The Power Broker #03: David Sims
02:07:00 Share

When was the last time I took a road trip? How many national parks could I hit in two weeks? What about hotels? Wait!

How much am I spending on travel?

Robert Half Research indicates 9 out of 10 hiring managers are having difficulty hiring. If you have open roles, chances are you're feeling this too. That's why you need Robert Half. Their specialized recruiting professionals engage their skills with their award-winning AI to connect businesses of all sizes with highly skilled talent in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, they know talent. Visit roberthalf.com today.

This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Elliot Kalin. Today, we'll be going through chapters 11 through 15. That's the first section of part four, The Use of Power. With us for this episode is David Sims, the movie critic for The Atlantic and also co-host of Blank Check with Griffin and David. Hey, David. Hello. Thank you for having me. Well, I'm so excited that you're here. It's so funny because...

I was like thinking about this show, like in the middle of night, I wake up, it's like three o'clock in the morning. And I was like, I bet David Sims has read The Power Broker. And I wrote you and like you wrote me about 20 minutes later because you're like an East Coast time. And you said, I love this book.

I have to assume that David Sims had woken up at the exact same moment knowing you were about to ask him about the power broker. Yeah. Is that right, David? That's of course, I, I have a power broker, a spidey sense, I guess we can all, we can all find each other on the astral plane. Um,

I was trying to remember if we had ever discussed it. No, Roman, but I guess we hadn't. You just sort of figured my sort of Venn diagram of interests would overlap. You often talk about on your show about movies, you reference reading very long books and being kind of a fan of the very long book, I think.

um and and i don't know i just had this i just had this feeling and i just wonder how do you feel about being someone who uh somebody thinks about in the middle of night and wonders if you've read the power broker is that is identifying character i feel i feel great i do think that i mean uh in my sort of public persona especially on my podcast i do talk about my love of like

you know, city subways and urbanism and, you know, things like, so maybe that's, that's true. But I have, I have a longer history with it. I mean, so, well, I don't know. Do you want my life story here? It's not going to be that long, but so I'm the child of two New York city journalists, reporters. Well, one reporter, one more of an editor, but still. So I grew up with like, you know, New York city,

journalism and history sort of steeped in that a little bit uh and then when i moved to new york uh from college in 2008 the first job i got was at a newspaper called the chief i have no idea if either of you would know the chief anyone nope anyone uh not at all it's a it's a venerable weekly newspaper uh print obviously paper in new york that's existed since the 1890s that is like

focused on like municipal news, like civil service, unions, news for city workers, right? Yeah. And it's this kind of, I mean, God love it, this, you know, creaky old buttress, you know, in the sort of New York City media world. Back in the day when city reporting was robust, you know, you worked at the chief and then you would sort of jump up to a job at the post or the news or whatever, you know, you would, it was sort of part of the latter. Yeah.

Uh, so I worked at the chief, I covered teachers and white collar workers and DC 37, a lot of unions and all that. And I covered the city budget. And, uh, so within weeks of the job, I had to call Robert Caro on the phone. Um, because my boss, Richie Steyer, who's this venerable municipal kind of expert genius. Um, you know, I'm writing some story about the parks department.

And Richie is just like, hey, call Robert Caro. This is his phone number for background on, you know,

Henry Stern on whatever, on some piece of history. And so I have Robert Caro on the phone and he immediately is basically like, well, if you could turn to this page in the power broker. And I was like, oh, I don't have that in front of me. And it got couriered to the office within a day. He should have hung up on you immediately at that point. It was like, and I was still this baby. I think I sort of knew who he was and I knew about the book and

But I was still like a wet-eared nobody, 22-year-old trying to figure out how collective bargaining in the city worked and things like that. And so I quickly sort of realized like, okay, well, a great way for me to steep myself in the kind of thing I have to worry about on this job, which is like how...

this levers of government work and, you know, how, you know, what goes on in these sort of agencies is to read the power broker. So I read it

I read it in my early 20s as this kind of Bible of New York history, which is what it is, among other things. And then later, during COVID, I finally read all of the Lyndon Johnson books. So I'm a Robert Caro nerd, I would say, at this point. I've been very, very...

Just adoringly listening to the stuff you guys have put out so far. Oh, thank you so much. I mean, the book really is profound in this way. Like if you want to understand this, and in fact, this is the part of like Elliot's origin story of this is like, is there somebody handing it to you and just like saying, he's like, if you want to understand anything about the city, like this is the book. This is the way to do it.

Yeah, this is the book, and it's the – when I was walking around New York, I was handed two books, The Power Broker and Dianetics, and I chose one, and I never looked back. Still haven't read the other one.

I think I made the right choice. We'll see. We'll see how life turns out. I mean, Dianetics has got a big volcano on the cover. That's pretty exciting. It does have a volcano. I mean, the Power Broker has – it's a crumbling statue that towers over the ground around it. It's Ozymandias transposed to the New York landscape, which is still a pretty great cover. But it was very much a similar thing for me that I was a production assistant at The Daily Show at the time, and it was a similar sense of like if you're going to understand politics –

then this is the book to read. And it's, it served me in good stead for my years there. Certainly. When you're handed it, you're like, where does this book get off? It's so big. It's not just that it's 1300 pages, but the fact that it's this sort of like Atlas sized object, uh,

You know, you're just sort of like, how could this be? But at the same time, you are kind of like, well, this must be a masterpiece, right? Like for it to dare exist in this form. Yeah, exactly. And it's sort of that's what it is. It truly is.

So, let's get to our recap. We're going to sort of pick up where we left off at the end of Chapter 10. It's 1924, and the New York State Legislature has just passed a bill written by Robert Moses giving him enormous, like, hidden power to appropriate and govern land to the new State Council of Parks that is run by Robert Moses.

He wants to build a string of parks connected by parkways on Long Island, with his biggest dream being Jones Beach, which he envisions as the greatest bathing beach in the world. And the part that we're going to be talking about today is the use of power, where we find out where he gets things done. So, Elliot, tell me about the opening of this chapter. Oh, you got it. So, as you said, this is the section where he's wanted power all this time. Now he finally has it, and he's

and he's going to use it. And we start with chapter 11, The Majesty of the Law. This chapter opens with an epigram. I love a good epigram opening chapter. I didn't look up the original source of this one because after the Sophocles quote that starts the book, I was just like, I'm not going to find Carol's sources sometimes. But this is a quote from Cornelius Vanderbilt, credited here as Commodore Vanderbilt, as he was known, where he says, Law, what do I care for law? Haint I got the power? And we're going to see this is going to increasingly become Robert Moses' way of seeing things. And I love this.

The use of the word hate, which I'm sure is how it was said and written down. It's like this is the way people talk in the olden days. It doesn't say ain't I got the power. It says, ain't I got the power. But we're going to see this transformation over the course of these chapters that we're talking about today where Robert Moses really says goodbye to the idea of legality as a way of getting things done and embraces power over the law and kind of running roughshod over the law. So –

Last time, he wanted this $15 million bond to start building parks and parkways, to make this Long Island dream a reality. It hasn't passed the legislature yet. Don't worry. Governor Al Smith, he always has Robert Moses back. He gives him $225,000 from the general state revenue to start work. Moses does the important things first, rents a big office a couple blocks down from where he used to work, and across the street from the tiny room, we finished writing the government reorganization report. He is in a very literal way –

showing his past, how much power he now has by getting an office in the same area. He gets himself a black Packard limousine, the top-of-the-line car, and a chauffeur. He starts hiring people he's known for a long time. He exempts them from the civil service exams, the same civil service exams he was so

crazy about when he was a younger person that he just could not get enough of civil service regulation now when he's hiring people he's like forget it we're not going to do that and he buys them their own cars and their own fancy office furniture he is ready to start spending money on his favorites and almost immediately

He's using political favors to get things done. He's doing the kinds of things that I feel like conspiracy theorists are always talking about where there's a classmate from Yale who knew him back when he was a student who's an assistant to Herbert Hoover, who's then the secretary of commerce. And he helps Moses get 600 acres of Fire Island Beach, that 600 new acres that wasn't even mapped yet because nobody knew it was there until he went there to see it.

they're like, yeah, yeah, we'll give you that. We went to Yale together. Sure, that's fine. He has this land now just through his connections as part of the state government, but that's not going to be enough. He's going to have to go take land from other people. Is he willing to take land from other people? Yes, he's willing to take land from other people. Yes, very much so. In a myriad of ways. He enjoys it, it seems. The chase is part of the fun for him, I think. I think that's true. It's the chase and the conquest. So he starts going out to Long Island at the time is still

Kind of split up between farmland and rich people's estates, and there's a little bit of housing developments. And he goes out to Long Island farmers in the evenings when they're done with their work. He charms them into selling him the pieces of the fields that he needs for his parkway route. If they don't want to sell, the charm goes away, and he plays hardball. He condemns property. We'll see a longer example of that later on in this episode. Long Island barons –

They don't like this. The whole reason they got these big estates on Long Island and then bought the land around the big estates and then bought the land next to the big estates was to keep the wrong kind of people away from them. And now Robert Moses is saying, I'm going to build parks and roads that will bring those wrong people straight to you. And there's a specific man who decides he's going to stand up to Robert Moses. His name is W. Kingsland Macy, which is –

The names of people in the past were so on the nose. I just love it. Like if you were a wealthy guy in Long Island, you were W. Kingsland Macy. If you're going to donate money to the Yale swim team, you are Ogden Reed Mills, I think it's named, or Ogden Mills Reed. I can't remember anymore. But W. Kingsland Macy, he starts a consortium with a couple other wealthy people, and he's not the wealthiest of the barons, but he's a man with money. And they preemptively buy this land called the Taylor Estate that Moses is supposed to go take.

And Moses calls Macy into a meeting, and he goes, don't finish buying that land. I have the power to seize that land. The law says so. If I want, I could go into your house, and I could seize your house. I could kick you out of it. If you tried to go back into your house, I could have you arrested for trespassing. And then I would have the newspapers in New York harass you for trying to get back into your house. So don't buy that land. And W. Kingsland Macy is like,

Well, this isn't really the spirit of the law. I have rights as an American, and he buys that land. Moses immediately sends state troopers to take possession of it and starts working with it. And Moses is doing this with other barons as well, and they have their expensive lawyers start researching what Moses' law means when it says appropriating land, which as we…

talked about last episode, it means something different than what most people think it means. And F. Truby Davison, the rookie state legislator who put the law through, he feels really bad about introducing that bill. It just wasn't what he intended it to be. And Moses just appropriating land left and right. Is anyone going to stand up to him? Roman.

David, is anyone going to stand up for Robert Moses at this point? If they are, they're only going to supercharge him. Yeah, that's true. There's one man who's going to do it. W. Kingsland Macy. Yeah, well, it's Macy. But the thing is, what's so interesting here is like this type, you know, when he has this power and he sort of like he begins to show his corrupt side.

And it isn't even really it's not even that corrupt. Like he you know, he gets a fancy car. He has a nice office, but none of it is like a crazy amount of stuff. And then he starts, you know, going after these parcels of land and.

And I always find myself in this section really flip-flopping on how I feel about Robert Moses because sometimes he's taking it from people. I'm like, yeah, sure, go ahead and take that land from those people. Literal land barons, essentially. Like modern, like who...

And he does seem to be one of a few people who's looking at Long Island and is like, we should do something with this, right? Which you sort of understand. I think what you're getting at is there's a thread running through this section especially of the power of the political argument of the people versus the powerful and how there is a certain – it's the thing that the framers of the Constitution were worried about in terms of a demagogue who could come in, how there are –

certain times when it is very attractive to take something from powerful people, rich people, and give it to poor people. And often that is a form of justice as well. There are times when that's the right thing to do, but it's easy to overstep that boundary. And the idea of one man standing up against the wealthy for the benefit of the poor, of the many, is a very powerful argument that gets used to support Moses in this section. And when Moses is using it to do something good,

in a way, to create these parks and to make them available to regular people.

It's easy to see that as a positive thing, but it's also easy, as Caro shows it, to see the seeds of what will become the bad Moses later on. Moses is – he's taken from the rich, so why shouldn't he take from the poor as well if it's getting in the way of his schemes? And we'll see that later in the seeds that are being planted here. But it's easy to overlook it because when you're reading this book for the first time, I know it's like, do it, Moses. Do it. Take that land from those barons. They don't need it. Give it to the people. And it's –

It's that kind of back and forth that is the devil of democratic government. And he's learning here that the fastest route to what he wants is not really going to be the most legal or the most compassionate route, right? It's going to be more brutal, sort of a mix of brutality and like, you know, charm, I guess, or, you know,

something a little insidious. But, I mean, look, what I love about this book and about the Johnson books is like what powers Caro's sort of fascination. I think it's like, right, like,

you know, how much good these people did, but often the means were terrible and motivations were bad and, and, and results were often so like, you know, like, but how do I measure that against like the great good being done? Like, that's what's so gripping about him arguing with farmers over the price of an acre of where you're just like, you should be,

you know, putting this book at the bottom of a gigantic pile out of total boredom when, you know, he's describing the Long Island zoning to you, but you're not. Not at all. It's so dramatic. He makes it so dramatic and so exciting and it's...

