The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
O'Lessker, Karl
Buckminster Fuller (the subject of his previous book) as Kenner is, but I can believe that he is attracted to Fuller because he sees in him an image of the holistic comprehensive imagination that...
...That was April 1956, and the hitherto unassailable reputation never recovered...
...It was like that throughout most of his career...
...And yet he always identified himself as (and no doubt truly believed himself to be) a conservative...
...In fact, it is this capacity to move easily across boundaries that made it possible for Kenner in Bucky to put Poe alongside Fuller in order to see in both the striking homemade combination of crank and genius...
...Buckminster Fuller (the subject of his previous book) as Kenner is, but I can believe that he is attracted to Fuller because he sees in him an image of the holistic comprehensive imagination that they both admire...
...But it would be a mistake to think that Kenner quite literally climbs out of his box and leaves it behind him—just as it is a mistake to believe that one can be effectively at home in many cultures without being grounded in one of them...
...and when the neighborhood mothers protested, he did as he always did: he ignored them...
...The dream of a comprehensivism beyond specialization is probably as doomed as is Alex Comfort's dream of an anarchic-pacifist utopia achieved through the elimination of sex hangups...
...And when it began to appear that Rockefeller might really accept the resignations, Moses eliminated any chance of reconciliation by issuing a savage press release (prior to any announcement by the Governor) declaring that Rockefeller had asked him to resign from one of those posts "so that he could put his brother Laurance in my place...
...As chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Moses had virtual free rein to float great bond issues as he saw fit...
...the MOE ruthless corrupter of the political proces in New York's history will be just a fascinating to anyone with even th slightest interest in human motivation...
...and that in the farthest reaches of upstate New York he built immense power dams along the St...
...Because of his fiscal policies, Triborough bonds were unassailably gilt-edged...
...that on Long Island he built every one of the 416 miles of parkway and all its great beaches and parks...
...But it was a writer's crisis purely, a poet's crisis, an episode in the history of nature poetry since Wordsworth...
...A syndicate of underwriters purchased the entire issue for $295,760,851—and sold them the very same day for $300,570,851...
...Or better: in his very first New York State job, as president of the Long Island State Park Commission, he rented and lavishly furnished a grand suite of offices for himself and his friends, acquired limousines and chauffeurs for all, and spent no less than $63,089 on such "overhead expenses" out of a total beginning appropriation of $225,000...
...And even, oh so belatedly, the Times began to contemplate its hero's handiworks and found them wanting...
...In short the master-builder not only constructed his own coffin but seized himself by th scruff of the neck and threw himself in...
...With an absolute genius for public relations (except when he ran for governor) Moses enjoyed the nearly total adulation of the press and its near total support in each of his many furious battles with an array of opponents ranging from Long Island robber barons to good government reformers and spokesmen for the poor...
...So of course Moses beat a strategic retreat, right...
...Soon it became a drug to him...
...Kenner moves as naturally from Zukofsky's poetry to the primitive Kitty Hawk airplane, or from Hemingway's style to the implications of Hefner's philosophy, as Fuller moves from southern California zoning ordinances to problems in geodesics...
...There was nothing they could do except stand outside the fence and cry as the trees came down...
...Read it—read it and weep...
...Lit.," The Joy of Sex —like the Kitty Hawk plane, the Model-T, the Geodesic Dome, and all those sensitive backpage lonely souls—is a legitimate concern of the critic who wants to see his subject in its proper con- text...
...When the state's at-orney general issued a statement de-:ailing the extravagance of Moses' ex3enditures for cars and office furnishngs, the Park Commissioner's reply `attacked the Attorney General for lelays in searching title for proposed )ark acquisitions...
...For construction of the VerrazanoNarrows Bridge, for example, Triborough offered $300,000,000 in new bonds...
...Only two other men in America, said Nixon, understood the uses of power as well as he himself did: John Connally and Nelson Rockefeller...
