The Power Broker #10: Clara Jeffery

ROMAN MARS: This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. I’m Roman Mars.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And I’m Elliott Kalan.

ROMAN MARS: So, today we are finishing Part Six, The Lust for Power, and finally beginning Part Seven, The Loss of Power. That’s Chapters 39 through 41, pages 895 through 983. Later on in this episode, our special guest is Clara Jeffery. Clara is the editor in chief of Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces the fantastic radio show and podcast Reveal. You should definitely subscribe to Reveal. It’s fantastic. She had a long and storied career editing works of investigative journalism that speaks truth to power and afflicts the comfortable–all the good stuff. So, she brings that perspective to her understanding of The Power Broker. What is especially fun to me is that I’ve known Clara for a long time. She hadn’t read The Power Broker before, and this podcast inspired her to pick it up and read it along with us. So, she’s truly one of us.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And a special thanks to everyone who came out to our live event with Robert Caro in New York at the New-York Historical Society. What an amazing thing. What a dream come true. I felt so grateful and excited to be on that stage with him. And what made it even more exciting was that you were there, too. Thank you for bringing your excitement and your energy and your interest and yourselves. We had a great time. I hope you did, too.

ROMAN MARS: So, on the last episode of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker, Robert Caro took us on a lavish, luxurious trip to Jones Beach so we could see what it was like to be wined and dined by Robert Moses. And then we watched him ram one mile of expressway through a Bronx neighborhood, needlessly destroying it and bringing misery to the many lives of its occupants in the process. It was a real roller coaster of an episode.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It was a real “here’s the good news, here’s the bad news about Robert Moses.”

ROMAN MARS: Truly. And today we’ll be covering Chapters 39 through 41. That’s pages 895 through 983 in my copy of the book. At this point in the story, Robert Moses is at the height of his power and control. But that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be that way. We’re going to be finishing Part Six, The Lust for Power, and beginning to move into Part Seven, The Loss of Power. We have arrived!

ELLIOTT KALAN: Not quite, Roman. We’ve still got to get through this episode.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. Midway through this, we’re going to turn the corner.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, power will begin to be lost not as quickly as we might like it.

ROMAN MARS: No, not as quickly as you might want.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But keep in mind, this also happened a long time ago. It’s all over. So, it did happen.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. Okay, so we’re going to start with Chapter 39, The Highway Man. What are we going to cover in The Highwayman?

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, in The Highwayman, we’re starting the first of a duology of chapters. We saw that trilogy of chapters in the last episode that were centered around specifically East Tremont, the neighborhood in the Bronx where the Cross Bronx Expressway is just being shoved right through against all reason and rationality. These two chapters–they’re going to build beautifully yet frighteningly off of those previous two, going from this microcosm of one mile of the Bronx and now Caro’s going to widen out his focus to show how that is just one part of a larger Moses plan, which will deliberately or not foreclose the future comfort, convenience, and quality of life for generations of New Yorkers and Long Islanders. He’s like, “Oh, it’s terrible how the 1,500 families got really hurt by this.” Now it’s everybody. It’s such a sudden jump to a wider scale. And I have to assume that the title of this chapter–it’s never made explicitly clear–is a reference to the double meaning of highwayman. Not just a man devoted to highways, but literally a highway man–the old fashioned sense of a robber who stops people on the road and steals their valuables. And he’s here showing Moses to be someone who’s stealing time, enjoyment, quality of life from the lives of commuters and stealing the future from as yet unborn generations of New York metropolitan residents.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s not only a widening scope of geography, it’s really a widening scope of time–that he’s going to fuck up New York so much that you cannot unfuck it. You know what I mean? It really is like it’s going to last forever–for decades–maybe forever. And that’s the scope of these two chapters. So, where in time are we starting here?

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, we start by jumping back in time to July 3rd, 1945, when the first new civilian car made in the United States since February of 1942–

ROMAN MARS: Oh, wow.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It rolls off the Ford assembly line. And this is not to get off the point almost immediately, but I was astounded seeing this again. It’s just such a sign of how single-minded and goal-oriented the United States was during World War II that for three years there were no new cars basically. All auto plants were making military armaments for three years. And the idea that the country could ever be that devoted to its single goal is astonishing and inspiring to me. And someday maybe we’ll have that sense of purpose again. Maybe we won’t have to fight the worst war in the history of the world. That’s not great.

ROMAN MARS: And hopefully not eat organ meat.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, I’m fine with that part as long as it’s prepared well. But we can talk about that later. But now it’s 1945, the war’s over, gas rationing is over, people want to buy cars, they want to drive cars, they want to do it as much as they want… And what does that lead to, Roman, within weeks? What is the result of people wanting cars and wanting to drive ’em all the time?

ROMAN MARS: That there is street congestion–just streets filled with cars not moving.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it’s that old law we’ve talked about a lot. If people have the opportunity to drive cars on roads, too many of them will decide to do that and the roads will not be able to handle it. And the Herald Tribune runs an editorial asking why the city government isn’t doing enough to solve this traffic. And Robert Moses responds with a letter that is such classic Robert Moses writing. I just wanted to read a little bit of it just for fun. I just am enjoying his style. And he says, “What has New York done about street congestion? Bless your little journalistic hearts. A hell of a lot. And why sit we idly buy without further plans for the big jam, singing Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well, while up in the roaring ’40s, editors are cutting up tires into rubber heels? Tush, tush. The blueprints are oozing from our files and spilling over the floors.” And I just want to say I love this. Everyone in the ’40s–when they’re writing stuff–they turned into Stan Lee. Stan Lee at his most trying to be poetic yet also irreverent at the same time. This is– I love it. It’s so of the time. And it’s like, “Robert Moses should have been, like, a columnist.” That’s what he should have been doing.

ROMAN MARS: Totally. Not penning those racy novels.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It makes you want to read that romance novel he wrote so badly just to see what crazy turns of phrase are in there.

ROMAN MARS: And his solution to everything is just building more roads. That’s it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes.

ROMAN MARS: And maybe more parking garages. That’s it. That’s it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. And the parking garages are the new aspect. He’s like, “Hey, get this. We’re not only going to build more roads for cars, we’re going to build more places just to stuff cars.” And he keeps announcing these huge plans. He’s going to expand the roads he already has. He’s got this project that involves at least 200 miles more worth of roads. And Caro talks about how in each decade–the ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s–Moses has announced a plan that seems unthinkably large. And then the next decade, he announces a plan that makes the last plan seem like a small plan.

And I was recently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s book, the Lathe of Heaven, and she has a passage in it that I couldn’t help but think about Robert Moses when I read it. And she says, “The quality of the will to power is precisely growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.” And while I was reading it, I was like, “I wonder if she read The Power Broker when she was writing the science fiction novel.”

ROMAN MARS: Or really Ozymandias is really– That’s the same principle there–just weeping because there’s no more worlds to conquer. You just have to get bigger and bigger and bigger or this guy doesn’t exist.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And it feels like Robert Moses’ answer as always is “We need more roads–bigger roads,” partly to ease traffic but also partly because what’s he going to do if he stops building roads? What does his life mean if he stops building roads? Where does his power go? And in the 1920s, 1930s, Caro says, “People were really excited to see these programs completed. Now in the ’40s, the response is getting slightly more muted. And this is partly because urban planners have started to say with increasing urgency that you need a balance of transportation. You can’t just rely on roads. You’ve also got to have mass transit to balance out the fact that, when you build roads, there’s going to be more roads.” But Moses doesn’t like mass transit. He doesn’t want to build it. He’s not interested in it. And he monopolizes the construction money in the city so much that even if people were like, “Well, we’ll build it without you,” they couldn’t do it. All the money is being poured into roads. And that’s something that we’re going to see again and again throughout these couple of chapters–just how much he is taking from the potential of mass transit so that you can put it into roads.

ROMAN MARS: And this really just points out, again, more of Robert Moses’ weakness. Caro talks about him having a certain genius for seeing a city and carving up a city and drawing lines. But he has almost a rudimentary, just backwards notion of how systems work together. But I think it’s partly his bias towards not wanting mass transit and thinking cars are great and not realizing how cars just become functional things in people’s lives through the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. But I actually wonder if he’s particularly stupid in this area because– And just willfully stupid because it’s not that the buses or subways or light rail or trains would be good in and of themselves. They would actually make the roads he made better. If he thought more holistically about them, they would perform better for the people who wanted to be on them and siphon off some of the excess. And I find that particularly interesting or kind of galling but also just strange–that he didn’t see any upside in making these things just for the benefit of roads. You could make a case that, for the benefit of just his roads, you could have done these other things and made them better.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think you’re exactly right. And this is part of Caro’s argument that the roads would function better if you had these mass transit systems working with them. I have two answers to that. As someone who has not studied Robert Moses as much as anyone except– I mean, as much as Robert Caro has. I think one of them is because I don’t think he really cares that much how the roads function. He cares about building them. And once it’s built, he’s onto the next project. Like I was saying with that Lathe of Heaven thing– And this would be a much better place for me to put that quotation, but I already said it. He likes building. He doesn’t like road management. Other people would’ve been fine with overseeing these enormous bridge projects and then not building other things. That’s why Monument is this bridge. But he just has to keep building. And once it’s done, it’s just a revenue machine for him. He doesn’t really care if it’s working well. He just cares about the driving numbers. But the other thing is… I think we have to remember because it gets thrown around a lot… In the last episode, I think we made this mistake, too, and we corrected ourselves in calling Moses an “engineer.” He’s not an engineer. His education is in civil service–understanding how a civil service system works and how to reform it. And a civil service is built out of people. And it’s a system that’s flexible because people can change, whereas a road is not flexible. Once it’s built, it’s there. You can expand it or you can move it with great effort. But you’re not dealing with people who are adaptable. And I think that’s part of it. I wonder if he might be approaching construction infrastructure from the point of view of someone who thinks that it has the flexibility of a human-based system.

ROMAN MARS: Well, but he also takes advantage of the fact that that is inflexible at a certain point. He does stake driving later on that sort of limits any criticisms or changes that can come later on. So, he counts on both sides of it. But I think that’s really interesting. He builds it, he’s done. And then the only sort of value of that road is how it induces demands for more roads later on–not that they do the thing that they’re supposed to do.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, it’s very similar to the way consumer technology works now where a piece of electronics that you buy–it’s not intended to do that job as well as possible. It’s intended to do it fine until it breaks and then you get the next version of it. There’s that built-in obsolescence. And it’s like the opposite end of not delivering a great product where, on one end, everything breaks down super fast and you have to replace it. On the other end, it doesn’t work great but you can never replace it. It’s permanent and immortal. And I think he doesn’t care. I don’t think he cares if it does a great job partly because he’s not going to have to use it. Or if he does, he’ll be in his office car where someone else is driving him and he can… I would say he’s going to kick back, but he’s just going to do a lot of work in the backseat.

ROMAN MARS: So, it’s not only that he’s just not building or considering mass transit in his plans. He is actively destroying mass transit in the process of building these roads. He’s pulling up tracks. He’s really just starving it of money. And he’s taken advantage of this idea that this really is a system, but he’s hogging up all the resources and thought and leadership of this system of transit to the benefit of just building bridges and roads.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And there’s ripples that lead out from that. And that’s what a lot of this chapter is about; it’s not just transportation but about the way a city is built around that transportation. And Caro started talking about how this road-based system is affecting the development of the outlying neighborhoods in New York and in Long Island because a neighborhood developed around a subway line is going to be developing for foot traffic. It’s going to be much higher density because people need to be able to walk from the station to their homes. Living in Los Angeles, people are like, “You should take the rail to work.” And I’m like, “So, I drive to a parking lot and then get out at the train station and then take the train the rest of the way? Come on. I want to take it the whole way.” But if you are building around roads, then people are going to need cars and the neighborhoods are going to be zoned and developed in a way that is low density because people already have the cars. And it wouldn’t be so bad if the people living in those lower density, more suburban parts of the city had access to jobs near where they lived–maybe if they could walk or take a local transit to their jobs. But Moses is such an influence on how the land around his parkways is zoned and controlled and he wants them to look beautiful and pristine. So, he discourages industry from expanding out to those areas, which means the vast majority of these new residents in the outlying areas have to drive back into the city every day for work or take the rickety Long Island Railroad. And we’ll talk later about why nobody wants to do that. But he’s basically using his road building as a way–deliberately or not–to control how these parts of the city are developed and built and how the people there are going to have to live their lives.

ROMAN MARS: And it really is this positive feedback loop. And what I mean by positive feedback loop is the action amplifies the next action that amplifies the next action. And either that happens in a positive direction or a negative direction. The positive part is just the amplification. It’s the sort of death spiral.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It rarely happens with positive outcomes for anybody.

ROMAN MARS: But it isn’t that– A negative feedback loop will be one where the next action stops the previous action. So, this is like everything just sort of spirals away. Because of this choice, there’s roads, therefore it makes low-density housing. That means more roads and more and more of an idealized form of what could be higher density, better served communities along Long Island are just denied. And it starts from the very beginning and just kind of builds and builds and builds on itself.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The other thing… Here’s the other thing about cars. Alright. Roman, I’m going to lay this on you. This might be a big shock to you. So, you live in Long Island but your office is back in Manhattan. You got to drive into work. When you get to work, you got to do something with that car. You can’t just put it in your pocket and go into the office with it. You got to put it somewhere. You’ve got to find parking. And Moses is pouring all these new cars into the city and people are like, “Where are we going to put these cars?” And he says, “Don’t worry, we’re going to build these multi-story parking garages.” He doesn’t say this, but the implication whenever I read this part is the most beautiful thing you can add to a living city–just multi-story parking garages above ground. And aside from the fact that they’re hideously ugly– I apologize to anyone who owns or designs parking garages, but it’s the ugliest thing you can put in a city, I imagine. The planners start to notice the city can never really park more than a fraction of the cars coming in. There isn’t the space. There isn’t the money to build those spots. At a certain point, you’re just building a city made out of parking spots. There’s no room for the people anymore. And this is something that is also kind of affecting and unfair for average New Yorkers.

In 1945–and I think this is still the case–Caro says, “Most New Yorkers didn’t own cars.z” And now, I think in many cases it’s a lifestyle choice. Certainly when I lived in New York, I did not want the hassle of owning a car, so that’s why I didn’t have one. But back then, most New Yorkers could not afford to own a car. And Moses is diverting all this funding into roads and away from mass transit, leading–as we were saying–mass transit fares rise, less people are using it so the fares have to rise again to cover that shortfall, and money is being spent to help the few in the city who can afford to drive or from outside the city who can afford to drive and not the many who can’t. And the result of that is not just that mass transit stays the same and/or deteriorates slightly but that new mass transit is not being built. And Caro talks about how there were plans for the fabled, legendary Second Avenue subway line. Roman, you’ve never lived in New York, so you don’t know how often the topic of conversation is “if only we had this second Avenue subway line.” Now, nearly 80 years later, it’s still not fully finished yet in the way that it was talked about at the time. It was going to be this amazing line going all the way up through the city. And now it goes, like, four extra stops on the Upper East Side. And it took billions of dollars and a lot of time to get there.

And Caro notes–he says, “By building transportation facilities for the suburbs, he was ensuring that no transportation facilities would be built for the ghettos. Therefore planners saw, in the transportation field, the portion of the public helped by the use of public resources would not be the portion of the public that needed help most.” So once again, like he did with parks earlier and like he did with the roads within the city, he is weighting resources towards the people who don’t really need them to live their lives in the city. And the end result of this is that poor residents are cut off from the full use of their own city. There are neighborhoods that are just inaccessible for them to live in. There are parts of the city they can’t get too easily. There’s resources that they should be able to share in because it’s part of their city and they just can’t get there in an easy way. And Caro’s making the case that it’s not just that Moses, through his road building, is not helping these people, but he’s actively maybe not deliberately hurting them by making it harder for them to take full use of this amazing city that they live in and have just as much a right to as anybody else.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And what’s interesting is, as the number of cars has increased so much, people are starting to recognize that building more roads is not working for them. This is really beginning to reach the average person where they’re like, “I’m not buying this anymore.” And then the new beginning of an urbanism movement and thinkers like Lewis Mumford are presenting it and people are more actively talking about it and are more aware of it.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: You start to see letters to the editor to newspapers talking about the need to cut down on cars. The newspapers themselves don’t cover this particularly much, which is something that we’re going to see throughout these chapters–the lack of either interest or appetite or desire in the part of the major newspaper press in covering the idea that there is a problem with traffic in the city. And the problem is not just “we don’t have enough roads to take care of all these cars.” And something that we’re going to see throughout is, one, this kind of failure on the parts of the papers to call real attention to this and, two, for modern readers, the continuing shock at how many newspapers were in New York at the time, which we can talk about more later. You read it and you’re like, “All these newspapers that I don’t know about.” And you really had your choice back then. I also want to mention that it’s fun to see Lewis Mumford mentioned a couple times in this chapter. I’m a big fan of his. I love his book, The City and History, and his architecture reviews. They’re, like, lovably curmudgeonly in a way that I enjoy reading.

