--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Robert Moses represented a past that's a time when we wanted to build bridges and super highways and things that pretty much has gone out. We're not building super highways now. We're not building vast bridges like Moses built all the time.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Had Robert Moses not lived, not done what he did, New York would have followed the trail of maybe Detroit. Essentially, all the big roads, all the bridges, all the parks, the United Nations, Lincoln Center, the World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, and hundreds of other things he built. And I think it was the best book I ever read. In broad strokes, it's correct. Robert Moses had more power than any urban figure in American history. He built incredible monuments. He was ruthless and arrogant and honest.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, I am really, really excited about this one. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Kenneth T. Jackson about the life and legacy of Robert Moses. Professor Jackson is the preeminent historian on New York City. He was the director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History and the Jacques Barzun Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, where he has also chaired the Department of History. And we will be discussing Robert Moses. Professor Jackson is the author and editor of *Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York*. Professor Jackson, welcome to the podcast.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, thank you for having me.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So many people will have heard of Robert Moses and be vaguely aware of him through the popular biography of him by Robert Caro, *The Power Broker*. But most people will not be aware of the extent of his influence on New York City. Can you give a summary of the things he was able to get built in New York City?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: One of the best comparisons I can think of is that Caro himself, when he compared him to Christopher Wren in London, he said if you would see his monument, look around. It's almost easier to talk about what Moses didn't do than what he did do. All the roads, essentially all the big roads, all the bridges, all the parks, the United Nations, Lincoln Center, the World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, and hundreds of other things he built. He didn't actually do it with his own two hands, but he was in charge. He got it done.
--:-- And Caro, who wrote a really great book, I think the book was flawed because I think Caro only looked at Moses' own documents, and Moses had a very narrow view of himself. He thought he was a great man, but he didn't pay any attention to what was going on in L.A., for example. But clearly, by any standard, he's the greatest builder in American history. There's nobody really in second place. Not only did he build and spend this vast amount of money, he was in power for a long time, really a half century more or less. He had a singular focus. He was married, but his personal life was not important to him. He did it without scandal. Even Caro admits that he really died with less than he started with. He wasn't in it for money. He wanted power, and boy, did he have power.
--:-- He technically was subservient to governors and mayors, but since he built so much and since he had multiple jobs, that was part of his secret. He had as many as six, eight, ten different things at once. If the mayor fired him or got rid of him, he had all these different ways he was in charge of that the mayor couldn't touch. So people were afraid of him. And they also respected him. He was very smart. And he worked for a dollar a year. So what are you going to get him for?
--:-- As Caro says, nobody is ready to be compared with Robert Moses. In fact, he compares him with an act of nature. The person you can compare him with is God. He put the rivers in. He put the hills in. He put the island in. Compare that to what Moses did. No other person could compare to that. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but when you really think about Robert Moses and you read *The Power Broker*, you are stunned by the scope of his achievement, just stunned.
--:-- And even beyond New York, when we think of the interstate highway system, which really starts in 1954, 55, 56, and which is 40-something thousand miles of interstate highways, those were built by Moses' men, people who in their young life had worked with the parkways and expressways in and around New York City. So they were ready to go. Moses also worked outside New York City, mostly inside New York City. But he achieved so much.
--:-- Partly you need to understand it's not easy to get things done in New York. It's very dense, much twice as dense as any place in the United States, and full of neighborhoods that feel like little cities and are little cities and that don't want change. Even today, a place like Austin is heavy into development, not New York. You want to build a tall building in New York, you have to fight for it. The fact that he did so much in the face of opposition speaks a lot to his methods.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How did Moses do what he did? That is a huge question because it isn't happening anymore, certainly not in New York City. That's really why I wanted to talk to you and talk about this book. *The Power Broker* was released in 1974. At the time, New York was not doing well, which is to put it mildly. But today, the crisis we face is one where we haven't built significant public works in many American cities for decades. So it's interesting to look back on a time when we could actually get a lot of public works built very quickly and very efficiently and see if maybe we got our characterization of the people at the time wrong. That's where your 2007 book comes in. How was the book received 40 years after *The Power Broker* was released? What was the reception like? How has the intellectual climate around these issues changed in that time?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: *The Power Broker* is a stunning achievement, but you're right. *The Power Broker* is subtitled *Robert Moses and the Fall of New York*. He's thinking that in the 1970s, which is the bottom in New York's 400-year history. The city was bankrupt. Crime was going up. Corruption was all around. Nothing was working very well. My argument in the subtitle of the 2007 book or that article is *Robert Moses and the Rise of New York*. Arguing that had Robert Moses not lived, not done what he did, New York would have followed the trail of maybe Detroit and St. Louis and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and most cities in the Northeast and Midwest, which really declined. New York City really hasn't declined. It's got more people now than it ever did. It's still the number one city in the world by most standards. It's the global leader, maybe along with London. At one point in the 1980s, we thought it might be Tokyo, which is the largest city in the world, but it's no longer considered competitive with New York. New York and London are kind of alone at the top.
--:-- I think Robert Moses' public works activities... I just don't know that you could have a New York City and not have expressways. I don't like the Cross Bronx Expressway either and don't want to drive on it. But how can you have a world in which you can't go from Boston to San Francisco? You had to have it. You have to have some highways. And Caro had it exactly wrong. He talked about Moses and the decline of public transit in New York. Actually, what you need to explain in New York is why public transit survived in New York, whereas in most other American cities, the only people who use public transit are the losers: the old, the disabled, the poor. In New York City, rich people ride it. It's simply the most efficient way to get around and the quickest. So some of the things need to be turned on its head.
--:-- How did he get it done? How did he do it without scandal? When you think about how the world is in our time, when everything has either a financial scandal or a sexual scandal attached to it, Moses didn't have scandals. He built the Whitestone Bridge, for example, which is a gigantic bridge connecting the Bronx to Queens. It's beautiful. It was finished in the late 1930s on time and under budget, actually a little earlier. There's no such thing as that now. You're going to do a big public works project, and you're going to do it on time? And also, he did it well. Jones Beach, for example, for generations, has been considered one of the great public facilities on Earth. It's gigantic. And he created it. I know people would say, it's just sand and water. No, it's a little more complicated than that. Everything he did was complicated.
--:-- I think Robert Caro deserves a lot of credit for doing research on Moses, his childhood, his growing up, his assertion that he's the most important person ever to live in and around New York. Just think of Franklin Roosevelt and all the people who lived in and around New York. Moses is in a category by himself, even though most Americans have never heard of Robert Moses. That book made him famous. I think his legacy will continue to evolve and I think slightly improve as Americans realize that it's hard to build public works, especially in dense urban environments. And he did it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There's so much to talk about there. One of the interesting things from *The Power Broker* is Caro is trying to explain why governors and mayors who were hesitant about the power that Moses was gaining continue to give him more power. There's a section where he's talking about how FDR would keep giving him more positions and responsibilities, even though FDR and Moses famously had a huge enmity. He says no governor could look at the difficulty of getting things built in New York and not admire and respect Moses' ability to do things efficiently, on time, under budget, and not need him essentially.
