Robert Caro's The Power Broker still powerful after 50 years
It has been called “monumental” and “surely the greatest book ever written about a city.”
Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker recently marked the 50th anniversary of its publication. It is a biography about an urban planner. So why does it inspire so much praise?
Robert Moses was no ordinary urban planner. Starting in the 1920s, he held a succession of un-elected public positions, variously heading parks and planning commissions and bridge and tunnel authorities, all the while shaping modern New York City and New York state. There are today parkways, parks, dams and power plants named after Moses, but the greatest testament is Caro’s biography.
But it is more than a biography and the title points to the book’s real theme: the uses – and abuses – of power. Over the course of 44 years, Moses accumulated so much power that no mayor or governor would stand up to him. If Moses determined a tunnel or bridge needed to be in a certain place, entire neighbourhoods were razed to make way for them. If he set a route for a parkway, it did not matter if it cut a poor farmer’s plot of land in half or passed through the front yard of a millionaire’s estate.
Equally impressive as the book itself is how he went about writing it. Caro’s method is to personally interview everyone that he can possibly find connected to the subject. He also pours through archives and personally views every document he can get his hands on.
The writing of The Power Broker is heroic because of this dogged dedication to the truth but also because of the personal sacrifices he made to write it, giving up his job as a journalist and running out of money during the writing process. The writing of The Power Broker is also a love story. His wife, Ina Caro, herself an historian, typed his manuscripts and became his researcher, believing in him so much that she sold their house without his knowledge in order to raise the money so he could keep going.
Caro employed the same methodology of research writing his next massive project, the equally impressive multi-volume biography collectively known as The Years of Lyndon Johnson, famously moving to Texas and sleeping under the stars in Texas Hill Country in order to better understand the origins of the former president.
The 50th anniversary of the publication of the first volume in the series happens in 2026. Now 89 years old, Caro is currently writing the fifth and final volume.
President Barack Obama recalled reading The Power Broker when he was 22 years old and being “mesmerized” by it, adding “I’m sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.”
The paperback edition of The Power Broker, weighing in at over a kilogram, is a hefty volume to carry around with you. But as I reflect on passing the words contained in its 1,344 pages through my mind. I believe it changed both the way think and the way I write. To me, there are two kinds of city planners, journalists, politicos: Those who have read The Power Broker and those who have not.