Kenneth Jackson: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. In fact, when he finally was taken down, it took the efforts of a person who was almost considered the second most powerful person in the United States, David Rockefeller, and the governor of New York, both of whom were brothers, and they still had lie to make Moses get out of power in 1968. But it was time. And he exercised power into his 70s and 80s, and most of it was good. The bridges are remarkable. The bridges are gorgeous, they're incredible. The Throgs Neck Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, they're really works of art. He liked to build things you could see and I think the fact that he didn't take money was important to it. I wouldn't say he's not wealthy in New York terms, but he was not a poor person. He went to Yale as a Jewish person in the early 20th century, that's fairly unusual and he lived well. We can't say he's poor, but I think that Caro was right in saying that what Moses was after in the end was not sex and not money, it was Power. He wanted power. And boy, did he get it. There's a good review of the book from Phillip Lopate and he made a good point, which was that the connotation of the word power is very negative, but it's a modern thing really to have this sort of attitude towards power that somebody who's just seeking it must necessarily have suspicious motivations. If Moses believed that he was just much more effective at building public works for the people that live in New York, was it irrational of him or was it selfish of him to just desire to work 14 hour days for 40 years on end in order to accumulate the power by which he could build more public works? So there's a way of looking at it where this pursuit of power is not itself troubling.…

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