It's Complicated

Think Tank #18

Yesterday morning, I read the introduction to Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

Published in 1974, the book is a behemoth. Over a thousand pages long and seemingly packed with information. It’s about—you guessed it—Robert Moses, and the mark he left on New York City.

But so far, twenty-something pages in, it’s fantastic.

Moses was what I guess you could call an ‘urban planner.’ He commissioned highways, bridges, parks, public housing projects. There’s a map of New York City and Long Island at the beginning of the book showing all the different places Moses was responsible for, and at first glance, it just looked like a regular map of the city. All of the major highways, the vast majority of the parks and beaches. This guy built New York City.

Some might also call him (and this is putting it mildly) a massive jerk.

Moses was famously ruthless (largely because of The Power Broker, in fact—his reputation was squeaky clean for decades). He displaced people from their homes to build his highways, stuck the poor in poorly-built slums. He had a purported tendency towards racism that I don’t want to minimize but also don’t really know how to reckon with, having not finished the book. He ruled over the city like a tyrant, buying unelected power in all the right places.

In other words, he was a cold, calculated genius. Admittedly, when reading the first several pages of the introduction, I was kind of rooting for the guy. He was a man with a vision, and he knew how to bend the system and gain power in order to make that vision a reality. Sure, that kind of cunning isn’t exactly saintworthy, but he was using it to build parks and infrastructure that needed to be built—if someone like Moses didn’t do it, who would?

Robert Caro’s writing is no joke. This author knows how to draw a reader in, and he knows that a character in a book, like a would-be tyrant, needs to charm his subjects before disappointing them.

And anyway, I don’t think it’s accurate to either love or hate Robert Moses. As Caro articulates in the end of the book’s introduction, New York would be an entirely different place if it weren’t for him, for better or for worse.

It’s one of those gray areas. Power corrupts, but without it nothing gets done, and things need to get done.

So, to paraphrase a question posed by Caro: Was New York better off because of Robert Moses?

To pose my own, related question: Is it possible to do anything without being painted as either a hero or a villain, depending on the context?

I don’t have the answer. The guy was a tyrant—impermissibly flawed, yet fascinating.

If you’re interested (and itching to pick up a 1000 page book), read The Power Broker. It’s surprisingly fun to read. And Caro refrains from glorifying or vilifying Moses, realizing quite rightly that the truth is a lot more complicated.