Robert Moses Turned Bridge Tolls Into a Three-Decade Power Base

Robert Moses built more of New York’s physical infrastructure than anyone before or since, Dwarkesh Patel argues: the Triborough and Verrazano bridges, the Cross Bronx Expressway, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, power dams, and hundreds of parks and pools. By 1964, Moses had built 672 of the 899 miles of highway completed in New York State. For more than 30 years, he was more powerful than any elected mayor or governor, though he held no elected office. When Moses was asked about the criticism that officials did not have to be elected, his reply was: “you don’t have to be either.”

The foundation of that power was legal engineering. Moses was known as one of Albany’s best bill drafters, and Patel says he used that skill to give himself powers lawmakers did not realize they were approving. The clearest example was the Triborough Bridge Authority Act of 1933. Public authorities were supposed to finance a specific project by selling bonds, pay back the debt from tolls, then hand the completed project to the city and dissolve. The act appeared to follow that model: the authority would cease to exist once its bonds were paid off. The bonds could run for up to 40 years, but revenues from the bridge were expected to repay the initial cost sooner.

Moses added provisions that changed what the authority could do. One allowed it to refinance its bonds “from time to time” with new bonds issued for “any other corporate purpose.” The authority could therefore extend its life by refinancing and use the proceeds for purposes beyond the original bridges. Other language allowed it to build connecting roads and facilities “not inconsistent with the use of the project.” Patel describes Moses’s interpretation as expansive: roads connected to other roads could be treated as connected to the bridge, potentially bringing a wide network of streets and related facilities within the authority’s reach. Patel says Moses used that interpretation to gain influence over roads, parks, and housing affected by the authority’s projects.

That breadth mattered because the authority could borrow against the Triborough Bridge’s toll revenues.

The authority’s borrowing capacity was more than twice the city’s, even though New York City was the largest city in America. Patel says Moses had given Triborough access to a financing base the city itself could not match.

Bond covenants made that authority difficult for later officials to undo. Moses’s act allowed the authority to include in its bond contracts “any other matters of like or different character” that affected the bonds’ security. Patel explains that the U.S. Constitution bars states from passing laws impairing contractual obligations. The covenants could specify that Triborough set tolls, keep the surplus, and continue collecting revenue. Once the bonds were sold, Patel says, those contractual terms constrained the legislature, governor, or mayor from simply revoking the authority’s powers. That constraint lasted for the life of the bonds—and that life could be extended through refinancing.

The law also helped Moses keep his job. Commissioners could be removed before their terms ended only “on stated charges after a formal hearing.” Patel notes that Moses’s disputes with mayors and governors usually concerned what he built and who was displaced, rather than personal misconduct. Caro wrote that Moses was not personally corrupt and was uninterested in payoffs. In Patel’s account, the absence of formal charges made removing him mid-term difficult.

Reappointment was harder to block because Moses held 12 government positions at once, including posts appointed by both the mayor and the governor. No single official could remove him from all of them. And removing him from any one position meant provoking a fight with a man who would still hold considerable power elsewhere.

Patel also argues that Moses’s reputation in later decades can obscure why officials kept him in office. His public image was fixed in part by Caro’s 1974 book The Power Broker, whose subtitle is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Patel argues that New York’s later crisis—marked by crime, deindustrialization, and white flight—reflected broader structural forces, and points to Detroit and St. Louis, where Moses had no comparable role, as cities that experienced more dramatic collapses. For much of his career, Moses was popular because people could see and use what he built: beaches, parks, and pools. In the 1930s and 1940s, New York high school students voted him the city’s most admired figure.

The speed and scale of that work helped make Moses popular, and gave mayors a reason to keep him in office. In his first four months as city park commissioner, Patel says, Moses kept crews working around the clock and completed 1,700 park renovations. The public works he delivered were visible and useful to millions of New Yorkers. Caro recounts that children at park and playground openings sometimes cheered Moses by name.

Moses could also deliver projects on a timetable that mattered to elected officials. Patel says major works could be completed within an election cycle, allowing a mayor to appear at a ribbon-cutting before facing reelection. He contrasts that pace with the Second Avenue Subway: construction began in 1972, its first section opened in 2017, and the initial two miles cost taxpayers $4.5 billion.

Speed helped Moses secure funding, too. Cities with completed plans could start work as soon as federal programs became available. Moses had a large team of planners and engineers; by 1936, New York was receiving one-seventh of the federal money allocated for Depression-era work relief. Since Moses chose the projects, a mayor with a different idea faced a practical disadvantage: without independent technical staff to draw up competing plans, the choice could be to build Moses’s projects or build nothing.

That leverage showed in Moses’s frequent threats to resign. One aide to Mayor Wagner said it seemed Moses was resigning “about one thing or another about twice a day.” La Guardia’s lawyer even had resignation forms printed for him. The joke masked a real political risk: accepting Moses’s resignation could cost the city its projects and funding, while inviting a public fight with a highly respected official. Patel says Moses had cultivated newspaper owners, including the Sulzberger family, which owned The New York Times. Mayors knew, in Patel’s account, that a resignation could be framed on the front page as a politician driving out a public servant who had refused to compromise the city’s interests. Moses himself described his advantage as “just sheer stubbornness.”

