The Power Broker #02: Jamelle Bouie
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This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Elliot Kalin. On today's episode, we're covering part three, The Rise to Power. That's pages 91 through 177 in my copy with some nice glossy photos in the middle there. And our guest is esteemed historian, New York Times opinion columnist and TikTok superstar, Jamel Bouie. And when we first came up with this series, I knew I wanted to have Jamel on because he

He is so great at contextualizing history and connecting the past to the present. So thank you for being here. It's my pleasure. Now, I should warn the audience ahead of time. Jamel has not actually read The Power Broker. That's okay. That's okay. It's like a lot of you. You haven't read it either. He hasn't read it. This is his first true exposure to the book. And I couldn't be prouder that Roman and I get to deflower him in this way just when it comes to The Power Broker. But Jamel knows so much about this time period that we're covering. Yeah.

We're going to bring him in periodically just to help us get a sense of what was going on at that time. What's the context that this power is being broken in? That's right. So let's just start where we left off last time. At the end of Chapter 5, it's November. It's 1918. Robert Moses is about to turn 30. His career in public service has almost ended at this point. Like he's complete failure. All of his different programs he has failed.

have failed. But then he gets a call from his former boss's wife, Belle Moskowitz. So tell me, Elliot, who is Belle Moskowitz? Okay, here's one of the amazing things about The Power Broker. Jamel, now my whole mission in this episode is just to sell this book to you directly, hardcore, one-on-one. This is one of the great things about this book is that it is about Robert Moses. It's his face on the cover. It's his name in the subtitle. But there's so many things that Robert

Robert Carroll can't help going into detail about, and that's often the lives of the people who are important to Moses' rise and Moses' career. And in the case of Bill Moskowitz, this is someone who

Without the power broker, their story may have disappeared possibly. They may not have ever gotten the treatment they deserved because she is this unassuming kind of behind-the-scenes operator. She's not a government official, but she is an activist, and she's a determined activist, but she's also a very realistic activist in the reform movement of the late 19th century, early 20th century, and she's going to become –

The most trusted advisor of New York Governor Al Smith will be a major person in the life of Robert Moses. And she is – Al Smith, he always refers to her as Mrs. M, and he asks her opinion on everything. Caro depicts her as literally the last person that he will talk to before he makes a decision, and he'll usually go with whatever she says in the decision-making. And all the Irish political bosses, they really resent her, and they call her Mosky behind her back and very derisively as a sort of –

anti-semitic nickname that i will say as someone who's willing to find anti-semitism just about anywhere mosky is a pretty good nickname for someone in moscow it's like i don't know it's it's pretty natural so uh but she's i'll go very quickly for through her life she's the daughter of a poor eastern european watchmaker she comes from a different uh new york jewish background than moses does she gets involved with the settlement house movement which was one of the big you know uh

reform progressive movements. Maybe, Jamal, can you tell me a little bit more about the settlement house movement? Because I only know vaguely what was going on with it. I probably don't know any more than you do. I know the term settlement house. My main understanding is that there is a major concern with sort of like

crime and poverty among urban youth. And so this was like one of the ideas, especially in slums, basically, we can have these homes that can kind of offer programs, offer places for people to live, like a space that is conducive to developing human talents.

And that's the extent of my knowledge there. That's a great description. You started out modest, but you came in strong at the end. So I think that worked out great. She studies at Columbia University, and her second husband is the social worker Henry Moskowitz, who we met in the last episode running the Bureau of Municipal Research.

that Moses worked for. She's real reform circle royalty. Like she's a major figure in the New York reform circuit. One of the reasons for that is because she succeeded in cleaning up what they called the dancing academies, which were essentially sex trafficking spots, but were presented as dancing academies for young ladies, but were places where young ladies were then preyed upon. And,

She cleans them up not the way that other reformers might have with like a big public movement or by bringing publicity to the problem. Instead, she does what Robert Carroll loves whenever anybody does. She does the research. She goes to the titles and things for these buildings, the ownership documents. She sees they're owned by people in Tammany political circles, and she goes to those people and says…

If you pass legislation and then enforce it that regulates these things, I won't go to the newspapers and publicize your name. She's willing to kind of work with people to get things done. And she has made an arbitrator in the arguments between the garment workers union and their bosses. And she kind of wins over both sides because she's able to play the game. She knows how to work for a common goal between them without alienating the people in power. They come to really trust her. They trust their blackmailer. Yes. Yeah.

Well, I think there's a certain amount of like, well, you know, playing the game. This is how we do it around here. This is, you know, it's the early 20th century. We don't really have a lot of rules these days. She offers Moses a job as the chief of staff for a commission in the governor's office to design a reorganization plan for the state government.

And a kind of general implementation plan for social welfare reforms. And he's like, yes, of course. I think he cannot agree fast enough because, again, he thinks he has had no shot in government anymore after this. And he opens an office. Instantly, he – Carroll makes a point of saying that he starts hiring people from the Bureau of Municipal Research, the guys who used to look down on him. Now he's going to be their boss. And Robert Moses never knows why.

Mrs. Moskowitz picks him. Never knows why Bill Moskowitz chooses him of all people, but it is the major turning point, you could say, in his public career because –

It puts him into contact with Governor Al Smith, who Carol goes into it a little bit here, but there's going to be more about him later. So don't worry. We're going to get into more detail with Al Smith. But he is essentially, as Carol puts it, perhaps like the greatest pure politician in the history of New York State. And he is seen by outsiders as a real –

But a few reformers are like, you know what? I met this guy. He seems like he could be useful. Maybe he'll be okay. I'm not going to talk about it too much more because you know what? There's a big section on it in the next chapter. We're going to get to that chapter next. This is one of the things that Robert Carroll does in this book, which is a little confusing sometimes, is he kind of like plays with the timeline in ways that give you information when he thinks it is most necessary for you but sometimes can make it hard to understand.

Keep things in your mind. So at this moment, Governor Al Smith is governor. In the next chapter, we're going to jump back and tell you the entire life story of Governor Al Smith. This is not a totally chronological book. This is a real Christopher Nolan Stone Creek of a biography.

I guess I said Dunkirk as if his other movies are purely linear. It's a little jarring, but we'll get to that. So one of the key things that Belle Moskowitz is doing for Alice Smith is she is helping him court the women's vote. And this tells you a little bit about the time that they're in. This is the 1918 election. This is the first time women can vote in New York State. And Belle Moskowitz is his key advisor. And she tells him like,

to win over women, you should just talk to the women the same way that you would talk to a man voter and just tell them the same things that you would tell a man. And he does and he gets their vote. And this was revolutionary. This brilliant idea that shows you really what politics was like at the time or what, you know, even American society was like at the time. So the big

crusade here is reorganizing the state government. The state government is an example of, we talked about in the last episode, the sloppiness of early American governance, how kind of

Not organized, not put together, not governed, the government was. There's this mishmash of different agencies in the state government. Taxes are collected by seven different agencies who will all go to the same place and demand taxes. They all report to different people in the government. It's not really clear who is responsible to anybody. The governor has no power to do much of anything. He's only in office for two years. The state doesn't even have an accurate budget. Nobody knows how much money the state spends each year. It's impossible. No one knows about it.

And I feel like we hear so much budget accounting in the news now, and there's something kind of refreshing almost in the idea that back then the news was just like, money spent. We don't know. No amounts necessary. Not information that we need. I want to bring Jamel in here a little bit to talk about this, you know,

I think people's vision of politics and government is really sort of predicated on where they are, the solipsistic view of things are the way they're supposed to be the moment I was born and made aware of them. But this is a very different style of politics and government than is today. It's not very ideologically driven. It's more about what you can get and patronage and all that sort of stuff. You know, could you –

set the stage for what does it mean to be a political reformer in the early 20th century? Like, what are they reforming against? And what kind of government are people arguing for? There are a couple ways to get at this question.

And one way is to focus on one of the, I think, defining features of politics in the early 20th century, American politics in the early 20th century and late 19th, which is that it's still very regional. We live in an era right now of just completely national politics, right? Sort of almost all politics are national in one way or another. My congressman here in the 5th District of Virginia said,

um is a guy who i'm more likely to see doing a cable news hit than i am to see around the district right sort of like everything is national but a hundred years ago 120 years ago

There's no national media of that sort. Local and state party organizations were much stronger and more cohesive. They were really the main way through which people engaged in politics, which gave them a lot of sway. Today, we speak of kind of like the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as like a singular national thing with like a bunch of branches in each state. But then it's probably much more accurate to speak of the New York Democratic Party as

as being its own singular institution. And even within that, right, sort of in the context of New York City, you have its bureau has its own democratic club with its own set of power brokers and

Power brokers. And everyone else, Tammany and Manhattan being kind of the most famous of them, but Brooklyn, Queens, you know, the five boroughs. And the rest. Yeah. And the rest. So I think it's really important to kind of like understand that kind of like the organization of politics. It's just like way different than it is now. Right. In the context of New York politics,

It's very organization and very machine driven machine just being kind of like a dedicated political organization that doled out patronage, rounded up votes, provided, you know, like services to voters is like an important part of the important and perhaps like lost part of modern day thinking about political machines that they weren't just it wasn't just a way to stuff a ballot box. It was also sort of like.

If you had a problem with your landlord, you could go to your award leader and be like, I have a problem with my landlord. And the party machine would try to help you out, knowing that doing this would probably cement your commitment to giving them a vote and telling your friends and family that, hey, vote for the machine candidate.

So reform in this context often is reform of like this machines because a lot of middle class reformers around this time saw this as being kind of like messy and dirty, especially since machine politics is very much associated with like mass immigration, right? This is a period of large scale immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. And one of the things that political machines did was.

was quickly incorporate these people into sort of like the political process. And for many middle class, you know, Protestant white reformers, this was sort of like messy and undesirable. So we're talking about New York here, but this similar kind of reform spirit of trying to maybe rationalize the political process to make it less messy and less

is going on throughout the country. And one of the products of it are various types of suffrage restriction. And so the emergence of the secret ballot, called the Australian ballot, is part of this process in the South.

This is part of this process is Jim Crow. Part of the argument for Jim Crow is like, we're going to clean up boating by getting all of these people who don't belong out of the process.

