Caro spends thankfully little time on Moses’ early years, which are generally the worst part of any biography. What little he does say, however, really highlights the case for picking your own biographer. Now, in theory I am all in favor of historically significant people opening up their archives to allow broad scholarly access, and to not put in place limiting copyright restrictions that only allow an authorized biographer to access your papers. On the other hand, God forbid our teenage selves are described by someone who doesn’t like us very much. Caro comes awfully close to name-calling at many points, referring to Moses the minor as arrogant, stubborn, a loner, spoiled, a recluse, and emotional, while strongly implying epithets like “bully” and “poseur” (had the latter word existed in 1974). About the only positive thing he can find to say about Moses is to quote someone calling him “an attractive Jew.”
To outline his early life briefly, however: Moses’ grandparents, cousins (which is really irrelevant, but Caro emphasizes it), immigrated from Bavaria to New York and were married in 1849. Moses’ grandfather started a dry goods business and expanded into real estate, becoming a millionaire and a member of the New York Jewish upper class. Moses’ grandmother was, in Caro’s somewhat troubling depiction, a cold (never visited her dying daughters in the hospital!), intellectual (read newspapers in multiple languages!), “imperious” (cut in the front of lines!) shrew (bullied her husband!). Her daughter, Moses’ mother, seemed to take after her, although—and Caro actually says this—“her looks weren’t as impressive.” Rowr! She married Emanuel Moses, who owned a department store in New Haven, and moved to Connecticut with him for a while, then moved the family back to New York. (To do so, Emanuel was forced to sell the business, and spent the rest of his life in retirement, something he was apparently unhappy with.) Moses’ mother became heavily involved with the Settlement House movement, which moved poor immigrant Jews into newly-built housing. She became a very hands-on member, designing buildings, patrolling the grounds to find maintenance problems, and lecturing the residents on proper cleaning procedure.
Moses grew up his mother’s favorite, but had a harder time of it at Yale, which he picked because he missed the New Haven of his youth. Still dominated by prep-school Episcopalians, Moses was largely shut out of any of the major organizations, from the main literary magazine to the social groups, though he did not help his case by being younger than most and spending the majority of his time in his room reading. But this studiousness eventually attracted friends, fellow nerds, and Moses seized leadership positions at the second-tier organizations that were open to him. In the most memorable instance, he organized the minor sports teams at Yale into an organization that would be able to get better financing, and tried to trick one of the major donors, though his teammates blocked him. (Moses’ college career is weirdly similar to those of Presidents Nixon and Johnson.) He then went to Oxford, which treated him much more kindly, on the assumption that if you got into Oxford, you were already part of the elite.
Psychobiography aside, the most interesting parts of this section concern his time at Oxford, particularly as regards his thesis. In it, he endorsed the ideas of Woodrow Wilson, who had just been elected President. Believe it or not, this is a real present-at-the-creation sort of moment. Wilson is generally thought to have theorized and instituted the “administrative state,” and after Moses graduated from Oxford, he worked for the Bureau of Municipal research, which essentially implemented the ideas of public administration in the United States. (“One of his friends wondered, quite seriously, whether Bob Moses was not the man best educated in public administration in the entire country.”) For those of you who are not dating someone with a Master’s in public administration, this is all a pretty big deal. Public administration created the modern state, shaping our assumptions about how government should function and what it should be able to do. Despite my usual suspicion of claims that things now are different than they used to be, this really was a new way of doing things—more businesslike, more professional, more transparent, more efficient, and more responsive, but also far more active. The administrative state allowed the federal government to become the interventionist, active provider of services that we all know (and rely on, even if we don’t love it) today. (In the next entry, I’ll get into this a bit more, and talk about our how judgments about how well government works are sometimes rooted in a pre-administrative state understanding of government.)
This system holds great power, obviously, and Moses came very close to diagnosing the problem that he himself would later represent: what if someone with the wrong idea of how to do things gets in control? Moses thought that America should scrap the patronage system represented by the Tammany machine and put in its place something like the British Civil Service, which would award positions based on merit rather than political affiliation. (Caro accuses Moses of raging Anglophilia, though given that Moses seemed to encounter far less antisemitism at Oxford than at Yale, it’s hard to blame him.) This would open up government positions to anyone who could meet the requirements. But what if the wrong sort of person managed to get in? By this Moses did not mean someone like himself—in fact, he meant the exact opposite. He thought that only people educated at the best universities should be eligible for the civil service, as was the case in Britain at the time. At an Oxford debate, he even started a near-riot by arguing that colonial subjects were not really fit to take the civil service exam, and should not be allowed to self-govern.
