Parks became a uniquely coalition-broadening issue no faction opposed

Evidence

Al Smith, shrewd politician, had risen to the Governorship on great issues, and he was not slow to recognize a new one when it came along. An Albany reporter watched the awareness grow on the Governor and his circle. “You could see them beginning to realize that doing what Moses wanted would be politically advantageous,” he recalls. “One of them told me that supporting parks meant that the Governor would be helping the lowerand middle-class people, and thereby winning their support, and that the intellectuals would be for him because they saw parks as part of the new pattern of social progress. So you’d have all three groups supporting you. And besides, ‘parks’ was a word like ‘motherhood.’ It was just something nobody could be against.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 746

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘word like motherhood, nobody can be against it’ insight about a policy that unites classes anticipates how infrastructure later works (or fails) as consensus politics — a useful counterpoint to later chapters on Moses’s divisiveness. — connects to: Mass leisure and the Model T created a mass demand for countryside access — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 633; Smith offered Moses a commission presidency he had not solicited — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 756; Resistance to the bans built unprecedented cross-racial coalitions — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 470 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Resistance to the bans built unprecedented cross-racial coalitions #exemplifies (0.82) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 470