Half a century after its publication, “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s epic biography of the urban planner and city-destroyer Robert Moses, needs no revival. From the moment it was published — to “almost unparalleled fanfare,” in the words of the Book Review’s reviewer, a professor of urban history — “The Power Broker” has never gone away.
Its durability resembles that of Moses’ own prodigious creation, the redrawn arterial map of greater metropolitan New York: more than a dozen giant roadways “girdling the city”; seven bridges, “their towers as tall as 70-story buildings”; luxury high-rises, with color-splashed “terraces and finials,” placed at a remove from “mile after mile” of drab housing projects: prisons for the poor, especially the nonwhite poor, whom Moses did not want “mixing” — not on playgrounds and certainly not in swimming pools — with white people.
As is so often the case with great nonfiction, the inspiration begins in the choice of subject. Caro’s choice was ambitious but also bold, for Moses was still alive in 1974 (he died in 1981 at age 92), famous but unknown, more name than person. “I never had a clear idea just who he was,” wrote Gore Vidal in an ecstatic essay for The New York Review of Books. “I never got past that forbiddingly dull title Park Commissioner.”
The many other titles (a total of 12 at one point) were just as dreary — City Construction Coordinator, Chairman of the Power Authority of the State of New York, Chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. Dull, yes, but also creepily redolent of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.
Moses, in Caro’s telling, was nearly as autocratic and cultishly revered as Mao, all but unchallenged as he went about imprinting his ideas of urban improvement on the seat of the American imperium.
The facts alone are remarkable. But what captivated Caro’s readers in 1974 and speaks to us now is his vivid account of how Moses did what he did, decade after decade, from the high-flying ’20s up through the “crisis of the city” in the ’60s and ’70s. Moses outmaneuvered governors and mayors, dictated policies to legislators and manipulated public opinion with the aid of a supine press. (The worst long-term offender, sad to say, was The New York Times.) He became, in sum, the prototype of a type we now know all too well, the mogul politician who operates with open contempt for “institutions and the law.”
Today journalists honor Caro’s exploits as an investigator, the 522 interviews, including seven lengthy ones with Moses himself at his summer cottage at Oak Beach, where he “sat talking, framed, through a picture window, by the Robert Moses Causeway and Robert Moses State Park,” until he grew suspicious and ceased cooperating.
Caro was not the first journalist to expose the colossal shame of America’s cities and their corrupt political machines — “The Power Broker” cites Progressive-era muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis — but good reporting, no matter how vigorous, cannot alone persuade us, as Caro does, that the fate of a metropolis is so tightly bound to the story of one person. Making that case requires the soul and the gifts of a novelist.
Caro the reporter is twin to Caro the artist. He brings Moses alive and takes us along on his improbable journey. We are with the “big-eyed Jew from New York” as he navigates anti-Semitic Yale at the turn of the 20th century. We are with the impatient young idealist at the Bureau of Municipal Research who takes long walks on the bluffs of Riverside Drive and envisions the “vast low-lying mass of dirt and mud” transformed into an oasis of “green parks filled with strollers, tennis players and families on bicycles.” We are with him on his one try for elected office — a landslide defeat for governor of New York in 1934 — from which he emerges hardened in his resolve, Caro writes, “to be not the public’s servant, but its master.”
Even the haughty Vidal succumbed to Caro’s spell. It had taken him, he admitted, a full month to read “The Power Broker”’s more than 1,200 pages, but “not once — uniquely — did I find myself glumly rifling the pages still to be read at the back.” One reason is the story Caro tells. Another is his seductive prose, the iterative sentences as thickly cabled as Moses’s bridges, the incremental building of phrase upon phrase, of clause piled upon clause, all held together by the urgent rhythms of Caro’s voice.
The spell he casts can also be felt in many subsequent books by authors who seemed to have learned from him. We feel it in Taylor Branch’s lush volumes on Martin Luther King, Jr., in Rachel Aviv’s unblinking case histories of the mentally ill, in John Ganz’s rich gallery of 1990s ideological rogues.
Caro the literary man also knows when to bring in other voices: James Baldwin on the projects, F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Queens slums and Walt Whitman on the Long Island shore (“Sea-beauty! stretch’d and basking!”). He quotes these writers not only because they are so good but because they haunt his own vision of New York as a despoiled paradise.
