[RickinKs]

Originally Posted by lorenzotedesco

I too am a fan of Al Smith. I have stumbled upon a townhouse with a plaque dedicated to him on my wanderings in lower Manhattan. I can't remember if the building was on South St. or Oliver St. They are not far apart. His is one of those "only in America" kind of tales.

Nancy,
I'm wondering if Your Grandmother ever talked about Al Smith. I'm sure he's too old for Your Father to have remembered him (maybe not). Historians would tell you he was FDR before FDR.

Rick

[Carolinagirl]

But that is a great story about the creation of that park. Say yes to green spaces.

[Jake]

Robert Caro is "still" with us, and as Rick says, is quite the researcher. He's got a research team of one, his wife, who with together sort through the seemingly endless documentation for his books. I have the three Johnson books, and will try to get around to reading them.

Jane Jacobs starts out her book "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" (which I do have but have not read yet) by stating that the book is an attack on current city and urban planning, which basically meant an attack on Robert Moses. She was funded by the Rockefeller foundation, whom she acknowledges in her Acknowledgement section. The Rockefellers in the end took Robert Moses' power. I wonder if one Goliath helped David in defeating the other Goliath? In any case, Jacobs' book came at the right time and hit the right nerve to unravel the spinning vortex New York's urban planning had, by the sixties, become.

It's interesting to parallel Al Smith to Franklin Roosevelt. FDR and Al Smith came from the same party and were instrumental in instigating social programs to help those in dire straits, however, that is almost where the parallels stop. Roosevelt was Harvard-graduate aristocratically upstate, Smith was from South Street, with pride he always said he got a FFM degree ("Fulton Fish Market"). Smith was Tammany, Roosevelt was anything but. Smith could stand in front of a crowd, and with his booming voice, sing songs and crack jokes, Roosevelt....
Al Smith also had people like Belle Moscowitz and Robert Moses, Roosevelt wouldn't have anything to do with the latter. Al Smith wanted to become president, but chose a bad time to do so, as the depression was still a few years away and Hoover was at peak popularity. Robert Moses authored most of the bills which made it easy for Roosevelt to govern with no major administrative experience. Al Smith lost the presidential election, Roosevelt won the governorship in 1928.
Al Smith would gladly offer any help to the new governor, but the new Governor never sought that help, which cut into the pride of the FFM graduate. Robert Moses would hate Roosevelt in part for this and the two would be enemies for the rest of Roosevelt's life. The many New Deal aspects which made Roosevelt universally famous actually came from earlier Al Smith projects, the fireside chats were off-shoots from Al Smith's ways of speaking to the public. The Roosevelt White House was, in essence, the New York White House.

As for the Sinatras in Jersey talking about Al Smith in New York, considering Smith came from the shores of the East River and later moved on to Albany, I'm not too sure he would have found such an audience even across the Hudson, considering as well how he lost so handily against Hoover, even in his own state, in the 1928 presidential election. I would think there was more of a possibility of Frank Sinatra and Robert Moses meeting sometime in the fifties and sixties, than of Al Smith being a Sinatra Hoboken household name.

Just consider this: in 1928 Robert Moses drafted many bills in Albany. The Cross-Bronx Expressway was not mainly completed until 1963, and Robert Moses still had around 5 years of power left by that time. Robert Moses was in power for a long time, much longer in his positions than democracies are designed for.

If you go to the Department of Parks and Recreation New York City web site, and click on Parks History, you can download a pdf file on a report from 1964 detailing Moses-era programs and projects. Quite interesting.

[lorenzotedesco]

I know this is a Robert Moses thread, but I can't let Rick's thoughts on Caro and LBJ pass. First, your anecdote about learning how to can peaches by reading Caro really brought together different facets of your world. I really liked that you learned this art in such an off handed manner and that it tied in with your family's history.

One of the things that I took from the LBJ books that is another example of Caro's research was the mini-biography he included on one Coke Stevenson the man LBJ defeated in the run for the Senate in 1948. I was so absorbed by the Stevenson tale as told by Caro that I didn't want to go back to the bigger story on LBJ. Coke Stevenson was just a bigger than life figure in Texas who bridged the mythical independent cowboy world of the 19th Century with the modern Texas of the 20th Century, and his defeat at the hands of the LBJ machine was a bitter pill to swallow. I do wonder how much of Caro's perspectives and biases are reflected in his writing. He made the one, Stevenson, out to be a heroic albeit tragic figure counterposed against LBJ the helicopter flying, radio campaigner without scruples.

