5. Robert Moses and His Path to Integration
We middle of the road conservatives who get Irish confetti from both sides…
Robert Moses
I can imagine a common reaction to the previous chapter. Robert Moses, the stalwart champion of integrated housing? What about his role in keeping black tenants out of Stuyvesant Town? And isn’t this the same Robert Moses for whom Robert Caro in The Power Broker included twenty index entries under the heading “Robert Moses, prejudice against poor and non-white,”1 and whom Caro described as despising “people of color,” as thinking blacks were “dirty,” and as wanting to keep them “in their place”?2 The same man for whom a Google search reveals more than half a million hits for “Robert Moses” and “racist”? The same. A New York Times review of an exhibit in 2007 that tried to take a new, post-Caro, look at Moses concluded that while some aspects of his career might be up for revision, the stark facts of Moses’s racial attitudes are not; his racism “draws no argument from even the most ardent revisionist.”3 I will leave the ardency of my revisionism for others to judge, and I certainly won’t argue that he wasn’t racist. But the complex subject of Robert Moses and race cannot be summed up in a single pejorative descriptor.
There is no gainsaying the standard indictment, and indeed, I can add to it. For most of his long career, Moses was among New York City’s most prominent, persistent, effective, and outspoken opponents of civil rights legislation. He regularly growled at anyone he suspected of being a “professional integrationist.”4 As late as 1959, Moses would, in a speech, make reference to an “old darky.”5 (However, my perusal of a good chunk of Moses’s private correspondence found it free of the standard racial vulgarisms.) His actions in support of discrimination at Stuyvesant Town are indefensible, as is his record in displacing tens of thousands of poor and minority families from their homes with few alternative housing options. Some, like a recent essayist, make use of the lazy historical exculpation from context, arguing “Yes, Moses was probably racist, but who wasn’t in his day and age?”6 This does a great disservice to the many genuine opponents of racism and discrimination whom Moses regularly tangled with. The standard indictment stands, but it only makes Moses’s apparent about-face and emergence as an unlikely champion of integration at Rochdale Village all the more mysterious.
There is a short answer and a long answer to the question of why Robert Moses fought for the creation of Rochdale Village. The short answer is that Robert Moses was a pragmatist who above all wanted his deals to be consummated. And when you combine a white developer with roots in the Jewish labor movement and a massive housing cooperative in a black neighborhood, you get a final result with a lot of Jews and lots of blacks. Rochdale wouldn’t have worked if the United Housing Foundation wasn’t satisfied that it could draw on its usual clientele for the new project, or if local blacks weren’t convinced that they too would in some way benefit. Integration was inevitable in Rochdale, and Robert Moses was certainly shrewd enough to take credit for the inevitable.
The long answer is, as long answers tend to be, somewhat more complex and circuitous. Robert Moses was a pragmatist in some ways, and a man of unswerving and unbending principle in others. Without ever really changing his core values, Moses eventually learned how to accommodate himself to racial integration, and even to persuade himself that in doing so he was remaining true to his most fundamental beliefs. It is a story that goes beyond Robert Moses himself, to the changing political climate that made the building of Rochdale Village possible.
Although he would work with progressives and liberals of all stripes during his long career, Moses always called himself a conservative, and in many ways he always remained a nineteenth-century liberal, that is, a believer that government worked best when its ambitions remained modest and when it remained unobtrusively in the background unless forced by events to take a more active role. His basic attitudes to politics and social relations were formed early in his life, in part by his class background, and in part from his education. Change was necessary; social revolution was not. Sometimes government had to build bridges or housing, but it had no place in trying to muck about in the natural order of things. There was a natural hierarchy of talents, classes, and social groups that needed to be respected, and this couldn’t be altered by wishful thinking or decree. Moses counted as a formative influence at Yale the social theorist William Graham Sumner, a major figure in late nineteenth century social thought and a man who was profoundly skeptical about popular democracy and the possibilities of social reform. Sumner is probably best remembered for his 1894 essay “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over,” a sentiment that had Moses’s complete concurrence. Writing in 1939, Moses praised Sumner for “throwing vitriol” in his students’ faces and challenging conventional pieties about democracy. Moses’s own attitudes toward democracy were complex. He certainly believed, deeply and genuinely, that in his career, to quote the title of one of his books, he was “working for the people,” but this often involved working for them in ways that did not meet with the approbation of their self-appointed representatives.7
Moses, a lifelong Republican (and the Republican candidate for governor in 1934, his sole and disastrous foray into electoral politics) always distinguished his brand of conservatism from reaction, and called himself a “forward-looking conservative” in 1939, and a “middle-of-the-road conservative” in 1960, one of “those who lean a little to the right.”8 If the reactionary, in Moses’s view, was simply opposed to all change, Moses believed that social change could only be accomplished with Fabian caution, and that any effort at sweeping transformation of a society’s basic structures was either doomed to failure, or if compelled with sufficient governmental force, bound to be worse than the injustices and inequities it was trying to alleviate. And he applied his sense of the need for slow and steady change to racial matters, and believed that gradualism was as important there as for any other social issue.
