The Power Broker
LC Class | NA9085.M68 C37 1975 |
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a 1974
Synopsis
The Power Broker traces Moses's life from his childhood in Connecticut to his early years as an idealistic advocate for Progressive reform of the city's corrupt civil service system. According to Caro, Moses's failures there, and later experience working for future New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in the State Senate and Governor of New York Al Smith taught him how to acquire and wield power in order to achieve his goals.
By the 1930s, Moses had earned a reputation as a creator of public parks in both the city and state, and later long-sought projects like the
Caro pays ample tribute to Moses for his intelligence, political shrewdness, eloquence, and hands-on, if somewhat aggressive, management style, and gives full credit for his earlier achievements, but he has an ambivalent view of the man.
The book is 1,336 pages long (only two-thirds of the original manuscript), and provides documentation for its assertions in most instances, which Moses and his supporters attempted to refute.[3]
Origins
As a reporter for
"That was one of the transformational moments of my life," Caro said years later. It led him to think about Moses for the first time. "I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: 'Everything you've been doing is baloney. You've been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here's a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don't have the slightest idea how he got it.'"[4]
In 1966, Caro's wife Ina changed the topic of her graduate thesis to write about the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, while Caro was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University taking courses in urban planning and land use. He found that academics' notions of highway planning contrasted with what he had seen as a reporter. "Here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on," he recalled, "and all of a sudden I said to myself: 'This is completely wrong. This isn't why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don't find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.'"[4]
He found that despite Moses's illustrious career, no biography had been written, save the highly flattering and propagandistic Builder for Democracy in 1952.[5] So he decided to undertake the task himself, beginning the seven-year process of hundreds of interviews meticulously documented as well as extensive original archival research, listed in the notes on sources in an appendix.
Originally, Caro believed it would take nine months to research and write the book. As that time stretched into years, he ran out of money and despaired of ever finishing it. Ina, his wife and research assistant, sold the family home on Long Island and moved the Caros to an apartment in the Bronx where she had taken a teaching job, so that her husband could continue.[4]
Moses "did his best to try to keep this book from being written—as he had done, successfully, with so many previous, stillborn, biographies."[6] After Caro had been working on the book for more than a year, Moses agreed to sit for a series of seven interviews, one lasting from 9:30 A.M. until evening, providing much material about his early life, but when Caro began asking questions (as he later wrote. "for having interviewed others involved in the subjects in question and having examined the records—many of them secret—dealing with them, it was necessary to reconcile the sometimes striking disparity between what he told me and what they told me") the series of interviews was abruptly terminated."[6]
Caro's final manuscript ran to about 1,050,000 words. Editor Robert Gottlieb told him that the maximum possible length of a trade book was about 700,000 words, or 1,280 pages. When Caro asked about splitting the book into two volumes, Gottlieb replied that he "might get people interested in Robert Moses once. I could never get them interested in him twice." So Caro had to cut down his manuscript, which took him months.[7]
Reception
The Power Broker generated substantial public discussion upon publication, especially after the "One Mile" chapter ran as an excerpt in
The book won the
Response from Moses
Moses and his supporters considered the book to be overwhelmingly biased against him, and what his supporters considered to be a record of unprecedented accomplishment. Moses put out a 23-page typed statement challenging some of its assertions (he claimed he never used the anti-Italian slurs the book attributes to him about Fiorello La Guardia, for instance).[10]
Modern re-assessment
In later years a more positive view of Moses's career has emerged, in explicit reaction to his portrayal in The Power Broker.[11] This re-evaluation has included museum exhibits and a 2007 book (Robert Moses and the Modern City) described as having a "revisionist theme running throughout".[12] In 2014, Caro reminisced about his seven years' labor on the book in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.[13]
The book remains highly regarded. In 2017, David W. Dunlap described The Power Broker as "the book that still must be read – 43 years after it was published – to understand how New York really works."[14] In 2020, the book made frequent appearances as the "ultimate signifier of New York political sophistication" on the bookshelves of U.S. journalists and politicians appearing in TV interviews from their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.[15]
In the book Caro claims Moses built overpasses crossing his Long Island Parkways low in height to keep buses from transporting those without private automobiles (i.e. lower class, disproportionately non-white citizens) to the beaches and parks he developed as president of the Long Island State Park Commission. German professor of sociology Bernward Joerges pointed out in 1999 that "Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country" in designing bridges too low for buses to pass under.[16]
See also
References
- ^ a b Porch, Scott (2014-09-16). "'The Power Broker' Turns 40: How Robert Caro Wrote a Masterpiece". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2015-07-07.
- ^ "1975 Pulitzer Prizes". The Pulitzer Prizes.
- ^ "Robert Moses's Response to Robert Caro's The Power Broker". www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com. Retrieved 2021-04-16.
- ^ a b c d e McGrath, Charles (April 15, 2012). "Robert Caro's Big Dig". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved April 17, 2012.
- ^ Rodgers, Cleveland (1952). Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy.
- ^ OCLC 1631862.
- ^ Dreifus, Claudia (16 January 2018). "'Studies in Power': An Interview with Robert Caro". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
- ^ "Creatures of the State: How Robert Moses Got Things Done". The New Yorker. 1974-08-05. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ Klatell, David. "M.S. Fall 2007 In 2010, President Barack Obama, after awarding Mr. Caro a National Humanities Medal, said "I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was 22 years old and just being mesmerized, and I"m sure it helped to shape how I think about politics."Curriculum". Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Retrieved 2007-09-27.[dead link]
- ^ "Robert Moses's Response to Robert Caro's The Power Broker". Bridge and Tunnel Club. 1974-08-26. Retrieved 2015-07-06.
- ^ Pogrebin, Robin (2007-01-23). "Rehabilitating Robert Moses". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-07-06.
- ^ Powell, Michael (2007-05-06). "A Tale of Two Cities". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-07-06.
- ^ Caro, Robert A. (10 December 2014). "AUTHOR'S NOTE: 'The Power Broker,' 40 Years Later". New York Times Sunday Book Review. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
The theme of Mr. Moses's speech was a bitter one: the ingratitude of the public toward men who had done so much for the public. "Some day," he said, "let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man." In front of me the row of gray heads nodded in appreciation. "'R. M.' had built so much, created so much," they whispered to one another. "Why didn't people understand? Why weren't they grateful?"
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 28, 2019.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-05-28.
- ^ Kessler, Glenn (2021-11-10). "Robert Moses and the saga of the racist parkway bridges". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2023-01-26.
External links
- Official website
- Caro's retrospective New Yorker article on the writing of the book (1998)
- WNYC conversation with Caro about the book on the 40th anniversary of its publication (2014)
- Presentation by Caro on "New York Politics In The Mid 1900's", February 18, 1998, C-SPAN
- Presentation by Caro on The Power Broker, September 28, 1998, C-SPAN
- Presentation by Caro on The Power Broker, February 11, 2007, C-SPAN