Book Time #15: The Power Broker's Legacy

Hello everyone,

This month’s edition is about the legacy of The Power Broker, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. I believe its legacy is much more complex than many of the retrospectives published in major outlets over the last month make it seem. More on that below.

But first, I want to revisit something I wrote last month. I said, “The best books on Vietnam—The Best and the Brightest and A Bright Shining Lie immediately come to mind as not only titans of the field but also among the greatest non-fiction books ever written—were written at the time of the conflict.”

This wasn’t quite right. A Bright Shining Lie was published in 1988. Thanks to reader Howard for pointing that out. But, as with most things in life, there’s more to the story.

Neil Sheehan, the author of Shining Lie, and Stanley Karnow, whose book I wrote about last week, had some things in common. They were both journalists covering the wars in southeast Asia. Nixon despised both of them. And they both wrote very big books about the war afterwards.

But there were key differences, too. Karnow was more of a southeast Asia expert writ large dating back to the 1950s. In 1977, two years after Saigon fell, PBS contracted Karnow to work on the book/PBS series. It was done five years later. At the point PBS asked Karnow to do the series/book in 1977, Sheehan had already been working on Shining Lie for almost five years. And he wouldn’t be done for another nine years.

To put it another way, between the day of John Paul Vann’s funeral, the subject of Shining Lie, in 1972 and Shining Lie’s publication in 1988, Karnow wrote a book about Mao and China, the history of Vietnam, produced a documentary series on the same, and researched and wrote another book on the U.S. and the Philippines which, upon publication the following year, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Which is to say, both authors led accomplished careers, but very different ones. It was certainly misleading for me to say Shining Lie was written during the Vietnam War. It wasn’t just written then. It continued to be written for 11 years after the war ended, because for a great many people the war never really ended. Neil Sheehan was one of them, and, to me, it is part of what makes Shining Lie one of the greatest works of non-fiction ever written.

You can read more about what it took to make A Bright Shining Lie in Susan Sheehan’s 1990 New York Times Magazine’s “When Will The Book Be Done?" and Patrick Sauer’s excellent 2018 article, also in the Times (both gift links). And thanks, as always, for reading.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro

In 2018, I was covering the planned L train shutdown in New York City for the Village Voice. That May, I attended a community meeting in the West Village about the mitigation plan, which involved building one-way bike lanes on 12th and 13th Streets and turning 14th Street into a busway to accommodate displaced L train riders. The plan required tearing down zero buildings, displacing zero people, and building zero new roads. It called for no concrete to be poured or jackhammering to be done. At that meeting, I interviewed an older man who identified himself as a lawyer and 13th Street homeowner. He told me, referring to the MTA and DOT’s plan to build bike lanes and a busway, “This is exactly what Robert Moses did.”

Robert Moses. At every meeting about the 14th Street mitigation plan, his name was mentioned time and again. Each side would lob accusations back and forth at one another about who was acting more like Moses. Robert Moses. Robert Moses. Robert Moses. Robert Moses. Robert Moses. Robert Moses. Robert Moses. Moses, of course, has become the villainous stand-in for unchecked bureaucratic power. He tore down neighborhoods to build highways, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. People know about him and his highways because of The Power Broker.  

The villainization of Robert Moses is, of course, rooted in a valid criticism of his reign. Tearing down neighborhoods to build highways is bad, we should stop doing it, and we should reconnect as many neighborhoods as possible that were gutted to make way for them. And any public project, even for something more worthwhile than a highway, that does involve displacing thousands of people should be done with the most extreme caution and humility, if at all. But this obsession with Robert Moses has gone too far, resulting in an over-correction that has caused real environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic harm.  

It has been more than 60 years since Moses last held any semblance of power in New York. He died 43 years ago. The only reason anyone still talks about him, or even knows who he is—much less invokes his name repeatedly at the mere mention of any development project in New York City—is because of Robert Caro’s mammoth biography, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. With the noteworthy exception of Henry Grabar at Slate, the fawning coverage of the book’s anniversary has been generally lacking in any serious evaluation of the book’s legacy. While I am a fan of Caro’s work, times change. And so, as you might remember from my NYC and American urbanist starter packs, I am in total agreement with Grabar, who wrote, “It has been a long 50 years, and as a guide to the American city, The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to confront and overcome the challenges that face us today.”

The Power Broker was published in 1974. Subscribers of this newsletter will know this is a period I have been reading about a lot lately. The mid-70s was the apex of distrust in American institutions, especially political ones, a distrust that continues to this day. To situate us in time a little, The Power Broker was published one month after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. The country had been subjected to months and months of Watergate hearings, the disastrous slow burn evacuation from Vietnam, an oil crisis, high inflation, and the continuing rapid de-industrialization of the American economy and hollowing out of America’s cities. The “race problem” as it was so often called seemed to only be getting worse. Caro has often said that he was convinced no one would read the book when it came out. But in fact the nation was primed for a deep dive into how one man drunk on his own power leveraged government largess intended to rejuvenate cities and instead ruined them. It probably felt at the time like a parable for the country as a whole.

