Liveblogging The Power Broker, part 1
Jan. 3rd, 2026 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeWe're finally at the stage of 'Jack gives up on reading nonfiction using eyes' where I'm re-acquiring books that were already on my shelf as audiobooks. This works especially well for books that are intimidatingly long! Since October I've been listening to The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, and sending notes about it to ambyr in increasing detail.
I went in knowing that my uncle living in New York hates Robert Moses, that Jane Jacobs, renowned urban planning person, also hated him, and that he got a lot of highways built and destroyed large numbers of houses in a process known as 'urban renewal' - and that was about all.
The first half of my liveblogging is under the cut. Overall impressions, though: this book is extremely entertaining and lucid. Caro is good at rhetoric. He aims to tell the story of Moses personally and of New York as a whole, and does both things well - though the two parts aren't evenly distributed. For the book's first chunk, Moses is the protagonist, doing some bad things and some good things, having some successes and some failures, and gradually securing his hold on power, while the book detours into the history of various aspects of New York - Long Island, Tammany Hall - to put what he's doing in context. Then, about halfway through, Robert Moses finishes becoming a villain out of Tolkien, effective in his scheming, remorseless in his desire to reshape the world, and never satisfied in the immensity of his power. At this point, the book's focus moves more completely behind some of the people whose lives he destroys along the way, as they try and fail to stop him. This part of the book was hard to listen to - not because it's less interesting or worse-handled, but it's just so sad. And then we return to Moses more closely for his downfall.
Lightly-edited liveblogging commences.
…
I'm surprised to the extent I expected to be (if that makes any sense) at how much Moses did, and with what ridiculous amounts of money he did it. The introduction paints him as someone who managed to centralise mechanisms of corruption that had previously been scattered all over the place achieving mere minor selfishnesses. The book also front-loads the aspect of Moses that was awe-inspiring; I expect to begin properly hating him as I go on, and it gets more into the humanity of all the people he walked on top of. [See above: yes, this happened.]
…
Caro begins the book proper with a chapter on Moses’ mother and grandmother, from whom Moses seems to have very directly learned many of the things that would drive him. Both were ambitious get-things-done organisers who brooked no argument. Moses was his mother’s favoured child, not because he’d argue with her, but because he knew when to back down.
…
Robert Moses is extremely classist and racist by chapter four, has been to both Yale and Oxford, and is about to enter civil service.
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[I didn’t take many notes on the book’s opening. In this part, Moses comes home from England with a world-class education and lands his first city planning job. In that job, he lays out an extremely detailed redesign of New York’s government – eliminating many jobs and cutting pay to many others – with the stubbornness of someone who believes that a reasoned argument is all you need in politics. Something like his system was desperately needed in patronage-run, inefficient New York. Was Moses the man to do it? No! He had no idea how! He keeps on going to meetings and telling people why he wants them all to take the job interview from hell so that their personalities and work traits can be properly quantified, as though they ought to be happy about it. I forget whether they literally throw things at him, but it comes to the same thing: almost none of his plan is implemented, and his career looks sunk. This is during the First World War.]
…
Now Robert Moses has a good teacher. This part seems so happy: an appealing story of competence.
[The teacher is Belle Moscowitz, key political adviser in the story. I wanted more on her - she doesn’t get a chapter to herself like the grander figure she advises, governor Al Smith. Why does she call up Moses and give him back his career? History does not relate - except insofar as she was quite right to think he had potential. Without her, he’d probably have ended up a footnote. By arguing with her – resenting her all the while – he slowly learned about practical politics.]
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He’s learning who he needs to treat well in order to get what he wants done. But underlings? He does not need to say please to them.
…
I am fully ready to agree with you [about Moses neglecting public transit] but am distracted by having just spent a chapter on minor villains: the rich owners of most of Long Island. At least Moses did want to solve civic problems. These folks had bought themselves a ticket out of civic problems a long time ago. They made the lives of motorists who wanted to cross their land as hellish as they could manage. [These people are so awful! When one of them dies, they combine to buy his land and make a club and golf course on it so that no one outside their set can move in. The club and golf course are then scarcely used. One of them refuses to help exterminate the local mosquitos because they deter New Yorkers and she'd rather be bitten. Absolute caricatures of rich people.]
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Bob Moses, who never drove a car in his life and came up with the idea for giving Long Island its parks while looking out a train window at Long Island woods, shows no sign at this point in the book of having thought twice about building any transit other than a road.
