The Power Behind The Power Broker
September 16, 2014 9:27 AM   Subscribe

The Power Broker is 40 years old today. To commemorate the occasion, the Daily Beast conducted a rare interview with Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, master prose stylist, researcher, and typewriter enthusiast.
posted by ferret branca (19 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
(oops, it may not be apparent, but my link is to the interview. For info about the book, try here.)
posted by ferret branca at 9:29 AM on September 16, 2014


One of the most important books of the 20th Century.
A revisionist view of Moses—or at least a renewed appreciation for the more positive aspects of his work—was evident in 2007 in a series of exhibitions and an accompanying book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, by Columbia University historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson. Ballon and Jackson praise The Power Broker as “persuasively argued, beautifully written, and thoroughly researched” but disagree that Moses has had a net negative impact on New York’s development in the years since.
The nostalgia for the Moses era comes right at the time when many of the bridges and highways he built are reaching the end of their designed lifespan. The cantilevered section of the BQE that I live near is basically falling apart—every once and a while I walk past it and see chunks of concrete that had crumbled off the structure. Everyone knows it needs to be rebuilt, but there is no politcal will to do so.

Moses was a monster, but he was a monster who got shit done, and that's appealing to a lot of people.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:01 AM on September 16, 2014 [4 favorites]


This NYT Magazine article on Caro from 2012 is also interesting, even if it covers lots of the same ground (though focused more on the LBJ books than on Moses).
posted by chavenet at 10:02 AM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]


Moses was a monster, but he was a monster who got shit done, and that's appealing to a lot of people.

This is why people pine for Stalin, too, but I don't know that it would be a good idea to bring him back.
posted by briank at 10:04 AM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]


I have been meaning to read his LBJ books for some time now, but keep telling myself to wait until the last one is out so I can buy them all at once. I am surprised that I am not familiar with this book (although I have many ties to Texas and none to New York that I know of so I have a longstanding fascination with LBJ) but will have to get it now to tide me over.

Although I haven't gotten around to reading his books yet, descriptions of his meticulous research remind of John McPhee, one of my favorite writers. I notice they both attended Princeton, whatever that means.
posted by TedW at 10:22 AM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]


Most amazing Moses fact: he never learned how to drive! If you only read one Caro book the Moses book is the one to read.
posted by bukvich at 10:36 AM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]


... interviews with Robert Caro aren't that rare, he's often in the media, talking about LBJ - no matter how tangential it is to the topical at hand. Speaking of Caro, aside from his fantastic work on Moses, I pray that: 1. He lives long enough to finish his magnum opus and 2. Bill Moyers will finally talk to him about LBJ. I can't imagine someone dedicating his years the way Caro has to completely exhuming another man's life, with the aim of deconstructing the way power works in a human society. It's so impressive.
posted by Auden at 10:38 AM on September 16, 2014 [3 favorites]


I have been meaning to read his LBJ books for some time now, but keep telling myself to wait until the last one is out so I can buy them all at once.

Hmmm, it would be the equivalent of opening your door after a blizzard and all the snow on the room coming down on your head to bury you, never to be found again.

These are big books. There isn't really any other political biographer (from my point of view) who writes as well as Caro, getting into the psychology of his subject. And so the books are incredibly labyrinthine. You can't just muscle through them.

Master of the Senate is a masterpiece on its own, with a ton of information on the history of the Senate, the continuum of American political history leading up to LBJ's election to the senate, information about the rules and procedures of the Senate... It's a massive book.

You kind of need those extra years to go back and read the books before the next one comes out.

Anyway, if I was to start anywhere it would be Passage of Power. It's readable and intense. A good portion of the book is devoted to the psychology of Bobby Kennedy... the psychology of hate.
posted by Nevin at 10:46 AM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'll admit I'm in the minority here, but color me unimpressed with The Power Broker. It's certainly a big book with a microscopic focus; but while it exhausts every detail of Moses' life, it fails as a work of history because of Caro's utter lack of interest in putting Moses and his career into any sort of historical context.

If you knew nothing about 20th-century urban history other than what's in The Power Broker, you'd think that New York, under Moses, was the only city that was destroying historic urban fabric with urban renewal projects, or building highways through urban neighborhoods. You'd think that the monstrous Moses was the only person doing this. But of course, he wasn't; many, many American cities did exactly the same things, quite frankly, much more eagerly and aggressively and with far worse results. Think Detroit; think Boston's Central Artery. A suburbanizing, increasingly car-owning public and the politicians who wanted their votes LOVED these projects and built them with a zeal that is just completely foreign today. Moses wasn't by any means the outlier that Caro painted him as.

Plenty of Caro's assertions are just plain laughable. No, Mr. Caro, the Cross-Bronx Expressway did not destroy the South Bronx. Huge swaths of the city were effectively abandoned in the 1960s and the 1970s that were nowhere near new highways. All one needs to do is visit areas like Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and Bay Ridge, where new highways were pushed through in the '50s and '60s, to see that urban expressways and urban prosperity are not incompatible. And the BQE, in its basic design, was no different from the Cross-Bronx, or any of Moses' other urban expressways.

The Power Broker was written in the early 1970s, when the city was pretty damn near its low, and when it seemed like it would never come back. The Power Broker is a wonderful, detail-packed, gloom-and-doom artifact of its time, but as a work of history, frankly, a lot of it has been discredited by recent historians and the urban renaissance of the past 20 years.
posted by Leatherstocking at 12:19 PM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]


the Cross-Bronx Expressway did not destroy the South Bronx.