I wonder, does Caro only pick subjects who are flawed giants (at least as perceived by him)? I must see what else he has written.

Larry

[Jake]

Caro only wrote the three Johnson books, and the Robert Moses book. I think he's working on the fourth and final LBJ book. Before that, he was an investigative reporter. Otherwise he has contributed to documentaries like the "New York" docu by Ric Burns, which initially led me to Caro in the first place.

Check out youtube under Caro and watch his Charlie Rose interview. He is drawn to write about people with power and how power reveals the person. To show the effect of power on someone you have to see what the person with power does to those without.

Caro has his own website as well.

I would agree that Caro has his opinion and that one should not take all he writes as being the be-all and end-all of the tale. I agree, for instance, with Robert Moses when he says that you can't please everyone and that to build you have to at times tear down. I also think had Robert Moses been "kinder and gentler", as Caro wrote, New York would have been different. Not better, or worse, necessarily, but different.

[Carolinagirl]

and I'll recommend this book about Moses to my daughter. I think you might enjoy Kunstler's HOME FROM NOWHERE, too.

I enjoyed your posts about Moses.

[Jake]

Yes, ma'am!!!

[RickinKs]

just getting home....

Yes Caro has only written the Moses book and Caroline I don't think anyone has mentioned it's well over 1,000 pages before you get to the footnotes, but it's well worth the read and totally engrossing. I can speak to length because when I saw him speak in person I had 2 1,000 pages sitting on my lap for an hour and half and then held them in the autograph line for 20 minutes ..... by were my arms tired ( there should be a smiley rimshot).

From what I know he reading the 4th book, and I saw an interview with him on CSpan and he hinted at his next project being Benjamin Disreali , 19th century British Prime Minister. I hope he leaves long enough to write them, I think he's his mid 70's and at the book a decade paces he writes , who knows.

He talks a lot about the focus of his writing is Power and how it is used. He claims his book don't get into personal stories , but he manages to sneak a few in .

I think Caro belongs with David MCCullough,Douglas Brinkley,HW Brandis, Richard Norton Smith and the late David Halberstam as the great history writers of our time.

Rick

His

[lorenzotedesco]

Rick,

I don't know that I've read all the authors on your list but I would add Doris Kearns Goodwin in spite of the charges of plagiarism that have stalked her recently.

Larry

[Carolinagirl]

but my daughter might. She read Hugo's LES MISERABLES when she was eight years old. Of course, she was ten when she finished it. I'm not sure she's into Moses enough for the full ride, but she can read parts. LOL. She's pretty busy.
Carolina(Melanie)

Jake, do you mean Ken Burns documentary about the Brooklyn Dodgers? Burns supposedly was a member of my church in NYC, but I don't know if he ever came. I guess he was busy.

[RickinKs]

Originally Posted by lorenzotedesco

Rick,

I don't know that I've read all the authors on your list but I would add Doris Kearns Goodwin in spite of the charges of plagiarism that have stalked her recently.

Larry

Larry, I was looking at my bookshelf after I posted my earlier message. Yes she was omission on my part "Team of Rivals" is a wonderful book, and I love her every time I see her on TV, from Ken Burns "Baseball" to "Meet the Press", she's very good.

Rick

[Jake]

"Jake, do you mean Ken Burns documentary about the Brooklyn Dodgers?"

No, his brother, Ric Burns, and his, I think, wonderful documentary on New York, part of the "American Experience" PBS series, which includes Ken Burns' works on Baseball, the Civil War, Jazz, etc. David Ogden Stiers, of Charles Emerson Winchester fame from MASH, is the narrator of "New York", and people like Mike Wallace (not the 60 min guy, but Professor at City University New York), Kenneth Jackson, Robert Caro, Alan Ginsberg, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pete Hamill, Brendan Gill, David Levering Lewis, David McCullough, and many more contribute by way of interview and research. Excellent work, and the accompanying "New York, an Illustrated History" is splendid.

Another point to make: Robert Caro was born in 1935.

