Power at Its Best

I'm about 250 pages into rereading Robert Caro's The Power Broker, immersed in the time in the late 1920s when Robert Moses had just bent the laws of New York State to build the system of parks on Long Island and in Upstate New York within just a few years, openly defying the robber barons who owned not just the adjacent lands on the nearby shores, but sometimes the very land he turned into parks.

He was able to do it because Governor Al Smith let him do it, and because they both knew that parks would be popular with the mass of voters who were trapped in the city every summer. He also spread the parks around the state, the same way defense contractors and spread the wealth throughout Congressional districts after World War II so it would be less assailable.

In many ways, it's an admirable moment of a person beating the millionaires (these days they would be billionaires) at their own game to create a public good.

And the people did love the parks, and Moses was acclaimed for them. He parlayed that into more power that created the next 50 years of his career, in which he built and destroyed with almost no oversight.

One thing that Caro makes clear about Moses is that, while he wanted to make parks for people, he also looked down on people of color, immigrants, and poor people generally. He thought of them as lesser people. It's well documented that he built parks like Long Island's Jones Beach, for instance, so that it could only be reached by automobiles, not buses or any form of transit. The parkways he built to reach it had overpasses that were too low to allow taller vehicles, and he knew that. 

I was having my usual trouble thinking about the idea of power as I was reading Caro's book. Is its existence and essential problem? How do you get anything done without it? 

And then I saw this quote from Martin Luther King today. He wrote it in “Where Do We Go From Here?” (1967):

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.

Robert Moses had power, but he didn't have love, except for his own vision. 

King's statement would be my oath of office, if I had one.