United States: Essays 1952-1992 Chapter Summary & Analysis - "What Robert Moses Did to New York City" (1974) Summary

"What Robert Moses Did to New York City" (1974) Summary and Analysis

From the early 1940s through the mid 1960s, Robert Moses was a demagogue of New York City power politics who established and operated a series of self-perpetuating fiefdoms such as the Triborough Bridge Authority, and whose style is "a perfect blueprint for...the first popularly elected dictator of the United States." Vidal views the career of Moses, a conservative, Yale-educated German Jew from New York City, as a cautionary tale—one laid out splendidly in a biography by Robert Caro.

After Yale, Moses studied at Oxford where he identified with the ruling class and believed it to be the most enlightened in the world, with its firm but benign ordering of the lower social classes. To transplant this style at home, Moses advocated in his PhD thesis "the remorseless exercise of the executive power of suppression and dismissal" to prevent workers from organizing labor unions. When he got to New York City,...
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