Political corruption could be suppressed but never defeated, only joined.

Evidence

Moses apparently took the same attitude in his 1925 attempt to persuade Hempstead Township to cede him its portion of Jones Beach. Hempstead was controlled by Nassau County GOP leader G. Wilbur Doughty. “Today they talk about political bosses,” Leonard W. Hall, former national chairman of the Republican Party, would say in the 1960’s. “They don’t know what a real boss was. Doughty was a real boss. When he spoke, the discussion was over. He always kept his word; he was known for that. But cross him and you were finished. There’s no one like him today. We used to call him the Last of the Mohicans.” A square-faced man with a walrus mustache, Doughty had an almost visionary concept that rural Long Island would one day be a heavily populated suburban area and was always interested in suggestions for public works that could help open the Island to development. But his vision was heavily mortgaged to practicality: he ran one of the most corrupt political machines in the state—“In Nassau County,” one observer said, “zoning was bought and sold like potatoes”—and much of the corruption revolved around public works. Doughty’s brother-in-law, “Uncle Andy” Weston, was president of Booth & Weston, the largest contracting firm in the county, and Booth & Weston, along with Hendrickson Bros., Inc., another firm with which Doughty had close ties, were habitually given the lion’s share of county contracts. And since many GOP county committeemen happened to be on the payroll of the two construction firms, the firms helped Doughty keep them in line. The link between Nassau politicians and contractors had come close to surfacing in 1922; in that year, a Supreme Court Justice had impaneled a grand jury to investigate it and the investigation had already turned up a loan from Booth & Weston to Assemblyman Thomas A. McWhinney before McWhinney persuaded the Legislature to pass a bill establishing a commission to investigate the judge, a move that effectively stymied the grand jury. Moses had followed the case closely in his State Bulletin; calling the bill “legislative brigandry,” he had nominated it for his “Worst Bill of the Session” award and had castigated the Nassau GOP machine and McWhinney, whom he termed “the creature of the machine.” Moses must have known what it took to get things done in Nassau County, but he apparently wasn’t willing to do them; the best proof of that was, perhaps, the defeat of his Jones Beach referendum. … Moses announced that future planning for Jones Beach would be conducted in conjunction with a delegation from Hempstead Township, which would, of course, have access to commission plans showing the precise location of the proposed Meadowbrook Causeway to Jones Beach, and the chairman of the Hempstead delegation turned out to be Assemblyman Thomas A. McWhinney. And Moses was soon meeting regularly with “the creature of the machine” on an extremely friendly basis. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 914

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Caro’s larger arc of Moses learning to work through machines and bosses — the man who denounced ‘legislative brigandry’ becomes McWhinney’s regular friend. — connects to: Struggles for political progress are never definitively won. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536; Nationalist solidarity requires an adversary even when none exists.
• DEEPTHINKING: Not top-tier, but the prosecutor-turned-conspirator pattern and the institutional detail that complicity in corruption is the price of getting things built is a quiet core theme.

Broader Connections

• Struggles for political progress are never definitively won. #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 536
• Nationalist solidarity requires an adversary even when none exists. #corroborates (0.72)