In our
August/September 2013 edition,
Reason named the “45 Enemies of Freedom: People who have
been trying to control your life since reason was founded in 1968.”
Included on that list of villains was Robert Moses, the shadowy
government official who spent nearly half a century exercising
unprecedented power over the city and state of New York. Here’s why
Moses
made the cut:
The most authoritarian city planner in New York history, Moses
wielded eminent domain and many other government powers, unleashing
his bulldozers and wrecking balls on the homes, businesses, and
churches of as many as half a million powerless citizens, many of
them black, brown, or poor.
Forty years ago today, a young journalist named Robert Caro
published
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New
York. Thanks to this extraordinary book, the world came to
learn in detail about Moses and his many crimes. The book soon won
both the Pulitzer Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize and it still
remains the definitive work on Moses and his legacy. In my own
view, The Power Broker is one of the greatest cautionary
tales about political power ever written.
At The Daily Beast, Scott Porch offers a detailed and
fascinating account of how The Power Broker came to life.
It was “a seven-year ordeal,”
Porch writes, “that took the book through three publishers and
two editors and nearly bankrupted Caro.” As for the book’s enduring
appeal, Porch rightly credits both Caro’s masterful writing and the
strength of his research:
One thing that had made a strong impression on [Caro] in the
course of his research was the human cost of the massive
construction that Robert Moses had wrought in and around New York
City. Moses’ major highway projects had destroyed entire
neighborhoods and uprooted the lives of thousands of New Yorkers.
For a chapter called “One Mile,” Caro decided to trace the impact
of a mile of one of Moses’ expressways on hundreds of displaced
families. “This is such a human tragedy, and no one writes about
these things,” Caro said, “and I want to show what one mile of a
highway through a congested city can mean.” That single chapter,
the most visceral and moving part of The Power Broker, took Caro
six months to research and write….
On August 26, 1974, three weeks before The Power Broker
was published, Robert Moses, then 86 years old, released a
3,500-word rebuttal that said the book was “full of mistakes,
unsupported charges, nasty, baseless personalities and random
haymakers thrown at just about everybody in public life.” But Moses
had already lost. His reputation as a power-hungry bully preceded
the book, and the rapturous reviews praised Caro’s prodigious
research and his fair treatment of Moses.
Read the whole story
here.
Related: In 2011, Reason TV spoke with Robert
Caro about “The Tragedy of Urban Renewal: The destruction and
survival of a New York City neighborhood.”
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