Robert Moses and the Shaping of New York, Part 1

Stuff You Missed in History Class

This episode explores the early career and rise to power of Robert Moses, a figure who fundamentally shaped New York City's infrastructure without ever

Key takeaways

• Robert Moses leveraged government appointments rather than elections to amass significant public works power.
• He was mentored by Belle Moskowitz, who taught him how to navigate political structures without alienating voters.

Main topics

• The early life and education of Robert Moses
• Political mentorship under Belle Moskowitz

Notable quotes

As long as you're fighting for parks, you and public opinion are on your side.

Conclusion

The episode provides a nuanced look at how Moses's administrative tena

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This is an iHeart Speaker 1 (0:00) Podcast. Speaker 2 (0:02) Guaranteed human. Speaker 1 (0:05) Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio. Speaker 1 (0:16) Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So recently, as I was scrolling about on social media, as one does, there was a, in my case, Instagram post by New York Mayor Sir Anwar Mdani announcing that the city was going to start a renovation of a one and a half mile section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, known as the BQE to New Yorkers. that runs between Atlantic Avenue and Sand Street. The whole expressway does not that section. There's so much punditry about this announcement and whether it's good or bad, we're not weighing in on any of that. Because I don't live in New York. I don't have, you know, I'm in New York a lot, which is why I keep getting fed these ads or these videos, but I don't live there. So I don't feel like I have any gravity regarding the situation. But in that announcement. uh, Mayor Mom Donnie mentioned Robert Moses and Speaker 2 (1:13) said Speaker 1 (1:14) like, oh, that's a whole other video. And I was like, oh yeah, there's a person that is controversial and intriguing and worth talking about. Speaker 1 (1:22) because he is responsible for so much of the infrastructure that is part of day-to-day life in New York. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica account, his work included 35 highways, 12 bridges, numerous parks, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Shea Stadium, many housing projects, two hydroelectric dams, and the 1964 New York World's Fair. Speaker 1 (1:47) We're not going to talk about all of that because we can't. There's just too much. But we will talk about some of the things that he worked on and the controversies that played out and continue to. New Yorkers, I feel like, and people who are into urban planning instantly know who you're talking about when you say Robert Moses. But in my casual survey of people in my life, a lot of people did not seem to really know about him or fully understand the breadth of his impact. And here's the thing, when you look at his life story and his career, it is a wild ride. And there is, as I said, a lot, even pared down to exclude a lot of his big projects. Like, we're not talking about Lincoln Center today. Sorry if you wanted that. But even getting rid of some of those big projects, it's still another two-parter. Because Robert Moses was busy. He's got some problems in his career that we have to talk about. And even though he has been dead for 45 years at this point, he remains a divisive figure whose legacy is probably going to be debated for another century or more. And he really did, though, impact the city. And he created that legacy, interestingly enough, without ever having held public office. He was never elected to public office, although he did manage to gain an awful lot of power through appointments to government positions. Speaker 2 (3:07) Robert Moses was born December 18, 1888, to Emanuel and Bella Moses in New Haven, Connecticut, where Emanuel had a department store. The Moses home was just a couple of blocks away from the Yale University campus, and they lived there until Robert was nine years old. Then the family moved to New York City at Bella's insistence. Emmanuel was already planning his retirement, so once he was done with working, the Moseses moved to East 46th Street in Manhattan. Once they were in the city, Bella worked in a settlement house that helped Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. And that sounds like kind of a wholesome project for her to do, but Bella had her own agenda at work with this. She really thought immigrants had to be Americanized. Speaker 1 (3:57) Yeah, Bella, I feel like, could be her own topic. I don't know if there's enough information on her, but she sounds like a very headstrong, very bossy woman with a lot of ideas. She came from a lot of money. Speaker 1 (4:12) Bella. That's all I got to say on that one. She will come up briefly later in the episode. But after going to prep school, Robert enrolled at Yale. And as an undergrad, he was really active in a lot of sports. He was a standout on the swimming and water polo teams. He completed his undergraduate degree in 1909, and then he went to Wadham College, Oxford for his master's degree. And Moses made a really strong, positive impression on his fellow students in England, and he was elected president of the Oxford Union. That's the debating society. He is the only student from the U.S. to have ever held that position, as far