ROMAN MARS: And so, as people are recognizing that these roads are not serving everybody–that they’re not doing all they need to do–they’re not really, like, an opposition movement that says, “Build no roads.” The sort of new thinking is, “Well, how about we build the roads but, in between that highway, we put a train because we’re going to do it anyway?” And this is the thing–this theoretical notion. The Blue Line in Chicago goes along the 95 in between. And it sort of makes a ton of sense. You’re clearing the road. There’s a middle section. It’s straight. Let’s put a train there. But this does not ever fly on Long Island.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No. It’s true. Also, in Los Angeles, there are train lines that go down the middle of freeways and they always look weird to me because I’m not used to seeing that from New York. But lots of cities have them. It’s crazy. And the city planners say to Moses, “Look, we don’t have the money to build these mass transit lines into Long Island that we’d like.” It’s the late 1940s. New York never has any money. America is flush with post-World War II money, but New York somehow still has no money. The greatest city in the world is always penniless–always has its pockets hanging out–because there’s no money and has just, like, little moths flying out of it. But they say, “Look, all you have to do to make it affordable in the future for us to build those lines is, as you’re planning the Long Island expressway, just get an extra 50 more feet of right of way, leave a center island so that we can build rail down there eventually… And look, it’s going to lower the cost of these eventual trains. It’s going to lessen the disruption of the construction because it’s going to be right in the middle of the road with cars on either side rather than up against people’s homes. It’s going to prepare the city for future development. It’ll be easy. It’ll be inexpensive.” Caro points out the cost for all this would be borne by the city and the state–not Moses and not Triborough. You don’t need federal approval. If the city doesn’t do it now, you’ll never be able to afford it. As you said, Roman, Chicago is already doing something similar. There’s literally, literally no reason at all not to do this. There is no reason not to do it except the one reason that Moses has, which is “I don’t want to do it.”

And this is when Caro’s got… Every now and then, he’ll introduce us to kind of a new, what I would call “bureaucratic researcher hero.” He has his heroes who really get into research and paperwork. And he mentions F.–“F.” for Francis–Dodd McHugh, who’s the chief of the office of master Planning of the City Planning Commission. and he draws up this master plan for the New York airports where he’s looking at all these new roads that Moses is planning to build to go to, like Idlewild Airport, which is now JFK. And he realizes that the roads Moses is building–particularly the Van Wick–it’s totally inadequate for the number of people who are going to need to go to the airport. It’s inadequate, especially considering there are people who are going to use this road who aren’t going to the airport. Let’s not forget about them also. There’s other people. And Moses is like, “Eh, I’ll widen the roads. It’ll be fine. That’s not going to be sufficient either.” It’s tens of thousands of people above what they’re actually going to be able to carry. And once people get to Idlewild, how are they going to get around? Where are they going to put their cars? How are they going to get from the parking lot to the terminal? And McHugh says, “The only real solution is some kind of big rapid transit link, similarly, where you’d carry more people faster. You run it down the middle of the road.” And Caro, at one point in this, estimates that a rapid transit trip from Penn Station–in the middle of Manhattan–to Idlewild airport would take 16 minutes, which blows my mind. That’s one part where I’m like, “I don’t know about that. I don’t know.” Because right now, if you want to get from Penn Station to the airport–which I’ve done many times–that’s a long trip. At some point, you have to go from the subway to the air train or you get to one of the shuttle buses. Anyway, you don’t need to hear from me about how you get to the JFK airport from Penn Station, but it takes a long time.

And Caro goes into all this detail about how relatively easy and inexpensive it would be to build those rapid transit links at this one point in history while at the same time you could use that opportunity to build a subway link between Brooklyn and Queens. He goes into a lot of detail about all this. It is such total fantasy catnip for me, certainly as a New Yorker. When I was first dating my wife, I lived in Astoria, Queens, and she lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn. And the only way to get between the two was to take a train that went through Manhattan, and it took so much longer than it needed to. A couple other times later we’ll talk about points where Caro was talking about a thing that would’ve directly benefited my life when I lived in New York. And it’s like you were saying, Roman, earlier that he’s working on this scale not just of geographic space but chronological time–that he’s saying that this little bit of work now would, in the future, be so much more valuable and be worth so much more. And I tell you, Roman, I’m living proof of it–just the hours I wasted because this stuff didn’t exist. And McHugh says, “Even if we don’t build these transit lakes now–same story as with the Long Island Expressway–we could reserve the land for less than $2 million.” This is at a time when the city is pouring $280 million into expressway construction. The city that has no money is spending nearly $300 million on expressway construction. And he goes, “If we don’t spend that $2 million now, we’re never going to have the chance to do this rapid transit again.” And he wants to put this proposal in his plan, but he makes a mistake. Roman, you know what that mistake is that McHugh makes?

ROMAN MARS: Well, he defies Robert Moses. But he also forgets that he is a civil servant.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, he mentions it to his boss who mentions it to Moses and McHugh gets yelled at. The mass transit proposal is slashed from the airport plan. And his salary gets slashed to the minimum. And he ends up resigning from his job. It is such unnecessary retaliation from Moses and it’s all part of this big refusal to share any space or any money with mass transit that at certain points almost feels like an obsession–like how Batman has all those villains that are obsessed with a specific thing. You know, Calendar Man is all about holidays. And Kite Man is all about kites. And Robert Moses is all about roads. He’s the Highwayman.

ROMAN MARS: Highwayman. Yeah. And this is another one of those things where it’s just the way that an airport functions as a spoke in a transportation system–it really only makes sense if a train goes to it. I mean, that’s its peak functionality–a train going there–because taking a car and leaving it at the airport for two weeks… I mean, I do this all the time. I’m not saying morally it’s wrong necessarily.

ELLIOTT KALAN: One, I’m going to say two weeks? That’s a pretty nice vacation. It’s pretty sweet.

ROMAN MARS: Maybe a week.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But you’re right, it’s a misuse of that infrastructure and for no reason–for no reason at all. If you asked me, “Would you rather take a quick train to the airport and not have to worry about your car or even drive it there?” I would say, “Yes, 100,000%. That’d be fantastic.”

ROMAN MARS: But it’s shocking how many airports do not link to public transit in this country. That’s a mistake done over and over again in the Bay Area. There have been sort of janky add-ons for a few decades. And then recently it’s sort of connected and more smoothly. But it’s just one of those things that, if you really thought about it, you would… If the FAA had the power–if they were building more airports where they’re not really–I would require that there’s a public link to an airport. It just makes so much sense.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s a little nuts that, in most cities, it is easier to get to a stadium than it is to get to an airport. In New York, certainly, it’s easier to get to Yankee Stadium or Citi Field than it is to get to the airport without using a car–at least in my experience. New Yorkers, write me and tell me if I’m wrong–if it’s gotten harder to get to those stadiums in recent years.

And Caro talks about–we had talked about this–for lack of a better word, “ghettoization” of certain city residents. And he talks about how opponents of Moses saw this as an inadvertent oversight–that they just didn’t care enough to look into it. But Caro is again presenting it as a deliberate objective–that he wants to keep specifically poor people but also likely non-white people from Long Island and that that’s one of his interests in not having mass transit there. And he quotes a 1945 speech that Moses gives to the Nassau Bar Association where he literally says, “Figure out what sort of people you want to attract into Nassau County. By that I mean people of what standards, what income levels, and what capacity to contribute to the source of government.” Even if you strip that of all of the more worrisome implications, he’s still saying, “Certain places are for certain people, and we need to build our infrastructure and arrange those places to attract only that certain type of people. We don’t want those other kinds of people,” which is pretty damning for a guy who is working, in theory, for a city and a state rather than for a constituency.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, that’s really… I don’t think he has a quiet part to say out loud. There’s always that phrase that he’s saying the quiet part loud. But it is just very, very clear what he is about–he’s about dividing this community up and really, again, just not serving the whole community. It really is. It’s about funneling all the resources towards the few people who have cars and those communities that they create and really leaving behind all the rest of them and not just leaving behind as sort of neglect or even benevolent neglect. It’s true harm being done to them. It’s awful. It’s awful stuff.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, and Caro then goes in again to– He has a long section about how Moses’ personality kind of insulates him from changing realities from criticism and his confidence is never shaken because his power and his arrogance keep him from learning anything that might shake it and how he’s sure these roads will make his name immortal. He’ll be like the builders of ancient Rome. And he has an article he writes about New York in the year 1999 where he is basically talking about how great his roads are and how they’re still going to be there. And we know this stuff about him, so I want to rush through to this amazing sentence that Caro has where, just about within two weeks of its opening, Van Wyck Expressway is jammed with traffic. And–I love this–Caro writes, “‘Traffic will flow freely,’ Moses had promised. Inappropriate adverb.” And I love it. Two words. And just as a grammar teacher undercutting him. I just love the way he writes, “Inappropriate adverb. Yeah, it’s not moving freely, and I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about that.” It’s so funny. There’s so many points in this book, rereading it again, where I’m like, “This is a funny book.” It’s a sad book. And it’s a very dense book. But there’s some very funny moments in it.

ROMAN MARS: And all this… The big problem is him not thinking in terms of these systems. Once you begin to build out and extend and connect all these roads, they all just get worse and worse and worse. It really just doesn’t– His ability to underestimate traffic and not understand the concept of induced demand and not really learn anything and update anything in his brain is just really destroying and creating a system, just like a machinery that does not move anymore.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it seems that every one of his projects has the same exact problem. They all lead to greater congestion. They don’t take congestion off of the preexisting traffic arteries. And Caro–he gives us a lot of vehicle counts, travel times, and lengths of traffic jams. This is a data mine. And these chapters–something Roman and I were talking about before recording–have a lot of information in them and a lot of facts and figures that are not really fully necessary, it feels like, at times to make these arguments. But there’s part of me that thinks that Caro is putting it in there just so it’s somewhere–that if it’s not in this book, no one’s ever going to know it. But it certainly is… At a certain point you’re like, “Yeah, I get it. The roads are really full. There’s a lot of cars.”

ROMAN MARS: He’s already dead. Yeah, I mean it has that quality of just piling on the details. And I do think that you have to imagine the book landing in 1974; Caro knows exactly what it takes–this sort of amount of shoe leather–to get all this data and put it together into a cogent narrative. And he must be thinking, “This is the document. There is no internet. There is nothing to look up. This is where it’s going to be.” It’s going to get more and more scattered and lost over time. And if he doesn’t put it here, it will be gone. And I think this is a real kind of choice of a historian versus the choice of just a pure storyteller in this moment. I think Robert Caro is an unparalleled storyteller. I’m not meaning to disparage him at all, but this is sort of the difference between making a movie of this versus making a document for history. He’s balancing those notions.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He is. And I think–even more than that–I feel like it’s a little bit like he’s putting together a scientific argument. The myth of Moses was so strong, he felt that he needed to marshal so much evidence to prove his point–that at this point, it’s almost like he’s writing a lab or a research paper to really prove, “No, no, this evidence supports what I’m saying.” And so there’s a lot here that, to a modern day reader… I feel like everyone reading this book has already bought into the main premise by this point.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: We have no lived experience of Robert Moses. We didn’t grow up being told he’s an amazing man. And so it feels at times like, “Oh, this is a lot.” But I think you’re right that Caro feels like, “This information needs to be out there. I need to tell it to people and it’s nowhere. And if it’s not here, it’s never going to be anywhere,” which is a huge burden to feel when you are a biographer and a history writer–this idea that, “Oh, well, I found this information and if I don’t put it here, it’s just going to disappear forever.” And he’s spoken about that–the feeling of horror of the idea, “If I don’t get this into the book, no one’s going to know it. It’s never going to reach people’s awareness.”

Hey, though, he’s getting some help here because the newspapers–remember those newspapers we talked about? They’ve started printing stories again about traffic. It takes so long to get everywhere, and this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Caro talks about how there’s just this kind of cycle each time there’s a big traffic jam in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s… Traffic is bad. Everyone gets mad about it. And then they sink into this kind of sullen, apathetic acceptance. And he compares it explicitly to a lab rat getting used to electric shocks, which is such a horrifying way to think about urban life. You’re just getting used to torture over time. And there’s this cycle that always ends in numbness. It goes from anger to numbness. And now we’re back in that boom and bust cycle of outrage because people are back on the roads after a couple of years during the war of not being on the roads. And traffic is new to them. The frustration of traffic is new to them. And to those of us living in 21st century America, I feel like this boom bust outrage cycle that ends with sullen numb acceptance feels very unfortunately real–very real and very comfortable.

ROMAN MARS: It’s sort of the template to the modern condition for sure.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: But what is very clear–even though more people are talking and writing about the fact that traffic is a problem and this sort of dependency on the car is a problem–it’s still not getting through to the only man that it matters.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Who would that man be, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: That would be the elusive Robert Moses who we haven’t mentioned yet so far in the book. He is not changing his mind. There’s nothing about– In fact, it just kind of accelerates as much as possible.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And public awareness is slowly shifting. And Caro is looking at the proportion of letters to the editor versus editorials in major newspapers. And he’s saying, “People experiencing this seem to be understanding it’s a problem before the powers that be do–before the major kind of communication organs of the city.” But like you said, it doesn’t matter. Moses doesn’t want to do anything. He fights all these proposals. There’s one point where, in 1952, state legislators suggest that Triborough should take over the subways and use its surplus money to improve them. And Moses flies back from a vacation in the Virgin Islands to shut this down as quickly as possible. He goes, “No, Triborough has no extra money. Mass transit is too expensive. We shouldn’t do it.” And there’s just this lack of understanding at a basic foundational level. And I think maybe this is why Caro is marshaling so many facts and figures–to change that understanding of how necessary mass transit really is to make the city livable and how roads actually function. And he quotes this article from 1951 in the Herald Tribune–again, like, New York had so many newspapers, there’s no Herald Tribune anymore, come on–talking about the traffic boom in good terms as if bridges and roads were like companies that were experiencing this post-World War II, ’50s boom. And it says in it, “Business is booming. Traffic is everywhere, exceeding the experts’ predictions. If the present volume keeps up, all the bridge bonds will be retired by 1957 and all tunnel bonds by 1963. Good work, gentlemen.” And it’s like, “No! Traffic is bad. To look at these public works as companies that are getting a lot of customers and that’s going to increase profits and therefore that we can pay off the bonds faster is such a basic misunderstanding of what’s going on here.”

ROMAN MARS: I totally agree. Even the notion of the subway system has to be net neutral or has to make money–it’s like, “No. You can provide a service and it costs money. And that is just the thing we pay into all the time to make the city more livable.” Running things as a business is the type of thinking that I’m just never on board for. There’s just some things that’s just… That’s okay. We pay things that represent our values and they don’t need to pay off. The post office doesn’t need to make money. Subways don’t need to make money. It’s a crazy notion, and it’s, like, infected all parts of public life. It drives me mental.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, and it’s not a new idea. But it’s an idea that won’t go away. I mean, I was just rewatching Robocop. And that’s entirely about why you shouldn’t run a police department like it’s a business. It’s this assumption that if something takes in some money, then it must need to pay for itself. And the idea of a free subway system–which would be an astounding gift to all New Yorkers–it never enters into any thinking whatsoever. But we’re about to close this chapter. And we know that things can’t get any worse, right, according to Robert Caro? Oh, they can always get a little worse because, as this chapter ends, Caro says, “and in 1954, he took a further step–one that sealed the city’s future.” Bum bum bum… I added the “bum bum bum.” He didn’t write that part.

