I understand you probably didn't write that Times headline. But honestly it was one of your weakest pieces of writing. The alleged egregious errors of Caro's never seem to actually materialize, and you are grudgingly forced to admit that actually he does give Moses plenty of credit for the positives.
Yeah, as someone who read the book over the summer, the cherry-picking, combined with the ignoring of salient examples of racism (mentioning how many playgrounds he built but not where being the standout example), were really really obvious. Clearly a piece Ross decided to write before he went back to the book, and then found himself painted into a corner one can only get out of via selective readings and half-truths.
Moses’s origins were in the Progressive Era. The Progressives with a capital P had views about how to make society better. So, sure, we want the poor out of tenements. But we, the educated class, know what’s best for them, how they should live, what they are entitled to, where they are not welcome. Who are they to complain or state their opinion? This is a whole lot different from complaining about NIMBY.
To me, the most revealing story in the book ( besides those Parkway bridges) was the decision - when he was running out of money - to just pound the Henry Hudson Pkwy through Harlem and Washington Heights with no real parks at all - just the bare minimum for the working class.
BTW, Caro gets wrong the placement of the HHP even further uptown. He doesn’t like that Moses cut it through Ft. Tryon and Inwood Hill parks, where they are (in fact) virtually invisible. He wanted Moses to run it up Broadway - where it would have cut off access to the parks So Caro has a particular narrative, and he puts the pedal to the floor to tell it. Is he always a “trustworthy narrator?” No. But we can call out where Caro goes wrong and still see his critique of Moses’s perspective as fundamentally on point.
This is very perceptive on Caro and it is why I'm worried the last LBJ volume will be bad. The whole series is done from a very reporter-like perspective, inside a meticulously recreated version Johnson's world, or a part of it. Caro also, of course, brilliantly describes the Hill Country and gives an interesting history of the Senate. But the wider context of the Cold War is almost completely missing. In the most recent volume Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie and Ludwig Erhard all show up, but they are like exotic extras at an opera, Caro never even tells us what President Johnson said to them or thought of them. How is a book written in this style going to explain the Vietnam War?
Thank you for a sharply-observed and a well-balanced view of the man. I have lived in this maddening and glorious city since 1968, and, as Burt Lancaster said in The Sweet Smell of Success, "I love this dirty town." But the zeitgist in his time was that mass transit was for "those people," and was certainly not something to be encouraged. Look at LA tearing down its trams, or NY tearing down its own trolleys in the 1950s. There are so many archives demonstrating the clear intent to favor the private car. The postwar suburbs were to be for returning soldiers, who just wanted to raise a family as far as possible from the refugees who had fled the war zones, and to freely travel by car. The telling statistic is the 1946 all-time high subway passenger number.
And Moses faciliated those trends. It's a mixed blessing. And when you travel in Europe today on 200 mph trains, you realize how mixed it truly was.
Thoughtfully done, Ross, kudos. You might take a look at Schlegel, Waiting for Rain, on Buffalo for a multi-layered account of a different city with some of the same issues, mostly other issues. Schlegel (a colleague; I gave a conference on the book) is engaged throughout with Jane Jacobs.
Excellent piece. The "Robert Moses was a racist" trope is more than just an interesting ad hominem attack on a dead man. That claim actually fuels the decision-making of NYC politicians to this day and, in my opinion, leads to some head-scratching policy choices. My white whale is the insane push to maintain permanent mind-numbing traffic on the BQE at the triple cantilever section in part because "Robert Moses - who built the BQE - was a racist."
I was amazed by how even-handed Straight Line Crazy is. There is no lecturing or scolding going on. Probably because it was written by an English playwright who seemed unaffected by the breathless social justice revisionism of the past decade...
The Power Broker is one of the most powerful stories about a man and a city I have read. Whether it is the narrative and voice or the detail and historical value, it stands out and remains central to my understanding of New York,. and indeed of my own city of Montreal. It is not the final word, you have just added some powerful new paragraphs, but most other words now come through the lens of that telling of New York's story and Moses' story. Caro also tells the story of the Robert Moses who had the fierce drive and towering talent to put his stamp on the the face of New York, the city and the state. We can carry on the conversation about the good and bad impacts of his life's carnival of creative destruction... but about that drive and talent and intensity ability? We need more of the younger Robert Moses around today, people who get good things done.
I understand you probably didn't write that Times headline. But honestly it was one of your weakest pieces of writing. The alleged egregious errors of Caro's never seem to actually materialize, and you are grudgingly forced to admit that actually he does give Moses plenty of credit for the positives.
