Robert Caro

The Power Broker (1974) is probably the most influential book ever written about urban power, and its finding is that Robert Moses governed New York for forty-four years without ever winning an election. He did it by accumulating chairmanships of public authorities, bodies that collected tolls and could issue debt without going through the city or the state, and therefore depended on no voter.

Caro did not stop at the mechanism. He counted the price: around half a million people displaced to open urban expressways, the Bronx cut in two by the Cross Bronx Expressway, whole districts emptied, and a systematic policy of underinvesting in transit in favour of the car. His chapter on one block of East Tremont, following the specific families who lived there before the bulldozer, is the model for how displacement should be told.

Born in New York in 1935 and a journalist before he was a biographer, Caro spent seven years on this book, interviewed more than five hundred people and went broke doing it. He has since spent almost fifty years on the five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the other great American anatomy of political power.

The argument over Moses has never stopped: some historians hold that Caro underrated the parks, pools and public beaches he left behind, and that without him New York would lack much of its infrastructure. Caro has answered that both things are true, and that this is exactly the problem with unchecked power. His book is obligatory reading alongside the life of Jane Jacobs, who fought Moses in the streets of the Village.