"I got to be an investigative reporter totally by accident."
February 18, 2016 8:05 AM   Subscribe

Christopher Robbins interviews Robert Caro for Gothamist.
posted by the man of twists and turns (18 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
I gave in to the almost unanimous praise for the LBJ books from my journalist friends and picked up the first one. It's fantastic – a grand sweep over American history that's almost compulsively readable, and so much more than the bio I expected. Hell, it takes a good few hundred pages before LBJ even shows up.

Given how he utterly stripmines LBJ's psyche, I can't wait to see what he makes of Moses.
posted by bonaldi at 8:14 AM on February 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


This was an awesome interview, and man, I knew Moses was a grade-a-asshole but WOW THE RACISM and the vast structural inequity his bullying set in stone.

I mean, sometimes when I hear people ascribe various woes to white supremacy, I think "that's a stretch", but any doubts I had about *modern* *liberal* NYC being built with white supremacy coded into its very bones have been removed by Robert Moses's story - uncovered by Caro. Moses was effectively a Klansman....at the helm of the city's future. Holy fuck.
posted by lalochezia at 8:15 AM on February 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


I think the most interesting thing in this interview is Caro's take on the "Great Man" theory of history. He's right when he says its hard to dismiss this idea when you look at the examples he's talking about, especially Moses, New York would be a totally different place without him. It's almost funny the extent that I found myself grumbling about him any time anything goes wrong here after reading The Power Broker, because really, you can trace even the simplest things, like the Subways being delayed, or accidents on the highways directly back to him.
posted by hobgadling at 8:25 AM on February 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


The port authority bus terminal is actually an arcane prison of wards and enchantments to seal Moses' litch form away from the world of the living. That's why it feels so dire.
posted by The Whelk at 8:28 AM on February 18, 2016 [7 favorites]


Some years ago, I saw Caro give a series of lectures at the New-York Historical Society. The man is a dynamo! He admitted that if he wasn't so invested in LBJ, he'd want to write a voluminous biography of Al Smith (which is sorely needed).
posted by Bromius at 8:35 AM on February 18, 2016


The Power Broker is a really great book - amazingly, it's a page-turner. I highly recommend it.
posted by pombe at 9:32 AM on February 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


There was another guy in the room named Ferdinand Lundberg, nobody knows this guy’s name. Ferdinand Lundberg wrote a book in the ‘30s that was one of the greatest examples of political reporting. It’s called America’s 60 Families. This would be our one-tenth of 1 percent—it’s about how 60 families controlled 95 percent of the wealth in the United States. I came across that book as I was researching the robber barons and I thought it was the greatest book.

He is right about this. That is the greatest book.

Amazon has the hardcover in stock but not the paperback.

Since the freeway system did pretty much to every American city what it did to New York I don't see any great man theory of Robert Moses being personally required holds a lot of water.
posted by bukvich at 9:34 AM on February 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


I subscribe to the Great Woman Theory and praise Jane Jacobs.
posted by Monochrome at 9:40 AM on February 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


“Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

The phrase "evil genius" comes to mind. Also, the link in the FPP to the Caro quote about the Harlem comfort station. Damn.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:41 AM on February 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh man, I wish he had the years left for the bio of Al Smith!
posted by Chrysostom at 9:59 AM on February 18, 2016


a voluminous biography of Al Smith (which is sorely needed).

How voluminous? Robert Slayton's Empire Statesman: The Rise & Redemption of Al Smith is over five hundred pages.
posted by BWA at 11:01 AM on February 18, 2016


The port authority bus terminal is actually an arcane prison of wards and enchantments to seal Moses' litch form

Paging Tim Powers! Or possibly Elizabeth Bear.
posted by clew at 11:12 AM on February 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Robert Caro has been selling me books about Lyndon Johnson my entire reading life. My english teacher talked me into joining the Book of the Month Club, and I think Vol I of the LBJ books arrived that way. Last thing in the world my high school self would have bought. But I read it, sooner or later, and everything since, and bought the latest installment on Kindle.