Moses believed that talents and abilities were distributed unequally, and while society and government had an obligation to help the less fortunate, it should not, and really could not, alter this inconvenient truth. He never singled out racial minorities for special animus, but felt that as people starting at the bottom of the ladder, the climb to the top or even somewhere in the middle would necessarily be slow and prolonged. He approached racial divisions from his sense of the necessity and permanence of vertiginous social differences. His first known public statement on race was in 1911, when he was (somewhat bizarrely) a colleague of W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas on the American delegation to the first Universal Races Congress in London (added by his American classmates at Oxford), where he publicly attacked the notion of self-government in Britain’s colonial territories (after which his outraged audience rushed the stage, forcing Moses to beat a hasty exit). He was already, at age twenty-three, an outspoken social and racial conservative, fully formed and quite set in his intellectual ways.9
In the 1914 publication of his Columbia University dissertation, The Civil Service of Britain, we first get a good glimpse of his social attitudes. In many ways it was one of the most revealing things he ever wrote, a paean to the British civil service in the halcyon days of empire, and in particular, its rule of India. (In his tribute to the quasi-governmental British East India Company, one can see the glimmer of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and other public authorities he would create in his mind’s eye.)10 What Moses praised the British Civil Service for, above all, was its self-cultivated and self-conscious elitism, its disdain for the grubby world of political patronage. Moses urged that American reformers get beyond “false democratic theories” of government, which assumed all people were of equal ability. This in the end would only serve the interests of party bosses. What was needed was efficiency, and Moses quoted a favorite couplet by Alexander Pope:
For forms of government let fools contest
Whatever is best administer’d is best.11
It was, Moses wrote in his dissertation, “in a sense a cruel thing to set up class distinctions,” and to deny the possibility of advancement to those who, through no real fault of their own, lacked the opportunities for higher education. But, Moses asked, “Where does our sympathy lead us? Can the state repair the defects of heredity or of early education?” Moses’s answer to this rhetorical question was a resounding no. A fair society demanded that educational opportunity be available to all, and that “ability and promise are lifted as far as possible above want and social handicap” but realistically, “those who are fit to rise above the ranks will be few and far between.” If in time he modified some of the priggishness of these conclusions—as he would later write, his most important political mentor, Al Smith, a man of limited formal education, was a walking refutation of large parts of his dissertation—he would retain a sense of the unappeasability of class (and racial distinctions) throughout his career.12
One of the keys to understanding Moses’s attitude toward race and ethnicity was his ambivalence toward his own ethnic background. He was raised in an upper-class German-Jewish milieu where high degrees of assimilation were the norm. He had a lifelong abhorrence of cultural or ethnic identity of any kind. He was raised not as a Jew but within the Ethical Culture Movement (an offshoot of radical Reform Judaism), which proclaimed that any attachment to a particular creed or ethnic identity was a form of superstition. Caro writes that Moses was never circumcised, he had no formal and few informal connections to Judaism, and his funeral service was held in an Episcopal church.13 Nothing was more inimical to his thinking, or more likely to outrage him, than the common assumption that merely because his parents had been born Jewish, Jews or Judaism had any necessary claim on his loyalties.14 What followed from this was his belief in the importance of the individual over the group, a denial of any ethnic or racial group rights, and a deep suspicion of ethnic and cultural politics and of ethnic leaders who arrogated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of others in their group.
