Moses erased staff and Bureau credit while keeping their drafts nearly verbatim

Evidence

It was the practice at the time to list at the beginning of such reports the names of all individuals and organizations who had worked on them, but most members of Moses’ staff found that their names were mentioned nowhere. Unhappy about that, they were even more bitter that the Bureau, which they revered and on whose principles and 1915 report on the same subject this report was based, was not mentioned even once in the document they regarded as the historical climax of all its work, not even in those sections for which the Bureau had, at Moses’ request, done all the work. Moreover, Moses’ boast that he “rewrote everything” in the report was not strictly correct. Comparison of staffers’ rough-draft recommendations for two departments—the only such rough drafts available today—with the finished versions published in the report show that they are practically identical. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 468

Categorization

• XREF: The pattern of an ambitious man claiming sole credit for collective work will recur through the whole Power Broker arc; also evokes the ownership-vs-authorship theme elsewhere in the reading list. — connects to: Bureau staff deliberately received no credit for reports they largely wrote — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 468; Moses used up and discarded the people who served his purposes. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2545

Broader Connections

• Bureau staff deliberately received no credit for reports they largely wrote #corroborates (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 468
• Moses used up and discarded the people who served his purposes. #exemplifies (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2545