Like a lot of biographies, it starts slow, and when the thing is this long, the starting section goes pretty far into the first volume. I (at least vaguely) remember the point at which suddenly Caro's prose kind of catches fire, and all of a sudden you are standing in LBJ's shoes. It's difficult to make you identify with someone who was as unsympathetic as LBJ was. I wish Caro had diversifed a bit more, because there are a hell of a lot of people I'd like to see him write a bio on.

Praying for him to live long enough to finish up on LBJ, much less start on Al Smith..
posted by randomkeystrike at 11:33 AM on February 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Since the freeway system did pretty much to every American city what it did to New York I don't see any great man theory of Robert Moses being personally required holds a lot of water.

Well, Moses's ideas and practices did have an outsized influence on an entire generation of urban planners and engineers, and Moses did start building the NYC-area parkway system in the 1920s and consulted with different cities throughout the country, and the Interstate Highway System was at least in part influenced by it, in a way that if Moses was working in Sacramento in 1925 I don't think he would have had quite as much of an impact.
posted by Automocar at 1:06 PM on February 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


What about Al Davis?
posted by atoxyl at 1:09 PM on February 18, 2016


Caro comes off strangely, almost purposefully naive:
your whole work as a political reporter is based on the premise that power in a democracy comes from being elected. And here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything and he has more power than anyone who was elected, and he has more power than the mayor and any governor or any mayor or governor put together—look, he’s built the whole landscape of your life.
How could an investigative reporter really believe that one man could somehow dominate the physical infrastructure of NYC? The great man theory?

The antithesis to Caro's take on Moses is given by Bob Fitch in his "Assassination of New York" detailing how the usual suspects: the Rockefellers and various real estate interests in Manhattan dating back before the depression wrote the planning book for NYC that Moses read from:
Fitch detected Robert Moses's deep roots in the RPA's work in the 1920s:

[J]ust about every highway and bridge credited to Robert Moses was conceived and planned by the RPA. Moses simply poured the concrete on the dotted lines indicated in the plan.

And, he didn't blame only Moses for refusing to put mass transit on the Long Island Expressway; he located that resistance in the first generation RPA philosophy, believing mass transit would have congested population on Long Island and spoiled prime residential areas, and said Moses biographer Robert Caro ignored that. Fitch termed Moses "a perfect scapegoat."

He wrote:

The chief obstacle to RPA-style planning is the residual accountability that ties public officials to the public... Thus the passionate preference of the higher real estate interests for unelected commissions, appointive authorities, public development "partnerships." This is also why the RPA had as a principal aim the creation of a city planning commission that obviated legislative accountability.

He hammered home his criticism:

The master plan for New York that was the stated reason for creating the [City Planning] Commission has never materialized. its role is to validate and legalize the plans and initiatives conceived by the city's private real estate interests.

Note that the City Planning Commission today is significantly a Department of Rezoning, while the even less accountable New York City Economic Development Corporation steers planning.

Fitch offered further Moses revisionism:

There was the general feeling in the higher real estate circles (you'd never guess this from his biographers) that Moses was slowing urban renewal down. He took too long to get rid of people. He spent too much time, money and effort on housing low-income groups. And he was insensitive to the greater priority of the Mitchell-Lama (middle-income) housing program.
posted by ennui.bz at 1:10 PM on February 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


> Caro comes off strangely, almost purposefully naive [...] How could an investigative reporter really believe that one man could somehow dominate the physical infrastructure of NYC? The great man theory?

I'm a big Fitch fan too (as I wrote here, "nobody but ennui.bz and me has heard of Robert Fitch, one of the great social critics of our time"), but there's really no need to tear Caro down in order to build Fitch up. They're both great, and our understanding of history would be immeasurably poorer without either of them.
posted by languagehat at 1:44 PM on February 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


It's not as if politicians in those localities pushed to set aside ROWs for mass-transit or asked for integration. There's no "but-for this man." Moses highlights the ways (and for whom) these systems work.
posted by stratastar at 2:40 PM on February 18, 2016


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