Robert Moses’ ineffable power stemmed from one source: dishonesty. In The Power Broker‘s opening scene, Moses describes to the captain of his Yale swimming team how he plans to manipulate Og Reid, the team’s financial backbone, into putting his money into Moses’ newly conceived “Minority Sports Association” by lying to him that he would be, as usual, giving it directly to the swimming team. This association, Moses believes, is the solution to the team’s financial woes; he’s afraid Og Reid will see it differently. The captain, uncomfortable with dishonesty, prevents Moses from going forward with his plan. Moses, in a fit of self-righteous fury, resigns immediately. This anger stems from a second falsehood present in the scene, unspoken by either character. The falsehood that Robert Moses is infallible. This was the lie that would make the boy who conceived of the Minority Sports Association into the man who’d level New York and raise it back up in his own image.
When, early in his career, idealism failed him, Robert Moses turned instead to this belief in himself. He lied plain-faced to the press and the public that he was above the dishonest tactics of politicians when it was textbook political maneuvering which burgeoned him to the top of the public authority’s pecking order. But this was justified, because Robert Moses knew he saw the way. He maneuvered public funds into politicians’s pockets, silenced rivals with blackmail, lived and ruled with the wealth and impunity of a Roman emperor. But all of this was justified, because Robert Moses knew he saw the way.
Some might say it was money that granted Moses his power. And it’s true that it was money which lubricated his titanic political machine, bought materials and laborers enough to raise his innumerable public works, and allowed him to circumnavigate the laws of the land from his headquarters at Triborough. But this money was not Robert Moses’s. It was the taxpayers’. Taxpayers who entrusted it to Robert Moses because they believed in the lie he told them: that he was a man above corruption, negligence, and deceit. Perhaps this lie was so convincingly told because Moses believed it himself. Regardless, it was of this lie that the power and empire of Robert Moses were born.
Robert Mayo