So you're saying there's kind of like a good side to reform and a bad side to reform. It is not entirely a wholly positive endeavor, but that past political world looks so alien to us because it's so favor-based. It's so transactional on a micro level in a way that seems kind of slimy where it is like –

When I'm having trouble with my landlord, don't worry, the party's going to step in and help you with that. There's something a little mafia-ish about that. But it's also very – there's something appealing about that where, I don't know, like I don't know who in the government I would turn to in my elected areas of Los Angeles for help with a permit or something like that. Right, right, right. Or with any kind of issue. You wouldn't. You wouldn't, yeah. Maybe the city, you know, like different people in the city. But nobody –

who's like a legislator, you know, in any real way. Yeah. I mean, the unsavory parts of it

are real. Like there's a reason why there pops up a reform movement in Chicago and New York and all this in, in, in, in St. Louis and Kansas city, all the places where there are powerful political machines, like a reform movement to pop up specifically because like all of this can get very coercive and corrupt very quickly at the same time. And this is, this is sort of where my kind of sympathy for machine politics is.

arises from like that kind of direct connection between government and politics and everyday life is like really powerful and and and cements a sort of like level of civic participation and civic identity in people that is like it doesn't exist these days

Like one consequence of the end of that kind of top-down, highly organized political organization in American politics is that people don't have that kind of connection to political life because there's no mediating institutions to make it.

it. I actually think I missed this too. I think there's a huge problem with national politics because there isn't enough earmarks and horse trading and all that sort of thing. It's easy for us to say that now though because we're on the other side of it. At that time they were like, I don't like this. It turns out

The grass is always greener when it comes to politics. But it's true that there's this balance between idealism and practical reality that has to be struck, and this is what Robert Moses is starting to learn from Belmoskowitz. Thank you guys for providing me with a great on-ramp to this part of the Robert Moses story highway where they have this report from 1915 that the Bureau of Municipal Research put together about how to reorganize the government. It didn't go anywhere because the bureau has no power. But now –

in the late teens, Belmoskowitz has that power through the governor. And she says to Moses, it's time for you to put together a new report. Tell us how the state government should be put together. And he will come to her with ideas and she will say, no, we can't do that. I know you want to eliminate these positions because they're redundant, but the legislature uses those as big patronage positions and we need that. They want that. This stuff about civil service reform, you can't put that in there. That's going to antagonize voters, workers or voters. We can't do that. And

This starts to really annoy Moses, and they talk about how when he is not in the room with Belle, he swears about her a lot and he's really mad about it. But when he is in the room with her, he does not – he holds his tongue. He doesn't say those things because he's learning, and he's learning about how you balance idealism with practical political concerns. He's learning about where actual political power comes from and how you need to accommodate it. Belle is really his teacher in how to get things done through a system, what the real levers are.

And Governor Smith says to them, I don't want a plan that just has a bunch of airy ideas. I want actionable legislative policy. If you're just going to give me a bunch of ideas, finish the report right now, and I'll throw it away. That'll be great. You can just finish your job. And Moses takes this as a real challenge, it seems. He drives his staff super hard. They love him for it. And this is something that you see starting now, basically, and going throughout Moses' career is that he can get groups of almost

almost always men, but women sometimes also, to work for him really, really hard, often to the point of threatening their own finances and health eventually, because he is working harder than everybody else. And he has a personality that is both volatile but also welcoming and

This aspect of Robert Moses' personality, I've never – throughout the book, Caro talks about him in different ways of him being very likable, very good in a room, very hard-driving, and then also very cruel to his employees.

to his subordinates. I don't know if I ever get a real bead on Robert Moses, what it would be like to be in a room with him a lot of the time. It seems hard to square the circle of all these different personality traits into one human. It's a real Citizen Kane type scenario, yeah, where everyone sees a little bit of this big character. But it seems like he just is such an overwhelming character

figure of energy. He has such an overwhelming personality that he carries people along. And I don't think it's one of those things where he, uh,

is kind of doing nice things for his employees throughout the day like he's a tough guy but he was there for me when i needed him it sounds like it's more just the the sheer charisma of somebody who is so passionate about what he's doing that you can't help but get carried along with it even if after the fact you're like oh well he was a mean man that was it that was very mean of him to do that thing but in the moment you get swept up in it and this is the first time we see a thing that will continue throughout the book where

Robert Moses is so full of energy that at the end of the night, he will go out to this beach bungalow that his family is renting at the time. This is in 1919 and will just swim in the dark by himself and go way out farther than anyone else feels safe going because he's just so full of energy. He's just got to go swimming. And he is like a night swimmer throughout the rest of his life in a way that just feels like him burning off extra energy. The money for this commission runs out. Moses has to finish this report himself. And when it's finished…

And Caro is really very full of praise about it, that it is very clear. It's full of confidence. Moses takes almost full credit for it even though a lot of people worked on it. And there's a funny story where he hires the historian Charles A. Beard who wrote – what is it? The Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution. That's right.

Thank you. I'm so glad I got the title right. And he hires him to write part of it. And then Charles Beard takes that part of it that he wrote and repurposes it for an article. And Moses gets mad and threatens to sue him for plagiarism. And Beard is apoplectic. He's like, but I wrote this. Wait a minute. But you hired me to write it. I wrote it. You didn't write it. We're seeing that Ramos does not like to share credit.

with people. But he's also starting to build his name among the right people as the only guy who can get things done. So under the guidance of Moses, they formed this citizens committee on the reorganization of state government. And Al Smith is, is dumping across the state and he's giving speeches in support of the reports recommendation, which is all new, like for Moses, like, you know, he is like,

being supported for the first time. And he's also kind of learning the political game. Like he's showing tact sort of in the way that Bell Moskowitz has sort of trained him to kind of like defer to other people, give them his ideas. You know, he just is smarter about all this stuff. He's trying his best not to be visibly arrogant and hateful towards the people who have immediate power over him, which is new for him, which is very new for him. He doesn't like it.

And so with Al Smith's support and with Moses' deep knowledge of how all these laws work and how these reforms would work within them, they're able to get a lot of stuff done. They managed to pass a lot of this reform package. They don't get the biggest things. They don't get the four-year term for the governor yet. They don't get to consolidate the state bureaucracy yet. They don't get the executive budget, the idea that the governor would prepare a budget for the whole state. But Al Smith says to Robert Moses, don't worry.

I'm going to do that in my next term as governor. But there's a problem. Yeah. The term is only two years, as you said. And Al Smith does not get reelected. No. Unfortunately, his reelection is during the election of 1920 when the Democrats, his party, put up as President Cox. And of course,

Our audience, I don't have to remind you about President Cox. We all remember the amazing things that happened under his term, his tenure, him and his vice president, Franklin Roosevelt. I'm sorry. If you're like, I don't remember a President Cox, it's because they didn't happen. He lost really badly and took Al Smith down with him. Not the last time that Franklin Roosevelt will get in the way of Robert Moses, but certainly the first time. And so those major reforms, they just don't happen.

And suddenly, once again, Robert Moses is not in the realm of power anymore. Right, right. The committee gets disbanded. All that stuff, you know, just sort of goes away when Al Smith is no longer the governor. Except that Robert Moses takes this job at the New York State Association, which is, you know, something we'll hear a little bit more about the next chapter. But one of the real key things is

He has become friends with Al Smith. Like Al Smith has really taken a shine to Robert Moses. And now that they're both sort of like, you know, esteemed private citizens, they begin to hang out like his friends. Yes. There's a passage that I'd love to read here where Robert Carroll says,

becomes kind of Charles Dickens-y in describing these two seemingly mismatched but surprisingly deeply bonded figures. And this is where it says it here. Here it is.

The two men made an odd pair as they walked through the winding, narrow streets of the Lower East Side in the twilight, one of them tall, slim, handsome, and aristocratic and bearing, the other short, pot-bellied, florid. The taller man, striding out with long, springing steps, continually had to shorten his stride to let the other, who walked with a slow, extremely pigeon-toed gait, catch up.

Their progress was further slowed by Smith's popularity. He seemed to know almost every man and woman who passed, and when one of them stopped to chat, he would stop too, and talk with him without appearance of impatience, while his companion would stride restlessly in little circles, or, trying desperately to stand still and listen politely, would nervously clench and unclench his fists.

And the chapter ends with Robert Moses amazingly reporting to the people he knows that Al Smith listens to him. Yeah. And just to give full context of this, if you were to sort of encapsulate all of what Robert Moses did as this intern of a think tank when it comes to political reform, if it all sort of came down to one point, it is –

people like Al Smith shouldn't govern. Yes. It's like that is basically his conclusion at the end of his time at the think tank. This is his thesis. This is his master's thesis, right? Is that only people with

College educations should be in government positions, and Al Smith is the antithesis of that as we get through – go into chapter seven. But yeah, this is something that I wanted to get your guys' thought on before we get into Al Smith's amazing rise to the height of New York politics is that –

Al Smith to the outsider, he's a Tammany man. He's kind of emblematic of that kind of machine politics. And as you're saying, Roman, Moses reforms in theory are all about we shouldn't have guys like that in power. Only the college-educated should. The democratic, clean way of doing things is to not have this kind of machine corruption. But it's only in the world of that machine corruption that a guy as –

from the bottom as Al Smith can rise to the top. This idea that which is the truly more democratic system because if Moses has his way like you're saying, you wouldn't see Al Smith in government but it is only Al Smith who is able to get through the kinds of reforms that Moses is trying to do. Jamel, I guess this maybe dovetails with what you were saying earlier about

reform movements also being about removing certain types of voters or certain types of members of the populace? What is that? I don't have a way to phrase this as a question, but can you talk about it? I guess that's a question. Yeah, sure. I mean, this is the macro picture of American politics in kind of this period is that it's really fractitious, right? So in the 1880s and 1890s, you have the

farmers alliance and the populist party which is like hugely disruptive i mean i think i think today to the extent that anyone learns about the populace oh yeah the farmers got angry and they had a party and it you know contested some elections but like the populist party at its height more or less like unsettled american politics across the country and so you have you have this you have like labor unrest like really serious and violent labor unrest throughout the country and

There is multiple economic crises happening. I think there was a panic in 1893. There's maybe a little recession at the beginning of the 20th century. So kind of the context for the progressive reform era, which is what this is all kind of a part of, like progressivism exists in both parties as a reform movement. There are Republican progressives, there are Democratic progressives. They exist within, you know,

The Tammany machine has people who would identify as progressives. And this is, I think, to a large extent, like Robert Moses and this group of people are in that milieu. A guy who I'm sure will get mentioned in the book, Robert F. Wagner, because he's sort of like a very important figure in national politics in the 1930s. We'll hear about Robert Wagner and we'll hear about his son, the other Robert Wagner. Yes. Not the actor.

