It was a comment that showed Moses’ belief in the arrogant British philosophical views of the wealthy. In a film clip from Ric Burns’ documentary on New York, Robert Moses said to the camera in arrogant fashion, that the public did not know what was good for them. Moses wrote in his own book, Working for the People, that he had great admiration for the philosophy of British Civil Service. The public service taught was founded in the British philosophy of wealth and power of the highly educated governing over the public in a somewhat condescending fashion. Oxford was a conservative institution with a philosophy on teaching public service. In the early twentieth century, Oxford was a University attended by the wealthy and privileged. In 1909, Moses began studying at Oxford University in Cambridge, England. Caro argues that it was in those cliques that Moses’ developed his need for power that would later play a pivotal role in his life. It was at Yale in which Moses’ began to formulate small clicks of friends and colleagues in which he became the dominant leader. Stieglitz, World Telegram staff photographer, via Wikimedia CommonsRobert Moses attended Yale University from 1905 to 1909. Robert Moses’ future building aspirations seem to have been deep rooted in his family genes. Robert Caro made it clear in his book, The Power Broker, that Bella Moses had soon become more interested in the physical building of projects based on the settlement house movement, rather than the philanthropic issues that faced the poor immigrants needing help at the beginning of the twentieth century. Robert’s mother was a German Jew that became very involved in the settlement house movement at the turn of the century. When Robert Moses turned nine, his family moved to a luxury apartment near Fifth Avenue in New York City. Robert Moses’ father owned a department store. Robert Moses was born in 1888, in the town of New Haven, Connecticut. To understand where, why, and how a man formulates his ideals is an important step in analyzing the legacy and impact of a man such as Robert Moses.
The lifestyle that most Long Islanders live has been formulated by no one more significant than Robert Moses. Nonetheless, no matter what the reasons were behind Moses’ development of Long Island, most people cannot live on Long Island without spending a significant amount of time in an automobile driving on one of the roadways that Robert Moses’ built. It was that viewpoint of Caro’s that spurned a backlash to Caro’s book in the 1980s led by Columbia University Professor Kenneth T Jackson.
In an interview with Newsday in 1988, Caro stated that Moses’ intention was to develop an Island that housed only middle class to upper class people. Completed in 1975, Robert Caro’s renowned book, The Power Broker, takes a harsh look at Robert Moses. Historians have varying views on Moses’ true intentions for the development of Long Island. Robert Moses is well known for the many parks he built on Long Island, but it was the roadways to those parks, and his elitist attitude, that cemented his reputation as the most important builder in Long Island history, and significantly, the most ignorant!
Although Robert Moses’ legacy reached far beyond the landscape of Long Island, it was the relationship between the five boroughs of New York City and Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties that formulated the growth and limitations of the life of the Long Islander in both a social and environmental sense. Photo: By Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York (Verrazano-Narrows Bridge: The Beginning), via Wikimedia CommonsWithout a doubt, no person in the history of New York had a more significant impact on the development of Long Island than Robert Moses.
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