--:-- But speaking of scandal, you talked about how he didn't take salary for his 12 concurrent government roles. But there's a very arresting anecdote in *The Power Broker* where I think he's 71 and his daughter gets cancer. For the first time, he had to accept salary for working on the World's Fair because he didn't have enough money. He was the most powerful person in New York and he didn't have enough money to pay for his daughter's cancer. Even Caro himself says that a lot of the scandals that came later in his life were just trivial stuff. An acre of Central Park or Shakespeare in the Park. It wasn't the actual things that took him down, just trivial scandals.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, in fact, when he finally was taken down, it took the efforts of a person who was almost considered the second most powerful person in the United States, David Rockefeller, and the governor of New York, both of whom were brothers, and they still had to lie to Moses to make him get out of power in 1968. But it was time, and he exercised power into his 70s and 80s, and most of it was good. The bridges are remarkable. The bridges are gorgeous, mostly. They're incredible. The Throgs Neck Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Triborough Bridge. They're really works of art. And he liked to build things you could see.
--:-- The fact that he didn't take money was important to him. He was not poor. I wouldn't say he was wealthy in New York terms, but he was not a poor person. He went to Yale as a Jewish person in the early 20th century. That's fairly unusual. And he lived well. So we can't say he's poor. But I think Caro was right in saying that what Moses was after in the end was not sex and not money. Power. He wanted power. And boy, did he get it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There's a good review of the book from Philip Lopate, I think. He made a good point: the connotation of the word "power" is very negative, but it's kind of a modern thing to have this attitude towards power where somebody who's just seeking it must necessarily have suspicious motivations. If Moses believed, and he was probably right in believing, that he was just much more effective at building public works for the people that live in New York, was it irrational of him or was it selfish of him to desire to work 14-hour days for 40 years on end in order to accumulate the power by which he could build more public works? There's a way of looking at it where this pursuit of power is not itself troubling.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, first of all, I need to make a point that it was not just New York City. Jones Beach is on Long Island. A lot of those highways, the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, were built outside the city. And also big projects like the Power Authority in upstate New York. He also was a consultant around the world in cities and transportation. So his influence was really felt far beyond New York City. And of course, New York City is so big and so important.
--:-- I think we might want to think about the counterfactual argument. Can you imagine... I can remember when I was in the Air Force, we lived next door to a couple from New York City. We didn't know New York City at the time. I can't remember whether she or he was from the Bronx or Brooklyn, but they made us understand how incredibly much he must have loved her to go to Brooklyn or the Bronx to see her and pick her up for dates. You couldn't get there. It would take you three hours to go from the Rockaways in Brooklyn to somewhere in the Northern Bronx. But the roads that Moses built... I know at rush hour they're jammed, but right this minute on a Sunday, you can whiz around New York City on these expressways that Moses built. It's hard to imagine New York without them.
--:-- The only thing Moses didn't do was the subway. Many people have criticized him because the subways were deteriorated between the time they were built in the early part of the 20th century and 1974 when Caro wrote *The Power Broker*. But so had public transit systems all over the United States. And the public transit system in New York is now better than it was 50 years ago. That trajectory has changed. All these other cities... Pittsburgh used to have 600,000 people. Now it has 300,000. Cleveland used to have 900,000 and something. Now it's below 500,000. Detroit used to have 2 million. Now it's 600 and something thousand. St. Louis used to have 850,000. Now it's 300,000. The steep drop in all these other cities in the Midwest and Northeast, even Washington and even Boston and Philadelphia, they all declined except New York City, which even though it was way bigger than any of them in 1950, is bigger now than it was then. More people crammed into this small space. And Moses had something to do with that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You write in the book, and I apologize for quoting you back to yourself, but you write: "Had the city not undertaken a massive program of public works between 1924 and 1970, had it not built the arterial highway system, and had it not relocated 200,000 people from old law tenements to new public housing projects, New York would not have been able to claim in the 1990s that it was a capital of the 20th century." I would like to make this connection more explicit. What is the reason for thinking that if New York hadn't done urban renewal and hadn't built the more than 600 miles of highways that Moses built, that New York would have declined like these other cities in the Northeast and the Midwest?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, you could argue, and friends of mine have argued this, that New York is not like other cities. It's a world city and has been. What happens to the rest of the United States... I accept a little bit of that, but not all of it. You say, well, New York is just New York. So whatever happens here is not necessarily because of Moses or different from Detroit. But I think it's important to realize its history has been different from other American cities. Most American cities, especially the older cities, have been in relative decline for 75 years. In some ways, New York has too. Its relative dominance of the United States is less now because there's been a shift south and west in the United States. But the prosperity of New York, the desire of people to live in it... one of its problems is it's so expensive. One reason it's expensive is people want to live there. If they didn't want to live there, it would be like Detroit. It would be perfectly free.
--:-- Moses' ways were interesting. First of all, he didn't worry about legalities. He would start an expressway through somebody's property and dare a judge to tell him to stop after the construction had already started. Most of the time, Moses... he was kind of like Hitler. I don't mean to say like Hitler, but what I mean is he had such confidence. You just do things and dare other people to change it. "I'm going to do it." Most people don't have that. I think there's a little bit of that in Trump, but not as much. I don't think he has nearly the genius or brains of Moses. But there's something to self-confidence. There's something to having a broad vision.
--:-- Moses liked cities, but he didn't like neighborhoods or people. I don't think he loved New York City. He really thought everybody should live in suburbs and drive cars. That was the world of the future and he was going to make that possible. He thought all those old law tenements in New York, anything built before 1901, were slums. They didn't have hot and cold water, often didn't have bathrooms. He thought they should be destroyed. His vision was public housing, high-rise public housing was an improvement. Now, around the United States, we don't think these high-rise public housing projects are so wonderful, but he thought he was doing the right thing.
--:-- He was so arrogant, he didn't listen to people like Jane Jacobs, who fought him and said, "You're saying Greenwich Village is a slum? Are you kidding me?" He thought it was a slum. Go to Greenwich Village today. Try to buy anything for under a million dollars. It doesn't exist. He saw old things, old neighborhoods, walking as hopelessly out of date. And he was wrong. He was wrong about a lot of his vision. Now we understand that. All around the country, we're trying to revitalize downtowns and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and gasoline and cars. But Moses didn't see the world that way.
