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\The Power Broker\ in perspective
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Trade Publication Article
\The Power Broker\ in perspective
2024
Overview
Robert Moses was a titan the Napoleon of city building and Robert A. Caro s classic biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year and still sells forty thousand copies annually, is almost as titanic.1 In the three-quarter-million words that crowd the book s 1,200 pages, Caro depicts in encyclopedic detail what Moses achieved in shaping Gotham and its environs in his forty-four years in office, and he brilliantly illuminates the political legerdemain needed to accomplish that. Notwithstanding the book s subtitle, New York did not fall, however badly it stumbled in the 1970s, when The Power Broker appeared, and later developments have advanced our understanding of what makes cities thrive. Caro's riveting account of how Smith left school at thirteen to support his widowed mother and rose to become \"the state's greatest governor\" is one of the set pieces that make the book so alive. A champion of \"the people\" as opposed to \"the interests,\" writes Caro, he persuaded Tammany's boss that backing government welfare programs was a natural progression from the machine's old-style Christmas turkey baskets and patronage jobs, a way of keeping power by doling out benefits. [...]Tammany Democrats became Progressives, an evolution Caro approves of, but one that, after decades of welfarism, demoralizing to the recipients and burdensome to the taxpayers, looks less benign than he assumes.
Publisher
Foundation for Cultural Review
Subject
