Great post Rebecca! I found your analysis of Robert Moses’ actions very interesting. I think it provided a nice look at a possible reason behind why he has often come to be seen as a racist. I liked how you managed to not necessarily support, but not necessarily condemn his actions either. I feel that every person has multiple sides to them and reasons for their actions, and so I found that your post really spoke to me.

I agree that the New Deal tended to lean more towards supporting whites only. However I think that many politicians in general, especially those that were older, probably saw no need to support equality. Segregation was still part of the status quo, and it probably got pushed to the back burner as an issue while the government was dealing with the economic turmoil of the time. I think that not only FDR, but many others most likely just decided to leave racism for another day. Especially considering that FDR was known to fight to get his way (think about his attempt to modify the supreme court).

When you mentioned that Moses made a “conscious decision not to rock the boat”, I slightly disagreed. I feel that Moses was barely thinking about race at all as even a real issue. I think that his version of “the public” was automatically, to him, white. I don’t think it was him deciding to be lazy necessarily, but instead I believe that he just disregarded the issue entirely. Some of his pools were built in minority neighborhoods. But as you mentioned, he tended to build them around parks and schools. And there were probably fewer large parks and school areas in minority neighborhoods. To Moses, all he probably cared about was convenience and speedy building/lack of necessary location clearing.

I don’t mean to say that Moses wasn’t personally racist, but that he may not have consciously decided to be racist in all of his building decisions. It was more acceptable at the time to give minorities a disadvantage or to forget about them. White lifeguards were probably hired because white people were offered more jobs to begin with, and to be honest, I hate cold water myself, so I’m not sure if that had any real effect on the race of pool clientele. Moses to me seems like the type to go the extra mile if he cared strongly about something. I feel that he didn’t see much to gain for himself from particularly helping minorities. They probably often had less money to help fund his projects and therefore he saw no use in seeking to cater particularly to them. Moses was more interested in his own reputation as a builder than in social issues, and therefore went along with the status quo he was used to.