Yeah, as someone who read the book over the summer, the cherry-picking, combined with the ignoring of salient examples of racism (mentioning how many playgrounds he built but not where being the standout example), were really really obvious. Clearly a piece Ross decided to write before he went back to the book, and then found himself painted into a corner one can only get out of via selective readings and half-truths.
Moses’s origins were in the Progressive Era. The Progressives with a capital P had views about how to make society better. So, sure, we want the poor out of tenements. But we, the educated class, know what’s best for them, how they should live, what they are entitled to, where they are not welcome. Who are they to complain or state their opinion? This is a whole lot different from complaining about NIMBY.
To me, the most revealing story in the book ( besides those Parkway bridges) was the decision - when he was running out of money - to just pound the Henry Hudson Pkwy through Harlem and Washington Heights with no real parks at all - just the bare minimum for the working class.
BTW, Caro gets wrong the placement of the HHP even further uptown. He doesn’t like that Moses cut it through Ft. Tryon and Inwood Hill parks, where they are (in fact) virtually invisible. He wanted Moses to run it up Broadway - where it would have cut off access to the parks So Caro has a particular narrative, and he puts the pedal to the floor to tell it. Is he always a “trustworthy narrator?” No. But we can call out where Caro goes wrong and still see his critique of Moses’s perspective as fundamentally on point.
This is very perceptive on Caro and it is why I'm worried the last LBJ volume will be bad. The whole series is done from a very reporter-like perspective, inside a meticulously recreated version Johnson's world, or a part of it. Caro also, of course, brilliantly describes the Hill Country and gives an interesting history of the Senate. But the wider context of the Cold War is almost completely missing. In the most recent volume Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie and Ludwig Erhard all show up, but they are like exotic extras at an opera, Caro never even tells us what President Johnson said to them or thought of them. How is a book written in this style going to explain the Vietnam War?
Wow-ridiculous argument.. he didn’t like anyone who was below his elite caste system and it was very clear in his planning.
Thank you for a sharply-observed and a well-balanced view of the man. I have lived in this maddening and glorious city since 1968, and, as Burt Lancaster said in The Sweet Smell of Success, "I love this dirty town." But the zeitgist in his time was that mass transit was for "those people," and was certainly not something to be encouraged. Look at LA tearing down its trams, or NY tearing down its own trolleys in the 1950s. There are so many archives demonstrating the clear intent to favor the private car. The postwar suburbs were to be for returning soldiers, who just wanted to raise a family as far as possible from the refugees who had fled the war zones, and to freely travel by car. The telling statistic is the 1946 all-time high subway passenger number.
And Moses faciliated those trends. It's a mixed blessing. And when you travel in Europe today on 200 mph trains, you realize how mixed it truly was.
Thoughtfully done, Ross, kudos. You might take a look at Schlegel, Waiting for Rain, on Buffalo for a multi-layered account of a different city with some of the same issues, mostly other issues. Schlegel (a colleague; I gave a conference on the book) is engaged throughout with Jane Jacobs.
Excellent piece. The "Robert Moses was a racist" trope is more than just an interesting ad hominem attack on a dead man. That claim actually fuels the decision-making of NYC politicians to this day and, in my opinion, leads to some head-scratching policy choices. My white whale is the insane push to maintain permanent mind-numbing traffic on the BQE at the triple cantilever section in part because "Robert Moses - who built the BQE - was a racist."
https://open.substack.com/pub/brianhoward/p/the-brooklyn-queens-expressway-how?r=c50dd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I was amazed by how even-handed Straight Line Crazy is. There is no lecturing or scolding going on. Probably because it was written by an English playwright who seemed unaffected by the breathless social justice revisionism of the past decade...
Some interesting videos on the 1964's World's Fair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTRKG_ovjsA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48d7zXYvGZU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3k5sQSbTY
I read somewhere that he made fun of some French bureaucrats or something about Paris residents; I don't remember where, but it was funny.
The Power Broker is one of the most powerful stories about a man and a city I have read. Whether it is the narrative and voice or the detail and historical value, it stands out and remains central to my understanding of New York,. and indeed of my own city of Montreal. It is not the final word, you have just added some powerful new paragraphs, but most other words now come through the lens of that telling of New York's story and Moses' story. Caro also tells the story of the Robert Moses who had the fierce drive and towering talent to put his stamp on the the face of New York, the city and the state. We can carry on the conversation about the good and bad impacts of his life's carnival of creative destruction... but about that drive and talent and intensity ability? We need more of the younger Robert Moses around today, people who get good things done.