Moses was a lifelong opponent of Zionism, which challenged all his basic assumptions about the lack of a national and cultural identity in Judaism. When Moses was a special adviser to the U.S. occupation army in Germany after World War II, though he was moved by the plight of the Jews in the Displaced-Persons camps, he was dismayed by their attachment to Zionism. “The Jews, under the constant prodding and indoctrination of Zionists and as the result of exceptionally bitter experiences, are fanatical in their determination to go to Palestine.” If the other nations of the world could find homes for the displaced Jews, and refute the assumptions of Zionism, he wrote, it would mark “at least one milestone on the long, thorny, and weary road to the millennium.”15
And he again would tangle with Jewish groups in 1964 when, as president of the World’s Fair, he allowed the Jordanian pavilion to retain a mural depicting the suffering of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, despite a chorus of protests from local politicians. He would later complain of “a burst of stimulated indignation by pro-Israeli groups,” and the efforts of “fanatics” and “professional religionists” to disrupt the fair, the incident proving, Moses wrote, “that there were no Arab votes in New York.” (For his efforts, King Hussein awarded Moses the Star of Jordan Decoration of the First Order in 1965.)16
A telling exception to Moses’s aversion to association with Jewish organizations was his connection to the fiercely anti-Zionist (and politically conservative) American Council for Judaism that reflected the anti-Zionism that was common in his German Jewish milieu. In 1959 they sent Moses a letter that described him as “a friendly observer of our organization for some time,” and asked him to address their annual convention. The letter to Moses complained of recent political appeals to Jews including “efforts to catapult Jews into the desegregation issue through fear of Antisemitism,” and rejected the common tactic by such liberal organizations as the American Jewish Congress to link the fate of blacks and Jews as groups facing discrimination. If Moses, prudently, refused to speak to the group, he did allow that “all I can say is that, while I have no definite religious affiliations, generally speaking I share your convictions and endorse your point of view and that I believe in your immediate objectives.” Group rights for minorities were a challenge to his own identity as a non-Jewish person of Jewish extraction.17
But when given an unflattering reminder of his Jewish background, Moses could react violently. In 1929, at a meeting of the New York State Parks Council, Moses was undoubtedly being his usual overbearing and obnoxious self, one profoundly annoyed council member, Raymond H. Torrey (still fondly remembered as a pioneer conservationist and one of the creators of the Appalachian Trail), called Moses a “big noisy kike,” at which point Moses assaulted Torrey and tried to choke him, then threw a heavy ashtray or spittoon (accounts vary) in his direction. (Caro, reflexively taking the side of every Moses critic, predictably enough defends Torrey, arguing that he was usually mild-mannered and scholarly, but in this case was just angered past the point of endurance by Moses’s bullying. Caro even throws in the old chestnut that some of Torrey’s “closest friends were Jewish.”) If Moses overreacted, it is hard not to have sympathy with his account of the incident as reported in the Times (which did not use the k-word), that the gentleman in question “used an epithet which has never been addressed to me in all my life and I think he deserved much more of a thrashing than he got, and I guess pretty nearly anyone would agree with me as to this.” Indeed. Moses lived in a world where one word could still cut through all the polite assumptions about his place in gentile society. Any sort of ethnic group identity for Moses was just a way of letting others define you.18
Moses’s outrage at bigotry was not limited to instances when he was the target. The most searing episode of bigotry he experienced in his professional career occurred in 1928, when as a staffer to Al Smith during Smith’s presidential campaign, he saw the election first hand. Moses saw Smith’s loss as the defeat of urban tolerance and progressivism by rural, southern, Ku Klux Klan–inspired narrowness and fanaticism, giving Moses an unforgettable lesson in both the limitations of democracy and the depths of human depravity. In 1957 Moses wrote to the historian Oscar Handlin, who had just completed a biography of Smith19:
I don’t think you have stressed enough the cross burning and bigotry Smith ran into during the 1928 campaign, an experience from which he never really recovered. He would not believe such a spirit could exist in this country. Incidentally, the Governor never saw most of the foulest attacks which came by mail while he was away from Albany. The staff threw them away on the ground that it would do no good for him to see them. I saw a good many of them and they were incredible even from the viewpoint of this somewhat detached and cynical observer.
