The story, it turns out, has a belated happy ending. The Eagle returned, many years later, an old man. He had fallen in a rock chasm the day of the hunt, had eventually been rescued by passing hunters on their way to Canada, had followed them, had married a northern squaw, had joined the British Army against the French, and had finally made his way home. Learning their mistake, the warriors of both branches called a council and swore a peace. But, with the exception of this last touch, the story of the split tribe might have set the pattern of history in the Adirondacks. Because here, ironically, in one of the most beautiful regions in Eastern America—in one of the largest stretches of unspoiled wilderness in the country—the human story, both past and present, is underscored with conflict, argument, discord, and friction between factions; quarrels and schisms and confusions and misunderstandings and animosities that have managed to stop just short of bloodshed. Oquarah’s spirit lives on, it sometimes seems, making trouble in paradise.
Wherever you stand in the Adirondacks, a great deal of what you see belongs to the public. In 1895, the state of New York added Section 7, Article VII to its constitution declaring that the Adirondack Forest Preserve could not “be leased, sold, or exchanged, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed, or destroyed,” and that “the Forest Preserve shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.” Using blue ink, the cartographers drew a line enclosing all the Adirondack region. Within this line fell not one but five distinct and parallel mountain ranges, with over a hundred peaks worthy of being called mountains, nearly half of which are over 4,000 feet high; the line enclosed some 9,425 square miles, roughly an eighth of the land in New York state, an area somewhat larger than the state of Massachusetts, next door, making Adirondack State Park by far the largest state park in the country, and nearly twice as large as our largest National Park (Yellowstone).
The amendment to the state constitution, and the existence of what is still referred to as “the blue line,” was the start of all sorts of trouble, which is not to say that there hadn’t been plenty of trouble before that. (In 1609, for instance, Samuel de Champlain came to the area and to the lake that now bears his name, and there was an immediate scuffle with the Indians; Champlain shot two Iroquois, and there was war for the next one hundred and seventy years.) The blue line encircled whole townships, many of them sizable, all or part of eleven counties, to say nothing of a number of privately owned lumber and mining companies, resort hotels, and private estates that antedated 1895. But all the land that was not privately owned became state owned and, as private lands became available, the state snapped them up. Today, the state owns over two million acres of land.
It became a battle, needless to say, between the conservationists and the developers, but this is reducing the argument to its barest skeleton. From this core have sprouted offshoots of controversy as multifarious as the branches of a pitch pine tree. The central battle has led, at times, to warfare between state and local governments, between Democrats and Republicans, lumbermen and hotelkeepers, hotelkeepers and motel keepers, between people who love to pitch tents in the woods and all the people who would just as dearly love to sell them rooms for the night, between highway departments and conservation departments, mountain climbers and motorists, sailboat fanciers and motorboat owners, canoeists and beaver-fanciers, wets and drys, summer people and winter people, Jews and Gentiles, property owners and tax collectors, and—most significantly—between the rich and the dirt-poor.
Even the various conservationist groups—composed, by and large, of the Adirondack rich—do not agree with one another, nor with the New York State Conservation Department in Albany. What do the words “forever” and “wild” mean, anyway? They are certainly strong and sweeping terms. In general, the department has followed the wording of the amendment quite literally, insisting that nothing on state land be touched. A fine is imposed for chopping down a state owned tree, and even dead trees are protected and must be allowed to topple of themselves and rot on the ground, since that is the way a “wild” forest is. But some conservationists feel that a wild forest is not necessarily a healthy one, and that woodlands should periodically be cleaned of old and dying trees. In general, all conservationists are opposed to the carving of new highways through the mountains, and when a highway threatens an area of large private estates the outcries become particularly loud. At the same time, men in the tourist business cry, “We’ve got all this beauty here’ and no way for people to get to it.”
Adirondack lumbermen, who consider themselves the true aristocracy of the area—as opposed to the vacationing members of Society—are staunchly opposed to all conservationists, and for good reason. In his private journals, the late Ferris J. Meigs, who headed the Santa Clara Lumber Company near Tupper Lake, spoke derisively of “the so-called Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Adirondacks.” Obviously, everything they wanted to see left standing in the woods he would have preferred to see rendered into toothpicks and ice cream spoons. Lumbermen like Meigs were traditionally anti-liquor, preferring to keep their workmen sober. After a lengthy struggle, Prohibition was enacted in the town and the Santa Clara Lumber Company jubilantly blew its whistle. From across the street a saloonkeeper came charging out and shot the whistle full of holes.