Yeah. If you're Googling this, you got to remember there's an actor named Robert Wagner, too. So you want to look for Robert F. Wagner is the politician. His son is also Robert Wagner Jr. But not the actor. And then there's Robert Wagner from heart to heart. Yeah.

No, but it's the fractitiousness and in some cases the violence of American politics that a lot of reformers want to get a handle on. It's the very real corruption.

All of this is also happening. I mentioned there's mass immigration during all of this. And what's also happening is sort of like a growing kind of like nativistic attitude within American politics. So the progressive reformers, whether they're operating in New York or

or other northern and mid-Atlantic cities, whether they're out west in California, whether they're down south, the progressive reformers are trying to do like a bunch of things. And one of them is this attempt to

rationalize politics reduce the level of fractitiousness and like violence and conflict promote people who are interested in science quote-unquote scientific government government by experts government by people with a base of knowledge and this is like the ugly side it's like

The more ordinary immigrant voters, laboring voters, like what do they know? What do they know about administering the government? Maybe they shouldn't have as much of a say. Maybe we should be finding ways to have them be less of a part of the political process.

And to be clear, you're saying what they would be thinking. We shouldn't take that out of context and put it into a political ad. New York Times columnist Jamel Bowie does not think immigrants should be involved. I'm so glad that we settled that. Oh, thank goodness. But I think what I was thinking in that moment was actually like, how overt was the anti-immigrant sort of bigoted nature of this reform movement? Was it all subtext or did they talk about it openly?

Oh, it wasn't subtext at all. It was super text. Let me, let me pull up something real quick. There's a wonderful book.

from the 1970s by a political scientist who's still living named J. Morgan Kusser called The Shaping of Southern Politics, Suffrage Restriction, and the Establishment of the One Party South. And it's mostly about the South, but it deals, because it takes place during this time, it deals with similar kinds of movements happening throughout the country.

Here we go. This is from the book. Between 1889 and 1913, nine states outside the South made the ability to read English a qualification for voting. And Rhode Island required voters to pay at least $1 in taxes. Writing in the prestigious North American Review, a prominent University of Michigan geologist denounced, quote, the communistic principle of universal and equal suffrage.

Quote,

That's generally the tenor of conversation. So let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to get to one of our favorite sections of the book, a little micro biography of Al Smith, the great Al Smith after this.

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So this is part of the book where we talk about Al Smith. And right here, Carol jumps back in time. And if you're not paying close attention, it is pretty confusing for many of us. Because you're suddenly like, wait, he's a child now. I thought he was the governor. I thought he was the governor. And then he was the governor not elected in 1918. And then he goes back in time. All my life, I wanted to be the governor and then be faked. Yeah, that'll be the movie version of it.

uh, so we're in chapter seven now, which is called change of major. And it opens with a long section that I will try to do quickly and not too detailed. I love it. This is a 17 page section. It's half the chapter, which is just telling the life story of Al Smith. And every time I, I think about this book, I know it's 17 pages. It stuck with me from the first time I read it. And I'll be like, there's no way that section 17 pages, I must be exaggerating. And then I'll go back and read through it again. And I'm like,

No, it is. They talk about Al Smith for a long time to the point where when Robert Moses comes back in, I remember the first time I read this book, I was really enjoying Al Smith's life. And then Robert Moses came back and I was like, oh, yeah, this book is about Robert Moses. Like it felt like two superheroes were finally teaming up that I had been reading their books separately for a long time. But yeah.

He is the exact opposite in many ways of Moses' upbringing, and Caro compares them specifically. It says at this age that Moses is doing this, Al Smith is doing this. He's growing up in the Irish tenements of New York's Fourth Ward. They're right at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's all tenements. It's kind of your classic easy to romanticize but actually very terrible to live in tenements. And his father dies when he's young. His mother is literally worried that if she cannot financially support her children, they'll be taken away from her.

and put an institution. And finally, he drops out of school at 13 and goes to work. For much of that time, he's working at Fulton Fish Market, where Caro notes he works from 4 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Friday.

When he starts work at 3 a.m. It's not that he has Friday off. It just he has one extra hour of work. But he also starts getting into the kind of low level political work that Jamel you were telling us about, which they describe as executing contracts, which is kind of favors. You know, they talk about like tipping off a brothel owner that there's going to be a raid. So maybe get ready for it. Or there's a poor constituent who needs a little bit of help because they lost their job. And each of these things is a favor that you're doing.

And they know that – the person who's doing the favor knows this is the Democratic Party who's doing me this favor and specifically the local Democratic ward boss, who in this case is a guy named Big Tom Foley, which is a great – if you want to be a machine politician, you should have Big in the front of your name. That should be your nickname.

name. It can only sound kind of corrupt. It's hard for me to imagine a politician with big at the front of his name who is above board and just known for his honesty, like Big Abe Lincoln or something like that. And

He catches big time full of his eye because Al Smith is someone everyone seems to like. He goes out of his way to do as much as he can for people. He works hard. People just seem to like him. And he says, hey, I'm going to put you up as a state assemblyman. And Al Smith is like, oh, OK, sure. Yeah, that would be great. And he gets elected. He goes to the state legislature in Albany and he finds it impenetrable.

The speeches are impenetrable. The wording of the bills is impenetrable. Again, this is a guy who dropped out of school at 13, and this is a New York school in the late 19th century. This is not an amazing school probably. And each night after kind of carousing with his fellow legislators because a lot of the job of being in the state legislature seems to be to go drinking with the other legislators, he would go back to the room he was staying in and read through every single bill.

that was brought up that day and the older bills they referred to and it's his way of just trying to figure out what do these things mean like what what do they mean why are they written this way what are the people who who introduced this bill what are they thinking why are they why are they thinking this way that has to be done and he needs money uh he has a family by this point and he goes to big tom foley and tom foley says i'll give you this big patronage job this plum job it's not a lot of work it's good money but if you take it you'll never be a big man in new york but hey

maybe Albany's too tough for you. You know, maybe you're just not ready for it. And Smith decides to turn down that job and he goes back to Albany. And

While he's a state legislator, he's entirely a Tammany man. Whatever big Tom Foley tells him to do, he does it. And he spends his days voting whatever he's ordered to vote, winning over his colleagues with kind of jokes and things. But then at night, when nobody knows what he's doing, he's just researching and reading and studying and researching and learning. And as we know, there's nothing Robert Caro admires more than deep research that involves reading papers long into the night.

Anytime a character does interviews or researching papers in this book, they are – instantly, there's a shine that glows for them. And we'll talk about this more later, actually, because we'll get into the deeper weeds of Bill writing. But –

But as a dilettante when it comes to politics, I read about it, but I'm not a New York Times columnist or anything like that. Jamil, can you enlighten us? Why are laws written so complicatedly? Like why are they so complicated? Why do we need a whole court whose job seems to be just to tell us what words that are in the dictionary, like what they mean? Why should he have to study so hard to understand what these laws are saying?

A lot of reasons. So first, a piece of legislation may effectively just be an amendment of an older piece of legislation. So you need to know the language of the older piece of legislation, A, to understand what this new one is doing, and B, to even write it. You have to have knowledge of this previous piece of legislation. And then these things are written in like a kind of very technical, legalistic language. And that explains like 90% of it.

And so where a court comes in is like it's first of all, I mean, most often it's the bill is written, it's passed into law, it's being implemented, and the people tasked with implementing it, they're reading it, they're cross-checking it based on what they know, and they begin to take action. And then someone else who maybe is affected by that action says, hey, I don't think you're reading that correctly. This is what I think this means that the law says. And now...

the legislature doesn't really, it's doing other stuff now. It's not going to go back and like clarify. So the job of the court is they look at the text, they look at the legislative history, they look at, you know, similar laws maybe and how those are implemented, how they look at everything and they say, well, we think that this understanding of the law makes the most sense. And that's kind of most of the deal, right? Just sort of

Law writing is a technical process. It's an interpretive process. And the people who write laws are often trying to do it in such a way as to make sure that what they want to happen actually happens.

This is sort of like the big thing. You got to write it in a way that like we want X to happen specifically and you need to make sure that it does actually happen. Because there's someone else who can come along and say, oh, but that law kind of says Y. I know you maybe you wanted X, but Y works also. Yeah, yeah, right. You wanted X, but what you wrote is more akin to Y.

You're doing X, but you can't do X because actually it means Y. Like you want to avoid that situation as much as possible. Well, now that I know how complicated it is, it is less surprising to me that it takes Al Smith until his fifth term in the state legislature to finally understand how laws work and what's going on. I mean, this is a bit of my own little, you know, listeners, this is my own hobby horse. So if you disagree with me, whatever, just ignore it. Like, you know,

rewind, fast forward through, but this is actually the basic problem with like term limits as a concept that like when you get elected to a legislature, your first term, 90% of it is learning who the people are, what the basic rules are. And like, that's it. And if you get elected to a second term, then you can learn a little more. And in practice, especially for, um,

when the terms are two years or three years. In practice, your first five terms might simply be equivalent to orientation, right? Sort of like, okay, I've been here for 10 years. Now I know enough to do something that I want to do. And a term limit basically like

short circuits that process. What a term limit does is say, okay, you're now at the point where you have enough knowledge and you have, you built enough relationships and you've developed an area of expertise or an area of interest. You're at the point where you can write a law and build a coalition and get it passed. Well, now you can't be in the legislature anymore. Goodbye. You can't be here. Yeah. But even a term limit, like a single term being so short,

is an impediment to all of this. And it's pretty fascinating. I think one thing you have to sort of think about that's different today as back then is like,

You know, essentially campaigns are so long that two years, you're basically, you get elected, you have to like basically, you're focused on being reelected. It's like immediate. Whereas I think these campaigns, when he talks about different campaigns later on, they're like a month long, maybe, you know, like on the outside. They're pretty short. And when you're running for the state legislature and you got big Tom Foley in your corner, you're not really campaigning too hard. Yeah, you're kind of just...

You got the bully boys standing on beer barrels, giving speeches on street corners, and that's enough. And, you know, everyone owes favors. Guys with bats, you know, that kind of thing. Oh, yeah, of course. Oh, the good old days. Yeah, yeah, of course. But by 1911, he is the majority leader for his party.

