When Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency and ascended
into Marine One for the last time, he took a way of doing politics with
him. Americans had grown disgusted with
the backroom deals and wire-pulling which characterized the post-war era, and
fearful of an Imperial Presidency that had established itself. The methods of that moment have received –
and continue to receive – their richest portrayal in Robert Caro’s multi-volume
series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. But,
the vivid character of the man and the highly-charged partisan and ideological
aspects of his career easily overwhelm the work as a focused assessment of pure
politics. Nonetheless, in Caro’s
defense, it could be said that he had already written such a book, with his
1974 biography of Robert Moses.
The story of Robert Moses is the story of the construction
of massive public works in a densely populated urban area in the context of a
modern liberal democracy. The story of
his career is an account of the political maneuvers undertaken by an unelected
official to overcome a thicket of parochial and private interests for the sake
of grand public designs.
Across five decades, Robert Moses oversaw the planning, legislation,
funding, and implementation for the construction of a vast array of public
works including the entire system of highways, bridges, and tunnels connecting
Long Island to the mainland of the United States, the vast majority of the
metropolitan region’s parkland, the creation a half-dozen massive new beaches, the
reclamation of New York City’s waterfront, the building of several
hydro-electric dams, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, the United Nations
headquarters, hundreds of public playgrounds, and new public housing for thousands
of residents.
The case against Moses (where it is not a dispute about
the merits of various projects) is the classic case for skepticism of
centralized discretionary power, and of the costs incurred in its
accumulation. The argument in his defense
is the case for putting public above private interests, and for public improvements
against the tyranny of the status quo.
The Power Broker by
Robert Caro is an outstanding and gripping narrative of the career of Robert
Moses, a lucid exposition of his methods of accumulating and wielding power, a
reasonable picture of mid-twentieth century New York politics, and a
melodramatic and often poorly reasoned discussion of urban policy.
To put the strength of Caro’s political analysis in
perspective, it is therefore best to begin with its flaws. As a (highly successful) attempt to turn
arcane bureaucratic wrangling and policy disputes into a bestselling book,
dispassionate reasoning regularly takes a back seat to emotive
exaggeration. The brilliance of Moses’
early idealism is given a godly hue as pure as the darkness of his later supposed
cynicism. Characters enter as
caricatures, and the routing of every mile of road is a battle of good versus
evil. Long Island landowners are in one
chapter put-upon property-holders, and in the next grotesque oligarchic barons
– so best to suit the grand morality play.
Nowhere is a policy choice portrayed as a fine judgment-call, and
subject to uncertainty or compromise.
This is a shame, for such bombast renders Caro’s
judgments often imprudent and untrustworthy, and his discussion of policy
presumptive and lopsided. Moses is
blamed for the insufficient supply and poor quality of housing in New York City
and the inability of displaced families to find accommodation at the same price
they previously enjoyed – yet 1162 pages pass without the slightest reference
to the logic of rent control legislation.
Unpleasant insinuations of racism are made in Moses’ direction, and yet
Caro goes on to complain that expressway construction leads to the decline of
the Bronx, as Jewish families are replaced by “families from the other side of
the park”.
Moses is portrayed as insatiable in his lust for power,
yet reluctant to extend his empire into mass-transit. Suburban rail lines are described as subject
to collapsing demand, yet also the focus of irrationally foregone
opportunities. Implicit in Caro’s
jeremiad on the decline of Long Island Railroad, is almost a wish that if only a man of Robert Moses’ brilliance, power,
and ruthlessness was a zealot for mass transit, then wonders would truly be possible.
Yet, with this attitude, Caro misses the key to the whole
Robert Moses story: the man only accumulated such power because he was the only
man who could consistently deliver what the public wanted.
All other considerations derive from this basic
point. As an unelected official, Moses’
power had to constantly be fought for and justified at the margins, on the
merits of each specific project. Even at
the supposed height of his power, Moses was unable to gain assent for the
Brooklyn-Battery Bridge or even a small parking facility for
Tavern-on-the-Green.
Moses’ power was to a large extent contingent on policy
subsystems being left to operate by themselves by the broader public realm. He obviously devoted much attention and
resources to ensuring that fundamental questions of the desirability of the
power that he had accumulated was never a matter of open controversy, but he
was also very much aware that discretion was only afforded to him out of an
understanding that he had a peerless capacity for Getting Things Done. While Caro intermittently acknowledges this point,
this discipline was ever-present and acknowledged by all – not least by Moses,
who imposed a phenomenal workload upon himself and his staff. Moses’ innumerable threats to resign derived
their strength from this popular mandate, and the potency of the threat was to
a great degree contingent on the things that were to be Done being of
significant value to the public – and to elected officials, who needed
achievements (not just intentions) to proclaim.
