The Power Broker Book Review

When Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, fought for his vision of parks, bridges, and expressways in Long Island and New York City, the single most important tool at his disposal was his power. When his dreams met the resistance of his opposition, the outcome of each conflict reflected the balance of power on each side. When Moses prevailed, it was because of power. Though it is also a biography of Moses and a study of 20th century urban planning and civil engineering, this book shines as a treatise on power: how it is acquired, used, and lost. Moses has long faded into the annals of history; public policy has evolved during the intervening half century since the publication year of 1974; but power, through its invisible, grasping tendrils, operates in today's world through the same mechanisms as in the Moses era. Weaving his research throughout his narrative, Caro has crafted a cynical and compelling journey through the halls of power, inviting the reader to reevaluate their world through a new and insightful perspective — to see through the stark lens of power.

One particularly depressing theme of the book is that power always prevails. Truth, logic, and consequences be damned, the outcome is decided by what the powerful want and how much power they control. Power alone can explain why Moses' Northern State Parkway, unlike its Southern sibling, meandered tortuously across Long Island — to mollify the robber barons whose estates lay in the right of way — why his Henry Hudson Bridge sliced through the primordial heart of Inwood Hill Park — because, among other funding-related reasons, that particular route was eligible for federal subsidies — and why the East Tremont section of his Cross-Bronx Expressway veered to the north, blighting what had been a successful neighborhood, which remains to date one of the most impoverished in NYC — to preserve a transport depot in which key city politicians held ownership interests at the time. The tenants Moses evicted and the drivers trapped within the biblical congestion on his roads and bridges, congestion caused by the phenomenon of traffic generation (commonly known today as induced travel or induced demand) and more importantly by Moses’ motive of maximizing toll revenue, had few options to improve their circumstances because unlike Moses, they had no power. In The Power Broker, it is power that moves the wheels of history.

Another lesson from The Power Broker is that power-seeking compromises moral integrity. Ingenuity and work ethic aside, the personal quality which enabled Moses’ ascent to power was his practicality, his willingness to discard his other moral convictions when they hindered his quest for power, a quality embodied in one of his quotes: "If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?" When Moses brazenly attempted to seize W. Kingsland Macy's Long Island estate to create Heckscher State Park, Macy gave press interviews containing little more than the facts as he saw them because he felt that the truth of the matter should stand on its own, whereas Moses employed cunning lies to spin the narrative in his favor and turn public opinion against Macy. In Caro's words, "Macy was handicapped by principles." His strict adherence to moral principles became a liability which gave Moses a decisive advantage in their power struggle.

Moral corruption aside, Caro revealed the inner workings of power through the corruption of organizations designed to accumulate and exercise power at scale. In his youth as an idealistic reformer, Moses had faceplanted into the political might of Tammany Hall. By the end of his career, he had perfected a superior system of centralized power under which Tammany leaders served him. Moses realized the grand scale of his dreams by fully leveraging the economic and political resources he controlled to incentivize others, from politicians to union leaders to bankers to the Archbishop of New York, to do his bidding on his behalf. Power thus delegated to his counterparts was instrumental to the changes he wrought upon the world.

One commendable quality of Caro's writing is the staggering amount of research he synthesized into The Power Broker. No written document, however obscure, escaped Caro's meticulous gaze. In addition to the already extensive government records and newspaper clippings, Caro unearthed 18th century primary sources from far-flung libraries and unpublished personal diaries of public officials. In addition to the written evidence, Caro interviewed high-ranking Moses officials and Moses himself. From his vast trove of research emerged irrefutable patterns and recurring themes in Moses' relationship with power: his genius, his consequentialism, his hubris.

Yet, The Power Broker is neither a comprehensive nor an accurate biography of Moses. Caro's most controversial assertion, that Moses built low-clearance bridges over his parkways to prevent buses from using them with the intent of discriminating against poor and Black citizens who required buses for transportation, has attracted significant academic scrutiny and remains an unsettled question. On a separate occasion, Caro lauded Moses' playgrounds for replacing cinders with a new asphalt surface designed to prevent skinned knees but later claimed that the asphalt was awful at preventing cuts and scrapes. In a conspicuous omission, Caro mentioned the Robert Moses Power Dams at Niagara and Massena only in passing, feats of biographical importance which deserved more attention in place of harping on how the bankers supported Moses because they held financial stakes in the success of his projects, how the unions supported Moses because his construction created union jobs, and so on. On a matter of style, Caro's nonlinear and at times repetitive narration burdens any reader trying to piece together a chronology of events.

The Power Broker is, however, a masterful novelization of the historical record in which Caro's ingenious framing of major characters as foils to Moses animates the story throughout. Governor Al Smith, the political antihero who taught Moses the way to power but stayed steadfast in his lifelong commitment to the impoverished from whose ranks he rose. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who shared Moses' background and his personality and many of the same ideals but became his sworn enemy. Fiorello La Guardia, the ferocious Mayor of New York City who was as passionate as Moses about building public works and kindred spirits in how to get things done. ("In this administration, I am the majority.") Robert F. Wagner Jr., a well-intentioned reformist Mayor who weathered a thousand battles with Moses at the height of his power. And Nelson Rockefeller, the cold-blooded banker who outmaneuvered Moses' fiery crusades and created the perfect conditions to evict Moses from the empire he had ruled.

In addition to his characterization, Caro's writing style makes The Power Broker an enjoyable read. His trademark one-sentence paragraphs, often used in conjunction with paragraph-length sentences, established a rhythm which conveyed the inexorable inertia of power. Another technique Caro employed frequently was to ask his readers to reconstruct the narrative for themselves based on sparse evidence, highlighting the inscrutable nature of power. In one passage, the reader must infer Moses’ shadowy machinations to solve a puzzling sequence of events concerning the East Tremont section of the Cross-Bronx Expressway which demonstrated how common sense and the public good bowed to the political considerations and corruption of Moses' relentless political machine. A different excerpt, describing a newspaper column by Eleanor Roosevelt, exemplified Caro’s ability to dramatize ordinary events:

A single, small paragraph, on a subject she would not raise again. But revealing nonetheless, as the smallest ripple in a pond’s still water reveals the hidden trout below. For that paragraph was the ripple, the only ripple, that revealed that far below the surface of the public controversy over Robert Moses’ huge bridge, down in the quiet, murky depths, impenetrable to the public gaze, in which real power lurks, private passions were beginning to roil the water—and Robert Moses’ great enemy was beginning to move against him.

A single, small paragraph, on a subject she would not raise again. But revealing nonetheless, as the smallest ripple in a pond’s still water reveals the hidden trout below. For that paragraph was the ripple, the only ripple, that revealed that far below the surface of the public controversy over Robert Moses’ huge bridge, down in the quiet, murky depths, impenetrable to the public gaze, in which real power lurks, private passions were beginning to roil the water—and Robert Moses’ great enemy was beginning to move against him.

I strongly recommend Robert Caro's The Power Broker, an entertaining, devastating, and eye-opening account of the forces which move human endeavor. Despite its Faustian qualities, power-seeking is not inherently evil or unjustified; having the ability to control one's own fate is preferable to being controlled by others. Nonetheless, Robert Moses' life is a cautionary tale on the importance of having good reason for making the necessary sacrifices for power.