Robert Moses' Ten Commandments
Neither Moses nor Yahweh chose to elaborate at length on the Ten Commandments, leaving that impossible errand instead to the prophets, politicians, and hoi polloi of the millennia that followed. Perhaps His authority was thought to suffice. In this recording, the other Moses—Robert Moses, the seemingly but briefly omnipotent commissioner-of-everything New York—offers the graduates of New York Law School his own “decalogue,” his ten commandments, with a pointed defense for each, aimed to guide the young barristers as they begin their careers in his New York City. You could almost call it sacrilegious, but then Moses was never a particularly religious man.
Though Moses declares that he is “no Polonius offering a pompous, condescending philosophy to youth,” he doth protest too much; in this speech at least, he pretty much does exactly that. Here are his first nine commandments, in his words:
- Have pride in your city
- Be suspicious of lurid criticism, baseless disclosures, and easy remedies
- There are no easy fixes
- Belong to a party, but don’t be a violent partisan
- In government, view every dogma with skepticism
- Never fear to be in a minority
- Beware of dogmas about equality
- Beware of extraneous issues, appeals to race, creed, color, and residence
- Try your best to guard against appeals to bias and prejudice in whatever form, ancient grudges, bygone feuds, and what the poet called “old unhappy far off things and battles long ago.”
At turns shruggingly true, trite, vague, debatable, and/or false, and as a whole, repetitive and often contradictory. However, no more trite-and-true these days than the original Ten, which we’ve now had centuries to internalize. It’s when he elaborates on these that the true purpose of his commandments is revealed: this decalogue is yet another broadside attack on the growing mass of men and women finding fault not just in his methods, but in his very philosophy of city making—a defensive attack from a wronged man on his multitude of benighted “critics.” In this too he has company; Yahweh could be pretty defensive as well.
He spends the bulk of his speech on his tenth commandment—on the importance of the proper use of language—though it is difficult to distill his wisdom from his words:
10. “Finally, something about speaking and writing our native language…”
It reads less like a commandment than a placeholder inserted into an early draft, some lorem ipsum meant to be rewritten as some pithy yadda yadda he never got around to committing to script. It would be wrong to accuse a man as industrious as Moses of being lazy, but, well, he had his priorities.
Make what you will of his writing advice, but we’ve listened to dozens of Moses’ speeches here at the WNYC archives, and researched quite a few of his writings, arguably enough to give us some insight into how he approached the craft in practice. Distilled to its essence, Moses’ approach to writing consists largely of inserting as many allusions to classic literature and letters as possible—directed at the narrow contingent in whatever audience that might “get” them—into verbose, combative prose shot with broad aim at anyone who dare criticize his vision. The allusions? Blink and you’ll miss them. And if they don’t scan? So be it. For Moses, your philistinism would render you unworthy of judging men of his brilliance. It’s best you step aside and let the man do his work. In practice, it can tend toward tedium, and the relentless stacking of obscure allusions to the peril of quality prose is a common habit in those who take pride in their erudition, one that he frequently shares (I am often guilty myself). But I think he has a recognizable talent for it, and more often than not his approach falls on the right side of listenable. It’s almost fun.
“Pile Pelion on Ossa”
We made an earlier web piece exhaustively annotating one of his speeches, so we won’t do it again here (FYI - the poet in commandment nine is Wordsworth). But I would like to comment on one allusion that sent me into a frenzied evening of thumb-heavy research: “Pile Pelion on Ossa.” It is an idiom, not currently quick to the tongue, that refers to a tale from Greek mythology. In that myth, the Aloadae—Greek giants Otus and Ephialtes—attempted to storm the stronghold of the Gods by piling Mount Pelion and Mount Ossa atop Mount Olympus. They failed. According to the OED, it means “Add a difficulty or task to something that is already difficult or onerous.” I’m not sure that Moses’ usage of phrase is perfectly captured in that definition, but I’ll defer to Moses’ superior education; perhaps there is something in the tale that is apropos to the day’s commencement missing to the passive listener, other than doubling down on the mountain imagery of Moses’ commandments. As much as the idiom is not in common use, its literary pedigree is unassailable. The curious may reference Homer (Odyssey, Book 11) and Hamlet (Act V, Scene 1), Virgil (Georgics, Book 1) and Ovid (Metamorphoses, Book 1), and doubtless countless others.
I’m not sure how or when it became an idiom, but it did, eventually settling into “Pile Pelion on Ossa.” Those who have listened to the audio above will have noted that Moses reverses the order, piling “Ossa on Pelion.” This is not a mistake, not quite. Homer, likely prioritizing poetic form above the strict rendering of myth, seems to have reversed the logical order, and its his version that is followed in the surviving phrase, which Moses, following Virgil, corrects. As Classicist Philip R. Hardie recounts:
“Virgil, doubtless attentive to the fact that the Homeric text had two lines earlier specified Olympus as the object of these monsters, questioned the reasoning of ending up with Olympus at the bottom of the heap and gave us the present lines: thrice they tried to put Ossa on Pelion and Pelion to roll on leafy Olympus - in other words he reversed the Homeric order."
Alexander Pope had this to say about the literary gifts of Homer and Virgil: “Homer scatters with a generous profusion, Virgil bestows with a careful magnificence.” He actually had a lot more to say about the two, and I could readily be accused of cherry picking this particular sentence to belabor a point, but I feel there is something telling in Moses’ preference for Virgil here, something revealed in just those lines. Moses’ public works and words almost always display a “careful magnificence”: the highways and structures, and essays and speeches he is responsible for having created are nothing if not grand, letter-perfect hymns to his vision and his estimable ethic and knowledge. But they lack the generous profusion, the beauty of the human scale, that makes literature sing and cities beam with life.
His city and his speeches are meticulous and stiffly elegant, and often ambitious and imaginative, but they are unloved and unloving. They exist to be scanned on paper, as blueprints and scripts, where they can achieve their own dubious and cold perfection, rather than to be lived-in and heard, where we can achieve ours.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150454
Municipal archives id: T9278
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