"And When the Last Law Was Down …” (Part 1 of 4)

Core idea

And When the Last Law Was Down — title from A Man for All Seasons — is the saga of the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge fight (1939-1941). Moses proposed building a bridge from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan across the Battery rather than the tunnel that had been planned. The reformer-aristocracy of Lower Manhattan — RPA, Citizens Union, the Sulzbergers, the Astors — organized against it. The fight ran for two years and became one of the only Moses defeats of the 1930s. The topic takes its title from Sir Thomas More's warning that even the law against tyranny must be preserved.

Why it matters

The bridge vs the tunnel

The Triborough Authority's planning had originally specified a tunnel from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan. Moses, in 1939, switched to a bridge — cheaper, faster to build, and (not coincidentally) something the Authority could build itself rather than ceding to the New York City Tunnel Authority. The switch alarmed lower Manhattan.

The reformer-aristocracy mobilizes

Lower Manhattan reformers — many associated with the Battery, the historic blocks south of Wall Street, the Customs House — viewed the bridge as desecration. They organized: Iphigene Sulzberger's husband, the Astor family, the Regional Plan Association. For the first time since 1925, a Moses project faced organized upper-class opposition. The fight became a marker.

Key takeaways

Mental model

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Practical application

Example

Many political coalitions show the canary pattern: the urban-business defection from the New Deal coalition in the 1940s predicted the working-class defection of the 1960s. The Moses-aristocracy defection in 1939 predicted the broader Moses-coalition collapse of the 1960s.

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