...One oughtn't overlook a key fact about Rockefeller, so nicely illuminated by a recently quoted remark of former President Nixon...
...But it existed, neatly, on the poetic plane...
...That degree of understanding, it seems to me, almost certainly bespeaks a precedent devotion to, indeed lust for, the object of attention, such that there is a virtual symbiosis between subject and object...
...It was a game, at long last, he could not win...
...Moreover they understood the uses of public relations...
...It must have seemed to Moses, and with good reason, that the massed forces of the press stood ready, at a word from him, to scatter his opponents as rabble before an army...
...Moses was sorely to miss the adulation ofthe press when the most powerful antagonist he had ever had to face undertook to strip his power from him...
...A several points throughout the book Car lays aside the chronological narrative t talk about the Moses persona—his lift style, relations with family and sociates, romantic attachments, taste and distastes...
...Indeed the very shape of the city bears his imprint, for he added fifteen thousand acres of new land to its shorelines...
...for Moses it had to be czardom or nothing...
...That Kenner can do this about as well as anyone helps to explain the excitement his work can generate in his reader...
...Only a man of extraordinary self-confidence would have fared to be quite that outrageous in his qrst public position...
...Nor was his confidence misplaced...
...Briefly put, he decided to pave over half an acre of Central Park in order to build a parking lot for a restaurant called Tavern-on-the-Green...
...Robert Moses played this game to near-perfection, but with the difference that he measured his score in power rather than wealth...
...This is why (as I suspect Kenner knows) the New York Review of Books is not properly read if one omits the "personals...
...It is entangled in religion and philosophy: of course it is...
...That was one pillar of his triumphal arch of power...
...To put it another way, specialization is itself our indispensable hangup...
...In any event, no one in American politics is likely to deny the fact of Rockefeller's aptitude for the pursuit of power...
...And "very probably the single most powerful financial institution on the face of the earth" was at that time the Chase Manhattan Bank...
...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 197...
...Some Kenner-watchers may have been startled to see in a recent New York Times Magazine the report of his encounter with the Joyboy of sex, Alex Comfort...
...the city's merchant princes, including both Gimbel of Gimbel's and Straus of Macy's...
...It was only one more element in the power, and the display of power, he so relished...
...And his bitterest critic for thirty years, Lewis Mumford, said: "In the twentieth century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person...
...I shall not detract from the potenth reader's pleasure by outlining it here...
...Only a specialist in literature could say of Miss Moore that "she never allowed a fear of being thought poetic to deter her from accuracy," or of Faulkner that he "shows no special signs of thinking the old South more doomed than any other sector of humanity...
...C ...The fascinating story of a transformation from lyric poet and good government idealist to the most ruthless corrupter of the political process in New York's history...
...A few days later, at one-thirty in the morning, under the personal command of a top Moses aide, Park Department troops moved in by moonlight, constructed a protecting fence, and brought in the bulldozer...
...and perhaps only an idec logue could finally decide that the subjet is more hateful than admirable, or vic versa...
...Thus it was Moses' own obduracy that transformed a normal "politics-asthe-art-of-compromise" contest into a zero-sum game: winner take all...
...portant work ever written on America state and local politics...
...Later in the same statement Moses added the gratuitious (if not inaccurate) charg that Rockefeller had repeatedly subjected him to "humiliating" treatment...
...By the time daylight revealed the scene...
...If he doesn't go along, I'll destroy the son of a bitch!' And he'd call for a file, and he would begin to quote chapter and verse...
...But Moses wasn't concerned with the cost to the public...
...No one concerned with the life of the mind in these times will fail to notice how that mind has complicated itsproblems with its hopes for sexual liberation...
...Th story of his transformation from lyric pot and good government idealist to...