He's still doing Tammany business. There's a kind of a little bit of a turning moment as a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, one of the great labor tragedies in the United States history. And he adds himself to the committee that's investigating it for the state. And he starts to make relationships with the reformers who are also working on that committee and working in the cause of safer labor situations, especially for New York government workers but for workers in general. And –

He starts to make this relationship with a few reformers who see that he's uneducated. He seems to have no political ideology really whatsoever, but he cares in a broader sense of the idea of taking care of the people, of little people. He is – what, Jamal, you were saying about populism. He is that kind of populist in the positive sense of the word, and he becomes a very powerful speaker for the rights of workers and the rights of the poor while he's still at the same time –

doing Tammany business. And he becomes the assembly speaker. He gets a reputation for working efficiently. He bullies laws through. And he might stand up for a progressive bill. But if Tammany says, don't do this, he will switch on a dime. So that 1915 reorganization report that failed, the one before Moses' report, he was in support of it. And then his boss was like, don't do this. And he says to them, sorry, boys.

Got the word. Can't do it. Like he's very open about how he was told he can't vote, support it. So he's not supporting it. But behind the scenes, he's starting to kind of lobby the Tammany people to change their thinking a little bit. And he's getting traction because they have a goal they think he might be able to achieve, which is to be the first Irish-American governor of the state. It's something they've never been able to establish and change.

It means a lot to this very Irish political machine in a city with a lot of Irish voters who are looked down on. And so in 1918, Esme Munch, he's elected governor. He's associated in that campaign and then for the rest of his life with the then new song, The Sidewalks of New York, a song that I feel like I only know from old cartoons and things like that. That's the one that goes east side, west side, all around the town. East side.

West side, all around the town. The top sang green, a rosy London bridge is found. Boys and girls together, me and Mamie Roar. Cryptolite fantastic New York.

But you kind of feel like when Robert Caro is writing this, there are still old timers who when they hear that song, they go, ah, yes, Al Smith. You know, the same way that I'll always think of Bill Clinton when I hear that Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow song when it comes on the oldies radio. And Governor Smith, he will work with reformers, but he works on reforms that are good politics. He has no time for the kind of uncompromising idealists that Moses used to

traffic with. And he has some great names for them that I want to highlight that he calls them mush brains, double domes, crackpots. That's still around. And my favorite, which is goo-goos. Oh, yeah. I love goo-goos.

He just won't deal with goo-goos. He doesn't want them. And at this point, the book has brought us back to where we left off before. Moses is part of Smith's kind of coterie of people. He likes him. He likes singing barbershop quartet songs with him. Nobody really knows why. He just seems to like Robert Moses. And –

That's when we go back to the end of the last chapter. Smith loses the election. Moses accepts this job with the New York State Association. It's a new statewide good government organization. It's the first statewide good government reform organization in New York. And –

That instantly makes him a more important figure in that reform circle. He catches the eyes of the old reformers, the young lawyers. He's the embodiment of everything that they think is possible in the reform movement, this brilliant, young, hardworking guy who has strong principles, won't compromise. And he edits the organization's monthly magazine, which is very straightforward reform magazine.

principal boostering, except when it comes to talking about Al Smith, in which case it is a super pro-Al Smith magazine. And the other reformers are like, what is the deal? Like, I don't understand. Why –

Why is that the one guy? And in 1922, Smith runs for governor again. The Reform Magazine is so solidly pro-Smith that it is making factual errors about Smith's opponent, and Moses doesn't seem to care. It's so in the tank for Smith. And the other members of the government group who saw this as a nonpartisan organization, they're dismayed. They start to resign. The organization somewhat falls apart. And Robert Caro notes that 50 years later, when the book was written –

The League of Women Voters was still the only statewide political reform organization in New York that this organization, which had such potential, Moses effectively turned it into an Al Smith pack, super pack. And I have to assume that's changed by now, but I did not do the research for it, that there must be a statewide reform organization in New York now. And Robert Moses, he has made the ultimate change, which is that

These other reformers, they come to him and they say, Al Smith said this in his speech, and it's not true, this thing that he said about his opponent. And Moses goes, yeah, but it sounds better. We got to win this election, right, guys? And he has come to scorn anyone who prioritizes truth over results. And as Caro says, Bob Moses was scornful in short of what he had been. And –

Al Smith wins the election and wrote Carol ends the chapter saying, and when on January 2nd, 1923, Al Smith went back to Albany. He took Bob Moses with him and he took him back big. I love that. He knows how to end chapters. So it's a super chapter ender. Yeah.

So now we're into chapter eight. It's called A Taste of Power. And Al Smith is the governor again. And Robert Moses is up in Albany with him. But in what is a very, for me, was confusing the first time I read it, seeing he's not sitting next to Al Smith in the beginning of this chapter. He's sitting next to a young Democrat named Jimmy Walker. Who is Jimmy Walker?

At the time, Jimmy Walker is the Democratic floor leader in the legislature, in the state senate. And you're right. It is super confusing that this guy is just brought in and Jimmy Walker will eventually be mayor of New York. And he is famous as – he's the mayor who was – we'll hear about him more, but he's a man about town. He's a songwriter. He is kind of the epitome of –

gentlemanly slimy corruption in New York City. He is a guy who dresses well. He takes his mistress to official public events. Everybody loves him and he is super crooked. But here, he's just kind of mentioned and he's mentioned in the way that

I have to assume – what Robert Caro is doing here is equivalent to when a Marvel movie ends and a character suddenly shows up and half the audience goes, oh, and the other half is like, I don't know who this is. Am I supposed to know who this is? Like this character who shows his face for a moment that – because Robert Caro just assumes when he's writing for a New York audience in the 1970s, they know who Jimmy Walker is. Come on. He's famous. How could you forget about this indelible New York political character? And all I can think about is –

uh good times that's all that all comes to mind when i hear jimmy walker once again a new york political figures having the same name as a television actor has it will is tripping us up again thanks a lot reality for giving us so many of these that's two in one episode i'll say i just looked up a picture of jimmy walker this guy does not look like you should trust him

Well, and that's – in some ways he was kind of the way that Trump – part of the thing that people like about Trump when they like him is that he's kind of a slimeball. They kind of admire that about him. With Jimmy Walker, it was kind of the same thing where it was like, oh, Jimmy. Oh, this guy. Come on. Oh, that's Jimmy. He was very much the arch nemesis of a lot of reformers at the time. But this is before he's become mayor. This is when he is still a Democratic candidate.

But Robert Moses is doing the job in this scene of being the guy who stands next to the politician and tells him all the things that he needs to know so that he can then go out and give the speeches or make the legislative moves that are going to get the policies in place. Moses at this point.

He has no official position in the state government. His only official job, his only salary is as secretary of the New York State Association. But effectively his role is as Al Smith's legislative researcher, messenger, all-around companion, like right-hand man in a lot of ways. He's in the building when Al Smith's at work. He goes with Al Smith to visit Al Smith's grandkids. He goes with Al Smith at night to visit the animals in the executive mansion menagerie, which apparently was something that they had at

At the time of the executive mansion, and it's possibly the least relevant piece of information, but I feel like I have to highlight the animals that were living outside the executive mansion in Albany at the time, which was...

Let's see. Tiger and bear cubs, goats, a fox and an elk. And as permanent residents, six dogs, a mother raccoon with three baby raccoons and three monkeys. So at this point, there's the the governor of New York has a private zoo and Al Smith loves it. This will come up later. His love of zoos. But Moses is in the political inner circle. It's him. It's Mrs. Moskowitz. It's a few other people, Tammany bosses and reformers. He is in the mix of power. Jamel, is this how things still work that there's like just unpaid workers?

People wandering around with politicians. I mean, I feel like when I watch cable news, which I try not to because it depresses me, there's always people who are credited as like political consultant or advisor. Is this the kind of thing that Robert Moses was just kind of like a free floating kind of unpaid but very necessary advisor? Do we still have that?

Often the people who fill that role are paid these days, mostly because a politician, your top campaign advisor, you may bring on a staff. Maybe you'll be your chief of staff.

Um, maybe we'll serve some other like staff position that they can be paid. Uh, the kind of just sort of like guy who's around who doesn't really have a job, but like it's close to the, close to the governor or to the mayor or to whomever. Um, that's, I feel like that's a little less common these days. Like that kind of close advisors still around, but they are often given some kind of official role just to put them in proximity and you'd give them like a paycheck.

Patronage is still a thing. But now it's good white-collar kind of like expert patronage as opposed to the bad old-fashioned regular people get jobs patronage, right? Right, right, right, right. Oh, thank goodness. I'll just say even white-collar patronage, people still feel like someone needs to have qualifications. I don't know if you remember...

George W. Bush's first pick for Supreme Court after Sandra Day O'Connor retired, Harry Myers, who was like his personal lawyer. And it was like, yeah, I'll put my personal lawyer on the court. Why not? Right? Like that's like classic patronage. It's like, it's classic patronage. And I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's like, I think, I mean, I think we probably would have all been better off if it was Justice Harriet Myers, but not Justice Sam Alito. Yeah. That's, well, that's the amazing thing is it's like in theory,

That's bonkers for the president put his personal lawyer, someone who did not seem to have the experience. Nobody knew really what her ideas were to put on it. But looking at back on it now, I'm like, you know what? It probably would have been better to have just like a personal attorney who is not beholden to the like the Federalist Society or some didn't clerk for a Supreme Court justice like to have them on the court. Maybe we need more of that stuff. I don't know. This is actually the point I was going to make that sort of what we gain stuff.

The legacy of this reform movement is the professionalization of government service. And we gain a lot from that. That is important. But these are political jobs at the end of the day. And political considerations do have a place in political jobs. And I think we lose something in trying to get rid of political considerations in political jobs. There's a balance to strike. And sometimes I think

With certain kinds of positions, we've moved way too far in the direction of everyone has to be a certain kind of professional versus in the case of a Supreme Court seat or the federal judiciary in general. Hey, maybe it's not a bad idea to appoint someone who was a longtime legislator to this job. They can figure out the technical parts, but we're not hiring them for their judgment. And maybe that's what we're looking for.

