The Power Broker
So on my last many vacations I've been bringing long classic books with me to read. For my recent trip to Oregon, I polled my friends for suggestions, and Wayne threw out the classic biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. This book had actually been on my list for some years as it is often described as one of the greatest biographies of all time, and because the subject, Robert Moses, had an outsized influence on New York City and state. Fortunately, I was able to snag a copy from the library before I left.
I'm pleased to report that the book is as good as advertised. Caro's prose is mesmerizing. Moses starts as an idealist who quickly learns how to use politics to achieve his dreams, and then falls into using politics simply to gain more power while enriching his friends and overrunning anybody who tries to oppose him despite not actually being elected. Despite weighing in at nearly 1200 pages, it was a comparatively light and easy read. If I'd been able to lock myself in a room I would have been done in a day or two; reading it in bits and snatches I finished it over the course of the trip.
My favorite chapter was one about Moses attempting to build a bridge through the Battery, a rare case where he lost because FDR ordered the military to stop the project on (specious) national defense reasons. Caro quotes extensively from a book called The Battery by Rodman Gilder on the topic of Lafayette. I liked it so much I've retyped it here:
It was at Castle Garden on August 16, 1824, that, in the words on one historian, "it was proved that republics are not always ungrateful," for it was at Castle Garden on that date that Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, who as a rich young nobleman had defied his King and fought for America, returned to it, sixty-seven years old and penniless.
"Many of the spectators doubtless had in mind a gallant, boyish figure in the buff and blue of the American Revolution, with powdered hair tied in a queue," the historian wrote. "What they saw was an old civilian, in a short-haired brown wig." But when the old civilian stepped onto the Castle Garden landing stage - after a trip up the harbor on which his ship was escorted by a huge flotilla - to begin a visit on which he was to receive from the government and citizens of the United States gifts of bonds and land worth almost half a million dollars, the Castle's cannon roared out a hundred times. When the old man walked slowly into Battery Park, "to the incessant huzzas of the multitude that packed the waterfront," he walked between the weeping ranks of the Lafayette Guards. When he rode up Broadway, men and women on rooftops threw flowers in his path. A month later, a tall spar was raised in the center of the fort, a vast awning of sailcloth was spread across its entire ceiling, "the white banner of France was entwined with the Stars and Stripes, trophies of arms glittered from the walls" - and when Lafayette appeared at the ball, "the gay sets dissolved" and the dancers formed a long line, and as the old man walked along it, he saw that each man and woman was wearing a medallion bearing his likeness, the women's entwined with roses.
And it was at Castle Clinton that, ten years later, the handful of Lafayette Guards still alive drew up in a hollow square, in the center of which was a riderless black horse - spurred boots, reversed, slung across its empty saddle - to hear the funeral oration for their dead hero.
The brief summary of Lafayette's grand tour of the United States currently on wikipedia gives a sense of his fame in the United States.
I'm pleased to report that the book is as good as advertised. Caro's prose is mesmerizing. Moses starts as an idealist who quickly learns how to use politics to achieve his dreams, and then falls into using politics simply to gain more power while enriching his friends and overrunning anybody who tries to oppose him despite not actually being elected. Despite weighing in at nearly 1200 pages, it was a comparatively light and easy read. If I'd been able to lock myself in a room I would have been done in a day or two; reading it in bits and snatches I finished it over the course of the trip.
My favorite chapter was one about Moses attempting to build a bridge through the Battery, a rare case where he lost because FDR ordered the military to stop the project on (specious) national defense reasons. Caro quotes extensively from a book called The Battery by Rodman Gilder on the topic of Lafayette. I liked it so much I've retyped it here:
It was at Castle Garden on August 16, 1824, that, in the words on one historian, "it was proved that republics are not always ungrateful," for it was at Castle Garden on that date that Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, who as a rich young nobleman had defied his King and fought for America, returned to it, sixty-seven years old and penniless.
"Many of the spectators doubtless had in mind a gallant, boyish figure in the buff and blue of the American Revolution, with powdered hair tied in a queue," the historian wrote. "What they saw was an old civilian, in a short-haired brown wig." But when the old civilian stepped onto the Castle Garden landing stage - after a trip up the harbor on which his ship was escorted by a huge flotilla - to begin a visit on which he was to receive from the government and citizens of the United States gifts of bonds and land worth almost half a million dollars, the Castle's cannon roared out a hundred times. When the old man walked slowly into Battery Park, "to the incessant huzzas of the multitude that packed the waterfront," he walked between the weeping ranks of the Lafayette Guards. When he rode up Broadway, men and women on rooftops threw flowers in his path. A month later, a tall spar was raised in the center of the fort, a vast awning of sailcloth was spread across its entire ceiling, "the white banner of France was entwined with the Stars and Stripes, trophies of arms glittered from the walls" - and when Lafayette appeared at the ball, "the gay sets dissolved" and the dancers formed a long line, and as the old man walked along it, he saw that each man and woman was wearing a medallion bearing his likeness, the women's entwined with roses.
And it was at Castle Clinton that, ten years later, the handful of Lafayette Guards still alive drew up in a hollow square, in the center of which was a riderless black horse - spurred boots, reversed, slung across its empty saddle - to hear the funeral oration for their dead hero.
The brief summary of Lafayette's grand tour of the United States currently on wikipedia gives a sense of his fame in the United States.