Kenneth T Jackson: Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York?

Robert Moses represented a past when we wanted to build bridges and superhighways.

Kenneth Jackson, the Columbia historian of New York and editor of Robert Moses and the Modern City, opens with a compact claim. Moses built essentially all the big roads, bridges and parks in the city, plus the United Nations, Lincoln Center and the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs, along with hundreds of other things. He also says the city would have followed Detroit's path without him, calls The Power Broker the best book he has read and correct in broad strokes, and describes Moses as ruthless, arrogant and honest. Dwarkesh Patel then asks for a summary of what Moses actually got built, noting that most people know him only vaguely through Robert Caro's biography.

Jackson borrows Caro's comparison with Christopher Wren: it is almost easier to say what Moses did not do. Moses did not build with his own hands, but he was in charge and got it done. Jackson's judgment is that Moses is the greatest builder in American history, with nobody in second place. He adds a criticism of Caro's method. In his view Caro looked only at Moses's own documents, and Moses had a narrow view of himself that ignored, for example, what was happening in Los Angeles.

Jackson locates Moses's strength in three features. First, longevity and focus: he held power for roughly half a century, his personal life mattered little to him, and he worked without scandal, ending with less than he started with, as even Caro admits. Second, structure. Technically he was subservient to governors and mayors, but he held as many as six, eight or ten posts at once, so a mayor who fired him still could not remove him from the others. Third, he worked for a dollar a year, which left little to use against him. People were therefore afraid of him and respected him at the same time.

Jackson stresses that the influence went beyond the city. He credits Moses's men, who had worked on the parkways and expressways around New York, with building the roughly 40,000-mile interstate system that began in 1954 to 1956. He also points out how hard New York is to build in: it is twice as dense as anywhere else in the United States and full of neighborhoods that resist change, unlike a development-minded place such as Austin. In his view, doing so much against that opposition says something about Moses's methods, and the question of how he did it matters because it is not happening anymore.

Patel frames the present problem: many American cities have not built significant public works in decades, so it is worth re-checking how we characterize the people who once built quickly. He asks how Jackson's 2007 book was received forty years after The Power Broker. Jackson answers that the Caro book's subtitle is about the fall of New York, written when the 1970s looked like the bottom, with a bankrupt city, rising crime and widespread corruption. His own subtitle is about the rise of New York.

The argument is comparative. Without Moses, Jackson says, New York would probably have followed Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and most Northeastern and Midwestern cities, which declined. As evidence he points out that New York now has more people than it ever did and remains the top city in the world by most standards, alongside London. He notes that Tokyo was once thought a rival in the 1980s but is no longer seen as competitive.

He then turns Caro's transit story around. He says he cannot see a New York without expressways, though he dislikes the Cross Bronx Expressway himself. He argues that Caro had the transit question backwards: what needs explaining is why public transit survived in New York, when in most American cities only the old, disabled and poor use it, while in New York even rich people ride the subway because it is the quickest way around.

Jackson also stresses execution and honesty. He offers the Whitestone Bridge, which links the Bronx and Queens, as a project finished in the late 1930s on time and under budget, and Jones Beach as a facility long considered among the great public places on earth. He rejects the dismissal that Jones Beach is just sand and water. Everything Moses did, he says, was complicated.

Jackson still credits Caro for researching Moses's childhood and for establishing him as the most important person to live in and around New York, a category apart even next to Franklin Roosevelt. The book made him famous even though most Americans have not heard of him. Jackson expects Moses's legacy to keep evolving and to improve slightly as people recognize how hard public works are to build in dense cities.

Patel raises Caro's puzzle of why hesitant governors and mayors kept giving Moses more power. He paraphrases Caro as saying no governor, looking at how hard it is to get things built in New York, could fail to admire Moses's ability to deliver efficiently, on time and under budget, and so needed him. Even Franklin Roosevelt, despite a famous enmity with Moses, kept adding positions and responsibilities.

On money, Patel recalls the Power Broker anecdote that Moses, after taking no salary for about a dozen concurrent roles, had to accept one for the World's Fair when his daughter got cancer and he lacked enough funds. He adds that the scandals which later damaged him were relatively trivial, such as the acre of Central Park and Shakespeare in the park. Jackson agrees and notes that removing Moses in 1968 required David Rockefeller and the governor, both brothers, and, as transcribed, they still had to use deception. Jackson says Moses exercised power into his 70s and 80s and that most of it was good, and he singles out the Throgs Neck, Verrazano-Narrows and Triborough bridges as works of art.

Jackson qualifies the picture of poverty: Moses was not poor, attended Yale as a Jewish man in the early twentieth century, and lived well. What he wanted in the end was neither sex nor money but power, as Caro said.