Dwarkesh Podcast
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.
00:14:39 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
Through most of his career, there's little evidence that he had a coherent political ideology. He was a ruthless power seeker who embraced whatever happened to be the most expedient thing to do at that time. When Johnson first entered the U. S. Senate, he realized that the most powerful men there were the conservative Southern Dixiecrats. And the Johnson that they encountered was one who molded himself to their form. While writing Master of the Senate, Volume three of his Johnson biographies, Caro interviewed former Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He asked Talmadge what impression he got from freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson about the proper relationship between white people and black people. [00:15:19] S8: And now quoting Caro's recounting of this exchange, Master and servant. So I, Caro, asked, well, didn't Johnson have any sympathy for blacks? Any desire to improve their lot? My notes say, long pause. And then I wrote Talmadge's two word reply, not indicated. Another pause. And then, He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him.
00:15:19 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
[00:15:19] S8: And now quoting Caro's recounting of this exchange, Master and servant. So I, Caro, asked, well, didn't Johnson have any sympathy for blacks? Any desire to improve their lot? My notes say, long pause. And then I wrote Talmadge's two word reply, not indicated. Another pause. And then, He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him. [00:15:38] S0: Of course, we know that once he became president, Johnson spearheaded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction. So Moses began as a naive idealist but in Caro's telling became somebody seeking power for its own sake. Johnson, on the other hand, was an opportunist from the very start. It was only once he had real power that he used it for ideals few knew that he had. Before he was president, Lyndon Johnson was vice president. And before was vice president, Lyndon Johnson was in the Senate. And Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Senate Majority Leader, perhaps the most powerful legislator period in the history of this country. Here's Caro. [00:16:19] S8: He was master of the Senate, master of an institution that had never before had a master and that at the time almost half a century later when this book is being written has not had one since.