It reminds me – this section reminds me of when I visited Versailles in France. One time I went there, and they were like, the cost of building Versailles was half the gross national product of the country. And I'm like, that's crazy. People are dying in the streets, and he's building this enormous house. But then I was like, you know what? That was hundreds of years ago. Those people are going to be gone by now anyway, but the house is still here. So like was it a better investment? There was no way of me – I could enjoy those 18th century, 17th century Frenchmen, but I can enjoy this house still. So –

It's a hard thing. History is a tough business. Anyway. Well, we should talk about – because this is a real key moment here that ends up being kind of the – we talk about Robert Moses' ability to draft bills as being one of his superpowers. So he affords himself all this power through this law that he passed. He changes what the meaning of appropriating kind of means for most people. But it only really works –

When he begins to enact it, that Al Smith agrees to it. Like, yes. And this is a real key thing. He still is relying on Al Smith for that for that power. Exactly. Yeah. Because he could write that law and it doesn't matter at the end of it. Executing it requires the governor to buy into it. Yes. I mean, what what's so fascinating about his partnership with Al Smith, who's such a fascinating figure? And I assume you guys talked about him a lot last time.

is just that Al Smith is this genuine populist. And Robert Moses doesn't seem like a populist at all, but everything he is doing here is like, Ellie, like you're saying, is a form of populism, right? Like, yeah, this land will be for the people. Like, you know, we're going to make Jones Beach. And like, yes, insidious things will happen later to sort of make it for specific people maybe. And like, it's just such a funny match up

And I don't know, like would Moses have considered himself like politically aligned with Al Smith? Like probably not. Right. I don't think so. I mean, Moses never Al Smith is a Democrat. Moses never loses his Republican affiliation. Even when he's the closest man working for the Democratic governor, he is still registered as a Republican. And it's almost like Al Smith has no ideology whatsoever.

But he wants to help people. And so he will do whatever it takes to do that even if it means being a little slimy. Robert Moses wants to control things, and he wants to make things. And so he is willing to do nice things for people if it means he gets to create things. He had that idealistic bent at the beginning, but it was the –

It was the entitled idealist. It was the guy from above who feels like he knows better. Yeah, rather than the populist. He wants to make things for people, but he does not want the people to have the power to have decisions over those things that he makes. And I feel like Al Smith is the opposite.

he would rather have the people making decisions than powerful people, unless the powerful people are him and his best friend, Bob Moses. Man, Al Smith rocks. Even though Al Smith is a hugely flawed figure, then he eventually hated the New Deal. Just any time in this book when he's like, yeah, but I'm sticking up for the little guy. I know he didn't sound like that. I just kind of love thinking about Al Smith. He probably did a little bit. Yeah, he did sound like that, actually. I take it back. One of the other things that's kind of

Kind of surprising about the power broker considering it is so much about kind of the rules of power and how institutions work is how much it is still in that world of the influence of personality on politics. Why does Al Smith hate the New Deal? Because as we'll see, he hates FDR. He doesn't like FDR. And why does – why is he doing these things for Bob Moses? In a big sense because he likes Bob Moses and that the shape of a city can be so –

… transformed by the personality of the person, and that's much of the Johnson books as well is it's the effect of personality on history, which is not a popular way of looking at history right now, but it's undeniable that kind of larger social forces and individual personalities mix to create history.

The world we live in. It's all part of the beautiful tapestry of the power broker. But Al Smith is about to step into this Macy fight, as we'll see. W. Kingsland Macy's lawyers, he points out that the way Robert Moses took the Taylor estate wasn't even a fair according to the law that he wrote. He created a law to let him do whatever he wants, and he still oversteps that law.

And he shouldn't have appropriated that land without attempting to buy it first and without having the money on hand to legally purchase it. And Moses needs Governor Smith to sign the documents appropriating this land. And Smith is like, I don't know if this whole thing is legal. Let me meet with the barons so they can press their case. And the barons…

Screw this up so badly, this meeting with Al Smith, because it's like a scene. It's so the way Carol presents it. And I have to believe that this is how it was told to him. It's so on the nose that the rich people are like, well, we don't want Long Island to be overrun with rabble from the city. And Al Smith gets mad and goes, rabble, that's me you're talking about. And he signs the form right in front of them because he's so mad in that moment. And it's, again, personality and history. Maybe he wouldn't have been so eager to do it if those guys hadn't pissed him off in that moment, in that specific way that he's so sensitive to.

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how how Moses uses the political valence of like who is elite and who isn't in these ways that really get what he wants in each of these situations. And what's funny to me is how much that resonates with today. You know, like when Trump talks about the elites and these.

weird situations is like gold toilet billionaire talks about elites, you know, like it's just, it really is just a matter of like how you present that narrative. And, uh, these lawyers like really fucked up when it came to talking to Al Smith. They really, they really screwed it all up. And, uh,

This court fight for the Taylor estate, this is another time where we're going to watch something for a little bit, and then later we're going to skip back because Caro is not doing everything on the same timeline. The fight for the Taylor estate goes on for two years in the courts, and W. Kingsland's Macy's partners, they're like, this isn't worth it. But Macy, he doesn't care about the money. It's the principle of the thing, and he's got to fight for the private property rights of Americans.

And he's so old-fashioned. A reporter is like, hey, why don't you come take me to the land and show it to me? And he goes, no, I couldn't influence your thinking on it. That would be unfair. Whereas Moses is like, yeah, I'll take whatever help I can get. And the New York Times is putting out front-page headlines like, a few rich golfers accused of blocking plans for State Park, which is the yellowest of yellow journalism. There's no – I wish that – whereas nowadays the Times would be like,

In a fight over land, two competing narratives, and that would be their headline. They'd make no judgments whatsoever. But back then, they weren't afraid to. And the press – Moses is using them to really portray himself as I am fighting for the benefit of regular people and –

Yeah, they're going poorly because there's two big problems. Yeah.

he he's not allowed to appropriate land that he hasn't offered for purchase and he doesn't have the money to purchase it and yes so they they need to rectify these two situations like tootsweet before before before the court you know rolls over them and and so uh rob ross is like i need a legislature to appropriate this money for me but the republicans in the legislature are like this is a great way to embarrass al smith through his best buddy moses but luckily

In the end, in terms of politics, the court of public opinion

It's more powerful in many ways than the court of court, court, the court of law. People love parks and he has Al Smith. And so Moses can just use his lawyers to stall the court proceedings until Smith can bully the legislature into getting the money through so that it will appear somewhat legal. And most is like Smith. Hurry up. He says governor because he always calls him governor. Hurry up. Hurry up. And Governor Smith, who's the master politician, he says, wait, it's spring right now. Wait till the summer. Wait till New York gets hot.

Wait till the voters are so sweaty they feel the need for a place to swim, that they feel the need for fresh air because they're so hemmed in. And so on June 10th, right as the heat is starting to build up in New York City, in the first speech ever carried on a statewide New York radio hookup, Al Smith talks for two and a half hours, deepens the conversation.

He's demonizing the opposition, the rich, calling for a special session of legislature to give the people parks. And it's not a question of the state overreaching its power. It's a question of whether the rich can stop the state from giving the people what they need. He barely mentions Moses in the speech. It's all about the rich versus you, and you're hot in your tiny apartment.

You're sweating. It's terrible. And the Republicans have their own speech the next day about like, well, sacred property rights. But when you're hot, you don't care about that stuff. When you're a New Yorker and it's summer in the city, the back of your neck is getting dirty and gritty, you don't care about that. You want a place to go. And the people are so overwhelming in support of Moses and the governor's side.

They flood the legislature with letters. The New York papers keep carrying stories of this fight. And it's something that you have to wonder. Roman, this is a question that you brought up when we were talking about this episode. If you're there at the time not knowing how things will turn out, whose side are you going to take? I'm all Al Smith on this one. I am like all Robert Moses, all Al Smith.

He's making that speech and I'm like, hell yeah, let's storm the beaches. It's so rare that there's a fight over public parks. Now that this fight is always over, we want to take your land to build an arena for a billionaire sports team that doesn't want to spend one red cent building it. It's always something like that where it's easy to understand why people get angry about the construction of

you know, whatever arena. Or it's we want to take this land and build low-income housing in your neighborhood. And people get angry about that because with parks, it's the thing where everyone can use them. Even if you're middle class or if you're lower class, everyone can use them. And so there's less of a partisan fight except against the ultra wealthy who everyone hates already. I'm just amazed that this works so well. And it all has to do with the parks. You know, like it just is like

I just wonder, you know, like with Moses's acumen for like all things law and politics, if he didn't have the parks as his thing, would he have gotten anywhere?

You know, because it allowed him so much, you know, like so much latitude to do horrible things because he could always cloak it in the park fight. Right. Yes. It was very lucky for him that the issue that he was kind of naturally interested anyway, but that he could stumble into because it was it was not being.

exploited by anyone else at the moment was one that's so universally beloved and it's so hard to find a it's hard to make an argument against a park like it's I can't really think of one oh we should have a park here so that people can enjoy themselves and it can be like natural and fun and relaxing no we need people I mean I guess you could have people saying like um

Any distraction from work hurts the ambition of the species. We have to get into space or something like that. But that's a pretty out there argument. And it's not one they would have been making in the 20s. I think you're right that he had this powerful issue that gave him that latitude. I think he gets into it later in the book even more as well, just underlining how little public space there was available in the city, especially. And just...

Just like that there was like, yeah, one playground for every 150,000 kids or, you know, like stuff like that, where it was like the need was really, really desperate. I guess what happens later is the people start saying like, well, we don't want a public park because we don't like what that means, who that'll bring or whatever. But in the 1920s, I feel like Long Island is, it's not like empty, but it's a very quiet part of the state, right? Like comparatively. Yeah.

pre-motor car or whatever. It's the dawn of motor cars. You'll read like nostalgic things where like, yeah, we used to play stickball on the street and it's like, well, you were playing in the street because there was nowhere else for you to play. The street is not a good place to play. Like that's a bad place to play. Yeah.

Like, why can't kids throw balls against stoops anymore? It's like, well, because that's not a great place to be playing, you know, when a car could hit you or a horse could stove your head in. Horse hooves always stove things. Anyway, Carol takes a moment here to talk about some of the people who are behind the New York Times specifically, who are helping in the press. New York Times, even at the time, was the most powerful paper in New York. Now it's the most powerful paper in the country. And the

The publisher, Adolph Ox, was very close to Al Smith. His daughter, Iphigen, was this already an idealistic Parks activist. And as we'll see, she'll come to idolize Robert Moses. She will really kind of adore him and in a way worship him, and that support is going to be unquestioned for decades and will become hugely valuable to Robert Moses as he embarks on his projects.

And there's all this lobbying behind the scenes. There's all this kind of backroom politics stuff. They decide to hold a conference of regional parks commissioners on the day that the legislature session opens. They can all be there cheering when parks are brought up, just kind of classic old-fashioned political theater that works and works.

It doesn't work. The Republicans hold firm. They defeat Moses Park money bill. He doesn't have it. The purchase aren't there. He's losing land they could be buying. Worse, now the Taylor estate appropriation really is not legal. They've got to get this money from somewhere so that they can make it look kind of legal. That's when they turn to Mrs. Moskowitz, and she just says the name that I'm sure we've all been thinking up to this point, August Heckscher. And he is a millionaire. He's a famous millionaire. He's a millionaire.

He agrees to give them the money in exchange for naming the park after him. And it still is. It's called Heckscher State Park. It's still there. He was zinc. I always like looking up those guys where you're like, where'd they get the money? It's like, I don't know, zinc. The guy just had a ton of zinc. That was his thing. That was his racket. Robert Caro describes him as a wee man who has little tufts of white hair. And when he sits in a chair, his feet don't touch the ground. Wow.

Which is, which the image that conjured in my mind was Mr. Mixleplick from the Superman comics, you know? Sure. It just sounds like that to me. You have to imagine when Moskowitz said his name, he just appeared in the air floating around them. It was like, money for a park you need? Oh, well. Let me move 1,000 tons of zinc. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Powered by zinc. Yeah.

They're going to be in big trouble. So they have to ask one person who Bell Moskowitz says will say yes. And that's August Heckscher, which is crazy. Yeah. And it is the exact opposite of the theory of democratic democracy.

politics and governance that it's like, oh yeah, well we couldn't get this money to the democratic process so we'll go to one rich man in this fight between the powerful and the poor. We're going to go to this one rich man to make it happen but it's a complicated business, politics. The court battle is going badly. The judge rules against Moses. Meanwhile, these towns in Long Island that Moses needs the approval of to build his Jones Beach dream and his roads are turning against him. There's a public referendum to allow park development in Hempstead on Long Island. It gets voted down and Moses is like,

This is all slipping away. I'm not going to be able to build any of this. My land options are lapsing. The parkway land negotiations are halted. Developers are starting to buy up the land I need, and they're building little houses on it, which is not what I wanted. And this is when the chapter ends with one of Karo's most beautiful kind of tease transitions. He says – this is on page 206 –

It had been a year since Robert Moses had announced his revised and broadened park and parkway plan. Now, more than a year later, parks and parkways were still located nowhere but in the map of Moses' imagination. After all the talking, all the planning, all the fighting, they simply didn't exist. And at the end of 1925, there seemed little possibility that they would come into existence at any time in the foreseeable future. If one looked ahead a decade, even a generation, it seemed unlikely that any substantial part of the dream would be a reality.

New paragraph indent. Within three years, almost all of it would be reality. What? How did that happen? We got to find out in the next chapter. Because you counted him out, you fools. You thought he was dead. No one puts Moses in a corner. Nobody. Exactly. Him standing with his hands on his hips on a beach or something. God.

We could do a whole, like, at the end of this whole project, we could just do a whole episode on the last sentences of each of Robert Caro's chapters. They're so good. He has incredible flair. He's really good at finding the dramatic core.

of a moment, cutting through to what is the dramatic question that has to be answered. And guess what? In the next chapter, I'm going to tell you how we answer it. And you're like, I got to find out. But we'll get to that chapter after this break. ♪

Buy low, sell high. It's easy to say, hard to do. For example, high interest rates are crushing the real estate market right now. Demand is dropping and prices are falling, even for the best assets. It's no wonder that the Fundrise flagship fund plans to go on a buying spree, expanding its billion-dollar real estate portfolio over the next few months. You can add the Fundrise flagship fund to your portfolio in just minutes and with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com slash stocks.

That's F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash stocks. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise flagship fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at Fundrise dot com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Whether you're a family vacation traveler, a business tripper, or a long weekend adventurer, Choice Hotels has a stay for any you.