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Now he is showing great willingness to use underhanded political tactics that his younger self would have deplored in order to take land from those obnoxious robber baron estate-holders. If only I didn’t know who he was going to use those tactics against next.
…okay, we’re barely into the next chapter and he’s already doing everything but twirl his black moustache and cackle. [to whit: confiscating land from a small farmer illegally, and dragging the case out in the courts until it bends his way, though it really shouldn’t have.]
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The Power Broker takes a break from Bob Moses to sketch the degree to which New York lacked road access to natural parks, and wanted it, at the point when Moses was about to have a go at providing it.
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‘But what about people too poor to own cars?’ people say to Moses as he designs roads. Since they can’t actually stop him doing what he wants, Moses does not find it necessary to make any reply.
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[By this point he has built his glorious Long Island parks and the roads which link them, showing great tactical savvy in his negotiation of the many obstacles, and a brilliant eye for small details of their design. New Yorkers are flocking to his parks with an enthusiasm that will help keep his reputation spotless for decades after it should've looked like a cheetah.]
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I hate him so much
Now he is spending a chapter kicking nice old men as hard as he can
In an earlier chapter he took credit for the work of a team of subordinates who wrote a report, which clicked him firmly into the role of genius asshole boss in my mind. Now he is doing that again but instead of a report, he’s putting his name on roads and dams.
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Parks hadn’t had much government funding or government interest. (Maybe because, before cars and holidays arrived, fewer voters could go to them.) So the men in charge of it had been rich vocateurs who were willing to pay themselves for what the government wouldn’t. Parks got politically important around them, but they didn’t especially care. But at this point in the story parks are getting funding, and the public loves them, and whoever controls them has many political levers to play with. So it isn’t enough for Moses to have good work being done. This chapter is about the fact that he needs it to be him doing the good work and he needs it done fast enough that his political allies won’t get voted out before it’s finished. He destroys the careers of people doing the work he wants done, so that he can do the exact same work himself instead. (I say careers but these are old men between seventy and ninety who are in some cases dying, so I really mean lives and reputations. I hate Robert Moses.)
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Nearly too sleepy for Robert Moses - I think I have tuned out for important background politicking about power companies - I am nevertheless getting the basic message: he was crap at campaigning for Governor and shouldn’t have tried.
The barons of Long Island wanted him as a Republican candidate. It was a bad year for Republicans, and he had a useful sheen of progressivism that they knew not to be too worried about. (They had been his enemies before, but once he lost the backing of the old governor, Al Smith, he became willing to compromise with them, and they accepted him as a man who knows what to do with power: he had hurt them when he could, and now that he couldn't he would make nice with them, such being the way of the world.)
However, it turns out Moses has a genius for antagonising absolutely everyone when actually being disagreed with and asked hard questions.
...I’m genuinely wondering if this chapter’s twist is going to be that he was tactically throwing the race, as he proceeds to run the most arrogant, sparse, tone-deaf campaign for governor possible. But I think it’s more that Robert Moses doesn’t like the public very much.
(Someone interviewed in an earlier chapter about park construction said ‘he treated the public as though it needed exercising and watering and feeding so as to become a better public. Not as though he liked people.’)
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Gosh, imagine a political climate in which falsely calling your opponent a ‘liar’ is so outrageous it prompts your own supporters to abandon you. Also, what are you doing Robert Moses?! You may know everything about backroom dealing but you seem completely unprepared for being in front rooms.
A radio station refused to air any of Moses’ speeches unless the Republican campaign committee bought libel insurance to cover them for every word. This had never happened before.
Moses your campaign strategy is just shouting random bad words at your opponent how can you be this bad at it
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He got the lowest vote percentage of any major party candidate in New York in the preceding hundred years. (That’s longer than there had been a unified government of New York City.)
Yet how many chapters left until we get to Part VII: The Loss Of Power? Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight more chapters.
…
No twist, no hidden motives. This chapter ends with Caro wondering why Moses - so good at learning, so good at pushing himself to work long hours at difficult tasks, usually so good at speaking softly to the people whose goodwill he needed - couldn’t learn to address the public with anything but bored yet raging condescension.
My summary: because Moses was a git.
My slightly longer summary: because Moses’ superiority over almost everybody else was something he believed in and valued on a level he had no desire to control.
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Fire him fire him he’s weakened now fire him!