There is little evidence that race or the fate of blacks in the United States were particularly important to Moses before the 1930s. Racial concerns were peripheral to Moses during his time with Al Smith in Albany (most of the decade from 1918 to 1928), which reflected a lack of attention within the Smith administration itself.20 On the other hand, the Smith administration was sympathetic to black demands for inclusion in areas of housing, recreation, education, and areas where government could directly influence policy. Smith vigorously campaigned for black votes, was stalwart in his opposition to the Ku Klux Klan, and had broad black support. Moses shared this agenda, one committed to ending arbitrary discrimination in government services but without a sense of urgency on the deeper questions concerning the status of blacks in the United States.21
However, after 1934, when Moses was appointed New York City parks commissioner, racial matters became more central to his work. Indeed, Moses almost immediately made as a top priority and most visible project one of the most socially sensitive areas within public works, the building of public swimming pools, where wet young people frolicking in various states of undress tended to ruffle various sexual and racial anxieties. If in New York City, unlike many other cities of the time, there was no formal ban on interracial swimming, there was de facto segregation in many facilities.22 Moses saw his role as providing equal services to all citizens, but he did not see his role as challenging the prevalence of segregation among existing social mores (although neither, Robert Caro to the contrary, did he see his role as exacerbating it).23 Indeed, Moses was troubled enough by the de facto segregation in the city’s swimming pools to write about it at length. In a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1939 on “theory and practice in politics,” he described how he felt powerless to combat segregation in the Jefferson Pool in an Italian neighborhood in East Harlem, even though an all-white pool was “against the spirit and the letter of the State Constitution and the Civil Rights Law.”24
But what, Moses asked his audience, was he to do? Protecting the pool site would have accomplished little, according to Moses, because the real problem was not in the pool itself, but with persons of color walking through a neighborhood in which they were not wanted. This problem would continue for decades, and Moses did not know how (and had no authority) to solve it.25 The solution to the “delicate” pool problem for Moses was to open a separate pool in Black Harlem, Colonial Park Pool (now Jackie Robinson Pool), comparable in its facilities to Jefferson Pool. Public swimming in Upper Manhattan, if largely racially separate, would be more or less equal. “Our problem ended in a practical way and the theory of the Bill of Rights remained intact.”26
In a telling passage from the same lectures, he writes of the need for “a little honest indignation” for those toiling on the bottom rungs of society. Although he doesn’t explore the ways their plight might be remedied, the objects of his sympathies included not only “Lifschitz the sweatshop worker” and “Baccigaluppo the seasonal day laborer” but also “Taliaferro the urban Negro, who can’t get into a union.”27 And Moses’s commitment to equality of opportunity went beyond pronouncements from the lectern. In 1941, when a black vocal quartet won a Department of Parks–sponsored singing contest and was denied the right to participate in the national finals, Moses, who was a great aficionado of barbershop-quartet singing, promptly and very publicly resigned from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing that had prevented the black quartet from competing.28
But though Moses opposed the bigoted and invidious treatment of racial minorities by the government or private parties, he was profoundly skeptical of using the government to require private persons or organizations to adopt nondiscriminatory practices. And this, liberals might have asked Moses, raised the question, “If moral suasion failed, as it generally did in such cases, just how was Taliaferro going to gain entrance to that Jim Crow union?” By the late 1930s there was a new urgency to the demands for the expansion of rights-based liberalism, a new racial liberalism that was stirring what would emerge as the civil rights movement. Moses’s opposition to the expansion of rights-based liberalism was wrapped up in his opposition to FDR and the New Deal.
If for Moses, Al Smith was the most impressive politician of his generation, his successor as governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the worst, a judgment Moses based on a combination of personal and ideological factors. In 1934, during his unsuccessful Republican bid for governor, Moses, with the New Deal in his sights, argued it was “a detestable thing to stir up one class against another and to promise the masses circuses when there is no bread.”29 The next year Moses accused Roosevelt of trying to “usher in an economic millennium by Presidential decree.”30 (This did not prevent Moses from working with the Roosevelt administration and vice versa, when it was in their mutual self-interest.) And by 1944, Moses had added a racial component to his critique, arguing the president had “promoted factionalism, stimulated minorities, appealed to class prejudice and divided our people. He has sought to keep power by every art known to demagoguery.”31
There is no better example of Moses’s fight against the sort of liberalism that had unduly “stimulated” minorities than his fight against the civil rights plank at the 1938 New York State Constitutional Convention. Under the general direction of Governor Herbert Lehman, the convention was a high-water mark of New Deal liberalism and of the expansion of a rights-centered view of citizenship. The new constitution enshrined a number of rights not included in the Bill of Rights or other federal guarantees; the right of labor to form unions and engage in political and economic actions, the right to decent, affordable housing and clearance of slums, and the right of the poor and the indigent to have appropriate support from the state. It also included a civil rights plank, which would have prohibited discrimination on the basis of “race, color, creed, or religion” by any “firm, corporation, or institution.”32
Moses was a Bill of Rights minimalist. To expand rights were to dilute them. They needed protection, a chastity belt against their would-be violators. “It is,” he would write, “the immediate jewel of our political virtue which must be jealously guarded.”33 Moses reacted with horror at the civil rights plank. Its promise to “every racial and religious group an end of all social discrimination…gave the more conservative and responsible members of the convention cold chills.” He would write in 1939 that34
you cannot legislate tolerance by constitutional amendment or statute. There are no constitutional sanctions to enforce the essence of the Ten Commandments as summarized in the Sermon on the Mount, namely, that each should respect his neighbor’s rights as he does his own. It is difficult enough to attempt to carry out guarantees of equal protection by the government. It is impossible as applied to private persons, firms, corporations, and institutions. Social equality is of slow growth and rests on mutual esteem and respect, not on force.