ROMAN MARS: But it would be great if he did. You could send him some notes.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s what I’ll do–yeah–for the new electronic edition that they just released.

ROMAN MARS: We’ll get to the bum bum bum after this.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: Okay, now we’re on Chapter 40, Point of No Return. It really is what it says on the tin. What he is doing is laying out this idea that his plans for Long Island and the Long Island Expressway really just dooms Long Island to what it’s going to be. It’s like it’s going to be a traffic congestion nightmare with low-density housing. I mean, he’s really just setting it up. This whole chapter is about that.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s the real TLDR of this one. You’re right, you’ve basically said it. But he goes into much more detail on that, which we will too! As the chapter starts, we’re back in the ’50s now. Moses is being too successful. His authorities are bringing in way more money than his actual bridges and tunnels and roads cost to operate. He’s pulling in $21 million in surplus a year. He can use that to capitalize bonds worth half a billion dollars. He’s got so much more money that it risks getting the attention of the government, forcing him to use that money to bail out the subways or retire his bonds. And if he does either of those things, he loses the potential capitalization money that having that money allows him to. So, in order to keep making, he’s got to spend all his money. It’s a real Brewster’s Millions situation that Bob Moses finds himself in here. But the weird thing is that Robert Caro then almost immediately contradicts himself by saying, “Also, Moses’ construction plans were so huge that he didn’t have enough money to fulfill them.” He’s got all these projects. He’s going to build a New York Coliseum, the Throgs Neck Bridge, different expressways… He’s got Jamaica Bay Park. He’s got all these enormous plans that he wants. So, Robert Moses–the guy who has too much money–still needs to get more money. And he’s still looking for ways to get it.

And as we’ve seen before, he’s able to take advantage of federal programs like the lobbying for his roads to be included in the Federal Highway bill and things like that to get access to this money. And there’s another organization that he’s going to need the help of. If he’s going to get highway money from the federal government, he needs to build an interstate road. Unfortunately, due to the geography of New York, there’s only one state he can really put it through. There’s only one state he can enter, and that’s New Jersey–my home state–which I’ll admit is not as cool as New York. It’s kind of like New York’s little brother that is like, “Hey, what about me? What about me?” and New York’s like, “Uh, no.” So, I apologize to all the residents of Philadelphia who got mad at me last time because reading this part, I could feel viscerally Moses’ lack of interest in actually building a road into New Jersey. And I understood it. Even being from there, I understood it. It’s a great state, but still it’s not a romantic state that people desire to be in. A very true story for my life is that when my parents moved from the New York City area to New Jersey and then my mom’s brother, my uncle, also moved to New Jersey, my grandmother, who was a lifelong New Yorker, for years, did not tell her friends that her children lived in New Jersey. Instead, she just would avoid the subject.

ROMAN MARS: Wow.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. When you’re in New York, New Jersey is, I mean, when you’re in New Jersey, New York is the only place you want to be. If you’re in North Jersey, don’t even get me started on South Jersey. It’s a different world down there, but if you’re in New York, you have no interest in it. But if Moses is going to be able to build something in New Jersey, he needs to make nice with the Port Authority. That’s right. There’s another authority around, and they are bruisers as anyone who’s been in Port Authority Bus Terminal can tell you they do not have the finesse or the elegance of the tribal authority.

ROMAN MARS: So, yeah, he has to sort of mend fences there. He always sort of butted heads. I mean, I can’t remember the specific details of how the Port Authority and how Moses has tried to angle to take over more things from Port Authority at different times and then being thwarted by some other sort of schemer or another–but he has to figure it out.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, they’ve been having turf battles all this time. It’s a little bit like the scene at the beginning of the Warriors when all the gangs are being brought together and Cyrus is like, “We could work together.” And the gangs in the end… It doesn’t work out. They’ve got to mend those fences. And that’s because Port Authority has so much money on hand. They have the potential to capitalize $700 million worth of bonds–just an astonishing amount of money in the 1950s. But Port Authority lacks Moses’ greatest strength, which is not his ability to twist the law to do whatever he wants, not his shamelessness and refusal to be bound by ethics, but his vision. And Caro describes Port Authority as “long on cash and short on dreams.” All they ever think about building is revenue producing stuff. They don’t have the vision for a grand system–the kind of thing that can inspire, say, Albany to get behind a project in the way that Moses seems to so easily generate these dreams that people just flock to.

ROMAN MARS: And Moses has those dreams, but his dreams only involve highways and bridges and cars. That’s it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: In different configurations though. Sometimes it’s a highway leading to a bridge or it’s a bridge leading to a highway…

ROMAN MARS: But luckily the Port Authority is all on board for that.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes because they don’t just have a shared need in the need to combine money with vision and political power. The other thing is that Moses had so much power in Albany. They also have a shared enemy–a common enemy between the two of them that both Triborough and Port Authority are happy to stomp into the mud. And that enemy is trains.

ROMAN MARS: No love of trains.

ELLIOTT KALAN: They do not like trains. They love roads with tolls on them. They love traffic. They love tolls– Or not traffic necessarily. But they like having lots of cars going over their stuff. And so, January of 1955, Triborough Authority and Port Authority–these two titans of roads and inconveniencing people–they released the joint study of arterial facilities that, strangely enough, recommends building the stuff that Moses wants to build. It’s amazing. It turns out it’s just the best way to do it. Lots of expressways–even the long threatened mid Manhattan elevated expressway, which we talked about before, which thankfully was never built. And Caro lists so many potential expressways all through the city, reaching out to the suburbs. And he says, “This is a business arrangement.” Moses doesn’t have the money to build these things. Port Authority has the money but doesn’t have the power.

So, for instance, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge–they come to this agreement. Port Authority will fund the bridge. Triborough Authority will lease it and control it. And at some point, they will buy it back from the Port Authority in the future. So, Moses brilliantly– It’s kind of hard to know what Port Authority is getting really out of this except for a short-term amount of tolls because he’s convinced his rival to fund his own project. And when the bridges are built, both authorities are raking in huge amounts of money. I guess that is what they get out of it–the money.

And Caro quotes Moses describing this bridge. And there’s such an unfortunate, modern parallel in the way he talks about it. I don’t know if you’ll be able to recognize the person that it reminds me of in the way Moses talks about this bridge. He goes, “There’s going to be a bridge pretty soon–the bridge in my dreams. It’s going to be the most important, single piece of arterial construction in the world. It’ll be the longest suspension bridge in the world and the tallest.” It’s all superlatives when you talk about this bridge. Everything’s the best that he does. Everything’s the best. He goes just short of calling it the most beautiful bridge in the world, which he’s said before about his stuff.

And Caro talks about how it’s not just Triborough and Port Authority. Moses still has this alliance of people behind him who also profit, namely–number one among them–people who make cars, people who sell cars, and people who make money repairing cars. He’s the darling of the auto industry. We’ll see, in 1964, Moses is going to run the New York World’s Fair. And we’ll see what a lack of success that is in some ways. And the automakers pour millions of dollars into that. But my favorite detail here is how, in 1953, Moses enters and wins an essay contest run by General Motors. And he wins the $25,000 prize. And it’s so funny to me–the idea of him entering a corporate essay contest. And I just imagine some kid won second place and didn’t get the $25,000. But Robert Moses walked away with it.

And Caro says, “Moses is America’s most vocal, effective, prestigious apologist for the automobile.” He’s so good at pushing cars, and the car makers are just one of this regiment that he has that we’ve talked about before. Caro says, “The joint program represented profit–profit from bonds, deposits, contracts, premiums, retainers, jobs payoffs, bribes, grease. It enlisted behind him all those forces in the city–banks, unions, contractors, venal politicians, venal or shortsighted public officials, who put profit from public works above the public interest or the public trust.” Look, if you’ve got a project that can make a lot of money, you’ll have lots of people who are happy to be a part of it. And Moses has that. And because he personally doesn’t care about how much he takes in graft, as we’ve talked about before, he can spread it around. And he can enforce loyalty if he has to with that same old threat. If a local politician is like, “Maybe I don’t want you to build this enormous road straight through my neighborhood,” he can say, “Alright, the net project and all the money it represents will vanish and you just won’t have it.” And he institutes this kind of, I guess, informal policy where boroughs are allowed to publicly criticize Moses’ plans. But in private, when they’re actually voting on the board of estimate, they are not allowed to stop those plans. They don’t veto those projects. They allow them to go through. And the result of this, as Caro says, is that the city would just go on building bridges. It would go on building highways and building basically nothing else.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And he spends some time talking about what you could build with this much money. That’s this amazing fantasy land of modernizing the Long Island Railroad and also new tunnels to bring trains full of people from Manhattan to New Jersey. You could finish that Second Avenue subway–all this sort of stuff that’s, like… There’s so much you could build with this amount of money. And even though that idea of there’s not the old school style corruption in the system of him taking money, there’s still the same impulse. It’s causing a kind of internal corruption–the fact that this set of public transit systems just does not have the same financial upside in the end. Like, the margins are different. It is more of a service that you’re providing than a business that you are creating. And that is the core–that is the cancer at the center of this decision making.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. The quantifiable metric that they’re using to judge whether things are worth doing is exactly how much revenue is it going to bring in for the people involved and not the metric of how much is this going to improve or assist the lives of the residents of the New York area. And I’ll tell you, Roman, reading over this list of the things you could have done, I was like, “That would’ve helped me. That would’ve helped me. That would’ve helped me.” He specifically mentions extending the subway out to Mill Basin–far out in Brooklyn–as far as you can get in Brooklyn basically before you’re in Long Island. And I’m like, “Yeah, I remember the day that my wife and I and our friend, Sarah, wanted to go to the Mill Basin Deli.” And it took the entire day on bus and on foot to get to this deli for lunch. Each time he’s mentioning something, I’m like, “Yeah, that would’ve helped me.” So, I can tell you–it would’ve made a measurable improvement in my life if we had had this fantasy list paid into rather than the projects that they wanted to make.

And Caro says, “They could have taken this money, and they could have spent it on an entirely new modern subway system.” These two authorities, with their power and their money, in 1955, could have so massively improved the life of the millions of people that live in the region. And instead, nearly all of it goes to car facilities. They spend so much money. They’re spending $755 million on bridges, tunnels, and highways that were mentioned in that study. And that’s just the money that Triborough is spending. And Caro says that, from 1955 to 1965, there’s $1.2 billion in federal and state money that goes into highways mentioned in that joint study. And over the next decade, from 1955 to 1965, they build 439 miles of new highway and they built zero new miles of railroad or subway track. And Caro says, “In 1974, people using subways and railroads in and around New York were still riding on tracks laid down between 1904 and 1933. The last year before Robert Moses came to power in the city, not a single mile had been built since.”

And now–it’s in the 50 years since then–some new miles have been built, but certainly not many, very many. And so we’re still in New York. And I say “we” as if I still live there. We’re still riding in tunnels that were built more than a hundred years ago with very little new tracks and rails. And you hear all the time stories about how the machinery involved is all out of date and things like that. And there’s this moment, he’s saying, when it all could have been improved. And they just didn’t do it. It makes me so mad. I apologize. I’m getting all worked up, Roman. It makes me so mad. This stuff happened 70 years ago–60 years ago–and I’m still so mad about it and only partly because it affected me personally for years of my life.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, the trains break down. The switching systems are old. Robert Shaw is robbing them right and left.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The same year this book comes out, you’ve got literally four men hijacking a subway train in maybe the greatest movie ever made? I’ll say yes. I’ll say it is.

ROMAN MARS: But here is where we get into the territory– And this is, like, where maybe we could condense it. Caro gives the litany of indignities that befall people who dare to travel by train or subway.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh, the people who have to deal with that hellish purgatory that is rail travel. We can condense it here because first he talks about the subway and the Long Island Railroad, basically talking about how the trains are in bad condition. They break down all the time. They’re unreliable. Sometimes they just don’t show up. And the trains themselves are filthy. The windows are broken. The heating and the refrigeration doesn’t work. And if you want to get on a train to get to work in time, you have to show up incredibly early to get past the crowds of people who are going to build to get onto these trains. And he talks about different incidents where people get so mad at canceled trains or missed trains that they attack staff members. He talks about one Long Island Railroad train where people are on it. It stops in the middle of the tracks, and people get out and throw rocks at it. He goes, “It was no longer unusual to see a train arrive in Jamaica being pushed along by another train.” And there’s this train from Babylon to Brooklyn that doesn’t run for 102 consecutive days. And it gets named the Phantom because, when you show up to take that train, it’s just not there.

And we’re talking interchangeably of the subway and the Long Island railroad. They’re two different trains. But he’s basically saying his version with a lot of details–it’s almost MaD Magazine-level to me–details about how disgusting and unreliable these trains are. But it’s almost his version of the old Catskills joke about “the food is terrible and such small portions.” The trains are terrible, and you can’t rely on them to be there when you need them. It’s such an uncomfortable, debilitating in many ways experience that people have to go through on a daily, daily basis.

ROMAN MARS: But that’s the thing about mass transit–the pillars of it functioning well are that it is frequent and it gets you to where you want to go. And as soon as those fail, everything else begins to fail afterward. Then there isn’t enough money to upkeep. Then there’s breakdown. And then everything becomes worse and worse and worse. It’s a doomed spiral that is just really, really hard to pull out of unless you just make the decision of just like, “No, we’re going to do this because we need to do this. We’re going to do these things because they are hard.” And that’s just the nature of it. You have to have reliable service for mass transit to work. Unfortunately, this is not a weakness that highways have. When they are unreliable, people just accept it. The system has a weird way of tolerating that type of failure affordance as a design because you could try it at another time and it does work and it’s sort of sporadic. But mass transit has this problem of you get on the track and then it’s going in one direction. It’s kind of a ratchet. And it just suffers through this mania that he has for cars and just this whole bias against mass transit.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Caro gets to–at the end of this kind of long section about how crappy the subway’s gotten and how crappy the Long Island Railroad has gotten–he gets to this idea that the worst toll of it isn’t seen in kind of sporadic violence that happens when people get mad and they go into train rage. And it’s not seen in the accidents that take place on the train because the trains themselves are not well-maintained but in this general passivity and helplessness and kind of defeated giving in that the commuters just put up with. They just live in a state of constant discomfort and exhaustion related to the trip they have to take to get between their home and work every day. And a few times in this passage, Caro repeats the phrase, “get used to it,” in italics. He uses italics only when he is particularly grieved about things–only when he is particularly mad about things. And he’s just appalled at the idea of getting used to misery. And he says in italics, “We learn to tolerate intolerable conditions.” And it feels like, when I read it, there’s such anger behind that–not just at the idea that people are underserved by this that it makes people’s lives more difficult but that there’s this standardization of routine discomfort that numbs you to the pain that you’re feeling in your life as a result of these systems and also ultimately numbs you to the value of your life. If you are living through this every day, maybe you internalize it and you think, “Maybe I don’t deserve more than that.” And that is not just stealing time from people–it’s not just stealing comfort from people–but stealing, in a very real sense, this kind of faith in their own lives and the ability to think of their own lives being better than they are and that sense that tomorrow can be better than today. I’m reading quite a lot into it, but I feel like it’s mostly there. He seems very, very angry at the idea of people having to acclimate themselves to discomfort. And That’s something that I don’t hear very much in discussions of transit. Even today, it’s mostly about how fast, how efficient, how much money is this going to cost and very rarely about what is the human experience of riding on this train or riding on this highway, which is the most important aspect of it–the human part of it. And we’re people. I hate to break it to you, everybody, but we’re people. So, the people aspect is the most important one to me.

