February 2, 2007
Reassessing Robert Moses Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST I once reviewed, in brisk succession, two books on Lyndon Johnson, one the second volume of Caro’s massive biography of Johnson, Means of Ascent, and the other Robert Dallek’s Lone Star Rising. Caro, already famous as the author of a massive biography of the urban visionary Robert Moses, had produced a vision of LBJ that looked rather like his interpretation of Moses: a man whose vastly flawed character significantly tainted his achievements, another one-time liberal hero dethroned by the indefatigable Caro. For various reason’s, Dallek’s portrait—a flawed but very great man, to whom the republic owes an immense debt—seemed a lot more persuasive, and if you had read it, Caro’s attack looked, on various points, starkly tendentious. After reviewing both books, I was filled with uneasiness about the power of a gifted writer with an ax to grind, and I began to wonder whether Robert Moses might not have been the greatest figure in the history of my city, because given Caro’s influence, if Moses was, I’d never have known. Well, now I have a chance to find out. A link posted on the homepage of this website leads readers to a New York Times article on revisionist interpretations of Robert Moses. Caro’s massive 1974 biography was titled The Power Broker, and I’d bet it is the most influential work of urban history ever written. The book, based on a staggering amount of research and written by a man with a considerable dramatic gift, portrayed Moses in a less than flattering light; its revealing subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” gets across the balance of Caro’s judgment of his subject. While Caro acknowledged some of Moses’s achievements, his uglier charges became what most people think they know about Moses: he was antidemocratic, an enemy of mass transit, a racist, a would-be modernizer who did profound damage to his city, etc. There may be some truth in all of these charges, but if we can believe, among others, Columbia University’s celebrated architectural historian Hillary Ballon, it turns out there is also a very strong case for the other side. If Caro got Moses wrong, in the same way I think he got LBJ wrong, it may say less about Moses’s day (1888-1981), which was more or less coterminous with the era of LBJ (1908-1973), than it does about Caro’s era, in which we still live. Caro was born in 1935, which means he was still a youngish man during the Vietnam War, when Johnson was widely demonized and when LBJ’s Great Society programs were being depicted as a massive failure on the left as well as on the right. A profound suspicion of political power marks what I’ll call the Age of Caro, as does a striking moral absolutism about political men and their actions. In the Age of Caro, the inevitably massive impurities of politics and statecraft, when held up to impossible standards, have made large numbers of Americans disenchanted with both enterprises. Some activities—not only waging wars, but also making laws, and building cities—are necessarily morally impure. To demand moral perfection in these spheres of activity is in effect to insist that nothing be done. If you do not yourself desperately need to have done the things only the state can do—pass Civil Rights acts, construct public works, dispatch expeditionary forces, etc.—pillorying the people who sully themselves by attempting such actions apparently feels pretty swell. For whatever reason, Columbia’s Professor Ballon and her colleagues at the Museum of the City of New York, and at the Queens Museum—there will be exhibitions on Moses’s legacy at all three places—are attempting to partially rehabilitate a man who got a very great deal done. Perhaps the Age of Caro is drawing to a close.
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