The Power Broker #4: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Elliott Kalin. Today we'll be covering pages 283 to 401 in my book, chapters 16 through 20, and this is the middle section of part four, The Use of Power. And our special guest for today's book club is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

She represents the New York 14th Congressional District, which is home to a number of Robert Moses infrastructure projects and atrocities. And it is also the congressional seat once held by Fiorella LaGuardia, who makes his first appearance in this section of the book. We have a long, fun, enlightening discussion with AOC after we do the book summary.

So when we left off last episode, in a stunning turnabout, young idealist reformer Robert Moses has turned around and embraced corruption and dirty dealings to get things done. And this is the freight train that has been coming at us from page one. The heel turn is taking place.

And as a result, in three years, with the backing of Governor Al Smith, he massively expanded the amount of public park space in New York State. He turned Jones Beach into the world's greatest weekend spot and built expressways leading to all that stuff. And he has become this legend.

absolute hero to New Yorkers. He's seen as this man who stands up to the wealthy and he can get stuff done. He creates parks for the people, even though we've seen that, you know, he will totally get in bed with these powerful people to make his projects possible and he will ruin some small time farmers. He does some dastardly stuff, but the public doesn't see that. They just see these beautiful parks he's made. And this public idea of Robert Moses and the private reality of how Moses gets things done

are really diverging at this point. And through this, and the reason why he's able to get all this stuff done is he has the support of Al Smith. And unfortunately, in 1928, Al Smith runs for and loses the presidency. He cannot run for president and run for governor at the same time. So he goes to the presidency. He reaches for that brass ring. He does not reach that brass ring at all. And

And Robert Moses is left trying to do the things he's trying to do. But there's a new governor in office. And this is the man who Caro promises will be one of Moses' most powerful enemies. He is known as the Feather Duster, which is the title of Chapter 16.

Who is the Feather Duster? As you can guess, the Feather Duster from his name is a figure of power, a figure of strength, a figure of intimidation. And I'd like to start getting into that chapter with the opening of that chapter, which I love so much. It says –

There's an expression used in Albany to describe the relationship of two men between whom there exists bad feeling when that feeling has existed for years, has resisted every attempt at reconciliation, and has only deepened with the passage of time to a point where dislike is not so fitting a name for it as hatred.

In discussing two such men, one assemblyman will say to another with a knowing shake of his head, they go back a long way. Robert Moses and Franklin Delano Roosevelt went back a very long way. That's right. It's Franklin Roosevelt. We've all heard of him, right? Roman, you're familiar with the name Franklin Delano Roosevelt, right? Once or twice he's come up, yeah. He comes up sometimes in the talk of American history. So we all know who this guy is. He's eventually going to become one of the –

massive figures of the 20th century. He's going to be known as FDR, but this is the pre-presidency FDR. This is not yet the four-time elected president rallying America through the depression, fighting most of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt. At this point, Franklin Roosevelt is just a snooty state politician with a very famous last name. His distant cousin was president, and that

gets him a lot in the political world of the early 20th century. And something I want to point out before we get into the death rivalry between Roosevelt and Moses, which doesn't really seem to hamper Moses that much, to be honest, is that Caro seems to be making a real point

of never saying FDR, but instead saying Roosevelt. He always says Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt. And I wonder if that is to keep us from bringing to his discussion of Roosevelt all the kind of mythic freight that even by 1974, when this book came out, had already been accumulated by FDR. I think he wants us to remember this is not FDR, the titan. This is Franklin Roosevelt, the upstate New York politician. And so I want

I want us to try to follow that. It's very hard. I was going through my notes and I kept saying FDR in them, but I want to try to incentivize us not to say FDR. So every time we say FDR instead of Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, we're going to have to put a quarter into this jar.

Insert jar sound effect. That's the FDR jar. If we say FDR, we got to put a quarter in there. So, Roman, I'm going to need you to be honest with me on this. We're going to hope you have quarters in your pocket. Yeah, I do. I have plenty of quarters. And I think this is totally right, because this is actually a point that is brought up a lot in the Lyndon Johnson books, is that because Lyndon Johnson is strong.

so obsessed with FDR and is this acolyte of FDR, he actually insists that people call him LBJ. And he'll do this thing. He'll go like, FDR, LBJ, FDR, LBJ. See, see, see, see? Three, three. I have a middle name and he has a middle name. We're the same guy. And he does that. And it must have just burned his ass that JFK came along before him to usurp the initials as an icon.

But what it reminds me of our guest for this episode later on is AOC, which, you know, she entered the stage as a national figure very quickly. And that

you know, three initial like nickname really became part of her brand. It's funny how in the United States, I don't know if it's in other countries, I apologize foreign listeners if this is a thing you also do, that the three initial branding became such a

It became such a branding tool. Like you're saying, after FDR, eventually we had JFK. Harry S. Truman was never HST. And Dwight David Eisenhower was never DDE. But that JFK and then LBJ and that it's such a – there's a rhythm to it that is so inescapable, I guess, if the letters allow it. And it's such a way of –

attaching yourself to the feeling that comes off of, I assume FDR. And I have to assume that FDR started being called that partly because Teddy Roosevelt, his, his, or Theodore Roosevelt, who hated being called Teddy, his distant cousin when he was president was often known as TR. And maybe it was FDR was like, I'm one better. I've got another letter in my name. But an FR sounds, sounds weird.

I don't know. I was, you know, I had this sort of hypothesis that was sort of forming in my head that maybe the middle name has to be kind of a long three syllable middle name for it to work. But but that's not true because of LBJ. So because Baines is just one syllable.

Yeah. But this one amazing, amazing syllable gets its own letter. You should do a 9MPI episode about initials. I don't know why you haven't done that yet. I mean, I have done some reading about middle names because what's notable is that, you know, John Quincy Adams being our first sort of middle name known president is actually a very early example of an American with a middle name. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Which is kind of interesting. That's true. Middle names don't go back that far. They do not. But John Quincy Adams is because since his dad, John Adams, was also president, I assume that the President's Guild said they can't have two John Adams. You have to register your middle name also the same way that like Michael J. Fox had to register his middle initial because there's already a Michael Fox in the guild. Anyway, that's enough initial talk. So Franklin Roosevelt, he is a Democratic politician, but he is a state Democratic politician. In the New York State Democratic Party at the time –

Roosevelt and the Al Smith circle, which is the city Democrats, they had this relationship based on need. Al Smith is part of this Irish Catholic Tammany urban environment, and they need the help of someone like Roosevelt to get the upstate

protestant tammany hating city hating country folk which is funny i think a lot of people if you're not from new york state you kind of assume new york city new york state are kind of the same thing and it is especially at the time a huge state compared to other states and uh this the outside of the city areas are very different from the city itself uh but franklin roosevelt he has the trust of those kind of upstate farmers that make up the backbone of the state republican party

Because in 1911, he stopped the Tammany candidate from being appointed to the US Senate and that made him – some enemies in the Tammany side, but it made him kind of a name people trusted outside of the city. And also, as we mentioned, he's got that famous name. People love Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt, this is – served as president, had the most successful third-party run for president anyone has ever had. People still remember him in living memory. This is only 20-some odd years after Theodore Roosevelt was president. Right.

And Roosevelt had supported Smith for president multiple times. In 1924, he had given the nominating speech at the Democratic Convention. That was where Smith got the nickname the Happy Warrior, which is – along with East Side, West Side, that's the other part of the Al Smith brand is being called the Happy Warrior. And the song East Side, West Side, as we mentioned, will come up again.

And something that was interesting, which plays into the Roosevelt story a little bit, is that that appearance at that convention, this was the first time, Carol points out, that Roosevelt made a major public appearance after contracting polio and being essentially paralyzed for the most part from the waist down.

And it meant a lot to Smith that Roosevelt was the one giving that nomination. It gave him that support. But on the other hand, Roosevelt never fit in socially with the Smith crowd. And Caro kind of describes Roosevelt kind of like awkwardly calling Robert Moses and being like, hey, if you're going to go hang out with Al Smith, can I come with you? Can you take me with you? Which seems so pathetic. And it's always awkward when he does. And

Smith likes Roosevelt well enough, but Carroll quotes him as saying, Franklin just isn't the kind of man you can take into the piss room and talk intimately with, which is a real old school politics way of thinking about your allies. And this is one of the things we talked about last time and we'll talk about a lot this time is this the politics of personality. And even though Al Smith and Robert Moses might seem like sort of odd political bedfellows, they're not.

They just like each other, you know, and it's real simple. And Roosevelt doesn't really get along with these good time guys. I feel like I am firmly in the Franklin Roosevelt camp that I'm not also the type of man that you can take into the piss room and talk intimately with. And so I feel for Roosevelt at this point. Yeah, it's hard to see it and not feel for the person who's kept on the outside, even though Roosevelt is...

Much wealthier than either of these two guys and has had a – in some ways easier life until that moment that he gets polio and then his life becomes incredibly difficult. But everyone underestimates Roosevelt. He's spent his life being underestimated. He's seen as flighty. He got that nickname, the feather duster, when he was at Harvard. His classmates nicknamed him that because he was not considered particularly deep or someone you could rely on to stay interested in something. And in politics, he's seen as kind of like –

this prissy snob who is entitled but doesn't have the achievements to back that up. And what Carroll points out is they're not taking into account the personal strength it took to get back into the political world after being paralyzed. And there's a thread that runs through the Roosevelt story throughout his life of him not letting people know just how debilitating his physical handicap is. And it's something that

causes people to underestimate him completely because it takes so much willpower for this guy to get to the piss room. So much strength even to stand up and make it to the bathroom that to get back and become a public figure is astounding. And nobody seems to realize that FDR is laying the groundwork to run for governor himself someday and then to president eventually, except for Belle Moskowitz. She sees if she's about to say FDR. You know, I said it. OK, I'll just put a quarter in the jar. Hold on. She sees FDR as a threat. Yeah.

But everyone tells her that she's wrong. Bell, your instincts are off. You don't you don't know what you're talking about. But Bell Moskowitz is never wrong. She sees FDR as FDR, like from the get go. Yes. Yeah. She knows that Roosevelt sees himself as FDR to sees himself as as this figure. This just dropping coins in left and right.

Okay. 1924. So we've jumped back a little bit to 1924. When Al Smith appoints Moses president of the Long Island State Park Commission, he also appoints Roosevelt to chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission upstate. They are immediately at each other's throats. And Moses tells Caro that he thinks this is because he kept stopping Roosevelt from giving a patronage job to this advisor, Louis Howe, who everybody thought was –

But who was very loyal to Roosevelt and who gave up a lucrative job to help Roosevelt after Roosevelt was stricken with polio. But Caro thinks it's a different theory. He thinks these are just two arrogant, ambitious men. They both want power at the same time. They're both big fish in a small pond. And Roosevelt also has his plans for parks and parkways for his native Dutchess County outside the city, upstate. And Moses is always like, yeah, Roosevelt, yeah, you can build those parks. That'd be great. You've got a whole park system in mind. Yeah, definitely. You'll definitely get the resources to build that.

Until Moses is in charge, and then he's like, no, this money goes to the Long Island State Park system. Sorry, Dutchess County. Sorry, Feather Duster. And every year Roosevelt requests money, and Moses says, no, you can't have it. And Roosevelt gets so mad that he threatens to resign. Very ironic that he's pulling a Moses play. And Al Smith has to personally smooth things over because he wants Roosevelt to nominate him at the 1928 Democratic Convention when he's going to run for president again. That's right.

Like I mentioned, it happens. Roosevelt nominates Smith. Smith wins the nomination. We know that he's not going to win the presidency due to kind of anti-urban and anti-Catholic sentiment throughout the country. And he asked Roosevelt to be a successor as governor. How do you think Moses feels about that idea of Roosevelt taking the boss's seat? Moses hates this idea. And this is one of the few times where Moses changes his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.

just so he could maybe be considered for that seat if Al Smith vacates it to either become president or loses and therefore is no longer the governor. Yes. And this is an instance where Moses has such an amazing instinct for a certain type of politics, the politics of politics

negotiations and deals and getting things done. And he has such a poor instinct for the politics of voters and the electorate and getting people to to vote for things, because it would be very clear to any kind of party figure that Moses is not someone that you can run as governor and

Keep that seat, especially in a year when, as the election continues, it's more and more the election of what they call Romanism and Tammany where they need a candidate who is the opposite of all those things. And Moses, the man who is Al Smith's right-hand man, also is a city guy, is Jewish on top of that. The idea that like, well, the Klan vote doesn't want to vote for Al Smith for president, but I guess they'll vote for Robert Moses for governor upstate. Yeah.

That's not going to happen. Not to say everyone in upstate New York is in the Klan. I'm not making that implication at all, but it was a much bigger force at the time than it is now. And so they need someone who is the opposite of Al Smith in many ways so that they can keep the governorship in a year where it's very clear Al Smith is not going to win the presidency. But the thing is –

Moses has just reorganized the state government. His reorganization is so good that the state party is like, even a lightweight like Roosevelt can't screw it up too much. We've got the Moses system working here. That's right. And, you know, at this point, you know, Roosevelt has had these, you know, long-running, long-dustading plans to, you know, take—

both the governorship and maybe eventually the presidency by storm. But he knows that this is probably a Republican year, you know, when it comes to like the governorship of New York. And he does not want to run. But Al Smith, you know, persuades him to run anyway.

But as Roosevelt's campaigning, Moses is seeing this future where he's going to be working for Franklin Roosevelt and he hates it. And his private comments about Roosevelt are getting more and more vicious. And these comments are getting back to Roosevelt. And Moses is –

insulting Eleanor Roosevelt's looks, which is just like just a cruel thing to do, just a mean thing to do. He is implying that maybe we don't know just how debilitating Roosevelt's polio was. And Caro dances around this, but I have to assume that he's implying that Roosevelt's impotent, that he's not a man anymore. And Roosevelt learns of all this, and he starts saying, if I'm elected governor, I want Moses out.

I do not want him in my government. And Election Day, as we know, Herbert Hoover trounces Al Smith. Al Smith doesn't even win New York State. That's bonkers. It's his home state, and he doesn't even get it. But Roosevelt makes it in as governor. And Al Smith – there's a couple of sad things that happen with Al Smith. So he takes this private job and he retires from politics, but he's always like –

Franklin, if you ever need advice, just call on me. I'm always here. I'm always at your disposal. Just call on me if you ever want your advice as governor. And Roosevelt's like, I'll do that, Al. And he never does. He never calls on him. Al Smith is demoralized by this. Nobody is ever sure why. Maybe he has political reasons for it. Maybe he just likes to use people and then discard them when he doesn't need them anymore. Or maybe it's because Al Smith underestimated his intelligence and thought that Roosevelt would be kind of a puppet for him.

afterwards. We don't know for sure. Well, I mean, I think the most generous interpretation of this is that Roosevelt wants to be governor and he's following up the most popular governor in New York state's history. And he wants to run his own administration. Like, yeah, that's the generous that's the generous positive one. But the negative one would be that he's got a vendetta. He wants to hurt an old man. But I think you're right that Franklin Roosevelt's like one governor now. Like, why would I

Why would I do the things that you want me to do just because you want me to do them? I think you're right. Caro is so in love with Al Smith that I think any any slight on Al Smith, he gets a little he gets sensitive about. He does seem to have great affection for Al Smith and his role. And there are some very sweet scenes that are, you know, empathizing with Al Smith in this position. I mean, like.