That's what I like. I like to be within walking distance of all this stuff.

Radisson Hotels have flexible workspaces to get the most of your business travel and on-site restaurants. And at Comfort Hotels, you'll enjoy free hot breakfast with fresh waffles, great pools for the entire family, and spacious rooms. With so many hotel brands, Choice Hotels allows you to prioritize what you need. Choice Hotels has a stay for any you. Book direct at choicehotels.com where travels come true.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Finding work-life balance can be tough, but Squarespace gives you the tools to reach your goals and have time to celebrate. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Use Squarespace to create a website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to time, all in one place.

I will.

Okay, this is the new chapter. It's chapter 12, Robert Moses and the Creature of the Machine.

Where are we now? So this is one where, right, you've just said one of the coolest titles, I think, in any chapter in any book. The Creature of the Machine, don't get your hopes up. We haven't gotten to the curator of cauliflower yet. That's true. That's true. Last chapter in this section of this episode is the curator of cauliflower. And the first chapter of next episode is going to be the feather duster, which shouldn't sound cool, but it does. So Robert Moses and the Creature of the Machine, which, again, it sounds like he used a machine to build a creature, which is fantastic, but that's not what he does. This is...

It's 1925 going into 1926, and at this point, Caro takes a moment to stop us and to say, let's talk about the political power of parkways, of roads that open up new areas. They're a potential source of enormous wealth for politicians. Parkways mean that the government has to buy a lot of real estate. It means the government has to hire a lot of workers and contractors. It means that a lot of businesses that were isolated before are now reachable by road, land that was not valuable because –

it was too distant is now valuable because it's within close distance and if politicians are aware of where these roads are going they can buy land along those routes they can get contracts the people that are connected to them they can give tip-offs to people in exchange for money they can make a lot of money if they own businesses in those areas those businesses will now be worth more there's a lot of ways to make money off of a new road if you know where the road is going and in previously robert moses the idealist the democratic purist

Is he going to play that game of getting votes by telling them where they should buy land ahead of time, Roman? No, sir. No, sir. That is against the spirit of democracy or whatever. He refuses. In 1924, he announces his park plan. They say, where's the roads going to go? We want to make some money. And he says, no, I refuse. And in 1925, there was that Hempstead referendum. He still is refusing to give inside knowledge to the guy who can sway that, NASA County GOP boss G. Wilbur Dowdy. But his dreams are falling apart. So in 1925 –

That's going to change. He's not going to stand by that anymore. And Caro says, look, there's no record of a deal on paper. I cannot prove that there is an agreement by the standards of Robert Caro, which means it has to be written down on paper or he has to be told it by someone who either was there or talked to witness. But he goes, here's what happens. Moses says…

Oh, I'm going to work on this parkway with a commission led by a crony of G. Wilbur Dowdy who Moses has previously called this crony the creature of the machine. That's where the title comes from. He was so disgusted by this guy being a creature of the machine.

But not long after that, there's a politically connected lawyer who starts a corporation whose only business as a corporation is purely to buy 265 acres of seemingly worthless land, land that nobody has any use for, which happened to be needed for the right of way for the Meadowbrook Causeway, which is part of the parkway that's being built.

Contracts to build the causeways, maybe by coincidence, they go to a contractor that's owned by Dowdy's brother-in-law. And then Dowdy throws his support behind Moses' parkway plan, and he tells Moses, rewrite the referendum, resubmit it. Let's see what happens. And the referendum that lost by a 3-1 margin in 1925 suddenly wins by a 3-1 margin in 1926, giving the Long Island Park Commission…

Essentially control of Jones' speech. Now, can you prove a quid pro quo? Caro says you can't, but I mean it's basically – it seems unlikely that there was not one there. He's doing the thing he needs to do. He's getting his hands dirty in order to make his dream a reality, and it's the only way he can do it it seems. Yeah, yeah.

There's some election year wrangling in Albany that we don't need to get into it. As much as I love getting into the details of this book, we don't need to. But as a result of it, Al Smith and the Republicans in the legislature, they agree that in exchange for the Northern State Parkway not being built until Moses dies,

has a route agreed to by the Long Island Barons and has built enough of the Southern State Parkway to reach Jones Beach. There's a lot of names, a lot of details. They'll give him all the money for the parks in 1926 so that Moses can begin building his projects. Basically,

The agreement is he can't start this other road until he finishes the first road. He can't start the northern state until he's a certain way along the southern state, and they end the Taylor estate fight. Moses gets that land. Macy has realized that his allies in the legislature have betrayed him, which is a lesson he will take with him for the rest of his life as we'll see. And the Republicans say –

It's going to take him so long to build the Southern State Parkway. The Northern State Parkway, we don't even have to think about it. This parkway that's going to go through the land of our political patrons, the barons, we don't have to worry about that. It took 14 years to build the Bronx River Parkway, which is the same length. This is way in the future. We don't have to deal with this. It's going to take Moses so long just to get the rights to the lands he needs for the Southern State Parkway.

They don't know that Moses has been out scheming him and playing with the local Long Island bosses. So suddenly the Nassau County Board of Supervisors gives him miles of land as a gift, and combined with the land that New York City already owns, Moses suddenly has all the right of wayland he needs for the Southern State Parkway. And the legislators are like, well, what? I have to assume that they're eating soup at the time, and they just spit soup all over themselves when they get the news. Yeah.

And the Republicans are like, oh yeah, but we're going to give him all this money. But the appropriations until it's available, until that bond is passed, we're going to keep them small so he can't do any actual work. And then they look outside their windows I guess. There's engineers and surveyors already out there working because it says in Moses' law that the Department of Public Works can use its money and its workers to work on parks projects. And there's –

There's kind of classic – I always imagine that this is the way it would work in a movie is they're investigating, and there are parks workers working on park stuff, and they're like, what's this all about? And they're like, oh, yeah, we're from the tree nursery. This is the tree nursery program of the conservation department. It's fine. There could be trees here someday. Well, you're developing this beach for a parkway. Oh, no, no, no. This is oyster culturing. We're doing oyster culturing with this money. There could be oysters here someday. It's all this money that's earmarked for other stuff is going to park and road building and –

Caro personifies the Republicans in the form of Ways and Means Committee Chairman Eberly Hutchinson and Finance Committee Chairman Charles J. Hewitt. And Hewitt and Hutchinson are just going to be continually stymied by how fast Moe's is working and how Moe's out-thought them in this. And they go to the governor and they protest. And the governor's like, well, let's talk about it. Come over to my hotel room. And he just gets them drunk and they kind of listen to music all night. And he puts them to bed and the next morning makes them breakfast really early and they're all hungover. It's such a – again –

personalities and politics you know it's how are we going to deal with this problem and just send them over to me and I'll just drink with them all night and I'll get them hung over and they'll be they won't be able to argue anymore it does seem like the Al Smith treatment right like if the Lyndon Johnson treatment was that he screamed in your face until you just wanted to kill yourself like Al Smith is just like roll in like a barrel of bourbon we'll just we'll sort this out

I'll tell you about the Fulton fish market until you just, you're just like, fine. Now, whatever. He can have the money. Put a record on the gramophone, put sidewalks in New York on. That's my song. We'll listen to that. That'll be great. Come on. Sing with me, boys. East side, West side. But,

But they're sort of assuaged by this like chummy, old school, very slow working politics of Al Smith. But coming up right behind – drafting up behind him is this person who will like – while you like go to sleep at night, will have built an entire foundation on your land for something like – and then he's going to go, what? What? Were you going to tear it up? What? You know, like –

You know, it's like it's crazy. Like the two of them really work as this incredible team because Al Smith kind of lulls a lot of these old school politicians into thinking that this road will take 14 years. And our Moses knows it's going to take six months. You know, it's a real it's like slow cop, fast cop.

The way they deal with things. So now it's – we're in May 1926. They're still stalling that Taylor estate trial at the same time that they are literally in court stalling a decision about whether they own this land or not. Moses is sending out crews to start turning buildings that are already on the land into park facilities, and by mid-May –

The Deer Range State Park, as it's called, is open. And when the trial finally begins in June, the judge is like, we're going to find against you. He finds that Moses and the other park commissioners, he hits them each with $22,000 fines. And this is one of my favorite details in the whole book is that Moses' mother reads this in the newspaper and says, oh, he never earned a dollar in his life, and now we'll have to pay this. And I just love that.

That Caro knows that she said that. Talked to the right person who delivered that newspaper to her and knows it. Moses appeals. There's a new trial. Al Smith testifies in his favor and has lunch with the judge, and the judge ultimately decides in this retrial, the law was broken, but –

The land belongs to the Long Island Park Commission now. They've already done it. They've already built on it. He's not going to tell them to tear down the park buildings. And he advises the jury to fix damages owed to Kingsland Macy at six cents. So insult to injury, by the way, the law was broken, but they have it in any way and you don't get any money. That's awful. It's so mean.

It really seems like, I mean, I'm sure Moses loved it. But that's the twist ending of the movie The Sixth Sense is that Moses should have lost the trial, but he didn't. You did that one on Blank Check, right? We did. We did long ago, yes. Yeah. And I believe it was about a land battle.

in the Long Island courts. The whole time you're like, Bruce Willis doesn't own this land and the judge at the end is like, he doesn't, but he gets to keep it. What's the matter with you? Let the people have a beach. Six cents. Get out of here. Bang, bang, bang.

And all the people in the audience, they go, oh, that's what that title meant. That makes sense. This is the adage of possession is nine-tenths of the law. This is what this sort of refers to, this type of thing. It's like if you're there and you're squatting on it and you're doing the thing, judges are, you know, you think that judges are kind of conservative in the way of like, you know,

you know, like resting someone's land away from them. Um, stopping that as a conservative point of view, but in a way they're kind of more, mostly conservative in the sense of like, um,

Well, if it's going to cause so much trouble, like already these parks are here, you know, like we can't just undo all this stuff. Like they're really loathe to just cause something to stop or be dug up or do something different. They really want to keep what is the most ultimate common sense peace in this situation. And at this point, people are already going to this park.

So it just makes no sense.

And so it's like they're people. And like, Roman, like you're saying –

A judge is not going to be like, okay, well, the law says no one can use this park ever again, so I guess no parks. And at the same time, Tara talks about a real imbalance between a lawsuit between a private individual and a government agency because the government agency has so much money they can just keep stalling and keep appealing, whereas an individual will run out of money, and that's what happens with Kingsland Macy eventually. He can no longer afford to keep this lawsuit going. The park has already been built, but ironically –

he becomes so inspired by this fight that he decides to go into politics and he becomes the most ruthless machine boss that suffolk county long island has ever seen and they call him the little king of suffolk county he rules with an iron fist he goes sends himself to congress he and moses start working together and when macy dies in 1962 caro says the only person outside of macy's family that he wants to see before he dies is robert moses and it feels like

I don't know that there are any books about W. Kingsland Macy, but it feels like there's a whole book in this guy who lost this battle to Robert Moses. And instead of taking the lesson, we've got to do more to to regulate this government. He takes the like, well, if you can't beat him, join him. I guess I'll be a corrupt political boss, too, and become so good at it that he just takes over this one area and rules it like a king. That's a real comic book narrative right there. That's a real like like.

That's a real like Batman shows up in Gotham and then creates the Joker time. Yes. Right. Anyone who does battle with him is just like, well, I guess there's only one way to succeed. I,

It is crazy that he asked for Robert Moses on his deathbed, though. Like, is there more on that later in the book? I do not remember. Like, I would love to know. It's the last time you hear about Macy. It's a big book, David. We can't we can't talk about every person Robert Moses touched along the way. You know, I don't know. The book kind of has the vibe. Yes, we have the potential. You know, that's true. That's true. There's a lot of pages to fill.

You might think that Macy shows up. I feel like once they mention when a character dies, you usually don't hear about them again. Usually, Caro's like, I'm saying that now because you say goodbye to him. Caro is actually... You're right. He's outstanding at keeping information streamlined in a colossal book like this. You're not...

going 400 pages later and seeing a last name and being like, who the hell is this? Is this guy, you know, like, you know, it's not like that at all. Yeah. He, because he closes the book on Macy at this moment when he in fact lives another, you know, 30, 40 years, you know? Yeah. And he's just like, you can, you can put Macy aside and that's it.

He's not slavishly devoted to chronology when it comes to doing this type of biography, which is a fascinating choice. I mean, I find actually kind of sometimes it'll draw me a little bit, but mostly I love it because he's really much more about the ideas and the drama than the

than being like this relentless march of time. Right. Yeah. He's organizing the book mainly through Moses's development as a person from, from idealist to monster and anything along the way. If it makes sense to talk about this thing now, he'll talk about it.

There's a whole chapter we'll get to much later when we're talking that's just Moses' relationship with different mayors of New York where it's almost as if Caro was like, we're going to step out of the timeline of the book for a moment so I can talk about this stuff. And then we're going to step back into the stream of events. But he organized it really well. It is confusing sometimes, but it's just a lot of stuff to keep in your head for such a long book. And it's astounding to me that Caro was able to keep it in his head and organize it in this way over such a long thing. It amazes me to no end, actually. Yeah. Caro, at this point,

He enumerates some lessons that Moses has learned from this. Number one, the simplest way to get what he wants done is to use every source of power he has. He can't hold himself back because of his ideals. What difference does it make if a few politicians profit off of a public work? If they do, the work gets done. If they don't, it doesn't. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, which becomes one of Moses' big slogans.

Also, in the eyes of the public, the ends may not justify the means, but if the ends are loved enough, the means don't matter. They're unimportant. They don't have to be justified because no one cares. People love parks. They don't care how parks get built.

Another lesson, people love parks. If you're fighting for parks, you're a hero. It doesn't matter what you do. He's like, oh, this is great. Yeah. He gets undone later by forgetting that and instead being like, do people love highways in the middle of Manhattan? People are like, no. And he's like, are you sure? I really want to make one. Let me put one right here.