--:-- It's interesting. He never himself drove a car. Can you believe that the man who had more influence on the American car culture, probably even than Henry Ford, himself was always driven? He was chauffeured. In fact, he was so busy that Caro talks about him as having two limousines behind each other. He would have a secretary in one and he would be dealing with business and writing letters. Then they would pull off to the side of the road, she would get out of his car, the car that was following would discharge the secretary in that car, they would switch places, and the fresh secretary would get in the back seat with Moses and they would continue to work. The first secretary would go to type up whatever she had to do. He worked all the time. He really didn't have much of a private life. There are not many people like Robert Moses. There are people like Robert Moses, but not so many. And he achieved his ideal.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There are so many ironies there. Not only did he not drive himself, he didn't appreciate the density of New York which many people now love. It's getting more dense, they're building tall buildings everywhere. He didn't really appreciate the diversity, the toleration. He himself didn't care about that, but it worked. I think we have to appreciate the fact that he did what was impossible, really impossible, and nobody else could have done what he did. If we hadn't done it then, we sure as heck wouldn't be able to do it in the 21st century when people are even more litigious. You try to change the color of a door in New York City, there'll be a fight. You try to do something positive like build a free swimming pool, fix up an old armory and turn it into a public space, there'll be people who'll fight you. I'm not kidding. And Moses didn't care. He says, "I'm going to do this."
--:-- When he built the Cross Bronx Expressway, which in some ways was horrible what he did to these people... Again, Caro mischaracterizes what happened. But it's a dense working class, let's call it Jewish neighborhood in the early 1950s. Moses decides we need an interstate highway or a big highway going right through it. He sent masses of people letters that said "get out in 90 days." He didn't mean 91 days. He didn't mean let's argue about it for four years. Moses meant the bulldozers will be bulldozing. That kind of attitude we just don't have anymore. It's kind of funny now to think back on it, but it wasn't funny to the people who got evicted.
--:-- But again, it's hard to imagine a New York City without the Cross Bronx Expressway. They tore down five blocks of dense buildings, tore them down and built this road right through it. They didn't worry about where they were going to rehouse them. They did, but it didn't work. And now it's so busy, it's crowded all the time. So what does this prove? That we need more roads, but you can't have more roads in New York because if you build more roads, what are you going to do with the cars? Right now, the problem is there are so many cars in the city. It's easy to get around in New York, but what are you going to do with the car? The car culture has the seeds of its own destruction. Just parking them or putting them in a garage is a problem. Moses didn't foresee those. He foresaw you're all going to live in the Long Island suburbs or Westchester suburbs or New Jersey suburbs, park your car in your house, and come into the city to work. Now the city is becoming a place to live more than a place to work. What they're doing in New York as fast as they can is converting office buildings into residential units. He would never have seen that people would want to live in the city who had options, that they would reject the single-family house and choose high-rise and choose the convenience of going outside and walking into a delicatessen over driving to a grocery store. It's a world he never saw.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The thing you pointed out earlier about him having the two limousines and the enormous work ethic and the 90-day eviction. I'm a programmer, and I can recognize this trope immediately. Robert Moses was a startup founder, but in government. That attitude is like Silicon Valley. We all recognize that.
--:-- I think we should go back to what you said earlier about why governors or mayors couldn't tell him what to do. There are many scenes in *The Power Broker* where he will go to the mayor who wants to do something else, and Moses would damn it, throw his pages on the desk and say, "Sign this. This is my resignation. I'm out of here." Because the mayors and governors love to open bridges and highways and do it efficiently and beautifully, and Moses could do that. Moses could deliver. The workers loved him because he paid union wages, good wages to his workers, and he got things done. Things like more than 700 playgrounds. It wasn't just grand things. Even though people criticize the 1964 World's Fair as a failure, and financially it was a failure, still tens of millions of people went there and had a good time. Even some of the things which supposedly were failures, failures according to whom? According to the investment banker, maybe, but not to the people who went there.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The point about the governors and mayors needing him, it was especially important to have somebody who could work that fast if you were going to get reelected in four years or two years. You need somebody who can get public works done faster than they're done today if you want to be in there for the opening.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Exactly. And it's important to realize that Moses did try public office once. He ran for governor. I think it's true that he lost by more than anybody in the history of New York. He was not an effective public speaker. He was not soft and friendly and warm and cuddly. That's not Robert Moses. The voters rejected him. But the people who had power, and also Wall Street, because you had to issue bonds. One of the ways that Moses had power was he created this thing called the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to build the Triborough Bridge.
--:-- If in Portland, Oregon, you want to build a bridge or a road, you issue a couple hundred million dollars worth of bonds to the public and assign an interest rate that's paid off by the revenue that comes in from the bridge or the road. Normally, you would build a public work and pay for it itself on user fees. When the user fees paid it off, it ended. But what Moses, who was called the best bill drafter in Albany... he said he was somewhere down in paragraph 13, section Z, say, "And the chairman can only be removed for cause." What that meant was when you buy a bond for the Triborough Bridge or something else, you're in a contract that's supported by the Supreme Court. This is a financial deal you're making with somebody. Part of the contract was the chairman gets to stay unless he does something wrong. Moses was careful not to do anything wrong. And it would continue. You would get the bond for the Triborough Bridge, but rather than pay off the Triborough Bridge, he would build another project. It would give him the right to continually build this chain of events. So he had this massive pot of money from all these initially nickels and dimes. Bridges made up a lot of money in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s to spend more money and build more bridges and build more roads. That's where he had his power.
--:-- Wall Street, the big business, loved him because they're issuing the bonds. The unions loved him because they're paying the investors. What Caro says is that Moses allowed the investors an extra quarter percent, I think a quarter percent or half percent on the bonds. But they all sold out, so everybody was happy. Was that crooked? It wasn't really illegal. But it's the way people do that today. If you're issuing a bond, you've got to figure out what interest am I going to pay on this that will attract investors now.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The crucial thing about these tales of graft is that it never was about Moses trying to get rich. It was always him trying to push through a project. Obviously, that can be disturbing, but it is a completely different category of thing, especially when you remember that this was like a corrupt time in New York history.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This was like after Tammany Hall and so on. So it's a completely different thing from somebody using their projects to get themselves rich. But I do want to actually talk in more detail about the impact of these roads. Obviously, we can't have the current system we have today where we just treat cities as living museums with NIMBYism and historical preservation. That's not optimal. But there are examples, at least if Caro is right about Moses just throwing out thousands of people carelessly. Famously in that chapter on the one mile, how Moses could have diverted the Cross Bronx Expressway one mile and prevented thousands of people from getting needlessly evicted.
--:-- I'm just going to list off a few criticisms of his highway building and then you can respond to them in any order you want. One of the main criticisms that Caro makes is that Moses refused to add mass transit to his highways, which would have helped deal with the traffic problem and the car problem at a time when getting the right of way and doing the construction would have been much cheaper. Because of his dislike for mass transit, he just refused to do that. Also, the prolific building of highways contributed to urban sprawl, contributed to congestion, and contributed to neighborhoods getting torn apart if a highway would cross them. So a whole list of criticisms of these highways. I'll let you take it in any order you want.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, first of all, Moses' response was, "I wasn't in charge of subways." So if you think the subways deteriorated or didn't build enough, find out who was in charge of them and blame that person. I was in charge of highways and I built those. So that's the first thing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But before you answer that, can I just ask, on that particular point, it is true that he wasn't in charge of mass transit, but he also wasn't in charge of roads until he made himself responsible for roads, right? So if he chose to, he could have made himself responsible for mass transit and taken care of it.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Maybe. Although I think the other thing about it is putting Moses in a broader historical context. He was swimming with the tide of history. When he was building, history was building Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Chrysler Corporation, building cars by the millions. The automobile industry in the United States was huge. People thought any kind of rail transit was obsolete and on the way out anyway, so let's just build roads. That's what the public wanted. He built what the public wanted.
