The Power Broker

It wasn’t what Moses said that most antagonized voters; it was how he said it. He let his contempt for the public show.

There were other minor—but irritating—inconveniences: wars, for example. The Korean conflict was a source of real irritation. Steel was the precious metal to the highway builder, and the National Production Administration was obstinately insisting that available steel should go first to the war effort.

But in these battles with the Governor, Moses played the popularity that was his trump card for all it was worth. In fact, so sure was he—and he was right—that Roosevelt was afraid he would resign that he began using the technique, when Roosevelt crossed him on major issues, of threatening to do so. Resignation threats begin appearing in Moses’ let

The scale of his plans was too big for them. Not one city official, he would recall, seemed capable of comprehending a highway network on the scale he had proposed—a fact which would not have been surprising even if the officials had been men of vision, since no highway network on that scale had ever been proposed for any city in America, or, for t

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, reads the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. If you would see his monument, look around. By 1939, the same advice could have been given to a New Yorker asking to see the monuments of Robert Moses. They were everywhere in the great city.

Whether by design or not, the ultimate effect of Moses’ transportation policies would be to help keep the city’s poor trapped in their slums. They were in effect policies not only of transportation but of ghettoization, policies with immense social implications.

Under Belle Moskowitz’s tutelage, Bob Moses had changed from an uncompromising idealist to a man willing to deal with practical considerations; now the alteration had become more drastic. Under her tutelage, he had been learning the politicians’ way; now he almost seemed to have joined their ranks.

La Guardia’s predilection for pageantry, preferably with himself at its center, was obvious to anyone who noticed the yards of gold braid with which the Major outfitted his policeman bodyguard or his penchant for holding full-dress military-type inspections of anything that could conceivably be inspected—police or firemen with motorized equipment,

Reform work was, more and more, an irritating intrusion on his time.