...Lest anyone think that a five million dollar profit on a $300,000,000 investment isn't all that spectacular even for one day, I should note that it was an absolutely risk-free "investment"— financial institutions all over the East were clamoring for the privilege of being allowed to purchase Triborough bonds—"A very, very high quality instrument, you know," said a vice president of the Chemical Bank of New York, "the highest-yielding of any investment-grade security after tax...
...The problem Moses presents to conservatives is symbolic, to be sure, but The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro Knopf $17.50 none the less anguishing for that...
...He finally had to confront a political superior as ruthless as himself and having not the slightest reason—personal, political, or financial—to fear him...
...Rather, the savagery of Moses' methods impelled the newspapers—for the very first time—to inquire into the inner (if not innermost) workings of the Moses empire...
...That he lost, in 1934, is testimony to the times...
...The subject of all my books is the twentieth century life of the mind...
...And from Tavern-on-the-Green the newsmen moved into another Moses domain, public housing and urban renewal (he was Construction Coordinator for New York City as well as its Parks Commissioner...
...And when the mothers tried to reach the machine, the policemen joined hands and politely but firmly stopped them at the fence...
...And they paid interest at a tax-free rate of over five percent—so much higher than it needed to be that, as Caro calculates, "over the life of a single bond issue, the one floated to finance the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge,bondholders would receive the almost incredible amount of $40,000,000 more than they would gladly have settled for...
...There they discovered not only corruption (none of it, again, ever going to Moses' personal financial benefit) but unexampled brutality toward the city's poor...
...It made a superb media event: "Within hours, every major radio station in New ['he Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1975 25 York was telling its listeners the story...
...and the first of the mothers came running into the park, the bulldozer had pushed over a big maple tree and Park Department axmen were chopping it into small pieces...
...And his opponents, potential as well as real, knew it only too well...
...borough's bonds be a bank run by th Governor's brother...
...How else ex-plain the fact that a man named Moses, a pure-blooded Jew, would repeatedly and angrily deny—in New York!—that he was Jewish...
...On at least twenty separate occasions when we were on the same side, I would say about someone, 'I don't think he'll go along,' and Bob would say, 'Well, goddamnit, he'd better go along...
...I is enough to say that, despite Moses' ag (79), his long run of public relations dis asters, his having been divested (he als divested himself) of all other position which might have shored up his Tr, borough power—despite all that, "Wha was necessary to remove Moses fror power was a unique, singular concatena tion of circumstances: that the Governo of New York be the one man uniquely be yond the reach of normal political inflt: ences, and that the trustee for Tr...
...It is not enough to say that he built all but one of New York City's 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 expressways, each of its seven bridges raised since 1931, nearly seven hundred playgrounds and as many or more baseball diamonds and tennis courts, Lincoln Center, the Coliseum, Shea Stadium, the United Nations...
...the Archdiocese of New York...
...In case my enthusiasm for this magnif cent biography has not shone throug clearly enough, let me conclude by sayin that it is, in my judgment, the most in...
...The real bonus in the book is Kenner's ability to explicate literature out of the awareness of such entanglements...
...All too often, as a mountain of muckraker documentation shows, conservative rhetoric has been a screen of words behind which men of wealth pillage the public domain...
...There is some comfort to be taken in the fact that Moses' worst mistakes were the consequence of his worst moral features...
...With that limitless arrogance so characteristic of him, Moses, in November 1962, offered the Governor his resignation from all five of his New York State jobs and dared Rockefeller to accept them (this, by the way, after humiliating his newly re-elected superior by refusing to receive or return his phone calls following a contentious meeting between them...
...The rest of us are likely only to b shaken--and deeply grateful to a greportraitist...
...In any event, Kenner is first and everywhere, in this as in previous books, the specialist in literature—which is only to say that he speaks with authority when he writes as wonderfully as he does about the poetry of Moore, Stevens, and Williams, or about the fiction of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner...
...he consumed it with the appetite of a Gargantua, reveled in it, enjoyed all its perquisites—except estate...
...But his influence was not confined to New York...
