Kenneth Jackson: evaluation

Transcript context

…The Power Broker is a stunning achievement, but you're right the title is The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. He's thinking that in the 1970s, which in New York's 400-year history, we think of the 1970s as being the bottom. City was bankrupt, crime was going up, corruption was all around. Nothing was working very well. My argument and the subtitle of the 2007 book or that article is Robert Moses and the rise of New York. Argument that had Robert Moses not lived, not done what he did, New York would have followed the trail of maybe Detroit and St. Louis and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and most cities in the Northeast and Midwest, which declined. New York City really hasn't declined. It's got more people now than it ever did. It's still a number one city in the world by most of our standards. It's the global leader, maybe along with London. At one point in the 1980s, we thought it might be Tokyo, which is the largest city in the world, but it's no longer considered competitive with New York. I say London too because New York and London are kind of alone at the top. But I think Robert Moses' public works, activities, I just don't know that you could have a New York City and not have expressways. I don't like the Cross Bronx expressway either and don't want to drive on it. But how can you have a world in which you can't go from Boston to San Francisco? You had to have it. You have to have some highways and Caro had it exactly wrong. He talked about Moses and the decline of public transit in New York. Actually what you need to explain in New York is why public transit survived in New York, wherein most other American cities, the only people who use public transit are the losers. The old, the disabled, the poor and stuff like that. In New York City, rich people ride the subway. It's simply the most efficient way to get around and the quickest. Some of the things in that question need to be turned on its head. How did he get it done? How did he do it without scandal? When you think about how the world is in our time, when everything has either a financial scandal or a sexual scandal attached to it, Moses didn't have scandals. He built the White Stone Bridge, for example, which is a gigantic bridge connecting the Bronx to Queens. It's beautiful. It was finished in the late 1930s on time and under budget, actually a little earlier. There's no such thing as that now. You're going to do a big public works project and you're going to do it on time? And also he did it well. Jones Beach, for example, for generations has been considered one of the great public facilities on earth. It's gigantic. And he created it. I know people will say it's just sand and water. No, no, it's a little more complicated than that. So everything he did was complicated. I think Robert Caro deserves a lot of credit for doing research on Moses, his childhood, his growing up, his assertion that he's the most important person ever to live in and around New York. licated. I think Robert Caro deserves a lot of credit for doing research on Moses, his childhood, his growing up, his assertion that he's the most important person ever to live in and around New York. And to just think of Franklin Roosevelt and all the people who lived in and around New York. Moses is in a category by himself, even though most Americans have never heard of Robert Moses. That book made him famous. And I think his legacy will continue to evolve and slightly improve as Americans realize that it's hard to build public works, especially in dense urban environments. And he did it. Yeah. There's so much to talk about there. But one of the interesting things from the Power Broker is Caro is trying to explain why governors and mayors who were hesitant about the power that Moses was gaining continued to give him more power. And there's a section where he's talking about how FDR would keep giving him more positions and responsibilities, even though FDR and Moses famously had a huge enmity. And he says no governor could look at the difficulty of getting things built in New York and not admire and respect Moses' ability to do things efficiently, on time, under budget, and not need him, essentially. Speaking of scandal, you talked about how he didn't take a salary for his 12 concurrent government roles that he was on. There's a very arresting anecdote in the Power Broker where I think he's 71 and his daughter gets cancer and for the first time, he had to accept a salary for working on the World's Fair because he didn't have enough. He was the most powerful person in New York, and he didn't have enough money to pay for his daughter's cancer. Even Caro himself says that a lot of the scandals that came later in his life, they were just kind of trivial stuff, an acre of Central Park or the Shakespeare in the park. The things that actually took him down were just trivial scandals.…

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