I am enjoying Robert Caro’s biography “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York“.
I picked up the book on a recommendation.Caro is an excellent writer who has taken the craft of biography to the highest level.
I’ll write a longer book summary later when I have finished, it is over 1,000 pages.
There is an interesting obervation that at the elite Yale University in 1905, Jews and Catholics, whilst recently allowed admission were barred from joining the most influential organisations.
Discrimination against Jews and Catholics was common then and it lasted. The book, “The House of Morgan” notes that J.P.Morgan barred Jews working for them until the 1970s.
The discrimination was not limited to the USA. There was a time when it was hard for Irish lawyers (who often were Catholic) to get a job in a leading London City law firm. Today, the legal mile is often called the “Green Mile”, such are the influence of Irish lawyers.
I have experienced what now seem surreal job interviews which seemed focused on my Irish and Catholic background, and seemingly far more importantly being born in Northern Ireland. That said, when I moved to the European mainland, the issue did not come up, and even a deeply Masonic university accepted me as one of their own, when I accepted the idea of “Free Thinking”.
I have grown to accept that discrimination exists. People make lots of irrational, and what seem to me to be stupid decisions. There is not a huge amount I can do about it. What Robert Moses and Catholics showed is that by hard work, and often being far better than their competition, that even established firms who disliked them landed up employing them because the merits of doing so where so clear. You don’t hear too much about firms that don’t employ Catholics or Jews these days because their commercial lives tended to be very short.