For Moses the problem of establishing such a right would be its inherent unenforceability. Prohibiting “hotels and clubs to discriminate against Jews…for private firms, property owners, theater managers, labor unions, and other individuals, firms, and corporations to discriminate against negroes [sic]…would simply stimulate cute minds to find new and ingenious ways of doing just what they have been doing, and we would fan the flames we seek to quench.” But an unenforceable law would be an invitation to myriad legal challenges. “We would encourage scamps and professional agitators to blackmail not only bigots but those who cannot afford to comply with silly laws.”35
Moses’s solution to this imagined nightmare was a cunning bit of pettifoggery, which limited the scope of the clause to the existing corpus of civil rights legislation, which did not extend protection against third-party discrimination.36 Moses was proud of his act of emasculation of the 1938 statute, and wrote about it on numerous occasions, nowhere more prominently than in a 1943 article in the New York Times (which appeared the day the Harlem riots broke out), which serves as perhaps Moses’s most comprehensive statement of his racial philosophy.37 The article contains a fine tribute to the Harlem Renaissance and other recent achievements by African Americans in the cultural arena, and it is difficult to imagine any other prominent New York City politician in 1943 quoting a quatrain by the African American poet James Weldon Johnson to make a point. The article contained a combination of sharp observations married to rather conservative solutions. He wrote of the city’s “Negro problem,” created by whites, exploited by avaricious landlords and complicit lending institutions, in a “conspiracy of silence to hide the facts because they are unpleasant.” Moses, in a rhetorical pose he found very comfortable, was the lone voice decrying all the special interests standing in the way of slum clearance.38
But though many liberals would have agreed with his analysis, and even with his solution, a program of massive urban renewal, their paths diverged when it came to the political implications of the deteriorating social conditions faced by black New Yorkers. With the controversy over Stuyvesant Town still raging, Moses wrote that the housing problem for minorities had led “demagogues to shout for immediate social equality than to work for attainable objectives.” For Moses, “the truth is that the path to fair and honorable treatment of our colored citizens is a long and thorny one to be traveled slowly and surely with wise and patient leadership.” Rather than “immediate social equality” (as always, a nebulous phrase when used by Moses and other racial conservatives). Moses recommended following “in the footsteps of Booker Washington” in seeking improvements in housing, health, and physical conditions, and in wider opportunities for employment. Moses recounted that when the first blacks joined the New York City police and fire departments at the turn of the century, they faced decades of persistent racism. Now, Moses argued, there was an African American captain of police and a deputy battalion chief in the New York City fire department. “This may seem to some pretty slow progress, but all real progress is slow.”
For the city’s liberals, it was the fight over Stuyvesant Town, the massive East Side middle-income development built in the early 1940s, that made “Moses” a byword for racial reaction. Met Life was resolute in not permitting any African American tenants at Stuyvesant Town, and Moses backed their decision, for which he was, needless to say, pilloried by civil rights groups and many city officials.39 His reason for backing Met Life, beyond his distaste for antidiscrimination ordinances in general, was his conviction that, if in addition to the inherent difficulties of building housing in New York City, developers would also have to obey nondiscrimination ordinances, they simply would build in the suburbs, which is what they wanted to do anyway.40 Civil rights legislation will “effectively stop any future housing developments by the insurance companies and the banks.” If Stuyvesant Town failed, Moses warned, “there would be no more proposals of this character.”41
Moses was hardly inventing a nonexistent issue. Private developers were indeed vitally needed to help relieve the postwar housing crisis, and many preferred to build in the suburbs in the first place, where land was cheaper and easier to acquire, where their racial policies would not be scrutinized, and where the archetypal postwar suburb, Levittown, would soon rise from the potato fields of Hempstead with nary a black family. And in the wake of Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life did indeed forswear any similar ventures into urban housing.42 But a wiser man, or perhaps a more courageous man, would have demanded that the suburbs rise to a higher standard than the city sink to a lower one.
