From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):
Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road’s proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently “dirty,” there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses’ beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using “white” beach areas — the best beaches — by a system Shapiro calls “flagging”; the handful of Negro lifeguards (there were only a handful of Negro employees among the thousands employed by the Long Island State Park Commission) were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that “Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks. ” Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently — and the Governor never raised the matter again.In 2014, Robert Caro wrote that Robert Moses’s racism was “unashamed, unapologetic.” The Power Broker makes that clear. If you plan to read The Power Broker, you may want to wait to click on that link. It gives away the book’s final sentence.
Related reading
All OCA RobertCaro posts (Raindrop.io)
[Sidney M. Shapiro: one of Moses’s engineers. Roosevelt: Franklin Delano, then governor of New York.]
comments: 4
What a wonderful article about the process of writing! It’s almost like baking – – some chemical thing changes and you rise to the work.
It reminds me that Hilary Mantel said she knew she was ready to write about the execution of Thomas Cromwell when one day she started to weep at Sainsbury’s.
The article about Mantel writing Cromwell’s (and bet books’h end:
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/09/hilary-mantel-interview-life-age-fame
I daren't read the book, as I get angry merely from your notes.
Just as no one should be both judge and jury, so too should no one exercise such power without a reality check by other people. In this case including (but not limited to) Blacks. We instinctively know this when we set up an appeal process for each new government organization.
Fresca, something like that happens in Cather’s The Professor’s House. Godfrey St. Peter has the whole shape of his history of the southwest come to him at once.
Sean, it’s a good book to read with one or more other readers, because it helps to have someone to share the anger with. I’m not joking.
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