--:-- But it's not what I would have done historically. I don't think we did the right thing. But we needed to join the 20th century. New York could have stayed as a quaint—quaint is not the right word—but it's a distinctly different kind of place where everybody walks. I just don't think it would have been the same kind of city because there are people who are attached to their cars in New York.
--:-- The sprawl in New York, which is enormous, nobody's saying it wasn't, spreads over 31 counties, an area about as large as the state of Connecticut, about as large as the Netherlands. That's metropolitan New York. But it's still relatively—I don't want to say compact—but everybody knows where the center is. Nobody grows up in New York at 16 and thinks that the world is in some mall three miles away. They all know there is a center, and that's where it is. It's called Manhattan, and that's New York. Moses didn't change that. For all of his roads, there's still a definite center in New York, the skyscrapers and everything in the middle.
--:-- It's true public transit did decline. I like Chicago, by the way, and they have a rail transit from O'Hare down to the Dan Ryan—not to Dan Ryan, but the JFK Expressway I think—and it works, sort of. But you have to walk a ways to get on. You have to walk blocks to get in the middle of the expressway and catch a train there. It's not like in New York where you just go down some steps. The New York subway is much bigger than Chicago and more widely used.
--:-- The key thing about New York—and I think what Caro was trying to explain, and your question suggests this—is was Moses responsible for the decline of public transit? Well, he was building cars and roads and bridges, so in that sense, a little bit, yes. But if you look at New York compared to the rest of the United States, it used to be that maybe 20% of all the transit riders in the United States were in the New York area. Now it's 40%. So if you're looking at the United States, what you have to explain is why is New York different from the rest of the United States?
--:-- When I was chairman or president of the New York Historical Society, we had rich trustees, and I would tell them, "Well, I got here on a subway or something." They would say, "How do you think I got here?" These are people who are close to billionaires, and they're saying they used the subway. If you're in lower Manhattan and you're trying to get to Midtown and it's raining, it's 5 o'clock, you've got to be a fool to try to get in your own limousine. It isn't going to get you there very quickly. A subway will. So there are reasons for it, and I think Moses didn't destroy public transit. He didn't help it, but his argument was that he did. That's an important distinction, I think.
--:-- But he was swimming with history. He built what the public wanted. I think if he had built public transit, he would have found it tougher to build. Just for example, Cincinnati built a subway system, a tunnel all through the city. It never opened. They built it. You can still see the holes in the ground where it's supposed to come out. By the time they built it, people weren't riding trains anymore, and so it's there now and they don't know what to do with it. That was 80 years ago. So it's very complicated. I don't mean to make these issues—they're much more complex than I'm speaking of. I just think it's unfair to blame Moses for the problems of the city. I think he did as much as anybody to try to bring the city into the 21st century, which he didn't live to see.
--:-- But you've got to adapt. You've got to have a hybrid model in the world now. I think the model that America needs to follow is a model where we reduce our dependence on cars and somehow ride buses more or use the Internet more, but stop using so much fossil fuels so that we destroy our environment. New York by far is the most energy efficient place in the United States, mainly because you live in tall buildings, you have hot floors, it doesn't really cost much to heat places because you're heating the floor below you and above you and you don't have outside walls, and you walk. New Yorkers are thinner. Many more people take buses and subways in New York than anywhere else in the United States, not just in absolute terms, but in relative terms. So they're helping. It's probably a healthier lifestyle to walk around.
--:-- I think we're rediscovering it. For example, if you come to New York between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there are so many tourists in the city—I'm not making this up—that there is gridlock on the sidewalks around Fifth Avenue. The police have to direct the traffic. In part, it's because a Detroit grandmother wants to bring her granddaughter to New York to see what Hudson's was—which was a great department store in Detroit. Every city had these giant department stores with windows where Santa Claus is and stuff like this. You can still go to New York and see that. You can say, "Jane, this is the way it used to be in Detroit." People ringing the bells and looking at the store windows. A mall can't recapture that. It just can't. You try, but it's not the same thing.
--:-- I think that in a way, Moses not only did not destroy New York, I think he gets a little bit of credit for saving it, because it might have been on the way to Detroit. I'm not saying it would have been Detroit, because Detroit's almost empty. But it's not just Baltimore. It's Cleveland. It's every place. There's nobody there anymore. Even in New York, the department stores have mostly closed, not all of them. So it's not the same as it was 80 years ago, but it's closer to it than anywhere else.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. So I'm actually very curious to get your opinion on the following question, given the fact that you are an expert on New York history and you've written the encyclopedia—literally written the encyclopedia on New York City.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, 800 people wrote the encyclopedia. I just took all the credit for it. I was the editor-in-chief.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. So I'm actually curious, is Caro actually right about the claim that the neighborhoods through which Moses built his highways were destroyed in a way that neighborhoods which weren't touched by the highways weren't? Sorry for the confusing phrasing there. But basically, looking back on all these neighborhoods, is there a clear counterfactual negative impact on the neighborhoods in which Moses built his highways and bridges?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, Caro makes that argument mostly about East Tremont and places like that in the Bronx where the Cross Bronx Expressway passed through. He says this perfectly wonderful Jewish neighborhood that was not racially prejudiced and everybody was happy and not leaving was destroyed by Moses. Well, first of all, as a historian of New York City, or for that matter any city, if a student comes to you and says that's what I found out, you say, "Well, that runs counter to the experience of every city. So let's do a little more work on that."
--:-- First of all, if you look at the census tracts or the residential security maps, it's not true. The Jews were leaving and it had nothing to do with the expressway. They didn't love blacks. Also, if you look at other Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx—the Bronx was called the Jewish borough at the time—those neighborhoods that weren't on the Cross Bronx all emptied out mostly. The Bronx itself was a part of New York City that followed the pattern of Detroit and Baltimore and Cleveland. The Bronx is now coming back, but it's a different place.
--:-- I've said this in public and I'm playing it true: Caro wouldn't know those neighborhoods if he landed there by parachute. They're much better than he ever said they were. He acted like if you went outside near the Bronx County Courthouse, you needed a wagon train. I've taken my students there dozens of times and shown them the people, the old ladies eating on the benches. Nobody's mugging them. He just has an outsider's view. He didn't know the places he was writing about.