You know, he is not old at this point. I mean, he's in his early 50s, I think. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, for him at this point to become inactive in this world that like he really found himself, you know, like learned politics, basically taught himself to read in law books in Albany.

and becomes this titan, it's a real fall for him. I just can also see the point of view of Roosevelt going like, you know, I have to run things my way. I mean, I am the governor. And I appreciate it, but I don't need any advice right now. And so I kind of get it.

I get it too. And Smith says to Roosevelt, you can fire anyone in the administration, but you've got to keep Mrs. Moskowitz and Robert Moses. And Roosevelt is like, no, I don't want to keep them, and I especially don't want to keep Moses. He tells Smith, no, he rubs me the wrong way. Of course, Roosevelt can only remove Moses from the secretary of state office because Moses has done such a good job of writing the law that gives him his parks jobs.

that those aren't in Roosevelt's control. He's the head of the Long Island Park Commission. That position doesn't expire until 1930. He's chairman of the State Parks Council. That's elected by the council itself, which he has control of. It's his people who, along with him, are on that council. And Moses, the rule says he can only be removed for illegality, and nobody even knows what he's doing inside the parks. It's so opaque that you'd have to launch an investigation. He's so popular that an investigation of him, if it didn't find anything, would be a huge risk. And

He's established this independent power for himself, and Caro makes a mention of a very serious four-hour interview with Moses where, at the end of it, Moses finally laughs at how the law made it nearly impossible for Roosevelt to remove him. That was still a chucklebuster years later.

And when Moses learns he's not going to be reappointed as secretary of state, he preemptively announces his resignation to the press to embarrass Roosevelt. And Roosevelt has to put out a public statement thanking Moses for staying on in his park posts that even though he's leaving secretary of state, that position of secretary of state gets demoted considerably from the powerful position that it was when Moses had it. And Roosevelt reappoints every one of Smith's officials except for Moses and Moskowitz basically and a couple of others. And at the inauguration –

Roosevelt and Smith, they put on the show of friendship. But Moses makes a point of walking out before Roosevelt can give his inaugural address. They are being so petty. These are the most powerful people in the state. They're being so petty with each other. It is ridiculous. Yeah, I guess I changed my mind. It's probably just a bunch of back and forth nonsense that's making them fight.

No, I like your interpretation of it better that it was generous. I mean Roosevelt is someone who – he does not come off amazing in this book, but he's someone who I genuinely – except for one or two things in his tenure as presidency, obviously like the Japanese relocation camps are abominable. But otherwise, I find him to be such an –

Amazing figure, such a titanic, unbelievable figure that to see him being this petty throughout the book is really, it's really disappointing. But you can also just imagine what level of pain in the ass Robert Moses is. I mean, like, yes, I could totally just like I'm not inheriting this guy. I have no interest in this.

And Belmoskowitz seems perfectly great in so many respects, but also seems so loyal to Al Smith that, again, you're just like, well, why is she working for me here? Like, she's just working for Al Smith in this role. And so I can totally understand that reason. And like when you're doing all this stuff and you have all these people and all these responsibilities involved.

Having this thorn in your side the whole time, Robert Moses, I could totally say like, I'm just going to dig this thing out. I don't care how bad it feels to dig it out. I want it out of my body. Definitely. Yeah. To have Moses, this guy who loves Al Smith. It comes up later that he calls Al Smith governor, but he calls Roosevelt Frank. He never calls him governor. That the like you'd be like, do I have to deal with this guy? Like, come on. Let's bring in some of my people. Some people call me governor for crying out loud. That's my title.

So, but they're stuck with each other for now. So we go to chapter 17, the next one, the mother of accommodation. And it's a great chapter that sort of explains why Robert Moses, through this tumultuous period of not having the support of Alice Smith, still both retains and actually grows his power. And it is because

Because, you know, Roosevelt learns, just like Al Smith learned, that having noticeable improvements to people's lives, nipples, is a great way to stay governor. Right.

Yes, exactly. So Moses, he enters this administration not sure he's going to have the executive support that Smith always gave him. And that gets tested very quickly because it turns out there's this one spot where he's building the Northern State Parkway where there's no space between the barren estates that he wants to run the road.

And the Barons, it seems like they're going to use Roosevelt's background against Moses because they actually hire one of Roosevelt's old Harvard classmates, a guy named Grenville Clark, who again sounds like an attorney who went to Harvard at the turn of the century. They hire him to fight Moses, and Clark learns of Moses' biggest secret, the thing that –

Literally, Moses stopped talking to Caro when Caro brought up years later, which is the $10,000 that AutoCon gave to Moses's road building in order to route the northern state parkway around his golf course and through a series of family farms basically or one in particular. And Clark gives this information to those Moses-hating state legislators, Hutchinson and Hewitt, that Moses kept outwitting last episode like a legislative Bugs Bunny, like a bureaucratic administrative Daffy Duck.

And they make it clear that any attempt to route the road through this area called the Wheatley Hills where the Barons are will lead to a public fight. They will expose Moses' deal with Khan, and they'll do it so that it stretches into 1930 when Roosevelt will be running for reelection as governor. So Roosevelt agrees to this compromise. They're going to do a two-mile detour around the area, and the Barons will pay a little bit toward the cost of the detour, but more than 90 percent of that road cost will be covered by the taxpayers.

And Carol takes a moment to point out that this compromise and the compromise with AutoCon meant that commuters from east of the Dix Hills using the Northern State Parkway to commute in and out of New York, they have to go 11 extra miles each way every workday. That's an unnecessary 22 miles of driving every workday. That's 5,500 unnecessary miles a year. And so by the 1960s, tens of thousands of commuters are wasting tens of millions of hours of their lives driving.

On these extra unnecessary miles of road because of these political deals and each twist in that road is a tribute to the power of the barons who could work behind the scenes to thwart ostensibly public government. It all gets at this idea that Carol has throughout the book that each of the things that we live in in the built world is based on a choice that was made deliberately.

possibly because of power that was undemocratic or anti-democratic. But it's not the powerful people who force those choices that have to live with it usually. It's the ordinary folks like you and me, Joe Podcaster. Right, Roman? That's right. Yeah, we have to bear the weight of that choice. And it is one of those things that

I think one of the reasons why it is so devastating reputationally and why it is a good lever to use to control a little bit of what Robert Moses does, it is so antithetical to his image as a champion of people. Yes. I mean, it's the, it's the old Trump conundrum. Trump can openly do any number of bad things, but it's like, yeah, we kind of expect that from him. Like, you know, he's a, he's a guy that we expect that from. But if a, an upstanding type politician, uh,

gets found out doing something slightly shady, then it destroys that reputation that they have. It's more damaging because of the context of the reputation that's happening in. So for Robert Moses, it's almost like if people already knew that he was such a dealmaker and dealbreaker, if he was such a power broker and power smoker, that they would... And a midnight toker. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, if ever there's a guy who is not a midnight toker, I imagine it's Robert Moses. He's too busy tromping the hills of Long Island looking for routes for roads and looking for places to build beaches. But it's because – like you're saying exactly, because he has this reputation as this virtuous kind of man of the people that it would be especially damaging to be –

… making deals with the barons who are ostensibly his enemies. And part of this compromise is also that Moses promises he's never going to build parks along that North Shore section that's owned by the barons. And as of the writing of the book in 1974, this was still pretty much the case. Since then, it's not the case. And a lot of the estates up there are now parks and are now open to the public.

And they're very beautiful to go to. It makes you mad that it was just privately owned for such a long time. And Caro suggests that maybe Al Smith wouldn't have fallen into this trap, but that Roosevelt suffers a little bit in Albany because he's not seen as trustworthy. And Moses comes to not see Roosevelt as trustworthy. People expect Roosevelt to lie to them. And it comes to the point where Moses will be like, "Will you sign this law that I pushed through?" And Roosevelt's like, "I'll sign it." And then he doesn't do it. So Moses has to literally hang out in Roosevelt's office and physically refuse to leave until Roosevelt signs those laws.

Here's the place where I start to feel like Caro was misleading us a little bit because, as you mentioned, despite this big buildup about Roosevelt being his enemy, Moses grows in power during this time. Roosevelt signs most of the bills Moses wants. As we mentioned before, Moses doesn't even call Roosevelt by his title. He just calls him Frank, which I have to imagine most people, at least they call him by his first name, call him Franklin at least. Like the only worst thing would be if he called him like Frankie, which would be very funny.

And he does things without telling Roosevelt. He won't take Roosevelt's patronage suggestions, which is big because Moses now controls 1,500 jobs at least. And Roosevelt has this dream of turning this old army base in the Bronx into a merchant marine academy, which is the kind of stuff he loved. And Moses –

blocks that really for no reason just just to annoy him literally until roosevelt is leaving to become president on the third to last day of his governorship he knows he's been elected president he quietly is like and i signed this law giving this space over to become a merchant marine academy and doesn't tell anybody and it just seems like moses is needling him for no reason but he's also able to do this because

He understands the mechanics of the state government better than anybody else. He literally wrote the law. And later on in the book, you'll have young people will say to Moses, oh, well, the law says this thing. And he'll go, yeah, I know. I wrote that law. Like it came out of his head. And that means that he is someone who occasionally Roosevelt can rely on. So in 1929, Roosevelt has his first budget.

It's the first state budget drawn up under the Moses budget system. And the legislature is like, we're attaching a rider to this that gives us equal power to the governor in allocating government spending. And Roosevelt's like, what do I do about this? And Moses says –

Just let the courts veto the bill. We'll find other ways to pay for the government. There's always money to be found hidden in places of the government. And the courts will say it's unconstitutional. And that's exactly what happens. Moses is like this kind of like frenemy consigliere that he can rely on to understand things, even though I'm sure Roosevelt was mad, even though it helped him, that he was mad that Moses was right. I guarantee it. Yeah. And he really did reform the government to such an extent that, you know, he does know the ins and outs of this. And

You know, Caro presents him as being, you know, extremely sanguine when everything goes to court because he feels like his writing of these laws is so ironclad that no one would, you know, rule against him. And, you know, he's right. It's like you're playing a board game against the Parker brothers and they're like, yeah, we think we're going to win this one. But the real thing, the real reason why Moses accumulates power is

Yes. Yes.

Making nipples happen. He is noticeably improving people's lives in ways that are now finally coming to fruition. And so like, for instance, the Wanta Causeway opens. Now New Yorkers can drive all the way to Jones Beach. On the first day, 25,000 cars drive across it. In the first month, 325,000 people are going to Jones Beach State Park. And now that it's accessible to people from the outlying areas, they can see just how amazing it is.

And reporters from New York can come and see how beautiful it looks and all the little design details and things that make it like a little swimming fantasy land and have little – like Moses, he's always big on little touches that are kind of whimsical. And a lot of like – it's stuff like ship-themed water fountains and everyone who works there is wearing like kind of sailor-type outfits. It sounds a little cheesy to me, but –

I have to imagine 1929, this kind of like whimsical recreation land for ordinary people was mind blowing. Totally. This and later on we talk about the Central Park Zoo. It's like little he's like making little like proto Disney lands that just like feel like you're walking in a different world. I mean, you have to imagine that most of these people's lives were like bereft of delight, you know. That's such a sad phrase. Yeah, I think you're right. And when you see all this stuff and all this attention and all these cute touches, you

You know, and like, you know, Carol liberally uses the word gay to talk about, you know, happy and light and free. And it is this word that I was like, you know, obviously has changed so much over time and how we use it. But it's perfect for describing this feeling that is about happiness and lightness and goodness and whimsy that that must have just felt like.

you know, Dorothy walking into Oz for the first time. That's such a fantastic parallel for it. Like these people coming from the gray world of the city, these are middle or lower class people, mostly middle class people because they have cars, but maybe they brought their lower class friends with them in the backseat of the car. They're able to enter a world where they can forget about

the rest of their lives for a day and just enjoy it. And that's such a new experience to people, I have to imagine. And the other thing that everyone is amazed about with Jones Beach, the same as all adults are amazed about with the Disney parks, is how clean it is. It's amazingly clean. And you're coming from a city that still has like...

Horse dung all over the streets in lots of places. And they make a point that the attendants who wear sailor suits, if there's a piece of litter, they don't have sticks to pick it up with. They have to stoop down and pick it up with their hands so everyone sees that someone dropped a piece of litter. And it is especially embarrassing for the litter bug because they know that someone had to put effort into cleaning it up.

And Kara says that if a bag of garbage is found on the side of a Moses Parkway, the troopers who work the parkway will open up the bag and try to identify the owner from the contents. And they'll go to their home and issue them a summons. And they'll bring newspaper reporters with them so that there'll be a story in the paper like litterbug caught. You know, this litterbug from Manhattan was caught because they analyzed his trash. I'm 100% on Moses' side about this. This is the one crime. I believe firmly in the decriminalization of most things. Yeah.

But littering, I want to have stiffer penalties and fines and shame. Yeah, you're a hardcore litterbug death penalty advocate. And as a result, you know, by 1932, the attendance is in the millions of people. The facilities have to be expanded. It's a huge success. And that all reflects on littering.

Who's in charge at the time? The governor. It reflects on Moses but also on Governor Roosevelt. And Moses' projects have this kind of snowball effect where once people see how successful and how beloved one is, they want to build more. So he opens this two-mile-long ocean parkway in 1930, and it goes from Jones Beach in the direction of Fire Island. And he's like, actually, I want to build more.

98 more miles of parkway, all the way from Rockaway to Montauk Point. And these local communities that used to stand in his way, they're like, yeah, yeah, this is going to bring money to us. And he says to the legislature, I've got millions of dollars worth of land that's just been given to the state so I can build this road. Are you going to let it go to waste? He's using his whipsawing and his – what's the other one? Stake driving methods. And in 1931, the legislature, they appropriates the money to extend –

the route and it doesn't make it all the way through Fire Island, according to Caro, because there's two old lady sisters who live there who will not sell their land. They just refuse to. And Moses is like, I'll deal with them later. I'll get around to that. And luckily for everybody, he never does. So I guess we have those two old ladies to thank for Fire Island not having a highway running straight through it, for it still being a place where you can go and it feels like you're not in the New York area anymore. And it's funny that

And Caro told us in his interview, he was talking to Moses and Moses was pointing out to Fire Island being like, shouldn't there be a parkway up there? Like, shouldn't there? Like, he was still was like, I'm ensuring his head. He's like, those two old biddies, you know, they they stopped me from from my dream.

