The Power Broker Part II: The Reformer
Turns out Robert Moses also spent his twenties messing up.
This is the shortest section of The Power Broker. Just 12 pages long, it’s the last patch of preamble before Moses grabs power. So this won’t be a long entry, either!
Caro calls Moses “furiously impatient” as he begins his career. Moses gets a prestigious entry-level job working for the Bureau of Municipal Research, but he basically shows up and announces that everything is being done incorrectly and needs to change. He has good ideas, but no penchant for compromise. This does not make him popular. It also doesn’t make him successful—for years, he bangs on about reform but doesn’t actually enact changes. The world doesn’t immediately bend to his grand visions for remaking New York. Enemies amass.
I found this section unexpectedly comforting. Moses had the world’s finest education. He spends all his time banging on about meritocracy… and also only gets his position because he’s rich enough to volunteer to work for free and because his mom’s cousin hooks it up! If Moses ever acknowledged how cartoonishly hypocritical this was, Caro doesn’t mention it. His wealthy family insulated him from financial concerns and hooked him up with a job in his chosen field. And he still flailed around like an olden-days Hannah Horvath, entitled and snobby, refusing to do bitch work and learn on the job.
“The net result of all his work was nothing,” Caro writes. “Moses had failed in his calculations to give certain factors due weight. He had not sufficiently taken into account greed. He had not sufficiently taken into account self-interest. And, most of all, he had not sufficiently taken into account the need for power.”
I wish Caro would have spent more time with powerless Moses, though, since these years seem like the key to who he became even more than his weird fixation on his mom. I wonder if Caro had trouble finding letters and other documents detailing what happened in these barren years—Moses does seem like the type to destroy all evidence of defeat. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that Moses is about to rise to power in the next section…because it’s called “The Rise to Power,” lol. Goodbye, fail-son Bob.