In the southern Adirondacks, Saratoga Springs was a resort contemporary to Newport, and by the mid-nineteenth century this “Queen of Spas,” as it was called, was every bit as fashionable. The August races of the Saratoga Association for the Improvement of the Breed of Horses, organized in 1863, drew brilliant gatherings year after year. In August, Society flocked to Saratoga from as far off as Chicago, arranged itself on the extensive verandas of Saratoga’s great hotels, drank and bathed in its chalky springs (heavily charged with carbonic acid gas that was said to “flush” the liver), and changed its clothes. It was the era of the private railroad car, and the capacious Saratoga trunk was designed to handle the wardrobe required for the Saratoga Season.* Soon, however, the resort became a battleground. For one thing, the “curative” waters of the springs were so heavily exploited—bottled and sold—that the springs themselves were going dry. Also, after the Civil War the resort was going through a Newport-like transition, with newer and more ostentatious money coming in. Saratoga was becoming “vulgar,” and the older members of Society retreated to large and isolated “camps” along the northern lakes—Lakes George, Saranac, and Tupper.
Saratoga’s resort hotels began losing business, and one of them—the largest—the Grand Union, decided to do something about it In August of 1877, the hotel turned away the New York banker, Joseph Seligman, who had spent many Augusts there with his family, on the grounds that the hotel had a new policy and did not accept “Israelites.” In the long run, however, this action lowered the resort’s prestige among Gentiles as well as Jews, and Saratoga entered a long period of decline.
“Camp” life, meanwhile, was a return to studied rusticity. Well-tended by servants, Society roughed it—under beams and on furniture that had, at great expense, been chipped at with axes to look hand-hewn. Chandeliers were crafted out of antlers, and stuffed heads gazed down from every wall. (Conservationists who cared about trees were somewhat less thoughtful of the wildlife that grazed among them.) Mass-manufactured Indian blankets graced every bed whose head and footboards were of logs still in their bark. Massive fireplaces brought heat to chilly mountain nights.
The next inevitable step for this sort of Society was to form a rustic mountain club; the great resort hotels of Saratoga were languishing, and a new sort of center for social life was needed. To fill this need there came, in 1891, a strange, brilliant, neurotic man named Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey. Dewey had always wanted to create monuments to himself. While a student at Amherst he had invented the Dewey Decimal System for classifying books which has been adopted by libraries all over the world, making Dewey the father of modern library science. He was also a proponent of simplified spelling, and dutifully simplified the spelling of his own first
name to “Melvil,” though he was reluctant to drop any letters from his last. Waggish friends used to say that if it made sense—as Dewey said it did—to drop the “ue” from words like “tongue,” and “rogue,” then why not do the same with words like “true,” and “argue”? Dewey’s spelling influence is noticeable in the mountains today, where “Adirondack” is variously spelled “Adirondak,” or “Adirondac,” and where the main lodge of the Adirondack Mountain Club is called “Adirondak Loj.”
Though Dewey himself was not a member of the Four Hundred and, as far as is known, had no particular social ambitions, when he arrived at Lake Placid he had a vision of a place where “congenial people … the country’s best” could meet in an atmosphere of culture and refinement. He named his vision the Lake Placid Club.
This was an important moment in the Adirondacks. The Mauve Decade was under way, post-Civil War fortunes were firmly established. At the midsummer peak of mountain-bound traffic, the tracks of the New York Central Railroad leading to Lake Placid were strung with private railway cars bearing Harrimans, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Goulds, and Goelets to what was becoming the “heart” of the Adirondacks. It was becoming popular for camp owners to build rail spurs of their own from the main line of the Central directly to the camps themselves. At Nehasane, deep in the woods, Dr. Seward Webb, son-in-law of William H. Vanderbilt, built an entire private railroad station to serve his 112,000-acre camp. (According to an agreement with the Central, it is still technically impossible to buy a ticket to Nehasane, New York, unless one can produce a written invitation from the Webbs.) In this perfumed atmosphere, Dewey’s notion for a club was immediately well received, and founding members—each with ready cash to invest—made themselves available.