And everyone loves Moses' work. He takes a big advantage of that. His projects are an enormous part of the budget. They're 70 percent, more than 70 percent of the state's metropolitan construction budget. And when Roosevelt wants to cut the budget because when he runs for president, he doesn't want to be seen as a spendthrift. Moses, he

He threatens to resign. It becomes his go-to move. And this time it works. Roman, tell us again. It didn't work when he was a Yale swimmer. Why does it work now? He's got the power. He's got the power. And therefore he cannot be allowed to resign. And this is like the first moment where there's like this move that he goes over and over again, even to the point where like, you know, like, you know, people like LaGuardia kind of laughing them through the process. You know what I mean? And it really works and it works big.

And it really matters here because like half a chapter ago, Roosevelt was ready to fire him. Roosevelt was ready to get him out by any means necessary to endure whatever pain it was to get rid of him. But now he pulls the resignation move and it totally works. And he's going to use it for the next 50 years. And it's going to work forever.

Every time until the one time it doesn't work, which was in which case it really doesn't work. We'll get to that much later in the book. And Moses, he knows his his playbook. Now he's going to ask legislature for a big amount of money. He's going to build something part of the way.

He's going to say, I actually need more money, and they're going to say no, and he's going to say, are you going to let all that go to waste? You're going to tell the voters that you wasted all this money? And he almost always gets what he wants. And by 1930, the Long Island State Parks, according to Caro, they're seeing 3 million visitors a year at a time when the attendance at all national parks combined –

is 3.4 million. It's hugely popular. And he always includes Roosevelt in the big opening ceremonies and other politicians that he needs. That way, they get the media attention and they get the public credit. And Moses starts to say to people, you can get an awful lot of good done in the world if you're willing to let someone else take the credit for it, which is very funny considering he is also getting a massive amount of credit for everything. It's not like he's the man in the shadows that nobody knows about. He's still getting credit. But

Politicians, they need – especially if they're running for reelection, they need that record of achievements, and that means very early on in their terms, the projects have to start because they've got to be done in time for election day. They've got to be able to point to it and say, look at that road. Look at that beach. They can't point to a plan. They can point to a thing and –

A governor unfortunately can't – I mean not unfortunately. For those projects, a governor can't unfortunately just steamroll over people and break the guardrails of democracy. Democracy's whole point is it slows action down so that you don't run roughshod over people.

But because Moses is an appointed official, he doesn't need to be reelected. He can throw his weight around, be a jerk to people. He can be mean to voters. It doesn't matter. And everyone, if they get mad, they'll get mad at him and not the governor. But then when the project is done, the governor can be like, look at this great road I built. Yeah. Look at this. Look at this beach I built. This is an amazing thing because, you know, these terms, they might seem interminable to us when we have to endure a politician we despise. But they are very short in terms of getting things done. Yeah.

And Robert Moses, not only does he have all these qualities to get things done, he might be the only person in history that can put a road in inside of two years. You know, like, I mean, it's really stunning how different as a sort of weapon of accomplishment that Robert Moses is compared to most people.

Recently in Los Angeles, we had a problem where a major freeway – there was a fire under it, and it fell apart, and it was closed for a little bit. And people thought it was going to be closed forever, for a long, long time, and they finished rebuilding it in a relatively short amount of time, within a matter of weeks, and everyone was so amazed. You would have thought a magic trick had taken place in Los Angeles. People couldn't stop talking about it for a long time. Can you believe they – it's up already?

You can drive on it again. Can you believe it? Because this stuff is so difficult. It's so hard to push it through. And Robert Moses consistently doing it. I mean, if I had built Jones Beach, I would have been like, that's my monument. I did it. Like, that was a lot of effort. Now I'm going to rest on my laurels a little bit. But he just keeps doing these things. And as a result, he can get away with a lot that other people don't. And Kara talks about how Moses –

gets away with actually strangling, not to death, but strangling another member of the parks council during a meeting that the, to be fair, the council member refers to Moses by an anti-Semitic slur. And, uh,

Moses gets so mad that he starts strangling him, and when he's pulled off of this guy, he picks up a three-foot ashtray stand and hurls it at him and luckily only misses him because another guy hit his arm to stop it so it wouldn't hit this guy. But he gets so mad, and the council member goes to Roosevelt and is like, are you going to do something about this guy who strangled me? And Roosevelt is like, no, I don't think I'm going to, and the council member resigns. He is so –

politically important that he can get away with this kind of thing, which to most people would probably lose that job if they if they strangled a co-worker, let's say. That's true.

Maybe it's because this is a view of the kind of more negative aspect of Moses that this is when Carol starts to transition into Moses' efforts to dissuade black people especially, poor people in general but black people especially, from using these parks and facilities. And he quotes Francis Perkins who has known Moses for years and years saying that Moses saw the public as dirty and dirty.

Kara talks about how Moses kept the Long Island Railroad from going to Jones Beach, and he makes the claim that has become surprisingly controversial in recent years that Moses was deliberately keeping the overpasses on his parkways too low for buses to pass under. And there's been a lively debate over the past few years about whether this was standard parkway practice or not. One of Moses' –

top lieutenants told Caro that this was a deliberate move, but it's hard to know the truth about that. Although every time I've seen it fact-checked, the fact-checker is always like,

I guess Caro's technically correct since Moses's lieutenant told him this way and Moses did it. But it's become a surprising controversy recently. Yeah. I mean, I think there was some bus service to Jones Beach. It wasn't widespread. It was from the very beginning. Clearly, it was never meant to expand. It was meant to be very small. And there were lots of other things about how Jones Beach was run that

That, you know, comports to this idea of like not complete exclusion, but enough discomfort, enough shame, enough.

You just like making people feel uncomfortable that he was designing Jones Beach for a certain type of people and and and poor people and especially black people were not among them. Yes, they hired a couple black lifeguards and would post them at the farthest reaches of the beach, farthest from the bathhouses to kind of.

Given a little subtle pressure that that's the place where black bathers should go, he would keep the water in the Jones Beach pool cold under the impression that black people hate cold water. So they won't go into the pool if it's too cold, which is I remember reading this book years ago, and it was the first time I had ever come across that stereotype. And I was like, really? Like, what was he basing that on? Like, I don't. But.

Black civic groups notice this and they complain to Roosevelt and he has an investigation. It finds that Moses is discouraging black people from using the parks and Roosevelt brings up to Moses and Moses goes, no, I'm not doing that. And Roosevelt never brings it up again because I think he just – he needed to be seen to go through the motions. But Moses is too valuable to him. It's too valuable to the state in his mind. Yeah.

to get him into trouble for this. And even when Moses, he wants to raise the price of parking at the parks to 50 cents, which is a lot of money in the 30s. That's a huge amount of money to raise it. It leads to a backlash and Roosevelt wants him to lower the price. He threatens to resign. Roosevelt goes, oh, never mind then. And even Roosevelt even vetoes a bill banning fees in state parks because 1932 is coming. Roosevelt's running for president. He can't afford a public spat with his incredibly popular guy. And the chapter ends with

Everyone knows Roosevelt's running for the Democratic nomination for president. He's got a very good shot because it's the Depression and people want to change. Al Smith, he decides he's going to run against Roosevelt basically out of spite. And Moses, he takes a leave of absence to help his old boss try to defeat his current boss, which is a real – that's a real jerk of a move to do. And Moses does this knowing Al Smith does not have a chance. There's no way he's going to get this nomination. And Moses, in a show of loyalty and support.

spite of roosevelt those things dovetail beautifully here he kind of stands by smith through the moment when smith knows he has lost he doesn't abandon him before then uh which is a rare moment of maybe i don't know if it's compassion or comfort from moses he really does feel this relationship with al smith that will sit with him for the rest of his life uh and if it means that he gets to try to try to unseat this guy he hates his current boss then he'll do that too yeah yeah

It is really interesting to watch how pure his affection for Al Smith is. And this comes up, but we'll get there. But one of my favorite sections of the whole book. And, you know, despite his general political savvy and political calculations, although, as you mentioned before, he has kind of a blind spot for like electoral politics. He has different bureaucratic politics, like superpowers, but electoral politics, he doesn't have. He seems to just not be able to sort of

crack that code. But he really does, you know, want to stand with him and he sort of stays with them in all night, you know, with the democratic nomination until he realizes that it is not going to happen and a bunch of people break for Roosevelt and they, you know, secretly leave the convention, you know, by a side door and

He always wants to maintain the dignity of Al Smith. It's very clear. Yes, I think that's a great way to put it, that he always wants Al Smith to be seen the way he sees Al Smith as this just true heroic figure that is deserving of love, deserving of not just respect, but love. And there's something very beautiful about that. And it's you almost wish you could say to Robert Moses, imagine everybody in these buildings that you're evicting to build your expressway was Al Smith.

Like, would that change the way you feel about this? And I don't know, maybe it would, but maybe it wouldn't. Al Smith seems to be his one true love, which is which is very sweet. That's right. And while we're piling on all these like horrible things that Robert Moses does, except for his devotion to Al Smith, Robert Caro changes gears again in the next chapter that we will get to after this.

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So the next chapter is chapter 18, New York City before Robert Moses. It's a little bit of a misnomer. There's like only a little bit of before Moses and then there's a lot of after Robert Moses. Yeah, that's very true. But I think the point here is there is so much bad going on in the world. There's so much bad and comes to parks and to politics and to graft and everything that the environment that Robert Moses steps in and reforms is terrible.

really in need of reform. And there's a reason why he accumulates this power and goodwill. I think you're exactly right that this chapter is Robert Caro switching gears so that we can't just be like Robert Moses, boo, Rat Fink, boo, but instead to show us why there was a need in some ways for someone like him and that allowed him to do these things. So it's 1932. It's the Great Depression. It's hit the country. New York has hit particularly hard. This chapter is so full of

I feel bad that I get such pleasure out of it, this kind of terrifying urban apocalypse like everything's falling apart writing. And there's some of this right here where it says, New York in 1932 was half-completed skyscrapers. Work on them long since halted for the lack of funds that glared down the city from glassless windows.

It was housewives scavenging for vegetables under push carts. It was crowds gathering at garbage dumps in Riverside Park and swarming onto them every time a new load was deposited, digging through the piles with sticks or hands in hopes of finding bits of food. New York was the soup kitchens operated from the back of army trucks in Times Square. It was the men, some of them wearing Chesterfield coats and Homburgs, who lined up at the soup kitchens with drooping shoulders and eyes that never looked up from the sidewalk. He goes on and on about...

New York at this time is people being evicted. It's people living on the streets. More than a third of the manufacturing firms in the city have shut down. Nearly a third of the employable people in New York are out of work. There's 1.6 million people on welfare, kids going without proper food. And what makes the problem even worse is that the previous couple of mayors, Red Mike Hyland and our old pal James Walker, Bo James Walker, they –

They were so ridiculously corrupt. They were so corrupt. They're just hundreds of thousands of dollars in graft every year. Carol has this detail about how common it was for vice cops to just frame women as prostitutes and tell them that if they aren't paid off, they're going to take them to jail and whatever.

This stuff doesn't really become super public. Everyone knows that these guys are slimy, but the extent of it doesn't become public until this former judge, Samuel Seabury, who we'll see more of later in this episode, he investigates and he brings it all to light. He confronts Mayor Walker in court. He's like, look at all these bribes you took. And Mayor Walker is like, I resign. And he flees to Europe with his mistress. And.

His replacement is not much better. His replacement, Mayor O'Brien, he's another Tammany man. And at one point they ask him who his police commissioner is going to be, and he goes, I don't know. They haven't told me yet. So he is – Carol Rebens is like one of two incredibly bumbling New York mayors. And there's a lot of statistics on top of this about New York's population is getting bigger.

The budget costs are ballooning, and what that means especially is that the city is in debt. It has had to borrow so much money to pay its bills, and now the interest is coming due. The payments are coming due on that debt, on those loans, and the tax collections are falling just as all this money is coming due. They're going to have to pay, and the only way to pay it is to borrow more money. So the banks demand more budget cuts, which means…

cutting funds for infrastructure, cutting services, and the Tammany leaders, they won't fire anyone who's politically connected. So in 1931, they fire 11,000 teachers because the teachers have no power. They can just get rid of them. And 1933 is coming, and in that year, hundreds of millions of dollars in loans are going to be coming due, and New York simply cannot pay them.

And at the same time, this corruption also means that the people working in the government are incredibly incompetent. You've got engineers working for the city who don't have high school diplomas. Every time you want to build something, there's a series of payoffs that have to be made. So nothing is getting built, and the physical infrastructure of New York is so old and so crumbling. Carol mentions that from 1918 to 1932…

The number of cars in New York City multiplied more than sixfold. And at the same time, they're building no new major roads within the city or not finishing any of them. They haven't built a new route between the boroughs in 25 years. It's traffic jams all the time. The only way to get across the Harlem River from Manhattan to the Bronx is a three-lane drawbridge. So traffic gets backed up because so many cars would get across it, and then it might have to stop because a ship has to pass through. This is bonkers. This is the 20th century. This is –

I mean it's something about it that's kind of quaint. The Queensborough Bridge is 25 years old. They haven't even painted lanes on it yet. So when you're driving on it, you have to navigate where your car is supposed to go. It's just – it's incredibly bonkers that this – this is so not the image I have of New York City, which is skyscrapers, Broadway, the amazing things about New York. But the physical –

Living in it was falling apart, and I'll give you two examples of how unfinished New York was at the time. In Riverdale in the Bronx where my mom spent her first 13 years, they had built a 100-foot-high marble column. And in 1909, they're like, we're going to put a statue of – Carol calls him Hendrick Hudson the whole time, but I always know him as Henry Hudson. We're going to put a statue of Hendrick Hudson up there, and we're going to build a Hendrick Hudson Bridge.

By 1932, 23 years later, the column is the only thing there from the original plans. The statue is not even there. It's just an empty column. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn and Bay Ridge, they tunneled 96-foot deep holes that are going to be for a narrows tube to link Brooklyn and Staten Island.

And from 1921 to 1923, the city spends $7 million digging it, and then they just stop, and they just leave these huge holes. And eventually they put like a fence around it because kids are falling in them or threatening to fall in them. Like it's – the city is falling apart, and like to make it even more Moses-centric, the parks are in bad shape. They've rented out city parks to private owners in exchange for kickbacks.

The parks are staffed by the Tammany job seekers they couldn't put anywhere else. Everything's overgrown, except for the trees, which are stumps. Every single park structure in the city needs to be repaired. Monuments and statues are crumbling in Bryant Park, which is now a kind of weed-filled, vacant lot full of drunks. The statues there – I know there's one of Washington Irving. I can't remember what the other statue was.

They're just lost. Nobody knows where they are. They just lost the statues. And Carol doesn't mention this, but I did some research. In 1934, they were eventually found under the Williams Bridge. So they did find the statues. They were under a bridge. And...

corrupt vendors who paid for their license are selling kids unsafe hot dogs that make them sick. Like it's just everything's going wrong in the parks, you know. And you can see why the reform movement is particularly centered on parks because of all this stuff. I mean, these are the only places of respite in the entire city, a city that is falling apart. And

Parks just become the symbol of the reform movement. It's like the physical embodiment of everything that they want and it's all falling apart. And Robert Moses, you know, ends up being the answer to it. I mean, one of my favorite parts of this is that

You know, Central Park, you know, this jewel, you know, like this thing that's I think to this day, I think is one of the most amazing parks in the world in terms of. And you talk to New Yorkers. There's this general admiration for the foresight of the people who laid out the city that they kept that space open for a park when they could have easily just filled it in with buildings and it would have been worth so much money.

