10 min read · May 13, 2018
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Robert Moses is widely hailed as the most powerful unelected public servant in the history of the U.S. and one of the world’s greatest builders. According to one of his greatest critics “In the twentieth century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.” (All quotes are from Robert Caro’s The Power Broker). After starting his career as a powerless analyst at the Municipal Research Bureau whose four years of work writing proposals for civil service reform were hastily dismissed, Moses embarked on a meteoric rise to near-despotic control of all major construction projects in New York City.
Moses’ interests and personal characteristics
Moses was raised by a wealthy merchant and was extremely well educated, studying law and political science at Yale, Oxford, and Columbia. He began his career in the era of Tammany Hall, famous for its corruption and patronage politics, and his graduate studies and first four years at the Municipal Research Bureau were all focused on reforming local government. After his idealistic work went nowhere, Moses realized that ideas did not get things done, power got things done.
Moses was tireless, often working 16–18 hours per day and had a meticulous attention to detail. He was often described as “the best bill drafter in Albany” and might have been the most knowledgeable person in the state on matters of municipal law and governance. He was also intensely arrogant, and unwilling to compromise. He was driven by an intense ambition, but not an ambition for money — due to his privileged upbringing, he had little concern for money — what Moses desired was the power to shape the city according to his ideas, which he felt were of a special quality due to his education and expertise. Moses wanted to be viewed as a great man who shaped the city and left monuments to his legacy, and this would influence his choice of policies later in life.
Sources of Power
Moses’ sources of power at the start of his career were extremely limited:
1. Thought leadership & expertise: Moses was brilliant and understood civil governance to an extent that few around him could match. His proposals for state government reform were not accepted while in his first job, but they caught the eye of Belle Moskowitz, a close friend and advisor of the Governor, who rarely made any decision without her input.
2. A powerful mentor: After impressing Belle Moskowitz, Moses was invited to work for Governor Al Smith, who wanted reform the state government and relied heavily on Moses’ research and recommendations. Moses worked tirelessly and made himself indispensable within the Governor’s office. Using this platform, Moses was able to create a small niche of formal power that he would go on to exploit: The Long Island State Park Commission.
Tactics
After gaining control of this small Commission, Moses began a masterful effort to enlarge the span of his control and amass more power, both within the Long Island State Parks Commission, and in gaining control of other posts and boards.
Phase One — Foot in the door
1. Built a reputation for getting things done
Very quickly, Moses established a reputation for himself as someone who had solutions. The governor (and later, the Mayor of NYC, who Moses also worked for) was bombarded daily by problems to be solved. Many of the people surrounding him did nothing but surface issues and dilemmas. Moses, on the other hand, was different: “You give a problem to Moses and overnight he’s back in front of you, with a solution, all worked out down to the last detail, drafts of speeches you can give to explain it to the public, drafts of press releases for the newspapers, drafts of the state laws you’ll need to get passed, advice as to who should introduce the bills in the Legislature and what committees they should go to. He had solutions when no one else had solutions.”
2. Shared credit with those above him
Moses was known for frequently saying: “You can get an awful lot of good done in the world if you’re willing to let someone else take the credit for it.” Both the Governor and Mayor LaGuardia began to realize that they could fight Moses on some detail of a project or legislation, or let him do what he wanted and both of them would reap the political benefits. They frequently acquiesced to Moses’ requests (even if they disliked them), because they knew whatever progress was made, they would share the credit.
3. Used the power of public opinion
Moses’ first big project was parks on Long Island. Long Island had long been the exclusive territory of the wealthy, with large country clubs and private land barring typical New York City citizens from enjoying the beaches and woods. Moses wanted to change that, and pitched his projects as social justice causes which made them immensely popular and immune from public criticism despite the unsavory methods for accomplishing them. Even years later, Moses was associated with creating public parks and he received the benefit of the doubt with regards to public opinion. He was known to repeat to his aides that for a public figure, fighting the media is a losing battle, and he went to great lengths (see next section) to ensure a positive relationship with the press.
4. Used favors and flattery
Once Moses had some formal power, he used those resources to generate goodwill from the media and from the heads of other important agencies and unions in the city. He was famous for the events he would throw on Jones Beach (his first large State Park project, in which he designed a special restaurant and theater for just this purpose) to treat and flatter the people he needed to. “Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon. Moses used it like a master. Coupled with his overpowering personality, a buffet often did as much for a proposal as a bribe. “You’d be standing there eating the guy’s food and drinking his liquor and getting ready to go for a ride on his boat, and he’d come up to you and take both your hands in his or put his arm around your shoulders and look into your eye and begin pouring out the arguments in that charming way of his and making you feel like there was no one in the whole world he’d rather be talking to, how could you turn the guy down?”
5. Mastered timing and setting
a. Timing: One of Moses’ masterstrokes in getting an important piece of parks legislation passed was to wait until the hottest weekend of the year to make his case to the press — knowing that many NYC families would be sitting in traffic in sweaty cars and buses trying to find a patch of park or beach on Long Island to escape the heat, and that they would be repeatedly turned away by private landowners. And the legislation he wanted support for would give him broader power to take private land to create public parks.
b. Setting: Moses would frequently hold large banquet luncheons, and in the course of a cheery, social meal, Moses would put someone on the spot and pressure them into acquiescing on some deal or decision. Most figured the easy way out was to publically express some level of agreement in the hopes that they could later walk it back privately. However, just then an aide would appear requesting a signature on the necessary document, or the involved parties would have already been notified of the decision before the party was even over, making reversal awkward or impossible.
