Robert Moses - The Power Broker

The Power Broker

Moses's image suffered a further blow in 1974 with the publication of The Power Broker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Robert A. Caro. Caro's 1,200-page opus (edited from over 3,000 pages long) largely destroyed the remainder of Moses's reputation; essayist Phillip Lopate writes that "Moses's satanic reputation with the public can be traced, in the main, to...Caro's magnificent biography." For example, Caro described how insensitive Moses was in the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and how he willfully neglected public transit. Moses's reputation today is in many ways attributable to Caro, whose book won both the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1975 and the Francis Parkman Prize, which is awarded by the Society of American Historians, and was named one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library.

Caro's depiction of Moses's life gives him full credit for his early achievements, showing, for example, how he conceived and created Jones Beach and the New York State Park system, but he also shows how, as Moses's desire for power came to be more important to him than his earlier dreams, he destroyed more than a score of neighborhoods, by ramming 13 huge expressways across the heart of New York City and by building huge urban renewal projects with little regard for the urban fabric or for human scale. Yet the author is more neutral in his central premise: the city would have been a very different place — maybe better, maybe worse — if Moses had never existed. Other U.S. cities were doing the same thing as New York in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Boston, San Francisco and Seattle, for instance, each built highways straight through their downtown areas. The New York City architectural intelligentsia of the 1940s and 1950s, who largely believed in such prophets of the automobile as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, had supported Moses. Many other cities, like Newark, Chicago and St. Louis, also built massive, unattractive public housing projects.

Caro argues that Moses also demonstrated racist tendencies. He, along with other members of the New York city planning commission, were vocal opponents against black war veterans moving into Stuyvesant Town, a Manhattan residential development complex created to house World War II veterans.

People had come to see Moses as a bully who disregarded public input, but until the publication of Caro's book, they had not known that he had allowed his brother Paul to spend much of his life in poverty. Paul Moses, who was interviewed by Caro shortly before his death, claimed Robert had exerted undue influence on their mother to change their will in his favour shortly before her death. Caro notes that Paul was on bad terms with their mother over a long period and she may have changed the will of her own accord. Caro suggested that Robert's subsequent treatment of Paul may have been legally justifiable but was morally questionable.