Yeah. To have it there, it's so necessary to life the city. But yeah, Roman, tell us about Central Park in 1932. Well, it's been neglected for decades. All the lawns are turned to dirt. The paths are broken. Benches and garbage cans are overturned. And what's amazing to me, most amazing to me at all, is the Central Park Menagerie, which is what, you know, the predecessor to the Central Park Zoo, has become so rotted. Guards are given rifles to shoot lions in case they break free. Yeah.

Yeah, they're like, in case of a fire, the lions will probably just break through the cages because they're so weak now. So you have to carry this gun so you can shoot this lion, which is – it's just –

It's such a – that's an extreme situation for a zoo to be in. And even to call it a zoo is not fair because, as Carol mentions, it was called a menagerie because people would just leave their pets there. Like if you were tired with a pet, you just donate it to Central Rock Menagerie, and the whole thing is full of rats. And in the sheep meadow, there's this flock of inbred sheep that's become malformed over the years. And it's – and of course, it's the Depression, so there's a Hooverville there. And yeah, it's – this amazingly beautiful park has just fallen apart.

And sports facilities are inadequate. There's only two outdoor swimming pools in the entire city, which is amazing. There's not enough baseball diamonds or things like that. And Kara talks about these public restrooms where women who are connected to Tammany would be assigned as the overseers, and they would just turn them into private apartments that they would invite people to and host gatherings in, and you couldn't use them. They were not available to you. It's just – it's really amazing. And so –

As Roman and Tim were saying, parks have become this very potent, very visible symbol for the city reformers and the activists about what could be done to make life so instantly better for so many of the people in the city who –

Don't have cars and can't drive out of the city and are just stuck there, and especially for children. There's – on the Lower East Side, there's 500,000 people live there. There are two small parks. On the Upper West Side, between 110th Street and 150th Street, there's basically no green space. There's just tenements that block out the sun, and it's heartbreaking, I feel like. Carol talks about it.

And children just standing in spots where the sun happens to be avoiding the buildings, like having cracks between buildings that sunlight is going to do because they want sunlight so badly and waiting for hours online just to dig in like little plots of dirt that are – like you have to wait online to dig in dirt. That's how bad the recreation is for children in the city at that time. It's really – it's abominable. Yeah.

And the ultimate kind of symbol of Tammany's inability to deal with this is the Central Park Casino, which this is the big infrastructure project that Meir Walker is really invested in, where there's a nightclub in Central Park. He throws out the owner. He leases it to this guy that Caro says he owes him a favor, I guess, because he introduced him to his favorite tailor. And he gives him a sweetheart deal to lease this casino. And Walker's very invested in the building of it, the design of it.

And he treats it at his private social club where he and other Tammany politicians, they're drinking champagne. Motorcycle cops are escorting chorus girls when Broadway shows finish to the casino so that the politicians can spend time with them. It's really a bad situation for the entire city. Moses, he's been trying to get the city to follow through on its promise to build new roads since 1926, and six years later…

None of those roads are built. The lands that he was hoping to use for roads is filling in with housing developments. They have the plans to build this Triborough Bridge, and they didn't even make any plans to build roads that would link the Triborough Bridge to the streets in the city. It would just be a bridge with no roads on either side. It's okay. They don't have the money to build the bridge anyway, so it doesn't matter. Why would they plan for it?

This is when Moses starts to step in. Moses named the chairman of an activist organization, the Metropolitan Parks Conference, and he's got all these workers in his state parks office that he can use to start coming up with plans to submit to the city. And he is driving around New York at night just kind of dreaming about roads and new parks. And I was like, when does he have the time to do this? He's so busy. How does he have time to just drive around New York City?

But it all culminates on February 25th, 1930. There's a big black tie event, and he presents this massive plan for parkways and new bridges to connect New York City to the outside world and between boroughs to make it possible to drive through the city, around the city, out of the city without getting stuck in local traffic. And he's laying out what's going to become the Belt Parkway, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Henry Hudson Parkway, these many routes –

This chapter – I was going to go into more detail about it. It's a lot of New York metropolitan area-specific traffic talk. It's bridges that you know if you drive around New York, but otherwise – the point is you can go from New England to Long Island, and you won't get trapped in Manhattan traffic jams. That's his big – his big goal is to make it so that people outside of New York can get to Long Island without having to go through Manhattan, and you'd have parks alongside all these parkways. And he says, we can do it, folks.

We can do it. We just have to issue a bond of $30 million. Help me fight to make this happen. And the audiences are like, we love it. Yeah, this is amazing. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Moses, you're the best. And the city is like, oh, hold on a second. With good cause, because at this point, like everything has been deteriorating for so long and nothing gets built and nothing gets maintained. It must seem like complete science fiction to them. It's like he's going to someone who is out of shape and just watches TV, never gets off their couch. And he's like, next year, you're winning a gold medal in the Olympics. We're going to make this happen. Like, that's how New York feels. Yeah.

And they do pass that bond issue, but most of the money goes unspent until 1933. 1933, Roosevelt is now in the White House. He's in the White House. There's a new governor, Herbert Lehman, from the son of the Lehman brothers who become famous in other ways. Yeah, he's the Lehman nephew, I guess you'd call him. That's right. And he has so much respect for Moses. He's going to give him even more power. I know, Roman, you thought there was no more power left to give to Moses. Yeah.

But he gives him this very important post that sounds very boring. He makes him chairman of the State Emergency Public Works Commission, which means he's the one person who will determine which construction projects are going to be submitted to the federal government for funding now that the government under Roosevelt is doing all this public works funding to try to get out of the Depression. And Moses is like, I have some projects I will submit to the federal government. And he immediately gets funding for a ton of work in the Niagara Falls area, which Caro –

Caro throughout the book will occasionally be like, oh, yeah, this enormous dam that that Moses builds at Niagara Falls. And he seems to understand that his audience is a New York roughly centered audience is not that interested in the Niagara Falls stuff. But this is like the dam that bears his name. Yeah. Yes. This is the Robert Moses dam. And so it's very important to Robert Moses. And I it's almost I admire Caro so much. I feel like.

I like the honesty of him mentioning it, but almost implicitly being like, but that's not why we're here, right, folks? We're not here to hear about dams on Niagara Falls. But also like the Lincoln Tunnel housing projects, he's starting to get federal funding for those things in New York. Even more important for Moses' future, he's finally able to get the legislature to establish the Triborough Bridge Authority, which as a –

Semi-private, semi-public organization. It can issue its own bonds to be paid back by toll revenue, which makes it immediately eligible for $44.2 million from the Public Works Administration, from the federal government. And this is the moment I feel like when rereading it where it's really struck me, oh, the federal money is big money. Like there's no more –

He's scrounging from the state to a certain extent. He still does plenty of that. But now if he can get the state to get a little invested in something, he can go to the federal government and get an enormous amount of money. Suddenly, he has so much more potential to play with.

And the authority, of course, it's instantly corrupt. So the federal government is like, we're not giving you any more money. This is ridiculous. And Moses is like, Tammany guys, we could change the city like we can make it so much easier to get around it. And they're like, yeah, but how much money are we going to make off of this? And so the city is it's in bad financial straits. More loans are coming to things are really bad. Robert Moses, he sees only one solution. He's going to have to be mayor.

OK, now we're on to chapter 19 to power in the city, which I find it to be a little awkward to read out loud. It's a very Marvel Comics type story title. Yeah, it's the kind of thing Stanley would write. Like, would he be like, lo, a god cometh, you know, to power in the city, you know, daredevil discovers. Yeah.

And this is where we focus on the mayor of New York. A lot of this has been sort of bouncing around to like the governor and this. And we're focusing here more on the city and what it would mean to have a mayor also on Robert Moses's side. Yes. To not have to deal with.

The Tammany Machine, which would be a first in New York for a long time. And it starts with one of Caro's best chapter opening lines, which is – he has so many great ones. This is, in New York City, 1933 was the year of the goo-goo, which I love. But it's only now that I realize that goo-goo is a way of saying good government, like a derogatory way of referring to a good government person, which makes it a little less fun to me. I thought it was Al Smith calling people babies. Yeah.

But I like that it's the year of the goo-goo. The good government movement is back. Judge Samuel Seabury, who we mentioned earlier, he is spearheading it. And because of the depression, the electorate is seen as being more sympathetic to this type of good government movement because they need help so badly. You can no longer just be like, yeah, the government is corrupt. What are you going to do? Because you can't feed your family. And –

A mayoral election is looming. Public sentiment is against Tammany. It doesn't help that John Patrick O'Brien, the guy they installed after Walker, is a gaffe machine. And Caro points out two genuine gaffes. He's talking to voters in Harlem and he says, my heart is as black as yours, which is crazy. And he's talking to a synagogue audience and he tells them how much he admires the scientist Albert Weinstein, which is –

He's like a cartoon version of a bad mayor. And not too long before recording this, we talked to some of our listeners in a Discord AMA, and we were talking about moments of humor in the book. And I feel like Caro is very good at isolating some of these that are just –

It's silly. It's silly for him to go to an audience and say Albert Weinstein. So the environment is favorable for that most desired of all things by all reformers. You hear about it even now all the time, a fusion candidate. That's right, people from different political parties working together. The political media in the United States loves this. They love the idea of a bipartisan candidate even though it almost never works, almost never. Yeah.

And it's not always a good idea. It's often not a good idea. But so the reformers who would normally be kind of activist liberals, you could say, and the Republican Party, they form the city fusion party. They ask Judge Seabury to run for mayor. And he says, no, I don't want to do that.

And so they consider Robert Moses and Robert Moses is very attractive to them, to the older reformers who don't know that Robert Moses is a shady individual. They're like, oh, this is our protege. Like we saw him come up from a young man. He's our he's our son in a way. And the younger guard are like they look up to him. They see him as their idol. And he is considered a public servant and not a politician, which is not a

a real differentiation and Carol kind of criticized this as a naive way of categorizing officials but then it feels very real he's not a dirty politician he's a noble public servant Moses is like yeah I'll take that nomination for sure but judge Seabury the latest in a line of Moses opponents uh

He does not like him. And Caro takes a moment to talk about Seabury, who is this kind of like old-fashioned, descended from pilgrims, kind of sternly imposing patrician idealist. He's elected judge at age 28, and he spends nearly his entire life fighting Tammany Hall. And in 1916, when he was 43, one year older than me, which makes me feel very unaccomplished, he runs for governor, and he –

almost makes it but tammany orchestrates his defeat even though he's their candidate he's the democratic candidate he's their party's candidate and there's a footnote that i have to mention because i love it rucaro says that one of the reasons that seabury ran was that theodore roosevelt who at the time has been president of the united states theodore roosevelt convinces him to run and at the last minute he pulls his support and supports republican and seabury goes to roosevelt's home and calls him a blathersky he's so mad

that he goes all the way up to Oyster Bay to call him a blatherskite, which I just love. Do we know what a blatherskite is other than the greatest name ever? I mean, it doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound positive. I'm going to have to look this up right now. Okay, so a blatherskite is a person who talks at great length without making much sense.

Well, that's a little more mild than I thought it was. Yeah, I thought it was going to be worse. I thought it was going to be something that involves farm animals or, you know, like, you know, but it's still not a great thing to be called, especially in 1916. That's powerful stuff. And he wants to run for governor in 1918. The nomination goes to Al Smith, who Seabury does not like. He sees him as the friendly guy who puts a nice face on the Tammany Tiger.

He makes this corruption presentable, and Seabury returns to private life always believing, according to Moses, who I assume told this to Caro, that if Al Smith had stepped aside, he could have been governor and then someday president. And this is the lesson from every book about politics I've ever read. Everyone who goes into politics assumes they will be president someday.

It's the same way you read James Clavel's Shogun. Every character is like, yeah, yeah, and I do this and this and I'll become Shogun. And it's like, you're never going to be Shogun. Like you're four levels down. Everyone who goes into politics is like, yeah, I'll probably be president at some point. And this is the one time or probably one of a handful of times where Robert Moses' association with Al Smith is.

really hurts him because Seabury really hates Al Smith. Robert Moses is rightfully considered his right-hand man. And even though I think on the merits, Seabury wouldn't have huge problems with Robert Moses and what he did and how he gets things done, he just hates Al Smith so much that...

Robert Moses is unacceptable to him. Yes. And so he will not support Moses and his support is crucial for a fusion candidate. Even today in politics, personal endorsements, personal support from specific individuals is so important. And if Seabury won't support Moses...

It's impossible. So the party goes after a lot of different potential candidates. They all turn it down for various reasons. There's one guy, though, who wants the nomination so badly, but he is literally the reformers' last choice. They do not like him, and that is brash, ambitious, ultra-liberal, Republican, Jewish-Italian Fiorello LaGuardia, the little flower, former congressman, previously failed candidate for mayor. And I just want to mention the way Caro describes him. He says, LaGuardia possessed qualifications for making the run beyond the fact that,

Half Jewish and half Italian, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran of German descent, himself a Mason and an Episcopalian. He was practically a balanced ticket all by himself, which I think is such a – it's a fun way to describe him. LaGuardia –

So he's been anti-corruption before Seabury, but he is this fiery guy from the tenements. He's an outsider to the kind of upper class reformers, and he's very open about demagoguing, and he's nakedly ambitious, and that repels them. And on top of that, LaGuardia is a New Deal liberal. Even though he is a Republican, he is all about the New Deal, whereas the older reformers are less liberal. They are pre-New Deal liberals. They don't love the fact that the government is now stepping in and doing so much. He's too radical for them.

And yeah. And so because Seabury just hates Moses so much. And even though LaGuardia is the last on the list, he becomes the fusion candidate and then eventually becomes mayor. And, you know,

Moses is not a fan. You know, he thinks even though he's a Republican, you know, his liberalism and his sort of, you know, whatever commie leanings with the support of the New Deal. He's very suspicious of all that sort of stuff. Yeah.

And the key to this is, I think, the key to a lot of different parts of the book is these certain individuals who step into Robert Moses' life and alter his course. And so far in Belmotskowitz and Al Smith, they've, you know,

Yes. And Caro says,

He lays it out. All the reformers wanted Moses to be mayor. It was the year that a reformed candidate was almost certainly going to win, and Seabury said, no, I won't have him as the candidate. So in a very practical sense, you can say except for this one guy, Robert Moses would have been elected mayor of New York, and it's this clash of individual personalities, and it risks falling into the kind of great man school of history where history is just all about titanic figures.

