Dwarkesh Podcast
00:04:17 · Dwarkesh Patel
[00:04:17] S0: Moses' amendments also gave this authority the right to build connecting roads and facilities not inconsistent with the use of the project. These rights, when interpreted as creatively as Moses intended to, would allow Moses to alter most of the roads, parks, and housing in New York. For if a road connected to a road which connected to a road which connected to the bridge or if a park lay along the road that connected to the road that connected to the road that connected to the bridge, surely the Triborough Authority was entitled to improve and change it. All this construction cost could be financed by the bridge's enormous toll revenues and the right of the Triborough Authority to borrow against them. To give some perspective, in 1946, the entire New York City government could only borrow $150,000,000 before hitting its legal debt limit. That very same year, Triborough could borrow $360,000,000 So Moses' bridge authority had access to more than double the amount of money as the largest city in America. And what if a future governor or mayor eventually learned about all this power and revenue that had been delegated to this authority and they decided to claw it back. Moses had planned for this too and his solution was so clever that no lawyer or lawmaker in Albany saw it coming. The United States Constitution says that no state shall make, quote, any law impairing the obligation of contracts entered into by a government entity. A bond issued by a public authority is such a contract. Moses snuck a clause into the act which allowed him to add matters of like or different character which in any way affect the security or protection of the bonds, end quote, into these bond contracts. And these matters included that Triborough could charge whatever tolls they wanted and for however long they wanted and they could keep the surplus thus generated. That is to say Moses could now entrench his powers simply by writing them into the bonds that he issued. From the moment that those bonds were sold, those powers could no longer be revoked by the legislature or by the governor or by the mayor by anything in fact short of a constitutional convention. The powers that Moses now had were guaranteed for the bond's entire lifetime. A lifetime which could always be extended simply by refinancing.
00:06:40 · Dwarkesh Patel
So with just a few minor tweaks, Moses had turned an act meant to allow for the construction of two bridges into the basis of an institution that could build basically anything it wanted anywhere in New York and whose authority to do so was protected by the United States Constitution. These bond covenants had turned triborough authority's powers into granite, but nothing in them guaranteed that Robert Moses would remain its chairman. So how did Moses retain this position for thirty years? Part of the answer is, again, the law. Moses drafted the Tribor Act so that its commissioners could be removed midterm only on stated charges after a formal hearing. But any differences he had with a mayor or governor were more about what he decided to build and whom he displaced to build it rather than his personal conduct. As Caro himself writes, Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was in fact as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived. In the politician's phrase, he was money honest. End quote. So there were never any formal charges to bring. But this only explains why he wasn't fired in the middle of his term. Why was he reappointed every six years? Well, at his peak, Moses was a Hydra with a dozen heads. He held 12 different government posts at the same time. City construction coordinator, chairman of the State Council of Parks, chairman of the State Power Authority, and so on. Some of these positions were appointed by the mayor, some of them by the governor, and so no single person could cut off the head simultaneously. And removing him from any one position meant that you were making an enemy with the man who would still be the most powerful person in New York. More importantly, no mayor or governor wanted to fire him. The way we remember Robert Moses today is based on a reputation that was calcified in the 1970s when the power broker came out and where New York was experiencing a dark age of crime, deindustrialization, and white flight. Moses got much of the blame for this. After all, the subtitle of the power broker is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. But in my opinion, this crisis had more to do with larger structural factors that had nothing to do with Moses himself. Cities that he had nothing to do with, like Detroit and St. Louis, experienced a much more dramatic collapse.
00:09:07 · Dwarkesh Patel, S7
For the vast majority of his career, Moses was incredibly popular. In the 1930s and 1940s, New York high schools voted Moses the most admired New Yorker. This was because he had delivered, over and over again, public works which millions of New Yorkers got to use and enjoy. The beaches, parks, pools. [00:09:25] S7: They used to dive off a dock into the murky river. But now it's splashing the looks in a grand up to date needle. It cost a cool million and the kids say it's worth it. [00:09:33] S0: And he did so at a speed and a scale that nobody had seen before. In his first four months as the city's park commissioner, he kept crews working round the clock and finished 1,700 park renovations. And he did this all without a whiff of personal scandal. As Caro writes in The Power Broker, It was not unusual at park and playground opening ceremonies for children brought in by their parents to break into the sheer... [00:10:00] S7: You four sixty eight, who do we appreciate? Mr. Moses! Mr. Moses! Mr. Moses! [00:10:07] S0: Importantly, Moses could deliver these enormous and popular public works within a timeframe that fit into a single election cycle. If the mayor gave Robert Moses the power to build something, he could expect to be standing at its ribbon cutting before he was up for reelection. [00:10:21] S7: Robert Moses, Mayor Wagner, and Cardinal Spellman join other dignitaries in a ribbon cutting at the Brooklyn side of the bridge.