Well, that's the way they were doing things in the old days. And Robert Carr talks about the excitement for Moses of working in Smith's

He's in the center of power in the state, and he's seeing how real decisions are being made. He's seeing the practical considerations that go into these bills like you're talking about, into these decisions. And it's exciting for him because he knows now that none of his ideas matter if he doesn't have executive support. When he was pushing that civil service reform and the boy mayor, John Perry Mitchell, just wouldn't back it up. It died. But now he knows if he has a good idea that can get Al Smith elected,

political benefit and also will help people. Al Smith will put his support behind it. And he starts getting things done. And the things are not the things that we associate Robert Moses with yet. There's prison reform and especially juvenile detention reform. And a lot of elimination of ground level railroad track crossings, which were incredibly deadly and yet all over the place, that the trains were constantly hitting people, but it took a lot of effort to get those removed. And they eventually win that government reorganization fight that started Smith's first term. And they get

those bills and moses is doing a lot of the bill drafting here uh and there's a there's a section here that uh describes what we were talking about earlier that kind of like specialized knowledge of how bills go that i would love to read to you guys and then we can we can cut it later but you'll know that i read it to you and it'll it'll live with you forever uh until until your dying day um where it says um

Bill drafting was called by Albany insiders the black art of politics. An expert bill drafter had to know thousands of precedents so that he could call out the one, embodying it in the bill he was working on, that would make the bill legal or so that he could, by careful wording, avoid bringing the new act within the purview of an old one that might make it illegal.

He had to know a myriad ways of conferring or denying power by written words. He had to know how to lull the opposition by concealing a bill's real content. For years, everyone had known the identity of the best bill drafter in Albany, Alfred E. Smith. And Smith had never been shy about accepting that accolade. But now, when someone brought up the subject, Smith said, the best bill drafter I know is Bob Moses.

So he is he's making a name for himself as the guy who can write laws that get things done and that work the right way. And Al Smith wants to repay Moses the way that he's used to repaying people in these positions, which is with a high paying, low work job. He's like, hey, do you want to be director of the board that supervises the work projects in the state prisons? You don't have to do anything and you'll get paid money for it. And Moses says, no, I don't want that. And Al Smith keeps asking Moses, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want? What can I get you?

What can I reward you with? And Moses keeps saying nothing. And then the chapter ends with one of these lines. Robert Carroll, he writes it. This is one of these things where it's like it's a real like, oh, what moment? But only in this context says, and then one day there was something. The something was parks were 143 pages into the book. We're finally talking about parks. The thing that he does. It's amazing. We're here finally with chapter nine, a dream. We'll get to that chapter after this quick break.

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Invisible. Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash invisible. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash invisible. Rules and restrictions apply. Okay, so now we're starting with chapter nine. This is not the longest chapter in the book, but it's the longest one we've encountered so far. And it really sets up this idea that as New York was growing, there was always more land to be considered and there was open land and, you know, natural areas for people to potentially go to. But

New York is growing so fast. All that stuff is filling in and all of a sudden people are like, whoa, we need to get to some parks. We need to take care of parks here. You know what I used to see around here? Trees. I don't see them so much anymore. I'd like to see some. We got to figure out a place to have some. I mean,

I mean, it's hard to imagine it now, but New York wasn't always this, you know, densely packed with all these buildings and streets. When I lived in New York, I would walk around a lot and think about what part of what I'm standing on is natural geography, what hills and what dips are natural geography and what things were added by human beings. Because once this was all forest land, once this was all forest and marsh, and now it is entirely covered in paving, um, yeah.

And this is the period when those final bits of paving are starting to be done. That open space that the city used to have is being filled in with housing developments. And at the same time, there's all this new technology that means people finally have a little bit of leisure time. The days of working at the Fulton Fish Market seven days a week

4 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 3 a.m. on Fridays. That's starting to come to an end. People have cars for the first time. They can actually leave the city if they want to to go places. This is amazing. They need something to do with their leisure. Only problem is most of the good land right outside the city is in private hands. And the public land that you could use as recreation, it's too hard to get to. There's literally...

Very little actual road work to get there. The roads are poor. The bridges across the rivers are tiny. The only way to get west across the Hudson River is to take your car on a ferry, which has to be the least efficient way to do that other than to put, I guess, balloons under your car and float it across the river with an oar and make it its own ferry. And

To the east is Long Island. And Ravikar talks about this kind of open potential in Long Island. Long Island is this place that still has space. First, he talks about how the Ice Age created Long Island's geography. And I got to say, that's the one, maybe the two pages of this book I find my eyes really glazing over where I'm like, oh, I just can't visualize it. I can't. I love that part. And I'll tell you why. Because this is the first instance of

Robert Caro, the author using geography as a piece of a key piece of biographical texts, because in the opening, uh, uh, few like opening chapter of the first LBJ book, he, it's all about the Texas Hill country's soil composition and, uh, potential fecundity, which is the, who that, which creates, uh,

Johnson as a person. And so when I see this echo of, of, uh, of Caro's style, I, I get pretty excited even if I don't, you know, like if the details of the Ice Age forming the Long Island sound, uh, does not stick in my head. he's talking about this. I'm like,

All right, Mr. Caro, I respect so much that you put this effort in and you understood how the rock formations came across, but I'll just move on to the next place. The point is Long Island looks like it would be a great place to spend your one day off from work with your family, right? Right, but you can't. No, you can't, unfortunately, because Long Island...

Who's it taken by? There's the South Shore where you have the beaches. They're in the hands of the Baymen, these kind of fishermen who have lived in that area for generations, and they do not want outsiders there. They don't like people from New York City. Robert Caro presents them as especially careful to keep sacred the bay bottoms, the actual fishing area that they see as their birthright. He presents them as outsiders.

fairly racist and also talks about the clan's popularity there. And I sometimes wonder if Robert Caro is going really far to demonize these fishermen, but I can't tell for sure because this is a hundred years ago. I can't talk to them. They're not there anymore. That's the South shore. You've got your, for lack of a better word, you're a kind of provincials. Then up in the North shore,

Oh, it's even worse. That's where the land is locked up by the private estates of the wealthy robber barons. J.P. Morgan's family and his partners are there. We've got Standard Oil millionaires. Andrew Carnegie's partner. There's a lot of them. Robert Caro, he loves to list things. He goes through all of these rich people and what they own. He talks a lot about the size of their castles, how they would go fox hunting there. They build a private golf course that's surprisingly full of mosquitoes. They own vast amounts of land.

And then they own more land around that land that is guarded by private guards to keep regular people away from them, and they especially seem to enjoy blocking access to the beaches. And Robert Cowell points out that there's one area of Long Island where there was 48 miles of shoreline and 1,250 feet were open to the public, and the rest was all in private areas.

And the barons of the North Shore, they want to keep things this way, and they do that by essentially bankrolling the state GOP. The Republican Party, specifically the Nassau County Republican Party, is very much a machine that works at the behest of the barons to keep them in control of all this land. And Robert Carroll, he has –

This amazingly vivid section, this is one of the sections of the book that I always remember the most when I think about it. That is him describing the experience of you being a guy taking your family in your car on the weekend to drive out to Long Island to find a place to have a picnic and just how incredibly futile it is to do this. And I'd love to read some of it.

If they were heading for the North Shore on Northern Boulevard, 160 feet of smooth macadam shrank to 18 at the city line. The cars heading east had to cram into a single file. As they crept along, the paving of the boulevard deteriorated, so that each family had to watch the cars ahead jounce one after the other into gaping potholes and then wait for the jolts themselves.

more and more frequently they came to unpaved stretches in which if there had been a recent rain cars became mired bringing the endless line behind them to a halt if the earth was dry thick clouds of dust hung over the unpaved stretches turning dirty the gay dress mother had worn for the excursion

As the families drove, they could see on either side of them, through gates set in stone walls or through the openings in wooden fences, the beautiful meadows they had come for, stretching endlessly and emptily to the cool trees beyond. But the meadows and trees were not for them. The gates would be locked, and men carrying shotguns and holding fierce dogs on straining leashes would point eastward, telling the families there were parks open to them farther along.

There was no shade on Northern Boulevard, and the children became cranky early. The more persistent who determined to head east until they discovered some place to swim or picnic found the road becoming worse and worse. They would see Long Island villagers sitting on the fences and laughing at the families who, because of engine overheating or in a desperate try at a piece of grass, pulled off the road.

The line of cars was so solid, the radiator of one almost touching the tailgate of the one before it, that once out of the line, it was hard for a car to get back in. And it was fun, the villagers said, to watch them try. Just like all the elements of a really terrible outing with your family are there so vividly to me, where it's like, it was supposed to be nice. It's not working out. It's hot. It's gross. And the locals are laughing at you, and you're trapped there. You're stuck.

And I think we're all fathers, right? We've all been in situations where we want to do something nice with our families and nothing is working out right. And I feel like Robert Caro does such a good job, to me at least, of taking this big issue of public space and how it's allocated and what's public space and what's private space and making it really relatable in that experience of –

"Look, we just wanna go somewhere outside the city today, and instead we're gonna end up spending the entire day in the car, and then we have to go back, and it's terrible." The point is that people need parks. Long Island's the best place for them, but building a park there means you have to get the state legislature involved.

They're in the control of the barons. The land is too valuable for the government to buy. It's too valuable for them to condemn it. They can't afford it. And if you did build parks, even if you did, how would anybody get out there? The roads are so bad. And so the reformers who talk about parks, they have to settle for kind of like little city playgrounds. There's nobody who's going to be able to cut this Gordian Park not. Except there is one man. One man. Who would that man be? His name is Robert Moses. And in 1922...

So it's 1922, Robert Moses and his wife, Mary, they're renting a bungalow in Babylon, Long Island. And this is one of the few times you actually see Robert Moses on a train. Yes. Yes. He has to take the Long Island Railroad from Manhattan to Long Island, the same railroad he will years later help to push into deterioration and almost to disintegration with his road building. And as he's taking this long train ride, he's looking out the window to the

What he can see north of the railroad and he realizes he's passing all this untouched land. There's housing in towns, but in between it, there's ponds and woods and streams. There's just land that is just sitting there. Nobody's doing anything with it. How'd this land get there?

Well, this is what's the most amazing thing. He does some research and he goes to the Babylon Town Hall and he's told that this property was bought by the city of Brooklyn when it was its own independent city in 1874. And it was the emergency backup water reservoir in case the city needed extra water. And so he goes to the Department of Water and he asks the clerk, have they ever used it? And he says no. And it's just sitting there. It's undeveloped. And

Moses can't help but think to himself, I've got to look at it. I've got to see how much of this there is. And he decides just hike through Long Island just on his own. He's just tromping through the woods. And it turns out every time he thinks he's figured out how much land there is, there's more. It's so much more extensive than he thought it was. It's so much more beautiful than he thought it was. There's so much of it. Yeah. There's 3,500 unused acres that are just sitting there. And it's within 30 miles of Manhattan. And he really starts to...

create this vision of parks and sports facilities. And it's all right there. And he gets a motorboat, like a little motorboat, and he begins to explore the shoreline. And these are the most vehicles that Robert Moses will use in the entire. But this he is piloting this motorboat. He's never going to drive a car, but he's still he can apparently drive a boat, which is which I don't know why he didn't transfer those skills to cars, but he stuck with boats.

