Jacobin fucks up.
First read the article.
It begins as a partially useful critique—if obvious: Caro’s a liberal; he’s not a socialist—marred by unnecessary cutesy/nasty rhetoric, trying to turn Caro, a guy who simply writes books, into some kind of sinner of the Robert Moses ilk, when it’s clear that Caro has a deep interest in what power does to ordinary people. He’s put years of tireless labor into painting that very picture, and it’s the best part of his work, one could argue.
First read the article.
It begins as a partially useful critique—if obvious: Caro’s a liberal; he’s not a socialist—marred by unnecessary cutesy/nasty rhetoric, trying to turn Caro, a guy who simply writes books, into some kind of sinner of the Robert Moses ilk, when it’s clear that Caro has a deep interest in what power does to ordinary people. He’s put years of tireless labor into painting that very picture, and it’s the best part of his work, one could argue.
Caro was nearly penniless when he was writing The Power Broker. As is sort of alluded to, but has to be downgraded as “compulsion” as opposed to “dedication.” Yeah, yeah, yeah: he called it that himself; methinks not along the framing-lines marshaled here. We all know the tricks of the trade; or should.
Also, the economic isn’t “almost always missing”: in fact, Caro’s seemingly favorite bit of his ongoing LBJ bio was finding hard cold data to support exactly how economic interests shape politics (the early races of LBJ, where the money came from, and what the money got for their money). I mean, he’s specifically emphasized that over and over again through the years. No, he’s not a Marxist. So? And it’s true that, well, he’s a liberal, basically, if a New Deal type-ish. I’m also to the left of Caro. So? Make the criticism without the character assassination…but then you don’t get noticed.
There’s some kind of problem with pointing out that infrastructure projects, if done the right way, are good thing? I mean, attack the Triborough Bridge project on any number of grounds, but when Jacobin is rightly pushing a monster-sized Green New Deal, it’s sort of odd to get this apparent snark. From an academic historian. Who couldn’t possibly be just the slightest bit jealous. Every single thing she points out about how Caro didn’t do it alone is both obvious and applies not only to her but every single person on earth who hasn’t lived like Robinson Crusoe. Yes, I agree: Caro’s work isn’t the last word; he never said it was. Take it with pleasure, gratitude, and a dose of, say, David Harvey, too—or any number of other people’s work. No kidding.
But then we get to the worst part: Caro’s wife, and I will go all Talmudic on it below:
Most of all, his work has been made possible by his wife Ina (a writer in her own right), who Caro describes as the “only” assistant he has ever trusted or tolerated.
As Caro has said literally nonstop in just about every interview he’s ever had, to say nothing of in the books themselves. If he drops dead before he finishes the LBJ volume, she will finish it. He not only knows his wife is "a writer in her own right"—she’s a trained, and apparently well-regarded and published writer of high-level, historically informed travel-writing about France. And why the quotes around “only”? Does the author doubt that Caro has used only her? “Tolerated”? Well, when you’re trying to smear someone, to do the cheap trick of undermining someone’s work on a historical figure by claiming, sneakily, that He Is Just As Bad, some obnoxious dictator just like Robert Moses, who can only tolerate his browbeaten hausfrau as his intellectual servant (who else would put up with the abuse? who else could The Great Man tolerate in his August Presence?), well, this is how you do it. By cheap little rhetorical tricks.
That is how you turn Caro's total respect for his wife’s skills, judgment, and intellect into something close to its opposite.
It gets still worse:
Her research contributions have been oft noted in profiles of her husband,
Smear—her essential contributions have been oft noted by her husband in profiles of her husband.
but one anecdote that stands out here is the description of how she sold their Long Island home and moved them to the Bronx — without even telling her husband she was doing so, presumably to avoid causing him stress.
Bullshit. I can think of another reason—she didn’t want to give him the option of refusing to allow her to do it. I don’t have the video on hand right now, but I watch every interview of Caro I can on the Tube of You, and in one, when he relates how his wife did this for him, giving up a home she deeply loved for him and his work, he chokes up and can barely continue. It’s called “love” and “believing, both as a professional and as a soulmate, in your partner’s life work.” It’s not some browbeaten hausfrau we’re talking about here; this is really disgusting. And frankly, if (I presume) unintentionally, sexist: Ina Caro, we’re to believe, is some cringing submissive wifey? Because the author needs her to be? This is the kind of crap the I’m With Her crew did to any- and everyone not for Hillary in 2016. You know, which Jacobin rightly found disgusting.
And then there is the mention of how, once the rest of the money for The Power Broker came in, Ina commented that she was finally able to go back to the dry cleaner and the butcher. This was news to Caro, who apparently had not been thinking much about laundry or dinner (let alone the daily care of their young son).