--:-- But I think Caro was right about some things. Moses was personally a jerk. You can make it stronger than that. He was not your friendly grandfather. He was arrogant, self-centered. He thought he knew the truth and you don't. He was vindictive, ruthless. But some of those qualities were good for his strategies. He made people building a beach or a building feel like you're building a cathedral. You're building something great, and I'm going to pay you for it, and let's make it as best as we can. That itself is a real trick—how do you get people to think of their jobs as more than a job, as something else? Even a beach or a wall, to say it's good. He also paid them, so that's important.
--:-- He was making improvements. He said he was improving things for the people. I don't know if you want to talk about Jane Jacobs, who was his nemesis.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: I tend to vote with Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs and I agree on a lot of things, or did before she died a few years ago. Jane Jacobs saw the city as intricate stores and people living and walking and knowing each other and eyes on the street and all these kinds of things. Moses didn't see that at all. He saw the city as a traffic problem. How do we tear this down and build something big and get people the hell out of here? That was a mistake. Moses made mistakes.
--:-- But what Moses was doing was what everybody in the United States was doing, just not as big and not as ruthless and not as quick. It was not like Moses built a different kind of world that exists in Kansas City. That's exactly what they did in Kansas City or every other city. Blow the damn roads through the black neighborhoods, build the expressway interchanges. My hometown of Memphis, crisscrossed with big streets. Those neighborhoods gone. They're even more extensive in places like Memphis and Kansas City and New Orleans than they are in New York, because New York built relatively fewer of them. It's still huge what he built.
--:-- But you would not know from *The Power Broker* that Los Angeles exists. Los Angeles was building freeways too. Or he says that New York got more federal money than any other city. Well, not true. I've had students work on Chicago, and Chicago was getting more money per person than New York for some of these projects. So some of the claims, no doubt he got those from Moses' own records. But if you're going to write a book like this, you've got to know what's going on other places.
--:-- Anyway, let's go back to your questions.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: No, no, that was one of the things I was actually going to ask you about, so I'm glad to get your opinion on that. In preparing for this interview and trying to learn more about the impact of these different projects, I was trying to find the economic literature on the value of these highways. There was a National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Morgan Foy, or at least a digest by Morgan Foy, where he talks about the economic gains from highways. He says the gains tend to be largest in areas where roads connect large economic hubs, where few alternative routes exist. He goes on to say two segments near New York City have welfare benefits exceeding $500 million a year. Expanding the Long Island Expressway had an estimated economic value of $719 million, which I think was Moses. And he says of the top 10 segments with the highest rate of return, seven are in the New York City area.
--:-- So it turns out that seven of the top 10 most valuable highway segments in America are in New York. Reading that makes me suspect that there must have been—the way Caro paints Moses' planning process is just kind of impulsive and feelings-based and almost in some cases out of malice towards poor people. But given that a century later, it seems that many of the most valuable tracks of highways were planned and built exactly how Moses envisioned, it makes you think that there was some sort of actual intelligent deliberation and thought put into where they were placed.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: I think that's true. I'm not saying the automobile didn't have an economic impact. That's what Moses was building for. He would probably endorse that idea. But I think what we're looking at now in the 21st century is the high value put on places that Moses literally thought were a slum. He was going to run an expressway from Brooklyn through lower Manhattan to New Jersey and knock down all these buildings in Greenwich Village that people love now. Love. Movie stars, people crowd into those neighborhoods to live. And he saw it as a slum. Moses was simply wrong. And Caro puts him to task for that. I think that's true.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, Professor Jackson, now I want to discuss how the process of city planning and building projects has changed since Moses' time. We spent a good amount of time discussing what it was like, what Moses actually did in his time. But last year, I believe, you wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal talking about how a 27-story building in Manhattan was put in limbo because the parking lot it replaced was part of a historic district. So what is it like to actually build a skyscraper or a highway or a bridge or anything of that sort in today's New York City?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, I do think in the larger context, it's probably fair to say it's tougher to build in New York City than any other city. A little precious suburb—you may not know this—but as far as the city is concerned, there'll be more opposition in New York than anywhere else. And it's more dense. Just to unload and load stuff to build a building, how do you do that? You've got trucks that have to park on the street. Everything is more complicated and thus more expensive.
--:-- I think a major difference between Robert Moses' time and our own is that in Robert Moses' time, historic preservation was as yet little known, little understood, and little supported. The general view was that building is good, roads are good, houses are good, and they're all on the way to a more modern and better world. We don't have the same kind of faith in the future that they did. We kind of say, "We kind of like it like it is. Let's just sit on it." So I think we should say that Moses had an easier time of it than he would have had he lived today. It still wasn't an easy time, but easier than today.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Can you talk more about what that change in philosophy has been since then? I feel like that's been one of the themes of this podcast, to see how our cultural attitude towards progress and technology have changed.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, I think one reason why *The Power Broker*, Caro's famous book, received such popular acclaim is that it fits in with book readers' opinions today, which is that old is better. Also, you've got to think about New York City. If you say it's a pre-war apartment, you mean it's a better apartment. The walls are solid plaster, not fiberboard. So old has a reverence in New York that it doesn't have in Japan. In Japan, they tear down houses every 15 years. It's a whole different thing.
--:-- We tend to, in this new country, new culture, value oldness in some places, especially in a place that's old like New York City. Most Americans don't realize that New York is not only the most dense American city and the largest, but also really the oldest. I know there's St. Augustine, but that's taking the concept of what's a city through pretty extreme things. Then there's Jamestown in Virginia, but there's nobody there. Literally nobody there. And where the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, Plymouth Plantation, that's totally rebuilt as a kind of theme park. Santa Fe a little bit in New Mexico, but it was a wide place on the road until after World War II too. So for a place that's a city, New York is really old, and it's never valued history, but the historic preservation movement here is very strong.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What is the reason for its resurgence? Is it just that—I mean, it's had a big impact on many cities, right? I'm in San Francisco right now, and obviously you can't tear down one of these Victorian houses to build the housing that the city massively needs. Why have we gained a reverence for anything that was built before like 80 years?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Just think of the two most expensive places in the United States—it could change a little bit from year to year, but usually San Francisco and New York. If you want to make it more affordable, if you want to drop the price of popsicles on your block, sell more popsicles, have more people selling popsicles, and the price will fall. But somehow they say they're going to build luxury housing. When actually if you build any housing, it'll put downward pressure on prices, even at super luxury. Most Americans don't understand that. So they oppose change, especially in New York and San Francisco, on the basis that change means gentrification.
--:-- There has been a lot of gentrification. In World War II or right after, San Francisco was a working class city. It really was. Huge numbers of short and longshoremen lived there. Now San Francisco has become the headquarters really of Silicon Valley. But a headquarters city in a tech revolution has become very expensive and very homeless. It's very complex. Not easy to understand even if you're in the middle of it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, so if we could get a Robert Moses back again today, what major megaproject do you think New York needs today that a Moses-like figure could build?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, if you think really broadly and you take climate change seriously, as I think most people do, probably to build some sort of infrastructure to prevent rising water from sinking the city. It's doable. You'd have to—like New Orleans, in order to save New Orleans you had to flood Mississippi and some other places. Usually there is a downside somewhere. But that would be a huge project. Maybe build a land bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan to prevent water coming in from the ocean, because New York is on the ocean.