00:10:27 · Dwarkesh Patel
[00:10:27] S0: Today, it's almost unimaginable that the government could construct big things in a year or two. For example, construction on the 2nd Avenue subway in New York began in 1972, and the first section was opened in 2017. And just these initial two miles have cost the taxpayers $4,500,000,000 A lot of the funding for public works comes from Washington. Cities that receive the most money are the ones that have finalized their blueprints and can start breaking ground as soon as a new federal initiative is announced. Moses had the largest and best team of planners and engineers in the entire country. And because of that, by 1936, New York was getting one seventh of the money that the federal government had set aside for Depression era work relief for the entire nation. And the projects that this funding was going towards were the ones chosen by Moses. If the mayor had some different idea about what should be constructed, he'd to draw up his own plans, which he didn't have the independent technical expertise to do so. So he could either build the projects that Moses wanted to build, or he could build nothing at all. Between his ability to get things done, his popularity, and his control over money, Moses had a lot of leverage and he was not shy about using it. Far from being worried about getting fired, Moses would constantly threaten to quit whenever he didn't get his way. Under Mayor Wagner, one-eight said that, It seemed like he was resigning about one thing or another about twice a day. He threatened resignation to Mayor LaGuardia so often and over such small things that LaGuardia's lawyer got a stack of forms printed that read, I, Robert Moses, do hereby resign as so and so to save Moses the trouble of writing it out every single time. But behind that joke was real fear. If a mayor accepted that resignation, not only would he be forfeiting the completion of whatever projects Moses was working on, along with the money that was apportioned for those projects, he'd also be picking a public fight with the most respected official in all of New York.
00:12:24 · Robert Moses
[00:12:24] S2: Maybe that's the most important thing, just sheer stubbornness.
00:12:27 · Dwarkesh Patel
[00:12:27] S0: Moses has spent years befriending the owners of the city's newspapers. He spent many weekends at the summer home of the Sulzberger's, which is the family that owns the New York Times. The mayor knew that if Moses resigned, the next morning all the front pages would tell the same story about how a man above politics was driven out by a craven politician because he refused to compromise the city's interests. And the power that Moses derived from his popularity with the masses was nothing compared to the power that he derived from his connections with New York's powerful private interests. We are very used today to NIMBY, not in my backyard, where powerful but concentrated interest groups managed to stymie projects despite their broad popularity. Moses built a concentrated faction for Yimbi. Yes in my backyard. He built a graft machine that ensured that the most powerful people in the state would all benefit when new construction happened. The banks got to buy his bonds at a steep discount without competitive bidding. The unions got more jobs. Politically connected lawyers got legal fees. And party bosses got paid to broker insurance policies to bridges that had no plausible risk of falling down. Moses could then rely on these beneficiaries to call up anyone who stood in the way of one of his projects, whether that was a borough president or the governor himself. Caro paints Moses as somebody who began as an idealist rather than somebody who craved power from the very start. In the 1910s, Moses was a brilliant young reformer who joined this new good government movement which was trying to replace Tammany Hall's patronage with honest and competent administration. He spent years fighting this machine. But his reformers got killed. The machine won. And Moses learned that ideals are useless without the power to realize them. Caro writes: In the beginning, and for decades of his career, the power Robert Moses amassed was a servant of his dreams. Amassed for their sake so that his gigantic, city shaping visions could become reality. But power is not an instrument that its possessor can use with impunity. It is a drug that creates in the user a need for larger and larger doses. And Moses was a user. Lyndon Johnson's story, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite.