Book #301 of 2020:

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

A fascinating deep dive into the decades-long career of the official who designed and built many of the parks and highways around New York City and state. Robert Moses was a visionary architect who revolutionized urban design and introduced novelties like nursing stations for breastfeeding mothers, but he was also stubborn and cruel, forcibly displacing thousands of low-income families from their homes to make way for his projects and refusing to invest significant resources into majority-black neighborhoods. Most especially, author Robert A. Caro shows how his subject ruthlessly seized and wielded power, gaining an extraordinary degree of decision-making authority despite never being elected to any office.

Reading this 1974 biography in December 2020, it’s hard not to fixate on the Trumpian parallels. Like our 45th president, that earlier New York businessman had a terrifying instinct for the weaknesses of unwritten precedent, such that he was able to use his appointed positions to take outlandish steps that no one had thought to outlaw before. He would find and exercise obscure procedures of eminent domain that had been intended by the legislature to merely apply in sparsely-populated rural settings but technically were not so limited, or on occasion draft his own legal loopholes for a friendly politician to introduce, only springing the subtle trap and revealing his new scope of sovereignty once the proposal had been officially passed into law. He essentially carved out an entire shadow government for himself, staffed with die-hard loyalists, and found strategies to guard against any accountability. He pioneered the issuance of public bonds to bankroll his ventures, amassing such a stranglehold on available funding that mayors and governors were forced to partner with him and name him and his flunkies to his desired committees if they wanted to have any major infrastructure achievements to show voters during their tenure.

Moses was also supremely arrogant, feuding with the city planners and outside researchers who came to realize that many of his transportation initiatives were actually making gridlock and traffic delays worse. For the erstwhile builder, the solution to congestion was always to widen a road or erect another bridge, which he never saw could only be a stopgap measure. And he didn’t just decline to build new subways or bus lanes that would have reduced the volume of cars on the street; he purposefully engineered his developments so that there wouldn’t be cost-effective ways for anyone to add those features sometime further on. As when he long-resisted adopting a necessary hearing aid later in life, Robert Moses would resolutely insist on the universe bending itself to his will rather than the other way around.

Caro’s tome is not for the faint-of-heart; it weighs in at 1300+ pages or 66 hours as an audiobook on regular speed and it earns every iota of this space with the writer’s careful research and reporting. The book was a blow to the reputation of its title figure who rejected many of its claims, and Caro seems to be almost shoring up evidence in anticipation of that ensuing controversy. But it’s worth the time to follow along, and the result is an intimate portrait of a complicated man through his works, as well as a capsule of the changing face of early twentieth-century New York.

[Content warning for racism, ableism, and antisemitism, including slurs.]

[I read and reviewed this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation today at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke !]

★★★★☆

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