This week, it is exactly five decades since Robert A. Caro published his Pulitzer-winning biography of Robert Moses, a lesser-known but tremendously influential government official who would ultimately leave his mark on New York and the surrounding regions. This groundbreaking study is available for the first time in Kindle edition. Caro’s engaging and meticulous recreation of Moses’s story has been heralded as one of the best-written books of the twentieth century, and its message is still topical.
Some of the choices that Moses made regarding the construction of roads, bridges and parks impacted more than twenty million Americans living in the communities that they now call home. They decided who would be allowed to access necessities such as parks, supermarkets, well-paid jobs, and cheap homes—and most significantly, who would not.
What makes Moses’ story even more interesting is that he never served any elected post in his life and yet was able to control the growth of this country’s most populous city –New York. According to Caro, “Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor,” Thus Moses was a few steps removed from conventional exercise of power.
Today people tend to concentrate on an electoral level of governance, which is important to broaden powers outside of the vote. This gets back to Moses and his ability to demonstrate precisely how much political power can be grinded out of sight.
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