Dewey had specific ideas about who “the country’s best” were. Perhaps he was influenced by the Grand Union Hotel’s action a few years earlier; perhaps not. In any case, according to T. Morris Longstreth, one of Dewey’s chroniclers, Lake Placid Club guests were classified as follows—rather like library books: “Class C—common client, welcome, neither specially advantageous or disadvantageous; Class B—some talent, some distinguishing traits that make him desirable; Class A—those admirably suited to further the ideals of the club; Class D—doubtful or deficient characters; Class E—unsuitables who, if already in, must be eliminated; if still out, must be excluded for the protection of the rest.” Lake Placid Club literature went on to add these bluntly worded provisos:
No one will be received as member or guest against whom there is physical, moral, social, or race objection, or who would be unwelcome to even a small minority. This excludes absolutely all consumptives, or rather invalids, whose presence might injure health or modify others’ freedom or enjoyment. [Dewey himself came to the mountains for his hay fever, and his wife suffered from “rose cold” but their sneezing was evidently considered acceptable.] This invariable rule is rigidly enforced; it is found impracticable to make exceptions to Jews or others excluded, even when of unusual personal qualifications.
Mr. Dewey’s Lake Placid Club was such a success that other builders of clubs and resorts in the area quickly took it as their model. The Ausable Club, near Keene, was built, and is considered “like the Lake Placid Club, but smaller and more exclusive.” The anti-Semitism of Adirondack resorts became blatant. One hotel advertised, “Hebrews need not apply.” Another said, “Hebrews will knock vainly for admission.” Discriminatory statements in advertising are now against the law in New York, but various hotels have found clever ways of getting their point across. One may say, “Guests will enjoy our Christian religious library.” Another, in a reservation coupon, asks, “Please state your Christian name.”
“You must never underestimate the influence of the Lake Placid Club,” one nearby property owner says. “Over the years, the club’s influence has been absolutely tremendous. The club has influenced the entire Adirondack region.” This is true. But whether that influence has in the long run been malignant or benign is another matter. Oquarah’s cranky, restless shade may pace the mountains overhead, setting man against his fellow man. But in this enterprise he has had efficient human helpers, and many of these have been members of the Lake Placid Club. Today, the main clubhouse is a vast, rambling affair, part brick, part timber, and it broods at the edge of Mirror Lake where, on sunny days, it can see itself imposingly reflected. It is surrounded by numerous outbuildings and houses available for summer and winter rental. It has golf courses, a theatre and lecture hall, its own dairy and poultry farms, its own shops and laundry and dry cleaner, its own symphony orchestra, called a “Symphonette,” its own ski and toboggan runs, its own tennis courts, miles of roads, and over seven thousand acres of farm and forest land. The club today has a membership in the thousands. Oddly, it is cheap as clubs go. Non-resident members pay a hundred dollars a year.
At the same time, Mr. Dewey and the men who followed him had succeeded in splitting the Adirondacks along religious lines, and the division persists today. For Jews who wished to visit the mountains, the answer was to build Jewish resorts and clubs. Rumor has it,—as it always does in discriminatory clubs—that one or two “secret Jews” have been sneaked into the Lake Placid Club, but if the club has any Jewish members they are keeping very quiet about it. For many years the Lake Placid Club operated its own boys’ prep school. This was a posh affair indeed. “Every playboy you’ve ever heard of went there at one time or another,” says a local woman. The school was a unique adaptation of academic life to resort life; fall and spring terms were conducted on the schoolgrounds at Placid but, for the winter term, school and students packed up and entrained for Palm Beach. Today, the school—renamed Northwood—occupies grounds hard by the club, but is separately chartered. The school will accept Jewish boys, but it uses club facilities for many of its activities. And any parent who is aware of the club’s long reputation, and who reads in the school’s catalogue that Northwood “maintains a close relationship with the Lake Placid Club” may wonder whether Northwood is the place to send his son.
