Kenneth Jackson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Robert Caro and I were friends. In fact, when The Power Broker received an award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, it turned out we lived near each other in the Bronx. And I drove him home and we became friends and social friends. And I happened to be with him on the day that Robert Moses died. We were with our wives eating out in a neighborhood called Arthur Avenue. The real Little Italy of New York is in the Bronx. It's also called Belmont. On the 100th anniversary of Moses's birth, I think in 1989, I was asked to give the keynote speech at a conference at Hofstra University on Moses. And Caro was also invited to be a speaker, maybe another keynote speaker. And there I said, and I still stand by this, that The Power Broker, I learned more from it than any book I ever read and I wish I had written it myself so that my name was on it rather than his. And I think it was the best book I ever read. That may be a slight exaggeration, but just like it's an incredible achievement. Having said that, I said it's got a thousand errors, just small errors. I mean, in broad strokes, it's correct. Robert Moses had more power than any urban figure in American history. He built incredible monuments that the city needs. He was ruthless, arrogant and honest. That's a big story right there. That's probably true. But in all the little stories about the temperature in the swimming pools, about the destruction of public transit, about the destruction of the Bronx with the Cross Bronx Expressway, about the building the bridges too low so that buses couldn't get to the beaches. He's just wrong. It just isn’t that way. Wasn't that way, isn't that way. And all he had to do was look at some different sources, you know that they were doing some of the same things in LA or Chicago. They just weren't as famous as New York. That's more or less what it was. I think I still feel that way. I still wish I had written the book, even with all those mistakes. I've taught for half a century or more New York City history at Columbia University. I've had dozens of students write term papers on one or another aspect of Caro’s book. I can never remember a single one coming back and saying, “Oh, Caro got it right.” They would go back to the same source and say “This is not what this is not the way he said it was.” Now they may be smaller, but it was generally that way. They didn't celebrate it. I think he'd made up his mind what he was going to argue before he started it and Moses was a jerk. For example, think of the issues now with President Biden and his son Hunter, you know, and all the grief he's catching about his son or people with….. My wife is telling me not to go down this road. Moses is attacked in the book because he's not good enough to his brother. He should have done more for his brother than he did. Well, so what if he didn't give his brother a job. o go down this road. Moses is attacked in the book because he's not good enough to his brother. He should have done more for his brother than he did. Well, so what if he didn't give his brother a job. I'm just saying that all these little things that you can come to about different neighborhoods and things like that. But I think Caro was right that Moses, the biggest builder of cities in the 20th century, the builder of the greatest city in the world, didn't like it. That's incredible. He didn't actually like the place he was designing. He wanted everybody to get out. It's better in the suburbs, better if you have a house, better if you have a garage, better if you have a car in the front. That’s better than the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens. Whereas again, his opponent, Jane Jacobs, are people now. And one of the greatest changes now than when Caro was writing Moses is people wanted to all have a car in New York. Everybody wanted a car. Teens, when they were 16 years old, wanted to have a driver's license more than they wanted to have sex. Get me the car. Now a big percentage of young Americans are skipping the driver's license. They don't care as much. We're moving into a different time. And where that's going to lead us, I'm not sure. But I think we're ready to walk more for health reasons and all sorts of reasons. But Moses did not see it. Moses never drove, but he created the world for drivers. Some people might object to this defense of Moses by saying, “Listen, whenever he does something well, we give him credit here.” But then whenever he does something badly, we just say, “Oh, well, he was just swimming with the tide of history. There were other cities that were doing it worse.” We're doing what-aboutism on the negative side of Moses' legacy. But then we're happy to let him take credit for the good things. It's kind of a double standard. How would you respond to that?…

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