… punching each other and shoving each other and stepping on little people, and little people go, I don't know. I have no control over this, but – which is an anti-democratic way of looking at things, and Caro is very much about very pro-democracy and wanting to show how democracy –

Yeah. But here's the question I have for you, Elliot, is do you think.

that Robert Moses would have been an effective mayor I mean we learn about him being an effective candidate later on but like would this have been the it would have been the end of the book the power broker to be sure at this point but yes but it would would it be do you think he was more powerful not being mayor than if he would have become mayor not knowing everything in the world about

I think yes for exactly the reasons that Carol was saying earlier, which is that when you're an elected official, you have to at least show that you're willing to bow to the will of the electorate. And you have to work with different people to compromise because your power, if you're an appointed official like Moses, comes from the money or the jobs that you control.

Your power as an elected official comes partly from that but in a greater sense from the votes that you get because there's a political reality to you need votes to win elections to get elected office. And Moses is so bad, as we'll see later in the book, at being a candidate. I think he would have an incredibly effective first term as mayor and then immediately lose reelection because he will have –

Yeah. I think that's right. I think he does his best job not being beholden to the public directly and sort of only inviting them in as a support mechanism through like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you

You know, fawning coverage in the press and things like that. But if he was really, really beholden to the electorate in terms of votes, this huge source of his power would erode very, very quickly. And then and then everything else would would kind of fall apart.

But he is really important to those elected officials who can do the other part, can do the glad handing, can like at least pay lip service to the public and the public needs. And he's just a really good, you know, arrow in the quiver of those people. And LaGuardia knows this and he wants him and his administration back.

Badly. Yes. LaGuardia is like the anti Roosevelt in this way where Roosevelt is like, whatever I can do to remove this guy would be great. Where LaGuardia is like, how can I get more of you? How can I have more of you working for me all the time? And he's got a lot of good reasons. He wants to make the city physically functioning and beautiful again. He admires people who build things and he's promised to run the government using experts, not partisan hacks.

And on top of that, LaGuardia wants to keep Al Smith happy because there's always the chance in the back of everybody's mind that Al Smith could run for mayor, in which case he would probably win almost instantly. And LaGuardia knows the city has no money, but we have to build things. The only money we can get is federal money, and there's one man who knows how to get federal money, and that's Robert Moses. Yeah.

And for this to become part of the administration, he demands complete control over these, you know, previously separate borough park departments. And he wants parkway development and he wants to control the Triborough Bridge Authority. And

He wants to be able to keep his state jobs, which is the source of his power. And the problem is, is that you're legally not allowed to hold state jobs and state jobs at the same time. And so he begins to engineer a method in which he can do both. Moses, the lawbringer, enters into the story once again, and he's.

He says, hey, look, I'll take care of it. Let me write the law that's going to make all this legal. And he buries in Section 607 of the bill. It says an unsalaried state officer is not ineligible for an unsalaried city post. And so all he has to say, which then still backs up the idea that he is a public servant, not a politician, not corrupt, is I'm not getting paid for any of this. So I can hold all these jobs because it's not like I'm making money off of them and

Everyone – people in the legislature are iffy about this, but the press supports Moses. The reformers who would normally be against someone holding all this power, they support him because they trust him. The Long Island barons who know that they can do business with him, they support him. The mayor and the governor, they both want him in these positions. So the bill passes, and Moses is sworn in, and as we'll see in the next chapter, he immediately gets rid of everybody who's – that is not one of his people in the price department. Right.

And at this point, it's February 1934. Moses is now head of the Long Island State Park Commission, the New York State Council of Parks, the Jones Beach State Park Authority, the Bethpage State Park Authority, the New York City Park Department, the Triborough Bridge Authority, the Marine Parkway Authority, which he institutes right afterwards.

Every group controlling parks and major roads in the New York metropolitan area, he has pretty much personal control of. He's 45 years old, and he's got this. And he's come a long way from the guy who was about to turn 30 who figured that his career in public life was over. And he gets to work regularly.

Right away, the work that the New Deal has been doing to refurbish the parks has been generally crappy, to use a technical term. And he has his engineers go out. He goes, do an inventory of New York City parks. There's no complete record anywhere of how much park space New York City even has or what conditions it's in. And they put together this one-foot-thick notebook with plans for 1,800 renovations. It's going to employ 80,000 people.

And there's this constant stream of staff members sending them to parks, going with them, dictating his plans as they walk around, sending them to the main office in Babylon that he still has to get it turned into plans. And he's persuading all these experienced landscape architects to work for him, and his ideas are big and they're expensive. And his workers are like, that's going to cost a lot of money. And he's like, let me worry about that. Don't you worry about that. But while you're working on this, make sure the parks are fun. Parks are for fun.

Parks are for fun and Robert Moses is there to work. And the next chapter, we learn about all the things he can do in a very short amount of time. That chapter is called One Year and that is after this break. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes. But some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to at

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So this is chapter 21 year. It sort of starts at the moment that Governor Lehman signs a legislation allowing Moses to be the citywide parks commissioner. And in one of these great moments of Robert Moses being Robert Moses, he gets sworn in, he steps outside, and he tells everyone who used to work for that department, you're all fired. Yeah.

Up until that point, each borough had its own parks commissioner who had their own staff. It's almost as if he swears in and then turns around and is like, they're all gone by the way. He just fires them instantly, takes his own people to the Fifth Avenue Arsenal. That's going to be their headquarters building, their first job. They're going to make life so unpleasant for all the civil servants who got patronage jobs that they're going to quit. So he's like, you –

you live in the Bronx. Well, you work in Southern Brooklyn. Now you live in Brooklyn. You work in Harlem. Now just make their commutes as bad as possible. He gives them jobs that they hate. And there's this old lady who is, has a do nothing job that is kind of like a patronage version of a pension. And they force her to work through the night until at 2 AM. She's like, I'm retiring. That's it. I don't want to work here anymore. So they're just, they're ruthless with it. Yeah. Yeah. And he also recognizes that there's a lot of these plum jobs where people do nothing and,

But there's a lot of underpaid positions in this part of the government. And he, you know, he wants to make parks fun above all. He wants to make roads that are good. He wants to have good plans for these things. And, you know, the architects and, you know, you know, engineers of this time, you know,

are a lot of them are out of work. He wants to attract the best of them, but the jobs, the salaries are set so low that and they're set so low because of some sort of like different federal guidelines and things like trying to. Yeah, the Civil Works Administration is like, we can't spend too much money on this. So everyone, no one can be paid more than this amount. And and he's just like,

Screw all that. I need to get the best people to do this. And so he begins finagling like, you know, his own sort of like system of how to pay people so he can get the best and and get these people that instead of having, you know, a foot deep of things that have been, you know, undone and neglected and done poorly. He wants to start working through this. And so he's just trying to solve it in every way possible.

Yeah, and he has this kind of cattle call for architects. He wants to hire 600 architects. And this is another occupation that's been hit hard. Like you said, if the Depression is going on, people are not building things. And so if you're an architect or an engineer, you're out of work. You can't make any money. And this is a time when –

There's no unemployment right now. There's no unemployment insurance. Like these are all things that are being introduced during this time. And so people from all over, they flock to this kind of cattle call. And in one day in January, people are there from dawn until the early evening interviewing for jobs. If you meet most qualifications, you're put to work that day and they send you to the basement and they say, that's your desk. There's a cot next to it.

Work on this plan. Don't leave. Sleep here until it's done. We need those blueprints ready. And he's also unhappy with the workers that have been doing this refurbishing job in the parks. So he says to contractors who he knows, send me your toughest ramrods. These are the people whose job is just to bully people into working harder I guess. I guess they're supervisors. He goes, send me your toughest ramrods. I'm going to have them backed up by police officers. We're going to force everybody to work harder, and they're working through the winter.

And this is winter in New York. Now, Roman, you're a northern California guy. The winters there are pretty mild, right? They're very mild, yeah. Yeah. I live in southern California now. The winter's here. It just means rain sometimes. But this is New York. Winter is a real thing there. And the winter of 1934, when this is all happening, is severe. The city gets frostbitten.

52 inches of snow, Caro says. The mean temperature for February is 11.5 degrees. And Moses has people working in eight-hour shifts, three shifts a day through the night in the cold to get these projects done. On February 22nd, it snows 18 inches. They keep working through it. And they're working so hard that they're actually working ahead of plans. And the architects have to keep changing their blueprints to accommodate work that's being done, things that are being dug, pipes that are being laid, because it's happening so fast.

And one of the big projects, which we'll spend more time on a little bit later in the chapter, is a new Central Park Zoo to replace this menagerie full of lions that you have to shoot in case they escape. And the architects finished the plans for the zoo in 16 days because they're working just so many hours and they're working so hard on it. It's amazing. The first culmination of this.

Saturday, May 1st, 1934. For anyone who has lived in New York, you know that when spring hits in New York City, it is like the world has turned over. Everything feels so different. Everyone comes out kind of like their eyes blinking because they can't – the sun is so bright. They're all wearing coats, and they just shed them. People are just shedding clothes in the street because they're not used to the heat that's coming up.

And New Yorkers emerged from the winter doldrums to find that out of this 1,800 park renovation projects, 1,700 have been completed. And there's a – hold on. We're already going long, but I'm going to just say a little bit of this description here. It says – just to give the scale of it.

Every structure in every park in the city had been repainted. Every tennis court had been resurfaced. Every lawn had been reseated. Eight antiquated golf courses had been reshaped. Eleven miles of bridal paths rebuilt. Thirty-eight miles of walks repaved. A hundred and forty-five comfort stations renovated. Two hundred and eighty-four statues refurbished.

678 drinking fountains repaired, 7,000 waste paper baskets replaced, 22,500 benches re-slatted, 7,000 dead trees removed, 11,000 new ones planted in their place, and 62,000 others pruned. 86 miles of fencing, most of it unnecessary, torn down, and 19 miles of new fencing installed in its place. Necessary fencing, I suppose.

The unnecessary fencing, I have to assume, around things that are like damaged, that people can't use anymore. And the parks look better than they have in at least a generation. And for the first time in years, the USS Maine Memorial on Columbus Circle, which is still there. I used to walk by it all the time when I worked in that area. It's for the first time that anyone can remember. It's clean and has all its pieces like that. Part of that statue is a little boy and –

The arms of that boy had been missing for so long. And for movie fans, this is where in the movie Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro's character, Travis Bickle, is about to assassinate a presidential candidate and then runs off when he gets noticed. And so you have to imagine that scene loses some of its power. Maybe it gains some. I don't know. If the statue behind Charles Palatine, the candidate, is just wrecked, is just in bad shape, you know. That's right. And this is happening all over the city. Parks all over the city are getting refurbished. They're getting to a state where people can really enjoy them again. And this is

again why that whole last chapter spent so much time on this is to show you how far the city had come and how far it had come because of robert moses carrow is presenting a real moses before and after on this city this city is it's there's a real rebirth in the parks facilities and there will be again with the roads later on but i wanted to highlight two things where one of the things they did is they rebuilt the prospect park zoo in brooklyn which i'm very thankful for because

I went to that zoo many times. I took my children there probably 100 times. It's a great little zoo. And reading this, I was like, oh, yeah, like Robert Moses didn't just cause problems in my life about round mass transit. Like he also did things that were still positive in my life years later, like Bryant Park, which is like a beautiful, necessary park.

was garbage and then they refurbished it. They restore Central Park, they remove the Shantytown, they evict the deformed sheep, they kill 230,000 rats and they build new equipment and facilities and they build the restaurant Tavern on the Green where 40 some odd years later my father proposed to my mother before they got married leading to me. So Robert Rose is very responsible for me at this point for my existence.

And the city doesn't have money to buy new land for parks. Even the land is very cheap right now during the Depression. So Moses sends one of his men, a man named Bill Latham. He goes, inventory every piece of publicly owned land in the city. Any city department that owns a piece of land –

Go find out about it. Look at it personally. See if it's being used. And they find just a ton of unused or abandoned land all over the city and most able to convince LaGuardia to give the parks department almost all of that land. And he starts plans right away for 69 parks and playgrounds in slum areas, and they redevelop this whole multi-block downtown plot that is now Sarah Delano Roosevelt Park, which I mentioned just because

As an NYU student in downtown, like if I was going a little bit further downtown, I walked through that park all the time. Like you can walk through the city and still see so many footprints of Robert Moses all over the place. And he's so knowledgeable about the law and about public funding mechanisms that even when it seems like there's no money, he's always finding money. He's like, oh, yeah, there's all this land that the state owns in the city that they forgot about. Give it to us. He's like, wasn't there a memorial fund for World War I memorial that never got built? Well, we'll build one.

War Memorial Playgrounds. We used that money. Didn't Arnold Rothstein, the mobster, when he died, didn't he have a lot of unpaid back taxes but he owns some land? And so he goes to his estate, to Arnold Rothstein's estate and he's like, well, in exchange for this land, we'll forgive the back taxes. He's constantly wheedling and finding ways to get what he wants. He goes to the Catholic Church and the gas company and all these rich philanthropists and he's like, hey,

Don't you want to give us some land for some parks and playgrounds? Wouldn't that be wonderful? And the press is orgasmic about all of this. They just love him. He's in The New York Times nearly once a day for all of 1934, which is certainly more times than Albert Einstein, to use Caro's earlier metric for how many times Moses is in the paper.

Although actually in this chapter, I think he mentions that he's in the paper more often than J. Edgar Hoover. That's the metric he uses for this chapter. Yeah. Yeah. It is really remarkable. And again, this is like one of these things where you just like get through this and you think, you know, if I was a person around at that time, I would be just like I would have a like Robert Moses foam finger. I mean, I would just be all about all of this.

And it is really stunning. And I love these ways that he gets around things like using the War Memorial Fund to in and building the War Memorial Playgrounds. And just he just puts a plaque that just says, you know, war. Remember it. In honor of those we lost. We did it.

Great. Bring in the playground equipment. But it's something that I'd be curious to talk to a historian of parks, I guess, about whether that started the idea of public parks having war memorials embedded in them because there's certainly a lot of them now. I was just at a park with my kids where there was this memorial to the soldiers who came from the San Marino area near Los Angeles that lost their lives in World War II in Korea. And there's a statue of a soldier kneeling bareheaded –

In remembrance. And my son could not stop climbing on it. And I was like please don't climb on that. Let's respect their memory. But there's so much of that now. And I wonder if it starts here. So this part of the chapter culminates in. This beautiful section of the book. This five page section. All about the new Central Park Zoo. Those plans were put together so fast. On December 3rd 1934. My birthday. Not that year. I was born 47 years later. But on the end of the year.

Moses opens this new Central Park Zoo as a way to personally honor Al Smith. Al Smith is so depressed that Roosevelt won't consider him for a federal job. And he spends a lot of time at the Central Park Menagerie. As we know, when he was governor, he had his executive mansion menagerie. He loves animals. And he's like, as a special favor to the old man, won't you improve the Central Park Menagerie? And Moses, because he loves Smith, he makes the zoo a top priority. And he's diverting people from other projects to it. And he turns it into another one of these kind of like

Yeah.