ROMAN MARS: And truly this whole series of events is set in motion by decision to do the Long Island Expressway the way it was–to not sort of think of it as a grand plan–that the Long Island Expressway creates a low density. That low density can no longer support a train even if they wanted to have a train after the fact. It just continues. This was set into motion. I mean, this is really what the point of no return is about.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, he zeroes in–finally after this kind of wide-ranging look at rails–on exactly that. It’s 1955–the Long Island Expressway. And he reminds us that Long Island, as the name suggests, is an island. You can only go so far out in one direction before the land just stops and becomes water. The only way to go is the other direction into the city. And inevitably that means congestion if all you have is this road to get there and if you don’t have this mass transit. And meanwhile, Long Island’s population is growing and growing and growing. It’s no longer the bucolic open fields and rubber baron estates and small farms that Moses walked through 30 years ago in the 1920s. It’s suburban sprawl. It’s filling up. And again, Caro’s going to get into statistics and numbers. We don’t have to get into all those. He does have one line. He goes, “Onto Long Island’s potato fields was going to be dumped a population the size of Philadelphia.” Look, I said a lot of things about Philadelphia. It’s very useful as a metric for the number of people moving into Long Island. And just there’s no way these roads can ever handle it. And he says, “Attempting to handle traffic in such volumes by building highways just didn’t make sense.” And he looks at each thing. Okay, Moses is not going to build a train. What about making it easier for buses to go through? No, he doesn’t want that either.

ROMAN MARS: “Buses are for losers,” he says.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He says, “Buses are for losers.” And he says, “Once the LIE is in place–once it’s built–this opportunity to change the density to make it easier to get in and out and to make it easier to get around is gone. If you make cars the only way to commute from this place to the city, then you lock in this development forever as just the default state of the region.” And he says, “Build the Long Island expressway with mass transit or at least with provision for future installation of mass transit, and Long Island might remain a good place to live and play. Build the Long Island expressway without mass transit, and Long Island would be lost, certainly for decades, probably for centuries, possibly forever,” which sounds a little melodramatic. A lot of people do live in Long Island. Robert Caro, I think, has, like, a summer home or a weekend home in Long Island. So, people do live there. But they have to put up with this abysmal traffic–this abysmal way of getting in and out to go to the city.

ROMAN MARS: And one of the things I actually like in this description that Robert Caro talks about is that it’s kind of ahead of its time when he’s writing it in the early 1970s. Despite what I put on the attitude of Robert Moses that buses are for losers is that buses are kind of the greatest, most flexible way to solve these problems. And to have a rapid transit lane that’s devoted to buses is an extremely effective low-cost way to unmake a lot of these mistakes that people made with roads. Other cities, like Medellín, just totally revolutionized traffic by putting in dedicated bus lanes. And he kind of presents that as an idea here–as a way to be the remedy for this. But it just goes nowhere because Robert Moses just doesn’t believe in it. But I love… You can tell that he’s paying attention to Lewis Mumford in this time. He’s aware of the thinking that’s going on. And it strikes me as being very early in a popular nonfiction book to be talking about this in these ways. I find it pretty prescient.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, I think so, too. One thing that is… And we’ll talk about bridges and buses in a moment. We’re about to get to one of the more controversial parts of the book.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But one thing that I wonder– And this is something Caro could not have been prescient about. But what I was thinking about today is I wonder if these sections read a little differently and I wonder if the experience is a little different now in the world we live in now where the option of remote work, or at least part-time remote work, is a thing that people are living with. Robert Caro is taking it as such a given that you have a job, you need to go to that job. And so, if you live in Long Island, you’re probably commuting to Manhattan or somewhere in the New York area and you cannot get out of it. And I wonder if that is, in some way, alleviating things a little bit–probably not at the scale necessary. The traffic on the LIE is still ridiculous. But I wonder if these sections read differently to a younger person who was like, “Well, why do I have to go in to my job? Why can’t I do it from home?” which of course in 1974 and certainly in 1955, when the LIE was built, was impossible. You could not do that.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, what it points out to me is I would flip that and say essentially that, given the flexibility of work or the greater flexibility of work today, it really points out how it was an even worse decision in 1955 to make these choices. And there probably is a greater spread of people on Long Island just working nearby or working at home than there was then. But that just goes to show the degree in which Moses had blinders on about the whole issue of the whole problem.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, because, in 1955, you can’t call and be like, “Boss, I’m going to work from home today.” “How? All the paper is here. I think the only people working from home in Long Island at that time were comic book artists and they still had to drive in with their art to hand it in to the editor.” And of course it’s the same story here that we talked about before. You don’t have to build the tracks right now. Just leave that space in the middle of the road and we can build the tracks later. And he just doesn’t want to do it. And this is a study that shows–even bending over backwards for Moses to put rails in the worst possible light–just how much cheaper and more efficient and more effective it would be. But Moses just doesn’t want to do it, so he just starts building. And by the time that the big proposal for a rail line is finished, the proposal has to say, “Our own proposal is obsolete because the road is already too far ahead to do anything. It doesn’t matter.” And this gets no mention in the newspapers. It’s so easily buried–the idea that anybody considered doing this before the road started being built.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s the classic stake driving move that he does. Before he can sort of respond to any criticism and before anything can be done, the system is working so slowly that he just starts building things and therefore it’s a fait accompli. There’s no way that you can actually put in a railroad at this point. And again, the thinking of this–it sort of gets me sort of incensed when you think about all those potential subways and rail lines that could have made your life better. I think about this… If going back and thinking about the entire highway system–what if they just put a rail line between every median? What if they did that? What could we have today? It makes so much sense. And I don’t know if I’ve ever really thought about it that way–that you could, in a widespread way, think about every road as having a train line next to it. It would be kind of a stunning achievement. We would have a totally different life now.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It would be amazing. Roman, I’m already sad enough about the stuff that didn’t get built that Caro mentions in the book. Don’t mention even bigger things that would make life even better and easier that we don’t have.

ROMAN MARS: It would just change the nature of the whole country and in these ways that would be really amazing. And it would’ve been so easy and cheap. The lack of forward thinking about that kind of blows my mind.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, I guess the only argument is what you’re describing–it’s not technically socialism but it sounds close enough to it that it’s making me uncomfortable. No, but you’re right. I mean, it all comes down to, I think, one of the things that I think Carol is so aware of in this–that all decisions made about the way we live are decisions. They’re all choices, and none of them are inevitable. And if you have someone who’s sufficiently forward-thinking, you can make amazing choices and decisions and you end up with something like Jones Beach that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And if you have someone who is very far-seeking but is making bad choices and decisions, then you get the Long Island Expressway with no trains on it at all, which… I hate to spoil this for you, Roman, but it opens up and it is almost instantly congested. And just year after year… Caro quotes driver’s calling it the “world’s longest parking lot.” Moses’ solution? You guessed it. Make it bigger, which makes it even worse because now while they’re finishing the later stages of the LIE, they are rebuilding the earlier stages of it to make them wider. And that construction work only adds to the amount of traffic. And Caro says, in 1974, when he’s writing this book, “There’s still plans to widen the Long Island expressly that will stretch out to the end of the century.” And I don’t know if… I assumed they finished at some point, but maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s one of those things like in a Borge story where, as soon as they’re done with it, they just start rebuilding it again. Who knows if it’s the same road anymore?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah. It’s crazy. And he’s describing it–like you said– it’s an island with a choke point. And by the time you extend it out to the east, the west is insufficient to do the job. And so they just keep building it–widen it again. And it’s just one of those things that is just, again, really, really upsetting. This is the thing that he can somehow wrap his mind around changing or improving, but he can’t conceive of a world in which, when you improved it, you could just make a place for a rail line or make the overpasses taller, which gets us to one of the major talking points when it comes to this book, which is the height of the underpasses where cars are going through. The bridge is going over them. They are not very tall. They’re not tall enough specifically for buses to go under in the outer lanes.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Technically, a bus can go through the center lanes. But as Caro says, “Any bus line manager is not going to send their buses down a highway where there’s only one lane basically that they can use in each direction. What if the bus breaks down? What if there’s a lot of traffic? They’ve got to keep up a schedule.” And there’s been a ton of argument one way or the other about whether this height for bridge was standard practice at the time, whether it’s unfair to accuse Moses of deliberately keeping buses off, and whether it’s unfair to read a racial element to that or a class element to that. And it’s always surprised me–the controversy of it–because, in that section, Caro literally quotes Sid Shapiro, Moses’ right-hand man, saying, “Yeah, we kept the bridges too low so that buses couldn’t go through,” and kind of reminiscing in a happy way about the few buses that tried and had their roofs smashed in. Or he talks about one where the top was rolled back like a can of sardines. And it’s like, “I don’t know. If you got it straight from the guy who was working with Moses, then it seems like whether other people in other places were doing that–I feel like that’s all you need. That’s as close as you’re going to get to Moses saying, ‘Yeah, this is why I did it.'”

ROMAN MARS: And him being very, very clear about using the roads as a way to gatekeep people from being in different places. He’s very explicit about that as a motivation for him when he builds things and when he’s talking to the Nassau County officials. And so to have it expressed in that way–his intent… He always had this part of his intention when he built things. To have Sid Shapiro talk about it–to have them change a little bit, maybe, when they get rebuilt… There’s some increase in some of them to get a little taller for later overpasses. But I don’t get it. I don’t get what sort of daylight there is here to sort of create a kind of doubt. I don’t know.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I wonder if it’s just a human need to kind of poke holes in things. There’s so much that’s claimed by this book and so much that’s backed up. To be able to find something that feels like you could say, “Uh, this is not true,” and then to use that as the loose thread that you’re going to pull out and unravel the rest with… But I dunno. It’s one of those things that I’ve never quite understood–the arguments against taking Sid Shapiro at his word and taking Caro at his word that Sid Shapiro said this thing. And so it’s strange that this is one of the controversial parts. But people get very agitated about bridges, I guess. Maybe they feel very sensitive about bridge heights.

ROMAN MARS: I feel like what people are reacting to is the collapsing of the narrative of Moses didn’t want Black people at Jones Beach and therefore made the bridges too short for buses. And then people go, “But there were bus lines that kind of made it there,” but they weren’t very extensive. And it’s kind of like, “Yeah, but there was a Black section of Jones Beach.” But what they’re arguing against, I think, is that collapsed version told around a campfire.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The shorthand around the campfire. Yeah, the scary stories told at infrastructure camp. Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: And I think that’s what they’re reacting to and mainly trying to– In their way, they’re trying to add nuance to that narrative that feels too collapsed and too simple. But I think that, when you take in the book as a whole and the section as a whole, it just has so much support in it. And even if there are other bridges and other things that are low and they weren’t forward-thinking in the same way, it was clear that they were taking advantage of that convention to still get these same ends. So, I think that’s kind of where it lands. It just is really about people objecting to the shorthand version of this rather than what’s actually written. And what’s actually written is a quote from Sid Shapiro, like, laughing about it. It’s hard to argue that.

ELLIOTT KALAN: To me, it’s just funny that this is one of the big things that people go after in the book. It feels a little bit like, in online debates, you’ll see someone refer to an AR-15 as an assault rifle and somebody will say, “Um, that’s not what the ‘AR’ stands for. You don’t even know what you’re talking about.” It’s like, “You’re right. I got the initials wrong on that. Therefore people don’t get hurt with guns. You’re right. They’re wonderful because I didn’t know the terminology properly. You beat me.”

ROMAN MARS: And somehow arguing that this is just, like, a little star in the constellation of what Robert Moses did– It fits as part of that completely. It is not a deviation from the rest of his patterns and behavior. It’s really right there. And so, again, picking it out as its own thing is strange to me because all of this shortsighted thinking, all of this classism, and all of this non-system thinking and not caring about how these pieces fit together and serve a whole community is a part of his whole career for decades and decades. And so, if it was somehow a deviation, then it seems like it is sort of more ripe for criticism. But it really just sort of fits in with everything else.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Like you’re saying, it fits with Moses’ desires, his preferences, and his overall themes. And what Caro is basically saying at the end of this chapter is that he has had the foresight to lock in those desires for future generations–that by building this way, he has made it so that future generations have to travel the way Robert Moses would prefer them to travel. And in Caro’s view, this has doomed Long Island to a messy and congestion-based development pattern. I honestly don’t know if that’s changed since then. Maybe Long Island has opened up and become a traveler’s paradise. I’ll never know. I refuse to find out.

And this chapter–in ending on that point of Moses, through his use of concrete and steel, has locked in a way of living for generations, if not centuries, that he wants people to have, even if they don’t necessarily want it, even if it’s damaging to them, we have reached the capstone and the end of the Moses triumphant section of the book. This is the Act II, in which Moses has had his power, enhanced it, and wreaks havoc with it. We saw Act I, in which young Moses learned the ways of power and gained that power. This has been the end of Act II, in which he has reached the apex of that power and used it to decide how people living in Long Island now will get in and out of New York. The way I put it just now doesn’t sound like a major victory, but it is. Trust me. There’s millions of people that he’s dealing with.

Now, we’re about to enter Act III, Moses’ hubristic downfall. And reading the book again–spoiler as we get into this–it strikes me that this downfall section… You want it to be because the system rises up. Some brave hero is able to turn the tide and get him. But more than anything, it seems to be because Moses is just getting older and he is losing his faculties and he can’t navigate the system the way he used to. And I think that is part of Caro’s point. The system did not self-correct here. Moses just overreached by aging out of his potential–his highest level of power–and we’re going to see it. But I’m going to warn people, they’re not going to get the downfall that they want, which is for Moses to be pushed out by a crowd of well-meaning protesters or things like that or to be put on trial or something. Instead, it’s going to be much slimier and more self-destructive and a little bit less satisfying. Roman, do you feel the same way?

ROMAN MARS: Well, I would sort of add one other thing, which is that he does seem to have a worse and worse ability to deal with the public. But the public somehow has the platform, has the will, has a bit of the organization to give him a few flesh wounds along the way. And they seem to be landing more. I mean, famously the Jane Jacobs chapter of this was taken out. That would’ve happened probably a little bit… I’m trying to think where it would’ve happened, but it would’ve been…

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it would’ve been a little bit later. It would’ve been, like, early ’60s, late ’50s, I think, was the fight over the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

ROMAN MARS: But it’s clear that there is–even in these chapters–opposition forming in the public. They’re not really identifying it as Robert Moses as the culprit. When people are talking about traffic is bad and traffic and the cars aren’t the solution and expressways aren’t the solution, they’re not really tying that to Robert Moses in the papers. But they’ll begin to. And then there’ll be some dumb follies that he will make later on where he’s just making bad decisions that have bad PR, which is something that he wouldn’t have done earlier on. He’s so full of himself that he just doesn’t think bad press relates to him. But he does get bit on that later on. But I do think that there’s a little bit more agency in the public to take him on. And that sort of runs against him being a little less savvy and a little less able to take care of it. And then he runs against, later on, an equally arrogant person.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think I was overstating things by saying that it was just his own kind of folly and not the system. I think this is something that I should point out later, after we’ve talked about it more, that I’m almost inevitably going to forget, so I’m going to mention it now. This is something I should say next episode–that Robert Moses has been having his way with the city in large part because he has been doing damaging things to the lower classes and he’s been doing helpful things to the upper classes. But there’s one class that he has kind of had a good reputation with that–other than Jones Beaches and playgrounds and building roads and things like that–he hasn’t had as much interaction with. And that’s the middle class. And the middle and the upper middle class–once he starts rubbing them the wrong way and getting on their bad side… I think you’re right. That’s what really starts to hasten his downfall.

ROMAN MARS: And the middle class in the ’50s and ’60s is growing. And they’re going to be a really powerful voting block in setting the opinions and the agenda for things. And that’s the sort of golden age of the middle class. And as he’s getting weaker, they’re able to find sort of chinks in his armor at the same time. And I think both things are working in concert to bring him to his loss of power, which is Part Seven, which happens next–after the break.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Beautiful segue.

ROMAN MARS: Radio. 20 years.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: Okay, now we’re up to Part Seven, The Loss of Power. We have made it! Elliott Kalan! We’re already here.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It feels so good. It feels so good to finally be at this section. I mean, it doesn’t feel– Not in that I want to be done with the book. I’m loving reading through this book–talking about this book–but it feels so good to finally see the words, “The Loss of Power,” and be like, “Wait a minute. That must be referring to Robert Moses losing power.”

ROMAN MARS: Except for the process of him losing power still represents a bunch of misery. And so, actually, Chapter 41, Rumors and Reports of Rumors, is actually one of the more miserable chapters in terms of its detail.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, that’s true.