Moses’s racial conservatism was again on display in the spring of 1945, when the New York State legislature passed the Ives-Quinn bill, and became the first state to pass a statute outlawing discrimination in employment. Moses was a prominent opponent.43 “The passage of this bill,” he argued before a legislative hearing in February 1945, “will set the clock back.” Moses acknowledged that the underlying problem was very serious. “I am fully aware of the fact that discrimination has been practiced by many employers, often without rhyme or reason. Everyone knows that Negroes had been outrageously discriminated against in the past.” However, Moses argued, the situation was getting better, and that “the best way to improve it faster is by education, moral suasion, conference and reason and not by coercion backed by fines and jail sentences.”44
Moses further argued that the “most vicious feature” of the Ives-Quinn bill would eventually lead to the establishment of quotas in employment and education, and he specifically mentioned the infamous “numerus clausus” which limited the number of Jews in European and American universities to a “fixed number proportionate to their percentage in population.”45 Moses might not have been very forward thinking, but here he was prescient. Those who have argued that, by raising the issues of quotas, Moses was raising a largely phony and nonexistent issue in the civil rights world of 1945, ignore the extent to which proportional hiring was already being practiced in New York State in the early 1940s. Moreover, on the broader issue, Moses was surely correct that one cannot really separate serious efforts to create equality of opportunity without paying attention to the racial percentages of those hired or admitted to schools, as the history of civil rights and affirmative action in the 1960s amply demonstrated.46
Moses was joined in his opposition to Ives-Quinn by many Teddy Rooseveltian or Wilsonian progressives out of synch with the New Deal, such as Mayor La Guardia’s adviser C. C. Burlingham, 1924 Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis, and even Oswald Garrison Villard, a prominent leader of the NAACP in its earlier years, who felt that Ives-Quinn would be the Volstead Act redux, its inherent unenforceability, like Prohibition, making a bad situation worse.47 But Moses was a generation younger than these gentlemen. Their careers were winding down as World War II ended, and Moses would never have more power or visibility than in the decade and a half after 1945, when his racial conservatism came into ever sharper contrast with prevailing attitudes. Into the last third of the twentieth century, he remained the last of the old progressives. But by 1945, and with the passage of the Ives-Quinn law, Moses and the other old progressives were tackling a new foe that had been thrust into the forefront of New York State’s and the nation’s debate on racial equality: “integration.” It was not a new word; the earliest citations from the Oxford English Dictionary are from the seventeenth century, among them a 1658 work that defined integration as “a making whole, or restoring.” But it had a new meaning, one that it had gained only in the mid to late 1930s, that of the full inclusion of racial minorities in the warp and woof of the fabric of American life, the making whole, or restoring of American democracy. Integration was in part about passing laws. By the late 1950s New York City, spurred on by supporters of integration, had enacted prohibitions against discrimination in public housing, publicly assisted housing, education, public accommodations, and multiple-unit private rental property, all told giving New York the most comprehensive array of antidiscrimination ordinances of any major city in the United States. Although radicals (and many liberals) wanted more, and wished the net of regulation were both stronger and wider, the incremental increase of civil rights legislation was seen by liberals and many on the left as a crucial element of a comprehensive civil rights strategy.48
Integration was also about changing minds. One of the cardinal beliefs of opponents to civil rights legislation like Moses was that “you can’t legislate morality”; but integration advocates felt that morality could be altered through education, exhortation, and regulation. The bible of social engineering, as this view of government became known, was Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), a 1,500-page paean to the potential for social engineering to ameliorate the race question. Myrdal in the final pages of An American Dilemma concluded that America had to demonstrate a “progressive trend,” by which “the Negro became finally integrated into modern democracy.” Integration would be an example of the future of social engineering, “the drawing of practical conclusions from the teaching of social science that ‘human nature’ is changeable and that human deficiencies and unhappiness are, in large degree, preventable.”49
Robert Moses, the master builder, was not a social engineer. And yet nowhere did the temptation to social engineering provide as many practical opportunities as in the area of housing. Numerous sociological studies in the late 1940s and early 1950s supported the conclusion that, once people found themselves living in interracial settings, their former biases and prejudices were revealed as illusions. This would become a credo for many supporters of integrated housing in the 1950s and early 1960s; all one had to do to demonstrate integration’s utility was to try it, and thereby puncture the entire intellectual tradition on which people like Moses had based their understanding of race. In 1951 a pioneering study of interracial housing in the New York metropolitan area offered a very positive evaluation of South Jamaica Houses, and attacked Moses’s old teacher, William Graham Sumner, as the archetype of the old, now exploded notions of human nature:50
We are, in effect, rejecting the notion that has characterized much of sociological thinking in the field of racial relations: the notion originating with William Graham Sumner, that “stateways cannot change folkways.” The evidence of our study is that official policy, executed without equivocation, can result in large changes in beliefs and feelings despite initial resistance to the policy. Thus, it is clear from our data that although most of the white housewives in the integrated projects we studied did not, upon moving into the projects, like the idea of living in the same buildings with Negro families (and certainly the community as a whole did not favor it), a considerable change in attitudes and “folkways” has taken place as a consequence of their experiences resulting from a “stateway.”