The overarching theme of “The Power Broker” is New York as a latter-day Rome dragged into decline by its imperial rulers. The parallels with antiquity began with Moses himself. Upon the completion of Shea Stadium in 1964, he exults that the Emperor Titus, who reigned during the opening of the Colosseum in 80 A.D., “could have felt no happier.” Of course, Moses, like so many Roman leaders, had to fall. When at long last, he meets his match in superior royalty, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Caro gives the encounter the Shakespearean size of Mark Antony in fateful conflict with Octavius Caesar.
This is a lot to absorb in 2024. It was even more to absorb back in 1974. Was it really accurate or fair, some wondered, to pin so much on Moses alone? “‘The Power Broker’ is vastly entertaining,” wrote The Times’s daily critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “as long as you don’t take it too seriously from the historical point of view.”
But no point of view is more susceptible to revision than the historical one. In 1974 it might have strained credulity to think of the unelected park commissioner Moses exacting tribute in coin from an entire metropolis, including top officials, to fund, and not quite soundly, fleets of limousines, and teams of chefs and waiters at three different offices. But so too does it strain credulity, all these years later, to imagine that a U.S. President would scheme to bring business to his struggling Miami golf resort by holding the G-7 summit there.
Yet many readers did believe “The Power Broker,” in part because it reached the public at a moment of broad national reckoning. Mere weeks before its publication, President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor for Watergate. Soon The Times’s Seymour Hersh was reporting on a “huge C.I.A. operation” that had been illegally spying on U.S. citizens, and the last U.S. Marines were airlifted from an embassy rooftop in Saigon. Then, in the autumn of 1975, the municipal government of New York, “the greatest city in the New World,” in Caro’s words, nearly went bankrupt, pushed closer to the brink by the “incredibly wasteful” plans of the master builder Moses.
Americans, most of whom had not realized they were living in an empire, discovered with a shock that it was coming undone. As the truth sank in, “The Power Broker” seemed to offer an oddly hopeful message. The nation’s troubles could be understood and explained — not as a result of impersonal forces or distant enemies, but of the concrete actions taken by its own leaders. And in a democracy those leaders can be held accountable and replaced.
We can never fully know what inspires any writer to grand literary purpose. Caro, however, has given us a few clues. He has said that when he was an English major at Princeton in the 1950s, filling campus publications with hastily written stories, his creative writing teacher urged him to “stop thinking with your fingers” and instead use his very good mind to understand what exactly he was writing about.
That teacher was R.P. Blackmur, a pioneer of the text-besotted mode of scholarly analysis known as New Criticism. It is Caro the trained close-reader who uncovers the sources of Moses’ might in the memos and bills he expertly drafted establishing the regulation and financing of the offices that granted him “some of the powers of a sovereign state” through the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.
The New Critical influence shows perhaps in a second way. In a book he published during Caro’s sophomore year, Blackmur observed that, in the modern era, the archetypal hero was almost always an artist — in literature and in “painting, sculpture, dancing and music, and for all I know in architecture as well.”
Years later, Caro said he found in Moses a “very rare form of genius.” He “could look at a barren, empty landscape and conceive on it, in a flash of inspiration, a colossal public work, a permanent, enduring creation.” This was the discovery that helped Caro invent a new kind of nonfiction narrative, premised on what we might call objective enchantment, in which authors wholly abandon themselves to their subjects, embrace every aspect, good and bad, adopting their perspective, yet also examining their actions with remorseless fidelity to the facts.
Caro’s description of Moses’s first Xanadu, Jones Beach State Park, captures the wonder it caused when it opened in 1929, with its bathhouse “like a medieval castle,” Moorish facades composed of “Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick” and “parking fields that held 10,000 cars each.” Delegations of urban designers traveled from Europe to study what Moses had wrought.
But Caro the dogged journalist also retraces Moses’ steps, seeking out the families of baymen and farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed so the park could be built and ferreting out the actual arrangements Moses made with Long Island’s gentry, the oil tycoons and banking lords whose oceanside estates could not be disturbed.
Emboldened by triumph, Moses went on to create and destroy on an ever bigger scale, leaving behind ever more victims. There are “no accurate figures on the total number of people evicted from their homes for all Robert Moses public works,” Caro reports, but it is “almost certainly close to half a million.”
It is this blend of dream and appetite, of enlargement without exaggeration, of fact that feels like fairy tale, that makes “The Power Broker”’s portrait of the artist as an all-consuming monster the nearest thing we have to a consensus Great American Biography, a landmark in our journalism but also a classic of our literature.
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