...Isolated "do-gooders" had been trying for years to tell about it...
...It took little or no effort, for example, to find out that the chief beneficiary of the parking lot, Tavern-on-the-Green's private concessionaire, was paying the city only a fraction of what he should have been paying, keeping the rest for himself—and spending tens of thousands of dollars on lavish dinners and receptions ordered by Moses...
...The very first unraveling of the fabric of his immense reputation resulted from a typical act of Moses contempt for the public he was supposed to be serving...
...On those grounds alone we should not be surprised that the new Governor quickly decided to eliminate his most formidable rival, the Power Broker...
...It was Chase that Moses selected to be trustee of Triborough's bonds, and Chase therefore that received the largest quantity of "service fees" associated with the bonds...
...It is a very "busy" piece of writing: one's expectation that unexpected and significant connections will be made is continually being fulfilled...
...His biographer is persuasive on the point...
...With the possible exception of Huey Long, no one in our history has used the power of the state to more devastating effect—steamrollering private rights for allegedly public purposes with more skill, zest, dynamism, and utter unblinking ruthlessness...
...This is why A Homemade World has so few of those low-pressure moments which one learns to tolerate in even good books...
...And so, in an early phase of what became known as the Battle of Central Park, they blocked Moses' bulldozers with their bodies and baby carriages...
...Exodus How then was a man of such awesome power and implacable purpose finally brought down...
...For he is in an important sense the living embodiment of that schizophrenia that has characterized American conservatism since the time of Hamilton...
...Bob Moses has these files," recalled former City Council President Paul Screvane...
...The portrait that emerge has the kind of uncanny realism of Velasquez...
...They were well-to-do, educated, influential...
...The press and the biggest of the banks were on Moses' side, and so were: the construction trades unions...
...What is more, through most of his forty-year career as Construction Czar of New York City he was allied with some of the greatest capitalist institutions in America, not least of them the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank...
...Moses himself, it seems clear, never got a penny out of it (or out of any of the hundreds of similar deals by which he created fortunes for other men...
...Wrong...
...And not only public housing: "no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency...
...Tammany Hall...
...In Caro's masterful hands the record c Robert Moses' accumulation of powe makes hypnotic reading for anyone wit even the slightest interest in politics...
...and, out of fear not only of his political power but of the dossiers he kept on each of them, the elected politicians...
...The figures he has hitherto chosen to write about—Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Wyndham Lewis—indicate a sharp eye for the points of observation from which this life can be most instructively viewed...
...Power was the end and power was the means to the end...
...And those who prated loudest about free enterprise were those who most assiduously corrupted state legislators in the quest for law-endowed privilege...
...And, as a protege of Governor Al Smith, he set out to acquire all the power he could get his hands on...
...Kenner (who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins) has remarked that "I do not live in a box labeled 'Eng...
...That evening [it] was on every major television newscast...
...Indeed, the life of the twentieth century mind is such that it can be entered into only in proportion as the observer can come out of his box and move across the boundaries that separate social, political, and religious institutions, levels of culture, historical periods, philosophic perspectives, and academic disciplines...
...And sure enough [when the vote came], the fellow would go along...
...The Wizard of Concrete It is almost impossible to convey in less than book length the range of Robert Moses' powers and activities over four decades...
...the contractors...
...It was simply the sector he knew...
...The next day, a picture of mothers and children lined up defiantly between the menacing machine and a large tree was displayed prominently in every newspaper in town...
...Very early in his career, as a visionary idealistic good government reformer, Moses learned (the hard way: at the hands of Tammany Hall) that he would need power to achieve any of the dominating visions of his young life...
...But these mothers (and fathers and single persons) were different...
...His concern was to enlist in his cause the banks who could use their power to push behind-the-scenes political leaders, as well as state legislators, city councilmen, borough presidents—and mayors and governors—into approving a public work that they might otherwise not have approved...