He just can't help exploring and he gets almost obsessed with it. He's spending all of his time just pioneering through Long Island, this land that nobody has bothered to look at in such a long time. And because of the sort of, I don't know, hydrology and geology, there's actually more beach and more land than even the mapmakers had when they last surveyed it than he thought. And he gets obsessed with this little area, this area called Jones Beach.

It's this huge untouched stretch of shoreline. And he says to himself, this would be the greatest bathing beach in the world. This could be, but it's totally unused. It's totally untouched. There's only two problems. One, how do I turn this stretch of beach into the greatest bathing beach in the world? And two,

Even if I do that, how do I get people there? Because the reason this land is so untouched is partly because the city owns it and no one knew that, but also probably because there's no roads out there. He had to take the train to get where he was going, and you can't just turn a train and drive to a new area. You need roads to get there. And so now as he is tromping through Long Island, he is drawing on pads, drawing on maps these –

parkway lines, lines for imaginary parkways that he is envisioning the same way that Robert Caro told us in the previous episode that he was still doing years later. He just could not stop drawing lines on maps that represented roads. This is where he starts to do that really for the first time, and he's spending so much of his time doing it. It really makes you wonder...

Like, how does he have time to do his job and to be in Albany? He's a very busy man. And yet he somehow has time to just wanderlust through Long Island, drawing imaginary parkways. This guy, he's just really good at using his time. He seems to be. And other people don't seem to be demanding too much of his time. It seems like.

Hey, boss, can I just go walk around Long Island for a couple days? You got it. You're the best-built drafter in Albany. I don't need you for anything else. And there were a few state parks at the time. Robert Carroll goes into this that in the early 1920s, there were a few small state parks in the hands of local associations because the state basically didn't want to handle the responsibility. So they would say like, great, this land, you can take care of it. You want to be the caretakers, this local historical association or whatever, go for it. And Moses says –

This is a dissipation of power. Instead of one major parks organization that has political muscle behind it, you have these competing little tiny private organizations that the legislature doesn't want to give money to because they can't really control it.

And through the New York State Association, Moses issues a report that sums up all this called A State Park Plan for New York. A beautiful name for a beautiful report. Just really gets the blood pumping. A State Park Plan. I want to bring in Jamel here for a second. And a lot of like... I'll allow it. Our political history is about our relationship with land. And...

There was a sort of national parks movement associated with Teddy Roosevelt before this. And then there's also like the use of common land. And that was sort of like disrupted by barbed wire in the West. Where are we in our thinking of public land at this point in time in our political history?

We're at an interesting point. I mean, one of the things that is structuring how Americans are thinking about public land is just that the frontier, as they understood it, does not exist anymore, right? There's no west for the young man to go to. Everything's been settled. And there were also sort of in this age of industrial capitalism. And so all around the country, and especially in places that were populated, you're seeing the –

the march of industry, the use of natural resources, and the growth of the country's productive capacities. And for many Americans in the political elite, this is all well and good, right? This is the way things ought to be. But there is this anxiety about what's being lost. One interesting social...

wrinkle here is that the early 20th century, there are these recurring panics in the United States over whether young men are manly enough. And like, this is one of them is happening. Sort of like, oh, okay, are America's young men, are they being feminized? Are they spending enough time outside? Are they engaged in manly pursuits? Or are they reading books and being inside and all these sorts of things? This feels like a direct attack on me. But I understand. Yeah. Yeah.

All of this really does come together in all this is not I want to say come together, but it's part of this push for public parks and national parks and places where we can preserve the land, both because we want to we want to have a sense of what America was like in the mythic past. So we want to preserve what our forefathers saw.

But then also, we want to make sure that the young men of the country can be exposed to the outdoors, can be exposed to physical activity. The Boy Scouts are founded during this time. We want to make sure that the young men of the country are engaged in the pursuits that will keep them manly.

And not unduly feminine. This is the time when more and more men are growing up never having had the experience of cutting down a tree or something like that. And it's time to get them back into knowing what that's like and what it's like to, I don't know, sleep outside. Things that people spent thousands of years trying to get away from. It's time to get back to those things.

Or just like more Americans are living in cities, right? Living in cities, living in urban environments, like the percentage of Americans who are engaged in agricultural work is at a low point at this time. And so there's all this sort of anxiety about what's going to happen to American manliness and masculinity if there's no frontier for kids, for young men to go to to sort of make their way. Everyone's living in the city.

that kind of thing. Getting soft. Yeah. And there's a bit of an evolution here of like open land in the beginning is sort of like part of a commons that's

Dolled out, you know, not exactly fairly, but it's part of a commons for exploitation because there's always more land. You can exploit it and use it to whatever sort of industry you're trying to do. And then there's this moment of like, oh, my God, we need to conserve some of this to keep it as natural as possible because that's important to our character, too. And a little bit of Moses's evolution here is he's not trying to preserve the marshlands of Egypt.

of Long Island so that there's a nice natural place for us to go. He's going to, he's a new kind of developer. He's a developer of recreation and attractions. And so when he means park, he doesn't mean this nice natural area. He means a thing of, of really great design and utility for, for the purpose of recreation. And yes, and very specifically, you know, he means baseball diamonds. He means band shells. It's kind of halfway between being a, a soft, uh,

city lad and being like a rough and tumble country boy is that you get to go out on the weekends and play baseball or football or something in a park space during that time. And this is a big new idea for the reform element at the time in the

state is this idea of land not for conservation but for recreation that these are parks that are going to have roads and facilities like you're saying they're going to be designed things and he asks for a bond issue of 15 million dollars to fund state parks and parkways overseen by a proposed new state council of parks

And first he's got to win over Al Smith, this idea. Al Smith, he doesn't really care that much about athletic recreation. He is not a guy who is, he's not a big sports buff. And he thinks the plan is too expensive, but he's,

Robert Moses knows, and this is something that will come up throughout the book too, that other people are attracted to this as well, but that Al Smith particularly is attracted to big visual ideas. Show him a thing. Show him a made-built thing, and that will impress him, and it's something that he can point to for the voters and say, look at this thing I've got made. Look at the thing that we produced. If you elect me again…

I will make more of those things that you can really improve people's lives in a visual way by building stuff. It's just very straightforward. There's an acronym that I've been trying to get off the ground in my private life, but I can't really for politics where my, uh, my motto, I want it to be noticeably improve people's lives, which is nipple. And it's the people I've tested it on mainly my wife and my mom think I need a new acronym. It's not, they don't love it. They don't love the nipple acronym, but, but that's essentially what, what they're getting at here is noticeably improving people's lives with big visual things.

And Moses wears Al Smith down, and Al Smith goes, okay, but according to the law, I can only request one bond issue a year. I already requested one, and I'm not quite sure how the public is going to go with this because the price tag is so big.

So I'm going to make a public statement saying that next year, I want us to issue these bonds, and we'll see how it goes over. And he makes a statement saying next year we should have this $15 million bond issued at Bill Parks. And the immediate public response is enormous. People – almost nearly unanimous. People love it. Everyone approves of building parks today.

there's no one who sees a downside to it. Parks are the best. Everybody loves them. Robert Caro, he goes back to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to the park where Mark Antony is like, not only was Julius Caesar going to do these great things for you when he died, he left you all of his estates as parks. And that's what makes the Romans go nuts. Now they miss Julius Caesar. People love parks. You just can't get over how much people love parks. They love the idea of it. And Al Smith, he knows good politics when he sees it. He knows that if

even if they're expensive, if parks are something people loves, then that's the thing that will get votes. And...

Robert Caro goes into this description here of Moses' kind of comprehensive vision of Long Island in total as this working unit, this enormous development, and compares it to Walt Whitman's poetic vision of the area. He says basically Walt Whitman is the only other person he can think of who has that kind of grand and universal vision for this region. And Moses is not done. He's still roaming Long Island. He's still finding unused land. He goes to Fire Island, and he's confused that –

the beach looks so much bigger than his map shows. And he remembers back to earlier when he was told that the ocean is always depositing new sand. It's been so many years since anyone mapped this area that there is 600 new acres of beach that nobody knew about that is right here, that it's ready to use. And he's like drunk on the idea of land. He's just drunk on space and the ability to make these parks and on his own dreams. And

Moses says there's even more. We should do an even bigger system, more parks, bigger parks, a bigger parkway system. And Al Smith proposes making him the president of the Long Island State Park Commission. And Moses, unsurprisingly, accepts the job because if he didn't, that's the end of the book. There's no book left. If he doesn't take the job, we don't have a book. There's no book. There's nothing there. But luckily, there is a whole lot of book there left. And we're going to start with the next bit, chapter 10 after this.

But that is not all.

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article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model they have some really delightful prices too everyone who's listened to the show for years knows how in the bag i am for article furniture i love it i have a ton of it in my home but our sound engineer martin gonzalez just redid his whole living room with article he sent me a picture and it was almost comical how much article furniture he stuffed into his brooklyn apartment so i'm gonna let him tell you what he thinks

I'm sitting here enjoying my brand new article living room set. I replaced my junky free and Craigslisted furniture with a very nice set from the Senni collection. I got a sofa, love seat, and chair all in matching volcanic gray. I'm sitting here enjoying my brand new article living room set.

were delivered right to my door. All I did was pop open the boxes and screw some legs on. I am so much more excited to have people over now that I'm not embarrassed of my furniture. I did, in fact, use this offer code that Rowan is about to tell you.

Okay, we're back, starting with Chapter 10, the best bill drafter in Albany, which is...

A short chapter, a very fun chapter. I love this chapter. It's a very important chapter. The title makes it sound like the worst of the tall tales and legends of upstate New York's Adirondacks Mountains. It's like there's Paul Bunyan, there's the best field drafter in Albany. Gather around, children.

No one could draft bills better or faster than this man. Did he cut down trees or anything? No, he just was drafting bills all the time. Yeah, but he did it really well. And this is where really like his brains, his sort of, I don't know, deviousness and everything is coming together to give him the power that he needs to do what the rest of the book.

Yes, he is writing the law that creates the State Council of Parks, knowing that he will be in charge of the State Council of Parks. He's going to have that position. And so his job here is to write a law – not his job. It's his mission. No one said to him, write the law so you can be an independent power broker. But his personal mission is to do just that. And so, for instance, he says, well, we've organized the government. This state council has to be under the head of one of the preexisting departments.

