Robert Moses threatened farmers with eminent domain when charm failed

Evidence

But the charm could vanish swiftly. He joked and laughed with the farmers, but when one made clear that he would not sell his land, Moses could change in an instant to quite a different approach. P. G. Rasweiler was one of the five burly, thick-necked, red-faced sons of John Jacob Rasweiler, a Brooklyn-born farmer of German ancestry who had gone broke trying to raise lettuce, spinach, cabbage and cauliflower on a farm in Valley Stream and then had sold it and purchased another in Malverne, where, in PG’s words, “we all six of us broke our backs to make it pay.” … “The farm was doing good,” he recalls. “Then Moses came one day. He introduced himself as ‘I’m Robert Moses, representing the State of New York. We’re going to put a parkway through this section of Long Island.’ He was very polite, very diplomatic, at first. But when he saw my father wasn’t going to sell, he stood up in our kitchen and he said: ‘You know, Mr. Rasweiler, the state is all-supreme when it comes to a condemnation proceeding. If we want your land, we can take it.’ — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 795

Categorization

• XREF: Moses alternating charm with naked state power foreshadows his later treatment of communities across the book, and parallels the carrot-and-stick negotiation dyamics noted in earlier chapters. — connects to: Moses ordered state troopers to back his unpermitted private surveyors onto a farmer’s land — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 797; Moses could seize private land but needed voter approval for township-owned land — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 897; Robert Moses justified mass displacement of residents as necessary for urban renewal — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 113 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from salesman’s beer-and-jokes to bureaucratic menace—‘the state is all-supreme’—in the span of a kitchen conversation is a miniature of how public power actually gets exercised over ordinary people.

Broader Connections

• Moses ordered state troopers to back his unpermitted private surveyors onto a farmer’s land #exemplifies (0.95) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 797
• Robert Moses justified mass displacement of residents as necessary for urban renewal #expands (0.80) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 113
• Moses could seize private land but needed voter approval for township-owned land #qualifies (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 897
• Local government used eminent domain where private harassment failed to remove black residents #contradicts (0.72) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 346