Source: Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, serialized in The New Yorker, July 29, 1974 (“The Power Broker—II: Robert Moses Takes On Long Island’s Tammany”). Full URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1974/07/29/the-power-broker-ii-if-the-end-doesnt-justify-the-means-what-does
Moses arrives, April 1924
When, at the age of thirty-five, Robert Moses assumed his first two public posts — the presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission and the chairmanship of the State Council of Parks — in April of 1924, he had a park program but no money with which to carry it out.
The Fire Island land grab — first week
Harold Phelps Stokes, one of Moses’ Yale classmates, was an assistant to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. During Moses’ first week in his new post, he dashed off a letter informing Stokes of a discovery he had made at the Fire Island Coast Guard Station. Since the last maps had been drawn, the ocean had piled up six hundred new acres of sand on Fire Island’s western end. Moses asked Stokes to persuade Hoover to release the new acres as an addition to the adjoining two-hundred-acre Fire Island State Park. When Hoover agreed, Moses had in a single step quadrupled the state-park acreage on Long Island.
The town referendum problem
Jones Beach, the barrier beach that stretched along the South Shore of Long Island, was owned by the townships of Hempstead, Oyster Bay, and Babylon, and although the Long Island State Park Commission could buy, condemn, or appropriate land owned by private individuals, state law provided that property owned by a township could be transferred to other ownership only by a vote of the township’s residents.
Babylon refuses (July 17, 1924)
Moses had decided to try Babylon, where he spent his summers, first. On July 17, 1924, he had appeared in the Babylon town hall and asked the town board to hold a referendum. The five board members just stared at him. They had been elected, placed in their seats at the board table, by the votes of the baymen, and they knew that one way to make sure they would not be reëlected would be to demonstrate anything less than complete vigilance over the priceless heritage of the sacred bay bottoms. Within two months after Moses’ request for a referendum, not only the Babylon town board but the governing boards of other Suffolk County municipalities — and their chambers of commerce, boards of trade, and civic associations as well — were lined up against the proposal, and Judge James B. Cooper, editor and owner of the Babylon Leader, could proclaim with satisfaction that “the project at present has as much chance of carrying as a Great South Bay clam has of growing teeth.”
Oyster Bay forms the Save Our Beaches Committee — the genesis moment
When Moses turned to Oyster Bay, furious Oyster Bay citizens formed a Save Our Beaches Committee, and within days it had a membership of thousands.
Hempstead defeats Moses 12,106 to 4,200 (November 1925)
In desperation, Moses turned to Hempstead, although he knew that votes in Hempstead Township — as, indeed, in all of Nassau County — went whichever way the county’s ironfisted Republican boss, G. Wilbur Doughty, wanted, and he had been unable to persuade Doughty to want the Jones Beach development. Doughty allowed the proposition to be placed on the ballot in the November, 1925, election, and the vote against it was 12,106 to 4,200.
End of 1925 — Moses appears finished
At the end of 1925, Moses might well have thought he had lost his entire dream of parks and parkways. It had been almost two years since he announced his revised and broadened park-and-parkway plan… Now the parks and parkways were still nowhere but on the map of Moses’ imagination… And on December 31, 1925, there seemed little possibility that they would come into existence in the near future. Within three years, almost all of it was a reality.
The corruption pact (December 11, 1925)
On December 11, 1925, 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 route of the proposed Meadowbrook Parkway to Jones Beach. The chairman of the Hempstead delegation turned out to be Assemblyman Thomas A. McWhinney. And Moses was soon meeting regularly and on an extremely friendly basis with “the creature of the machine.”
(McWhinney was the assemblyman Moses had himself denounced just years earlier as “the creature of the machine” in his reform-publication days. The reformer Moses had become the deal-maker Moses.)
How Doughty’s machine worked
“Today they talk about political bosses,” says former G.O.P. national chairman Leonard W. Hall, who during the nineteen-twenties was a Nassau County assemblyman. “They don’t know what a real boss is. Doughty was a real boss. When he spoke, the discussion was over… But cross him and you were finished… We used to call him the Last of the Mohicans.”
Doughty… 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 Both & Weston, the largest contracting firm in the county; along with Hendrickson Brothers, another firm with which Doughty had close ties, Both & Weston habitually received the lion’s share of county contracts. And since many G.O.P. county committeemen happened to be on the payrolls of the two construction firms, the firms helped Doughty keep them in line.
The Hempstead reversal (November 1926)
Doughty’s friendship gave Moses his first real hold on Jones Beach. After the meetings between the two men, the Republican boss told Moses to resubmit, with some minor revisions, the proposal so roundly defeated in the November, 1925, referendum. Moses did so in November of 1926, and the three-to-one margin against the proposal magically became a three-to-one margin in favor of it — Hempstead Township voting, 18,872 to 5,076, to cede to the Long Island State Park Commission “all right, title, interest, and jurisdiction … to all that certain town land … commonly known as … Jones Beach.”
What this means for the JFK Sanctuary site
Caro is explicit that the township-by-township vote was the legal mechanism. Babylon refused to even hold a referendum. Oyster Bay’s citizens organized so fast and so loudly that the proposition was killed before reaching the ballot. Hempstead defeated it once on the ballot, then approved it on the second go-around — but only after Moses had cut the foreknowledge-for-votes deal with Doughty’s machine.
Oyster Bay never got the equivalent of the Doughty deal. The middle slice of the Town of Oyster Bay’s barrier-beach holding stayed in town hands. That is the parcel that became Tobay Beach + the JFK Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary. The 1925 “Save Our Beaches Committee” is the organization whose victory the modern sanctuary inherits.