About 50 years ago, writer Robert Caro published one of the most influential works of nonfiction in contemporary U.S. history, The Power Broker. In a riveting narrative, Caro takes readers through the life of New York powerhouse Robert Moses, an unelected bureaucrat who rose to the height of political power and deployed his authority to remake the city and its surrounding environs, often at the expense of the working families who stood in his way of his ambitions.
The landmark book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, remains a masterclass in politics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as home and office bookshelves turned into TV backdrops, the 1,246-page book was regularly referenced. “To display the book prominently is to signal that you, too, understand how politics works in both its pitfalls and its promise,” noted reporter Dana Rubinstein.
About 50 years ago, writer Robert Caro published one of the most influential works of nonfiction in contemporary U.S. history, The Power Broker. In a riveting narrative, Caro takes readers through the life of New York powerhouse Robert Moses, an unelected bureaucrat who rose to the height of political power and deployed his authority to remake the city and its surrounding environs, often at the expense of the working families who stood in his way of his ambitions.
The landmark book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, remains a masterclass in politics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as home and office bookshelves turned into TV backdrops, the 1,246-page book was regularly referenced. “To display the book prominently is to signal that you, too, understand how politics works in both its pitfalls and its promise,” noted reporter Dana Rubinstein.
U.S. presidents have praised the book’s impact on their own careers. Presenting Caro with a National Humanities Medal, President Barack Obama 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 shape how I think about politics.”
This year, readers have been celebrating The Power Broker’s 50th anniversary with author interviews and a stunning exhibition at the New York Historical Society. And now, with the 2024 U.S. presidential election days away, it is worth considering the book’s message to voters on the profound impact that the ethical and moral character of the person who holds power can have on the lives of citizens. Although Caro’s work centered on a New York official who never received a single vote, the lessons from Robert Moses’s life are extremely relevant to all levels of government, including to the next president of the United States.
Robert Caro, a native New Yorker and Princeton University graduate, wrote The Power Broker after years honing his investigative journalism skills. At Newsday, he learned from a veteran editor, Alan Hathway, how to comb through data like a detective to find the real story below the surface. Hathaway told Caro, “Just remember one thing: Turn every page. Never assume anything.” The mantra turned into the title of a 2022 documentary about Caro and his late editor Robert Gottlieb, Turn Every Page. As Caro dove deeper into the inner life of New York politics and learned more about Moses’s hidden hand, his masterpiece emerged.
Since its publication in 1974, The Power Broker has influenced multiple generations of readers who have learned how the infrastructure of a city and state is profoundly shaped by the racial and class biases of the people behind its creation, as well as their thirst for power. “If a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a Black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or would have been, in New York was designed too low for it to pass by—that obviously reflects racism that went into those deign choices,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said during a 2021 discussion about highway design, which was a nod to one of the most shocking sections of the book where Caro recounted how Moses purposely had the bridges on the Southern State Parkway be built too low for buses, thereby preventing many Black residents from reaching the beaches.
The book, which took about seven years to write, traces Moses’s rise to power in meticulous detail. After completing his education at Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, Moses, who was born in New Haven and grew up in New York, set out to succeed in city and state government. Initially, his aspiration was to actualize the high ideals of progressivism by supporting the creation and expansion of beautiful parks, constructing highways and bridges to facilitate the movement of people to broader areas of the state, and to build historic cultural institutions, stadiums, and beachside areas for recreation. Moses launched his career in the 1920s and ‘30s by working several city and state jobs before becoming president of the Long Island State Park Commission and chairman of the State Council of Parks. In 1927, he used a two-year stint under New York Gov. Al Smith as secretary of state to rapidly expand his power. Over the decades, Moses would accumulate jobs at the pace that kids collect baseball cards, continually using his cunning to expand his hold over New York’s government.
