The Power Broker
Robert Caro’s The Power Broker reveals how Robert Moses, though never elected, became the most powerful man in New York’s city and state governments for decades. Caro exposes the mechanics of real-world politics and how Moses, blocked by traditional democratic channels, built a vast, unchecked empire through public authorities like Triborough. Initially an idealist, Moses created parks, beaches, and highways — but later fueled urban sprawl, failed public housing, and systemic inequality. Dominating through fear, secrecy, and control of immense resources, he shaped the lives of millions and outlasted generations of governors and mayors — ultimately overseeing $27 billion in public works projects and wielding influence far beyond any elected official.
Highlights
In the evening of Robert Moses’ forty-four years of power, New York, so bright with promise forty-four years before, was a city in chaos and despair. His highways and bridges and tunnels were awesome — taken as a whole the most awesome urban improvement in the history of mankind — but no aspect of those highways and bridges and tunnels was as awesome as the congestion on them. He had built more housing than any public official in history, but the city was starved for housing, more starved, if possible, than when he had started building, and the people who lived in that housing hated it — hated it, James Baldwin could write, “almost as much as the policemen, and this is saying a great deal.” He had built great monuments and great parks, but people were afraid to travel to or walk around them.
Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? Any critic who says so ignores the fact that both before and after Robert Moses — both under “reform” mayors such as John Purroy Mitchel and John V. Lindsay and under Tammany mayors such as Red Mike Hylan and Jimmy Walker — the city was utterly unable to meet the needs of its people in areas requiring physical construction. Robert Moses may have bent the democratic processes of the city to his own ends to build public works; left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required. The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting, where such works impinge on the lives of or displace thousands of voters, is one which democracy has not yet solved.