Note there’s no quote, so we are not left with the evidence, just her word. But Caro apparently doesn’t give a fuck, the Intellectual Robert Moses, about the lives of his Victims, wife and young son. Let the little wifey take care of the butcher and all that—the pig! Other possibilities for explanation abound, but the propagandist already decided this was to be a smear.
The question of what relationships might sustain intellectual work — what might make the commitment Caro has demonstrated more widely available — is unfortunately never taken up in Working.
And perhaps it should have been—and perhaps it was, for all I know, and this reviewer is playing her smear game; Caro thanks everyone in sight every chance he gets if his interviews are any indication—but here’s what Caro did: he gave up his day job to write the Moses book. He and his wife, his full partner as far as I can tell, rolled the financial dice in the service not just of history but of doing what Caro has rightly said is the point of his work: the exploration of power in America in the 20thC, with a special, obvious, and thoroughgoing emphasis on the effects, often mostly ill, on ordinary people without power. He may not be a Marxist; he may not be an anarchist; but he actually cares about average people, and has put in the risk, blood, sweat, and tears to tell their stories. That’s why he and his wife moved to East Texas; that’s why they have apparently been living in Vietnam for long stretches as he finishes up the LBJ book.
And this is what makes the book seem less generous than it might be; its anecdotes and reflections not so much inspiration for others, but an exercise in self-celebration.
Unless Caro went all narcissist all of a sudden, this is crap. I haven’t read the memoir yet, but Caro is almost comically self-effacing and modest. A nice quiet guy, by all indications.
Most historians, after all, are not allowed to write five-volume biographies, no matter how much they might like to (leaving aside the question of whether there’s any virtue in concision).
Obnoxiousness. Who is stopping this author from writing a multivolume work? Associate professors at NYU have tenure, no? Go for it!
Nobody was stopping my tenured profs at Penn from doing that; in a sense, every historian does, at least thematically. And not every historian on earth writes as well as Caro, if I may riot in understatement. That said, sure, I’m all for more support for deeper scholarship. I’d bet my right testicle Caro would be for that, too.
Note the “concision” dig. Caro drafts like a maniac—that’s why, along with the research, it takes, on average, a geological age for the dude to put out a book. Whatever else you want to say about Caro, and part of this article’s critique is accurate, there is zero fat in his prose. Zero. Utter clarity and often it soars—can you say the same for most historians?
There’s a sense of “Oh, Caro’s so, like, totally from another age, with all that ‘effort’ and, like, ‘dedication’ to turning every page, and stuff.” [Eye-roll.] “I mean, where’s the ‘concision’!” This is purest jealousy: and intellectual swift-boating. Attack his research as selfish, Moses-like immorality; attack his rock-hard, fat-free prose as narcissistic bloviating. Attack his obvious empathy for actual victims of power as fraudulent—just look what he did to his poor wife and son! He didn’t even know (or care) about their FOOD, the monster!
Kim Phillips-Fein is pretty much saying, “I totally could have done what Caro did—it’s easy!—if only I were as selfish and exploitative of my loved ones. The only reason I haven’t done so is because I’m not a Moses- or LBJ-like Monster enjoying my Male privilege!” Cheap—and of course undermines the useful critique of Caro’s work from the left, which is more a question of how the work is framed.
I mean, I have my quibbles, too: I don’t like Caro's Portentous One-Sentence Paragraph tic. Who cares? He’s definitely not a radical. No shit. So show how a reframing from the left adds to the power of his massive effort. Why smear?
Most graduate students are not able to work year in and year out with no other source of support.
No kidding. Most day-job reporters, too. He took a chance, and that it worked out is pretty good—for all of us.
There’s a gap between the potentially limitless nature of research, and the necessary incompleteness of any finished book.
Really? Humans are mortal? My god, someone call the New York Times! What a scoop!
And the majority of scholars and writers cannot dissociate themselves from their obligations to other people: students, colleagues, family.
Nasty, question-begging, propaganda; a personal attack. Who says Caro dissociated himself from his obligations to others like some Moses-like Monster? She might as well claim Caro bulldozed his family-victims in order to put up the Cross-Book Expressway. Or, perhaps as LBJ did to his crony-servant employees, she could argue that he forced his wife and son to watch him defecate. You know, to enforce his rule. Cheapest, easiest kind of smear. (Yeah, the ass-covering weasel word is placed below; you’ll see: “a very different sort [of] power [than] that he has spent his life so adeptly trying to unravel.” I agree; it’s very different, because Caro/LBJ power is very different from “a guy trying to write a good couple of books who is blessed with a fine and equal partner of obviously rare and fine character.” True. Very different.