His support was not only popular or electoral. Moses also organized powerful private interests around construction. Banks could buy his bonds at a steep discount without competitive bidding; unions gained jobs; politically connected lawyers collected legal fees; and party bosses were paid to broker insurance policies for bridges. Patel says these beneficiaries could pressure a borough president or governor who threatened a project. Construction gave each group a reason to defend the projects, and Moses could rely on their influence when an official stood in his way. Patel describes this as a concentrated political faction for development: not opposition to construction, but an alliance positioned to benefit from it.

Caro’s account, as Patel presents it, begins with Moses as an idealistic reformer who joined the Good Government movement against Tammany Hall’s patronage system. Moses spent years fighting the machine, but his reforms failed. Caro’s formulation captures the change: power began as “the servant of his dreams,” amassed so that his city-shaping visions could become reality, but became a drug that created a need for “larger and larger doses.” Moses’s ability to build was real; so was the machinery he constructed to keep building on his own terms.

Lyndon Johnson followed a different path. Dwarkesh Patel describes him as an opportunist with little apparent political ideology for much of his career. When he entered the Senate, he saw that conservative Southern Democrats—the Dixiecrats—were its most powerful men and adapted himself to them. In an interview with Caro, former Georgia senator Herman Talmadge described Johnson’s view of the relationship between white and Black people as “master and servant.” Asked whether Johnson had shown sympathy for Black people, Talmadge paused before answering, “None indicated.” Then he added, “He was with us in his heart. I believed him.”

Yet as president, Johnson led the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Patel’s contrast with Moses is sharp: Moses began as an idealist and accumulated power until it became an end in itself; Johnson sought power opportunistically, then used it to advance ideals few had seen in him before he held the presidency.

Johnson’s most remarkable exercise of power came earlier, as Senate majority leader. Patel, drawing on Caro, calls him perhaps the most powerful legislator in the country’s history. The Senate had been designed not to be led. When Johnson asked the Library of Congress for a list of the majority leader’s formal powers, he found only one: the right to be recognized first on the floor. Before Johnson, the job was politically hazardous—a leader took blame for the Senate’s failures without having the authority to prevent them. His two predecessors had lost their Senate seats. Johnson won the position at 44 partly because others did not want it.

He made the job powerful through three methods: leverage over colleagues, control of the agenda, and dealmaking.

First, Johnson gave himself ways to reward and punish colleagues. He could help a senator get a bill onto the floor, persuade a committee chairman to report it, or enlist House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s help. He could also put senators in touch with Texas oilmen who might support their campaigns. Johnson influenced committee assignments by changing how some seats were decided. For about a century, assignments had been based on seniority; Patel says Johnson shifted many decisions to the party steering committee, which he controlled. A senator seeking a desirable seat therefore had reason to seek Johnson’s support. In 1957, after Estes Kefauver voted against Johnson on an important motion, a coveted Foreign Relations Committee seat went to the more junior John F. Kennedy, though Kefauver had expected it. Senators needed committee posts, campaign resources, and legislation for their states; Johnson could help them obtain those things or withhold his help.

Second, Johnson controlled what reached the floor and under what rules. Senate debate was unlimited by default, and senators could offer amendments—even unrelated ones—that might stall a bill. A unanimous-consent agreement could set a time limit and restrict amendments for a particular bill. Earlier leaders used such agreements sparingly, Patel says, generally after extended debate. Johnson made them routine and would not let bills reach the floor without one.

The agreement Patel discusses for the 1956 highway legislation limited debate on amendments, motions, and appeals to one hour, divided between the parties, and barred amendments that were not germane to the bill. It was a way to set terms for consideration before debate began, rather than letting debate and amendments proceed without limits.

The point was not only to shorten debate. Patel says Johnson wanted votes settled privately beforehand, where his leverage worked best. A long public debate might change a senator’s mind; an unexpected amendment might break a bargain. As Senator Paul Douglas put it, under Johnson, “all the actions take place off stage before the play begins.”

Third, Johnson made himself the Senate’s chief broker. He had committee staff report what was being drafted, while aides tracked senators’ activities. He spent his days in cloakrooms and hallways, listening and cajoling. With hundreds of possible bills and amendments, senators could trade support across issues; one bill could also be altered in many ways to win a vote. Johnson worked to ensure that he was the person arranging those trades—and that he knew what each senator wanted and what they would give up to get it.

The 1957 Civil Rights Act illustrates the method. Patel says Johnson wanted a civil rights bill to pass, even a weak one, because he hoped to become president and believed a Southern senator with a record of opposing civil rights could not win the Democratic nomination in 1960. But the dispute over jury trials seemed intractable. Southern senators wanted jury trials for cases against officials accused of suppressing Black voters. Northern senators argued that this would gut the bill. The bill was meant to address the exclusion of Black citizens from voting rolls, Patel explains, but Southern states required jurors to be registered voters. An all-white Southern jury, in his account, would not convict a white registrar for turning away Black voters.

Over seven months, Johnson assembled a deal linking the civil rights bill to interests that did not otherwise belong together. Western senators got a vote on a federal dam they had sought for years between Idaho and Oregon. Midwestern Republicans, whose states had powerful railroad unions, got the right to a jury trial extended to striking workers. Moderates got a provision guaranteeing that Black citizens could serve on federal juries, which they could present to voters as a new civil right. Meanwhile, the jury-trial guarantee for Southern election officials remained in the bill, making it weak enough that Southerners agreed not to filibuster it.

The provisions were not naturally part of one argument about voting rights. Their connection was Johnson’s ability to identify what different senators wanted, put the pieces together, and bring the bill to a vote. His power did not rest on a formal grant of authority. It came from controlling the dependencies, procedures, and bargains through which the Senate acted.