And when he opens it, he's like, now the Picture Book Zoo is open. It's officially open. And they surprise Smith. They give him a badge naming him Honorary Knight Superintendent of the Central Park Zoo and a horse-drawn wagon full of boys from the Fourth Ward, his neighborhood, singing East Side, West Side shows up. And they present Smith with a Christmas turkey, which is this strangely Dickensian choice. Yeah.

I mean Christmas is coming up. They're like, yeah, we love you. Here's a turkey. And Moses is not there because he was working so hard that he collapsed from influenza. He was working through a sickness and he just literally couldn't stand up anymore. So he misses all this. But later that week, he gives Smith a real key, this master key that unlocks the zoo and all the animal houses. And he goes, as night superintendent, you can go in whenever you want. And Al Smith will spend –

So many nights, years, I guess, just walking from his apartment to the zoo, unlocking it at night and just going in and like petting the animals at night. If there's a sick animal, he'll go and talk to it for a while. And he likes to bring guests and he'll go up to the tiger cage and he'll go LaGuardia to make the tiger roar back because they did that. The Tammany tiger is mad at what LaGuardia is doing to the city. And it's just it's so there's something so adorableness.

about all of this. It's so delightful. This like, just the, this, this act of love for Al Smith in making this zoo beautiful and giving him a special, special key to it. I, I love it so much. Yeah.

It just cracks me up. And it's like one of those things of all these sort of different indignities that probably, you know, he wouldn't have suffered, you know, if he didn't have the ego he had. Like there weren't true indignities. They're just like life moves on and it's OK, you know, type of thing. But like the fact that.

He gets this in his later life and it means so much to him. And it is so innocuous and cute. You know what I mean? It's just the greatest. I mean, it's so funny that this thing means more to him than his $50,000 a year Empire State job that he does not give a fuck about. And the fact that he has this for the rest of his days.

absolutely cracks me up. It's so, I feel every adult has a child inside of them, which is what, I guess, the Disney brand is built on. And if you're a pregnant woman, even more literally so, but that's not what I'm talking about here. But, uh,

It's just very sweet.

Once again, Moses has done all these amazing design touches that make the zoo a fun place to be, and people go there in droves. And Caro says – he says here, the purpose of a park, Moses had been telling his designers for years, wasn't to overawe or impress. It was to encourage the having of a good time. Like we were saying earlier, parks are for fun. Like this is –

This is Moses's philosophy in good and bad ways. In good ways because parks should be fun. In bad ways because he's like, why would we want a natural grove of trees that have stood here since the beginning of time when we could have a baseball field? It's bad for conservation, but it's good for recreation. But

We can't spend too much time on the Central Park Zoo as much as I would love to stay there because on page 386, we get a momentous sentence, and the Triborough Bridge was finally being built. That's right. The Triborough Bridge, this is the biggest project that Moses has taken on yet, and let's just get – how big is it? Well, let's find out by looking at the thing here. Okay.

It's approach ramps would be so huge – this is Caro, not me – it's approach ramps would be so huge that houses, not only single-family homes but sizable apartment buildings, would have to be demolished by the hundreds to give them footing. It's anchorages, the masses of concrete in which its cables would be embedded, would be as big as any pyramid built by an Egyptian pharaoh. It's roadways wider than the widest roadways built by the Caesars of Rome.

To construct those anchorages and to pave those roadways, just the roadways of the bridge proper itself, not the approach roads, would require enough concrete to pave a four-lane highway from New York to Philadelphia, enough to reopen depression-shuttered cement factories from Maine to Mississippi. To make the girders on which that concrete would be laid, depression-banked furnaces would have to be fired up at no fewer than 50 separate Pennsylvania steel mills. To provide enough lumber for the forms into which that concrete would be poured, an entire forest would have to

crash on the Pacific coast on the opposite side of the American continent. It's just like this is a massive project. It's so huge. It's so – like it's the pyramids. It's the Roman roads. It's enormous. And it's really four bridges which are going to link three boroughs and two islands. There's the Harlem River span that connects Manhattan and Randall's Island, the Bronx Kills span connecting Randall's Island to the Bronx, the Hellgate span between Ward's Island – Ward's Island and Randall's Island –

They're basically the same place. I think they filled them in and made it one big thing. Connecting Ward's Island and Queens and the causeway that connects Randall's Island and Ward's Island itself. And this will include the largest vertical lift bridge in the world and one of the largest suspension bridges in the world at that time. And on Randall's Island, there's going to be this cloverleaf exchange where 22 lanes of traffic –

have to wind around each other, never crossing at the same level. They have to go above and beyond, forcing drivers to stop at one, but never more than one, toll booth along the way. And Carroll calls it the largest traffic machine ever built. It's just this astonishingly sized bridge. It's just huge. Yeah. And if you are not from the area, which I am not, and so I'm not sort of intimately familiar with how all these things connect, this section here is like

a little jarring. You're like, it does this and this and these things and joins this and stuff. And you're just, just know, I think the big lessons are is that it is a huge project. It's one of the biggest that the world had ever seen. Um, it's linking all these places that had never been linked before. And I think kind of importantly for the rest of the book, this traffic engine, um, funded, you know, with like nickels and quarters from people passing through it, um,

is going to be one of the other major pillars of Robert Moses' power from here on out. Yes, and that he will eventually become kind of synonymous with the Triborough Bridge Authority. He has offices all over the city, but the offices on Randall's Island of the Triborough Bridge Authority, like that's his headquarters. That's his – that's – as –

Roman, I know you'll be delighted when they talk about how they had their own flag and their own seal. They're basically like a city within a city. All that is going to happen. So this big project – and we'll see in future episodes – Moses is not just thinking this is a huge bridge. He's thinking this is a huge lever of power that the Triborough Bridge Authority, which –

is ostensibly built, ostensibly exists to build this bridge and then go away. To build the bridge and stop. And stop. The key is that it usually stops, but not under Robert Moses. Not under Robert Moses. It doesn't have to stop. But that's all, that's all for, we'll get to those future machinations when, when Carol tells us about them.

The point is that in 1934, Moses is, as always, seeing this as a way to get his other stuff done too. He's going to link this up to his parkways. He's going to build new parks on Randall's Island and Ward's Island, even if that means kicking out the city hospital for the feeble-minded and tubercular and the Manhattan State Hospital for the insane. This was – he's so good at finding things that have been undervalued.

and then making value out of them. And one of these things is these islands, because until now, they've just been a place, even though it's centrally located in the middle of the city, a place just to dump the unwanted, you know? And unfortunately,

The plans that Tammany put together for the Tribal Bridge, they're not great. We mentioned already they didn't plan any roads to actually get to the bridge. He finds that the Manhattan terminus for the bridge is 25 blocks farther north than it really should be, which means that if you do that, you're going to have to drive kind of 50 unnecessary blocks, 25 up and then 25 back again. Yeah.

which is like two and a half miles. But he learns they did that because William Randolph Hearst, one of the most powerful newspaper barons in the city, everyone knows that he was the slight inspiration for Citizen Kane, that he owned some land there they wanted to sell to the city. And Moses is like, I'm not going to pick a fight with a guy who owns newspapers. So we're just going to leave that there. We're going to leave that on your 25th Street. And this is another one of these little jags in the road that were determined by rich people that Robert Moses accepts, you know, despite his character of being the champion of people. Exactly.

When power meets power, power will accommodate power. When power meets not power, it will –

get rid of it. Like for instance, the whole bridge, the original plans call it for it to be covered in granite because there's some Tammany guys who own granite quarries. And that means the bridge is going to cost many millions of dollars more than it's supposed to. And they also mentioned, oh, by the way, in the designs, they also, the lanes are too narrow. So where it says eight lanes in this part, it's really only going to be six lanes on this double deck, 16 lane design. This bridge is, it's not designed properly.

And two years earlier, Moses had looked at these plans, and he was like, can we remove the granite? And the engineer on the bridge was a guy who had been a Tammany man since 1886, and he goes, no. And now Moses is his boss, and he calls him, and he says, what's more important, the granite or the access roads that we should spend the money on? And the guy goes, the granite. And Moses goes, you're fired. So –

He hires this new engineer, the Swiss designer of the George Washington Bridge. His name is Othmar Hermann Amann, which is my new favorite name in the book. There's so many good names in this book. I've never named anyone named Othmar. Someday I hope to. And they have this new plan. They're not going to have granite. It's going to be a single deck. There's going to be six lanes on the Manhattan Arm, eight lanes on the other arms, and the cost of the bridge goes down from a projected $51 million to $30 million.

And now there's going to be a surplus in the budget that they can use to build some parkway links as long as they're defined as approach roads. It doesn't matter if the road goes many miles farther as long as it approaches the bridge. Well, that's right because the money from the PWA is bridge money. And rightfully, he goes to PWA and says, well, bridge money doesn't matter if roads don't connect to those bridges. So –

So, you know, let's use some of that money for approach roads. And, you know, again, this is one of those things where, you know, it's not quite like the, you know, war memorial playgrounds where you just slap a plaque on it and make it work. I think this is legitimately an expansion of the idea in the spirit of the idea. Somewhat. I think so. He's making the idea work for him. I think he's making the spirit work for him. Yeah.

When there's not land available for approach roads, Moses makes it. He's dumping sand and stone into the water off Jackson Heights to make land. And there's a section where it's all about these kind of elaborate Rubik's Cube moves he has to do in order to find the land along 125th Street that he can use where he's finding –

old covenants written to the deeds of the businesses there that say the city can take some of the land and then he's kind of making deals with one business that will build this tunnel if it means you don't have access to the water anymore and he manages to kind of finagle money from the city government and the federal government and then the authority is going to pay for some of it. He is brilliant at not just seeing what can be built but then making the deals and the arrangements so that it

can be built so that not not just what should be there but what can be there and uh this is kind of a little preview of a chapter we'll see later on where carol will go into a lot of detail about the different ways moses cuts down the amount of money that he needs right for a project and finally by the end he gets permission to build parks on randall moore's island they say you can build a 10 000 seat stadium he goes no i need a 70 000 seat stadium and he's the largest movable outdoor stage in the world and as we'll see later he's

This theater gets drastically misused just to present the kinds of things that Robert Moses thinks people should watch, which is – well, we'll get to that later. But it essentially becomes the private kingdom of – is it Guy Lombardo I think? And he's like the labor won't cost the city anything because the federal government is going to pay for it. So he convinces the mayor and the governor, kick all the asylum patients off the island. Tear down those buildings. We can do it. But while he's doing all this reconstruction for positive reasons, defensible reasons…

He has one thing at the end of the chapter that he does out of a sense of pure hatred and spite. Just for hatred of Jimmy Walker, he says, I control Central Park now. I'm going to tear down the Central Park Casino. And there is no financial sense in this. It's still a functioning business that could give the city money. There's no aesthetic sense in it. It's a beautiful building. It was lavishly and lovingly made. It's a historic piece of the city. There's a community sense to keep it up. It is something that the community could use. But he refuses to let it stand because he just hates it.

He hated the way Walker treated Al Smith, and this causes the first kind of glimmers of defection from these reformers, and they realized that this bill that Moses wrote that they supported, it gives him the power to do anything to any park, anything.

Yeah.

He can do things that we did not intend for him to do. And they tear down the casino, and except for some stained glass windows that get repurposed in a police station, it's just gone. It's gone forever. We'll never see it. And I can't help but wondering if it was still standing, maybe my dad would have proposed to my mom there instead of Tavern on the Green. We'll never know. That's one of those what-ifs, folks, the sliding doors moment, alternate universe.

And this is really true, Spike, because and it's really kind of odd because Jimmy Walker is like left the stage and gone to Europe with his mistress at this point. He's a non-entity. And he's just associated with this casino because it was his sort of personal playground. There's no reason why you can't scrub it of these associations and make it into something that would work for the city.

You could make it something wholesome or whatever. But he just – this symbol, he just – he wants it erased and eradicated. And he does it. And as soon as the appellate court rules, he just – before anyone else can appeal to another higher level of court, he just knocks the thing down. He just – yeah, he just destroys it. And it's – the lesson from this that he learns is –

I can do whatever I want. I know this. In the parks, I'm a king. And it's going to eventually lead in a later episode. He will attempt to destroy a much more historic structure in New York City that has much more meaning to it, fully knowing that the loss that he wrote says he can do it. And if no one else is going to stop him through the other levers of power, he's unstoppable. And so it's this first moment. We see Robert Moses started making the bad guy turn in our last episode. He is now –

Kind of a bad guy working for exciting and good purposes. He's building all these parks. He's making this big bridge. But he's going to get more and more bad guy from this point on. The real thing that changes for him is that...

He's going to be focused on things that are not just parks anymore. And it's going to center more on roads and then it's going to center more on housing. And all of a sudden, these reformers are very much not going to like this man. It turns out when the parks man turns his godlike eye to things that are not parks, they're like, oh, hold on a second. Maybe we shouldn't have given the best bill drafter in Albany the ability to get whatever he wants. Hold on a sec. That's right.

But we will cover that on the next episode. But on this episode, we're going to now talk to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about what it means to get things done and grind people under her heel. It would be so funny if we talked to her and she's like, yes, that's what you have to do. You've got to crush people. Wow, this is not what we expected. Introducing Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for who can contact teens and the content they can see.

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If the new chicken Big Mac at McDonald's looks like a Big Mac, has sweet buns and sauce like a Big Mac, but has two chicken patties, then it's not not a Big Mac.

Our special guest on this episode of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Power Broker is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has served the 14th New York Congressional District since 2019, taking office at the age of 29, making her the youngest woman to serve in the U.S. Congress.

Years ago, in her first term, someone asked her what she did on the train from New York to D.C., and she said that, among other things, she listened to 99% Invisible. So I am delighted that we get to have her on the show. Representative Ocasio-Cortez, what is your relationship with Robert Moses and this book, The Power Broker? Well,

You know, in some ways, I actually think if it wasn't for Robert Moses, I probably wouldn't have run for Congress. Okay.

You know, my dad grew up when the Bronx was burning, and he actually became an architect as a direct inspiration of, and in a lot of ways, he was inspired by all this calamity around him. He saw all of these buildings that were burning down, the arson that was happening at a very young age, at six years old.

He decided that he saw all of these buildings tumbling down and he wanted to be one of the people who built them back up. And that's how he decided to become an architect. That's how he remained committed to staying in the Bronx. It was very rare for people, especially from the Bronx, especially Latinos, especially a Puerto Rican at that time to get jobs.

any sort of a higher ed degree in that era, but particularly to become an architect. And so I grew up with a very unique and distinct perspective about why this happened and why

and also the community response to it, and kind of like this alternative perspective of what was happening to the people on the ground while the Cross Bronx Expressway was constructed, while landlords were, you know, kind of setting fire to their own buildings, and all of the fallout and social fallout that happened as a result of civil engineering and urban design decisions.

That's so fascinating. I feel like I was very late to this, like in terms of like incorporating this into my worldview. But you had it so young. What did that do to you? I think it really was a big source of the commitment to community in my family, actually. It's interesting because I didn't grow up in a particularly like explicitly political family, I'd say. Like they...