--:-- Some of the other big infrastructure projects, like they're talking about another tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York. The problem with that is there are already too many cars in Manhattan. Anything that makes it easier to bring cars into Manhattan—if you've not been to New York, you don't really understand this, but there's no place for anything. If you bring more cars in, what are you going to do with them? If you build parking garages for all the cars that could come into the city, then you'd be building over the whole city. There'd be no reason to come here because it'd all be parking garages or parking lots.
--:-- New York City simply won't work if you reduce the density or you get rid of underground transportation, because it's all about people moving around underneath the streets and not taking up space as they do it. Tokyo wouldn't work either, or lots of cities in the world. Increasingly, it's not just public transportation, but underground public transportation, where you can get it out of the way of traffic.
--:-- Moses probably could have done that. He wouldn't have loved it as much as he loved bridges, because he wanted you to see what he built. There was an argument in *The Power Broker* that he didn't really want the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel built because he wanted to build a bridge that everybody could see. So he may not have done it with such enthusiasm. I actually believe that Moses was first and foremost a builder. He really wanted to build things, change things. If you said, "We'll pay you to build tunnels," I think he would have built tunnels. Who knows? He never was offered that. That wasn't the time in which he lived.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm curious if you think that today, to get rid of the red tape and the NIMBYism, would it just be enough for one man to accumulate as much influence as Moses had and then to push through some things? Or does that need to be some sort of systemic reform? Because when Moses took power, of course, there was also that Tammany Hall machine that he had to run through. Is that just what's needed today to get through the bureaucracy, or is something more needed?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, I don't think Robert Moses with all of his talents and personality could do in the 21st century what he did in the middle of the 20th century. I think he would have done a lot, maybe more than anybody else. But I also think his methods, his really bullying messages—he bullied people, including powerful people—I don't think that would work quite as easy today. But I do think we need it today.
--:-- Even now, we have in New York just the beginnings of leftists. I'm thinking of AOC, the woman who led the campaign against Amazon in New York, saying, "Well, we need some development." If we want to make housing more affordable, somebody's got to build something. It's not going to become more affordable because you say you want affordable housing. You've got to build affordable housing, and especially you've got to build more of it. So we have to overturn the NIMBYism to say that even today, for all of our concern about environmental change, we have to work together. In some ways, we have to believe that we're in the same boat. And it won't work if we put more people in the boat but don't make the boat any bigger.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: When people discuss Moses and the power he accumulated, they often talk about the fact that he took so much power from democratically elected officials and centralized so much power in himself. Obviously, *The Power Broker* talks a great deal about the harms of that kind of centralization. But I'm curious, having studied the history of New York, what are the benefits if there can be one coordinated, cohesive plan for the entire city? If there's one person who's designing all the bridges, all the highways, all the parks, is something more made possible than if multiple different branches and people have their own unique visions? I don't know if that question makes sense.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: That's a big question. You've got to put a lot of trust into the grand plan, especially if a massive area of 20, 25 million people, bigger than the city, is what you're really talking about. I think that in some ways we've gone too far in the ability to obstruct change, to stop it. We need change. Houses deteriorate, roads deteriorate, sewers deteriorate. We have to build into our system the ability to improve them. We have little of that now in New York. We respond to emergencies. All of a sudden a water main breaks, the street collapses, and then they stop everything, stop the water main break, and repair the street. Meanwhile, in a hundred other places it's leaking. It's just not leaking enough to make the road collapse, but the problem is there every day, every minute.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm curious as a professor—you've studied American history. Do you just see this as a cyclical thing where you have periods where maybe one person has too much power, to periods where there's dispersed bureaucracy and sclerosis, and then you're just going to go through these cycles? Or how do you see that in the grand context of things? How do you see where we are, where we were during Moses, and where we might be in the future?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Well, you're right to say that much of life is cyclical. There is a swing back and forth. But having said that, I think a person like Robert Moses is unusual, partly because he might have gone on to become a hedge fund person—they didn't have hedge funds then, but a new competitor to Goldman Sachs. He could have done a lot of things, maybe been a general. He wanted to have power and control. I think that's harder to accumulate now. We have too much power. You can demonstrate and you can stop anything. We love demonstrations in the United States. We respect them. We see it as a visible expression of our democracy, your ability to get on the streets and block the streets.
--:-- But still, you have to get to work. At some point in the day, you've got to do something. Hitler could have done a lot of things if he wanted to. He could have made Berlin into—but if you have all the power, Hitler had a lot of it. If he turned Berlin into a colossal city, he was going to make it like Washington but times five. Washington has already got its own issues. The buildings are too big. Government buildings don't have eyes, don't have life on the street. Somebody like Hitler would destroy it forever, because you build a monumental city that's not for people.
--:-- I think that was probably one of Moses' weak points. Unlike Jane Jacobs, who saw people, Moses didn't see people. He saw bridges. He saw highways. He saw tunnels. He saw rivers. He saw the city as a giant traffic problem. Jane Jacobs, who was a person without portfolio most of her life except for her own powers of judgment and persuasion, thought, "Well, what does the shoe repair man have to do with the grocery store, have to do with the school, have to do with something else?"
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: She saw what Moses didn't see. She saw the intricacies of the city. He saw a giant landscape; she saw the block, just the block.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, there's a common trope about socialists and communists: they love humanity in the abstract but hate people as individuals. It's one way to describe Robert Moses. It reminds me of a relative of mine who is a doctor. He's not exactly a people person. He says, "I hate actually having to talk to the patients and ask them questions. I just like the detective work of figuring out what is going on, looking at the charts, and doing the diagnosis."
--:-- Are you optimistic about New York? Do you think that continuing towards the end of the 21st century and the 22nd century, it will still be the capital of the world? What do you think is the future of the city?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: *The Economist*, a major publication out of England, recently predicted that London and New York in 2100 will be what they are today: the capitals of the world. London is not really a major city in terms of population—probably under 10 million, much smaller than New York and way smaller than Tokyo. But London has a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous atmosphere within the rule of law.
--:-- What London and New York both offer, which Shanghai or Hong Kong doesn't at the moment, is a system where if you disagree, you're not going to disappear. There's some level of guarantee that personal safety is sacred and you can say what you want. I think that's valuable. Very valuable.
--:-- The fact that it's open to newcomers—you can't find a minority so small that they don't have a presence in New York. If you're from Estonia, which has fewer people than some New York suburbs, there's an Estonian house, Estonian restaurants. India, Pakistan, every place has an ethnic presence. If you want it, you can have it. You want to merge with the larger community? Merge with it. That's fine. But if you want to celebrate your special circumstances, it's been said that New York is everybody's second home. You can find people just like yourself, speaking your language, eating your food, going to your religious institution.