Phase Two — Creating staying power
1. Enlarged the formal power of his position
There was perhaps no more important piece of Moses’ rise than the skill he had in craftily expanding the powers of his office. In this one tactic, we can observe the expression of his intense attention to detail, his creativity, and his deep expertise in the machinery of local government. This was the key mechanism by which he took his humble positions as Parks Commissioner and Chairman of the Bridge and Tunnel Authority, and created for himself a vast empire.
a. Took advantage of powers no one had realized
After the establishment of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Moses was the first to understand and exploit the incredible powers that had been endowed to the public authorities by the State Legilsature: “A public authority, he had learned, possessed not only the powers of a large private corporation but some of the powers of a sovereign state: the power of eminent domain that permitted the seizure of private property, for example, and the power to establish and enforce rules and regulations for the use of its facilities that was in reality nothing less than the power to govern its domain by its own laws.”
b. Created legal staying power
The key toehold Moses identified in the powers of the public authority was its ability to issue bonds, whose contracts superseded any legislation or act that the state or mayor could attempt in an effort to dislodge Moses from his post: “Keen as always in discerning the potentialities for vast power in humble institutions, he had glimpsed in the institution called “public authority” a potentiality for power whose implications no one else, no one anywhere in the United States, had noticed, but that were exciting and frightening and immense: Authorities could issue bonds. A bond was simply a legal agreement between its seller and its buyer. A legal agreement was, by definition, a contract. And under the Constitution of the United States, a contract was sacred. No state, and no creature of a state such as a city, could impair its obligations. No one, not Governor, not Mayor, not State Legislature, not City Board of Estimate, could interfere with its provisions.”
c. Expanded the defined scope of his power
By including a single word — “connecting” — in the legislation establishing the Triborough Authority, Moses greatly expanded the purview of the Authority to include anything “connecting” to a bridge or tunnel, which could be interpreted as any road or freeway that led to a bridge or tunnel. In a narrow city surrounded on three sides by water, this was an enormous expansion of power.
2. Controlled and distributed valuable information
Control of construction projects is a particularly effective form of political capital because the dollar amounts can be so enormous. And in a space-constrained city obsessed as New York is with real estate, even more so. Because “Moses had the say to decide not only who should design and build all highways in the metropolitan area, but which highways would be built, when they would be built and where they would be built,” he had the ability to distribute huge sums, and disseminate enormously lucrative information.
3. Used ultimatums and the threat of resignation
Now that Moses had control over an enormous capital projects budget, responsibility over megaprojects all over the city, and a detailed grasp of their day-to-day activities, he was indispensable to the functioning of the city, and he knew it. Whenever a disagreement arose with the mayor or governor, Moses would simply threaten to resign. Given his public popularity, Moses knew that it would be a black eye for whatever administration he was fighting against to lose Moses and his projects.
Lessons from Moses’ rise
For at least seventeen years, Moses had absolute authority on every aspect of every bridge, tunnel, park, and major highway project in New York City. He did so through powerful personal characteristics that opened doors to formal power, which he then widened and bolted open through clever (and sometimes deceptive) legislation, and a maniacal attention to detail. Clearly, many of his tactics for gaining and sustaining power are very instructive — mastering a subject area, finding powerful mentors, expanding the powers of your position — but I think the tactic that resonates most with me (since it is one tactic that Moses used without deception) was building a reputation for getting things done. As Moses built this reputation, power and influence flowed to him naturally as busy Mayors and Governors assigned increasingly important tasks to the man they knew would get it done. I think this was Moses’ most noble quality, that he was tireless and, to put it simply, effective.
Lessons from Moses’ fall
Moses’ staying power relied chiefly on two pillars: his popularity and the budgets he controlled. His popularity had for almost 30 years been unquestioned, and his twelve positions in city and state posts were largely outside anyone’s ability to fire him, even the Mayor and Governor. Moses “had anchored himself in a position so secure that no one could take his power away from him. Only he could lose it for himself; his career, booming to new heights in the eighth decade of his life, could be checked only by his own personality. Only Robert Moses could lose Robert Moses his power. And he did.”
The crux of his downfall was his intense arrogance — in thirty years of almost absolute power, he had surrounded himself with sycophants, and was never forced in any meaningful way to compromise or reconsider what he wanted. His theories on urban transportation were completely obsolete — his stubborn refusal to build mass transit and simply continue building roads had brought the city to a deadlock, and his love of bridges and “monuments” to his own legacy diverted funds from many more worthy causes. But even once his reputation was tarnished, much of his power remained outside anyone’s ability to take it — Moses had to make a mistake. His final fatal mistake was the arrogance to continue to use his old ultimate tactic, the threat of resignation, one time too many. He finally used it on someone who was willing to accept it, and in a single stroke, lost five of his remaining posts, and the erosion of his power was complete.
The most enduring lesson I have learned through my study of Robert Moses is the crippling effect of arrogance. Moses was so effective in getting things done and cutting through the usual layers of bureaucracy that he could have done incredible things for the city. Instead he clung to power jealously, squandered immense wealth on projects detrimental to the city, and died a pariah.
