The Power Broker
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The Power Broker is not a light read. Spanning 1,336 pages in most editions, its length mirrors its subject, 20th century New York infrastructure titan Robert Moses: intense, durable, and almost impossible to best. This isn’t a spring-break book. It’s an-entire-spring-and-maybe-a-bit-of-summer book. However, its prohibitive size should not blind the potential reader to the essentiality of this masterpiece for anyone wishing to understand how true power is acquired, utilized—and abused.
For anyone who’s ever entered New York City by plane, car, or train, you’ve benefited from Moses’ work. As the epitome of the government employee with the “philosophy… that accomplishment, Getting Things Done, is the only thing that matters, that the end justifies any means, however ruthless,” who understood and pulled the true levers of power, Moses knew no equal. He created the Long Island park system. He created the parkways used to access these beaches and forests. He created the bridges that linked Manhattan to these parkways. He destroyed thousands of brownstones to cut the swaths through Queens, the Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn needed to hold these roads and bridge approaches. He then built thousands of other housing units, blighting swaths of the City with segregated redbrick projects that persist to this day. He dammed the Niagara and St. Lawrence rivers to partially power these buildings. In short, he built modern New York—and he did this all largely with little more compensation than the money his patrician, Old Money Mother gave him (plus what he allegedly stole from his brother when he had her sign a deathbed will).
That the literary structures and prose of Caro’s various works are exceptional goes without saying. He is an undisputed master of the descriptive biography, winning the Pulitzer for this and his seminal (and ongoing) work on President Lyndon Johnson and, yet, it is not the writing, but Caro’s ability to wrap, in this case, over 1,000 pages around one central them—the idea of idealism lost, of power corrupting—that impresses most.
Moses entered New York City’s civil service in the 1910s, committed to delimiting the Tammany Hall patronage machine; when his dream was crushed by the reality of municipal politics, what he believed to be his central mistake—separating the end goal from the process of achieving it, a naive belief in the power of The Good Idea—was never to be repeated. Through his association with legendary Governor Al Smith, his willingness to bargain with the rich, his mastery in handling the New York press, his unparalleled ability to hide sweeping change in seemingly innocuous legislation, his control of numerous quasi-public posts (the Triborough Bridge Authority being the center of his domain), and his ruthless drive to never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, he was able essentially to create an island all his own, protected from the whims of elected politicians and voters. This island was his base of power, from which he exacted revenge on opponents large and small, free from retribution by even the country’s most powerful citizens.
Looking back on Caro’s creation, it is difficult to tell if he approached his subject with a vendetta, or merely a strong disdain. The profile certainly involved a modicum of admiration— Caro repeatedly referred to his subject as “beyond brilliant”—but the overarching sentiment, from the introduction to the final pages, was one of questioning toward Moses’ abandonment of his youthful idealism, of the eventual disconnect between the ends and the means with which they were reached. Is it right to destroy an entire neighborhood, as Moses often did, to give hundreds of thousands of people easier access to the beaches of Long Island?
Is displacing thousands to build an onramp to the Triborough Bridge or an elevated highway morally just? Moses himself would scoff at such questions. I am simply getting things done, he would say—and to hell with my methods. Said methods can be summed up thus: Find great men; become indispensable to them; know more about the subject at hand, and the way the subject is handled, than anyone else; get the media on your side, playing an altruistic tune; use all the aforementioned action to create independence from the great men you originally sought out. Then, Moses’ critics would say, run roughshod over the little man, replacing your original goal (to help people) with a new one (the acquisition of more power).
Whether New York City and State would have been better off without Robert Moses is a question often asked. That the man understood power in a way few before or after have is not a question at all. While Caro’s focus on his misdeeds emerges, intentionally or not, as his central point, readers who care little for New York’s infra-structural history still will be fascinated by the way Moses amassed and used his power. Indeed, it is this part of the story, above any single issue about a bridge, parkway, or building, that provides a lesson, and warning, without age. –Kip McDaniel