...If bondholders received tens of millions of dollars extra in interest, drivers would have to pay tens of millions of dollars extra in tolls...
...That was the Moses style: imperial tastes, imperial arrogance...
...Once you are no longer confined to the box of "Eng...
...High yield was another key to Moses' popularity with the bankers...
...The other, already referred to, was his alliance with some of the giants of New York's financial community...
...During working hours (usually sixteen a day) he operated in imperial splendor, as for instance in having three fully staffed private dining rooms scattered throughout his domain on the chance that he might choose on the spur of the moment to dine in one or the other...
...Lit.' out of which I occasionally climb...
...And in his one fling at elective politics, Moses ran for governor as a conservative Republican challenger to that quintessential New Deal liberal, Herbert Lehman...
...I mean that dual commitment to genuine economic freedom on the one hand and to the use of state power for economic advantage on the other...
...The answer is deceptively simple...
...Those are large achievements but tell far less than the fact that, as Construction Coordinator for the City, he personally approved the site and construction plans for each of the 1,082 public housing buildings erected between 1945 and 1958, containing 148,000 apartments and over half a million tenants...
...The first administrator of the federal Interstate Highway System said flatly the System could not have been built without him...
...The way it worked was this...
...For all that, however, it was not Rockefeller who forced the issue but Moses...
...But in order to do the things he wanted to do as Governor—most particularly in the field of mass transportation—Rockefeller had to be able to exercise direction and authority in those areas...
...But the single greatest source o Moses' power remained: chairmanship o the Triborough Bridge and Tunne Authority, with its huge cash surpluse and even greater bonding authority Caro's account of how Moses in 196 effortlessly brushed aside Mayor Lind say's efforts to remove him, but how h then two years later fell before the in comparably more powerful strokes of Nel son Rockefeller's sword, is surely one c the great tales in American political his tory...
...And when Moses offered his irrelevant counterattack, a Times editorial called it "a model of moderate statement...
...unless Robert Moses approved its design and location...
...Book Review/Karl O'Lessker Building Bridges in the East • • Robert Moses is a problem for conservatives...
...After forty years of unparalleled opportunity for graft, a position from which any ordinary politician would certainly have emerged a multimillionaire, Moses is ending his days still needing to earn a living through writing and consulting...
...It was not that very many people remembered the Battle of Central Park long after it was over...
...And Nelson Rockefeller understood from the beginning that he could not share power with Moses in any areas of mutual concern...
...Lawrence and even vaster ones at Niagara...
...That he lost as badly as he did is testimony to his own monumental ineptitude for electoral politics...
...That model of journalistic rectitude, the New York Times, handled the Attorney General's documented charges by calling them "an attempt at retaliation by Republicans on Governor Smith for his veto of the Thayer State Park bill," and buried the whole thing on an inside page...
...Fc any historian or political scientist nc utterly stupefied by "methodology" ought to exert a truly redemptive effect leading them at last out of the Mandari desert...
...As we shall see, it was a Rockefeller who laid him low, but that doesn't dull the point...
...The boundary crossings have the effect of intersecting crosscuts that increase the tension of his prose...
...In its .dissectio and analysis of the elements of politic power in our system it stands alone...
...But Kenner's interest in Comfort (who since his arrival in America may himself have become homemade) is as inevitable as his interest in Pound and Fuller...
...I say "ought to" but without an great confidence: what Robert Caro did i this book is hard work—ever so muc harder than diddling a computer and the pasting up the results for a journt article...
...If all this seems incomprehensible to anyone who understands the principles of sound financial management of public (or private) authorities, Caro explains his subject's motivation: "Moses' generosity had to be paid for out of the pockets of motorists, of course...
...But only a man who is at once a specialist and a good deal more besides could say of Stevens that "He tended to suppose that he was at grips with a religious or a philosophic crisis...
...Now they were...
...but the newspapers (with one exception, the Post) hadn't been interested...
Vol. 8 • August 1975 • No. 10