...the governor he ran a libelous campaign against reinstates him as Parks Commission Chair, saying Moses is the best in the business and he won’t let a purely personal matter influence his political choices. You could have just fired him.
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Misc Moses details: he seems a very typical bad boss in many ways. Those who worked for him loved the work, but that’s because those who couldn’t be available to him at any hour of the night and for as many hours as he wanted were fired or left in tears, and only those who matched his ridiculous pace were left. He was superficially gentler with women than men - never shouted at women - but still looked over the shoulders of his secretaries and snatched pages from them as soon as they’d finished typing to begin correction, etc.
He was brilliant and funny, good to his friends, but even just on a one-to-one level, he damaged as many people as he delighted. [There's a bit late in the book where Moses literally causes someone to have a heart attack by shouting at him. His rage was no joke.]
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And I am curious to see when in the book we’ll learn more about Moses’s wife, who is not much detailed so far except that we know he took her advice seriously and that she believed deeply in his vision.
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President Roosevelt personally detests Moses due to their time working together in New York, and tries to make Mayor La Guardia fire him. This gets picked up as a poster child of New Deal overreach into state affairs, and Moses plays it well enough to, as the book puts it, ‘screw his halo back on’ after his disastrous campaign for governor. And he keeps the halo on for thirty more years by never again making the mistake of running for public office.
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What was the nature of the competence that kept Moses his job? If the mayor asks someone else to solve a problem, they tell him it can’t be solved, or can’t be solved cheaply, or can’t be solved practically, or they come up with some idea that's nonsense. If the mayor asks Moses to solve a problem, by next morning Moses has a solution on his desk: not just a good idea, but drafts of the speeches the mayor will need to give about the idea, the constitutional precedents he’ll need to be aware of, the blueprints for any related construction, and the laws he’ll need to pass.
…
Oh dear. I keep listening to Caro. Now he’s explaining how, as the New Deal poured money into New York, Moses was able to basically make up his own mind about where it went, as an unelected official who no one could fire.
The federal government would only supply funding for works that could show quick results - that is, works whose plans were complete. Moses had built his own engineering team, who he had made sure were all extremely skillful people who could work like dogs. So Moses could present the mayor with prepared plans while other departments lagged, and the mayor had few resources to properly evaluate those plans.
Also, Moses had used underhanded tactics to keep a large labor force under Parks. The mayor wanted to reassign five thousand labourers to build firehouses (his pet symbol) as well as schools and police offices and so on. Moses first refused, then closed all the city’s playgrounds, locked their gates, locked their toilets, and removed their moveable facilities, while telling the press that La Guardia was forcing him to do it by reassigning all the playground supervisory staff. La Guardia was not able to get the public’s ear with the fact that Moses had chosen which Park personnel to remove, and that his actual request had been for labourers from Moses’ ongoing construction projects, not the parks at all.
So now Moses can control most of what gets federal funding and what gets actually built. Does he build any hospitals? No! Sometimes he closes a hospital because it’s in the way of a bridge, though.
…
(Moses does twelve horrible things before breakfast and I am too weary of him to summarise them.)
The rest of this chapter is about how he evades the regulation of other departments: he lies, intimidates, blackmails, ignores. [Moses literally kept files on people. At some point in the book a longtime adversary of Moses gives the advice: 'Never let him do you a favour. If you do, it will go into his books until he needs to threaten you with it.']
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Huh, I discover the phrase ‘coercive deficiency’ when reading about the origins of government shutdowns, and my response is, ‘so that thing Robert Moses does has a name.’ Although not really, because he’s not at the federal level. (Something something boss baby meme.)
Robert Moses had a thing where he would get money for a project, promise he would not need more money, spend all that money laying the barest foundations for the project, and then say, “Well, you'll look pretty silly in front of the voters if you don't give me the money to finish it now!” And it worked! Again and again! Why did anyone ever believe him when he presented them with a cost estimate? (One reason was that institutional knowledge about how to fight Robert Moses was not retained. He outlasted so many other people that they had to keep on reinventing the methods of getting around him. Another reason is that he controlled so many of the city's engineers that it was hard to get anyone to come up with alternative figures.)
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Urban planners the city over are discovering for the first time a principle that perplexes them: building bigger roads does not make any of the roads less congested. Robert Moses has a good idea for solving this which is to continue to build bigger roads.
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Now Robert Moses is causing his brother - who sounds pretty much like his good twin - to be disinherited. (Allegedly. Caro is careful with what we can and can’t know, but we can pretty well know that Moses at least blocked his brother from any and all government appointments as an engineer.)