Moses never changed his belief that human nature could not be changed by moral persuasion, never believed in the grander goals of integration, and never changed his basic attitude toward civil rights legislation as a species of pernicious meddling. In 1956 the New York Post claimed that one subject on which Moses “has not altered his views is the matter of anti-discrimination legislation in the field of housing,” and he was quoted as saying “his only regret is that he lost” the battle against antidiscrimination ordinances.51 When in the same year he was asked his private opinion of a fairly modest open housing proposal by the city government, he snorted, “In my book there is nothing more contemptible than stimulating racial, ethnic, religious, ideological and economic controversies by unsupported generalizations about discrimination, warnings against obscure conspiracies and promises of immediate magical solutions of long range problems.” As was so often the case, his concern was that in forcing private landlords to obey antidiscrimination statutes, government would only “promote tension and conflict rather than end it,” and “set back the clock a quarter century.”52 He again preached gradualism. “Responsible leaders” know that integration and the improvement of race relations “must be done slowly, patiently and honestly and not by ukase, fiat and manifesto.”53
However, there is a “but” to this. Without ever changing his underlying philosophy, Moses accommodated himself to integrated housing. When in 1950 the state legislature banned discrimination in any future government-assisted private housing developments (like Stuyvesant Town), Moses went along without much comment, and even before that bill passed, he had started to adjust to the new reality.54 As early as 1952 he would tell his biographer Cleveland Rodgers that Met Life had “poor advisers” in the Stuyvesant Town fight, that they should have accepted black tenants, and that in general they ought to exhibit “more of the milk of human kindness” and “keep abreast of the times.”55
Where Metropolitan Life refused to tread, Moses found other developers, primarily nonprofits like the UHF, who were happy, even eager, to adopt nondiscriminatory housing policies, and he learned to tolerate their forays into social engineering. At times, as with his efforts to work with the Marshall Field Foundation in the late 1940s and 1950s in an abortive attempt to build middle-income housing in Greenwich Village, integrated or interracial housing was the primary goal of the endeavor.56 By 1956 he could even offer somewhat strained compliments to the State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD), the agency formed by the Ives-Quinn Act, allowing that it had “worked reasonably well,” albeit because the “left-wingers” had been kept in check.57 And in the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Moses didn’t hesitate to take credit for his support of integration in Rochdale. In early 1959 he wrote a friendly letter to Elmer Carter, the newly appointed African American head of SCAD, requesting a meeting. He cautioned Carter, using one of his favorite phrases, that “handsome gestures are no good” in the field of civil rights or open housing legislation. However, he called special attention to the Jamaica project as an example of a valid effort toward integration in housing, and sought Carter’s support for the development.58
As Moses no doubt knew, the UHF was increasingly vocal on the question of integrated housing. In 1956 the UHF published an article by Eleanor Roosevelt in which she argued that progress in civil rights had been “pitifully slow in the field of housing” and the North’s problems in this regard were as serious as the South’s. “A segregated community is an unnatural and unhealthy situation. Many of our other social problems can be traced directly to that condition. If we can solve the basic problem of housing we will at the same time accomplish much toward finding solutions to full employment, juvenile delinquency, and segregation in institutions like schools and churches.” And cooperatives, Roosevelt stressed, were key to solving the problems of both housing and segregation.59
The UHF regularly wrote about segregation in the North, the ineffectiveness of current laws, and the ways in which cooperatives might in some way ameliorate the situation. Roosevelt’s sentiments were echoed in UHF publications by Henry Lee Moon, the director of publicity of the NAACP from 1948 to 1974, and a resident and leader in a union-sponsored cooperative in Queens. Moon would offer the standard liberal justification for integration. “It’s good for a child,” said Moon, “to grow up with knowledge and consciousness of people of various races, creeds, religions, and backgrounds. It’s not healthy for a child to be reared in a ghetto situation.” Moon would later serve on the board of directors for both the UHF and Rochdale Village.60
Moses never lost his skepticism of civil rights legislation. In his 1963 article on Rochdale in the Long Island Press, he dismissed integrationist liberalism with some of his familiar code words. “We live and labor in a highly emotional, explosive atmosphere in which the humble, simple, and primarily physical aspects of decent living of the first half of the twentieth century tend to be obscured by fearfully large, complex, economic and social objectives, no doubt ultimately valid and undeniable but hardly immediately obtainable.” But yet, most of the rest of the article addressed the way that Rochdale reflected the diversity of the city, and would help improve the lives of its residents, who “need only a little help to be on their own” and how Rochdale would also be a boon to the black neighborhood in which it was located, with racial synergies of various kinds benefiting all.61
In short, though Moses remained opposed to civil rights legislation in general, he also felt that if there was a way to go about trying to create a racially egalitarian society, the UHF and Rochdale Village had hit on it; integration freely entered into by all parties, uncoerced, unmonitored, and unregulated, just people of different races choosing to live together. And in an era when race was central to the political discourse in New York City in a way that was unimaginable when Moses’s career was getting started a half century earlier, Rochdale Village would be his vindication, proof that he was not indifferent or insensitive to the plight of racial minorities, and that indeed, unlike the radicals and reformers, he could do more than talk about integration; he could actually do something about it.