ROMAN MARS: So, we’ve been talking about roads all this time. But what we have not yet really spent a lot of time on and Caro has spent a lot of time on is that he’s also the director of the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee. And he has this massive power over public housing. In fact–I have now read this book three times–I don’t fully understand his role in public housing completely, to tell you the truth.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think that is mostly by design, Roman. So, this period, we should remember, in the ’50s and leading into the ’60s–this idea of slum clearance and the rebuilding of the city’s neighborhoods so that you could eliminate blight was something that was really big. The idea that there were poor parts of a city, there are rich parts, and there are middle class parts… “What if we could get rid of the poor parts?” What used to be called kind of, like, the “tenement areas” are now seen as slums. And I think a big part of that is because they are now often populated by people of color rather than say immigrants from Germany or Italy, who at the time, when they came in, were not really accepted. But there was still a greater visual link, let’s say, with the powers that be.

But setting all that aside, everyone’s talking about slum clearance. “Let’s get the poor out of this bad housing and into better housing. Or as Moses would say, “Let’s get them out of this bad housing and then???” And as the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee Director, it’s another one of these big overall czar positions where he is not directly overseeing each individual project, but he is overseeing the assigning of slum clearance projects to private developers through the federal kind of Title I program, where you can get federal money for, I think, conversions by a developer of private residences into a new housing development. And Caro has talked earlier about this idea of eminent domain–that Moses is taking advantage with his roads–the idea that you can take land from a private owner and use it for the public good. And this housing development slum clearance is a further step in that, where you’re taking private buildings away from private owners and then handing them to other private owners, in theory, as a public good, in order to create better housing for citizens and residents. And it’s another one of these things that… “Oh, he’s a big hero. He’s clearing out the slums. He’s building all this new housing. New York is in a housing crisis. It needs more.” And everyone just takes it for granted that he says, “It’s going great.” And the newspapers just kind of run with that. But as Caro says, “A few isolated but perceptive observers were beginning to notice clues to something very disturbing about slum clearance.” And here, Caro starts constructing this little Avengers-style cast of reformers, who each get their own little adventure where they’re learning about the problems with the slum clearance programs in the same way.

You’ve got activist lawyer Hortense Gabel. She helps found the New York State Committee on Discrimination and Housing. And she’s middle class, but she starts talking to and listening to Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers for being affected by the housing policies in a way that previous reformers hadn’t really. Previous reformers had also been like, “We know what’s best. Give these people the things that we think are best.” They kind of thought the way that Moses thought. And Caro was kind of portraying this as a difference in a way that this new breed of activist is taking the lead of the people they’re trying to serve in some ways. And she starts going into the buildings that are being built. And she’s horrified by some of them. There’s a moment that I find so scary just from the implications of it, where she’s in one of these apartments and she goes into the bathroom to check her hair and she looks in the mirror and there is no mirror. There’s just a hole looking into the next apartment. That’s astonishing to me–that they’re just like, “Yeah, yeah, we just left a hole there between these two apartments.”

There’s City Planning Commission member Lawrence Orton. He starts questioning the statistics that Moses is using to show that the families that have been evicted are being given new equitable housing. And he knows there’s simply not enough public housing in the city being built to meet the needs of these displaced residents.

And there’s Walter Fried, Regional Council of the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency. And he’s noticing that the buildings in his own neighborhood–in the west 90s–are getting seedier and that more people are crowding into them. And by the summer of 1953, it’s clear to him that these poor people of color–Black and Puerto Rican residents–are being pushed out of their homes by this huge, Moses-controlled urban renewal project right nearby. And the closer he gets to the site of that project, the worse the state of the neighborhood gets. And he’s realizing that this slum clearance project is not clearing out a slum. It’s just kind of smooshing it down so it spreads outward. If you put too much peanut butter on a sandwich and you smush it down, it’s not like the peanut butter gets cleared away. It just overflows.

So, it’s appearing to each of these people in different instances. Like the old proverb of the three blind men with the elephant, they’re all feeling different parts of this problem and not quite seeing how they connect but understanding it’s all part of one thing related to Moses’ housing developments not doing what they’re promising to do, which is to rehouse people in better places.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that’s right. They’re picking up little bits of things that you maybe wouldn’t notice if you weren’t on the ground. I think it’s really clear–this idea of these places that are nearby that are getting more rundown are getting more rundown because the city is not taking care of those spaces to accommodate all the extra people, which are now being crammed into extra places, being divided up by landlords taking advantage. And they mentioned seeing way more garbage cans than you would expect outside of an apartment building, indicating that, instead of five people living in a place, 12 people are living in a place. And this is all just, like, again, a person who is in charge who is not thinking about the whole and also not thinking about the suffering of other people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And these are things that we’ve noticed before in the stories that Caro tells of the people being affected directly by them. And part of the difference here that we’re going to see is that, as we mentioned before the break, these are middle class people that are noticing this. Two of these people are lawyers. Two of them have official positions in government. And that makes all the difference. These are people who have access and also the space in their life because they’re living comfortably, I have to assume, if not willfully. They’re living comfortably enough to give thought and energy to what’s being done and how to put it together as opposed to just trying to survive while they are being put in a difficult position.

And I want to mention two things. One is I love the way that Caro writes each of these sections. He starts each of them with a similar mirroring phrase. The first one goes, “For Hortense Gable, it was rumors.” And it goes through hers. “For Lawrence Orton, it was statistics.” And it goes through his section. “For Walter Fried, it was garbage cans.” And it goes through his section, which is great. Also funny. Rule of threes right there. The third one’s the funny one. But it just shows you how Caro is working on a literary scale and on a larger scale–that he’s not just writing each of these sections to be good reading. But he’s connecting them in a way that is just magnified fractally throughout the book, which I think is so amazing–to hold the whole thing in his head in that way–the whole design.

But here he’s also talking about that idea of blight. And we talked about, in the last chapter, how he was using some language that kind of edged into where we were feeling uncomfortable about how he was describing blight. And I feel like here he is not falling into that same problem. It feels like here he is making it clear that blight is not a problem caused by the poor people in the neighborhood. It’s the problem of those people not having access to adequate housing and adequate resources–and that Moses’ Slum Clearance Title I projects are pushing former residents of those slums into worse housing. And it’s spreading the overcrowding and the problems farther. So, I think–for all the kind of queasiness that we had about some of his language in the last chapter–reading this chapter over again, I was like, “Oh, Mr. Caro, you’re back on firm ground. It’s not the people on the ground that are the problem. It’s the people making decisions above them that are the problem.”

ROMAN MARS: And part of that is told through the eyes of these crusaders who have the time and the empathy, and they’ve just evolved to take people’s individual experiences and not see the failure of a neighborhood as the failure of individuals. It’s really the failure of people like Robert Moses and the city. Pointing out that they might go to a rundown neighborhood–but every time they go into a home, they see that the home is lovely and cared for. And folks really want to have nice things, but the system is really stacked against them. And this is further motivating their actions to recognize that this isn’t a thing that anyone deserves. It’s a thing being done to them. That’s the heartening part of all this, is that there’s these people out there that are the antithesis of Moses.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And for all that we’ve heard about how people need to be cleared out of slums, it becomes clear to these activists, too, as they talk to people there that these are poor neighborhoods. These are neighborhoods that the public parts of them that individual families can’t control are rundown or not clean. But their houses are clean or the insides are clean. And also they don’t want to leave these places. This is where their communities are. They’re worried about being relocated to places that are even smaller–more expensive. And it’s tough. The people there don’t want to leave those places. They prefer to have the homes they live in improved and being given access to the resources to do that. But their fear is that they’re going to be forced out and scattered to the winds. And the activists are on top of it. They’re out there. They’re trying to get the newspapers to cover it. They go to the New York Times. Is the New York Times interested in this story, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: No, sir, they are not.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No. They’re like, “We’re not an investigative paper. Maybe take it somewhere else.” I was like, “Well, then what do you do? What does a reporter do other than investigate?”

And so they start to do things in their own way. And Orton–from the City Planning Commission–I really love what he’s doing here. So, he works in the master plan unit, which nobody has been paying attention to. We talked in an earlier episode. New York does not have a master building plan. Moses very successfully stopped that from happening. But there’s this master plan unit. And he is like, “Well, nobody pays attention to us. We can do whatever we want.” So, they just become kind of an eviction data collecting unit in looking at how many people have been evicted, what happens to them afterwards, and the consequences for the city. And Orton acts like he’s the member of an underground resistance team, which I find kind of adorable, to be honest.

And Orton is working with bad data–incomplete data. The only people who may have the right numbers are people at Randall’s Island–maybe people in Triborough. And Moses and his men have used their influence to keep those statistics out of the public eye. And so, they’re working with just the statistics they can get from Triborough, which are deliberately kept low by generalizing rather than actually counting people. And even with that low end estimate, Orton’s Group says that 170,000 people have been displaced in New York City for these public works in the seven years since the end of World War II. And Caro–he loves lists. So, he goes, “More people than lived in Albany, Phoenix, Little Rock, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Topeka, Baton Rouge, Trenton, Santa Fe…” And I’ll stop it there, but a good sized small city of people have been removed. And a remarkably disproportionate number of those displaced people are Black or Puerto Rican and poor.

And this is this Orton survey that confirms the suspicions of the liberals. And they find that, while Moses has been promising to relocate people, he usually just–as we’ve seen–moves them from one pre-demolished building to the next. And a third of the resident files are marked, “disappeared, whereabouts unknown.” And Caro writes about how Moses couldn’t really know if the living quarters that people were going to were better or equivalent to where they left because he doesn’t even know where those living quarters are. He doesn’t know where these people went to. So, when he’s saying, “Oh yeah, everyone ended up in better housing,” there’s no way. But it’s a safe bet that they’re not moving into a better situation than the one that they were forced out of. And there’s this parallel here with what we saw in East Tremont where a lot of these neighborhoods, the activists are finding, are valued by their residents, even with their flaws, but not by outsiders. And the outsiders are the ones making the decisions, but the residents here have an even greater sense of helplessness because they know, as people of color disproportionately, they have even less of a say in this system in their own future. And they have even less access to housing in the rest of the city. These are the people who are really at the biggest disadvantage and the most vulnerable to this kind of slum clearance pushing them into worse and worse living situations.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s really tragic stuff. All that sort of bullying–the sort of, like, “You need to be out in 10 days”–that’s completely bogus. All that sort of stuff… I don’t even know. I am a person of great means. If the city of Berkeley put a thing on my door that said you had to be out in 10 days, I would freak the fuck out. And it’s just miserable. It’s one of these things– The roads, the bad thinking, and the bad planning is one thing. This kind of not feeling safe and secure in your home, which is really the emotional center of feeling safe in your home and being able to relax at the end of a day, is so fundamental to a healthy person’s life. And to think about that they’re on edge all the time and then he treats it as nothing… I mean, one of the things that he’s doing is he’s triple and quadruple and maybe quintuple counting what’s available. So, he’s building things, and he’s like, “Yeah, we got a thousand units available for people.” But they’ve already been promised. And it’s kind of like he’s just doing the shell game when he is trying to answer for this stuff. And it’s just gross behavior.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s really gross. And he’s not oblivious to the problem. I think that’s part of the issue. It’s not like he’s like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that. I thought we were doing great.” No, he knows what he’s doing. He knows that even the housing that they are producing is priced at a point that is too high for the people he’s evicting to afford–that he is replacing housing for the poor with housing for the middle class. And these facts are available to him because he’s hiding these facts. It’s not like the liberal dream of going to him and saying, “Did you notice this?” and him going, “Oh no, I never realized that. Guys, shut it down. Shut it down.” Instead, he’s like, “Yeah, I know what I’m doing and I don’t care.”

And so activists–they start writing up these reports. Orton has his master plan unit write a report. This other group–the Women’s City Club–they write a report. And nobody sees these reports, especially with the Orton report. Moses, I guess, caught wind of it. And his allies in the city planning commission delay the release of that report for nine months. And they rewrite it to be supportive of Moses’ housing work. And they so change the tenor of this report that Orton is like, “I need to be able to write a minority rebuttal to the report that my team wrote that you changed.”

And in the case of the report from the Women’s City Club, Moses’ lawyer, Samuel Rosenman, who I think we mentioned before, who had the ear of presidents and things like that–a very respected figure in New York–he releases his own public rebuttal of that that provides a second set of conflicting facts. So, city reporters are like, “I don’t know which facts to choose from–this women’s club or this guy who’s a well-respected part of the Democratic government establishment. I guess we just won’t deal with it.”

And the newspapers either bury or ignore the reports completely. If they cover it, they lead with this proposal that Moses people inserted deliberately as a diversion, saying they might increase the city tax on telephones to pay for housing. So, if there’s any coverage of these reports about how massively the housing developments are failing people of the city, it is about how we don’t want to pay higher fat tax on telephones. It’s some totally irrelevant, not real proposal. And at one point, the New York Times quotes Moses’ reply to the Orton rebuttal, and Orton is like, “I didn’t even know he had written a reply until it was quoted in the New York Times. No one even told me that he rebutted my rebuttal.” And the papers, ultimately, don’t care what happens to poor people.This is a heartbreaking sentence–Caro says, “The fate of poor people had never been news in New York City. It still was not news.” And it’s such a sad, truthful statement of the abdication of any sort of power to take care of people who desperately need that help. Yeah, news in New York City is not that people are poor and poor people get pushed around. That’s not news. People either assume it or they don’t want to know about it or they don’t care about it. That sentence, when I was rereading this chapter, just sprung out at me. It hit me so hard because it’s still true to such a great extent.

ROMAN MARS: For sure. For sure. And here, in all this dealing with Title I and independent developers, is where a lot of old fashioned corruption happens and skimming. And it seems like this might be something that could build into a scandal, although it somehow doesn’t. But I still don’t– Could you describe the scandal that’s potentially happening here?

ELLIOTT KALAN: I would love to. I would love to. In 1954, the Senate actually investigated one of the projects that was being done to look at the books. And we get a cameo in the book from Senator Prescott Bush, who–when this book was written–was not yet the father and grandfather of presidents of the United States of America. He’s just a senator. And they talk about how, for instance, real estate worth $15 million on the open market had been given to developers for $1 million. And in the time that these developers have been mandated to tear down 338 buildings, they’ve torn down 58. And the other 280 are not only still standing, the developers are running them and collecting rent from the tenants. And so essentially developers who have promised to tear down buildings and build new better buildings are instead just taking over the management of those buildings and raising the rents and refusing to maintain the buildings. So, people are paying more for worse, living in slums.

And then there’s just classic stuff. There’s fake legal fees. You put your family members on the staff of this development company and pay them money. And there’s a great one that I love that I want to read to you on page 981 about this guy Casper, who’s running one of these. And it says, “Casper had skimmed off for himself and his family $115,000 in less than a year. He set up a separate corporation headed by his son-in-law. Manhattan Town sold the son-in-law’s corporation and all the gas stoves and refrigerators in the tenements for $33,000 and then rented them right back from the corporation, paying it in effect for the privilege of using what had been its own appliances.” And they’re able to make so much money just corruptly milking what the city and the federal government are pouring into this and turning into the most basic kind of graft. And by then, it says, eventually, financially, this development project–Manhattan Town, in this case–it was back where it started from. It had made no progress. But his son-in-law had pocketed $115,000. So, it’s a success as far as the Casper family is concerned.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And so it’s that kind of classic graft.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. But none of this corruption–even though it has Senate hearings, even though it’s written about a little bit, even though it probably isn’t written about enough–none of this blows back to Robert Moses, the head of all this.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And Robert Moses is both the beneficiary and the shield for these projects in that way. I think there’s this understanding still–there’s this assumption–if incorruptible Robert Moses, the people’s public servant, the man with the parks, if he’s in charge of it, these things must be going fine. His word still carries weight. If he says it’s fine, it must be fine. And there’s such an ingested assumed assumption on the part– The most redundant thing I could possibly say. “Assumed assumption.” There’s such an understanding on the part of the editors at newspapers that Robert Moses is incorruptible that they tell the reporters, “There’s probably not a story here. This is probably a bad apple–this one bad apple that maybe Moses didn’t know about.” Or they’re so afraid of his power in the political world that they won’t go after it. And so he’s able to keep his name out of the official proceedings because he’s so powerful. And he’s able to keep his name out of the papers because he’s seen as such a saint. Why would you bother to investigate him?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. When all these facts are complicated–the trail is hard to follow–they land on this one fact. What they think is a foundational truth is that it can’t really be all that bad because Moses is the one in charge. And that is what they rely on to the detriment of the city and to all these people. It really is a failure on the part of the people who should be reporting these types of things.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it’s the kind of thing that we still see in reporting today quite a bit, and which I’m sure we’ll talk about later in the episode. Just as Moses has cut himself off from new information–and this has meant that his work is at best stale and at worst destructive–the people in charge at these newspaper organizations have cut themselves off from the possibility of new information. Robert Moses–they understand him. They know him. They’ve known him for years. It’s not worth looking in and finding something new. And so they miss out on this enormous scandal–this enormous story. And so, from 1952 to 1956, there are, as Caro says, rumors and reports of rumors of the damage that Moses is doing to the people in these slum clearance housing projects. But the papers barely touch it. And Moses’ reputation remains firm. And the rest of the book kind of seems to bear out the idea that, again, it’s because the things he’s doing are affecting the poor. They’re affecting the people at the bottom of the ladder who the people at other rungs of the ladder–unless they are particularly empathetic or open-hearted people–do not care about. But Caro ends this chapter with a little glimmer of hope in there. He says, “Before the people would be willing to look at Moses’ program straight on, they would have to look at Moses straight on. And before the public could do that, there would have to be an issue that would show him so clearly for what he was that there could be no mistake.” And in this next chapter, Roman–in the next episode–we will cover that mistake and we’ll find that it is maybe the least of all the things that Robert Moses did that was wrong. But it’ll happen. It’ll happen in the next episode.

ROMAN MARS: It’s so funny and weird and it feels so true that the thing that brings someone down or just really does have a sort of mortal wound to him is something that just matters so much less than everything else horrible that he’s done.

ELLIOTT KALAN: All these things. It’s the Capone tax evasion charge of Robert Moses to a certain extent. But that’s one of the lessons of the book that, I feel like, is not talked about too much–at least in my hearing about it. There’s so much talk about cities and how they work and things like that, but the idea that the things that get noticed are less about what’s being done than about who they’re being done to. And the victim matters even more, in some cases, than the act, especially if that victim has connections to the news media, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. But we will get to more of The Loss of Power next time. Coming up, our conversation with Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones and one of your fellow book club participants.

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ROMAN MARS: And now, our conversation with Clara Jeffery. Clara has been with Mother Jones for more than 20 years and has been editor in chief since 2015. Clara now oversees the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces the exceptional radio show and podcast Reveal after that organization merged with Mother Jones this year. Earlier in her career while she was at Harper’s Magazine, Clara edited several essays by the great investigative journalist Barbara Ehrenreich from when Ehrenreich went undercover as a low wage worker to expose the impact of welfare reform on the working poor. Those essays later became part of Ehrenreich’s seminal 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed. To me, Mother Jones and CIR do the reporting that’s closest to what the Power Broker did when it was published–reporting that drills down deep and explains systems, challenges the status quo, holds the powerful accountable, and focuses on the humanity of the people affected.

Well, thank you so much for being on The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. It’s just a pleasure to have you.

CLARA JEFFERY: Well, I’m really excited to be part of the Carossance. the volume of material to ingest– The book itself. Your guys’ podcast. There are movies. There are articles. It is just a phenomenal upwelling of interest about this book, which is beloved by many for decades. But it’s really kind of nice to have this national reading project that you guys have convened.

ROMAN MARS: I’ve been so heartened by people taking this on and taking it into their heart and taking on the task of reading this true tour de force of journalism. And one of the reasons I want to talk to you is you’ve been on the front lines of this fight for a long time for championing investigative journalism and society and making sure that we have a healthy ecosystem. And so when you read this book, how does it make you feel as someone who is always thinking about stuff like this–fighting to keep Mother Jones alive–often from existential threats, like from people trying to sue it out of existence. So, how do you feel when you read The Power Broker?

CLARA JEFFERY: I mean, first of all, just an utter admiration for the work involved by Caro, by Robert Gottlieb as editor, by everybody else, and by Ina Caro helping her husband with research for 40 years now. Just everyone I’m sure– And the publishers. I’ll admit– I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I don’t think you can read The Power Broker and kind of contemplate this all as a journalist or a public policy person and not feel a great sense of imposter syndrome. You’re like, “My God, what have I been doing with my life?”

ROMAN MARS: We’ll answer that for you. You’ve been doing plenty.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, I’ll take the other side of this debate. Not enough, not enough.

CLARA JEFFERY: Not enough. Never enough. And I think one of the things in kind of contemplating this is how indefatigable Moses is, Caro is, and Gottlieb is in this weird– Speaking as an editor, I throw the editor in there, too. And that just obsessiveness is a hallmark of investigative journalists and lots of different kinds of journalists–but I think particularly investigative journalists. It’s a personality trait that has many great qualities about it. And also we’re a little squirrely sometimes. So, just contemplating the sort of full sweep of the book and how much it has really just influenced so many people, I think, both directly–people who remember reading it or are reading it now–and indirectly because I think that sort of demonstration down to the detail of every little deal and every little inch of land he wrested from somebody or another in one way or another. And to tell that all compellingly is really awe-inspiring.

ROMAN MARS: One of the things that comes up a lot when Elliott and I are discussing the book and when we’re doing the summaries is I’ll read a paragraph that is just… You know, he just put together all the facts and figures of this one little highway. And I think about him assembling that information before the internet–before he wrote it down himself because he became the source of it all after a certain point–and just how hard one of these single paragraphs that he just tosses off is. It’s so nice to be around another journalist who understands how hard some of these– When you go through a book of 1,200 pages, noting that there’s a single paragraph in Chapter 40 that probably would take me three months to assemble maybe–it’s staggering.

CLARA JEFFERY: It is, and it’s this sort of particular kind of detail that you find by combing through files and bills and et cetera. But then also just his–whatever–500+ interviews. And clearly he interviewed some of these folks multiple times, which he sometimes really acknowledges and other times is a little bit more coy about it. But to combine both of those skills– Journalists often sort of go down one route or the other either. There’s sort of personality-driven journalism or really in the details in the weeds. And it takes a special talent to fuse those so well and to make it a compelling psychological study–and not just of him but, like, La Guardia and Al Smith and all these people that you’re just really pulled along by the human drama as well as you’re getting to know the exact cement mix of some overpass or whatever or exactly what way he fileted a assemblyman to get what he wants. So–yeah–just truly awesome.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s a relief to me because I was worried that you were going to say that, as an investigative reporter, you’d be looking through it at times being like, “That’s not how I would’ve done that. Oh, this isn’t how I would do it.” That’s the same way that when I watch a comedy show on TV, my wife hates it because I just sit there going, “Not how I would’ve written that.” Do you ever have that moment when looking through it? Or is it just such a monumental work that you can’t even find a single crack in its edifice?

CLARA JEFFERY: I think there’s some cracks in its edifice, but it’s more like in contemplating what he ended up cutting and some of the stuff that he didn’t cut. I think in the documentary Turn Every Page, which is about him and his editor Bob Gottlieb, he… Well, Gottlieb is talking about being a completist himself. And in that conversation, he sort of is indicating things that he might’ve wanted to cut. And he doesn’t exactly spell out what that is, but it seems to be the sort of summation pieces at the end of every chapter or the sort of, like, “Let me once again step back and tell you the sheer awesomeness of the power that Robert Moses had assembled.” And yet, I mean, I think for a book this ginormous, people even back in the ’70s were probably reading it not as one big sit down experience with this 12-pound tome in your lap or whatever but “okay, now I’m going to take on a chapter or two.” And it does allow you to come back to the book having been away for a while and not lose the threads. So, even there, if I had to pick a sniggle, I guess it would be that. But it’s so minor in the scheme of things.

ROMAN MARS: Speaking about this relationship of the editor and the author, another fundamental text in my life was Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. You served as the editor at Harper’s when it was developing into the book it became. Can you talk about that process of working with someone and having it kind of work for a magazine and then become a book–what that was like?

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, I mean, I worked on a couple of… There are sort of three parts to the book and I worked on two out of three of them when I was at Harper’s–and the first being sort of going undercover, as it were, as a waitress in a chain restaurant. And it was really fascinating. That kind of thing had become so verboten. Any kind of undercover work sort of went through this, like, “Oh no, the Grand Poobahs of journalism say we can’t do that. And she had the idea that she wanted to do it. And then we talked through a lot. I remember one of the interesting– I was a very young editor and she was already a superstar. but one of the things that I had to sort of reinforce is you actually have to back up and say– Now, I’m doing exactly what maybe Caro would want. You have to back up and say why this is important. You have to back up and also admit that, as hard as it was for you to do this job for a month or two, it’s not nearly as hard as it would be for someone who had no other recourse and couldn’t pull the plug at any moment or talk to their kids on the phone or know that they were going back to their literary life. And it was interesting. I remember having a discussion with her. She’s like, “Do I really need to do that?” I’m like, “I do really think you need to do that.” Maybe a little bit generational. I feel like that’s the kind of thing a young person would tell me now. They’d be like, “You really got to get in there and admit your privilege.” That wasn’t even the vocabulary that we had back then, but it was part of that conversation for sure. I’d worked on several other pieces with her that were about vaguely defense industry stuff and another piece– I did a big bunch of pieces on sort of pinkwashing and breast cancer, which then became a book for her kind of down the road. And her writing was always lovely and her thought process was always fantastic. So, it was just those little tweaks of often you need to provide more context or you may not come off so great in this way if you phrase it just in this manner… And very gracious at taking input–

ROMAN MARS: That’s what I was going to ask.

CLARA JEFFERY: No pushover–mind you–but gracious.

ROMAN MARS: And what are those conversations like? Do you get to a point where you build a rapport where that works and you can be very blunt, or do you always have to be kind of circumspect in your sort of criticism so that everyone feels okay in the end?

CLARA JEFFERY: I think that very much varies by the author that you’re working with–partly their personality and how yours interacts, how much experience they have, and how insecure versus overly secure sometimes people are. So, you are often playing a little bit of shrink where your job is to get the best work out of them and help support them in that process and not let them do things that would damage the project or damage their own reputation. I think, sadly, that latter part has gotten a little bit lost in some corners of journalism where having someone get messy on the page is sort of the goal rather than keeping people from sort of self-harm in a writerly way. But yeah, so it’s always partly shrink and supporter and then you’re always kind cracking the whip a little bit. There’s always a deadline of some sort. Bob Caro doesn’t have one, but I think most other people do. And the way the industry has become– I mean, I think just another thing, reading this book and the LBJ books, is just like, “Wow, this… Even if it was Bob Caro, would this happen now just on an industry economics point?” And that’s really kind of tragic to think about–that there’s just not… The economy of the business or the priorities of the business have kind of changed whether it’s in books or magazines or newspapers or whatever. And there’s still a lot of great stuff being done, but some things it’s hard to imagine would still happen.

ROMAN MARS: You really do feel… There are parts of the book where I feel like it’s super relevant to today. It has a ton of lessons in it. I mean, we talk about them all the time. It also does feel like a product of a different era of just imagining this book hitting the shelves. I can’t remember the last time something like this sort of came out of nowhere–a big tome about something came out of nowhere–and surprised people as a bestseller. Maybe that book Capital that came out 10 years ago that was also big and dense and seemed very challenging in some ways. But still, this is a rare example of a kind of excellence that you do worry doesn’t have the chance to get past the seedling stage in today’s world.

CLARA JEFFERY: And it’s really interesting. I wasn’t able to find that much about it exactly. It seemed to take off right away. And maybe because it’s in New York and because Gottlieb was his editor and because all of these things and Nesbit was his agent, that was going to happen. But it is kind of phenomenal that it didn’t happen–so far as I can tell–because a lot of people were having their suspicions confirmed. There are a lot of books that come out that are like, “Hey, everyone knows this thing is bad. Let me show you how bad it is or why it’s bad or maybe good.” And this felt like the entire topic was not very well understood even by journalists and scholars of the time. But I say that– You guys are now the experts, so please correct me if I’ve–

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, it certainly seems like it wasn’t. That’s one of the exciting things about the book. One of the interesting things about the book now, looking at it on its 50th anniversary, is that it’s so become the default way of thinking among so many people about these topics. And at the time, it very much wasn’t. And it’s one of those things where… Also, you were saying how… Would something like this happen today? And I kind of feel like it almost didn’t happen then–a book like this. And there was a certain amount of novelty, I think, when it came out of, “Are you going to read this huge book about Robert Moses, the parks commissioner? You’re going to. Can you believe this book is about Robert Moses?” Robert Moses now– Because the Caro view–which is not as straightforwardly flat as it’s often taken to be–of this guy did more harm than good likely or did a lot of harm is so taken now. But at the time, it was almost like not just, “Ugh, are you going to read this whole book demonizing Robert Moses,” but literally, “Are you going to read this whole book about the most boring man in the world, Robert Moses?” And so it has this uphill battle of even just getting people interested. And Caro talks about how people would say to him, “No one’s going to read this book,” not because he wrote it or because it’s big. No one’s going to read a book on this topic because it’s so boring. But I feel like, every now and then, there’s one of those… Just the right book at the right time hits it, where a book that should exist in academic libraries only if the normal rules of market economics applied suddenly becomes this enormous thing. And with a book like this, it’s got to be partly because it’s such a rich, satisfying read, I think. But it’s true. It’s a funny thing that– Exactly what you’re saying. At the time, it wasn’t just that people liked Robert Moses. People didn’t even think about him. It was not even an interesting topic.

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah. And I mean, I can only imagine it was very much helped along. Like, if Robert Moses had happened in LA or Chicago or another great huge important city but maybe not the heart of where publishing is, would people have been like, “Wait a minute, that’s why I don’t have a playground? That’s why I can’t get to the airport by the subway?” So, I think there… I have no doubt that that kind of helped accelerate the uptake of the book. But it’s also remarkable that he pretty much just had written it. And then he’s like, “Hey, I need an agent. Hey, I need an editor.” And then he kind of got the best of the best on both counts. And that also feels like, on the one hand–yes–this work totally deserves that rare purchase in the industry. But also it feels very serendipitous. It could have just not happened.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And a good reminder too–for all Robert Caro is responsible for this book–how many other people were involved in making it and bringing it to fruition. His agent, his editor, and his wife–how many people were necessary to then lift up this book that Robert Caro’s name is on the cover of because he wrote it. But it was not a one person job to get a book like this off the ground–not just because it’s enormous. It’s very hard to lift a book like this by yourself.

CLARA JEFFERY: Well, I think it’s really notable. I just want to highlight that for a whole bunch of reasons, like feminism and the need for two incomes, having your wife be your research assistant… Maybe they figured out a way to pay her directly through the contract, but that is a thing that wouldn’t happen today for mostly good reasons. But who knows how that would’ve ended up without such a steady research partner who literally knew him better than anyone and could go– Because it doesn’t seem like he’s a guy who kind trusts a lot of people to go figure something out for him. So it literally took being married to a presumably world-class researcher to kind of help get this over the line–and the LBJ books as well.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Very much so. Along the lines of changing people’s minds, basically, Robert Caro–you feel, in The Power Broker, how hard he’s pushing to at least bring to the attention of the people reading this book what Robert Moses was responsible for and to change the general myth about him. And Mother Jones is often, it feels like, doing kind of similar work of trying to push people so that their assumptions aren’t taken for granted as assumptions–but instead to question them. What does it feel like to be doing that work because it’s not just a work of reporting but a work of trying to move the reader to a place beyond being informed to understanding something in a different way. And do you feel a kinship with the book in that way? What’s that kind of work?

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, I think the work that we do and the work that Caro does and many other journalists– But we were into systemic stuff before “systemic” was a buzzword. So, it’s not just looking at the sort of individual “how did this contract come about?” “How did this person become the underling that helped him push this through?” But I think Caro is very insistent in a way that… Because it wasn’t the first book that’d ever done– I mean, Upton Sinclair is right there however many years earlier. But there is a way that he’s just really insistent not only that you know what happened but why it happens and the sort of failings of other bodies and people to stop this person from doing all the harm that he did do–and not that he only did harm. I think that that’s important. And you get this incredible Shakespearean arc of his temperament and his kind of ego. And that really helps draw you through. If he were just a super villain at the beginning of the book, I think a lot of people wouldn’t be as interested because more complicated villains are better villains generally. So, in that sense, I think, to again weave that sort of psychological profile together with the incredible investigative reporting… He’s not the only one who has done it, but he does it incredibly well.

ROMAN MARS: In the section that we’re talking about in this episode, there’s a lot–actually it’s throughout the book–of The New York Times in particular failing to hold Robert Moses into account. I mean, this is a time period where there was maybe 27 local New York newspapers. You know what I mean? There’s a lot of newspapers back then. And still the degree to which one big news entity not sort of seeing the story here or not valuing it or not agreeing with the criticism really set the agenda and for what the city did… And it strikes me that today, in terms of the news media, it’s even worse. There’s just fewer people doing the work. When you hear– I’m not one of these knee-jerk “the media gets it wrong” type of people at all. I’m a big supporter. I like tons of people who make news and who write the news and investigate the news. But could you reflect on this idea of what it means to not have a diverse body of work or people working to hold power accountable?

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, I mean, let’s first start with the failings of the media back then about Caro–

ROMAN MARS: About Moses.

CLARA JEFFERY: Sorry, about Moses, yes. As you say, the Times was probably the worst offender–maybe mostly because it, then as now, was the most important of the papers. And it seems like this really started with Iphigene– Am I pronouncing her name right? Sulzberger?

ROMAN MARS: See, I say “Iphigene.” And you say something. But Elliott says it differently, too, I remember.

CLARA JEFFERY: I looked up also the Greek pronunciation. I’m like, “I’m not touching that. I’m going to completely mangle that if I try.” But, in any case–

ELLIOTT KALAN: In any case, I say “Iffy G.,” which was her recording name.

CLARA JEFFERY: Iffy G. is a great rap name.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m the owner of the Times, and I’m spitting out rhymes. That kind of stuff. Yeah, it was early. It was early. It was primitive hip hop. But she was on the forefront.

CLARA JEFFERY: She was a great parks lover and booster and so really admired not everything but mostly what he did with the parks stuff. And then that just set the glide path to being blind or throwing her hands up at everything else because both that work was so important to her and then once the Times, I think, had kind of got into, you know, my view about him… I was thinking about how different actually reporting was back then because–say you were even a reporter who got on a story about Moses 10, 20 years into his power–if you were a Times reporter, the place that you go look for what to think about him and what to know about him would’ve been your own on…

ROMAN MARS: Paper…

CLARA JEFFERY: Clip archives that would’ve been brought up to you in some kind of folder by the people who work in the morgue–what they call the “clip room.” And so, the prejudice or the bias is sort of baked in generationally. Even if the publisher’s wife wasn’t putting her finger on the scale of anything that kind of rose to “are we really going to get into it?” kind of territory–just on the sort of incidental, prosaic front that they would be kind of relying on their past work… And so, you know, once there’s a bias or a blind spot, that just gets reinforced. And I think we see that time and again by the media in general and specifically. And then there’s a sort of, well, listening to the money men. I mean, that’s always been a problem–just like, “Well, these are the people who have the money and the power, and they say this is good. And so, we’re all for it.” I think what was interesting about these chapters is it was the Women’s… WWC, right? The Women’s Council?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah–that did the investigating in the sort of low-income areas. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The Women’s City Club. Yeah.

CLARA JEFFERY: Women’s City Club. There you go. Who went out and did their own investi– and not journalists. But they did their own investigation to track down what happened to the tenants of the various Title I housing projects that were being displaced. They were told they were going to get some kind of new housing that would be as good or better than the housing that they had been booted from. What actually happened? And these women really did a heroic job–again–not professional journalists. In the mores of the times, probably not a thing that a lot of women went out to do that often. And they found this great stuff. And then they went to all the papers. And the papers did a little bit here and there but seemed to mostly shrug it off.

And so, again, now they would have other venues to maybe take that. They’d make a TikTok. I don’t know what they’d do, but they’d get that information out somehow, hopefully. But at the time, that was sort of it. You could go to the reporters–almost all of whom were men–and give them the dossier that you had prepared. And they would take you seriously or not and be willing to run up against their editors or not if they found interference there. So, that was sort of, in part, the structure back then. I mean, today–honestly–what I’m worried about is when people, certainly on social media, kind of spin themselves up about a terrible Times headline or this, that, and the other. I think that the real problem the media is facing is there’s just so much less media.

I mean, Robert Caro first got into this as, like, a reporter at Newsday. And someday where everybody else was at the company picnic, he was the only guy left on the city desk. And someone was like, “I got a big dossier on some regional airport situation.” And he tried to call the investigative editors and reporters and everyone who was at the picnic. And so, eventually, he just goes and looks through all this stuff. And in his telling, that’s how he got this bug. And there aren’t a lot of reporters out there in the world who get to spend days and weeks combing through papers. I mean, a lot of places, nobody’s going to city council meetings and nobody’s going to zoning board meetings. There’s just nothing. And so I’m much more worried, in the broadest view, that the problem with the media right now is that it’s sort of like if you imagine a marine food web or something. And you might be focused on the tuna or the whale or whatever. But if there’s no plankton, all of that stuff eventually runs into real trouble. And that, I think, is the largest problem. Yes, there’s still bias and blind spots. Journalists are humans, but it’s, I mean, hundreds of thousands of jobs in the last decade alone–all across the country.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I mean, that’s what I read into this when he has these criticisms of the New York Times–not so much that the fix was in or some kind of thing. It is about that sort of institutional legacy–the trust of institutions. So, when Robert Moses says something, a few rabble-rousers don’t really merit… And the fact that all this information is funneled towards a couple people with their biases– And therefore the best remedy for that is having a lot of people with a lot of different biases. You’re not going to eliminate the biases, but it’s nice to have a bunch of people who– Because other biases, like mine, would be like, “Oh yeah, let’s take that fucker down.” You know what I mean? My instinct is to not believe him rather than to believe him. And I wouldn’t be a responsible steward of a paper if I always acted on that impulse either, but there’s enough papers that it all comes out in the wash. But the idea that there was that choke point then–and now, so much of our, like, “The New York Times is there to defend our democracy,” last one on the wall type of thing–really scares the crap out of me.

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, I mean, again, I think mostly what the Times does is great. And it’s just that we need more than just the Times.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, exactly.

CLARA JEFFERY: And where there’s just the Times there, nothing is a check on the Times. And they’re so much bigger than even the next biggest paper in both reach and influence that it’s also an ecosystem where everyone’s trying to get to the Times. I mean, not everyone. But that’s where the career paths go. And that also really has a sort of punishing effect on really important journalism that isn’t based in New York that requires a different type of person to go out and report it–different life experiences. So yeah, it’s a little grim out there for the media.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it feels a little bit like the New York Times is the United States of America of newspapers where it’s much bigger than any of the other ones, it’s much more powerful than the other ones, but it’s imperfect. The idea that there should be a perfect paper that does everything you want it to do is an insane notion, especially when you look back in The Power Broker and you’re like, “Oh, they’ve kind of always been like this.” It’s always been a flawed newspaper. And I remember, 20 years ago, coming out of college and reading the Times’ coverage of whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and, at the time, being like, “How could the Times do this?” And it’s frustrating to feel like it’s 50 years after the fact and I’m still kind of frustrated with The New York Times for the same things back then. But again, it’s only people. I shouldn’t expect so much of them just because they have the word “New York” in their name. But I do, you know?

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, I think there was a line in there that was like, “The fate of poor people had never been a subject of news in New York City, and it wasn’t now.” And I think that that is still true, again, in part because, even with the Times, there’s just not enough people going out and covering all these little things that would lead you to the big story necessarily. But also, those aren’t the stories that are going to get you a lot of attention most of the time. Yes, if you produce The Power Broker, you’ll get some attention. But the individual stories that might lead you there if you’re a beat reporter are probably not the most well read, well regarded, and well shared. And those amplification incentive factors are even greater in the social media era for sure.

ROMAN MARS: When I think about the qualities–the hallmarks–of a big Mother Jones story, it shares a lot of the DNA of The Power Broker. It has sort of a humanist point of view. It’s about systems and trying to get an investigation to get the facts and sort of reveal a system. But that is a rarer and rarer position that magazines occupy. How do you keep that going? What is the underlying principle that keeps that to be the forefront of what Mother Jones does?

CLARA JEFFERY: I mean, it is really interesting. In some ways, I think it’s almost driven by the products that you have. We have a magazine, and that’s been a staple. And now we have a long form radio show that does, in a very different way, the same sort of intensive investigative journalism. And because we have those things, we have the muscle memory and we make those things. And we make other things! We do a lot of short video. We do a lot of daily news reporting. But it is harder and harder to access workplaces that operate in longer form, more in depth work. They’re just, again, fewer of them. So, I think that that’s part of it. And then I think Mother Jones has always held up as this mission, like, looking out for the little guy–looking out for the people that are getting quashed by whatever it is. Sometimes it’s government. Sometimes it’s private industry. But a lot of the great work that we do comes from just asking, “What’s happening to these people? Why are we hearing about this amazing thing? And what’s the underside to that?”

For example, a few years ago, Shane Bauer did this fantastic piece where he went, again, undercover in a private prison. And we had done a lot of private prison reporting, and he is a delightful madman who wanted to do this. And there were many sleepless nights for more than a year, but–

ELLIOTT KALAN: I was going to say, that seems like the scariest possible– Or one of the two or three scariest possible assignments I can imagine, unless it was like, “You’re going to live in a den of tigers for a year. See what it’s to be a tiger.”

CLARA JEFFERY: He also went undercover with a militia.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yikes.

CLARA JEFFERY: So, it wasn’t his only piece like that for us. And since–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Every now and then, you hear about a job and you’re like, “I am not cut out to do that job. I’m glad somebody else is. Yeah.”

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah. And I think one of the most interesting things about that work, for example, was that Shane had been held in captivity by Iran for more than a year. So, he had been in solitary confinement. He had his own personal, crazy journey through one of the worst prisons in the world. But that said, he brought a real sense of humanity to the guards who he realized are all earning nine bucks an hour and are really not that much different than the prisoners that are guarding. Their economic circumstances aren’t that different. These are the only jobs around. What does it mean to have to do that kind of a job, especially in a facility that is so under-resourced, as many of them are? And I think that, too, is really having that kind of eye for the humanity, even in the things that you find to be suspect or corrupt in some way, which I think Caro is also really good at. I mean, Moses himself, I think, becomes an increasingly remote figure when it comes to sympathy from the reader. But we get to know him better and better.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

CLARA JEFFERY: And that is just so important to this kind of work.

ROMAN MARS: And you know the human he was when he started, which makes the whole narrative arc so compelling. You sense his idealism and his vision for seeing things that no one else can see. And it’s one of the things that, I think, when people are craving a modern day Moses in terms of people who can get stuff done and who can dream big and build big things and create their megapolises… I think that’s what they’re drawn to. If it was just the latter part, I don’t know if they would be quite as drawn to it. But I am struck by this idea. One of the things I’ve been trying to articulate to people… I’ve been interviewed a lot about this sort of anniversary and…

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’ve noticed, Roman. I’ll get a lot of Google alerts that are like, “Oh, Roman Mars is talking about this thing.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay, interesting. I was involved in that podcast.” I’m just kidding–mostly.

ROMAN MARS: But one of the things I’ve said in every one of them that’s never been picked up on–because it’s not a very good sound bite–is I think one of the underlying benefits to people reading this book is not learning how cities are built or how power is done or this sort of deep exploration of this man, Robert Moses. It’s actually sitting in the company of this really thoughtful humanist in the form of Robert Caro and the way he sees the world. And that is what is so uplifting and profound about the book when so much of it can be dire and very devastating to read.

CLARA JEFFERY: I think one of the things I love most about this book is that he does center the little people. He does a great job at finding… I don’t know if it was really women who, again and again, were, like, the people jumping in Robert Moses’ way. But he does a great job of–whether it’s the Women’s City Club or the Tremont folks who are housewives leading the charge there–really going out and finding them and treating them with dignity and respect and doing the careful work of taking them seriously and really understanding their circumstances. And there’s a version of this book that would still be very good but didn’t accomplish that. And I think that is the difference-maker honestly in this. I mean the majesty of it all for sure–but it’s those small, intimate details and stories and the sort of sympathy and empathy that he brings to folks that he may not have had all that much in common with before or known much about. But you know that he is going to go spend eight months on that avenue to figure out everybody who was involved in that movement–and he manages to pull that off well.

ELLIOTT KALAN: In a lot of the retrospectives that have been coming out, especially now– There’s also a lot of articles coming out that are like, “50 years on, The Power Broker doesn’t do everything right.” And it’s like, “Well, of course, yeah. It’s a book. And also it’s a half a century old, so…” But I’ve seen a number of times and also in the contemporary reviews of it that they accuse it of pushing the kind of great man view of history that Moses is this great world changer and everyone else is just kind of in his wake. And it feels like that’s such a misreading to me of so much of the book because he does highlight so many other human beings. They don’t get the same amount of space as Robert Moses does. And each of these people is someone who is striving to accomplish something–is fighting for either their own livelihood or to get some kind of truth out. And we’ve seen them a number of times in the series–these little biographies of these kind of heroes that Caro’s clearly bringing up who are usually people who do a lot of research and a lot of investigation. He likes people who go and look up answers to questions or talk to people to get the answers to questions.

But hidden beneath this kind of argument about why this way of running a city and constructing a city is there, there’s this kind of hidden celebration of ordinary people who are either doing a job that is trying to make a difference or forced out of their normal lives and making a difference in that way. And there’s something very exciting about it. It makes it feel so much more like the portrait of a city than just this one guy and the clay that he’s working with. It’s something that Cara does so well that, now reading other biographies, I do miss it. If there’s a three-sentence sketch of some person, I’m like, “What about that person’s dreams? What about the rest of their life?”

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, I mean, this book really contains multitudes. There are full-on profile-worthy books in there, certainly of LaGuardia and Al Smith but others along the way. And it’s just like, “Wow.” I really felt I learned more about many, many mayors even the really, uh…

ROMAN MARS: Mayor Impy?

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’ve come to really love him for all the wrong reasons, I guess.

CLARA JEFFERY: Than I had known even when I lived in New York. I’m curious what you guys think–if the kind of critique of Moses and everything that Moses stood for kind of set the country and maybe particularly sort of more progressive folks down a path where they were so suspicious of any development and any massive projects, be they public, private, or hybrid, that that’s part of why we kind of find ourselves where we are, which is stuff is crumbling, nothing’s getting built, and everything is being held up in a community meeting, which of course… Even though Jane Jacobs isn’t mentioned in this book, ultimately this sort of city is a collection of neighborhoods that all need to be listened to. If you think that that… We’re in a weird moment where it’s not like anyone wants a Moses, but we also don’t want paralysis.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Roman may disagree with me, but I’m going to draw a parallel between… We clashed so many times on this show. But I’m going to draw a parallel between the way people talk about Robert Caro’s critique of Moses–that it’s elevating him in too much importance and it’s making him too much that the single thing and single source of it all. And I think that that criticism of the book commits the same sin when you look at the history of the United States since this book was written. And it’s not like America didn’t need Robert Caro to make it distrust authority, like Watergate and the Vietnam War and so forth to that. And America didn’t need Robert Caro to make it dislike large spending on public works projects because Ronald Reagan did plenty of that. It feels like it is the same way people will make the criticism–they’ll say, “Robert Moses is a symptom. He’s an avatar of the larger thinking of the time rather than the source of it.” I think you could look at the book kind of the same way in some ways. And to elevate it, maybe it has an outsized proportional importance to urban planners. But that kind of work would only be in this state if America had been driving in that direction to a certain amount anyway. So, as much as I love this book, I feel like I can’t give it all the credit nor blame for what’s going on. Roman, what do you think about that?

ROMAN MARS: I think that’s similar to my reaction to that, which is it wasn’t Caro pointing it out that caused the problem. It’s that Robert Moses built shitty public housing and didn’t maintain it. And that is the part that’s being overcorrected for–that the bad actors who literally built the things and did not care for them and designed these really tight closed systems that had no fault tolerance whatsoever, like a real community does, are the people that failed in this scenario. And pointing it out is not really the issue. You know what I mean? And I don’t think people are overcorrecting The Power Broker. I think they’re overcorrecting for the sins that these people committed. And they were bad. I mean, they really did not serve the communities they were supposed to serve. And we’ve had to deal with that failure for a long, long time. But what I think was powerful about The Power Broker is it teaches you kind of indirectly the method to which to make it better.

I’m really struck by the fact that the book is called The Power Broker. It’s not called The City Builder. It’s not called The Master Builder or whatever other things you might think of as a moniker for Robert Moses. He’s really focused on power and the human here. In a way, he’s not really trying to explain all cities. But what he’s saying is that the root rot of this problem is the lack of democracy. That’s what Caro really holds onto. And to me, these projects or things that fail is that same problem–a kind of lack of input, a lack of care, and a lack of not having enough influences and expertise and material and it all being top-down.

A public housing system is great when everything works. It’s just that it handles failure so poorly. It has to have a diversity of incomes and races. It has to have working lights and safety and stuff. And when one of those things falls apart, like when Pruitt–Igoe fell apart in St. Louis, it crumbles dramatically. But in the beginning, it works really well. And that’s just the problem of an idea in your head versus a thing in action. And it just so happens that the Robert Moses types of the world, who make things, have much more fealty to the idea in their head than the actual thing that’s created. And that would all be worked out through iteration and input and all sorts of other things that would make things good. So, I would say that Robert Moses ruined it for all of us–not the knee-jerk reaction that The Power Broker brings. It is the lived reality of the failure of public housing–the failure to the community it’s supposed to serve, most of all–that I think people are reacting to more than just its criticisms.

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, for sure. I guess what I was sort of driving at is that there’s a critique now–voiced by, among others, Ezra Klein and so forth–that we have gotten into this dynamic where any objector to any project can stop, certainly in California, many projects for any reasons. Sometimes those reasons are valid. Sometimes they’re not that valid. And this, in part, is a system that sort of grew up as a corrective to the absence of that. And I think that that’s a really… I just had that in my head a lot while I was reading this book–about where are we going to hit that balance correctly?

ROMAN MARS: And I think that’s a good criticism of the state of the world–that we’ve probably overcorrected. And a kind of knee-jerk NIMBYism is just a part of our modern progressive DNA. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s a disappointing aspect of a branch of progressivism to not embrace imperfect solutions that will help a lot of people. But I do get a sense that it’s beginning to turn a little bit–the sense that, okay, well, maybe we are too reactionary about change and we have to serve as many people as possible. And I do think that these things come in waves. They come in fashion and go down again. And the truth is, it’s going to be a case by case on every single issue of this. It’s really going to have to be decided based off of the merit of every single development and what the cost is.

And it just so happens that, in the Robert Moses era, it was only up to him. And that’s the huge mistake. And we don’t have that same problem today because there’s not one person. But I do feel that sense of… People have a default sense that a certain type of development is bad. And we have to stop because there’s bigger problems to solve. And we need to sort of take in as much information. The biggest sin that Robert Moses had was that he could take in no new information his entire life. Cars were leisure vehicles. Cars were just going to be for fun.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “We can’t move the road. I already drew the line on the map.”

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

CLARA JEFFERY: And also just like, “I don’t care if I’m in traffic for two hours because I’m sitting in the backseat working and somebody is driving me. Sounds pretty nice, actually.”

ROMAN MARS: And so what I hope is that the leaders of today and the people who support them will accept a kind of thoughtful ambivalence about things–not being just a diehard about one thing or another and just like, “In this case, this makes sense. In this case, this makes sense.” And I would love if we all just got behind people like that.

CLARA JEFFERY: And I do feel a great sense of optimism on that front that I think just Californians, at least, and probably everyone in the country just kind of got so sick of the sclerosis that they just individually dug in and started to figure out zoning codes and go to hearings and so forth because it wasn’t kind of breaking out of the dynamics that it had been in for a long time. And that is super encouraging. And I think shows that really explain this kind of thing, as yours does, also help us.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Hopefully. If there’s anything we are getting across in this show, I hope it’s that the one correct and true reading of The Power Broker is, in my opinion, it’s not that he’s saying, “This is the way to build and this is not the way to build,” but that every project is a series of choices and decisions and you have to make those choices and decisions as judiciously as you can based on the best information. And it feels like you could go through that book, project-by-project, with Robert Caro and he might say, “This one they did okay. This one maybe they should have done differently. This one was good.” He continues to go back to Jones Beach because clearly he sees Jones Beach an unalloyed good–maybe not in the way it was managed necessarily but in its construction. And so the idea that people read it–this huge book with just so much stuff in it and so many ideas in it–and they come out and they’re like, “Oof, bad to do big things.” It feels like that’s people refusing to pick up what Robert Caro is really saying, which is like, “Hey, let’s not rush things! But let’s do them!”

ROMAN MARS: It’s funny–as much as I love this book and it’s become the center of my personality for now many, many years at this point–how much I love big plans. I love big plans! It has not dissuaded me from big plans at all. Big plans are great.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Roman, reading this book–every time they mention that elevated expressway through mid-Manhattan that would go through buildings–I’m like, “That would be bad, Everything about that is bad.” But you imagine it, you’re like, “That sounds amazing; it sounds so cool,” knowing it would be terrible. But it still sounds cool. You can’t deny it.

CLARA JEFFERY: Some sort of Jetsons situation where you can just carve a tunnel right through the Empire State Building.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: It would be fun to see.

CLARA JEFFERY: Yes.

ROMAN MARS: So, one thing I want to get to is it strikes me that you have been in a position where you’re about to publish something that is going to piss someone off. And I think about this book about to come out and Robert Caro’s state of mind. Could you put us in that headspace of you’re about to put out your reporting. You are confident in it, but you’re always nervous that you’re going to get little bits wrong. It’s going to make people mad that are very, very powerful, that have a lot of money. What does that feel like right before you publish it?

CLARA JEFFERY: Sheer terror. I mean, I think when you’ve done your best to report something out and… It would be very different than the manner in which Caro, reporting over many years and going back to Moses many times–and at some point, Moses cut him off, of course–has the questions. You’re like, “Okay, this is your last chance. These are my last questions. I still didn’t get an answer.” And to really do that early and often and to make sure that you go back at the end–particularly on a long involved project–and give people that space and real deadlines and… But it is terrifying. And also, you could have everything right and people will, of course, disingenuously describe your reporting or maybe really just not see your point of view at all about it. So, it’s not like you’re ever going to get the people that you’re reporting critically on to agree with you. That said, we often have people say, “All right, I didn’t like it, but it was fair.” I think that that’s what you hope for when you can get it–for sure.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. When I think about this book, I think about how important it is to explain New York in an important biography of a person. And Caro has admitted we probably wouldn’t think about Robert Moses at all if it weren’t for his book. So, he’s both presented him and changed people’s minds about him. But it makes me wonder, if you were to write your Power Broker–if I were to write my Power Broker–are there a thousand more books like this to write? Is this kind of a singular subject and style and achievement? Or if you dig deep enough, are there equally profound and interesting biographies out there for cities all over the world?

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s at least one of Lyndon Johnson that I can think of.

ROMAN MARS: Well, that’s kind of it. The things those two things have in common is Caro. But maybe there’s way more people that explain the 20th century in their own ways. I honestly don’t know the answer to this question.

CLARA JEFFERY: I think that there are if you have the sort of serendipity of the right reporter and project with the right subject. I mean, I’m thinking of a book that I thought was a truly excellent biography. George Packer’s biography of Richard Holbrooke was called Our Man. And I had studied Vietnam a little bit in college and whatever, but that was a book that, in a similar but much shorter– Even though it also is a doorstopper. You know, it just sort of makes me feel like, “My God, this person was at the nexus of everything and I had never really thought about them at all. And now I kind of see the world in a different way.” Obviously, he’s a great writer, but I do think that the works out there are possible. The sort of time and… Even if you have a writer that’s predisposed to spend years and years and years on one subject, which for a lot of people that would not be a healthy decision… But again–back to the support–just how many people are going to get that level of institutional support or have… Maybe they’re independently wealthy or whatever it is, they can just plug away at a book for seven years in the case of this one. And the LBJ stuff is what? Another 40 or something or around 40 years now. And that’s incredibly rare.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think, in order to do the rest of the lives justice, you need to explain the world. You need this kind of Borgesian library where there’s a biography of every single person who’s ever lived that has been given the treatment that Robert Caro was able to give to Robert Moses because everyone is the nexus of everything in their own lives. And it’s just like The Power Broker is, like, this little portal into what that library would be like. But unfortunately it’s beautifully impossible, Roman.

ROMAN MARS: Well, I think that’s kind of my point. Is there a Power Broker to be written about a lot– I mean, obviously there’s some people that don’t have as much influence in the world as this, but there probably is more than we think. We wouldn’t know of this one if it wasn’t for this book. And so it makes me think that there’s just a world out there to investigate and explore in a way that it gets me kind of excited. I like that idea.

CLARA JEFFERY: I mean, the other thing–I think, Elliott, you and I talked about it a little bit before Roman came on–the one… And I mean, maybe somebody should get around to doing this project. But the sort of examining of the climate impact from what Moses and the Moses imitators or contemporaries did–it’s super enraging to be like, “Why can’t I get to the airport via the subway? Why does it take three hours when it should take an hour to get out to wherever on Long Island?” But then when you sort of sit back and you realize, “My God…” Just the lack of a good railway system on Long Island–the lack of certain things that really became obvious even at the time but not with the same vocabulary because, of course, they weren’t worried about CO2. That was stuff locked deep in the memorandum of ExxonMobil and wherever. Nobody else kind of understood that or was talking about it. But they did start to understand the traffic and the more tangible pollution part of it. And that’s the part that just enrages me.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And even more than wanting to see his work on Jane Jacobs, that feels like the missing piece. I had not thought about it too much until you had mentioned it before we started the interview, but exactly–the idea that he’s so focused on the effect of the people in an area where this road exists or the people have to use this road. And now we know that the emphasis on cars affects billions of people that are not even living near the road, who have nothing to do with that road. And it’s such an amazingly massive scale compared to what KCaro was talking about in this book. That being said, when you live in New York, it’s pretty inconvenient to get to the airport.

CLARA JEFFERY: Let’s not forget about that. One of its least attractive features is how hard it is to get to the airport. It’s not really his to do, but I do wish somebody could do it.

ROMAN MARS: It’s a really good question. There could be just a Moses report that’s just like, “This person is responsible for this many metric tons of CO2 in our atmosphere.” It strikes me as a doable or at least a teachable metric to come up with.

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah, sort of back of the napkin way. And just since I have you guys on the phone, I’m also curious, do you guys think that he directly influenced tons of projects and planners elsewhere in the country? Like, this book is so– We know that he goes out there and he brings them in and he has them to Jones Beach and Guy Lombardo plays and all this stuff. But what part of this was really he was the stone thrown in the pond and the ripples go out from him versus LA was tearing out its trolley system and the Eisenhower Expressway project was underway? But that part, I feel like, Caro had not–at least so far as in my reading–kind of gotten to yet.

ROMAN MARS: And he doesn’t get to it. And I think this is one of the mistakes. People–when they criticize the book–they talk about how this was happening everywhere and Robert Moses wasn’t all that important. And I think that what Robert Moses was great at was being at the lead of the popular sentiment that was already happening. So, he was an effective warrior in this sort of idea of complete mobility, freedom through cars, and the interstate system. And it was out there, but he was truly effective and pushed it. And when he was successful at generating money and generating his own projects and them all building on each other, that also was an example that people followed. So, I think it’s a little bit of both. And again, this gets to one of the criticisms of the book that I kind of bristle against. People try to take it down, but they go, “Well, that doesn’t explain LA.” I was like, “well, it wasn’t trying to explain LA.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: New York is in the subtitle. Come on. Or the criticism that says, “It’s 50 years and New York has bounced back. How does he explain that?” And it’s like, “It’s been 50 years? That’s half a century. I hope that New York has– I hope that the greatest city in America in the world has bounced back.”

ROMAN MARS: So, I think it was a little bit of both. But he definitely, like, exported himself. He went to other cities. People came to study it. And he had the legacy and the ear of the agenda-setting people in the federal government who were putting all this money into highways. And he just tapped into it. He just had a way of just being a little bit ahead of everyone else, but knowing where it was all going so that he had very little friction.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It feels unfair that sometimes a criticism the book gets is: “Yeah, but it doesn’t explain everything.” And I guess the risk you run when you create an amazing, enormous book is that people want to find everything in it and easily explain everything. But sometimes you’ve got to read a second book. You can’t just rely on the one book.

ROMAN MARS: And everyone should. And no one’s saying that you should only read The Power Broker. No one’s ever said that. But I think that goes right down to, again, its title. It is not The City Builder. It is not The Master Builder. It is The Power Broker. He wasn’t trying to explain all cities. And in a way, he wasn’t necessarily trying to explain everything about New York City, even though people have taken it on as the perfect history of a city. He was really focusing on a human and the effects of this human and what he got out of it, even though he wasn’t a “corrupt” in the way that we normally think of. And that’s his focus. What other people try to imbue into the text is kind of their own problem. But when I find criticisms, mostly it’s those things that are these distal things that people have created around the book than the book itself.

CLARA JEFFERY: Right. It’s a mistake to think the story here is just how did he make the Atlas of New York look different, when it’s really, like, how did he sort of gather and exploit power in a way that had not been documented on this scale?

ROMAN MARS: Absolutely.

CLARA JEFFERY: Both a credit in his own way to Moses’ sheer force of power to do all that, but then to Caro for showing it and really explaining how this has a material impact on everyday people both then and now.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that was Caro’s mission. And to me, he fulfilled it and then some. I don’t think he was even trying to explain everything about New York City. He clearly thought there was something more to say when he was going to do a La Guardia biography, for example, or something else. There’s definitely more to say even about New York.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He doesn’t even try to say everything about Robert Moses. He barely talks about that power dam that he built at Niagara, which–

CLARA JEFFERY: He has a sister! He has children!

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. That’s right. Well, Clara Jeffery, thank you so much for being on The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. It was a real pleasure to have you.

CLARA JEFFERY: Oh, well, thank you so much. I just want to say, again, what a fan I am of your show and also that I got my mom to start reading The Power Broker. And she’s already caught up to where we are. I only talked to her a few weeks ago about this and–

ROMAN MARS: Wow.

CLARA JEFFERY: She’s 86. She’s getting through it.

ROMAN MARS: Your mom’s a beast, man. She’s getting through it.

CLARA JEFFERY: Yeah. She’s a big reader. She’s a big reader.

ROMAN MARS: Well, it’s a real pleasure to have you.

CLARA JEFFERY: Thanks so much for having me on.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Next month, we continue our journey through Part Seven, the final part of the book, The Loss of Power. We’ll be covering Chapters 42 through 46. That’s pages 984 through 1.081. That’s right. We’re crossing the 1,000-page mark. We did it! Quadruple digits of pages! And we couldn’t have done it without you. Now, if you can’t wait that long to hear me summarize something, then I direct you over to The Flop House Podcast on the Maximum Fun Network. That is my bad movie podcast, which is a lot less informative than this one. But it does have roughly the same amount of me talking during it.

ROMAN MARS: I cannot believe we have only two episodes left. So, make sure to commemorate this incredible journey that we’ve all taken together this year with some 99PI Power Broker merch. We’ve got T-shirts, we’ve got bags, we’ve got bookmarks… Head over to 99pi.org/store to get yours.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angell–edited by committee. Music by Swan Real. Mix by Dara Hirsch.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible’s executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmet FitzGerald, Gabriella Gladney, Martín Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Neena Pathak, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find the show on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server, where we have fun discussions about The Power Broker and architecture and movies and music and all that kind of good stuff. It’s where I’m hanging out most these days. You can find a link to that Discord server as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

ELLIOTT KALAN: What’s the word I’m looking for? It’s open. That’s not the one I’m talking about. Hold on a second. I can’t think of the word I’m looking for. That’s fine. Isabel, keep all this. This is all gold–me struggling to find this word.