Sublime

Survey the whole vast cast of characters on the New York political scene and there was only one man who could with impunity confront—and defeat—Robert Moses. The man who was now Governor.

He was innocent as a new-born lamb. And look, he had so little fear of the world: the greatest, the most powerful people who exist, the most dreadful people, they were his friends: the Saxon Elector, the Crown Prince of Prussia who was later a great war hero, before whom that Austrian woman, the Empress Theresa, trembled on her throne. Zannovich di

He won every fight in the State Parks Council. By the end of 1928, most recalcitrant regional commissioners had been replaced, as their terms expired, by men amenable to administration of their parks by the council’s central staff, which, through Lutz, took orders from Moses.

He, more than any other individual, knew which of the tens of thousands of administrative positions in that government were crucial to his purposes, and after a quarter of a century of power in the state, he had “Moses Men” in most of these posts.