We have this dumb park, but there could be a big cloverleaf exchange. That's a really good point. That really is because, yeah, he loses touch of this like of this, you know, secret sort of well of goodwill he can tap into when he's trying to do all these ruthless things. And it's so crucial. Right. That's like that when he pivots to the car shit.

You know, sorry for swearing. I'm not sure. But if I'm allowed to do that. You can. This is an all audiences family power broker podcast because the kids really want to hear about it. Power broker, of course, is rated G. No, but like and the other thing about Moses is when you look in the city and you see the parks that he made, you're like, you know, these endure like, yes, maybe they had some problem, but like they

And all of his roads like stink because they're parkways that are made for, you know, cars that go 40 miles an hour. And like, you're supposed to look at trees while you go by. And now you're like on the Jackie in like an insane traffic jam. And you're like, who built this stinking road? Like it's, it's Robert Moses. Yeah. Like he, you know, roads are just not the way to go. Anyway, I'm sorry. That's my, my road ran over, but I think that's really smart. I mean, it's not just

all the like time moving on and people getting savvier to his ways. I mean, like if he doesn't have this as this battery source of power, the goodwill of parks, like he really falls down and becomes like,

more and more people, maybe not the New York Times, but more and more people, you know, consider him a villain. And it's really, really intriguing. And in addition to sort of like this moment where he's learning like all these lessons that he has to let go of his morals and his ideals of how politics works.

He's learning really key things about like what it means to be like a developer and constructor of things. Like if you drive down stakes and you pour concrete, it is really hard for people to stop you. And that's a really important lesson he uses like constantly. And then the other thing is that is really important to lie about how much everything costs. Yes. Because.

Because he knows that none of this stuff will work even for like the whatever, that $225,000 allotment that he got, you know, barely got him a limousine and stuff. But he just begins to work on stuff and knows that if he spends a lot of money but not all the money needed –

And does a part of a thing that, you know, people might be mad at him for like underestimating the cost. But then he can just say, yeah, but, you know, you're the one who gave me this money. And if you're so smart, you should have known better that it's not going to cost this much. I mean, like he's really devious when it comes to this stuff. I also like that, that like his, his tactic in this is to not like build.

you know, a couple of things or like spread the money out and start lots of things. Like he likes to get really far along with one thing. So then they just cannot help. But, you know, just like, OK, I guess we got to put this building up. We have to do this thing because it's already, you know, it's already so far along that it's really hard to say no. And people are really subject to a sunk cost fallacy when it comes to this stuff. He's got kind of a two pincer strategy. You're right. He's going to use this again and again and again, which is

I'm going to spend enough money to make sure that there's visible work done. And are you going to tell people you wasted that money instead of finishing it? And then I'm going to finish it so that people see it and see how great it is, and they will want me to do more of it, that voters will want me to do more of it. Once I finish these buildings on Jones Beach, they'll let me do whatever I want because they'll see how amazing they are. Once I finish this park, but also, as we'll see in this section,

I'm going to use all the money you gave me to build this building to lay the foundation for this building. And then I'm going to say, are you really going to just leave a naked foundation on this beach and tell people that that's what you did? No, you're going to give me the rest of the money. And

The ultimate lesson, he broke the law. He got everything he wanted. He was fined six cents for it. So it's one of those things where it's like you got what you wanted, but was it worth it? And he's like, yeah, it was worth it. It was worth six cents to do that. And he's insulated from the law because he has contracts and money to dispense. He has access to lawyers who can delay it. Carroll says on page 220, if there is one law for the poor who have neither money nor influence and another law for the rich who have both, there is still a third law for the public official with real power who has more of both.

And he's learned that he has the power to defy the law, and the only way that he can make his dreams a reality is to defy the law. So he has $1 million available to him immediately from this $15 million for the entire Parks and Parks Way system. He uses it to buy up so much land so he can start developing them. By the end of 1926, some of them are open for public use so he can show people, look what we're doing. And on August 29th, 1926, my wedding anniversary, but many years later…

He digs the first bit of soil of his first road construction, the section of the Southern State Parkway that's going to loop around the Hempstead Lake State Park Reservoir. He's been planning roads since 1914 in his mind. And I think the reason, David, that I think he goes to roads eventually rather than parks as his big thing is what he really loves is he likes drawing lines on maps. He likes taking a pencil and drawing a line on a map. And you can do that with roads even more than with parks. It's what Kara said on your on this podcast, right? That he like.

He drew all these lines on a map basically when he was a teenager, and then he built them all when he was an adult with very little change. He did exactly what he always wanted to do. Twelve years later, he's finally building these roads, and Hutchinson and Hewitt, they're so mad. Moses is finding more money than they intended and doing more work than they intended, and he starts planning Jones Beach.

They say, oh, you're making a bathing beach. Okay, you'll have a few kind of cheap dressing areas so that the boys can't watch the girls getting changed. You'll have like a boardwalk or something with some hot dog stands. And most is like, no, I don't want that. I'm going to get a bunch of star architects together. I want enormous bathhouses big enough for 10,000 lockers.

I want swimming pools big enough for hundreds of people. There's going to be terraces with restaurants. There's going to be diaper changing stations. It's all going to look fanciful and whimsical. I want it to look like a fairy tale. I want two parking lots big enough to hold 10,000 cars each. I want bandstands. I want outdoor sporting areas. And the architects are with him standing on an empty, totally nothing sandbar. There's nothing there. And he's like, I want this entire recreation complex. You're going to make it. And they start bringing him designs. And they're very utilitarian. They're the kind of stuff you would expect for a government

you know, bathing station. And Moses is like, no, I want, I want one, one of these buildings to look like a castle. I want another look like a Moorish temple. I want this to look like a Campanile from Venice, this water tower. And he's demanding, I want the most, I want these beautiful building materials. I want it faced in the most expensive stone I can get. And, uh, there, his architects are like,

It's going to cost a million dollars to build this. And Hutchinson Hewitt says, well, we'll only give you $150,000, assuming that he's going to scale down his plans. No, he just used all that money to lay the foundations. And they're like, what? That's all you did? Smith, fire this man. And Smith says, no, I'm not going to do it. And Moses just sees the situation so clearly. Like we've said, are Hutchinson and Hewitt going to go back to their voters and say –

This guy lied to us and we wasted $150,000 on two cement foundations on a random sandbar in the middle of nowhere in Long Island that you can't even get to because there's no roads to get there. Yeah.

or you can even give me some money. You can give us more money. And I'm going to finish this. Yeah. And they're like, well, we'll get revenge on you. We'll only give you some of the money you want. And he's like, I can just take money from the other departments. It's fine. Like, I have so much more control over this. And that's how the chapter ends with Hutchinson and Hewitt fuming on Jones Beach at these foundations, just going, ooh, Moses, he got us again. That's the end of chapter 12.

This commitment to having this is, again, where I get kind of like on Moses' side a little bit where I'm just like, yeah, get that Ohio limestone. What are you going to – you can't build – get it. You know, like it's – you know, everyone who like does any sort of like remodeling or construction knows that like a building is – a building costs what a building costs. But like 90% of what the building cost is in the end is that quarter inch of construction.

surface. You know what I mean? Like, is it bamboo? Is it stone? Is it marble? You know, it's that little bit. And, um, and he's picking the most expensive like materials like in the United States to do this stuff. And he has this real eye for this stuff. And people talk about this, that he has a real designer's eye. Like he'll go like, yeah, but those bricks,

will really bounce off the sand and sea. You know, like it'll really, the colors will really sparkle. And I totally appreciate that. Like, I think that's amazing. Yeah, he has a real aesthetic sense. He wants these things to look beautiful. And there's also, there's such an undeniable,

fun in seeing him outsmart and out with these guys. There's a real Bugs Bunny kind of coyote element to Robert Moses outwitting these guys who are trying to keep things, trying to basically do their job of not overspending on a public beach. That's really funny. Those bathhouses are still incredible. A lot of them are being spruced up to this day or whatever. They are impressive places

enduring. He was right on a lot of those calls, which again is weird when he seems to abandon aesthetics as he goes on. Like any artist, his style changes over time. It's his earlier, more popular stuff. It's easier to understand. His later, more brutal or more... His pollution era. Yeah. Yeah.

someday maybe we'll be kind of high-minded enough to understand what he was getting at with those works, what he was saying. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it's so true that the enduring quality of

just how nice Jones Beach is. You could take the most ardent, anti-sprawl, anti-car, anti-Moses person, but they'll go to you, yeah, Jones Beach is pretty nice. It really works in his favor, this vision. In a way, it's interesting that

This is his crown jewel, and it's done so early in this process. But you could say because it's so beautiful, because it's so accomplished, it gives him a blank check.

for his later work. I mean, he definitely wrote himself blank checks, right? It's not the traditional blank check of the government being like, whatever you want. The government's just kind of like, how are you paying for this? And he's like, don't worry about it. I got nickels coming from so many bridges. You don't even need to write me a check.

But in blank check parlance, this is the guarantor. Like Jones Beach, its success is the guarantor. All of his work with Al Smith is the guarantor for later, like now you can't get rid of me. One, because I've created popular things, and two, because I have planted roots in every agency and you cannot get rid of me. Even if you try, I'm already over there, so it doesn't matter if you've gotten me out of here or whatever.

He's like Voldemort. You know what? Yes. It's like I hate to do – I know everyone compares everything to Harry Potter, but when you were talking with Kara, I was like, yes, it's like Horcruxes. He's like, you can't destroy me because I have a job in that agency. So even if you obliterate this one, I live eternally. It's ridiculous. Yes. We've got to take a break when we come back. Chapter 13.

Whether you're a family vacation traveler, a business tripper, or a long weekend adventurer, Choice Hotels has a stay for any you. Choice Hotels has over 7,400 locations and 22 brands, including Comfort Hotels, Radisson Hotels, and Cambria Hotels. Get the best value for your money when you book with Choice Hotels. Cambria Hotels features locally inspired hotel bars with specialty cocktails and downtown locations in the center of it all. That's what I like. I like to be within walking distance of all this stuff.

Radisson Hotels have flexible workspaces to get the most of your business travel and on-site restaurants. And at Comfort Hotels, you'll enjoy free hot breakfast with fresh waffles, great pools for the entire family, and spacious rooms. With so many hotel brands, Choice Hotels allows you to prioritize what you need. Choice Hotels has a stay for any you. Book direct at choicehotels.com, where travels come true.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So when it comes to my self-care, there are a few things that are non-negotiable. I have to read something every day and I have to exercise every day. It could be a walk, that could be boxing. I just have to do something consciously to move my body or I will feel awful. When your schedule is packed with kids' activities, big work projects, reading 1,200-page books, it's easy to let your priorities slip. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's hard to make time for it.

But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge.

Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. One in five Americans have learn a new language on their bucket list. If that's you, make 2024 the year you finally check it off that list. We

With Babbel. Don't pay hundreds of dollars for private tutors or waste hours on apps that don't really help you speak the language. Babbel's quick 10-minute lessons are handcrafted by over 200 language experts to help you start speaking a new language in as little as three weeks. Babbel's tips and tools are approachable, accessible, and rooted in real-life situations and delivered with conversation-based teaching so that you're ready to practice what you've learned in the real world.

I'm going to Spain in the fall and I'm using Babbel to brush up on my Spanish so I don't have to have like a language translator app always open on my phone and I can just interact like a real human in a place. I'm so excited. Here's a special limited time deal for our listeners. Right now, get 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners at babbel.com slash eBabbel.

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.

Let's move to the next chapter, chapter 13. It's called Driving, and this is a chapter title that Carol's going to use again, and I love it as a title because it's got two or three big meanings. Moses is driving himself and his men to work as hard and fast as possible in this so people can do driving in their cars later, and it reminds you of that irony that Moses himself –

Almost never drives a car, never really learns how to drive. There's a scene in here where he's practicing in case he wants to learn someday, and I think he just decided he doesn't want to. But Moses' success in the bathhouse battle, the Battle of the Bathhouses, shows him how much he needs Al Smith's support. Al Smith is the one who – he is the guarantor right now that can back him up against the legislature, but he's not going to have Al Smith for long. Al Smith is planning to run for president in 1928 and –

So Moses is like, I've got to get as much done as possible on these projects so people can see how great they are, and then people will provide pressure on the government to get my other projects completed. And so Moses' staff in a lot of this chapter is about how hard he pushes them. They're working from 9 a.m. to midnight on many days. If someone isn't giving Moses what he wants, he yells at them or even worse, shuts them out of his presence, just cold shoulders them completely.

And at the same time, Moses is still overseeing a lot of non-parks projects for Al Smith because he's still Al Smith's go-to guy for getting things done. And Caro talks about the schedule. Moses, he gets on the 6 a.m. train to Albany, which is a four-hour ride on Monday mornings. He goes to Al Smith. He says, can you give me a state-owned car and a chauffeur to take me back so that I'm

Because I know I'm going to miss the midnight train back home, and if you give me a car back, then I can start work tomorrow morning on Tuesday on park stuff. And he has spent at least three days a week in New York City for the State Council of Parks. He's shuttling between regional parks to check in on them. His park employees at the Long Island office and the old Belmont mansion, they say he never seems tired. He's working late into the night. He keeps them there until late in the night. The only person who can get him to leave the office is his wife, Mary. So sometimes the employees will sneak out and call her privately.

privately so that she will come to the office and tell him to come home. But then when he goes home, he does more work there. There's always a manila envelope full of new instructions for his employees the next morning in his house. And

His family is always around the office, and the people at the office talk about how they're working hard. Their boss is kind of a tyrant, but there's a sense of excitement, and there's a sense of a fun, informal atmosphere, especially for the 1920s. They don't have to wear their suit jackets while they're working and things like that. Their boss dresses like a slob and is always wearing an old, beaten-up hat.