I'm at the point in the book where Caro writes about the "Urban renewal" programs. Another 150 pages to go. As I mentioned earlier, I don't take the book with me on my working trips, as it is big and clumsy to carry in luggage. Anyway, quite shocking stuff, I admit.

I would like to know if the traffic situation in New York and what Caro wrote for this book, which was finished in 1974, is still valid, and if the Moses projects are still haunting New York traffic to this day, particularly in the region between JFK airport and Manhattan, and mass transportation?

[Carolinagirl]

But I sure don't know. When I lived there, I never had a car.

[Jake]

Robert Moses never learned how to drive a car. As Caro wrote, by the fifties, Moses was so sheltered by what was happening in the New York region that he may have really thought that the situation out there was like the situation in the twenties, when he first envisioned the vastness and potential of Long Island, and the parkway as a "leisure route", where drivers could watch the magnificent scenery go by.

In a way, I don't buy that. I don't agree with Caro on that issue. I think, perhaps, that Robert Moses was so intent on keeping power that, he avoided the reality in favour of what his yes-men were telling him; that the traffic situation of NYC in the fifties and sixties were like the twenties. And since Moses rewrote so well bills and laws and by-laws and what have you, he could think that way and doctor any statistic that showed he was wrong. What's more, as Caro wrote, the major newspapers like the New York Times never lifted a finger to show he was erroneous in his take on things and reality. This was the best way to keep power, in his opinion.

Are we different today?

[Carolinagirl]

Though I don't think I'll fully understand till I read more about it. These things are my daugher's obsessions. I'm convinced I want to retire somewhere I don't have to drive to sustain life, though that doesn't mean I won't drive.

[Jake]

The story of Robert Moses and New York is much more complex than even we can imagine, Melanie. As many have said before, the 1840's or so were probably the last years where people could say they understand what's happening in the city.

[mikesnyc]

just want to say as a new yorker that its a fascinating subject (robert moses, etc) and that this thread is wonderful-- alot of very informative postings!

I have little to add to what's been discussed, but as someone who has relied largely on public transportation for the last 15 years after moving into manhattan, obviously i don't see eye to eye with robert moses.... but as everyone has pointed out, its a complex set of issues, making a city run, grow and develop, and no doubt there's been huge changes and will continue to be.

[Joe Szulczewski]

There's a lot that can be said about Robert Moses and how he can be looked on as both great and destructive. His great infrastructure projects in NYC made the city a great place to tavel to and from at the cost of housing. He is responsible for bringing back National League baseball to the City. He has done so much more good, as well. But we need to look to his beginnings as a builder and large public works projects in the late 1920s and his influence on then New York Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt with those projects and how he managed to find and carry them off. If you look at the basis of the New Deal to get America out of the Great Depression, you'll see a lot of Mr. Moses' influence with the model FDR used for his programs. Large Public Works projects spurred the need for manpower and materials.

[Jake]

I for one am not a New Yorker, cannot claim to know much about the city from personal experience, have visited the city four times, the longest time was 6 days and then I just had to leave. That said, I love NYC and can't put to words why.

I devour literature on New York, and its history. I have to get some documentation regarding public transport in the late 60's and 70's, 80's... you get the idea. I would like to know how much NYC had to pay for revamping its public transportation, since Robert Moses didn't do much to improve what was in the 20's considered one of the best public transportation departments in the world.

"But we need to look to his beginnings as a builder and large public works projects in the late 1920s and his influence on then New York Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt with those projects and how he managed to find and carry them off. If you look at the basis of the New Deal to get America out of the Great Depression, you'll see a lot of Mr. Moses' influence with the model FDR used for his programs. Large Public Works projects spurred the need for manpower and materials."

I think this paragraph, in a way has more to do with Al Smith and less with Robert Moses. Al Smith's was the model Franklin Roosevelt took for his "New Deal" (Robert Moses, who despised FDR with a passion, would probably say that FDR stole Al Smith's ideas without ever acknowledging the "Fulton Fish Market graduate"). Al Smith had many key advisors, most notably Belle Moskowitz, who encouraged Smith to make the young, and up to then very unsuccessful, Robert Moses Parks Commissioner and Secretary of State of New York. Robert Moses was considered "the best bill drafter in Albany" by Al Smith.

[Carolinagirl]

I know some of them. Of course, you can't make another one.

I, too, love it.