The response to all this—not just Moses, but the entire backlash against big government liberalism—was profound. In short, people thought big government had failed. On the macro level, the country elected Ronald Reagan twice, the second time with 97.5 percent of the electoral college votes, on the message that government is not the solution to our problems but is the problem. On a smaller but no less consequential level, a broad bipartisan consensus formed around the idea that communities should get virtual veto power over most kinds of development. Given the events of the decades that preceded them, I am tremendously sympathetic to these views at the time. How could anyone have possibly lived through urban renewal, Vietnam, and Watergate thinking the adults in charge knew what they were doing?  

But the backlash went too far, assuming that all expertise was bunk and only ordinary citizens were blessed with the knowledge required to improve neighborhoods. I have written extensively about how the policies that reflect these new values were born out of backlash to the postwar building era, and how they are responsible for our housing and transportation crisis. Critically, it is not merely due to the letter of any law or zoning code. It is something deeper, the unquestioned dominance of the mere theory of community control. Few politicians are willing to override functionally powerless entities like community boards or public comment sections of environmental reviews even when they have the power to do so. In effect, the politicians of today have become the anti-Moses, declining to use the power they possess. The result? An unmitigated ecological, environmental and social disaster. The ultimate example is the fact that a disproportionate amount of new U.S. housing is now built in unincorporated, greenfield areas because there is no community to get feedback from.  

I first read The Power Broker in 2013 before I was deep in urbanist discourse. I did not take away from my reading that Moses was a villain. He certainly didn’t seem like a fun guy to be around, or work for, or deal with. And while he clearly had views we would today consider racist, at the time he was in power—Peak Jim Crow to just before the passage of the Civil Rights Act—they were more or less standard. (Also, the most egregious examples of his racism have been debunked.) More to the point, some aspects of his legacy are far less controversial or condemnable than his detractors make it seem. Most notably, Moses was a public parks visionary. On the back cover of The Power Broker, you’ll find a map of the ones he created. In the introduction, Caro famously lists all the highways Moses built. The list of parks he built, and acres of land he preserved for nature and recreation, would be even longer. Caumsett State Park, Wildwood State Park, Montauk Point State Park, Palisades State Park, Tallman Mountain State Park, Rockland Lake State Park, Harriman State Park, Stony Point State Park, Hook Mountain State Park, Bear Mountain State Park, Storm King State Park, Mohansic State Park, Catskill Park, Grafton State Park, Taconic State Park, it goes on and on. Many of these places are now surrounded by McMansion suburban hellscapes, making his efforts vital to the preservation of important green space and wildlife areas. Caro does mention this, right there on Page 10. “At the end of his leadership of the New York system, the total acreage of the state parks in the fifty states was 5,799,957. New York State alone had 2,567,256 of those acres—or 45 percent of all the state parks in the country.”  

I say this not to argue Robert Moses Was Good, Actually, because that take would be just as simplistic as Robert Moses Was Bad, Actually. Moses was a complicated person. The gift of a 1,200 page book exploring that person is that it embraces his complications. So, on its 50th anniversary, I submit the most important thing we can do is embrace the complications.  

There is still plenty to learn from The Power Broker that applies to today. While many of the federal programs Moses took advantage of no longer exist, new ones have come to the fore, and the exercise of power is a timeless art. We must be careful about relying too much on new technologies and methods that have not stood the test of generations. Treasure the aspects of our cities that have: our parks, our public transportation, our sidewalks and our shade. Give the most scrutiny to the largest projects that promise new things, and the least to the smallest changes that we know work.  

Despite being much more versed in urbanism discourse today than when I read The Power Broker 11 years ago, I still reject the idea that Robert Moses was a villain. My greatest qualm with The Power Broker as a work is that it overstates how special Moses was. Every city had a Moses-like figure who directed federal funds to tear down masses of housing, build a series of highways, and a new cultural center or two. They all did it! What every city didn’t have was an obsessive journalist willing to spend a decade of his life writing a biography of that person. What every city didn’t have was not a Robert Moses, but a Robert Caro.  

Moses was a pure reflection of the time he lived, a man who embraced the task of destruction and construction at a time when this was a virtue. Moses was just as much a man of his time as our endless parade of ineffectual politicians and bureaucrats who consistently fail to build anything of consequence are not villains themselves, but reflections of their time, our time, a time of skepticism of government’s ability to make our lives better. Instead of embracing his complications, the villainization of Moses has made us so afraid to build anything of consequence we have ensured we build nothing of value, nothing worth treasuring, and all too often, simply nothing at all. 

For (shorter) books on other cities during the time of Robert Moses consider:

• Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, Lizabeth Cohen

• American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Adam Cohen, Elizabeth Taylor. Different kind of power broker, similar outcome.

• The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Thomas Sugrue. Not a biography, but a detailed account of the leveling of postwar Detroit using similar programs as Moses took advantage of.