And indeed, some former critics took note of Moses’s achievement. Stanley Isaacs, the onetime liberal Republican Manhattan borough president, had tangled with Moses often, over Stuyvesant Town and many other issues. In her 1967 biography of Isaacs, his widow, Edith Isaacs, provided a long list of instances in which Isaacs had earned his reformer’s credentials by fighting the good fight against Moses. Then she turned to Rochdale. “It was Moses’s idea, for example, to acquire the Jamaica Race Track for city housing, and Stanley was delighted. Since it was a huge area, it could provide extensive housing for tenants without dislocating a single person. Stanley went all out to back him, and today a huge integrated middle income development is a reality there, with 25 percent occupancy by minority groups.”62
By 1966, from Moses’s perspective, support of integration at Rochdale could almost pass for middle-of-the-road conservatism, with the reactionaries and segregationist diehards on the right, and the noisily vehement left on the other. In 1966, at the ground-breaking ceremony for Co-op City, Moses would claim that “Rochdale in a quiet way has achieved remarkable success in integration and in happy relations among tenants.” This would be a claim he would frequently reiterate in his last years in the public eye. Increasingly, his plans for dealing with the slums and the gathering racial crisis of the times was to build more Rochdales, with Co-op City being the first of what Moses hoped would be many similar massive developments. Why not, Moses suggested in early 1968, let the UHF “begin really big slum clearance in the presently hopeless ghettos of Harlem, Central Bronx, South Jamaica, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, and Brownsville?”63
But Moses’s attachment to what Rochdale had become went deeper than a tactical adjustment to the shifting racial discourse. He became convinced that Rochdale, and cooperatives like it, were the best way for cities to save themselves and to mend their increasingly severe self-inflicted racial wounds. By the early 1960s Moses had become ever more worried about the fate of New York City and other cities, in part because of his loss of power, and in part because the 1960s was a very good time to worry about the fate of cities. In his 1963 article on Rochdale he wrote that “our American cities at the moment don’t know whom they will follow or what they want. Certainly cities are not for the tired, the discouraged, the cynical.” Rochdale was part of the answer to the cynics, and Rochdale’s achievement was indissolubly tied up with bettering race relations.
Moses’s most remarkable statement about Rochdale was his last, when he spoke at Rochdale’s Community Center at the annual meeting of the National Cooperative League in October 1968. After praising Rochdale for what it had accomplished, Moses offered a typical blast at his critics. “You have also, in the distance, no doubt heard the familiar forces of detraction, debunking, and disapproval. New York is the world’s fanciest rabbit warren of critics. If the subject is cooperative, multifamily building on vacant land, the location is wrong, the plan faulty, the architecture boxlike, unimaginative, and contemptible…. Co-op City will still rise from the swamps and lift people from the slums when the critics have flung their last rotten eggs and gone to their reward. Pay them no mind.”64
In the end, Rochdale and cooperatives like it had become an essential part of Moses’s vision of city life, and he felt that the urban order he had labored so long to help create was under attack, and that the fires of the ’60s were turning the country against cities. As he spoke that October, the ongoing presidential campaign was on everyone’s mind, and Moses looked with alarm at the success George Wallace was having in the North as well as the South, and had visions of the burning crosses on hilltops that had greeted Al Smith forty years before. “The Kluxers in white sheets have raised the specter of urban genocide and they are booted, saddled, and riding.” Urban genocide. Or perhaps urbicide: the total destruction of cities as a type of social formation. For Moses, Wallace and his supporters were at their core anti-urban: narrow-minded and bigoted despisers of cities (and, a fortiori, New York City) and everything cities had achieved through cosmopolitanism and diversity. “I do not know whether the corporate intelligence of the United States can be insulted, but if so, the formula for Governor Wallace for meeting the urban crisis by an enforced back-to-the-farm movement has surely succeeded. Can such vicious balderdash bolster a protest vote?”
For Moses, Wallace’s racism followed from the latter’s effort to imagine an America without its cities and its urban residents, mere excrescences on his mythical, all-white, and viciously xenophobic “heartland.” Moses had battled for urban America for half a century.
If Moses proposed a program of building many Rochdale-like cooperatives to eliminate the problem of the slums, it was to cure a disease, not to kill the patient. Regardless of the outcome of the election, the Wallace supporters would be “an evil force to reckon with in the future.” But, Moses concluded, there was only one response, one refutation of Wallace. “This is the lesson of Rochdale,” said Moses in closing his speech. “Cooperation is the answer.”65