BIRTHDAY | Robert Caro, 85

L to R: Alec Baldwin, Jules Feiffer,
Robert Caro, East Hampton Library,
2015. Photo by JTMarlin.

October 30, 2020—Happy 85th birthday, Robert Caro. A New Yorker by birth, Caro is known for his two in-depth biographies, of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson (five volumes so far, or is it six?), to which he has devoted his lifetime. 

These congratulations are a reprise of the Happy Birthday posted here on your 80th, five years ago.

Congratulations also on the fine tribute to you today from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, from which this is extracted:

As an investigative reporter for Newsday, Robert Caro wrote why a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay would be a bad idea. It was promoted by Robert Moses, the urban planner. Caro had been convinced his articles would reverse the decision to build the bridge, but the state’s Assembly voted to begin construction. Caro was stunned. He said: 

I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.

Caro's latest book, on his
work habits. Previewed in
The New Yorker.

Caro took seven years to write his 1,300-page biography of Moses, The Power Broker (1974). He was so broke while he was writing the book that his wife sold their Long Island house without telling him. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction [he won again with his LBJ biography]. To write biography well, Robert Caro believes it must read like fiction. He says:

Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to ­accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do. 

Caro keeps a strict routine when writing, like wearing a suit and a tie and keeping the same hours every day. He interviewed LBJ's speechwriter 22 times and lived in Texas for several years while doing research.

Comment: I was introduced to Robert Caro in New York City in 1974 when The Power Broker first came out, I think by Julius C. C. Edelstein, who was a fellow professor when I taught in the CUNY system in the 1970s. 

I have met the Caros several times since then at the Authors' Night in East Hampton, where they have a summer home. He has described both of his biographies as investigations into power—how it is acquired and how it is used. He has said: “The power of the historian is the power of the truth, a very basic thing.”

The Guardian published a fine interview with Caro last year that includes his wife Ina. She was Caro's sole research collaborator and recently wrote two books of her own on traveling in France. One of her books describes the palace that Fouquet built; it inspired Alice and me to visit it when we were in France recently.

50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

LBJ signs Voting Rights Act of 1965 as MLK looks on.
MLK was assassinated in 1968.

On this day in 1965, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, guarantees the rights of all American citizens to vote.

The law makes it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections designed to deny the vote to some citizens, notably blacks.

Johnson was elected Vice President under JFK. He President in November 1963 upon the JFK's assassination. In the presidential race of 1964, Johnson was elected in a lopsided victory and used the mandate to push for legislation he believed in, including stronger voting-rights laws.

LBJ would have taken cautious steps toward greater voter participation, but in March 1965, television viewers watched as state troopers in Selma, Alabama, attacked a group of peaceful protestors who were marching to the capitol. A week later, President Johnson gave a televised speech before Congress, in which he said:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote ... [A]ll of us ... must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Robert Caro, in an eloquent introduction to his bestselling book, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, volume 2 of his biography of LBJ, explains to future generations of students of history the significance of the last sentence of this quote.

Martin Luther King Jr. was watching the address at the home of a family in Selma, Ala., on television that night with some aides. None of these aides "during all the years of struggle ... had ever seen Dr. King cry." When LBJ got to "we shall overcome", "they were looking when Martin Luther King began to cry" (Caro, 1991, p. xx.)

When the president signed the legislation a few months later, MLK and other civil rights leaders were present. The law was designed to enforce the 15th Amendment of the Constitution ratified in 1870, entitling all male citizens to vote. The 1870 law was extended by the 19th Amendment 50 years later - in August 1920, when the last required state (Tennessee) ratified it - to include all women as well as men.

In his speech to Congress on March 15, 1965, Johnson outlined the ways in which election officials denied African-American citizens the vote:

• On the day of election, officials told blacks they gotten the date, time or polling place wrong, that the officials were late or absent, or that the prospective voters hadn't filled out an application.
• Election officials required literacy skills.  Voting officials, primarily in southern states, had been known to force black voters to “recite the entire constitution or explain the most complex provisions of state laws”.
• Even blacks with college degrees were turned away from the polls. 

Caro in Master of the Senate, volume 3 of his LBJ biography, gives many vivid examples of how blacks were disenfranchised. An African-American woman who had studied hard to pass the literacy test failed her test because someone else the same day could not answer a question.

Even after the Voting Rights Act passed, state and local enforcement of the law was weak and even  ignored, but African-American voters now had a basis for challenging voting restrictions in Federal courts. Problems with voter suppression did not end, but they diminished. The new law was followed by a huge increase in voter turnout - in Mississippi, voter turnout among blacks rose to 59 percent in 1969, from 6 percent just five years earlier.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act and lowered the eligible voting age for all voters to 18.

Jerry Goldfeder of Stroock Stroock & Lavan offers a free update on voting rights in the USA in August 2015.

Some are deeply concerned that new moves for voter suppression threaten the achievements to date.