. Progressives rebelled against special-interest politics and emphasized the broader public interest. They hated ward politics and favored at-large representation to ensure that government policy would reflect the will of the people of the city as a whole. Neighborhood nabobs in the form of the ward aldermen were just one more special-interest obstacle in the path of the commonweal. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s a new view of democracy emerged in which activists claiming to speak for a neighborhood or ethnic group became the supposed tribunes of the people battling elected officials and their appointees. Democracy now seemed to mean the right of a fragment of the city to thwart the will of those who represented the majority of the larger electorate.

Under the older view of democracy, Moses was democratic. He was appointed by elected officials and his projects were subject to the approval of the elected members of the city’s Board of Estimate and city council; his authority came from laws approved by the elected lawmakers in the state legislature; much of his funding came from programs authorized by elected representatives in the United States Congress. Though Caro deems Moses a dictator dedicated to usurping power, Ballon and Jackson as well as anyone knowledgeable about the complexities of government know that he acted within the legal and structural constraints imposed by the representative system of American government. He did not force his projects down the throat of an unwilling city. In the late 1920s, before Moses had assumed any city office, the Regional Plan Association drafted the blueprint for proposed highways that Moses would later attempt to implement. Every mayor from the 1930s to the early 1960s was dedicated to realizing that plan, as was every major public official at the state and federal levels. Likewise his slum-clearance efforts enjoyed the mandate of elected representatives at each level of American government.

Under the new concept of democracy of the late twentieth century, however, Moses’ disregard for the will of the fragment as opposed to the people as a whole doomed him to public damnation. Across the nation, at-large election now yielded to schemes for renewed ward representation, and self-chosen “grassroots” spokespersons such as Jane Jacobs became the voice of democracy. Special-interest neighborhood, ethnic, and environmental organizations assumed new legitimacy and a heightened role in decision making.

Similarly, Moses ran afoul of changing views of technology. During the first half of the twentieth century technology was deemed a force for good; the automobile was the greatest advance in the history of human transportation and the ultimate in freedom and mobility. Society embraced speed, streamlining, smooth concrete, and clean, machine-like design. The Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 was a dream world of futuristic technology embodying these attributes. For millions of Americans it portrayed a coming paradise. It also accorded with the aesthetic and vision of Robert Moses.

In the late twentieth century, however, an increasing number of Americans lost their faith in the merits of technology and modernism. The automobile now seemed the harbinger of pollution and congestion rather than speed and freedom. Moses’ highways were nightmares rather than dreams. Critics lambasted the unadorned, clean lines of urban renewal architecture as bland and grim. To be machine-like was a virtue in 1939; fifty years later it was villainy. Many New Yorkers embraced Jane Jacobs’s evocative portrait of the small-scale life of the sidewalk in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and eschewed the gigantism of Moses’ soaring bridges and high-rise renewal projects. The small and aged were deemed more attractive than the mammoth and modern.

Basically, Moses was the victim of these changing perceptions. He stayed too long in power and suffered the consequences of his cultural obsolescence. Had he retired in 1953 at the age of 65 he would have been universally proclaimed a hero. Even had he left office at 70 in 1958 he would have stepped down with his reputation intact. But he held power until 1968 when he was almost 80. By that time he was a symbol of a hated recent past. A good performer knows when to leave the stage. In the end Moses suffered from poor timing.

Perhaps in coming years Moses’ reputation will revive further as perceptions of democracy and technology shift yet again. In his essay in the Ballon and Jackson volume, Joel Schwartz seems to lay the groundwork for a critique of the participatory democracy of Jane Jacobs and her ilk. “Was Jane Jacobs a heroine or did she merely give an eloquent voice to Greenwich Village chauvinism, bolstered by reform Democratic politics, which combined into a selfish NIMBYism?”{10} As the selfish “Not in My Backyard” opposition of neighborhood spokespersons paralyzes public policy aimed at enhancing the welfare of the city as a whole, perhaps Moses might seem less of a dictator and more of a democrat. Similarly, as Americans balance the comfort and convenience promised by technology against the preservation of dingy, abandoned factories or the habitat of slimy, obscure snails, perhaps bridges, highways, and slum clearance might win new adherents. Just as changing perceptions of the present state of New York City and its infrastructure underlay the current reassessment of Robert Moses and Caro’s work, so changing notions of democracy and technology might yet redeem the master builder’s reputation and raise new doubts as to the merits of the biography that consigned him to infamy.

{1} Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “You Couldn’t Fight Bob Moses,” New York Times, 9 September 1974, 33.{2} Richard C. Wade, “The Power Broker,” New York Times, 15 September 1974, 455.

{3} Edward N. Saveth, “The Moses Model,” Reviews in American History 4 (1976): 451.

{4} Herbert Kaufman, “Moses: Charismatic Bureaucrat,” Political Science Quarterly 90 (1975): 537–38.

{5} Kenneth T. Jackson, “Robert Moses and the Rise of New York: The Power Broker in Perspective,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, ed. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson (New York, 2007), 70–71.

{6} Hilary Ballon, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” in Ballon and Jackson, 94–115.

{7} Robert Fishman, “Revolt of the Urbs: Robert Moses and his Critics,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City, 129.

{8} Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, “Introduction,” in Ballon and Jackson, 66.

{9} As quoted in Erica Pearson, “The Power Broker Revisited,” Gotham Gazette, 18 August 2003, available online at http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/feature-commentary/20030818/202/494 (accessed 16 January 2008).

{10} Joel Schwartz, “Robert Moses and City Planning,” in Ballon and Jackson, 133.

Jon C. Teaford is professor emeritus of history at Purdue University. His most recent book is The American Suburb: The Basics (New York, 2008).