as I could tell. I know he was the only one at that time. Moses then went to Columbia to get his Ph.D. in political science, and his dissertation for his Ph.D. reflected the influence of his time at Oxford. It was titled The Civil Service of Great Britain, and he received his PhD in 1913. The Speaker 2 (5:12) months immediately after the completion of his education were very busy for Robert Moses. He had a job basically waiting for him thanks to his mother's connections that was at the Training School for Public Service, which prepared students to work in government jobs. Speaker 1 (5:27) This job was apparently not something that Moses especially liked. He thought it was really dull and unstimulating. Working at the school did have some positives for him, though. It led him to meet his future wife, Mary Sims. And he did pretty quickly find a way out of the tedium of the training school. And that was in a job working for John Perroy Mitchell, the mayor of New York, as part of the New York City's Bureau of Municipal Research. So this job still related, of course, to government work. But this time, Robert was reorganizing the city's government, or at least making recommendations for it. And he found that much more engaging. All of these moves and meeting Mary, that all happened still in 1913, the same year as his PhD. So it was, as we said, a very busy year for him. Then after a two-year courtship, Robert and Mary got married. That was in 1915. And they would go on to have two daughters together. Speaker 2 (6:26) After several years of working for the city, he met Alfred E. Smith, the new governor of New York, and became part of his team. The actual job came through Belle Moskovitz, who was a progressive reformer who had become Smith's advisor, and she could easily be an episode in the future. In 1919, Moses became the chief of staff for the New York State Reconstruction Commission. Smith had assembled this group, and Moskowitz had brought Moses on to bring change to New York through a government reorg. Moses learned a lot from Moskowitz in this role, and she had a really deep understanding of how to maneuver through the government to achieve goals without angering the people who held power. An important skill. Speaker 1 (7:13) Yes, she's really considered a mentor to him, and, like, there's one example of... him making a recommendation at one point in an early draft of a report about having to cut some of the workforce. And she was like, ah, don't forget, every one of those people is a voter and we don't want to make them mad. We have to figure out a way to cut costs without eliminating this many people. Just little things like that that she taught him to think about as he was doing his government work. And in this new role, Robert Moses first had to make an assessment report on the state. of the government, and then a plan for a state government reorganization, similar to what he had done for the city. On October 10th, 1919, Moses submitted that report to the governor. It was titled Report of Reconstruction Commission to Governor Alfred E. Smith on Retrenchment and Reorganization in the State Government. This was a substantial document. The summary alone was 42 pages long. and there were another 372 pages to it. Speaker 2 (8:18) Moses had spearheaded an in-depth look at every single job in the state government, and he made thousands of recommendations based on that look. This really started things off on the right foot for him, as the report was considered both comprehensive and impressive. It gave Moses enough clout with the governor that he stepped into an advisory role with the state administration. The report was very popular with progressives. A lot of the recommendations in the document required approval from the legislature or even changes to the state constitution, and a lot of that passed, but not all of it. Moses intended to keep lobbying for the remaining recommendations, but in 1920, he had a hiccup in this plan, and his career was also... having a little hiccup because Alfred E. Smith lost the gubernatorial election. Moses got a new job with the New York State Association, but he and Al Smith kept in close touch after this. Speaker 1 (9:19) And then in 1922, Smith ran again, and this time he won by a huge margin. Once he was back in the governor's seat, Moses was right back on track with his own career and was once again a rising star in the state government. In 1924, Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed Moses to a role that he would parlay into a huge amount of power because he became the head of the New York and Long Island Park Commissions. We Speaker 2 (9:47) will talk about why the Park Commission job was so important after we pause for a sponsor break. Speaker 1 (10:02) The significance of the New York and Long Island Park Commission's position is really tied to shifting socioeconomic conditions in the U.S. in the mid-1920s. So we're going to zoom out for a second. In the first quarter of the 20th century, there were a lot of reforms and changes for the U.S. There were moves for business regulation and better working conditions. And then after World War I, economic prosperity reached a wider range of people than ever before. A lot of households saw an increase in their income, with working hours also being reduced in many sectors. While the 40-hour workweek was still decades away from becoming a federal law, a number