Also Moses’ wife is gradually shrinking into herself and talking less at parties as she manages every aspect of Moses’ private life while Moses refuses to accept a salary yet insists their children must go to private schools.
AAAAAAAAAA
(One thread running through the book is about how people assess Moses as generous and public-spirited because he refused salaries for most of his work. It takes a while for people to realise that he is extremely selfishly motivated, but all that motivation is about power instead of wealth.)
…
HE JUST MADE HIMSELF AN ADDITIONAL GOVERNMENT
THE SCREAMING CONTINUES
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I remembered the prologue had talked about him creating an entity that gave him unprecedented powers in the city, but naive fool that I am, I thought we had already gotten up to that part. I had forgotten that he then went and built a bigger one.
He has already been cunningly and/or cruelly evading a lot of regulations, but now he has worked out how to not be subject to those regulations even in theory. Which frees him up considerably to do, oh, anything whatsoever relating to roads.
One of his consistent skills is getting bills drafted which nobody passing them understands because he has hidden something with implications that change the intent of the bill in a dry legalistic passage on page eighty-two. Now he has built a toll bridge using a public authority designed to lapse from existence after the bridge is paid for, and made sure that it will never lapse from existence – instead of having to repay its bonds and thus fizzle into nothing, it can use the revenue from the toll bridge (in the tens of millions) to build or widen any road connected to the bridge. ‘Connected’ can be defined however he likes.
Oh and it can build parks on those roads also.
(I keep listening:) Oh, and also houses.
And any other facilities relating to the use of the roads.
Oh also the authority can have its own police force and pass regulations that shall have the force of law governing its own properties with possible punishments including fines and jail time.
And he has embodied all of this chicanery in the contracts between the authority and the holders of its bonds, which, unlike legislation, cannot be repealed once created unless both the authority (Moses, in this case) and the bond holders agree.
[Up until this part of the story Moses has spoken bitterly about the big lesson he learned in his first failures: if your boss doesn't support you, you can't get anything done. His great successes started at the point when he became good friends with Governor Al Smith, and most of the early ones were due to Smith having his back. Now he has finally secured a stream of power that is totally independent of the city administration - and totally independent of voters and the democratic process.]
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Robert Moses gets defeated in his efforts to build a terrible bridge!
But only because the actual President personally hated him and intervened secretly. This is not good news. It is not meant to take the President to halt the plans of a city official allegedly subordinate to the mayor of New York.
In the course of this conflict, Robert Moses demonstrated that he no longer needed either public opinion, or the support of the old guard of Good Government activists who had helped his career get as far as it did. Absolutely everyone hated his bridge, but they could not stop it, because no one else was offering money to build the alternative (a tunnel,) he himself refused to countenance building the tunnel (for no particularly obvious reason,) and the city had to solve its congestion problem somehow. So much of Moses' power exists in a context where city officials don't think 'do nothing' is a practical option - either for reasons of re-electability, or city congestion, or both - and Moses is the only one holding out a feasible something. (Edit: okay, as I listen on I am reminded that Moses does have a practical motive for supporting a bridge over a tunnel: he wants to ruin a tunnel construction authority and thus secure control over all public authorities which control funds relating to water crossings.)
And the old guard looked around and went ‘Wait - we liked it when you disregarded protocol and personally insulted your opponents, Moses, but that was because your opponents weren’t us.’
And Moses did not bother to reply. Caro quotes A Man For All Seasons, Roper telling Thomas More that he'll tear down any law if it lets him chase out the devil. “And when the last law is down," says More, "and the devil turns on you, where will you hide from him?”
ambyr in increasing detail. I went in knowing that my uncle living in New York hates Robert Moses, that Jane Jacobs, renowned urban planning person, also hated him, and that he got a lot of highways built and destroyed large numbers of houses in a process known as 'urban renewal' - and that was about all.
The first half of my liveblogging is under the cut. Overall impressions, though: this book is extremely entertaining and lucid. Caro is good at rhetoric. He aims to tell the story of Moses personally and of New York as a whole, and does both things well - though the two parts aren't evenly distributed. For the book's first chunk, Moses is the protagonist, doing some bad things and some good things, having some successes and some failures, and gradually securing his hold on power, while the book detours into the history of various aspects of New York - Long Island, Tammany Hall - to put what he's doing in context. Then, about halfway through, Robert Moses finishes becoming a villain out of Tolkien, effective in his scheming, remorseless in his desire to reshape the world, and never satisfied in the immensity of his power. At this point, the book's focus moves more completely behind some of the people whose lives he destroys along the way, as they try and fail to stop him. This part of the book was hard to listen to - not because it's less interesting or worse-handled, but it's just so sad. And then we return to Moses more closely for his downfall.