It is the excitement of a startup, essentially, that they're working in, in this parks department. And this is the 1920s. Things are super basic. Moses is like, I want the areas around my parkways zoned a certain way so they can't be turned into houses. And the towns on Long Island are like, we don't have any zoning laws. We don't have those. So Moses' workers have to draft laws and then work with local town councils to get them put in place. There's so much work that has to be done, even beyond the designing of things. And the designing of things has to be

incredibly effortful because Moses wants his work to be as elegant and beautiful as possible. If you're designing a guardrail, if you're designing a light pole, if you're designing the sign that points to the bathroom, he's saying, "How do we make this pleasant to look at? How do we make this something that people will enjoy looking at and remember?" And his workers are very inspired by that, as I imagine anyone would be by someone who's pushing them to do their best, not just to work hard because we've got to make money for the company,

But to do the best work that they can do as designers. Yeah. Yeah. This is the part where I feel like the cult of personality makes the most sense to me when it comes to Robert Moses. Like sometimes when he's like shouting at people, I'm always like, I would just walk away from this. Right.

Fucking idiot. You know what I mean? But like this, this vibe, this is very like put out the school paper, you know, public radio. Everyone's get paid like fifteen thousand dollars a year. And, you know, like what we're still going to put out something amazing. We're going to work all the time like this. This really feels that I can get into the spirit of this moment.

There's a number of times in the book, this is one of them, and earlier when Moses was starting to work for Al Smith, that really resonate for me with my years at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We didn't get yelled at at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but there was a very hectic pace. You had to work really hard. You were putting out TV shows four nights a week that had a lot of substance in them. But you felt like

This exact feeling of I'm being pushed to do my best and I'm doing something that feels important and I want to do it as well as possible and I want to make it as funny as possible while also saying something. And there's something very exciting about that, especially when you're young and a lot of the people working for him are relatively young men. There's an excitement to that.

doing that, especially when you have the energy to do it. Later on, as we'll see coming up soon, people with families also have to work this hard, and it is not as easy. But I see why some of these guys who are working for him here go on to work for him for decades, and will defend him to Caro throughout. So...

They got to do work on Jones Beach. It's the winter. We're going to wait till the winter is over to survey this beach, right? No, we're not going to do that. You have to go out. We have to get it done. Go out there. Well, sometimes the water freezes and we can't get off the beach. So bring rations with you so you can live there. At one point, the bay freezes for 10 days and most surveyors have just trapped there and they just eat nothing but pancakes because that's all.

All they brought with them is pancake fix and they can never eat pancakes again because they spent 10 days eating pancakes. The beach level, it's too low to keep the ocean from rising above the road at times. So they're going to have to fill this beach with 40 million cubic yards of sand fill taken from the bottom of the bay. It has to be dredged up and spread over 17 miles.

It's the winter. The crew is living on the ships in the winter of 1927 to 1928, working all day to get it done. The bay bottom sand, it's too fine to stay down when it gets windy. It blows in your face. Now we've got to plant millions of clumps of beach grass by hand to hold it down. We've got to do it in the winter. So you've got guys by hand kneeling in the sand, digging holes to plant beach grass as wind is buffeting them and it's freezing. They're just doing it because Moses knows they have to get it done enough before Smith gets out of office.

The contractor who's building the causeway, he's like, look, I'm out of money. I can't meet my payroll. So if we don't get another $20,000, we're not going to do it. Moses can't get the government to pay it to him. So as he always has done, he turns to his mom and borrows that money from his mother, which again, it is bonkers to me. The idea where it's like, well, this is a government project, but we got to get it done. So mom, can you give me $20,000 so I can pay these guys to build a highway?

It's so funny. He's ignoring legal injunctions to stop working. Like he's still working. And he is building Jones Beach and he's getting closer and closer to the point where the landscape stops being his and starts belonging to Babylon Township. He needs that land before he can build the roads that are going to reach his beach and reach other places that make that land valuable. And he doesn't want someone to see that the road is going there, buy it up and build Jones

crappy, gaudy beach stuff. He wants it for himself because he needs to someday be able to build his bridge that goes from there to Fire Island. He has so many plans he needs this land for. He tries threatening the Babylon town board. It doesn't work. He's unpopular there. He's living there at the time. So when his wife goes to the stores to get to buy things, she's getting dirty looks from the people in town. One day,

He's practicing driving in case he ever does it. He's never going to. He meets an old man, and the old man is like, hey, my father was a judge in the county, and he and another judge, they had to resolve a case about who owns the Bay Bottom, this sacred Bay Bottom that Babylon Township has been leasing out to fishermen. It's there. It's the thing they've been protecting for generations. Hey, why don't you go talk to this other old man who dealt with the case? He has something interesting to tell you. And this other even older man tells Moses. Yeah.

When they were looking at this, who knows how many years back, they discovered that there were two laws that were going to be passed in the mid-19th century, giving half the Bay Bottom to Nassau County and half to Suffolk County. The Nassau County half passed. The Suffolk County half, they never got around to it. They never passed it. So that Bay Bottom that Babylon treats as sacred and they lease out and they don't want anyone ever to impinge on it.

They don't actually own it.

I'll reveal to your citizens that you have spent 70 years leasing it out to fishermen when you don't even own it because you never bothered to finish the job of getting legal control over it. And they go, okay, okay, well, we'll hold a referendum. How about that? We'll hold a referendum about whether you'll get this land. And Moses says, that's fine. And you know what? This referendum, voting shouldn't just be open to taxpayers here.

It should be open to anyone who lives in town, including the employees of my projects that are living here temporarily. And you know what? We're going to hold it on the day of a primary. But the primary hours, voting is going to be open until 9 o'clock.

The referendum hours, the voting is going to end at six. And so they're bringing in by car state employees from out of town to vote. There's no clear voter registration rules. They can't tell people not to vote. People show up to vote after six and find that they cannot vote in the referendum or the primary. Even with all that, the referendum ends. Moses wins by seven votes. And so with all of that, and he barely gets it, but now he finally has that land. And I just love –

I love that it feels, again, like a movie where it's like, if only I had some special information I could use to get this land. And an old man says, well, you might look back here. Where'd this old man come from? Look, these were the days when there was, if you want information, you had to find an old man so he could tell you. They didn't have the internet. There weren't a lot of encyclopedias. You had to get an old man to give you some information. Yeah, yeah. And this is another instance of Robert Moses kind of using the sort of like,

Yes.

And it works a lot. I mean, Bill Moskowitz kind of taught him this stuff. We talked about in the last episode with the dancing halls when she cleaned those up where she said, I could reveal that you are running these places of predation or we can register them and no one has to know about it. And he's using those lessons he learned from Bell that instead of a frontal attack off

Often you can get around the back and make an agreement with your enemies that they won't like, but you'll get what you want. And he's not in it. Look, he's like a reality show contestant. He's not here to make friends. He's here to win. He's all about parks. He's not here to make friends with the Babylon Town Council. But he's running out of time. Smith's governorship is almost up. There's a law that says you cannot run for president and governor at the same time in New York State, and Smith wants to be president so badly.

And so Moses, he's working fast. In less than three years, he's got all the land he needs for the Southern State Parkway. He has 21 miles of it in various stages of work. In that time, he's also expanded Long Island's state park space. It's gone from 200 acres to 9,700 acres across 14 parks. He's acquired that land for about a million dollars, even though the land value at the time was more than 15 times that. Through picking up land the government already owns, making deals with people, trading things…

He started building facilities in those parks, bathhouses, baseball fields, picnic areas, playgrounds, diving boards, hiking paths, roads. Jones Beach in 1926 is nothing but sand. Now it's got these two enormous, these beautiful bathhouses, and here is another passage that I'd love to read to you just about the immediate effect of this after this hurry, this frenzy of work.

So...

There was this need. People do love these parks. They're already using them. And there's also a foreshadowing here of what's going to happen when Moses builds roads. Later on, he's going to build expressways and bridges to cut down on traffic only for more and more cars to fill up these roads. And he's seen that happen with people. But here there's something kind of joyous about it because it's like, yeah, people are using the parks. This is amazing. This is great. He's already making this dream happen in reality.

And the press loves him. They give Moses all the credit. He's becoming a popular hero in New York. And Robert Caro has an interesting comparison here where he's like, Moses was getting far more New York headlines than Einstein's new theory of relativity. Einstein had a new version of the theory of relativity that was coming out at the same time.

And, yeah, it's an interesting way to measure relative popularity. Totally. Because it's not like, you know, there's newsies on the street corner going, extra, extra, read all about it. Time slows down as you approach the speed of light. Oh, my God.

But it's a – I guess it shows you how big a name Moses is. Even the most famous scientist in the world is getting less press. One funny thing is they keep giving him middle initials in the press even though he doesn't have ones. They're making up middle initials for his name. He's like Robert A. Moses or Robert T. Moses. And the legend is being built. Here's this public servant. He doesn't care about making money. He makes very little money, but he wants to build parks. And now his Long Island dream is pretty much safe. But –

He's actually accomplished even more than it seems because while he's been building all this Long Island stuff, he's been buying up land and preserving parks upstate in New York also. There's all this land around Lake George and almost none of his own by the state, and it's been opened up to development and logging. And he persuades some of the rich old men there to give him 11,000 acres of land for the bargain basement price of $75,000.

And he's preserving Revolutionary War battlefields at Fort Stanton and at Saratoga, over 10,000 acres of Whiteface Mountain, and he's absorbed 70 parks that were kind of already there but not run on a professional basis for another 125,000 acres. He's buying up land in the Adirondacks and the Catskills, or at least obtaining it, and he's building facilities in these places. But since the

The people upstate don't care about Long Island parks. They don't use those. And the people in New York City, they don't care about the upstate parks. Nobody but Moses really seems to have a total understanding of just how much land he's now made into public parks and how much land is now under his personal control. Yeah. And they don't really understand how much all of this success has changed him. Yes. Right. And Carol ends this chapter talking about how amazing it is. The most remarkable thing maybe is that the...

These parks and parkways, they're so close to the plans that he first presented in the early 1920s. He has – in this short amount of time, he has made his dream either a reality or about to become a reality purely through the power of –

political sliminess and pushing people really hard and lying to people and just being general. Sowing them into oblivion. Yeah, exactly. Not showing up to his own depositions, you know, things like that. Yeah. We skipped over that, but there's a part during the lawsuit that Macy has against him where he's not showing up because he's too busy. And then also his lawyer just stays away for one day. He says, I'm too busy. I can't show up at court. And then when the court reconvenes, he's like, well, certainly we can't.

I wasn't even here yet last time. We can't do anything now. What kind of a court is this having trial without me even present? I wasn't even here. This is outrageous. All right. Moving on. Next chapter is chapter 14. Changing. Elliot, what is Carol referring to when he says?

changing here? Well, everyone knows that ch-ch-ch-changes, time may change you, but you can't change time. And in this case, power can also change you, but you can't change power, I guess. Robert Moses is, before our very eyes, through Caro's eyes, is changing as a result of suddenly having power. All the negative traits he had before have become

enlarged and kind of enhanced because people can't say no to him. So the arrogance, the impatience, the condescension, his refusal to compromise, those were all there in his character. Again, he was Bella Cohen's son. He has her qualities, but now he also has the power that means he doesn't have to hide those qualities. He doesn't have to temper them. And his earlier idealism is giving away to...

the easier way to do things, the more effective way to do things. He no longer has as much of a positive path set before him to follow. He has power now, and he's determined to do things his own way no matter what. And so he starts lashing out at people who disagree with him. If you're on the phone with him and you disagree with him, he'll just hang up on you. He doesn't care who you are. He ignores the press. He insults legislators to their faces. There's one particular passage here that I'd love, Roman, if you and I could talk about when a particular legislator named Jeremiah F. Toomey

the Senate Finance Committee chairman. He represents Brooklyn. He stops by to talk to Moses about a bill that Moses has that might provide some patronage, and it was reported to Caro as happening this way. Roman, would you prefer to be Mr. Moses or Mr. Toomey? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Let me do Bob Moses. Let me do Bob Moses. Okay, you'll take the plum part. That's fine. You're the boss. That's okay. A very Moses move to do that. So...

This is how apparently Toomey told the story. Toomey says, Bob, it looks like there'll be a lot of jobs out there. And I was wondering if we could get a couple. Well, what did you have in mind, Jerry? Jerry mentions one job and Moses says very softly, very politely. Do you have anything else in mind, Jerry? Jerry completely taken in, thinking that for once this fellow is going to be reasonable, mentions a couple of other jobs. And Moses says, Do you have anything else in your mind, Jerry?

Jerry says, well, that's about all. And Moses says, Jerry, you can take that bill and stick it up your ass. Perfectly done. So that's the way he talks to the legislators that he's working with. He's just he's like, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Of course. Anything else you want? Well, get the hell out of my office. Like it's I love that. Not just that he yelled at him, but that he led him along. Right. Took him down the garden path, you know, to get there. I think that he projects such invincibility.

You guys are asking Kara about this. Why didn't people just fire him or accept his resignations eventually? His psychic armor is only growing more powerful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's how Moses is dealing with his...

He's got ostensible opponents. These are like the Republicans in the legislature, but he's also dealing with his ostensible allies that way. One of the ways he was able to get his bill passed that gave him all this power was because he had the support of the people who would become the members of the State Parks Council, these older men. They're pillars of their communities all over the state, and they run little parks, and they don't like how fast he's moving. They see that…

This land, when we change it, we can never go back. We can never undo these changes. So let's take our time with it. They don't like his methods for taking land. They don't want to lose control of their own individual parks. And he had promised them, this state parks council, this is an advisory council. This is not a supervisory council. And they soon learn...

That's not the case anymore. Now that he doesn't need their support, he starts refusing their budget requests. He's rude to them, and they, like everybody, finally read the law that they helped him pass, and they go, oh, that's not what they wanted. And they cannot stop him from putting his own projects through. He controls enough votes on the council. They can't stop him from being elected as chairman of the council.

