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

by Robert A. Caro

Robert Moses built public works costing, in 1968 dollars, twenty-seven billion dollars. In terms of personal conception and completion, no other public official in the history of the United States built public works costing an amount even close to that figure. In those terms, Robert Moses was unquestionably America’s most prolific physical creator. He was America’s greatest builder.

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.

He was America’s greatest road builder, the most influential single architect of the system over which rolled the wheels of America’s cars. And there was, in this fact, an irony. For, except for a few driving lessons he took in 1926, Robert Moses never drove a car in his life.

By 1957, $133,000,000 of public monies had been expended on urban renewal in all the cities of the United States with the exception of New York; $267,000,000 had been spent in New York.

When Moses resigned from his urban renewal directorship in 1960, urban renewal had produced more physical results in New York than in all other American cities combined. Says the federal official in charge of the early years of the program: “Because Robert Moses was so far ahead of anyone else in the country, he had greater influence on urban renewal in the United States—on how the program developed and on how it was received by the public—than any other single person.”

The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter. This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.

Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.

Corruption before Moses had been unorganized, based on a multitude of selfish, private ends. Moses’ genius for organizing it and focusing it at a central source gave it a new force, a force so powerful that it bent the entire city government off the democratic bias. He had used the power of money to undermine the democratic processes of the largest city in the world, to plan and build its parks, bridges, highways and housing projects on the basis of his whim alone.

The German Jews even coined a word for their coreligionists, a word based on the fact that many Russian names end in “ki.” The word was “kikes.”

But Moses had failed in his calculations to give certain factors due weight. He had not sufficiently taken into account greed. He had not sufficiently taken into account self-interest. And, most of all, he had not sufficiently taken into account the need for power.

In 1909, for example, the Women’s City Club, under Belle’s direction, began an investigation of the city’s so-called “dancing academies.” The “academies” were the only easily accessible places of weekday recreation for the poor girls of the Lower East Side who worked in garment-center sweatshops. These girls, many of them in their early teens, were unsophisticated. But the academies served liquor at tables on the dance floor, had rooms ready for hasty rental down adjacent corridors and seemed expressly designed for what reformers euphemistically referred to as “the downfall of young women.”

In no part of New York State were the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose venom was directed in the 1920’s not only against Negroes but also against Jews and Catholics, as numerous as in Suffolk County. Three successive chairmen of Suffolk’s Republican Party had been members of the Klan, and anyone who needed an additional symbol of its power had only to look at the flagpole in front of the Islip Town Hall: the pole, read the inscription on an attached plaque, had been donated by the Islip branch of the Ladies of the Klan and gratefully accepted by the Town Board. (In 1928, when Al Smith ran for President, fiery crosses would blaze on the hills of Alabama and Mississippi—and, by orders of the county GOP organization, on the hills of Suffolk.) Combining with the baymen to dominate the Suffolk political picture, the farmers had no difficulty persuading the county’s supervisors to make sure that there was not a single park in Suffolk open to city residents.

(so many of the largest contributors to the Republican Party came from the North Shore that during the 1920’s the GOP’s National Finance Committee contained forty-nine members—one from each of the forty-eight states and one from Nassau County),

This lesson Robert Moses translated into phrases that began to appear in his letters and, according to associates, his conversation after the Taylor Estate fight: “The important thing is to get things done.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?”

Only that once you physically began a project, there would always be some way found of obtaining the money to complete it. “Once you sink that first stake,” he would often say, “they’ll never make you pull it up.”

For the rest of his life, when a friend, an enemy—or one of his own lawyers—would protest that something he was doing or was proposing to do was illegal, Moses would throw back his head and say, with a broad grin, a touch of exaggeration and much more than a touch of bravado: “Nothing I have ever done has been tinged with legality.”

Their distribution, for example, was not at all even. The areas of the maps on which the dots were clustered most thickly corresponded in the main to those areas inhabited by families that were well-to-do or at least “comfortable.” The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly corresponded in part to undeveloped outlying areas of the city that did not really need playgrounds, but they corresponded also to some of the city’s most congested areas, to the tenement neighborhoods and slums inhabited by families that were poor—to areas that needed playgrounds desperately. Most of Robert Moses’ neighborhood playgrounds had, in other words, been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds least. Few of the playgrounds had been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds most.

The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes. Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930’s. He built one playground in Harlem.

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green. —SIR FRANCIS BACON

Just to make the most minimal repairs on the outmoded school plants required between $15,000,000 and $20,000,000 per year. During the O’Dwyer administration less than $5,000,000 per year had been allocated for this purpose, with the result that by the end of that administration, the backlog in minimal repairs, a staggering $30,000,000 at the beginning of that administration, had mounted to $75,000,000. During the Impellitteri administration, thanks largely to the real possibility of disasters in the schools, the amount for maintenance was increased—but only slightly. By the end of that administration, the backlog of minimal repairs to the city’s schools was about $100,000,000.