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The New York City cityscape

‘The Power Broker’ Conveys the Perils of Rejecting Reality

October 10, 2024

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What would it take, Robert Caro wonders in The Power Broker, to erase what Robert Moses wrote across the landscape of New York? Caro’s massive masterpiece, which reached its fiftieth birthday this year, chronicled how Robert Moses began seizing or creating public offices in 1924 and only relinquished power in 1968. As Caro predicted, his (magnificent) appraisal of Moses’s legacy as an architect of bridges and roadways and as an artist of power must come short of the longevity of the legacy Moses left behind in concrete and stone. “The roads of Rome stood for 2,000 years and more,” Caro wrote, “Who would predict less for the roads of Moses?” To erase Moses’ authorship over the city, Caro concludes, would require the “monumental calamity” of an atom bomb.

Musical theater or speculative fiction allows authors to project the ordinary stirrings of the human heart against an extraordinary canvas. The heightened tone and circumstances of these genres redirect our attention to the monumental consequences of small, secret movements of the soul. Caro consciously borrowed from the epic traditions (modeling his enumeration of Moses’ built works on the Catalogue of Ships from Homer’s Iliad). It is not just the scale of New York that demands this treatment, but the character of Robert Moses. The Power Broker is a deeply human tragedy, one that is commonly repeated, albeit at a smaller scale. 

Moses initially approaches New York City politics with the zeal and idealism of a reformer. He doesn’t just intend to clean up corrupt politics, limiting harm, but wants to actively pursue a positive good. New York City is at a pivotal moment in its growth, preparing to develop and build on previously fallow land. Moses has a comprehensive, generous vision for how to allow the city to grow while preserving parks for the good of the people. 

In order to build, he decided he must have power, enough power that no one could say no to him and make it stick.

Even if Moses might not have framed it this way, he begins his work attentive to the glory of creation. Moses has an eye for the integrity of a plan at every scale—seeing the sweep of roads needed to connect city to parks—but also pausing to think about the small, repeated movements of a woman changing a child’s diaper at the beach, redrawing counters to avoid asking her to strain her back. His attentiveness to the details requires him to be deeply rooted in reality.

However, his brilliant plans were initially impossible to put into practice. When he began his career, he found that he and fellow reformers were frequently stymied by corrupt or simply slow governance. The larger Moses’ vision, the more intolerable he found the idea of being stopped from doing it right—that is, exactly how he had envisioned it as an integrated whole. In order to build, he decided he must have power, enough power that no one could say no to him and make it stick.

As Caro chronicles it, Moses’ maneuvering for power ranges from scrutinizing city records to find city-owned but underused land; writing law that referenced obscure provisions, allowing it to pass with its full impact unknown; and, eventually, simply straightforwardly dispensing bribes to the Tammany elite—the very behavior that once disgusted him. In moments, Robert Moses parallels his eventual biographer Robert Caro in his diligence. Caro, in his memoir Working, describes how he learned as a journalist to turn over every page to find the story hidden in plain sight. Moses, too, relied on knowing the legal code better than any state assemblyman who helped write it or studying the history of easements for a harbor bottom more closely than its fishermen. Before he was able to dispense bribes, Moses depended on knowing the world deeply.

Caro borrowed from the Greek forms, and Moses’ hamartia—his tragic flaw—becomes more perilous with every new success. Moses succeeds in becoming a law unto himself, whose whims neither the voters of New York nor the mayor who appointed him can limit. (One of Moses’ only defeats requires the intervention of President Franklin Roosevelt and his War Department.) His dynamic “Moses Men” who assist him become servile and sycophantic. He rejects any alteration to his plans, even wise edits proposed by reformers deeply embedded in their communities, and he lashes out in anger for the presumption of proposing changes. His victory unmoors him—he is disconnected from reality long before he is finally dispossessed of his power. 

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As Moses makes himself sovereign over parks, power plants, bridges, and housing, he unmakes his ability to steward what he has seized. He becomes both figuratively and literally deaf to the world. As his hearing deteriorates, he refuses to make any acknowledgement of his infirmity, and answers imagined questions rather than slow down to hear what is being said to him. As he circles the city in the back of his chauffeured car, he is unaware of how his multiplying roads have not solved New York City’s traffic snarls. There is a stark contrast between the imaginative empathy he had for the mother at the beach and his cultivated indifference to New York’s other commuters. 

What good is the power he successfully guarded for so many years when Moses loses his ability to apply it to the world as it actually is? When Moses is finally forced out, he is in agony in retirement. He draws up plans and makes calls to politicians that are never returned. He cannot abide living with his energy turned in on itself, with his days devoid of meetings and decisions. 

He resembles no one so much as the cultured Ghost in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce who hesitates on the threshold of heaven. “I should want a guarantee that you are taking me to a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness,” the Ghost demands, “and scope for the talents that God has given me.” His guide is frank with him. In heaven, he is not needed. There will be “no scope for your talents, only forgiveness for having perverted them.”

It’s easy to fall in love with the idea of autonomy, to desire scope for our gifts (real or imagined). But the more Moses stands alone, the more ensconced he is in his power, the less free he is to act in the world as it really is. Moses’ erring decisions are devastating for those in the path of his misplaced roads and for the commuters condemned to traffic as he spurned accommodations for subways. The most painful part of reading The Power Broker is watching Moses construct a prison of “yes” for himself, ultimately just as constricting as the “nos” he aimed to escape. As his bridges and parkways are flung across the landscape, Moses is increasingly disjointed and isolated. None of us can make use of the talents we have received unless we are rooted in reality.