And some of this is genuine philosophical differences about how land should be used, whether it should be conservation or recreation, but other is, is just about power. And there's one story in particular that Caro tells that we'll, we'll go over quickly where the treatment of two members of the Niagara state park commission, uh, the elderly judge clear water and the also elderly Ansley Wilcox, uh, judge clear water is a former political power in New York state. And he was semi-retired, but he went to lobby in Moses behalf, uh,

during the Taylor State fight. Ansley Wilcox, Carroll presents him as almost single-handedly responsible for making Niagara State Park a thing. That when he was a young man, he surveyed it on his own and then lobbied to get it made a park and has caretaken it for years. And they also want to develop the park. They're not disagreeing with Moses about developing the park in some way. Wilcox is dying of cancer. He wants to see this park finished and used before he dies. So they agree with Moses' plans for the most part, but they want to control it. This is their park. They've been running it for a long time now.

They don't agree with all of Moses' individual decisions, and they don't really care about this larger parkway system that Moses sees as a piece of. They're not part of that. They just like this Niagara Park. They've arranged for the Niagara Power Company to buy a little bit of land that the park needs for its roads and to donate that land to the park. And Moses uses this benevolent thing that they've done.

in order to start rumors that Wilcox and Clearwater, who at this point also, Caro relays it on, are very sick old men. Like, they're both sick. They can't even go to all the meetings. Moses uses that to start rumors that they are colluding with the power company for profit. And there's a bunch of machinations. There's an investigative hearing where during the hearing, they refuse to admit that there are charges they're investigating. And then they release, then a report gets written that says there's no problem here and the report doesn't get released. But Wilcox keeps saying, can you send me the report so I can clear my name? And Moses says,

sends around a letter that's meant as a reply to Wilcox without sending Wilcox's letter where it's like, I don't know why you sent this insulting letter to us. I don't know why you had to take this abusive tone. And Wilcox is in such bad health that it takes him five days to dictate this 10-page letter laying out the facts of what happened, accusing Moses of abusing his power. And at the end of the letter, he says, you know, few will read this letter and fewer still will understand it. And Karos says,

He was right, and on page 254 he goes,

And he says that Moses has removed all the plaques from the park that mentioned Wilcox's name and replaced them with plaques that mentioned Moses's name. And the parkway that gets built there is the Robert Moses Parkway. The dam that will someday be built there, this huge power dam, will be the Robert Moses Dam. He has erased Wilcox's memory from the park he created. And it's like, what? Come on. Why are you doing that? What are you doing that to this old man for? Yeah.

I mean, there's a kind of cruelty to it that is really present here that it's hard to get over. Yes. And Robert Carroll has a habit in his books of kind of lionizing and sanctifying old men who represent a previous way of doing things and whose passing symbolizes –

the passing of the old way and the rise of the main character's way of doing things. He's been criticized for the way he handled Coke Stevenson, who was running against Lyndon Johnson for the Senate in the book Means of Ascent. But here it's kind of hard to see what the negative side is of these two guys, and it just shows how unnecessarily cruel –

Moses's treatment of them is how, what little threat they were to his plans and how he had to do this. And Carol, I love that Carol gets in that little bit of like, um, you know, Indiana Jones hero action by being like, I'm the one who found that, that letter in that dusty folder in the, in the warehouse. It's so good. I like, I like when he reveals a little bit of his process and it comes through and, and, and there's no other way to really talk about it. You know, like it,

He does this in the Lyndon Johnson books, too. It's just like he gets the notebook of the guy who fixed all the ballots when he won his first Senate seat. It has the same thing. And I do – you know, what really churns your stomach is the Kafkaesque trial quality to this, that they get accused of something, but then they say they're not really accused, so they can't really fight it. And then they get stuck in this just –

vague accusations that they're colluding with someone in this weird way and for this public servant or you know whatever this guy committed to a mission which is a pretty noble mission and it's just it's just sort of

How someone with a mission can just totally just like undermine someone who has been acting in good faith most of his life. It also it emphasizes what Moses thinks matters, which is having your name on a place. Right. Like, you know, it's like I'll take that away from him. That'll be the sort of ultimate punishment. Right.

Amazing that it took this many people to figure out there should be a park where Niagara Falls is. I'm just realizing this guy is like, you know, we should put a park here. These waterfalls are very pretty. Lovely. We could have a place to stand to look at them. It shows you how much they took for granted.

These things will always be around and always be here. And I think it isn't until Niagara Falls becomes a tourist spot and gets really kind of gross. I don't know if you've been to Niagara Falls, but it's... It's a little gross. Aside from the falls, it's kind of... Maybe it's different. When I was a kid, I remember it was like

There's Niagara Falls and there is Ripley's Auditorium, like where they have like the sideshow animals. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But it is funny that they're like, well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You know, this is nice land. Maybe it should be a park here. But every idea has got to start with someone. And the other old men of the Parks Commission, they're like Governor Smith, fire Moses. And the legislators are like, fire Moses. And Smith refuses. First, parks are good vote getters. Second, no.

Smith is all about loyalty. He's loyal to me. I'm loyal to him. And third, nobody works harder for Al Smith than Robert Moses. And Al Smith can see the work that Moses is doing. He can see those parks. And this is – last episode, I talked about my slogan, noticeably improve people's lives, nipple. This is nipple in action. Moses is all about nipple.

And Smith recognizes that nipple. And it's possible that Smith is not aware of some of Moses' worst methods, but he knows Moses is a fighter. He likes that he's a fighter, and no matter how Moses treats everyone else, he always shows respect to Al Smith. He calls him governor, and he refers to nobody else ever.

As governor. No other governor he works with. He calls them all by his first name. But as Carol says, for Robert Moses, there would always be only one governor. And again, this is personalities. Al Smith just likes Robert Moses. They hang out together. He likes singing with him. It's hard to overstate in any industry, business, or organization how much you can let someone get away with when you like them and you're like, but I like being around that person. And how much you can get away with when people like to be around you.

There are so few bosses I have sung with in my life. There's an intimacy, too. We sing together. And now we're getting to the most strange section of the book, which is Robert Moses' dalliance with boxing. We're going to handle that after the break.

Do you know about all the important work the Humane Society of the United States does to protect animals? Together with millions of supporters, they take on puppy mills, factory farms, the fur trade, trophy hunting, animal cosmetics testing, and other cruel industries. This important organization responds in critical moments of crisis when animals need immediate help. But that is not all.

They're also laying the groundwork for change that will prevent tomorrow's cruelties by fighting for better laws, holding corporations accountable, and tackling the worst animal abuses. But there's so much more that needs to be done, and they need your help to protect all animals and prevent suffering. Feel confident knowing your support helps provide life-saving care and resources to animals in need. Your contribution, no matter the size, has the power to change lives.

By donating today, you can create a future where animals no longer suffer. Donate today by visiting humanesociety.org slash donations. That's humanesociety.org slash donations. Hi there. I'm a PBM. I'm also an insurance company. We middlemen are often owned by the same company. So, hard to tell apart.

We control what medicines you get and what you pay at the pharmacy. That's why today, more than half of every dollar spent on medicines goes to middlemen like us. Middlemen are driving medicine costs, and you don't know the half of it. Get the whole story at phrma.org slash middlemen. Paid for by Pharma.

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 going to show you a little bit of my living room.

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.

Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more to claim visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will automatically be applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.

So the next chapter we're covering and the last chapter we're covering today is chapter 15, The Curator of Cauliflower, which is a cryptic name to say the least, but we will explain it as we get there. And not if not if you're a boxing fan, not if you're a fan of the sweet science, you know, but by 1928. Okay.

Everything in Moses' 1919 state government reorganization plan has basically become law. The governor still doesn't have a four-year term. That happens in 1932 eventually. But he has drastically reshaped the government of the state. He's been a big part of fighting to get it passed. And finally, the governor of New York has real executive power, and Smith has been using that to push through labor reforms, welfare reforms. He's made the state more responsive to the needs of voters. He's cut taxes. He's done a lot of good work for the people of New York. Yeah.

And he streamlined what used to be like 150 departments into eight departments. It's really something. And when people talk about, you know, maybe people who are not really thinking about the things that Robert Moses built, but if you were to sort of put some of that stuff aside, all the nipple things, you could...

If you can take your eyes off the nipples for a moment, yeah. You could argue that this moment of state governance reform, which is repeated all across the nation, is maybe one of the biggest significant acts of Robert Moses' life. Yes. The same type of work he's doing in the physical world he has done in the world of institutional organization, which –

It doesn't sound as exciting maybe to most people, but it does to me. Just that the functioning of government, the mechanics of government has now been also molded in the way he thinks it should be done. And just as with his parks and roads, we're still living with that effect, you know, for better or ill in different ways. I mean, mostly this is for good. I mean, this is really one of those ones where I don't know if there's a real downside to any of this stuff. The downside is now it's harder for an Al Smith president.

to get into that place because like we were talking about with Jamel last time, you need kind of technical knowledge of government that maybe you didn't have before. You can get elected to office and there's plenty of clowns in Congress who don't have the knowledge of what they're doing but to get things done now, it's no longer a matter of being in touch with people at the local level and making those decisions. You need to know the systems but in most ways, it works much better. I mean the days of you need to pay someone off

to get something done in the United States are for most, to the most part, not around anymore. You know, the idea that to get, and to get a job, you no longer need to pay your ward boss a certain amount or kick back part of your salary. Those things as a big, as a big result of this organization are not an issue anymore, which is, it is hard to say that there's a bad side to that. Yeah. But there's a, but all this stuff that comes with this sort of like better

Better labor relations, better welfare reforms, all this sort of stuff happens when the professionalization of the government at this sort of level was quite good, you know. Right. This is good. And it's – this kind of moment is like kind of the golden moment of this. Like there's enough professionalization to knock out the sloppiness and the sort of basic level corruption on the street. But there's still kind of that –

idea of a little bit of patronage, a little bit of earmarks, a little bit of horse trading so that you can sort of swallow a pill of something that you don't necessarily agree with if it's going to just mostly make your life better or maybe the people in your district better. I think that push and pull is like when government is probably acting at its most powerful, is to have a little bit of all this stuff.

Yeah, when there's a system that's tempered by a kind of almost folk culture of politics and there's ideologies that are tempered by realistic practicalities. Like that's – yeah, that's that sweet spot. Al Smith is sitting right in that sweet spot. And one of the changes to that reorganization is that secretary of state is now in an appointed position, not an elected position. Who is Al Smith going to appoint into that job? There's no other option. It's got to be the guy who fights the hardest for him and does the most, Robert Moses –

And the Department of State that he now oversees, it handles everything that kind of doesn't fit into other departments. If you're filing incorporation papers, you've got to file with the Department of State. If you're compiling the results of an election, it's the Department of State. If you're an auctioneer and you need a license or you're a private detective and you need a license, it's the Department of State. And also, very importantly for this chapter and the title thereof, but also kind of –

because Secretary of State is apparently the most random job in New York State. The Secretary of State also had control over New York's Athletic Commission, which oversaw boxing in the state. And this means the Secretary of State controls a lot of patronage. There's all those people who want private detective licenses, and they're going to have to get those jobs to license them.

And Smith wants this to be the person who coordinates all of the state's construction and also coordinates the state's cabinet. So it's a hugely powerful position, and Albany does not want Robert Moses to have that power.

They hate him, but Smith is too popular. The newspapers are too eager to present this as the fat cats versus the parks man for them to actually vote against Moses' appointment. And now the big repercussion of this, the big immediate consequence, Moses finally has a job that pays a decent living. He's finally making $12,000 a year, and his mom is like –

At last, at last, he's going to start earning a living like this is all of his mother's work for decades has finally led to this moment that she doesn't care. He's powerful. He can finally support himself and his wife, which is which is it must be amazing to be reading the newspapers about your son who is building these structures all over the state. And then he's like, Mom, can you help me pay the rent? And she's like, yeah, I guess I'll do that. Yeah.

And Moses presents himself to the press. He's going to be the crusading secretary. He goes personally to strip the licenses from unscrupulous business operators and detectives, but he goes too far. He tries to regulate the corrupt ticket sales involved in boxing matches. He really doesn't understand the boxing industry. At one point, he says that if the judges at a boxing match can't decide, he will step in and make the decision, which is a bonkers thing to do.

It'll go up to the Secretary of State. It'll go up to the Secretary of State and see who wins. Which of you men enjoy the beach more? All right, you're the winner. And his reign as the curator of cauliflowers, as the press calls him, is...

Yeah.

And it turns out that the ticket box office can't handle all the people buying tickets. And so like these boxing matches are like one third full because people are standing outside still trying to get in. And then he realizes for the first time, I think, and maybe the only time in this book that he's just in over his head. And he's just like, I don't want to deal with this.

And he probably just doesn't care enough. He's like, you know what? He does the calculus. He's like, people care about parks. That's a source of power. People don't really care that much about whether the boxing industry is slimy or not. I think they kind of accept. And at a certain point, you have to think he's like,

They could punch me if I keep pushing this. I'm dealing with people who punch other men for a living. And so for our younger listeners, and I mean listeners under the age of 80, what does cauliflower mean when it comes to boxing? So

I should have done research on this. My assumption always, since I read it, is that they're talking about cauliflower ears. Like boxers, they get their ears would become deformed. And it's just the sign of the times in the 20s that they would – they're like, hmm, your ears are becoming malformed from being hit in the face as part of your job. Let's give it a cute name. Let's call it a cauliflower ear because that's kind of what it looks like. It's like a little cauliflower. Yeah.

Yeah, it does. I mean, at no point are they like the curator of cauliflowers should stop people from having their ears ruined from boxing. We'll just give them a nickname that's based on it. You know, they just kind of understood it. So that's why it was not actual literal cauliflowers. He was not running a museum of vegetables and curating the cauliflower department.