Although Caro portrays the decline of Moses’ power as the
result of a extraordinary presence of countervailing power in the person of
Nelson Rockefeller, it is probably more important to note just how easily and painlessly
this fall from grace was achieved, once an elected official set his mind to
achieving it. John Lindsay’s attempt to quash
the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which Caro acknowledges involved remarkable
ineptness on behalf of the Mayor, is portrayed as a result of Moses marshalling
the resources of a hidden oligarchy to subvert the cause of democracy. A more accurate characterization of the
incident would be to suggest that Lindsay and his team were quite clueless as
to the true value to the city of existing institutional arrangements, and that
the legislature was easily persuaded by the unanimous agreement of the experts
who had any knowledge of the situation whatsoever.
Of course, it is true that some of the value of existing
institutional arrangements had been deliberately crafted by Moses to sustain a
need for himself. Just as Alexander
Hamilton bound states to the new Union with debt, so Moses was able to bind a
network of banks, corporations, and labor groups in support of Triborough. Yet, it is also clear that such designs had
been approved by elected authorities at every stage. Indeed, the long-term autonomy and power of
Triborough was of significant value to the public as a whole. The bankers, who Caro at times portrays as
puppets of Moses’ power, had good reason to entrust an independent authority
with so much credit for highly profitable public works – and citizens of New
York, though guaranteed contracts of an independent agency, were in turn able
to (with very low risk, and hence interest rates) credibly commit to turning
over some of the value that would be created for them.
Similarly, while Caro is eager to suggest that Moses’
staying power enabled him to outlast elected officials, it also enabled him to
be a reservoir for long-run trust.
Indeed, one of the reasons for his rapid downfall in old age, was the
widespread recognition among interested parties that the post-Moses era was not
far away, and that planning for this time had to occur sooner rather than
later. With this expectation and public
opinion more strongly against him, Moses was not able to do much to forestall his
loss of power. Speaking of the 1964
World’s Fair, Caro suggested that “Moses appears to have seen the Fair as a
gigantic gravy train on which he could ride back to power” and that the
“World’s Fair gave Robert Moses a billion dollars to spend on power, and he got
his money’s worth.” Yet, while the snide
remarks fit the story, they do not fit the facts: when his tenure at the Fair
ended, Moses had far less power than when it had begun.
Nonetheless, while Caro’s wildest insinuations of Moses
as a subverter of democracy are ill-founded, the more modest charge – that
Moses construction plans were fully imbued with political calculations is
clearly true. Indeed, it is the
ever-present considerations of democratic politics which makes Moses’ career a
remarkably different enterprise to that of the more simply rationalistic, but
politically far less involved Parisian urbanist, Baron Haussmann. If the problem Moses faced was a multitude of
stubborn rights-holders with their own private interests standing athwart his
public designs, his weapons were democratic instruments – at every stage
designed to mobilize the broader public to quash parochial interests.
Since his accountability to voters was indirect, he could
not neglect their ultimate sovereignty. Yet, his methods were not conventional
electoral devices, but owed much to the institutional situation with which he
was located, the resources with which he was endowed, and the environment in
which he was constrained.
Not being constrained by the need to maintain a
multi-issue electoral coalition or the need to keep a base enthused for
fundraising, Moses had more flexibility, and hence was able to
cast a wider net for popular support. He
could inveigh against Long Island barons one day to gain right-of-way for
parkways, and wage war on leftists the next to remove obstacles to development
on Manhattan – simultaneously reaping the benefits of right and left-of-center
populism.
The strength he gained from the bureaucratic arts, at
which he was highly accomplished, also owed much to general popular
appeal. Indeed, his threats to elected
officials could be said to depend upon a triangle of bureaucratic resources:
the heat of information (the files of damaging facts he kept on associates, and the
talking points he held on project proposals), the oxygen of publicity (his
carefully cultivated relations with the media, and resources marshaled for
public relations), and the fuel of public interest in his projects. With these, each at his discretion, he was
able to light a fire of public concern under the feet of elected officials who
were minded to obstruct development.
With his ability to allow, block, or re-assign
construction projects, Moses was able to orchestrate compliance from a vast
network of political associates in support of his overall plans. Although Caro does not say so explicitly, it
is apparent that Moses’ objection to the “One Mile” diversion of the
Cross-Bronx expressway was likely founded in such deals – without which the
support of all officials possessing veto-powers would have been altogether
impossible. The assent needed to pass
miles of highway through some of the most densely populated real estate in the
western world could only be obtained by a man with an extraordinary knowledge
of the legal, economic, and electoral sources of power, which motivated
thousands of the nation’s savviest and best-connected political operators – and
the ability to marshal them in support of his designs. Moses’ persistent exasperation with critics
who “don’t know what they’re talking about” likely stemmed from the highly
delicate balance assembled from such an array of accumulated
considerations. His stubborn refusal to
revise projects, once devised, seems to derive from the keen awareness that the
carefully constructed web of political support for them could easily
unravel. Far from being evidence of his
autocratic authority, his obstinacy was as much a product of his tireless
coalition-building.