Lightly-edited liveblogging commences.
…
I'm surprised to the extent I expected to be (if that makes any sense) at how much Moses did, and with what ridiculous amounts of money he did it. The introduction paints him as someone who managed to centralise mechanisms of corruption that had previously been scattered all over the place achieving mere minor selfishnesses. The book also front-loads the aspect of Moses that was awe-inspiring; I expect to begin properly hating him as I go on, and it gets more into the humanity of all the people he walked on top of. [See above: yes, this happened.]
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Caro begins the book proper with a chapter on Moses’ mother and grandmother, from whom Moses seems to have very directly learned many of the things that would drive him. Both were ambitious get-things-done organisers who brooked no argument. Moses was his mother’s favoured child, not because he’d argue with her, but because he knew when to back down.
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Robert Moses is extremely classist and racist by chapter four, has been to both Yale and Oxford, and is about to enter civil service.
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[I didn’t take many notes on the book’s opening. In this part, Moses comes home from England with a world-class education and lands his first city planning job. In that job, he lays out an extremely detailed redesign of New York’s government – eliminating many jobs and cutting pay to many others – with the stubbornness of someone who believes that a reasoned argument is all you need in politics. Something like his system was desperately needed in patronage-run, inefficient New York. Was Moses the man to do it? No! He had no idea how! He keeps on going to meetings and telling people why he wants them all to take the job interview from hell so that their personalities and work traits can be properly quantified, as though they ought to be happy about it. I forget whether they literally throw things at him, but it comes to the same thing: almost none of his plan is implemented, and his career looks sunk. This is during the First World War.]
…
Now Robert Moses has a good teacher. This part seems so happy: an appealing story of competence.
[The teacher is Belle Moscowitz, key political adviser in the story. I wanted more on her - she doesn’t get a chapter to herself like the grander figure she advises, governor Al Smith. Why does she call up Moses and give him back his career? History does not relate - except insofar as she was quite right to think he had potential. Without her, he’d probably have ended up a footnote. By arguing with her – resenting her all the while – he slowly learned about practical politics.]
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He’s learning who he needs to treat well in order to get what he wants done. But underlings? He does not need to say please to them.
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I am fully ready to agree with you [about Moses neglecting public transit] but am distracted by having just spent a chapter on minor villains: the rich owners of most of Long Island. At least Moses did want to solve civic problems. These folks had bought themselves a ticket out of civic problems a long time ago. They made the lives of motorists who wanted to cross their land as hellish as they could manage. [These people are so awful! When one of them dies, they combine to buy his land and make a club and golf course on it so that no one outside their set can move in. The club and golf course are then scarcely used. One of them refuses to help exterminate the local mosquitos because they deter New Yorkers and she'd rather be bitten. Absolute caricatures of rich people.]
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Bob Moses, who never drove a car in his life and came up with the idea for giving Long Island its parks while looking out a train window at Long Island woods, shows no sign at this point in the book of having thought twice about building any transit other than a road.
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Now he is showing great willingness to use underhanded political tactics that his younger self would have deplored in order to take land from those obnoxious robber baron estate-holders. If only I didn’t know who he was going to use those tactics against next.
…okay, we’re barely into the next chapter and he’s already doing everything but twirl his black moustache and cackle. [to whit: confiscating land from a small farmer illegally, and dragging the case out in the courts until it bends his way, though it really shouldn’t have.]
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The Power Broker takes a break from Bob Moses to sketch the degree to which New York lacked road access to natural parks, and wanted it, at the point when Moses was about to have a go at providing it.
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‘But what about people too poor to own cars?’ people say to Moses as he designs roads. Since they can’t actually stop him doing what he wants, Moses does not find it necessary to make any reply.
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[By this point he has built his glorious Long Island parks and the roads which link them, showing great tactical savvy in his negotiation of the many obstacles, and a brilliant eye for small details of their design. New Yorkers are flocking to his parks with an enthusiasm that will help keep his reputation spotless for decades after it should've looked like a cheetah.]