Yes, it did. No one is claiming that it's the only reason the Bronx declined, but the Bronx fared far worse than any other part of the city, and the Cross Bronx Expressway was a big part of that.

All one needs to do is visit areas like Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and Bay Ridge, where new highways were pushed through in the '50s and '60s, to see that urban expressways and urban prosperity are not incompatible.

Interestingly, in all the neighborhoods you singled out, the highways are elevated. Elevated highways suck, but they don't cut off and isolate neighborhoods the way that at- or below-grade highways do. Neighborhoods like Red Hook suffered a similar fate as did the South Bronx. (again, not the only reason, the decline of the waterfront played a big part here, also), but Red Hook has not recovered in the way that surrounding neighborhoods have because it is cut off from them by the below-grade BQE.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:41 PM on September 16, 2014 [5 favorites]


I think it's understandable that Caro didn't put in a ton of larger historical context, given that it sounds like he really had to trim down his manuscript to even get to ~1300 pages. I'm afraid if he had included that background, it might have been at the expense of the specificity that I found so moving (particularly the stories of residents in the Bronx, and, to my surprise, some of the descriptions of Moses's personal life).

I admit that I don't know as much about other cities' suburbanization, but I do think if nothing else Moses's story is remarkable because New York is so damned big and had (has) such a host of influential individuals in government and beyond, and Moses managed to push through so many projects despite that, and despite not being actually elected by the city's constituents.

Also, I'm with 1970s Antihero re: the highways. I think it's also worth noting that in Brooklyn Heights in particular the highway is totally on the edge of the neighborhood itself so it's understandable that it wouldn't have as huge an impact. And places like Williamsburg are obviously seeing a huge surge of prosperity these days. But I think that's despite the highways, not because of them, or at least I sure think that when I am trying to cross the grimy BQE underpass and almost get mown down by cars.

On another note, one of these days I'm gonna have to tackle the LBJ series; Nevin makes a compelling argument to get started already!
posted by ferret branca at 1:03 PM on September 16, 2014 [3 favorites]


the Cross-Bronx Expressway did not destroy the South Bronx.

Yes, it did. No one is claiming that it's the only reason the Bronx declined, but the Bronx fared far worse than any other part of the city, and the Cross Bronx Expressway was a big part of that.


No. Large parts of Central Brooklyn, Upper Manhattan, and the Lower East Side were as bad off as the South Bronx. The worst parts of the South Bronx were well south of the expressway, in Melrose and Morrisania. If no one is claiming that the Cross-Bronx Expressway played a unique role in the decline of the Bronx, why did Caro devote a huge chapter to making exactly that point?

You're wrong about the expressways in those neighborhoods. Brooklyn Heights has the cantilevered expressway along its western boundary (which has, with its famous promenade, become a celebrated urban amenity), but down through Cobble Hill and southward, the expressway is depressed below grade, as it is in Bay Ridge and Williamsburg. You also have things entirely backwards regarding elevated versus depressed expressways. Elevated expressways are much worse for surrounding neighborhoods than depressed expressways. Elevated expressways are noisier, smellier, and, with their enormous structures, create much harder barriers between neighborhoods for pedestrians than depressed expressways. This was well-known by the 1930s, and it's a testament to the city's highway planners that they chose to construct depressed rather than elevated expressways in a lot of cases even those the depressed expressways were much more expensive and complicated to build.

Take a look at the buildings adjacent to the elevated versus depressed versions of the BQE. Which ones are in better shape and attract wealthier tenants? Undoubtedly the below-grade expressways, because they're much easier to live with.

Regarding Red Hook, Red Hook is cut off from EVERYTHING because it has almost no public transit.
posted by Leatherstocking at 1:15 PM on September 16, 2014


I think it's understandable that Caro didn't put in a ton of larger historical context, given that it sounds like he really had to trim down his manuscript to even get to ~1300 pages.

You'd figure with 1,300 pages to work with, he could have found some room for historical context.
posted by Leatherstocking at 1:18 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'll admit I'm in the minority here, but color me unimpressed with The Power Broker. It's certainly a big book with a microscopic focus; but while it exhausts every detail of Moses' life, it fails as a work of history because of Caro's utter lack of interest in putting Moses and his career into any sort of historical context.

If you want to see Moses in context you should read Bob Fitch's The Assassination of New York. The plans for Mose's highways go back to 1929. It's really more about the Rockefellers and Moses was just a lightning-rod.
posted by ennui.bz at 1:43 PM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]


I truly don't understand this subject well enough to offer an educated opinion, but if Caro's not it, is there another work that offers a counterpoint on the historical context, perhaps with the evidence that a thread like this necessarily lacks?

Or someone could just tell me who I'm supposed to hate and save me all that trouble.
posted by Jacks Dented Yugo at 2:04 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]


I have been meaning to read The Power Broker for nigh on a decade. I keep hoping it will come out on e-book so I don't have to lug a tome around, but no dice yet. Thanks for the link and the reminder.
posted by dry white toast at 2:26 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]


[I]t fails as a work of history because of Caro's utter lack of interest in putting Moses and his career into any sort of historical context.

This statement is the wrongest thing I've read all day, all week, all year. Did you even read the book? It is stuffed silly with historical context!
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:48 PM on September 16, 2014 [6 favorites]


Metafilter: Just tell me who I'm supposed to hate and save me all that trouble
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:59 AM on September 17, 2014 [2 favorites]


and they still don't have it as an e-book?
posted by sciencegeek at 4:47 PM on September 18, 2014 [1 favorite]


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