The widely publicized membership policy of the club has created certain social drawbacks for “the country’s best” who belong to it. In 1965, R. Peter Straus, president of radio station WMCA, publicly criticized Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Stephen E. Smith, who had taken his family for a skiing holiday at the club, calling it “incredible” that Mr. Smith would stay at “a place that is known to discriminate against Jewish people.” “Of course we were never like Newport,” one member explains. “We were not competitive. We were more club-centered, more family-centered. We never went in for Newport’s splash and show. We come up here to rest and be by ourselves.” Still, Lake Placid likes to think of itself in the same breath with Newport. But, because of its policies, it has long been snubbed by Society editors of important Eastern newspapers—particularly by the New York Times, whose owners and publishers are related by marriage to Mr. Straus.
So the Lake Placid Club functions in a kind of social limbo, reduced to talking to and about itself. Through the years the club has had its financial ups and down, but all seemed well until 1947, when the club entertained a record number of guests. Then a sudden decline began, and the club is now trying to find its way out of a mare’s nest of financial woes. Members vary in their opinions of it. One woman calls life at the club “terribly gay, terribly fun,” and defends its membership restrictions by saying, “After all, it is a private club. It has a right to choose those it wants as members.” Others, particularly younger members, say it’s “full of old fogeys,” and describe the giant dining room as “a sea of white heads eating mediocre food.” The Symphonette plays “constant Tchaikovsky,” adding to the torpor of the mood. One member says, “The club is simply going to have to change its policy if it’s going to stay alive.” No early change in policy seems likely, though. And the club’s future poses a dilemma to the entire community. It is virtually a year-round operation, and employs many local people. It is also an important
taxpayer. Its death would be a severe economic blow to the entire area. Meanwhile, as the éminence grise of the Adirondacks, the Lake Placid Club’s anti-Semitism may have done more than anything else to cause the Adirondacks’s descent from ultra-fashion-ability. For the plain fact is that if mountains have lost chic generally, the Adirondack Mountains have lost more chic than other mountains. “We are now paying,” says a local real estate man, “for the mistakes of past generations.” And, around the Lake Placid shore, vacated and decaying private camps and lodges—one with its own little rusted railroad track running from the boat dock to the house, once used to transport guests and groceries—stand as testimony to what is happening.
It is astonishing to see how deeply entrenched the religious apartheid in the Adirondacks has become. Another area that has changed greatly in recent years is the western shore of Lake George, where a once-famed “Millionaires’ Row” stretching from Lake George Village to Bolton Landing has become a giddy string of motels, bowling alleys, and pizza palaces. “Jewish builders” are blamed by the old people who still summer here for the desecration of the landscape, but the cupidity of the estate owners, who sold their places to the highest bidders without caring what became of the property, is more to blame. The answer to the situation at this end of the lake, one wild-eyed woman explains, “is to keep Jews out of the Lake George Club. That will show them!” She adds, “I can’t walk down the sidewalk any more. The Jews come along and push me right into the street!” The house next door, she explains, was sold to Jews. “And do you know what they’ve done? They’ve put up a flagpole on the front lawn!” Though her neighbors flew the American flag, she added, “Most of them are Communists.”
Meanwhile, the old rich and the solid rich have moved elsewhere in the mountains. The rich have not abandoned the Adirondacks, not by a long shot, but if life around Lake Placid was “never like Newport” then it is even less like Newport in the lonely lostness of the southwestern quarter of the park. Here, the Lake Placid Club is hardly ever thought of because, in a sense, each family has built a comfortable club of its own. William A. Rockefeller has large land holdings in this area. So do the William A. and Bayard W. Reads. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney—the famous “Sonny”—has a hundred thousand acre tract, and J. Watson Webb has a smaller tract of forty-five thousand acres. New York’s McAlpin family also holds onto a sizable piece. Harold K. Hochschild, a wealthy copper miner, owns a great deal of land around Blue Mountain Lake, and the Hochschild family gave Blue Mountain its colorful Adirondack Museum. (Harold Hochschild is credited with being the first person to take an automobile into the Adirondack Mountains; the trip, in a 1905 Winton, took two days from Saratoga Springs, involved broken springs and five flat tires, but may have signaled the end of the private railroad car and the dawn of the motel business.) Many of these large properties are worked for lumber, but they are lumbered selectively, with strict re-planting schedules, so the effects of lumbering are only occasionally visible. Nearly all contain game preserves, and several have Christmas tree farms. Conservation and moneymaking have made an acceptable compromise.
The Right People Page 27