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I hate him so much
Now he is spending a chapter kicking nice old men as hard as he can
In an earlier chapter he took credit for the work of a team of subordinates who wrote a report, which clicked him firmly into the role of genius asshole boss in my mind. Now he is doing that again but instead of a report, he’s putting his name on roads and dams.
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Parks hadn’t had much government funding or government interest. (Maybe because, before cars and holidays arrived, fewer voters could go to them.) So the men in charge of it had been rich vocateurs who were willing to pay themselves for what the government wouldn’t. Parks got politically important around them, but they didn’t especially care. But at this point in the story parks are getting funding, and the public loves them, and whoever controls them has many political levers to play with. So it isn’t enough for Moses to have good work being done. This chapter is about the fact that he needs it to be him doing the good work and he needs it done fast enough that his political allies won’t get voted out before it’s finished. He destroys the careers of people doing the work he wants done, so that he can do the exact same work himself instead. (I say careers but these are old men between seventy and ninety who are in some cases dying, so I really mean lives and reputations. I hate Robert Moses.)
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Nearly too sleepy for Robert Moses - I think I have tuned out for important background politicking about power companies - I am nevertheless getting the basic message: he was crap at campaigning for Governor and shouldn’t have tried.
The barons of Long Island wanted him as a Republican candidate. It was a bad year for Republicans, and he had a useful sheen of progressivism that they knew not to be too worried about. (They had been his enemies before, but once he lost the backing of the old governor, Al Smith, he became willing to compromise with them, and they accepted him as a man who knows what to do with power: he had hurt them when he could, and now that he couldn't he would make nice with them, such being the way of the world.)
However, it turns out Moses has a genius for antagonising absolutely everyone when actually being disagreed with and asked hard questions.
...I’m genuinely wondering if this chapter’s twist is going to be that he was tactically throwing the race, as he proceeds to run the most arrogant, sparse, tone-deaf campaign for governor possible. But I think it’s more that Robert Moses doesn’t like the public very much.
(Someone interviewed in an earlier chapter about park construction said ‘he treated the public as though it needed exercising and watering and feeding so as to become a better public. Not as though he liked people.’)
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Gosh, imagine a political climate in which falsely calling your opponent a ‘liar’ is so outrageous it prompts your own supporters to abandon you. Also, what are you doing Robert Moses?! You may know everything about backroom dealing but you seem completely unprepared for being in front rooms.
A radio station refused to air any of Moses’ speeches unless the Republican campaign committee bought libel insurance to cover them for every word. This had never happened before.
Moses your campaign strategy is just shouting random bad words at your opponent how can you be this bad at it
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He got the lowest vote percentage of any major party candidate in New York in the preceding hundred years. (That’s longer than there had been a unified government of New York City.)
Yet how many chapters left until we get to Part VII: The Loss Of Power? Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight more chapters.
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No twist, no hidden motives. This chapter ends with Caro wondering why Moses - so good at learning, so good at pushing himself to work long hours at difficult tasks, usually so good at speaking softly to the people whose goodwill he needed - couldn’t learn to address the public with anything but bored yet raging condescension.
My summary: because Moses was a git.
My slightly longer summary: because Moses’ superiority over almost everybody else was something he believed in and valued on a level he had no desire to control.
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Fire him fire him he’s weakened now fire him!
...the governor he ran a libelous campaign against reinstates him as Parks Commission Chair, saying Moses is the best in the business and he won’t let a purely personal matter influence his political choices. You could have just fired him.
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Misc Moses details: he seems a very typical bad boss in many ways. Those who worked for him loved the work, but that’s because those who couldn’t be available to him at any hour of the night and for as many hours as he wanted were fired or left in tears, and only those who matched his ridiculous pace were left. He was superficially gentler with women than men - never shouted at women - but still looked over the shoulders of his secretaries and snatched pages from them as soon as they’d finished typing to begin correction, etc.
He was brilliant and funny, good to his friends, but even just on a one-to-one level, he damaged as many people as he delighted. [There's a bit late in the book where Moses literally causes someone to have a heart attack by shouting at him. His rage was no joke.]
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And I am curious to see when in the book we’ll learn more about Moses’s wife, who is not much detailed so far except that we know he took her advice seriously and that she believed deeply in his vision.
