Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is one of those books I always used to see in the subway and think, wow, the person reading that must be so pretentious.
My libby queue was empty, I was looking for something long to read, and I finally got around to reading this book myself.
It’s a long book, but if you’re into the history of NYC, it’s actually a pretty fun read – but it definitely does feel pretentious reading it ;)
Probably the most interesting thing about this book to me is how well it traces the idea that democratic capitalism is synonymous with progress, and opposition to business is anti-progress (see the notes and quotes below for examples of this conflation).
One of the other things that struck me about this was how Moses – along with a bunch of others in power during the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s – got rich by building highways, bridges, and tunnels that were supposed to “solve” traffic problems which only ended up creating even more traffic problems. And they nearly bankrupted all the mass transit systems in the process.
Notes and quotes…
1665 From the head of the table, Silent Charlie listened silently to Smith and other young sachems like Wagner. Murphy knew that Tammany must change. He knew it because of the reasons the young men gave—and he knew it because of a consideration of his own. Never had one of their own kind risen to Governor or senator; never, despite the power of Kelly and Croker before him, never, despite his own power, had a Tammany man ever come even close to the top prize in the Democratic Party for which Tammany supplied so many of the votes. Always Tammany was thought of as the party of Tweed and Kelly and Croker, of the poor from the Old Country who might be fit to sweep the streets but not to sit in the Governor’s Mansion or the White House. Becoming identified with Progressivism, becoming known as the party of social progress, would be a way to shatter that image forever. Pushing to the forefront bright young men identified with such causes rather than with the ancient rituals of Tammany would be a way to spawn candidates who would shatter forever the unseen but heavy chains that weighed down the Irish Catholic in America. Why, already, wasn’t at least one of his bright young men, as true to Tammany, as loyal, as regular as even he, Charlie Murphy, could wish, also an object of praise by the Good Government organizations which habitually damned anyone who sat around the table in Delmonico’s? Hadn’t the young man, once assailed by the Citizens Union,
2477 Albany reporter watched the awareness grow on the Governor and his circle. “You could see them beginning to realize that doing what Moses wanted would be politically advantageous,” he recalls. “One of them told me that supporting parks meant that the Governor would be helping the lower- and middle-class people, and thereby winning their support, and that the intellectuals would be for him because they saw parks as part of the new pattern of social progress. So you’d have all three groups supporting you. And besides, ‘parks’ was a word like ‘motherhood.’ It was just something nobody could be against.” During the spring of 1923, Smith assured Moses he would push for adoption of the park program in 1924.
3807 Some people must be hurt by progress, he said. But that is unavoidable. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“There are people who like things as they are,” he said. They cannot be permitted to stand in the way of progress. “I can’t hold out any hope to them. They have to keep moving further away. This is a great big state and also there are other states. Let them go to the Rockies.”
11451 It is no coincidence that, as Raymond Moley puts it, “from the pyramids of Egypt, the rebuilding of Rome after Nero’s fire, to the creation of the great medieval cathedrals… all great public works have been somehow associated with autocratic power.” 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.
- Read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro