The Power Broker at 50: Lessons from Robert Moses

Founder mode in public office

Five decades since it was published, Robert Moses continues to reach out of the pages of the Power Broker and grab readers by the lapels. The author, Robert Caro, wants us to reject Moses – but what can we learn from him?

The peril of champions

Running somewhat in parallel with Moses’s career was the Good Government reform movement of New York, born of wider Progressivism in the early 20th century. A loose collection of idealistic, civic minded citizens, it sought to eradicate corruption and government inefficiency. Its nemesis was Tammany Hall, the Democrat machine which, through the exchange of jobs and city contracts for votes, ran New York and maintained a stranglehold on its politics.

In Caro’s telling, Moses began his career as a genuine ally of these men and women. He fought in the trenches with them as part of the Bureau of Municipal Research. He wrote a report on how to reform the civil service, calling for a meritocracy in civil service appointments – instead of the patronage based system, where your employability was more to do with your connections and voting history.

Later, though, after Moses had tasted bitter defeat and seen his reform plans shelved, his priorities changed. But the reformers didn’t know this – they realised only too late that Moses no longer shared their priorities – in the meantime, their trust had helped place him in his new, powerful position. In Caro’s telling, Moses became focused on attaining power for its own end, and ultimately embraced the kind of political corruption he had once railed against.

Apparently German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck behaved very similarly:

[His] political career was accelerated by a group of eminent, devout Christians. He used their support for his own gain and adhered to their principles as long as he needed their support. Once he was powerful enough to do without their support, he had no issues with negotiating with Liberals, Socialists, Catholics - all abhorrent to his early patrons.

Any idealistic movement which is keen to reform government should beware who they empower and defend.

The role of the press

Moses is reminiscent of another figure oft-discussed in tech circles. Take Moses’s written analysis of the press, for example:

The power of the press, radio and television to make or break any man in public life... is awesome and often grossly unfair. The press, for the ostensible purpose of keeping it honest, has done much to make public employment dangerous and unattractive...

Many a good official has been frightened or flattered by idle gossip, random criticism or attack...

There is a type, fortunately rare, which is indifferent to the ordinary decencies and proprieties, skilled in eavesdropping, glued to keyholes, willing to embarrass families and friends, a species to whom nothing is sacred. Such reporters, if they could, would wire and violate the confessional... I sometimes wish we had a few Gorgases to keep yellow journalists off our necks so that we would be free to do our work...

Cleverly and dramatically reflecting public opinion is one thing. Planting suspicion, poisoning minds, rousing the mob spirit, quoting out of context — these are cute tricks far removed from straight honest reporting... Critics build nothing. The only excuse for a critic is to toughen the hides of his victims...

A different man, who lived thousands of miles away and also forged a reputation for Getting Things Done across a decades-long public career, said:

“freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government” (source)

“We allow American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their fellow countrymen. But we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media play in America, that is, that of invigilator, adversary and inquisitor of the administration.” (source)

Lee Kuan Yew’s remarks above are remarkably similar to the attitude of Silicon Valley founders today, like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

They have a point; one shouldn’t be naïve about journalists. The image of the journalist in popular culture, of someone who speaks truth to power, should be balanced with a recognition of the base incentives they face.

Lee’s Singapore has good reasons to care about political stability, and the fruits of their particular political culture – which limits the freedoms of journalists – are obvious to behold. 

But Moses does show how this restrictionist, anti-journalist perspective can be taken too far. Despite heady idealism in his early days, he ended up mired in corruption, undermining the very meritocracy he once supported – like the shadow version of Lee. Public scrutiny and free speech is an important way to disincentivise this kind of behaviour.

Read the docs

This is perhaps the biggest single lesson of the book. Moses amassed power early in his career by becoming, in the words of then-Governor Al Smith, “the best bill drafter” in Albany. Smith found the young Moses indispensable as a legal and political aide, always able to get the right reform done or find a way for a new proposal to be financially viable. This was how Moses cut his teeth on getting things done in politics.

He deployed this know-how throughout the rest of his career. An early, crucial example came in 1924. Still an aide to Smith, Moses drafted laws to establish organisations that would govern parks in the state – organisations which even then he intended to lead. He subtly developed clauses and definitions, referring to old, forgotten acts and obscure yet genuine precedents, which drastically increased the power of the Long Island State Park commission: power to seize private land if an official simply walked on it and claimed it, power “to write its own laws, hire policemen to enforce them and prosecutors to prosecute them… virtually all the powers granted to the City of New York.” 

Moses concealed these implications, found useful idiots to champion the bills, and saw them pass (without any scrutiny from his Good Government allies). This allowed him to spend decades with parks as essentially his private fiefdom.

In addition, his drafting ability made him indispensable to decades of elected officials. There was already a basic political logic to their alliance with him – he offered parks, and later infrastructure, that people wanted – but his deep knowledge of legislation in New York helped them get things done.

Roosevelt and Moses hated each other, yet Roosevelt couldn’t help but rely on him:

No one knew the vast administrative machinery the Governor was supposed to run better than this man the Governor hated. To a considerable extent, the machinery was his; he, more than any other individual, had drafted the bills that had increased that system, the department consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He, more than any other individual, knew the considerations—constitutional, legal and political—that lay behind wording in those laws that was otherwise so puzzling. He knew the precedents that made each point in them legal—and the precedents that might call their legality into question. He knew the reason behind every refinement, every clarification—and every obscuration—in the laws’ final versions. When discussing a point of law with some young state agency counsel, Moses liked to let the lawyer painstakingly explain the legal ramifications involved and then say dryly: “I know. I wrote the law.” This store of knowledge, coupled with an intelligence capable of drawing upon it with computer-like rapidity, constituted a political weapon which no Governor could afford to let rust in his arsenal.

His legal acumen also allowed him to draw on disparate and seemingly inaccessible pots of money: against all odds he found $109 million to make his Westside Improvement dream into reality. One longtime associate of Moses said “RM has this mind– he can read a piece of legislation and remember every darn thing in it. He seemed to know the wording of every darn bill in Washington and in Albany that had ever been passed relating to public works.”

Perhaps the last and greatest example of his legal prowess was the power he secured for himself through the Triborough Authority, which he headed. Authorities like Triborough were able to issue their own bonds, which, as contracts, were protected by the U.S. Constitution, and that no government or other party were able to interfere with. The original law establishing the Triborough Authority said the organisation would exist for 5 years, or until all bonds were paid off (an upper limit of 40 years).

Moses drafted amendments to the original law. Buried in a subparagraph was a new provision allowing Triborough to pay off its old bonds with new ones – effectively giving it infinite runway. He also subtly added new powers, so that the Authority could work on not just bridges and the roads that approach them, but ‘connecting’ roads – arguably almost any road in New York.

His amendments went further still, giving Triborough the right to build any facility for the public ‘not inconsistent with the use of the project’. As Caro notes, ‘An aggressive Authority chairman… could well find in that phrase legal authorisation to build any type of public facility he chose anywhere along the Authority’s bridges, roads, streets, parkways… anywhere, in fact, in the city.’

Moses then linked Triborough’s new powers to the contract with the bond holders, rendering them immune from later legislative correction. The power over construction, the very physical reality of New York, guaranteed political power and financial power through contracts and services, which could make or break politicians or construction firms.

I’m not sure how repeatable this is today – can you really eke out an advantage in being the only one to read laws properly? There are some examples of this, like the British student who became an expert in Congressional procedure. Press reports suggest that people on the receiving end of new laws often feel they weren’t drafted properly. So while there might be some opportunities to eke out advantages here as a bill drafter, there are also a lot of veto points (like judicial review) which would make it hard to accrue a lot of power through any one law.

In the coming years, large language models will surely do a lot of the reading (and writing) for us, but Moses shows why it’s important to actually read the legal documents, line by line.

Getting things done, fast

It’s extremely striking in the book that infrastructure projects were completed quickly.

Take Moses’s early triumph on Long Island:

Moses had not been given funds for his Long Island parks and parkways until the spring of 1926. By the end of the summer of 1928, in a period of less than three years, every foot of right-of-way for the Southern State Parkway was in his hands, a seven-mile stretch, from near the New York City line to and around the Hempstead reservoir, was completed. Long rows of newly planted elms and maples lined it and stone-faced bridges, every one different, were carrying crossroaders over it so that nothing should interrupt the swift passage of its users. A second seven-mile stretch, from the reservoir to Wantagh, was completed except for the landscaping. A third seven-mile stretch, from Wantagh to Babylon, was graded and ready for paving. And the fill for the Wantagh Parkway had been laid, a pavement placed on top of the fill and three of the four bridges that would carry the causeway across the bay completed.

When Moses had become president of the Long Island State Park Commission on April 18, 1924, there had been one state park on Long Island, the almost worthless 200-acre tract on Fire Island. By the end of the summer of 1928, there were fourteen parks totaling 9,700 acres. Because 6,775 of those acres had been acquired—from Hempstead, Oyster Bay and Babylon towns, the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City and private individuals—as gifts, the Long Island parks had cost the state a total of about a million dollars. At 1928 land values, they were worth more than fifteen million.

Moses’s speed meant that the parkways and beaches could open in the summer of 1928, and the resulting public adulation guaranteed that no politician would stop the remainder of his park plans. 

On 19 January 1934, Moses became NYC’s park commissioner. Despite funding issues leading to the dismissal of half of his workers at the end of March, and a severe winter (the average temperature in February was -11.39℃), Moses’s men had completed over 1500 renovation projects:

Every structure in every park in the city had been repainted. Every tennis court had been resurfaced. Every lawn had been reseeded. Eight antiquated golf courses had been reshaped, eleven miles of bridle paths rebuilt, thirty-eight miles of walks repaved, 145 comfort stations renovated, 28 statues refurbished, 678 drinking fountains repaired, 7,000 wastepaper baskets replaced, 22,500 benches reslatted, 7,000 dead trees removed, 11,000 new ones planted in their place and 62,000 others pruned, eighty-six miles of fencing, most of it unnecessary, torn down and nineteen miles of new fencing installed in its place. Every playground in the city had been resurfaced, not with cinders but with a new type of asphalt that Moses' engineers assured him would prevent skinned knees, and every playground had been re-equipped with jungle gyms, slides and sandboxes for children and benches for their mothers. And around each playground had been planted trees for shade.

Caro records that Moses moved faster than his contemporaries expected, so we shouldn’t take him as the norm for the period. But he is a great yardstick on what is possible.

So what made Moses so fast? Certainly it was partly to do with his boundless work ethic:

Up in the morning at six or seven, he often made breakfast for his wife and brought it to her in bed. In the evenings, at the far side of twelve or fourteen hours of unbroken toil, he would head not for home but for the swimming pool. One weekend, he invited Ingraham to Babylon and told the reporter to come up to Randall’s Island Friday evening and drive out with him. Arriving at five o’clock, Ingraham found Moses in conference, and settled down in the Commissioner’s waiting room. An hour later, he was still waiting; the conference was still on. When it broke up around six-thirty, Ingraham was invited in, and Moses told him he still had a few things to attend to. He was still attending to them at seven o’clock and eight o’clock, and nine o’clock and ten. Rising finally, he said, “Let’s stop off at Earle Andrews’ place on the way out.” The “place” turned out to be Andrews’ glass-enclosed swimming pool in Huntington. Letting himself in with his own key, Moses changed, plunged into the water and began swim- ming. Watching the muscular arms windmilling endlessly up and down the pool, the drowsy reporter dozed off. Some time later, he awoke. The windmill was still turning; if anything, Ingraham realized with a start, Moses was swimming faster than before. It was, he says, “late” when the Commissioner clambered out of the water, looking as fresh as a youth, and very late indeed when the two men finally arrived at Thompson Avenue. As Ingraham climbed the stairs to the guest room, he saw the Commissioner’s broad back disappearing not into his bedroom but into his study, yellow legal note pad in hand. When Ingraham fell asleep, he knew his host was still working. And what awakened the reporter the next morning-“at some ungodly early hour”- was the smell of bacon and eggs. Hearing him stirring, Mary called up the stairs: “Come on down. Bob’s cooking breakfast.”

It must have helped that Moses was great at talent selection, as Caro attests to many times. Moses also excelled at challenging requirements, perhaps one of the most important skills of a CEO. The ability to push subordinates to justify their proposals (and knowing when to stop) prevents lower rungs of management from slowing you down:

Insisting that the engineers in charge of a project prepare a schedule showing the date on which each of its phases would be completed, Moses would move up the deadlines – by days, by weeks, sometimes by months – until the engineers felt it was absolutely impossible to meet them. And then he insisted that they be met.

Reports one associate: “Hours didn’t mean anything to him… Days of the week didn't mean anything to him. You worked when there was work to be done, that was all.” Meetings ran so late, even on weekends, that staffers longed for Moses to receive a call from his wife – the only thing that would get him to head home.

Robert Moses running a project sounds a lot like founder mode. 

More broadly, though, Moses provides a datapoint on just how fast things can be built. Patrick Collison has noted that many projects have been completed at a pace that seems absurd in hindsight. Caro, assessing Moses’s Long Island parkways and beaches work in the late 1920s, states that “In the history of public works in America, it is probable that never had so much been built so fast.”

There was also a political dimension to speed in completing infrastructure projects. Politicians fully expected infrastructure projects could be delivered within a single term, so that they could get re-elected.

Could the same be said for any such projects today in the Anglosphere? They don’t just last longer than a single election cycle, but sometimes longer than an entire career e.g. HS2 has been planned since 2009, Californian high speed rail has been seriously in the works for about three decades, and the less said about Dublin’s metro system the better. 

The UK faces a lack of physical infrastructure (in the form of houses, roads, and public transport) somewhat like New York in Moses’s day. One can’t help but suspect that even if an enterprising government was to tackle these problems in a serious way, it would take so long that the political benefits would go to someone else. Is it any wonder we don’t build things? 

To be more specific, New York governors had terms that were just 2 years long from 1894 until 1938, when it was extended to 4 years. Mayoral terms were 4 years. These are in fact shorter than the length of a UK parliament – these politicians faced even more time pressure than some politicians today.

Moses was well capable of completing even large, complex projects in just 2 or 3 years, like the first parkways and beaches on Long Island. And, crucially, throughout his career Moses built a steady stream of such projects – there was always a political win just around the corner for the politician who kept him in his various posts. 

Moses does bear correcting, however: one of his tenets was that once stakes were in the ground and construction underway, it was politically impossible to cancel a project because no one wanted to be accused of having wasted money. In 2024, the UK government was willing to cancel swathes of HS2, despite having already bought almost £600m of land required to build it, and even begun some groundwork. The cancellation itself will cost a staggering £100m.

Reflections

In a lot of ways, Moses is an excellent model of How to Get Things Done. His productivity, determination and perhaps most of all, his ambition, surely put him in the top tier of Americans ranked by achievement in the 20th Century.

Moses embodies two of the core values at my old workplace: dig deep and never settle. Digging deep means not accepting surface level answers, and instead pushing until you get to actual hard facts (pretty similar to the now-cliche “first principles thinking”).

Never settling means exactly what it says on the tin. Again and again, Moses kept working away at seemingly insurmountable problems – and, more often than not, he got what he needed.

Tyler Cowen has said that the top founders need to be an A++ in at least one skill, and have a high average across other skills. Caro shows that Moses excelled in a range of areas: legal acumen, talent spotting, salesmanship, stamina, management, leadership. He even had an artist’s eye when it came to the design of many of his projects, adding flourishes and the kind of user-friendly features that a consumer-facing product manager would be proud of.

The master builder of New York is also enjoying somewhat of a rehabilitation in reputation thanks to modern NIMBYism, as seen when American elites discuss the travails of Penn Station. If you believe it’s time to build, then you’re inevitably going to look at Moses with some admiration: here was a man who knew what it took to get desperately needed infrastructure projects done (as ably explained by historian Kenneth Jackson).

Yet we must balance that view with Moses’s morality. It’s hard to make a genuine, overall assessment given that details of Caro’s book are contested by Jackson and others, and not everyone will agree about quite how many corners should be cut when getting things done.

Perhaps at a minimum we can agree that lies are a poor foundation for public works, and result in brittle foundations for whatever you do. Fears about dishonest, Moses-like figures have seen judicial vetos proliferate since the 1970s and contributed to our inability to get things built.

Dominic Cummings has likened Bismarck to artificial intelligence gone wrong; an unbounded intelligence that freely roams and does its own will. Moses, too, took decades to reign in once he was let loose. His fixation on cars, roads, and bridges as a solution to New York’s problems, to a damaging and even absurd extent, almost prefigures the unaligned, paperclip-maximising AI – a remorseless intelligence with the wrong programming.

Learn what you can from him, but be careful about setting him loose.