They didn't strongly identify as Democrats or Republicans. I mean, they always tended to vote for Democrats were in New York. But...

It was a family that was very rooted in community and the impact of these decisions. And so I think I grew up a lot with that idea of the decisions around us are made by people. And it's really important for us to not just pay attention to it, but that we can have a hand in it.

And, you know, sometimes it wasn't most of the times it wasn't even through an explicit political process. It was largely done through organizing communities around us and in much less formal ways, getting someone a job down the street, you know, checking in on people, seeing if we could get them a good union city job. And that was a big part of what shaped politics.

my upbringing. And when did this idea that there were people making these decisions that were, you know, possibly or probably making lives worse by those decisions, when did that coalesce into the name Robert Moses in your consciousness?

That, I think, happened maybe a little bit later on. I wouldn't be surprised if I had heard the name growing up, but it probably kind of washed over. I think like maybe in my late teens or early 20s is when I started to really connect those dots more explicitly because that's when I started –

really asking my dad these stories because, you know, he would always talk about this time, about why the buildings were going down and the arsons that were happening. And I started to dig a lot more into why that time happened and

And it came to really the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway when Reagan came and said that the South Bronx looked like Dresden after World War II. And then I kind of dug into why the Cross Bronx and how did that happen? And I think that's where Robert Moses came into the picture of my consciousness. So your district is.

includes so many Robert Moses projects, the Triborough Bridge, the Bronx Whitestone Bridge, the Throgsnecks Bridge, the Cross Bronx Expressway. What is it like living in a district shaped by so many Moses productions? It's like the opposite of entering houses of faith. Where, you know, you'll walk into this

cathedral and every design decision is to make it feel liberatory and expansive and soaring. And I think one of the things that I really did not appreciate until I went to college and lived in a different city is how much the civic and urban planning of

really affects the psyche of the communities that occupy and have to endure these decisions. Because until you experience something else, you're just living in it. Like you think it's just life. And there is a psychic weight to living in communities that are designed to be disconnected. It affects your social life.

My neighborhood that I'm from in the Bronx, in Parkchester, we have some of the longest commutes in all of New York City. And it is a commute not just to work. It is a commute to do anything. It is a commute to connect socially. It is a commute to connect spiritually if you are part of a faith community. It is a commute to go get your groceries. And so...

These decisions are designed to disconnect, disempower, and isolate people. And when you layer that with a lot of Robert Moses's racist intent to very much do so to a very specific kind of people, black, brown, low-income, poor, et cetera. And when you contrast that with

other neighborhoods or other cities, you can really see how it actually builds in organizing challenges to communities who actually want to empower themselves politically. It makes sense that it would have that kind of psychic toll that

His stated reason is people need to get through this area much faster. And what that means is it's an area that you're not meant to go to or to stay in. Its only value is as a way to get from one place to another. And I was on the Cross Bronx Special Way just a few weeks ago and was thinking about looking from side to side on it, just thinking about like,

Yeah, this is to walk from that building to that building should take a couple minutes. But there's this enormous, there's this enormous road. There's this cut going right between the two. And what a, what a like an almost biblical sized division that is between two places. You're saying that it's a real, it gets in the way of organizing things like that. How do you get around something like that to maintain a life that might have to be on opposite sides of this enormous, almost like a moat cutting off two sections from each other?

Well, it still persists today. You know, I think there are things we can do, but there's a certain aspect to it that there's no getting around it. This is a gash through an enormous community, not just in New York City, but also one of the more famed communities in the United States.

And it is designed to separate. You know, it was a couple, I think it was like a year or two ago, the New York Times had come out with this New York City visual map and what it kind of pegged what people called certain neighborhoods in the city. Like, what is Greenwich Village? You know, what counts as Bed-Stuy? And one of the interesting responses that I saw is that when you would go to the Bronx, people a lot of times don't,

If you live in the Bronx, they don't always call where they live by their neighborhood. They will say like the street that they live on or they'll call it by the boulevard. So like in Hunts Point, a lot of people don't say, I live by Hunts Point. Sometimes they do. But a lot of people will say, I live on Southern Boulevard. Or people will say, I live by East Tremont.

And I think that really shows, like even today, the culture of the Bronx is very much defined, even in very small ways, in how we relate to the infrastructure around us. Because so many of these neighborhoods have been artificially built.

cut through. If you take the example of Hunts Point, Hunts Point is on the other side of Longwood. And what goes in the middle, it's Hunts Point, then you kind of have, I believe, like the Bruckner Expressway. And then on the other side, you have the neighborhood Longwood.

But a lot of these neighborhoods have been artificially segmented. And so people don't even sometimes know what to call where they live. And so they've developed these new ways of relating to the built space around them. And so to me, like how you organize around that, it is very challenging. And it's unsurprising that now the Cross Bronx itself has become –

a unifying target of activism in the Bronx. And that is actually the thing that has separated us for decades is now the thing that is starting to unite us in order to build a movement around capping the cross Bronx, around environmental justice activism, and many, many other topics as well.

So in a way, you could say Robert Moses is a real hero by giving them something to unite around finally. He made it happen. In a way.

So in the book, The Power Broker, Robert Caro gives, you know, he explains both Robert Moses and Governor Al Smith coming to Albany, studying really hard, learning the way the government works, learning how to get things done. And when we spoke with Jamal Bowie in our second episode, you know, he expressed his sort of like disdain for term limits because he thinks that like

the first couple of terms, you're just learning how to do things. And what is your experience with that? Like, has government, you know, is it the same way? Has it gotten more intuitive? Do you still, what does it take to learn the ropes the way they did, you know, 100 years ago and today? It's really, really true. I am in my third term here in Congress, and it really does take years to,

truly map out and understand how things work. There is the way that people tell you things work or, you know, on paper, or if you read the law, you know, this agency is responsible for that thing. But then there's the way that the world actually works. And having to map out

Yes, like this agency technically has jurisdiction over that thing. But the people who really have influence that make the call as to whether that agency gives it a green light or a red light is someone else entirely. And one of the most effective ways

political tools that oftentimes the opposition uses in government is the wild goose chase. And a lot of times you spend your first couple years trying to do something and being sent on wild goose chases, trying to track down what is the door that actually opens the possibility that you are seeking.

And there is no way around that, I don't think. I think that's just part of a function of not just government, but almost any organization, knowing who the real gatekeepers are, who the real positions of influence are. And that is ever evolving and shifting and changing because you

knowledge is power and knowledge should be power. You know, I think that

people who know how to do things well, who are skilled and effective, ideally. And of course, democratically, we want to make sure that there's multi-democratic structures around it. But at the same time, you do want the people in charge to be knowing what they're doing and having that balance between those two things. And so, you know, for me, I feel like I'm just kind of hitting a place where

I'm more effective. I'm able to be more effective than I have been before. And the steps between wanting to do something and getting it done are shortening, not just because of a substance understanding, but because of a social and bureaucratic understanding.

And governance understanding. And the only way to learn that, it sounds like, is to really experience it, is to be actively seeking it and paying attention. It isn't like they swear you in and then they're like, here's the – let me hand you the actual instructions for how these things work. Don't show anyone what I just gave you. You have to put in the work of learning it yourself is what it sounds like. Yeah, especially, to be honest, especially –

If you're a woman or if you come from a community of color or if you run and you come from a working class background and you don't come from a highly connected political or wealth-based background, you have a different track. You have a steeper learning curve. Mentorship is everything. And people from certain backgrounds or even sometimes from certain political spaces or political circles –

have access to a certain degree of an inside track of greater mentorship, greater social esteem that can, you know, get you to move faster, right?

And when you are, it's not just a question of identity, but it is a factor. You know, if you come in as a woman and you don't know how to golf and you are less relatable to the people who have historically held these positions, you either need to really, really fight to

you know, win the trust of those folks or you just like need to keep really fighting for longer. And so sometimes it's just a scrap. Yeah. That makes sense. It's something that has come up a few times when we're talking about the book is

personalities and how much personalities they think and that Al Smith and Robert Moses, Robert Moses so depends on Al Smith's mentorship but it's because Al Smith just likes being around him. Like they just get along as two guys who like to sing together whereas if they, I imagine it's much harder if there's not someone already there who sees that connection in you and is like, well you remind me of me so I want to be with you and kind of guide you through this, you know. It's all personality. Yeah.

It's hugely personality driven. And I think sometimes people and I think it's understandable to look at things like this and be like, I can't believe this is how decisions are made in our government. Like, really? Like, just because like some guy, like some other guy or whatever, like that's how this happened. But you think about your own workplace and this is how things happen. Yeah.

Oftentimes in our own workplace, you know, like it's important to like the people that you are spending huge amounts of time with. I see it. I'm going to be honest. I see it behind closed doors. Yeah. Sometimes certain decisions suffer because the person advocating for it is annoying. Yeah.

Like just straight up. Like I've seen people in power having to choose. And like sometimes this happens where it's like all things are equal and there's a tiebreaker, right? And what breaks the tie often – it's not that huge, enormous decisions are just like all made just because of this one thing. Right.

You know, there's a lot of ties and people in positions of power are tiebreakers. And a lot of times it comes down to gut. Who do I trust?

How do I feel about this? What do I think about that person's judgment? Do I understand where they're coming from? And it matters. It matters. It's crazy, but it matters. And likability matters. This comes up a lot in the book because Robert Moses is like –

graduate thesis was pretty much a treatise on why people like Al Smith shouldn't be governor, but they become friends. And then he amasses so much power because of the support of Al Smith. And, you know, contrary to that, Al Smith, you know, pretty much agreed with

Roosevelt on almost everything, his successor. But when the New Deal was enacted, Al Smith was just completely against it, even though it sort of contained all the values he seemed to have when he was governing, just because by that point, he was mad at Roosevelt. He didn't like Roosevelt. And so he hated the New Deal. And it just is like over and over again, you see this in this book. And it sounds like that really rings true to today as well.

Oh, yeah. I have seen – I mean, it's terrible. It is awful. And, you know, it's not to say that everybody operates in this way. But when we think about governance, there are hundreds of members of Congress. There are thousands of people in positions of decision-making power. And some of them are going to be spiteful and –

like human nature. And I have seen people make terrible or hurtful decisions because they had an ax to grind. And especially kind of, you know, the more

you are in places of elevated kind of bird's eye view decision making, the more the decisions feel, can feel smaller, even though the impact is so large. And so, yeah, and especially because a lot of times it's about trade-offs. It's not just,

Are you going to do this or not? But it's who is going to get this? And that is a lot easier to facilitate if you are like people are trying to settle scores and things like that. And to be honest, score settling is also a function of power. If

If you are a person in a position of power and you continue to allow yourself to be disrespected or crossed or you let people break their word to you and there is...

actually no consequence, then people learn that they can break their word to this person and it won't be a big deal. And if you want to be effective, you need to be able to hold someone accountable. And so sometimes it's spite, but also sometimes it's just

accountability. Like you can't let someone walk all over you if you want to get and secure things for the communities that you advocate for. Well, it's interesting the way you're putting it. It is so it's such a great way of illustrating kind of the two sides of the idea of power that when we think about power and someone wants power, there's a kind of an evil feel to that. But in order to accomplish things, you need a certain amount of power and you need to have other people

Respect your ability to do it and also trust that you can do it. And so what you're saying is like sometimes you need to be – it's almost like you need to be slightly petty in order to maintain the foundation that allows you to convince other people that they should do things or you can do things. Yeah. Which is unfortunate, I guess, that it can't just be just like sweet wishes and good arguments to get people on your side. I think about it. I think about it.

As a sense, a proper sense of justice. That's a great way to put it. That's a great way to put it. This is the difference between you are an effective politician and I'm an effective comedy writer. So I'm like, yeah, yeah. So it's just power. You're like a mob boss. And you're like, this is about justice. This is about effective justice. But I think you hit at a very good point, which is, but also it illuminates a certain paradox, which is,

If we all think that only terrible people want power and we adopt that as almost like a cultural cliche or norm, then only terrible people will pursue power because people who want to be good and good hearted then associate power with a negative thing. And then people that that does not bother so much will seek it.

And so then we get a self-selection bias. And so I think that, you know, it's not about power or not power. It's about how you use it. It's about standards of, from, for which we pursue it and standards for which we allow ourselves to be held accountable to when power is in the mix. Yeah. That gets so at the heart of, of what we've been talking about with the book where it, Robert Moses, at times he, he's this very ambitious, you know, public civic person. And, and,

He has goals that are often positive goals, not as much when he's carving up the Bronx. But when he – earlier in his career when he wants to build the best public beach that there's ever been and he wants to have park space where there isn't. And the way he does accomplish so much of that is by –

misusing that power and being kind of a monster. And so how do you, you, you strike me as not a monster. And so like the, how do you exert power to achieve those goals without losing sight of the ideals that brought to the, to those goals in the first place? How do you keep yourself balanced in that way? Well, you know, it, to me, I think of it as a discipline. Um,

People think about politics in terms of like the food fight that you see in the media, but it is a vocation actually. And I think we don't talk about the vocation of politics that much in our public discourse. And what we rob ourselves when we don't discuss politics as a vocation are the skills, disciplines, and kind of lifelong skills.

sharpening that is required when you are in a position of public service. And so to me, that question of, you know, efficacy and ethics is

are, that's the iron sharpen iron element of this, is there are certain tight ropes that you're always walking. And you cannot lean too far in one way or another. If you are trying to be far to kind of

answering every single ethical question under the sun in whether you decide if you're going to use this, you know, what printer paper you're going to use in the library, then you're never going to get anything done. You're never going to build the world that we're fighting for.

At the same time, if you are too expedient in your decision-making and too dismissive in the name of efficacy, then you will end up unrecognizable. And so when I think about the sets of questions that I'm asking myself on a near daily basis, this is often one of it. It's on literally day-by-day, case-by-case basis that

should we make this trade-off or should we stand and fight is a daily question. It's like, what is the hill worth dying on? And,

That is something that I think is very often communally and community based. We do a lot of consensus building. And so it's not just me making a decision, but I will ask and talk to a lot of people and say, you know what, this one, let's just say F it and go for it. And on other times, it's like this is too important to get wrong.

That's a huge element. But there are many other strings like that, too. Yeah. People who really hate Robert Moses can sort of admire him in two different aspects. One is that Jones Beach is pretty great. So is Orchard Beach, by the way, which is also in the district. I feel like that's the most amazing thing is how it's like –

how do I promote my district? Hold on. My district has the better beach. This is great. Hold on. I'm shrewd. Jones is shrewd. Exactly. Every opportunity, every opportunity to bring somebody to the Bronx, somebody to the district. Yeah. But the other thing is that he got big things done. Like a lot of people say that there should be some more Robert Moses spirit in things, just the things that I want to do. And you have big ambitious plans for the world. You've sort of brought

the Green New Deal to people's attention when you join Congress. How do you sort of implement big things? Because I would imagine those like ethical and efficacy questions get more and more complicated, like exponentially more complicated, the bigger and bigger the idea is, the more land you have to move, the more people you have to get on board, the more like social systems you have to change from the ground up. How do you make that stuff happen and dream big?