But that's one of those times. Again, Robert Caro's writing this in the 70s. He doesn't feel the need, I think, to define it, does he? I don't think he goes out of his way. No. It's one of those ones where it's like, again, it feels like a non sequitur to us 50 years later. It is a complete sequitur in 1974. So this reign of being the curator of cauliflowers is sort of...

Quickly over. But he's still doing a bunch of other stuff as secretary of state. Yes, he is in charge of making the construction of new prisons and mental hospitals goes faster. The end at times he is going to do park building work and the governor will literally send state troopers to get him and force him to go to the nearest telephone so that the governor can make him do more things. And he is essentially co-running the government.

at this point for Al Smith, and he has no time for personal life. It's at this point, Carol says, Moses, he doesn't do sports except for swimming at night. He has no hobbies. He has no socializing. He can't go out to buy his own clothes. His wife has to do that. He can't go to the barber. The barbers have to come to his apartment to cut his hair, and he's always done a little bit of work in the back of his limousine. Now he is literally turning the back of his car into an office. It has extra seats. He has his secretary sitting

Hazel Tappan riding with him, taking dictation in the car. He holds meetings in the car, and there's another chauffeured car that's always following his car so that when he's done telling the secretary what to do, she can get out, get in that car, and be driven immediately back to the office with those new orders. And both cars are staffed with three drivers each working in eight-hour shifts, so they have 24-hour driving coverage. He is always working, and he's always on the move. He replaces his office phone

with a single line that just goes to his secretary. The phone has no buttons on it. He cannot call out from it. It can only come in and only when a secretary lets someone through. And if you are not Governor Smith, if you call, you're going to wait until he's ready for you. He will not just interrupt things to pick up the phone. Uh,

Every governor after Smith and every mayor of New York has to wait. Moses will not drop anything. They have to wait for Moses to take their call. He installs this buzzer system in his desk that connects to each of his executive's offices so he can call them individually right away. And as soon as he pushes the button, they know they have to drop whatever they're doing and go right to his office right away. Like he is –

It is such a – it's the 20s, but it feels like it is the parody of like a 1950s boss office where it's just like this special phone line. I mean only Commissioner Gordon really has a special phone like that usually, right? Like it's the president's hotline to Russia, and it's Commissioner Gordon's hotline to Batman. He refuses to have a desk. He just has a table because he doesn't want work shoved into drawers and forgotten about. He wants that table cleared off of work at the end of every day and –

he's just constantly working and just reading this part stresses me out so badly. I don't know if you had the same feeling. Except he has his daily swimming routine, which David, I know you have the same thing. I do. Well, I swim laps in a gym pool. I don't like what,

I feel like what he does is he like drives to the beach and just runs into it every morning. Yeah, he does. At like the crack of dawn, I have to assume. Like it's kind of amazing. It says he changes in his car, right? And then he just like jumps out of his car. Yeah. I remember that. So tell me as sort of an equally powerful man, you know, dedicated to swimming every day. What do you think if you could put us in the mind of Robert Moses, what is the swimming doing for him?

Well, if you are unable to listen to podcasts, I currently listen to podcasts while I swim. I don't think Robert Moses had that technology available to him. So you do like you zone out. My joke is that you think of death, but like in a fun way, right? You just sort of start meditating on the universe as you're kind of just like back and forth, back and forth, counting the laps.

I find swimming to be incredibly pleasant, but I don't swim in the ocean, which is very cold and has powerful waves and currents.

uh, every morning. Maybe I should, maybe I should do that. Yeah. And he swims at night too. It talks about how sometimes on the way home, he'll tell the driver to take him to Jones beach so he can run into the water and just swim out into the darkness. He's, he loves swimming. He's more fish than man at times. You know, he's like, right.

Aren't there stories where people are like, is he dead? And then he finally returns. He's gone in the ocean for so long that they're like, should we call the goddamn Coast Guard? Where is Robert? These are the parts that are mythic. And the swimming is not enough to stop the strain. He's starting for the first time to really show the strain of all this work. And there's a section here just about his temper that's starting up here. It says...

The fuse, always short, that ignited his temper had been chopped down to a nub. The broad smile with which he greeted underlings could disappear in an instant if the reports displeased him. The hard mask that replaced it would turn pale, almost white, as his rage mounted. And then a wave of deep red, almost purple, would seep up out of his collar and over his face.

The palm of his big right hand would begin to smack down on the table as he talked. And his secretaries, listening outside the closed door to his office, trying to smile at each other, would hear his voice begin to rise. Lunging out of his chair, he would stride around the room, bellowing, his eyes wild. And sometimes as he walked, he pounded his clenched fist into the walls so hard the skin was ripped from his knuckles. Oblivious to the pain, he would sit back down at his desk and grab the next batch of papers with bleeding hands. And it's like, this is written, the stuff with the colors and everything, I'm like...

I bet Robert Caro saw some of this while he was interviewing him. I bet he saw him get mad and saw this because it's so specific and so detailed. But it really makes me – it's like if you're in a room with that guy, it's frightening. I'm sure you'll do whatever he says to get out of that room. Yeah.

And his – the people who work under him, they talk about like because of this intercom system, they eat at their desks and they'll put anything away to go deal with him. It's not that he's calling on them all the time. He just has so complete control over them that they can't do anything else because they're waiting for him to come.

To call on them, you know, like there's no leaving. There's no that there's no that there's like if there's someone's having a barbecue, it's like, when can you be there? I'll be there in 45 minutes and he's there in 40. You know, like that is just they're always on call. And I can't imagine the stress of that.

It's incredibly stressful, and some of the Moses men, as they're called, they start being called Moses men, and they call him RM. They start to crack under the strain. Caro talks about more than one becomes an alcoholic, some that have nervous breakdowns, some that have marital problems. There's at least one suicide, although Caro does not mention suicide.

That person by name in the notes in the back, he says that he's kept that man's identity private out of sensitivity to the man's mother, which is also a very kind of old-fashioned way to do something in a book. But for all the people who are inspired by Moses and are being pushed to their best work and being molded by him into men they want to be, there are workers for him who are cracking under this strain because it is –

Like you're saying, it's so overwhelming. And exactly. Not because they are on call all the time. So even when they're not being talked to by him, they know that at any moment he might need them. And they're going to be expected to drop everything and go right towards them. But at the same time, there are some perks to working in the Moses man world. Yes. Yes. Because you have all this land and you have all these people who can build things. And so he just starts building houses for them.

Yeah. He'll use Parks Department resources to build houses for them on park land. The Parks Department pays for the utilities for the houses. If he feels like someone is not making enough money but the civil service regulations mean he can't give them a raise, he'll put their wives on the payroll so that they have a little bit of extra cash. It's a real carrot and stick thing. He's really taking care of them in some ways and –

Brutalizing them in others. And he also really trusts his people like he when he finds people that he can delegate to, he will let them do the job. And that's why he's able to get so much done so quickly, because, yes, there's there's whole parts of his like empire building that he can't possibly be present for every moment of it. But they handle it for him. Yes. He has a real eye for talent.

And he's good at picking people and saying, you can do this. Now you do it. And then leaving it up to them. I mean, it's how like Henry Stern, who ran the parks department for years, was one of like his sort of little protégés. And he ran things that way too. And like you would hear that about Bloomberg, who I covered as the mayor for a long time, of like if he delegated to you, you got to do whatever you want. You know, like he would sort of invest incredible, which could be good or bad, obviously, depending on how you felt about it.

the power being delegated, which is probably true here too. But I think it's classic municipal stuff, right? Yeah, you can't pull every lever yourself. Yes. And at this point, Moses has become the second most powerful person in the government and there's newspaper articles about it. He can do whatever he wants basically and Smith has his back. And

Robert Caro takes a moment to quote two speeches that Moses gave in 1927 to associations of Long Island real estate brokers where he seems to very kind of blatantly lay out his feelings about things. And he says, the future of Long Island is as a recreational community for New Yorkers. You can't go any farther than that.

East around here because you hit the ocean. You can only go west to the city. So that's where you have to look to for your future. That's going to require a lot of zoning and development. Your local governments, they're not equipped to handle it. So we're going to do it for you. And if you're opposed to what we're going to do –

We're going to defeat you because your opposition is stupid because this – all the things we're doing mean a lot of money going into your places, and if you don't like it, the money will go somewhere else. It doesn't have to go to Long Island. And so if you're opposing me, you're opposing money coming to you, and if some people get hurt along the way …

He can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. And he says, he's like, people who don't like the things we're doing, they can always go west. They can move to the Rockies if they want to, which is such a mean but also funny way to look at things. Like, you don't like this new park, this new parkway in Long Island? Go to the Rocky Mountains. No one's developing that area. And in his second speech, he talks about how sometimes to do the right thing

You have to do other things that might technically overstep the law, and he's becoming more and more comfortable with that and not only comfortable with doing it but comfortable with pushing back aggressively against anyone who tries to stop him. And Carroll quotes Francis Perkins, who we remember has known Moses for years now. They were young reformers together. She's working in the state government.

And she calls him and says, Moses, you're using non-union labor to build these bathhouses on Long Island. By law, you're only supposed to use union labor. You're being naughty. I think she uses the word naughty in it. And she's acting as a public official. She's calling him on breaking the law as part of her job. And he instantly becomes abusive and is like, I'm going to build these bathhouses and no one's going to stop me. These are for the people. And she says, we had known each other for years informally. And he's talking to me this way. And he's like, I'm going to build these bathhouses.

By the time he is eventually rebuked by a court for using non-union labor, again, as we said, it doesn't matter. The bathhouses are being used. You can tear them down. People are already in there changing. People would see them changing if you tore those bathhouses down while they're still inside. And he's becoming more – he's becoming kind of like a bully. When he drives around Long Island, his car is speeding over the speed limit. He has motorcycle troopers around his car that push other cars off the road so that

He can get where he's going and he's now using his power to make life easier for him because in his mind, it all counts towards this end goal of getting this stuff done. Yeah. But,

There are times when one power meets a greater power. Oh yeah, when an immovable force... Exactly, when an unstoppable force builder meets an immovable lands baron. And in this case, something that we don't see a lot is that he compromises.

because of his probably his familial familial association with autocon yes he's had to make deals with long island barons about the roots of his parkways usually it's like hey instead of running your road right next to my house can you put it like on the edge of my estate he's like that's fine can you uh make sure there's not an exit on the road near my property yeah we could do that but

There's one instance particularly, Otto Kahn, who is married to one of Moses' cousins. And Otto Kahn is one of these people who I know of as a rich person, but again, I don't know what his money came from or anything like that. What is it, David? Is it zinc? Is it what? Let's find out. How did Otto Kahn get his money? Let's see. He was known as the King of New York. Pretty good title to get.

I would say. It's that old classic, banking. Yes. Banking. The man had banks. I think he did a lot of railroad stuff with his money, it seems. He was the ablest reorganizer of railroads. What does that mean? I guess he would like

He would take over failing railroads. Yeah, he's a hedge fund guy. He was the Mitt Romney of his day, right? Totally. Except he would probably just be like, crush these workers! I mean, I don't mean to impugn him. I don't know if he said to crush workers. Probably. Assuming, yeah.

I assume he did. But he was also a patron of the Metropolitan Opera. So, you know, let's give him that. Is it David Koch who's like, I'm evil, but I love the ballet, so I will keep the ballet running. Yes. He does love the dang ballet. And as a devoted viewer of the Gilded Age, I, yes, now have learned that the Metropolitan Opera was basically a Netflix-style deficit spending scheme founded by

buy new money because they didn't like their box seats at the old opera, the Academy, which was wonderful to learn. I'm looking at this picture of Otto Kahn on Wikipedia and he looks like a child with a fake mustache on. He has the most triangular mustache I have ever seen.

Yeah, it's a real whisk broom of a mustache. It's like curling up on the sides, but he looks like he has a real Richie Rich kind of vibe. And then this big black mustache on his face. You know, I always look at these guys and I think like, God, they had so much money. They controlled so much land. And they didn't have like air conditioning, though. Like, you know, how good was life for an Otto Kahn?

I totally agree. They didn't have air conditioning and they didn't have like Tylenol. Exactly. When you read about rich people hundreds of years ago and they're still complaining about bed bugs and it's like, yeah, I guess you knew you were going to eat. That was the basic benefit of being rich. To be clear, there were benefits. It was good. Yeah.

When somebody asks like Gore Vidal, like, you know, this sort of noted historian and, you know, and a writer of history books, you know, you know, what is the time that you've, you know, written about that you would want to live in? And he's like, no. Yeah.

I'll tell you one word. Count me out. Anesthetic. Anesthetic. It's like that's enough of a reason to live now and not any other time in history. Yeah. So Otto Kahn, you know, finally he has this golf course, I guess, right? He's the golf course guy? Yes. He has a golf course in Long Island and the Northern State Parkway is going to go through it. And he says to Moses, I'll give you $10,000 to fund surveys for the land,

if you don't cross my golf course. And Moses goes, sure, I'll do it. And that means shifting the route a little farther south, which goes through the estates of two other rich, powerful men. And they say, we don't want that. And he goes, okay. And he shifts it further south through the estates of other powerful men. I cannot begin to tell you how much of Long Island was owned by rich, powerful men at the time. And he shifts it further south and outruns the land of a farmer named James Roth. And

Roth and his wife, they had bought this land in 1922. They cleared it of trees and rocks themselves. They haven't even owned it that long. By now, it's 1927. They've been working for five years nonstop. The farm is just beginning to pay off. They can support themselves on the farm. When a parks official goes to tell Roth, the parkway is going to go through your land.

