Tomorrow-Land by Joseph Tirella

and that they must employ some?”
    But Moses’ fears were unfounded. In April, after Bunche lodged his complaint—and after the Urban League threatened to bring their grievances to the White House and New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller—the World’s Fair Corporation hired Dr. George H. Bennett, an African-American educator who worked at the UN and had international connections. The sky didn’t fall, and no geopolitical fracas ensued. Instead, Bennett went on to become a key member of Poletti’s all-important International Division.
    What made Moses’ adversarial reaction to legitimate civil rights critiques so difficult to understand was that it contradicted other projects he was undertaking while preparing the Fair. While being pilloried in the press for the lack of diversity among his staff, just ten miles away on the long-abandoned Jamaica Race Track in Jamaica, Queens—then the third-largest African-American neighborhood in the five boroughs—Moses was putting the finishing touches on Rochdale Village, the largest integrated housing complex in the world. “One of my babies,” he referred to it fondly.
    Moses had earmarked the defunct Race Track in the center of Queens for redevelopment by the mid-1950s. From the start, the site had one huge advantage, according to the Master Builder: It had “no people to move.” Rochdale Village was conceived as an affordable integrated cooperative for New Yorkers, and to bring it to fruition, Moses teamed with his old ally, Abraham Kazan, the president of the United Housing Foundation.
    The pair was the oddest of political couples. Kazan was an idealistic labor leader whose radical left-wing politics, somewhere between anarchism and socialism, were reflective of his humble Ukrainian origins. Yet, he and Moses had collaborated on several successful housing cooperatives since 1950. They also had a genuine and abiding admiration for one another. Moses, never one to bestow praise lightly, deemed Kazan a “working genius,” while Kazan admired the Master Builder for his loyalty. “If you got Moses to be on your side,” a Kazan associate recalled, “you knew that you didn’t need anything more than a handshake to know that Moses would be with you through thick and thin.”
    Still, due to Rochdale Village’s biracial makeup, banks and builders shied away. That didn’t stop Moses, who with his usual single-minded focus, steered the project to fruition by personally lobbying financiers and Governor Rockefeller for funding. “Rochdale Village owes its existence to Robert Moses,” Kazan later said.
    In December 1963, just four months before the opening day of the World’s Fair, Moses unveiled Rochdale Village and its fourteen-story buildings (twenty in total) with 5,800 apartments. Soon Rochdale Village’s population was 80 percent white (the vast majority Jewish) and 20 percent African American. Quick to show off his vision of what integrated housing could and should look like, Moses planned bus tours from the World’s Fair to the site for international and domestic politicians and VIPs.
    In 1966 the New York Times would rave about Moses’ handiwork in a piece titled When Black and White Live Together. While Congress debated “opening housing laws” aimed at ending the kind of discriminatory housing practiced in northern cities such as Chicago—a discussion that threatened to rip the Democratic Party apart—Rochdale Village could legitimately be held up as an example of what integrated housing could achieve. Despite his conservative racial beliefs—and unwillingness to challenge the hiring policies of New York’s unions—Moses led the way for publicly financed integrated housing, proving that if nothing else, he was a man whose work was often ahead of his time.

8.
    We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it . . . but are we to say to the world