Yeah, I mean, we're also in such a different political landscape in terms of power now than we were back then, too. Now, private interests, special interests have much more sophisticated lobbies. The power of the state was much stronger back then. There was no CBO score and budget hawks.

back then. But I think now, what it requires too is different techniques and a willingness to experiment. I think a lot of times folks talk about efficacy and they'll say like,

You hear this all the time. I hate this phrase in D.C. They go, oh, I'm not a show horse. I'm a work horse. And it's like – so you're just giving up like the entire mantle of public power and the interest of public power? Like it is a part of being effective. And we can't moralize –

or consider some avenues as more or less virtuous than others. I think that for me, when it comes to implementation, we rallied enormous public interest and continue to rally enormous public interest in

And I think like in D.C. that's considered dirty or like low brow. And I just lean into it because I'm like, great, Elaine unto myself. I have no competition. Like I'm from the Bronx. I don't care. I don't care about like if it's high brow or low brow. Like it's there. I'm going to use it. But then on top of that.

Okay, then you hit the institutional power. This will never get past, you know, I, I,

pissed off all of the gatekeepers and ring holders and all that. And it gets to a point where then they just don't want to move anything out of spite, right? Like you didn't kiss the ring. You didn't do the proper thing. So like we're not going to move it. And that was, I think, the story of those early days. And so then I kind of look around and I say, okay, what other levers can I use? I don't need to pass this thing to do the thing actually because it's passed in the public consciousness. Right.

And so what I started to do was to look for the small ways and unnoticed ways. And so I started to turn to how do I do things without my name being on it and without Green New Deal being on it, but it actually being a Green New Deal project. And so my next step was

was that I started to marshal community project funds. And so in the last couple of years, for the first time in over a decade, Congress started to renew the practice of community-funded projects by members of Congress. And so I said, how can I make a Green New Deal project in my community? And then also, how can I contact individuals

you know, 100 or so other co-sponsors of the Green New Deal and get them to build Green New Deal projects in their communities. And, you know,

We won't put Green New Deal in the text, but it will meet all of the standards, that it creates good union jobs, that it focuses on underserved communities, and that it helps us decarbonize our economy in 10 years. And so, you know, slowly but surely, one of the things that I did, my project in my first cycle was we went to Throgs Neck, right near the Throgs Neck Bridge built by Robert Moses. Right.

And I went to SUNY Maritime College, which is one of the only public merchant marine academies that we have in the United States. That's the one I think we talked about earlier in the episode where Franklin Roosevelt wanted it so badly and Robert Moses would not let him have it until Roosevelt was leaving to become president. Yes. Clash of words. Yeah.

And so we went to Maritime College and we said we would like to fund a training program where we train folks here to build the underwater pylons that are good union jobs for offshore wind.

And the Merchant Marine Academy said, SUNY Maritime said, sounds great. Let's do it. We built an entire facility. People go, you get electricians putting on scuba gear and diving into pools, learning how to do electrical work.

way out in the ocean. And you've got simulators where people are learning how to actually navigate these ships through offshore wind farms. And we're training really good union jobs for people in the Bronx to access in order to access jobs and have jobs that help us decarbonize our economy. None of that, none,

None of the people in power knew what I was up to when we were doing that. Like not one. And that first cycle, we authorized 60 plus such projects across the United States. No one's hearing about it. No one knows about it.

And that's all the better for me. Because the more they know about it, the more other people are going to try to block it. And so I did that very quietly because –

You know, there were too many axes to grind at the time that I didn't want to imperil the goal. And so sometimes being really big and out there is to our advantage. And sometimes it's not. But it's not an either or universal application. It's about understanding and having the discernment of when you use what tools. And that takes time. That takes time and practice to develop. Yeah, yeah.

You see that happening with Robert Moses in the book, too. Like, he's trying to figure out, like, how much credit do you give the boss upstairs to get things done? How much do you take on your own so that when the boss gets mad at you, the public rallies to your support? It's fascinating how universal this is. And it totally makes sense. Yeah. It's like with organizations where sometimes you're frustrated at work and it's like, you know, the personality stuff. But also...

Humans are a medium and we would love for it to be just like math or science. But it's not because we also need to weigh costs and benefits that are not always immediately apparent. And I think sometimes that's the part of the social science of decision making. Yeah.

So also in this section of the book, the episode that you're going to be on, is the introduction of Fiorello LaGuardia, who is your predecessor in your district, not your immediate predecessor. No, there were a number of predecessors between him and you. My ancestor. Yes, your ancestral predecessor. How does LaGuardia loom in your consciousness growing up and your consciousness in this job? You know, I think LaGuardia...

While he's not as large of a looming figure as Moses is, I think he's also an example of someone that marshaled the public. And that is in contrast to Moses, who was much more of an internal operator. And it shows the...

how both of these kinds of power can be wielded. And also that it's not necessarily an either or decision either. And that,

A lot of times people kind of shun one and valorize the other. But if you can kind of lean into both, then you can really clear a lot of road, if you will, or I should say,

Subway tracks. Yeah, yeah. We're all about mass transit. Express! We're not taking the local. We can make the express from one place to another. But you're right. We see that in Moses and LaGuardia working together where Moses is very much the backstage operator and LaGuardia is the one –

who specializes seemingly in appearing publicly everywhere in the city every day at all times. And when Moses before that is working with Governor Al Smith, where he's the one behind the scenes and Governor Al Smith is the one who's out in public making the case for things and rallying people to it, that they are – there's such complementary modes of power and –

I guess if you can have two people who partner in that way, they can – those are some of the times that Moses is able to accomplish so many of his better kind of bigger projects. Before he goes into the darker side and he's just like, well, why should we have people in the city when we can just have roads in the city? We can just go through it all the time. Do you find that something that –

Something that's a method that you're thinking about where it's like, who can I partner with on this thing? Who's someone who can take this aspect of a project and I'll take this aspect so we can handle it in different ways to get it finished? Yeah, absolutely. You can't accomplish anything without public will.

And public sentiment. It's, you know, there are some things that you can, but it's going to take a lot longer. And when you have public support for something, for better or worse, by the way, you know, there are entire industries that are built around influencing public sentiment. Mm-hmm.

And sometimes we see that even today in our politics where there's some issue or there is something that has sometimes captured the public sentiment and it actually doesn't line up with public health data at all. It doesn't line up with facts on the ground at all. But if people just...

if the vibe just gets contagious and everyone just starts feeling a certain way, even if it's completely divorced from data, reality, what we're seeing, there are times when people just feel like crime is up when crime is actually down. I think that's a classic example. And it happens, I'm not even talking about just present times, it's happened throughout history.

history. And it is a very effective political tool. And so making sure that you have that public sentiment is important, even if it's not explicitly around the project that you are talking about. Because whatever has public sentiment is what your goal is competing with. And so that, you know, it can make things...

very, very easy. But if you don't have the internal path, it can also be ineffective as well and vice versa. And so having both the decision makers and building that coalition is really important. I often think about, you know, when in the House, you author a bill, and sometimes you have co-leads on the bill.

And who you select as your co-leads sends a message to the rest of the house about what kind of mission you're on. And so if all of your co-leads are...

you know, are very outside facing, then sometimes people get the message that this is more of a messaging effort. This is not to pass. This is to send a message, which is a tool that has its own, you know, role.

But sometimes you have a coalition of people that indicate something else, that you are very serious about passing this thing or, you know, this is a shot off the bow. Or sometimes like someone has a primary and they're trying to get like their base off their back and that's why they signed on to it. And so people read your coalition as a signal of what your plans and intentions are. Yeah, that makes sense.

You're an advocate for public housing. I'm an advocate for public housing. If it wasn't for HUD paying my rent as a kid, I don't know where I would be today. Robert Moses built most of the public housing in New York City, and a lot of it is considered not very functional, not very good. The execution and administration of public housing has often been lacking, and I think it has unfairly sullied the public housing as a concept. How do you do it right?

I mean, it's important. This, the, the,

I think that the divestment and the dissolution of public housing is a story about race. Yes. And I think it's important for us to talk about that very explicitly because the public housing of Robert Moses' day, even though he was discriminatory and had a lot of class bias in addition to racial bias, you know, when public housing was occupied by mostly white families, it was...

at its peak, it was quite idyllic in terms of public policy. You had housing that was affordable, that you could raise a family in, that was built with community infrastructure in mind. These weren't just apartments in a building, but there were playgrounds, there are community spaces, there's senior programming, there's childcare. And

It worked. It worked. It was when public housing began to be integrated and you started to have black residents move in. In New York City, a lot of Puerto Rican residents start to move in. That we started to see the mass disinvestment of public housing because it started to be seen through a politically racialized lens. And

In my view, it still is. But we also know that public housing has been enormously successful. And in fact, you know, one of the pieces of legislation that I have introduced is the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment.

which currently bans construction of new public housing units in the United States. And if we repeal that, I think once people experience public housing in an integrated and socially integrated way, it would create public will for more of it. In addition to social housing models, in addition to lots of other kinds of housing models that can

can decommodify the housing market that we're currently living in. That is completely unsustainable. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, this is the thing that people talk about when they really examine public housing projects, even ones that are sort of notorious like Pruitt-Igoe. There's a section or there's a period of time when that existed, when it was integrated and there was proper investment and proper maintenance and proper care. And it functioned in all the high ideals in which it was intended. And then when white flight happened and the divestment happened afterwards,

then that's when it falls apart because these design systems are not quite as robust and they need to be more robust, like to take a light that goes out and that doesn't turn into a hallway that becomes dangerous. That doesn't become into this. It takes people constantly thinking about it as a system and treating it as a system. And I just think that

people have gotten the wrong idea of it and I like want a better world in which public housing is just part of the fabric of our cities, you know. Yeah, and it's a similar thing actually in New York City with free public college tuition. Our CUNY system was free. It was free. You could go to college for free.

It was after the Civil Rights Act and the civil rights movement, which forced integration of our public systems, that we started getting divestment from our public systems. And it's really important that I think people understand that is that this is not just like

just government abandonment. This is a story about race. And part of our journey in healing our racial divide is by advocating for the reestablishment of integrated economic social safety nets that aren't blind to racial injustice, that are conscious of it. But I think that the way that we do that

is by reminding ourselves that we as a people, as a society, as a working class, even as a poor class, we deserve nice things. We deserve human dignity. And we deserve...

tuition-free public college. It's not a pipe dream. We deserve housing that we're not spending every single ounce of our non-food or medicine income, oftentimes people making those trade-offs. We deserve housing that doesn't suck all of that up. We deserve good schools. But we have to demand them across lines of race and culture. And

If we're not fighting for black Americans' right to that, if we aren't seeing cultural inequities, then what it means is that we're denying it to ourselves. And like, it's not just like a fight for equality. It's a fight for access. That's really what it is. It's like if you can, because if you can, we see this over and over again. If you make public housing accessible,

Like when what people think, like let's just get real about it, right? If what people think if public housing is black residents and then we have this internalized racialized construct about what that means or there's some sort of like media value on what that means, then –

People are going to otherize it and think that's somebody else. This benefits somebody else. It's not for me. So I'm okay. I'll look the other way if it's, you know, defunded or if, you know, in the wintertime, the gas goes out and the heat's off. But when we reject that as another and we say, wait,

If that's happening to them, it's going to happen to me. It happening to them is it happening to me. Then that's how we get there. That's how we do that. And that's why I think that the racial dimension of Robert Moses' legacy is not just a cautionary tale. It's not just, oh, yeah. Oh, and by the way, this guy was like mad racist. It's not just that. Okay.

If only Robert Carroll could have said it that way, the book would be so much shorter. It's not that. It's like it actually shows us the way forward. Like if this was truly unacceptable, not from a not from a oh, we don't believe in inequality, but like we are one like we are one. If we oppose it on that basis, we probably would have a lot more public transit in New York City right now.

We would absolutely, without a doubt, have a lot more and well-invested public housing. I think that we would still have a tuition-free public college system. And it's not an accident, right?

That in the aftermath of Moses's kind of peak era, you see the emergence in New York City of the Young Lords, of the Black Panthers, who are directly advocating for the infrastructure investments and speaking to the inequities that he was starting, that he had just created. Right.

And I think that's part of the story, right? Where his chapter ends, ours begins. It feels like it does.

For me, it harkens back to something you said at the beginning of the conversation where you're talking about choices. And it's something that comes up in our discussions on the episodes too is each of these things is a choice. There's no inevitable way that public housing has to be. It's not that, oh, it always has to be like that or if the light bulb goes out, you just leave it out. There's nothing you can do about it. And if those are choices that they made, then it feels like we can make the other choice. The other choice is available. They haven't fully foreclosed it even if –

It does seem like it's a lot harder after all that stuff's been built to change things. It's amazing how systems get so tied to physical things. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the thing is, like, kind of to your point earlier about some of Robert Moses's earlier work that –

there were benefits for. You know, his advocacy for public pools in New York City, the construction of public pools, the construction of beaches, you know, he, of course, had racist intent with that. However, earlier on, you saw that in how he administered, like, the administration of the pools, but not necessarily in the construction of them. And so...

So as a result, to this day, now, actually, public pools in New York City are, and access to public pools are an enormous racial benefit. And not just a racial benefit, but a class benefit that people from all sorts of backgrounds who would normally not be able to access a club or whatever it may be, can learn how to swim, can enjoy the pools that we have in places like Astoria Park.

And Orchard Beach is like, I think of Orchard Beach and City Island as working class Hamptons. Yeah.

That's where everyday people go to soak up the sun and enjoy the space. And those same plazas that Robert Moses built around that time, during this New Deal era, those same plazas still exist today and, in fact, are in the process of having just been reinvested in and overhauled.

Because that is actually a hundred plus year legacy that has withstood the test of time. And, you know, I think he would be appalled at who is going there today. Yeah.

But it is to all of our benefit. Luckily, he doesn't have a say in it anymore. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Representative Acosta-Cortez, for spending time with us and having us talk about Robert Moses and the book and your district. It's been the world to me to have you here. So thank you so much. Of course, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.

Next month, we're finishing up part four, The Use of Power, covering chapters 21 through 24. That's pages 402 through 496 in my amazingly huge printed copy of The Power Broker. In the meantime, you can check me out on my other podcast, The Flophouse, every Saturday. And you can also join the conversation with other Power Broker readers on our Discord. The link is on our website or go to discord.gg slash 99pi.

The 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angel. It's edited by Committee. The music is by Swan Real, and the mix is by Dara Hirsch.

99% of Visible's executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Sarah Baik, Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney, Artin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashima Dawn, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Potok, and me, Roman Mars.

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They learn to work together in some way because of Franklin Roosevelt's love of nipples. And so we will learn about that in the next section, Chapter 17, The Mother of Accommodation, when we come back. What a tease. Love of nipples.

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