I'll put it in the conservation department, and I'll say that the conservation commissioner submits my budget to the legislature. But a little bit farther down, I'm going to write a law that says I prepare that budget, and the conservation commissioner doesn't have anything to say about it. He just delivers it. And obviously, this is part of the executive branch. I have to be responsible to the governor, but I'm going to make it so that my term is six years long, which is longer than the governor's term. So when there's a new governor –

I get to stick around. I don't have to leave. And he's just putting in all these ways like that to give himself his own power and cement himself as an independent part of the government that other people don't have control of and cannot remove very easily. Yeah. Like he's creating his own deep state, like the deep state of parks. Yeah, the deep park. Yeah. And he is...

He's doing all the things that like – I feel like we're warned about about sneaky politicians. There's one more that I want to mention that is – because it feels so bonkers, and then I want to talk to you, Jamel, about the stereotypes around this kind of thing. But he writes the bill using the word appropriation and appropriation.

The legislators would have taken that to mean allocation of funds. That's the only way they use appropriation. You appropriate money for a thing. But then in the bill, it says that the term is used, quote, in the manner provided by Section 59 of the conservation law. And just like you were saying, Jamel, that law is one that was passed in 1884. So that's 40 years earlier. And in that law, it provides for appropriation of land.

… by a state official, by walking onto private land and saying, I am now taking this land from you, and if you want compensation, come back to us later. And it's a method that hasn't been used in 30 years at that point. There was questionable constitutionality, but it's still on the books. It was never appealed. So it's still a law. Moses knows that law. Most of the legislators don't. And there's just clause after clause in this bill that gives – this prior council –

So much power, power to control roads, power to control – to have their own police force, power to basically write their own bylaws in parks. And he writes a thing in it saying that the commission shall have power to improve, maintain, and use lands of the municipalities adjoining the parks and parkways of the commission with the consent of the local authorities having jurisdiction thereof. And since this is in Long Island, the legislators all say …

Oh, yeah. Well, that means the local Long Island governments because they don't know a lot of this land is owned by New York City. So he doesn't have to get the consent of the local Long Island governments. He just asked the city and the city is like parkland for our residents. Go for it. I don't care what happens to Nassau County. Like just build build the roads. And so he's he's managed to kind of hide all these things in there. And the question I want to ask you was, I feel like it's it's been a stereotype in American politics for 200 years that politicians are kind of like.

slimy folks hiding things in bills to do favors for people or to get things for themselves. And it feels like Robert Moses is really doing that here in order to make this parks committee as powerful as possible or parks council. I keep using council commissioning committee interchangeably when I know they're not, they mean different things that I don't know the definitions of. I apologize to council members, committee members and commission members who are listening to this. We're very frustrated by it. But how often do you know of this kind of thing really happening where someone is really hiding something,

things in bills, knowing that by the time anyone finds out, it's going to be too late. Is that a really a thing that happens or is this out of the ordinary? Yeah, this is unusual only because it's such a singular person doing it. This is a kind of unusual case of a singular guy being like, I know I'm going to be in this position and I want to make sure that I can accrue as much authority to myself as possible in a way that no one's really going to notice. And that's, I don't, I can't think of it happening.

All that often, because usually a bureaucrat like that isn't in a position to write laws, right? Like usually a bureaucrat like that is in the executive branch and they may have influence on writing laws, but they may not be able to directly write the law themselves. That's like...

That's what we call a separations of power problem. You don't necessarily want the person charged with executing a law to be the one writing the law. More common is...

executives, whether they're at the state level or the federal level, creatively reading existing laws for the sake of doing things they want to do. Maybe the great example with the presidency is the Emancipation Proclamation, with the Lincoln essentially saying, this category of person, these are contraband,

And the law gives me the legal authority to seize enemy contraband. And so I'm saying that all states in rebellion, because the Lincoln administration does not recognize the Confederacy as a thing, legally, according to the White House, the Confederacy does not exist. These are just states in rebellion.

I can confiscate contraband in the states of rebellion under the existing legal authority I have. That's all just a creative reading of like existing law, right? Like, I mean, that's way more common than someone writing the law itself to give them basically a bunch of secret power that no one anticipated. Okay. Well, I'm, I feel good knowing that this is out of the ordinary. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a little less common. In part because lawmakers are very jealous of their power to write laws. They don't want other people to do it.

So it's very clever and sneaky of Robert Moses to have put himself in a position to be the guy to write the laws. There's some of that kind of – I guess setting himself up for those interpretations also where he talks – in one section, it talks about the bill giving the commission power over parks. And in another section, it defines parks as including parkways, boulevards, docks, piers, bridges, entrances to parks. And it says –

The state law on highways says counties can veto highways and their borders, but that law doesn't mention parkways. So he specifically makes sure that they are labeled as parkways, and that's one of those readings where I'm like –

Okay. I mean, it's roads, right? The idea that a highway and a parkway are such totally different animals that the counties can veto one and not the other seems like an interpretation. Yeah. I mean, that kind of politics and bureaucratic maneuvering rewards people who are really into being the biggest pedants you can imagine. Yeah.

And we're finally answering this question that, you know, Robert Caro started in the very beginning, you know, like when we talked to him and he's like a reporter at Newsday and he's like, he's, you know, he hears Robert Moses being mentioned in something and then he looks up his title and it's like New York City Parks Commissioner. Why is he building roads and, you know, you know, like housing developments in all these places if he's the parks commissioner? And it's like, this is it. Like he answered the question. This is how, because he's managed to call everything a park, a

A road is a park. Just look at subsection C of clause nine. You'll see that park commissioner is defined as a God emperor of New York. Yeah, it's kind of it. Yeah. Clearly this isn't a park, Mr. Moses. If you, if you look at the section after you can see parks can be defined as the internal organs of people I don't like. And so that's why I've been removing the kidneys of people who get in my way. Oh, it's legal. It's all there in black and white. You know, I guess we should have read the law. Uh, but,

Luckily for Moses, nobody reads the law. Nobody reads it before it's introduced to the legislature. The people who run the small parks in the state, Moses is like, hey, this is just going to be like a coordinating agency. You guys are still going to control your own little parks. So will you support me in this? And they go, certainly. And that's a lie. It's just an outright lie. And Moses hand-selects to introduce the law.

A state assembly member representing the North Shore, a guy named F. Truby Davison, which Truby is an amazing middle name for the guy who is kind of the political novice who represents rich people. He is a wealthy 22-year-old. He is so impressed to be in a room with Al Smith. He doesn't really know what he's doing. He doesn't read or study the bill. On April 10th, 1924, he introduces it. It passes by unanimous vote with no debate.

And then Robert Carroll depicts Moses as being so impatient for Al Smith to sign this bill, probably because he's worried someone's going to read it before Al Smith gets around to signing it into law. And finally, eight days later, Smith signs the bill. He immediately appoints Moses president of the Long Island State Park Commission, which makes him a part of the State Council of Parks. The State Council of Parks elects him its chairman. And as Carroll ends this chapter, end this part, part three, he says, at the age of 35, Robert Moses had power and no sooner did he have it

Then he showed how he was going to use it. Oh, that's where we leave off. He's got the power finally. Finally, he's brokering power. It's so good. So much of this book feels at times like a like each chapter is the end of an episode. And I'm like, all right, well, how are they going to get me excited for the next episode? And then they do it. And I'm like, wait, how's he going to use that power? I know. I just I just watched the movie Executive Decision. And there's a scene where a character says,

the president's going to have to make an executive decision. This is what this feels like.

Probably the only time that a Steven Seagal movie, or I guess really a Kurt Russell movie, right, has been compared to The Power Broker, but still. It reminds me of the end of that last section where we said, what about parks? It kind of reminds me of like every dumbass Easter egg in the Star Wars prequels, you know, where they're like trying to give some little backstory here. And you're like, oh, I know what that means. I know. Oh, that's where Han Solo got his jacket. I was wondering that. Yeah.

But yeah, there's a – Robert Caro has done such a good job of setting up this guy is going to take parks and he's going to use them to reshape the city. And so as we see him getting closer and closer, it's – even though I know where it's going, I know that it's going to a place that is going to be very bad for certain people, for thousands of people as they are forcibly removed from their homes in his later projects. I'm still like –

There's the excitement of seeing it come to fruition and the fact that when we started this episode, he was 30 years old, and he seemed like a has-been, and now he is 35 years old, and he is approaching the apex of this power that he's going to wield for the next –

40 years as one of the most important people in the in the northeastern United States. It's very exciting. It's a yeah, it's a real Star Wars prequel thing where it's like Anakin, he's he's becoming more and more like Darth Vader. I'll say it's always striking to me just to see how young people are, right? Like 35 years old and sort of. Yeah, it makes me very mad. Yeah. About the wield a tremendous amount of.

And that to me is always quite striking. Yeah. It's also what's striking about this moment is there's only one person in the world who knows how powerful he is at this moment. And that's Robert Moses. He's the only one who knows how powerful he has made himself. And that is just a great moment of just, I don't know, like...

I don't know, like the end of Clockwork Orange or something, you know, like where you look in his eye and you see, you know, like he knows what's going on, you know, like, you know, it's just really an intense moment. And I love it. I love the trauma of it. Yeah. That sets us up for part four, the use of power, which we will not get into in this episode, but, uh,

It's going to be very exciting. This is it. Look, Moses versus the North Shore Barons. Moses is going to start getting corrupt. He's going to make his dream a reality. He briefly gets involved with boxing in a way that is not totally straightforward. You know, it's only it's very brief. He's got power. He wants to build things. And to do that, he's going to have to start breaking things like rules because he is the power broker rule breaker. Yeah.

There's only so, I mean, there's only so exciting. I can make the, make it, make it a certain point. Well, that's, that is on the next time. So Jamel, thank you so much for joining us. And, and like, I hope that we've spoiled enough of this to convince you to pick up the rest of the power broker and, or at least follow along with us listening. If, if nothing else, if there's an audio book of this, I think I might pick up the power broker to listen to at least because I am, I am genuinely fascinated by kind of bureaucratic maneuvering and like legislative maneuvering. It's, it's,

fascinating to me. Oh, you will, you will get your fill. Yeah. You will love it. Yeah. It's 66 hours. The audio book is actually very good. And the, um, Robert Sundin is the, is the narrator. He has extremely good diction. So you can speed that sucker up. Yeah.