If Caro had been an unusually dedicated doctor treating cancer patients all these years, this reviewer would compare that work to cancer itself.
“I mean, look—Caro did impressive and admirable work with cancer patients, but, just like a cancer cell (although in a very different way), he lacked the contact inhibition necessary to exist with minimal moral decency in the society of cells known as a healthy body.”
As impressive as Caro’s accomplishments are,
That’s the ass-covering phrase for when people get annoyed with her. “Dude, I said his work was impressive. What’s the problem?"
the total surrender to his own intellectual ambitions that he describes here in fact involves a tremendous amount of work on the part of others.
True, and he’s never stopped heaping praise on his wife, his editor, and his publisher for making it all possible in this very way. Ina’s written two books since the early 90s, you know. I presume in between beatings.
His freedom is a difficult one to attain.
No shit. The structural issue is of course valid, but Caro actually had the courage and dedication to roll the very loaded (against him) dice when he didn’t have a pot to piss in and was just some young schmuck reporter who quit to write a gigantic book he had every reason to believe few would read, let alone laud.
I know, I know, she gets him on the other end, too: It’s not courage, it’s not dedication; it’s a Monstrous Man eating alive all in his orbit in his selfish monomaniacal drive toward self-glorification.
It is hard to avoid the sense, at the end of Working, that it may even involve a certain kind of power — although of a very different sort than the power he has spent his life so adeptly trying to unravel.
Garbage, and she knows it. It might be hard for her to avoid pretending that those who read it, sans her “thought-leadership,” will decide Caro is some selfish, power-mad tyrant. It’s not hard for me to see that if taken seriously this part of the critique would undermine anyone of any gender in any field of endeavor doing anything above and beyond the average at all. Even with the consent of those loved ones. More like the proactive, I-don’t-care-what-you-think-you’re-fulfilling-your-calling support of his obvious soulmate.
In the end, as he himself would probably agree, memoir isn’t adequate to understanding a life; Robert Caro may have to wait for his own biographer as well.
Again, no shit, but the rhetorical tack is clear: this bloviating narcissist who’s been holding his family hostage to his blind, Caesarian ambition, who is supposedly dedicated to Truth, can’t be trusted to do anything but glorify himself—just like Moses did in response to Caro’s book, famously (and you know she knows all about that). [To self.] Ha, ha! I turned the tables on you, Bobby; I, whose work no one will likely remember (for all I know, unfairly) as opposed to yours, which will live on as long as there are books and people to read them. (Which, truth be told, is probably about another five minutes, anyway.)
This review has been just plain nastiness, and the author must know it. I wonder if she’s pointing to herself and coughing here (I’ll be that biographer!); doubt it. More like academic jealousy—and typical self-promotion: find the Famous Person, attack, hope they read your bio at the end and you sell more than 4000 copies of your academic tome (which, again, for all I know, is really good work):
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Phillips-Fein teaches American history at New York University, where she is an associate professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her most recent book is Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics.
Yes, her book may well be terrific. it was a finalist for a Pulitzer last year. Didn’t win, though…and how many Pulitzers does Caro have? Oh, right: two. As if the fucking awards matter, of course. Anyway, have a read at that link to see how subalternly underprivileged poor Kimberly Phillips-Fein has been. How did she make it? I mean, as the Pulitzer people put it:
A lifelong New Yorker, Phillips-Fein grew up in Brooklyn in the years immediately following the fiscal crisis. She currently lives in Greenwich Village with her husband and two young children.
Oh, my god—she was living in Brooklyn! And in the years immediately following the fiscal crisis, no less! She probably survived on acorns and dried grass, which she gathered herself, sacrificing the flower of her academic prime to feed her family, unlike that bastard, Caro. Now she struggles to balance her work and family life in the austerian nightmare known as a tenured (one presumes, perhaps wrongly) professor at NYU, the most expensive private college in the country, I think, in that Gaza-like slum known as Greenwich Village.
If only she had just a little privilege, she’d be totally way better than the Monster Caro. I mean, if not for the need to make sandwiches every so often for her kids, she’d be David Hume and Karl Marx all rolled into one; screw Caro.
Whatever the quality of her academic work, this article is crap, and since most Jacobinites probably haven’t read Caro or made a minor study of him as I have, and are pre-adapted to hate all things deemed “liberal,”(with much justice), well, yeah, she hit all the right buttons and will probably get away with this.
As Vidal said of Capote's death: "It's a good career move."
And so it goes.
And so it goes.