And he says, can you move it 400 feet south so that it'll go through the less fertile part of my fields? It'll still go through my fields, but not the part that I need to farm. And he's told, that's impossible. This road has been laid out on the basis of engineering considerations. This is where it has to go. And we see that Moses will shift the road over three miles for the rich and the wealthy, but for a farmer, he will not shift it 400 feet. The road is built. It cuts the farm in two. And now just to...

plant his fields and harvest his fields. He has to make a 50-minute both-ways round trip across the road.

to get to the other part of his field, and the farm is no longer profitable. They can't even sell it because instead of one big field, it's now two small fields. And the only consolation that he and these other farmers that this happened to have are that at least we know the road couldn't have gone anywhere else. It was the only place they could have built this road. And Caro again inserts himself and says, not until the author talked to them and the other farmers 40 years later did they think at any point that it could have gone through the rich estates instead of their own fields.

And it's just – it's Moses again. He is willing to do whatever it takes to get his projects done, and if that means crushing farmers so that he can accommodate the wealthy, then he will do that. Crush, crush, crush. Yeah, and so against the old Moses that we used to know and –

It's hard in this part because he's still doing this ostensibly for like a good thing, right? Like it's still for the parks and getting to the parks, right? Road. I mean, less so. You do have to get there. But it is one of these things that he uses kind of expertise and engineering and science to.

as this cudgel to get through what he wants because he'll often rest on this just like somebody will say, well, why can't you build it over here? Why can't you do this? And he'll just like, engineers, man, they told us this has to be where it has to be, which is almost never the case. But he really does use that for people who won't stand against him. That's a really powerful argument of just like, I guess this is the way the world works. But rich people know

that that's not the way the world works. You know, like that you can pay enough money to build around a thing if you want to. But these, you know, these farmers, they don't have a concept of this and they really suffer because of that.

And it's a foreshadowing. Again, there's so much foreshadowing because Moses' life lives in cycles. It's a foreshadowing of what's going to happen later on with his larger projects within New York City and especially what he does to the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx much later to build the Cross Bronx Expressway. One thing that's also notable about this auto con moment is –

The moment where Robert Caro talks about interviewing Robert Moses and he mentions the name Otto Kahn and Robert Moses is like, this interview is over. Yes. Because he knows immediately. That's when he sniffs it out, right? When he's like, oh, wait a second. You're not just writing about how great I am?

Yeah, after hours and hours of Karo sitting there while Moses regales him with tales of his amazing projects and shouldn't there be a road over there? There should be. Yeah, you're right. This is the name that Karo mentions and Moses says.

Our time is over. You got it like this. That's the music's playing. You're going to have to leave. And it's interesting because it is it's kind of such a minor transgression on his part, like taking ten thousand dollars to kind of move this compared to so many other things that he does that is so awful. But I think it has a.

It has a kind of taint of of corruption that Robert Moses is really allergic to. You know, I think that I think that's the nature of it. Like he doesn't sort of he'll say stuff like, oh, you know, like the rabble got upset when I was going to move 500,000 of them, you know, out of their neighborhood. But we just ignored them. And he has no compunction when it comes to that sort of thing. But this little payoff really sort of gets under his skin, I think.

I wonder if there's – this is me armchair psychologizing even though I'm sitting in an office chair, not an armchair. I wish I was sitting in an armchair. I'd be more comfortable than this swivel chairman. I wonder if this is a moment that he looked back on as this is the beginning of when I really changed for myself. Before I could say I am breaking the law, but I'm doing it –

to keep the rich from stopping me from building things for regular people. And this is the moment where it is, no, I'm hurting regular people to help the rich, something that I had not really done before. And I wonder then if it had some kind of like

psychological importance for him as a you know kind of like an original sin that he cannot he can't explain it away or rationalize it the way he could his other stuff maybe yeah I mean I like that explanation for it I mean this is what a book club is for it's just sort of like figure out what you think of these meanings you know but

But that makes sense to me because it strikes me as, you know, just like surprisingly mild for all the things that he has done for this to be the thing that where Robert Moses really is like, oh, I don't want to talk to this Robert Caracai anymore because he brought up this one transaction is really something. No, I mean, he just must think of it as like a time he didn't lose per se, but he

you know, he couldn't just run roughshod and yeah, maybe, maybe it still irked him. It's also possible that he saw that as the thread that the loot one loose thread that Carol could pull that he's like, Oh, if you know about that, you must know about all this other stuff. Oh, we cannot talk anymore. A hundred percent. It's like, if you, there's, you know, you must've found the Wilcox letter. Yeah. Who told you that someone ever defied me? Wait a second. That's supposed to be top secret. Um,

Robert Moses is – he's ensconced. He has power, and he has the – something that Caro doesn't get into here but which I was kind of reading the underlying subtext of it is –

This moment where Robert Moses almost gets access to even greater power because it's 1928, June. Al Smith wins the Democratic nomination for president, and Moses is there with him and Belmoskowitz. They're celebrating the news. Moses isn't involved with the campaign because Al Smith has basically said, you are governor while I'm running for president. And Al Smith –

for people who are not familiar with his life story does not win the presidency in a very large part because he would have been the first catholic president and there is still this intense anti-catholic prejudice you know 32 years later when john f kennedy is running for president he still has to deal with the fact that a lot of the americans do not trust catholics and al smith for the rest of his life is kind of bitter about he was denied this thing

because of who he was. And Caro doesn't talk about it, but if he was president, you have to imagine he might have tried to get Moses to come with him. That, you know, Jamel was saying last episode,

You get into office and you bring the people that you trust with you and get them jobs. And I wonder if Moses ever wondered about what he might have been if the man who trusted him more than anything else and who he always relied on him, he could always rely on, became the president of the United States of America. Especially because, as we'll see, one of his diehard enemies does become president later, and it doesn't stop him that much, but it annoys him quite a bit. Right.

It stops things for him, right? There are certain things. Yeah, some things. We'll get into those details. But Moses is like,

There's still so much left to do. I'm the acting governor right now, but there's still so much left to do. I've got to finish the Southern State Parkway before the next governor comes in so that people can see how great it is, and the new governor won't be able to stop me from doing more. And I've got to complete this road to Jones Beach so people can see how great that is. And as 1928 ends, he's still sending out workers at this furious pace. He's got to do more work on these roads, and the chapter ends thusly on page 282.

Those close to Robert Moses knew that there was justification for his urgency, a reason for the desperation, which now seemed to underlie his haste. Without his loyalty to me, Moses was to say about Al Smith, I could have done nothing. He had had Al Smith and his loyalty for ten years, but now he was to have Al Smith no more, and the man who was to follow Moses' greatest friend into the governor's chair was Moses' deadliest enemy.

End of chapter 15. So New York elected Skeletor, correct? Yes, exactly. That was 28. New York was really ahead of the rest of the country because the rest of the country wouldn't elect a Catholic and New York would elect an evil skeleton warlock from Eternia, not even born in the United States. Oh, God. It's just so funny that like Caro is doing this like bum, bum, bum about like a...

you know, a genteel politician in many ways, although a very powerful one, obviously. A very powerful one. So the next episode of the Power Broker Breakdown Show, we're going to find out who is Moses' deadliest enemy. I'll give you a hint. His initials are FDR. And then what else is going to happen? Moses is going to take Manhattan and he's going to have

Such a more lasting impact than the Muppets had when they took Manhattan. We're finally going to get to see more of Jimmy Walker, the slimy, dandy politician. He's mayor now, and he's got his own casino in Central Park. We're finally going to get into the genuine accusations of racism that Caro has for Moses. And Al Smith, after his governorship, he's going to get his own key to the Central Park Zoo in what is, I find to be such a beautiful and touching moment. It doesn't make up for the...

accusations of racism that Moses has, but Moses does to keep taking care of the governor. That's going to be all that and so much more. Roman, what pages are we covering in the next episode? We'll be covering pages 283 to 401 from chapter 16, The Feather Duster, to chapter 21, Year. And that's the next episode of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Power Broker.

David Sims, it was such a pleasure to have you here. It's been delightful and thank you for making me crack this book open for the first time in like 15 years. I'm going to be reading along with you eagerly for the rest of this series and I'm honored to be considered

The way this works is that I'm considered an equal of Robert Caro. Yeah, I think that's exactly how that works. Yeah, you can say that. You, Jamel, Conan O'Brien, you're all on the same level. We're peers. That's right. Can I ask you, while we have you, you watch a lot of movies. You're a movie critic.

There's been numerous attempts, or at least people have optioned the rights to this book and have tried to tell the story of Robert Moses in different ways. What do you think it would take for this to be a good piece of filmed entertainment? I mean, I don't know that it's possible. And I also would fear that, of course, it would be turned into a sort of sludgy 10-episode prestige streaming drama. Not that that would be necessarily bad, obviously, given that it's like...

a large sort of story to tell. When you think of like the Clint Eastwood, J. Edgar Hoover movie, right? Like J. Edgar Hoover is sort of very similar figure to Robert Caro in American life. Robert Moses. Robert Moses, not Robert Caro. J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Caro have very little in common. I want to be clear about that. You know, investigators, they find secret information. Yeah.

Like, you know, I read G-Man, which was this big biography of Hoover a couple years ago. And like, it's another... He's another guy where it's sort of at a certain point, people are like, how do you know everything and know everyone? And I can't get rid of you. And every subsequent president has to kiss his hand versus the other way around. Like, why does it work this way? And like...

Clint Eastwood's movie just tries to do like okay well uh Jager Hoover was a young man and he aged into an old man we're just gonna rush through it I would probably try to do more of a like let's uh let's concentrate on Moses at the end in the 60s when he's like I don't think there should be Shakespeare in the park you know when he's like you know finally turned into an actual cartoon villain and and you know parallel it with this time in his life right with the with the accumulation of power in the 20s

And the ways in which he maybe started out somewhat idealistically and figured out the best ways to...

get things done was not very idealistic. I don't know. That's probably the approach, but it's a really hard story to tell in less than 1300 pages, which is what Robert Caro, that's his name. I got it right. Learned when he wrote this book. It's, it's, it's so hard to get across the scope and those details while boiling it down. And I, this is something I only thought about until just now. So tell me if I'm off my rocker with this.

The only movie I can think of that gets across this same kind of feeling is there's a section of the Russian movie Andrei Rublev. It's a Tarkovsky movie from 1966 where this young guy is put in charge of making an enormous bell for his town's church. And to get it done, he is pushing the workers so hard and he becomes a tyrant. And they're like, this isn't how your dad who we worked for used to do it. And he's like, this is how I do it now. And he is in such tension.

hoping that the bell doesn't fail when it's finished because that's the end of his life if this bell doesn't work. And I feel like that movie was the only time I've seen something that gets across the idea of someone who is so invested in a construction building project that they're giving up everything and they're pushing people to their limits and it becomes their entire life and their whole being and all they're focused on is the end point.

It's the last chapter from what I remember.

So maybe if we can bring Andrei Tarkovsky back to life. He died in 1986. Maybe bring him back. Maybe he can do it. I don't know. That would be great. I would love Tarkovsky to be revived, told all about Robert Moses, who he might not know too much about, and then set to work. Yes. Recreating his life. Can I see my family? Can I see how they turned out? No. Get to work on the movie. How's Russia doing? Don't worry about it, Andrei. We need you to read this book. Okay.

Oh boy. Again, David, it was a pleasure. Can you tell people where they can find your work and find you? Yes, of course. I'm a film critic at the Atlantic where you can read my reviews of films and such. And I host the podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David, with my co-host Griffin Newman, where we tackle directors, filmographies, movie by movie, directors who have gotten a Moses-esque blank check to make a crazy passion project at some point in their life.

And Roman and Elliot have both been on and both should return. I would love to. I love your show. It is my favorite good movie podcast. Good save. Good save, Roman. Of course. Of course. I saw you about to say favorite movie podcast and you caught yourself and you saw me glaring at you. But again, it was great to have you here. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Seriously.

That's it for this episode. Again, next month we'll be covering chapters 16 through 20. That's the middle chunk of part four, The Use of Power. And remember to join our Discord server. You'll be able to connect with other Power Broker fans and keep the discussion going. The link is on our website, or you can go to discord.gg slash 99pi. We did an AMA there a couple weeks ago, and it was so fun, so keep an eye out for other events. And as always, you can check me out on my other podcast, The Flophouse.com.

which I must assume is Roman's favorite bad movie podcast. It absolutely is my favorite bad movie podcast. The 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by committee, music by Swan Real, mix by Dara Hirsch.

99.9 P.I.'s executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Sarah Baik, Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashma Dawn, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and more.

and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence. The art for this 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 us on all the normal social media sites, as well as our Discord server, the aforementioned Discord server, which is our favorite place to hang out right now.

You can find a link to that and every past episode of 99 P.I. at 99 P.I. dot org. That's too bad you picked the one fictional universe. I don't know well enough to talk in. I mean, if we want to talk about it in terms of the Dune world, we could talk about it that way, you know, but anyway. OK, well, I mean, no, no, no, sorry. Go on. So he's he's he's like the melange spice that you need for navigation, you know.

Hi there. I'm a PBM. I'm also an insurance company. We middlemen are often owned by the same company. So, hard to tell apart.

We control what medicines you get and what you pay at the pharmacy. That's why today, more than half of every dollar spent on medicines goes to middlemen like us. Middlemen are driving medicine costs, and you don't know the half of it. Get the whole story at phrma.org slash middlemen. Paid for by Pharma.

Pulling up to Mickey D's just for drinks. Oh yeah, that's me. Nothing extra, just perfection and a straw. Coming in hot for the coldest cups on the block. Because there are drinks. Then there are drinks from McDonald's. Mix things up with any size lemonade or sweet tea for $1.49. Perfect with our classic fries. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

Meet the next generation of podcast stars with Sirius XM's Listen Next program, presented by State Farm. As part of their mission to help voices be heard, State Farm teamed up with Sirius XM to uplift diverse and emerging creators. Tune in to Stars and Stars with Issa as host Issa Nakazawa dives into birth charts of her celeb guests. This is just the start of a new wave of podcasting. Visit statefarm.com to find out how we can help prepare for your future.

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.