Although Moses’ ability to construct a power apparatus
for his own pleasure has been exaggerated, he did possess one significant independent
source of power – the revenues, available for use at his discretion, at the
Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.
The functions of money in economics are classically defined
as being a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. In the field of politics, relative to the
direct bartering of the commodity of power, money similarly has certain
critical advantages. It is easily
aggregable (it does not perish in accumulation), it is fungible (it can be
leveraged on targets regardless of pre-existing ties), and its value is clearly
recognizable. Moreover, money also
yields certain advantages unique to the realm of politics: it is non-reciprocal in its effect (control
of funds does not produce exposure in the way that an alliance or trading of
favors would) and it solves a multiple principal problem (at least where there
are no checks on appropriations procedures, as in the case of Moses).
This advantage was heightened by circumstances. City and state funds were under assault from
all sides and felt the pinch of inflation, whereas Triborough’s funds grew
steadily with traffic flows through its toll booths. Possessing control over
such a potent weapon of power, Robert Moses was also assisted by the relative
scarcity of discretionary resources available to his rivals and associates. While he could get the most out of his money,
legislators, state and city officials were constrained by a web of checks and
balances, as well as entitlement obligations.
Instead of going cap-in-hand to elected officials for funds, it was they
who would have to bear the burden of begging from him.
Yet, money alone does not yield power in a
democracy. It must be leveraged to move
elected officials so that they not obstruct one’s designs. Moses’ investments were largely of this sort
– not campaign contributions aimed at promoting the rise of certain
officeholders, but the carefully controlled disbursement of funds so as to
direct their attention and efforts in a more amenable direction. Moses spent money to create incentives for
compliance with his designs and political momentum behind his plans.
At the same time, with his post as Construction
Coordinator for New York, Moses held a choke-hold on the city’s alimentary
canal of federal assistance. This
enabled him to impose take-it-or-leave-it offers upon officials and highly
mobilized interest groups, hungry for funds, and to accumulate influence at all
levels of government. Yet, this
important power was also highly conditional on the application of Moses’ unique
ability to Get Things Done. Indeed, it
derived from the fact that his team at the Park Commission was the only one
able to develop plans, on time, and to implement them swiftly. Unions could be sure to benefit from
patronage regardless of the source of funds, but Harry Van Arsdale’s support of
Moses’s authority was to a large extent the product of his unique ability to
win these supplementary contracts for the region. Without widespread trust in his ability to
deliver, the power for him to do so would not have been so widely supported.
Almost all of Moses’ projects would be categorized by
political scientists as “non-incremental policymaking”. For instance, the essence of bridge-building,
from a political standpoint is that half-a-bridge is as useless as no
bridge. Only a fully complete bridge is
of any value whatsoever, regardless of how many public funds have been spent up
until that point. This allows those in
charge of construction to hold the public hostage to a certain extent, and to
derive a significant degree of discretionary power in the process. Robert Moses did this repeatedly – almost
always being sure to lay foundations before full right-of-way (or even full
funding) had been obtained.
It was this and a multitude of other similar bureaucratic
tactics that eventually soured much of the city on Moses, when given full
exposure in its press. Although he had
traded on his popularity to keep his methods quiet, once his reputation was
tarnished in a number of relatively minor incidents, elected officials were
less keen to entrust him with authority, and his power gradually ebbed
away.
Yet, while his successors have doubtless avoided his
level of controversy, they have also fallen far short in accomplishment. America struggles to upgrade its crumbling
infrastructure to keep up with a growing population, despite
hundred-billion-dollar legislative appropriations for surface transportations,
as major projects are stymied by interminable legal wrangling and battles with
environmentalists, unions, and local communities.
While it may be easy to blame others for gridlock and inertia, a free
society rightly affords people multiple opportunities to defend their private
rights when there is no demonstrable popular enthusiasm to usurp them for the
sake of the public interest. Hence the indispensible
role for leadership – to offer a vision that moves people, brings together
those with widely-differing motives, and gives foot-draggers a reason to get on
board.
In the mid 1960s, Nelson Rockefeller decided against
giving Robert Moses the responsibility for constructing a Long Island Sound
Crossing. Over forty years later, the
project remains on the drawing board.
No comments:
Post a Comment