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President Roosevelt personally detests Moses due to their time working together in New York, and tries to make Mayor La Guardia fire him. This gets picked up as a poster child of New Deal overreach into state affairs, and Moses plays it well enough to, as the book puts it, ‘screw his halo back on’ after his disastrous campaign for governor. And he keeps the halo on for thirty more years by never again making the mistake of running for public office.
…
What was the nature of the competence that kept Moses his job? If the mayor asks someone else to solve a problem, they tell him it can’t be solved, or can’t be solved cheaply, or can’t be solved practically, or they come up with some idea that's nonsense. If the mayor asks Moses to solve a problem, by next morning Moses has a solution on his desk: not just a good idea, but drafts of the speeches the mayor will need to give about the idea, the constitutional precedents he’ll need to be aware of, the blueprints for any related construction, and the laws he’ll need to pass.
…
Oh dear. I keep listening to Caro. Now he’s explaining how, as the New Deal poured money into New York, Moses was able to basically make up his own mind about where it went, as an unelected official who no one could fire.
The federal government would only supply funding for works that could show quick results - that is, works whose plans were complete. Moses had built his own engineering team, who he had made sure were all extremely skillful people who could work like dogs. So Moses could present the mayor with prepared plans while other departments lagged, and the mayor had few resources to properly evaluate those plans.
Also, Moses had used underhanded tactics to keep a large labor force under Parks. The mayor wanted to reassign five thousand labourers to build firehouses (his pet symbol) as well as schools and police offices and so on. Moses first refused, then closed all the city’s playgrounds, locked their gates, locked their toilets, and removed their moveable facilities, while telling the press that La Guardia was forcing him to do it by reassigning all the playground supervisory staff. La Guardia was not able to get the public’s ear with the fact that Moses had chosen which Park personnel to remove, and that his actual request had been for labourers from Moses’ ongoing construction projects, not the parks at all.
So now Moses can control most of what gets federal funding and what gets actually built. Does he build any hospitals? No! Sometimes he closes a hospital because it’s in the way of a bridge, though.
…
(Moses does twelve horrible things before breakfast and I am too weary of him to summarise them.)
The rest of this chapter is about how he evades the regulation of other departments: he lies, intimidates, blackmails, ignores. [Moses literally kept files on people. At some point in the book a longtime adversary of Moses gives the advice: 'Never let him do you a favour. If you do, it will go into his books until he needs to threaten you with it.']
…
Huh, I discover the phrase ‘coercive deficiency’ when reading about the origins of government shutdowns, and my response is, ‘so that thing Robert Moses does has a name.’ Although not really, because he’s not at the federal level. (Something something boss baby meme.)
Robert Moses had a thing where he would get money for a project, promise he would not need more money, spend all that money laying the barest foundations for the project, and then say, “Well, you'll look pretty silly in front of the voters if you don't give me the money to finish it now!” And it worked! Again and again! Why did anyone ever believe him when he presented them with a cost estimate? (One reason was that institutional knowledge about how to fight Robert Moses was not retained. He outlasted so many other people that they had to keep on reinventing the methods of getting around him. Another reason is that he controlled so many of the city's engineers that it was hard to get anyone to come up with alternative figures.)
…
Urban planners the city over are discovering for the first time a principle that perplexes them: building bigger roads does not make any of the roads less congested. Robert Moses has a good idea for solving this which is to continue to build bigger roads.
…
Now Robert Moses is causing his brother - who sounds pretty much like his good twin - to be disinherited. (Allegedly. Caro is careful with what we can and can’t know, but we can pretty well know that Moses at least blocked his brother from any and all government appointments as an engineer.)
Also Moses’ wife is gradually shrinking into herself and talking less at parties as she manages every aspect of Moses’ private life while Moses refuses to accept a salary yet insists their children must go to private schools.
AAAAAAAAAA
(One thread running through the book is about how people assess Moses as generous and public-spirited because he refused salaries for most of his work. It takes a while for people to realise that he is extremely selfishly motivated, but all that motivation is about power instead of wealth.)
…
HE JUST MADE HIMSELF AN ADDITIONAL GOVERNMENT
THE SCREAMING CONTINUES
…
I remembered the prologue had talked about him creating an entity that gave him unprecedented powers in the city, but naive fool that I am, I thought we had already gotten up to that part. I had forgotten that he then went and built a bigger one.
He has already been cunningly and/or cruelly evading a lot of regulations, but now he has worked out how to not be subject to those regulations even in theory. Which frees him up considerably to do, oh, anything whatsoever relating to roads.
