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🪵 The Threshold

Parks once united voters across class lines as an unopposable political issue

Properties2
tagsja-picks, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, xref, question, causal_relationships, trade, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@caro_power_1974, loc. 746

2 min read

Parks once united voters across class lines as an unopposable political issue

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: Relevant to the ADDENDUM on trees/park infrastructure as political wins and to questions about what today’s unopposable public-good issues are. — connects to: Support for parks was unanimous across New York in 1923 — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 740; Parks became a uniquely coalition-broadening issue no faction opposed — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 746; Legislators’ fear for party allies in 1926 elections drove their park policy votes — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 924 (+2 more)
  • QUESTION: What 2020s public-infrastructure issue holds a similarly unopposable ‘motherhood’ status across class and intellectual lines?

Broader Connections

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