Sympathy for the Devil

The Power Broker by Robert Caro deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. One of the best books I’ve ever read and up there in my pantheon of non-fiction books with Breaks of the Game and What it Takes.

Reading this book from the perspective of 2025, I think Robert Caro got Robert Moses wrong.¹ Yes, he was obsessed with power. Yes, he ruined neighborhoods and destroyed communities with highways and slum clearance programs. Yes, he failed to treat the black citizens of New York City as having equal significance with its white citizens. He had all of these failings and it is important not to shy away from them.

But he was also a genius. An operator and a builder. He reorganized the New York State government into the form it still holds today. He built parks and stadiums and power dams.

Yes, Moses hoarded power. He had sharp elbows. He pushed the limits. He was also prepared, on time, organized, and ready to work tirelessly. He didn’t enrich himself or his family, but instead funneled money into getting power, so he could do more building. He built with all the limitations and blindspots of the generation he grew up in but he did build. He could be petty and attention seeking and yet he was also fantastically productive, not for just himself and his ego, but also for the people of New York.

It’s important while reading the book to pay attention to the other characters coming of age alongside Moses, people like Jimmy Walker, who are comically corrupt by today’s standards. When you do, you get the feeling that Caro is comparing Moses not to the other men and women who could’ve been chosen to lead at the time but to a hypothetical perfect public servant that never did exist and never could exist.

I first heard of Robert Moses in a City Planning Survey course that I took as a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill. The TA who taught the class had an infectious enthusiasm for city planning and so that summer I found myself reading the Jane Jacobs classic Death and Life of Great American Cities.²

So I came into the book with a sense that the problems with American Cities are downstream of the choices that Robert Moses and his disciples made to orient them towards cars and away from walking and public transportation and neighborhoods with a sense of place.

But after reading the book, I think the problem for American cities isn’t that Robert Moses ruined them, but that there have been no Robert Moseses since: civic leaders with the intellect and power to reshape cities with a new, imperfect vision of what the good life is. We know from Amsterdam and Paris that this sort of transformation is possible and yet we’ve chosen to stay stuck in time, living with the same problems year after year.

The Robert Moses of 2025 would probably not favor cars over other forms of public transportation or redline minority neighborhoods. He would be imperfect in new ways that we cannot yet see or understand. But he would build.

2025-10-02