One of his consistent skills is getting bills drafted which nobody passing them understands because he has hidden something with implications that change the intent of the bill in a dry legalistic passage on page eighty-two. Now he has built a toll bridge using a public authority designed to lapse from existence after the bridge is paid for, and made sure that it will never lapse from existence – instead of having to repay its bonds and thus fizzle into nothing, it can use the revenue from the toll bridge (in the tens of millions) to build or widen any road connected to the bridge. ‘Connected’ can be defined however he likes.
Oh and it can build parks on those roads also.
(I keep listening:) Oh, and also houses.
And any other facilities relating to the use of the roads.
Oh also the authority can have its own police force and pass regulations that shall have the force of law governing its own properties with possible punishments including fines and jail time.
And he has embodied all of this chicanery in the contracts between the authority and the holders of its bonds, which, unlike legislation, cannot be repealed once created unless both the authority (Moses, in this case) and the bond holders agree.
[Up until this part of the story Moses has spoken bitterly about the big lesson he learned in his first failures: if your boss doesn't support you, you can't get anything done. His great successes started at the point when he became good friends with Governor Al Smith, and most of the early ones were due to Smith having his back. Now he has finally secured a stream of power that is totally independent of the city administration - and totally independent of voters and the democratic process.]
…
Robert Moses gets defeated in his efforts to build a terrible bridge!
But only because the actual President personally hated him and intervened secretly. This is not good news. It is not meant to take the President to halt the plans of a city official allegedly subordinate to the mayor of New York.
In the course of this conflict, Robert Moses demonstrated that he no longer needed either public opinion, or the support of the old guard of Good Government activists who had helped his career get as far as it did. Absolutely everyone hated his bridge, but they could not stop it, because no one else was offering money to build the alternative (a tunnel,) he himself refused to countenance building the tunnel (for no particularly obvious reason,) and the city had to solve its congestion problem somehow. So much of Moses' power exists in a context where city officials don't think 'do nothing' is a practical option - either for reasons of re-electability, or city congestion, or both - and Moses is the only one holding out a feasible something. (Edit: okay, as I listen on I am reminded that Moses does have a practical motive for supporting a bridge over a tunnel: he wants to ruin a tunnel construction authority and thus secure control over all public authorities which control funds relating to water crossings.)
And the old guard looked around and went ‘Wait - we liked it when you disregarded protocol and personally insulted your opponents, Moses, but that was because your opponents weren’t us.’
And Moses did not bother to reply. Caro quotes A Man For All Seasons, Roper telling Thomas More that he'll tear down any law if it lets him chase out the devil. “And when the last law is down," says More, "and the devil turns on you, where will you hide from him?”
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Date: 2026-01-03 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-04 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-03 02:03 pm (UTC)Yes, I too would like to know more about Belle Moscowitz!
why Moses - so good at learning, so good at pushing himself to work long hours at difficult tasks, usually so good at speaking softly to the people whose goodwill he needed - couldn’t learn to address the public with anything but bored yet raging condescension. Moses as Coriolanus?
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Date: 2026-01-04 03:56 am (UTC)There does seem to be a biography of Moscowitz, by her granddaughter, which at least according to a random goodreads review she was inspired to write for exactly this reason: she read The Power Broker and went, ‘Huh, there’s clearly more to this story about my grandmother.’ Alas, it is expensive and not in audio, but I’ll still see if I can find it at some point.
Have I ever seen Coriolanus? I don’t think I was there for the Catterpillars’ ones. I think of the movie I heard about with Ralph Feinnes and a modern setting.
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Date: 2026-01-04 04:09 am (UTC)Well if you ever see Coriolanus you'll get my reference!
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Date: 2026-01-03 10:04 pm (UTC)This was very entertaining!
The podcast 99% Invisible did a year-long reread of the book, publishing an episode a month & including interviews with a bunch of interesting people, including Robert Caro.
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Date: 2026-01-04 03:46 am (UTC)I think this may be the same podcast my dad has been talking about enjoying. I plan to listen to it when my memories of the book start to dim.
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Date: 2026-01-04 05:03 am (UTC)I remember waking up to this; it still makes me laugh.
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Date: 2026-01-04 12:05 pm (UTC)And it still makes me go ‘aaaa why didn’t you just fire him.’
(It’s okay, Jack, Robert Moses is gone now, you can emerge. Now you get to learn about, uh, cadastral maps I guess. And be angry with whole states instead of just one guy!)