So you can get through it. I tend to go back and forth. When I redid it, I went back and forth and read some parts and then took the dog on a walk and listened to some. And it's a good way to get your power broker in for sure. I should do that because I have to admit, I have my two copies of the book, my signed copy that I will not let my children touch, and then my working copy that I write notes in. And I will frequently find myself reviewing it by...

reading it in bed before I go to bed. And it's such a big book that it like hurts my tummy when it's resting on it. Like it's not really comfortable to rest on my stomach. So the audio book might be the way to go for me. And notoriously, there is no e-book version of this, which a lot of people on our Discord have complained about. And they're like, do you think maybe the presence of this book club will make them put out an e-book version? And in a way, like perversely, I actually...

I never want to see a Eberk version of it. I really want it to be this big tome that you have to carry. You know, what I love most about it is when I was carrying around reading it the second time, I would rest it on the passenger seat of my car. And it weighs enough that the car thinks I need to buckle the seatbelt of the passenger seat. Yeah.

because it just sets off the alarms. And so it's a human sized book. It's a person sized book. And I love that about it. Jamel, where can people find you? Like, listen to your podcast, all that sort of stuff. Let's do that.

You can find me usually twice a week at the New York Times. I have my weekly column that runs on Tuesdays and Fridays most of the time. We also have a new blog at New York Times for opinion, and so sometimes I post on that. And that's like my job. That's like my main job. And so...

I mean, honestly, a lot of people don't necessarily understand. I mean, they think that, oh, you write for the New York Times sometimes and then you do other stuff. Like, no, my full-time job is writing that column. That's how I can afford to go to the dentist. I have this podcast, Unclear and Present Danger, with my friend John Gans, who is also a writer. And we watch the political and military thrillers of the post-Cold War period of the 90s. Otherwise, you can just find me around the internet. I don't know. I'm on TikTok.

Um, I've been on Elliot's other podcast, the flop house. That's right. Jamel is, uh, the flop house is politics and hedgehogs correspondent. He was on our episode for Sonic, the hedgehog and our episode for Andy, the talking hedgehog. So we're looking forward to having you back for Sonic, the hedgehog too, I guess. I just wish you had a larger purview, but yeah, that's the only other hedgehog movie. Uh, I'm sure there'll be others. Uh, hedgehogs, I guess are popular. I don't know. Um,

So that's where you can find me. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about this, this TikTok outlet that you have, because I don't use TikTok very much, but I mostly just see you on it and it, and it's great. And it's sort of an interesting and maybe not intuitive place for, you know, good political discourse, but you, you bring it there. You know, how did you stumble upon it? How do you use it? Like, how's that working?

So I've been in journalism for about 13 years now. And the entire time, my thinking has always been whenever there are new social platforms, it's worth trying to get familiar with them just because I don't know what, who knows what's going to happen. It's nice to be able to translate what I do to maybe a different kind of medium. What I think I do is think about contemporary American politics with an eye towards like broader American history.

Yeah. Very often I'm like, I'm not, you know, you can believe or think what you want, but it's like worthwhile to know the specifics and the actual mechanisms at work here. Some of this is like pushing against, you know, things I like to call folk civics, like ideas about the way government works that have no real relationship to reality, but are like a good story that we've told ourselves are true.

Some of this just relates to sort of straightforward American history. There is a period where I was like constantly doing videos about why like Abraham Lincoln really did a post slave. Like really trying to impress people like, no, this is really, this is like actually very significant thing that is true. So why do you think?

we have to reset a narrative about Abraham Lincoln. Like, I have this hypothesis, and I think narrative journalism plays a role in this, that it is our tendency as humans to

to revise narrative sort of like in surprising ways, especially. And so you grow up, you know, and you think, well, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. There's no argument there. And then there's like this impulse to forward the story in some way that complicates it and makes it different and develops it and maybe eventually even makes it counterintuitive. And then we have to reconnect to the original story again.

What is that impulse? I'm so curious about it. No, I think your initial explanation actually is a lot of it. Just sort of, we get these stories and these ideas and these often this, and then we learn more and it challenges and shatters our previous conceptions. And so we think that we, I think, make the totally reasonable and rational decision

um, supposition that for anything, it even seems like a little good in the past, in the past, especially there must be some complicating factor to show that either it's actually bad, or even if the result is good, the intention was bad. And, um,

With Lincoln in particular, I mean, Lincoln's sort of a perfect subject for this precisely because he's sort of like the great secular American saint, right? Like he's like the, you know, he's the guy for whom, you know, he's unimpeachable. And then people learn, right? They learn that

you know, through much of his career, he supported colonization of blacks. They read the letter he wrote the horse really. And which says, you know, if I could save the union without freeing a single slave, I would. And it all builds up as like a circumstantial picture for like, oh, well, this guy was totally insincere and he was a politician and blah, blah, blah. And the hard thing is actually kind of the thing that's actually kind of hard to communicate is that like,

At the same time, all of those things are not, are totally true. But then you read more about the guy's life and the politics and it becomes also, it's also very clear that this is a guy who has a deep-seated opposition to slavery and is negotiating that through the world of like,

for him, contemporary American politics. How do I act as a guy who's against slavery in a political context where most people don't really actually care that much? And people who care a lot are some of my putative political allies. That's a more interesting story. And it's less clear cut. I think...

I think people want the story to be neater than it is, but like, it's not right. I was talking about this on Tik TOK actually with regards to the LBJ LBJ, probably a racist. Like it's not really that, you know, like it's not really that hard to, you know, yeah, no, I think straightforward. It wouldn't be surprising. Right. Yeah. LBJ also a sincere believer in civil rights. Yeah. And the two things are both true. And yeah,

There's a tendency, I think, in American culture to want everyone to be one thing or the other. And we have a very hard time with dealing with sort of like contradiction and dealing with sort of like oftentimes major political figures that

Being both at the same time. Like I, I feel like my, my thing on Tik TOK is sort of like emphasizing this again and again, and like emphasizing why this is important to take seriously and what the lessons of this might be. Yeah. I mean, certainly the story of Robert Moses, as Robert Caro tells it in the power broker is a story full of nuance and, you know, some noble motivations and some terrible motivations and some, and, and, you know, he's a complex figure. And when you get to like the Lyndon Johnson books, um,

Whoa, Nellie. I mean, it is a real mess of nuance to tell you the truth. It's kind of crazy. The whole message of the Lyndon Johnson books seems to be

a bad person can do a good thing sometimes. And asking the question, is it worth all the bad things that it took to get that good thing eventually? That's right. And with Power Broker, it's almost the opposite where it's like, hmm, this guy could do bad things too, but he might do some good things along the way. Or a good thing could turn out to be a bad thing. A bad thing maybe could turn out to be a good thing. We can never know anything. That's why I always turn to the Power Broker for all my answers. Yeah.

And also the power broker in and of itself is this gigantic tome of revisionist history. Like people had a very different concept of Robert Moses before this book started. Yes. And then after this book came out, really everything changed. That's exactly right. That literally before this book came out, unless you had done this

the specific research into the life of Robert Moses or you had been affected personally by Robert Moses where you thought of him just as he's that good guy who built the parks. He seems great. He didn't even want money. He's amazing. And Robert Carroll's book

change that story completely to the point that we are now currently in this wave of revisionist revisionism, this post-power broker world where you have books coming out saying, well, actually, Robert Moses was the only guy who could get things done, and you need a giant city planner who will push people around like – not even chess pieces, like tiny ants or something like that. And

There's just no end to that cycle. I'm looking forward to when I'm an old man and Power Broker 2 comes out and it is the revisionist take on that revisionist take. I guess that's just – one of the wonderful things about human nature is that

You always want to prove your previous generation wrong. And the next generation always wants to prove you wrong. And maybe history moves a little bit forward at the same time through that process. You know, over the years, like certain other, you know, reassessments and some criticisms of the book have sort of bubbled up to the surface. And we're going to actually talk about some of those, I think, over the course of the year as we go through the parts of the book. But I have to say that most of them are not as compelling to me.

As the book, The Power Broker. It's difficult. It's such an amazingly written book. Robert Carroll put so much work into it. He has documents to back up everything he's saying. That's right. It's a real, if you come at the king, you best not miss type scenario where it seems like anything you can come up with. He's like, well, when I talked to the guy who did that, this is what he told me. Or when I looked at the document no one else has ever seen, but I'll show it to you now. This is what it said. So-

To undermine the power broker would take – in a truly effective way would take such an enormous outlay of energy and time and patience, the kind of thing really only Robert Caro has in him. That's right. That's like you need a Robert Caro to take on Robert Caro. It's like the old story where Sherlock Holmes creates Moriarty because he needs an opponent worthy of his skills. Robert Caro would have to put on a mask or something and become Dark Caro and go after his own work so that he could stop himself.

I wish that I had any other cultural frame of reference besides superheroes. I feel like I brought them up so many times in this episode. Well, we can figure out some way to incorporate superheroes. And the next part of the book is part four, the rise to power. This chapter is 11 through 15. So get out your books, turn on your audible or whatever, however you consume your power broker. Get on that and we'll talk about that next month.

If you're yearning for even more Power Broker discussion, we have a whole Discord server with like 1,400 people have already joined the Discord server. We'll have a link to the website and we'll also have a link inside the show notes. There's been really a ton of fun discussion going on. We'll also have a post on the 99% Invisible subreddit so you can talk about the Power Broker there to your heart's content.

If you enjoyed this episode and you thought, I wish I could hear Elliot talk more, but this time I want him to talk about stupid things, then why not check out my other podcast, The Flophouse. It's America's original bad movie podcast, probably. My co-hosts, Dan McCoy and Stuart Wellington, have been doing it with me for a long time now. Also, I have a couple other things starting in April. You can pick up

a comic series called Hercules from Dynamite Comics. It's based on the Disney film of the same name. It's also completely unrelated to The Power Broker. But luckily, I have two books I'm working on now that should hopefully be out not too long after this show finishes. One is a book about joke writing from the University of Chicago Press. It's called Joke Farming. And the other is a children's picture book from Hottie.

Harper kids called Sadie mouse wrecks the house. Those books are still being made, but I guess write yourself an email, set it to arrive in your inbox a year from now, reminding you to buy those two books. I'd really appreciate it. They are not related to the power broker. I apologize. It was perfectly fine.

The 99% of Us will Breakdown of the Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angel. It's edited by Committee. Music by Swan Real and mixed by Dara Hirsch. 99PI's executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohl says the digital director of the rest of the team includes Sarah Baik, Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney, Martin Gonzalez,

Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashma Dawn, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence. The art for the Power Broker series was created by Aaron Nestor. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

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