--:-- I think that's going to continue. It's not only what makes the United States unusual. Switzerland is like it, but the thing about Switzerland is that parts of it are Swiss German and parts are French, and they stay in their own places. They speak French here and German there. In the United States, Arizona and Maine are not that different demographically. Everybody has shuffled the deck several times. That's what makes New York unique. And London too. Paris a little bit—you go to the Paris Underground and you don't even know what language you're listening to.
--:-- To be a great city in the 21st century—and by the way, Texas cities are often very diverse, San Francisco and LA are very diverse—it's not just New York. New York stands out because it's bigger and the neighborhoods are more distinct. Anybody can see them. That's what Robert Moses didn't spend any time thinking about. He wasn't concerned with who was eating at that restaurant, or if there even was a restaurant.
--:-- Whereas now, there's a slow drift back towards cities. I'm predicting that the pandemic will not have a permanent influence. The pandemic is huge and it's affected the way people work, live, shop, and have recreation. I'm not trying to blow it off. But in the long run, we are social animals. We want to be with each other. We need each other, especially if you're young and you want to be with potential romantic partners.
--:-- Just a few days ago, there was a horrible tragedy in Seoul, Korea. That's because 100,000 young people were drawn to each other. They could have had more room to swing their arms, but they wanted to crowd into one alley because that's where other people were. That's a lot about the appeal of cities today. We've been in cars and on interstate highways. At the end of the day, we're almost like cats—we want to get together at night and sleep on each other or with each other.
--:-- It's not for everybody. Most people may rather live in a small town or on top of a mountain. But there's a percentage of people—let's call it 25%—who really want to be part of the tumble and the tide, who want things mixed up. They will always want to be in a place like New York. There are other places: San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia a little bit. They're not mainly in the United States, but in Europe, Copenhagen. Copenhagen is not a big city, neither is Prague, but they have urbanity. New York has urbanity. I think we don't celebrate urbanity as much as we might—the pure joy of being with others.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. By the way, I'm curious if you ever got a chance to talk to Robert Caro himself about Moses at some point.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Robert Caro and I are friends. In fact, when *The Power Broker* received the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, it turned out we lived near each other in the Bronx. I drove him home, and we became friends, social friends. I happened to be with him on the day that Robert Moses died. We were with our wives eating out in a neighborhood called Arthur Avenue, the real Little Italy of New York in the Bronx, also called Belmont.
--:-- On the 100th anniversary of Moses' birth, I think in 1989, I was asked to give the keynote speech at a conference at Hofstra University on Moses. Caro was also invited to be a speaker. There I said, and I still stand by this, that I learned more from *The Power Broker* than any book I ever read. It's such an enormous topic. I wish I had written it myself so that my name was on it rather than his. I think it's the best book I ever read. That may be a slight exaggeration, but just slight. It's an incredible achievement.
--:-- Having said that, I said it's got a thousand errors. Small errors. In broad strokes, it's correct. Robert Moses had more power than any urban figure in American history. He built incredible monuments that the city needs. He was ruthless, arrogant, and honest. That's a big story right there. That's probably true. But in all the little stories—about the temperature in the swimming pools, about the destruction of public transit, about the destruction of the Bronx with the Cross Bronx Expressway, about building bridges too low so that buses couldn't get to the beaches—he's just wrong. All he had to do was look at some different sources. They were doing some of the same things in LA or Chicago; they just weren't as famous as New York.
--:-- I still feel that way. I still wish I had written the book, wish my name was on it, even with all those mistakes. I've taught New York City history at Columbia University for half a century or more. I've had dozens of students write term papers on one aspect or another of Caro's book. I can never remember a single one coming back and saying, "Oh, Caro got it right." They would go back to the same source and say, "This is not the way he said it was." They may be smaller errors, but it was generally that way. I think he made up his mind what he was going to argue before he started. And Moses was a jerk.
--:-- For example, think of the issues now with President Biden and his son Hunter, all the grief he's catching. My wife is telling me not to go down this road. But Moses is attacked in the book because he wasn't good enough to his brother. He should have done more for his brother. He didn't give his brother a job. All these little things about different neighborhoods.
--:-- But I think Caro was right that Moses, the biggest builder of cities in the 20th century, the builder of the greatest city in the world, didn't like it. That's incredible. He didn't actually like the place he was designing. He wanted everybody to get out. It's better in the suburbs, better if you have a house, better if you have a garage, better if you have a car in the front. That's better than the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens.
--:-- Whereas his opponent, Jane Jacobs, saw people. One of the greatest changes now from when Caro was writing about Moses is that people wanted to all have a car. Everybody wanted a car. Teenagers when they were 16 wanted a driver's license more than they wanted to have sex. "Get me the car!" Now, a big percentage of young Americans are skipping the driver's license. They don't care as much. We're moving into a different time. Where that's going to lead us, I'm not sure. But I think we're ready to walk more for health reasons, all sorts of reasons. Moses did not see it. Moses never drove, but he created a world for drivers.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Some people might object to this defense of Moses by saying, "Listen, whenever he does something well, we give him credit. But whenever he does something badly, we just say he was swimming with the tide of history. Other cities were doing it worse. So we're doing whataboutism on the negative side of Moses' legacy, but then we're happy to let him take credit for the good things." It's kind of a double standard. How would you respond to that?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: I understand what you're saying, and I could sympathize with it. But let's take the Cross Bronx Expressway as an egregious example. Moses' critics would say, "All these people, tens of thousands of people, paid a price. Their lives were uprooted." But I just can't imagine you would say we can't have a Cross Bronx. It could have been two blocks this way or two blocks that way—that's a different question. But I think we have to have it.
--:-- I think the parks, the bridges—the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge transformed Staten Island. The history of Staten Island is before and after 1964. They had to take into account the curvature of the earth, that bridge was so long. At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It's been surpassed in Europe since then, but a big bridge. That would be a lifetime's achievement. If you built the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, this gigantic, gorgeous entrance to New York Harbor, that's a lifetime achievement. For Moses, it's one of a list of about 50 things. You don't even think about the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and Robert Moses. He did it. So what? He did lots of other big things too.
--:-- I think it's the scale. The scale was not human. It was on a completely different scale. With that comes a lot of criticism, because as he would say himself, "In order to make an omelet, you have to break eggs. No other way to do it." He would say, "I had to hurt some people. That's just the way it is." The way we live now, we don't want to hurt anybody. You can't run a city or a country that way. Nothing will change.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I've had a lot of guests recently advocating for a philosophical view called longtermism. The basic idea is that we should take the interest of future generations and consider them equally with the interest of people alive today. If we take this view that we care about progeny more, there's a part in *The Power Broker* where they're talking about the Cross Bronx Expressway through East Tremont. Moses is getting opposition from an elected official, and Moses responds by saying, "You make a habit out of pointing out that I'm not democratically elected while you are. But the advantage of me not being democratically elected is that I can build projects that might not be the favorite thing for the people alive now, but will benefit the city for generations and centuries to come."
