Title : WaPo's fact checker casts doubt on Robert A. Caro's "The Power Broker."
link : WaPo's fact checker casts doubt on Robert A. Caro's "The Power Broker."
WaPo's fact checker casts doubt on Robert A. Caro's "The Power Broker."
In "Robert Moses and the saga of the racist parkway bridges" (WaPo), Glenn Kessler fact-check's something Pete Buttigieg said:
"I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would’ve been — in New York was — was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices."
The question isn't whether Buttigieg got it wrong, but whether the massively respected Robert A. Caro got it wrong in his 1974 book about Robert Moses. And Kessler finds that in the years since the publication of the book, significant doubts have been raised about the part — 2 pages — containing the anecdote about the motivation for the height of the underpasses.
Caro's only source for the story was Sidney M. Shapiro, "a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission."
Bernward Joerges, a German professor of sociology, in 1999 carefully examined the saga of the bridges. In an essay, he acknowledged Moses was an “undemocratic scoundrel” and a “structural racist” but argues that all parkways at the time had low bridges.
“How, then, should one understand that Moses built some 200 overpasses so low?” he asked. “U.S. civil engineers with whom I have corresponded regularly produce two simple explanations for the rationality of the low-hanging bridges: that commercial traffic was excluded from the parkways anyway; and that the generally good transport situation on Long Island forbade the very considerable cost of raising the bridges … Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country. … In sum: Moses could hardly have let buses on his parkways, even if he had wanted differently.”...Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian who has said that generations of his students have failed to confirm episodes in Caro’s book, also says the overpass story is not true. “Caro is wrong,” he wrote in an email. “Arnold Vollmer, the landscape architect who was in charge of design for the bridges, said the height was due to cost.” He added: “Also, you can still get to Jones Beach by train and bus, as you always could.”...
But more recently, Thomas J. Campanella, a Cornell University historian of city planning, had a change of heart when he measured the height of the bridges on the Southern State Parkway. “I’ve always had doubts about the veracity of the Jim Crow bridge story. There is little question that Moses held patently bigoted views,” he wrote in an article for Bloomberg News in 2017. But then he recorded clearances for 20 bridges, viaducts and overpasses on other parkways built at the time and compared them to measures of the 20 original bridges and overpasses on the Southern State Parkway. It turned out clearances are substantially lower on the Moses parkway.
“The verdict? It appears that Sid Shapiro was right,” he wrote. “I do believe it is true,” Campanella said in an email to The Fact Checker. “The parkways I looked at were built in roughly the same era as the Southern State — especially Sawmill and Hutch. In fact, the Westchester parkways set most of the standards for parkway design for years in the United States. The lower overpasses on the Southern State parkway are a substantial deviation from precedent.”
Joerges suggested there was a reason for this. “True the bridges were low, but each had to be low differently,” he wrote. “Moses took great care that each and every bridge was individually fitted into its natural context: standardized unicity, as it were, was part of an artfully laid out nature. One can show more generally that, when it came to parkway building, bridge-building culture was connected to a specific politics of nature.”...
So what can you say about Buttigieg's use of the Caro account? Kessler refrains from assigning the usual Pinocchios. When politicians use history — as when judges and lawyers use history — they select the story that works they way they want. But it's a massive intrusion into the mind of America for the Secretary of Transportation to assert — as a truth — that our roads are structured by racism. We are owed a scrupulous adherence to the truth. America is as bad as it is, but no worse.
Thus articles WaPo's fact checker casts doubt on Robert A. Caro's "The Power Broker."
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