Malapportioned rural upstate districts vetoed a park bond that won statewide majority support

Evidence

One-man, one-vote upstate agitation was decades in the future; these legislators represented New York State’s rotten boroughs: districts whose voters numbered in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands, and who were farmers who had no interest in parks and who were, moreover, fanatically opposed to government spending. The idea of spending millions for parks had appalled them in the first place; the bond referendum might have rolled up a statewide majority of more than a million, but, with a single exception, Ulster, where old park philanthropist Judge Alphonse Trumpbore Clearwater took the stump for it, every upstate county had voted against it. Upstate New York in 1925 was a stronghold of Prohibitionism, of Protestantism, of prejudice, of Ku Klux Klannism—and of Republicanism. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 878

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader institutional theme of malapportionment and how unrepresentative districts distort majority will — echoes voter-suppression and gerrymandering concerns in other readings.