Over time, as Shakespearean logic would predict, Moses’s progressive idealism collapsed under the weight of his ruthless drive for power. His immense political capital and control over government funds made him virtually untouchable. As leaders came and went in the mayoral and gubernatorial offices, Moses remained the constant. Without having to face any kind of accountability, his unquenchable thirst for building things turned tragic. His love of automobiles quashed possibilities for mass transit while entire communities of working Americans were displaced just so that he could grab valuable property for his projects. If someone stood in his way, Moses turned into a human wrecking ball. His own personal biases are literally built into the architecture that surrounds New Yorkers. Moses once said, “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?”
In “One Mile,” one of the most disturbing sections of the book, Caro shows the devastation that was wrought by just one mile of a Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway, as hundreds of families lost their homes, streets, and community. “If the bulge in the expressway was puzzling to anyone studying it, it was tragic to those who didn’t have to study it, to the people who lived in or near that right-of-way,” Caro wrote about an immigrant community living in East Tremont. “For to these people, the fifty-four apartment buildings that would have to be destroyed were not just buildings but homes.”
In a review for the New York Times, Richard Wade said, “Moses is now finding out that the really dangerous part of the trade is not handling the opposition raised by projects as they are proposed or executed, but rather the judgment of history. Caro’s book represents the beginning of this judgment. He questions almost everything about Moses—his strategy and tactics, his methods and ends, his vision and ideology, his honesty and integrity, his character and decency.”
It is not a surprise that The Power Broker, which would go on to become one of the best-selling works of nonfiction and sell over 40,000 copies in 2024 alone—came out as U.S. President Richard Nixon fell from power, ultimately resigning from office in disgrace as result of the Watergate scandal that exposed the abuse of presidential power. With Americans still reeling over Vietnam, Watergate was the final nail in the coffin of trust in government. Robert Moses, who at the time of the publication of The Power Broker in 1974 wasa figure few Americans would have known about, emerged as another infamous symbol from the era of the ways in which power can corrupt.
In the years since the book’s publication, Caro has been careful to make clear that he doesn’t believe the way Moses deployed power was inevitable. Power, Caro has said, “doesn’t always corrupt. What power always does is reveal. When a guy gets into a position where he doesn’t have to worry anymore, then you see what he wanted to do all along.” With this important distinction, Caro argued that political power can be used for good or bad. In his biography of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, Caro showed readers how LBJ was able to exercise his power for the social good, including the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964. In other words, what Moses’s life shows is that wrongminded individuals can corrupt the political power with which they have been entrusted. It is this for which we must remain vigilant. And in this election, for all the discussion of inflation, immigration, and reproductive rights, the question posed by The Power Broker is probably the most fundamental of all: Who can voters trust to hold power?
Caro’s book used Moses to explore how political power could subvert democracy when the holder of authority did not face the scrutiny of the electorate. But Americans have learned that even voting does not provide fail-safe insurance from antidemocratic forces. It is possible for large swaths of the electorate to support elected officials who do not prioritize the health of the nation’s democratic institutions or are even willing to select elected officials who purposely undercut the integrity of the mechanisms upon which we depend to empower citizens.
While there are many disagreements over Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy, the major sources of tension have tended to center on what kinds of policies she stands for and how responsible she is for the failures that some claim have resulted from President Joe Biden’s tenure in office. Outside of the hardest core MAGA circles, there have not been widespread debates about whether Harris can be trusted to carry out the basic responsibilities of governance.
The concern raised by The Power Broker is much more relevant to the choice that voters face with the Republican ticket. Former President Donald Trump, who was at the center of a systematic effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and who has continued to promote election denialism, brings the current election back to the issues raised by Caro. Not only does Trump continue to threaten the election system, but he has also been candid about his intention to abandon all guardrails when exercising presidential power, including threats that he has made in public to use the military against his domestic enemies.
The Power Broker reminds us of how individuals can corrupt political power and then use that awesome muscle in extraordinarily destructive ways. While the politics of hope and joy might have been an effective strategy for Democrats to energize voters and retain media interest, the threats to democracy should not be forgotten. Voters need to remember that history shows how lives can be destroyed when political power falls into the hands of officials who elevate their self-interest over the public’s interest.
When Americans send in their ballots or go to their polling place on Nov. 5, they need to remember the high costs that continue to be paid by New Yorkers, who still live in the shadow of Robert Moses.
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