This attitude is odious to us, of course. (Even on a self-interested level: I went to a fairly good college, but it would not have met Moses’ standards and I would have been barred from government work.) But, looking at how things are now, it’s hard not to wonder if he has a point. A class of governors who had all shared an experience and a training could do much to alleviate many of the problems people detest in our modern politics. If legislators had all gone to the same school, they would have longstanding relationships they might be more loath to violate, they would have a shared background that could be appealed to, and they would all have been required to at least think about some higher purpose for what they do, something beyond partisan or personal goals. Despite idealistic visions of legislating as something anyone could do, the complex instrument that the modern state has become is not something you can just walk into. No amount of training could ever eliminate corruption—nothing can eliminate corruption—but our elected representatives seem to enter government service with very different ideas of what government is supposed to do, and how it’s supposed to function. But there is something like a neutral consensus on those issues, at least in broad terms, and just as we don’t really want our EMTs working under different conceptions of the EMT’s role (what if some thought that they best serve the public by letting them heal themselves?), it seems like it would be nice to have our public officials working under a shared understanding of what it means to serve the public.
Still, Moses is the ultimate counterexample. Exquisitely educated, obviously brilliant, he sincerely wanted to help the less fortunate, and had their best interests at heart. And yet his ultimate actions ended up doing irreparable harm to hundreds of thousands of people. This sends a chill through my good liberal soul. Like Moses, I am overeducated and I want to help people, and like Moses, I believe in using the power of the government to solve large-scale problems. I think power is a good thing, as long as it is used well and carefully, and toward a specific set of goals. But does that road inevitably lead to Moses?
I think there’s another element to the equation: sensibility. Caro makes a good case that Moses’ upbringing instilled in him a restless intellect and a desire to help the less fortunate, but also a patronizing way of looking at the less fortunate and a contempt for the opinions of others. This particular brew, combined with power, created the results it did. But if Moses had a different sensibility, if he had done better things with the opportunities he was given, then he would be hailed as a hero today. After all, Frederick Law Olmsted, who was also Parks Commissioner and also exercised his power to change the way New York looks, is spoken of reverently. Without the power—as Caro points out—there would have been nothing, and we would be able to legitimately criticize the city for not changing things, for leaving in place problems of public health and disgraceful living conditions. The power wasn’t the problem. What he did with it was.
It seems to me that when we talk about democracy, we tend to think of it as a system of values, as an ideal. But it’s not, really. It’s just an empty vessel, a system of rules inside which actions are taken. It should impart a concern for the will of the people, but as the most basic business of politics is deciding between legitimate competing interests, that’s not much of a help. Yes, the will of the people: but which people? Democracy simply draws a smaller circle, putting certain things (just doing whatever the fuck you want) out of bounds, but the original circle was limited too (to what you can actually get away with). True democracy is only possible on a small scale. But there are values that are important, a sensibility that we want our leaders to cultivate if they want to rule well. Education may be one way to get that across; life experience may be another. And they may very well be competing sensibilities. But the example of Moses suggests that some should be shared. As Rachel puts it, Moses’ argument is a tempting one for anyone with power, but it’s ultimately self-defeating. Even if you have the best of intentions, everyone messes up eventually, gets the details wrong or misses an unintended consequence. Without the sensibility that values debate and discussion—one that Moses absolutely lacked—you are eventually going to get something wrong, and that will result in the failure of your policy and/or the end of your career (and your associates’). It is ultimately in your best interest to be open to consultation and contrary ideas; no matter what you thought of them politically, it’s undeniably true that it was precisely this tendency in the last Bush administration that caused such ruin to his party.
And, of course, if you really want to serve the public, you have to see every member of the public as a real and important human being. This by no means requires you to do no harm; that’s essentially impossible in politics. But to really do what’s best for the people you represent, you need to acknowledge the harm you’re doing with your decisions, be aware of it, honestly conclude that, despite the harm it’s doing, it’s still the best possible policy, and then own up to it afterwards. Politics is always about limited resources, and that means not everyone is going to get what they want. And that means, always and especially, that political leaders shouldn’t always get what they want, either.
3 years ago | Tags: the power broker biography public administration administrative state politics
