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

by Robert A. Caro

When he built housing for poor people, he built housing bleak, sterile, cheap—expressive of patronizing condescension in every line. And he built it in locations that contributed to the ghettoization of the city, dividing up the city by color and income. And by skewing city expenditures toward revenue-producing services, he prevented the city from reaching out toward its poor and assimilating them, and teaching them how to live in such housing—and the very people for whom he built it reacted with rage and bitterness and ignorance, and defaced it.

The Governor does not hold office by hereditary right. He is elected for a fixed term by universal suffrage. He is controlled in all minor appointments by the civil service law. He cannot spend a dollar of the public money which is not authorized by the Legislature of the State. He is subject to removal by impeachment. If he were given the powers here proposed he would stand out in the limelight of public opinion and scrutiny. Economy in administration, if accomplished, would redound to his credit. Waste and extravagance could be laid at his door. Those who cannot endure the medicine because it is too strong must be content with waste, inefficiency and bungling—and steadily rising cost of government. The system here proposed is more democratic, not more “royal,” than that now in existence. Democracy does not merely mean periodic elections. It means a government held accountable to the people between elections. In order that the people may hold their government to account they must have a government that they can understand. No citizen can hope to understand the present collection of departments, offices, boards and commissions, or the present methods of appropriating money. A Governor with a cabinet of reasonable size, responsible for proposing a program in the annual budget and for administering the program as modified by the Legislature, may be brought daily under public scrutiny, be held accountable to the Legislature and public opinion, and be turned out of office if h...

Whether or not he so intended, he turned parks, the symbol of man’s quest for serenity and peace, into a source of power.

Beyond politics was the fact that the boy from the Fulton Fish Market wanted so passionately to improve the lives of the people of the Fourth Ward—and of a hundred Fourth Wards throughout the state. And parks were, unlike improvements in teachers’ salaries or other highly praised but unmeasurable accomplishments of his administration, an accomplishment that he could see, an accomplishment whose visible, concrete existence could prove to him that he had indeed done something for his people. When he saw families picnicking under the tall trees at Valley Stream or swimming at Sunken Meadow, he could feel that he had measurably improved their lives. So many of the things that made him most satisfied with his administration had been the result of Moses’ work.

“You can get an awful lot of good done in the world if you’re willing to let someone else take the credit for it.”

accomplishment proves the potential for more accomplishment. The man who gets things done once can get things done again.