Moses rigged the Parks Council votes with dummy commissions he controlled

Evidence

The old men reluctantly decided they would have to deny Moses a second one-year term—and suddenly realized, when they tallied up votes, that while their commissions controlled a majority of the state parks, they did not control a majority of the State Parks Council. Six of its eleven votes were in Moses’ hands: Moses’ own; two cast by Smith appointees not directly connected with parks, the State Conservation Commissioner and the director of the State Museum; three cast by the presidents of three new regional commissions which did not at the moment have any parks to administer but which Moses had insisted—for reasons the old park men now understood—be represented on the council and to which Smith had appointed men who would take Moses’ orders. … The old park men had many reservations about Moses’ over-all park policies as well as about his plans for specific parks. For one thing, they were concerned about his eagerness to develop parks that were far outside city limits—Heckscher was fifty miles from Times Square, Letchworth fifty miles from Rochester—without providing any means of transportation to them other than auto; the truly poor masses of the cities didn’t own automobiles, they pointed out; how were they to reach these parks? But every time they raised such points, they were voted down. And Moses was re-elected to the chairmanship in 1925, 1926, 1927 and 1928. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1089

Categorization

• XREF: The car-only-access critique of parks foreshadows/iterates with the book’s whole transportation argument; also parallels ch12 note on parks requiring autos. — connects to: Moses won Babylon’s land by rigged voting logistics and busing in employees — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1045; Moses turned parks, symbols of serenity, into weapons of power — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1139
• QUESTION: The old park men’s point about poor masses lacking automobiles is a devastating critique Moses apparently never answered.