--:-- There's obviously a lot of arrogance there. But to the extent that it's true—and it is in many cases, all these bridges and highways are still standing today and in wide use—it kind of changes how you think about him. Given all the egg-breaking that had to happen at the time, it's still the fact that for hundreds of years we'll get to use the things he built.
--:-- I'm curious, how did Caro react? You mentioned you were with him when you found out that Moses had died. Was he sad about it?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: I just remember being stunned at the restaurant. We were in a restaurant in the Bronx, and they brought a telephone to him. I've never seen anybody have a telephone brought to them. That was way before cell phones. It was 1989 or something like that, I don't remember the exact year. But we were friends when he died. Maybe it was 1981. Whatever year it was, it was after I criticized him in public and *The New York Times* quoted me. They didn't quote that I thought it was the best book I'd ever read and I wished I'd written it. They did quote that I said it had a thousand mistakes. That's what he read. He didn't hear my speech. I'm sorry about that. I don't want to have enemies with anyone. I have regard for the book and for his ability to do research. That's what's amazing about *The Power Broker*—his ability and interest in going back and interviewing Moses' third grade teacher, finding that out. That's way more than most of us are willing to do.
--:-- His reaction when he found out Moses died? That was not unexpected. Moses was 90 years old at the time. This is 30 years ago, more than that. Not many people live to be 90. He was an athlete, a swimmer. He swam in the ocean in his eighties. He was quite a person.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There's a part in Caro's memoir where he talks about learning from Moses' former aides, who were now friends with Caro, how they would tell him that now that Moses had lost his power, he was just in his house all day looking at his plans and writing down more ideas. "There should be another highway here," and so on. Just impotently making new ideas. Caro says that hearing about that scene—this master builder just having nothing to do—it made him want to cry. Despite the fact that he documented all the harm Moses had done, that was a really interesting reaction.
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Moses had a phenomenal amount of power, and he lost it all in short order. That's got to be tough. Really tough.
--:-- Moses did write a response to *The Power Broker* which was published in *The New Yorker* about 1975. A long response saying that Caro had it all wrong.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I read it, and I thought that Moses kind of vindicated Caro's description of his personality because it was very ad hominem. It wasn't specific. I'm sure there were a lot of errors, as you say. But Moses wrote 8,000 words and actually documents very few of the supposed errors he claims Caro is making. The ones he does document are minor ones, not the major ones about his public works. Small little details. What was your reaction to that response?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: I think you're very perceptive. His response was rambling, wordy, not particular. He probably could have taken Caro apart, but he didn't. He didn't say, "This page, you said this, this is wrong." He didn't. Moses also didn't have people around him—maybe like Hitler didn't, or Trump—to say, "Boss, you're wrong here. You need to reword this. You don't mean it the way you said it."
--:-- The quality of his response was poor enough that he needed assistance. He needed three or four smart people to say, "Put it this way. Give this example." But it tells you something about Moses, their response. The way Moses held grudges. He blames *The New Yorker* and he blames Knopf, Alfred Knopf Publishers, because "you're in cahoots with Caro. You're all damned and going to hell," rather than just talking about Caro. Maybe that's just the way he looked at the world at his time. You've got to find out who's got the levers of power and then go after them. The rest of the people don't matter.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I want to respect your time. You've given me so much already. Before we close out, if you have any other things you want to say about *The Power Broker*, or about Moses, or about his legacy, or about NIMBYism today, or the state of construction and public works today?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: I think of Moses as the polar opposite of Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs was a woman. Think about what Jane Jacobs saw as important. She saw the block, the store, the people, the mixture of genders and races and everything else as significant. Robert Moses really didn't see people. He saw massive things, things you put on an architectural board. He didn't see other things. That's both his strength and his weakness. Had he seen people more, maybe he would never have built what he did, and we wouldn't have had the bridges. But we do.
--:-- Can you imagine New York without the Triborough Bridge? It's not imaginable. Readers who have not been to New York may not understand. This is a city that has water all through it. It's about water. It's not like Dallas where there's essentially no water. New York water is everywhere. You've got to cross these bridges. You've got to get over there. It creates a problem of circulation that's vast, especially when you have tens of millions of people trying to move around. That's something that Moses figured a way around.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One more question that just occurs to me: why do you think this biography of Moses by Caro achieved the cultural prominence it did? It's an incredible book, and I enjoyed it a lot. But there are countless biographies written every year, and many of them are also good. What was it about this book that catapulted it? There was a review of the new play about Robert Moses, and the title was just that New Yorkers love to hate Robert Moses. Why does he have this cultural prominence in New York and across the world?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: Because Robert Moses represented a past when we wanted to build bridges and superhighways and things that are pretty much gone. We're not building superhighways now. We're not building vast bridges like Moses built all the time. He's not swimming with the tide of history anymore. That's part of it.
--:-- Plus the fact that it's a biography that has an argument. The argument is understandable, and it runs through the whole book. He's a terrific writer. He builds suspense. He can write a paragraph in two words. He repeats himself a little too much. When I get negative, my wife who is nearby gets on me. But I think it's a terrific book.
--:-- Moses was a great man. Caro is a great writer and in many ways a great historian. The other thing is, Caro's book is so important. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln—you're going to have lots of books written about them. But Caro, not so much. Moses, not so much. He's not that famous. It's such a big and intimidating book that everybody else is afraid to go there. There will be other books about Robert Moses. There may be underway as we speak. They will revise our reinterpretation. He will be reinterpreted in ways we talked about today, though I don't know that.
--:-- The basic thing that Moses did is there. You can look at it. The things that Caro said about him are mostly true. Where he lived, it gives a little tiny bit about an affair. He once explained to me that sex was not important to Moses. If you want to understand him, it wasn't about females. Moses was committed, married to his job and to his vision of a city. That's both his greatness and the fact that he didn't have many friends. He didn't live the world the way most people live it, with people. I think that's probably all I know.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This was a true pleasure. I highly recommend that people check out your book, *Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York*. There they can find your essay on Robert Moses and the Rise of New York City, which I highly recommend. Professor Jackson, where else can people find you?
--:-- Kenneth T. Jackson: My email address is still at Columbia University. KTJ, just my initials, number one, at Columbia.edu. I'm there.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Excellent. It's a pleasure.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, I would really, really, really appreciate it if you could share it. This is still a pretty small podcast, so it is a huge help when any one of you shares an episode that you like. Post it on Twitter, send it to friends who you think might like it, put it in your group chats. Just let the word go forth. It helps out a ton.
--:-- Many thanks to my amazing editor, Gram Besalu, for producing this podcast, and to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode, which have helpful links. You can find them at the link in the description below. Remember to subscribe on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Cheers. See you next time.
