‘GREATEST PROSECUTOR’ WAS ALSO THIEF, STOLE LAND TO COMPLETE NYS THRUWAY AS GOV, TRIBE SAYS, COURTS AGREE
FEDERAL COURTS FIND NEW YORK STATE MAY HAVE STOLEN LAND FROM NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBE SENECA NATION TO COMPLETE STATE THRUWAY IN 1954, ORDER STATE TO RENEGOTIATE SHADY LAND DEAL WITH TRIBE
Governor Thomas E. Dewey with Seneca Nation leaders opening the so-called Iroquois Trail through the New York State Thruway, ca. 1954. Photo Credit: NYS Archive.
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What essential but taken-for-granted New York institution was partially shut-down by Woodstock, the background to a notorious bank robbery-gone-wrong, ridden by a wagon train to celebrate the American Bicentennial and helped birth the modern American superhighway?
The Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway is the Empire State's Main Street. Its 426-mile long mainline connects the Bronx with Buffalo. Spurs connect it with Massachusetts and New England to the east; Canada to the north; Pennsylvania and the rest of America to the west; and New Jersey to the south. It is "a critical component of the State’s economy," according to a 2023 Comptroller's report, earning $898 million in toll revenue in 2022 alone.
The Thruway's success is also based on a crime: it was partially built on land stolen by New York State in 1954.
That's according to a federal lawsuit filed by The Seneca Nation, a Native American tribe in western New York. They won a federal appeals court ruling in Jan. defeating New York's attempt to have their lawsuit dismissed. The ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals means the tribe's allegations, if proved at trial, may require New York to return the stolen land.
That ruling is the second in less than a year favoring a Native American tribe alleging New York stole land from it, as previously reported by The Free Lance.
View north along Interstate 87 (New York State Thruway, Ramapo, New York. Photo credit: Lamartin via Wikipedia.
Millions of New Yorkers use the Thruway to escape the drudgery of their daily lives every year, whether on week-end road trips or rolling week-long adventures. Millions more use it for commerce, to deliver goods in trucks. Few pause to think about the Thruway as an important New York institution. Even fewer know about the original sin that made it a true "Thruway" spanning the State end-to-end.
Republican Thomas E. Dewey's political ascension started with a "runaway" grand jury. It publicly alleged Manhattan District Attorney William C. Dodge was only assigning them small-time bad guys to investigate. Dodge wasn't going after real criminals, grand jurors alleged. He ignored the kingpins who ran illegal gambling in the City. Dodge shut the runaway Grand Jury down a month later.
In response, Gov. Herbert H. Lehman said he would appoint a special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation into organized crime and public corruption in New York City. To avoid charges of partisanship, Lehman, a Democrat, sought a Republican. No one wanted the job. Only Dewey accepted.
Dewey working as a prosecutor in New York City. Photo credit: screengrab from “The Dewey Story” via Library of Congress.
Incorruptible, innovative and armed with a bear-trap memory, the Michigan-born Dewey previously served as Assistant US Attorney. Using modern investigative methods like informants, wiretaps and financial records, Dewey convicted notorious Lower East Side bootlegger Waxey Gordon and ruthless mob enforcer Jack "Legs" Diamond.
As special prosecutor, Dewey's biggest prize was Charles "Lucky" Luciano. He appointed a Black woman, Eunice Carter, to investigate and prosecute Luciano. Carter succeeded. She not only convicted the ruthless crime lord, of forcing women into prostitution, she got him sentenced to 30-to-50 years in prison.
New Yorkers elected Dewey Manhattan District Attorney in 1937. One newspaper celebrated with this headline: “Hoodlums Start Out as Dewey Starts In.” Besides gangsters, the crusading crime fighter convicted corrupt public officials and other enemies of democracy. For example, he convicted a former president of the Stock Exchange of corruption then convicted American Nazi leader Fritz Julius Kuhn of embezzlement.
Dewey failed to convict Dutch Schultz, twice, but got him sent to the grave when he tried a third time. In response to Dewey's dogged pursuit, Schultz asked a collective mafia decision-making group called "The Commission" for permission to assassinate Dewey. The Commission's answer was to kill Schultz instead, the FBI says.
For his all his law enforcement accomplishments, Dewey has been lionized as America’s Greatest Prosecutor.
Clearing the City of front-page mobsters also made Dewey a bona fide American folk hero. He paid back Gov. Lehman—the man who appointed him special prosecutor in the first place—by running against him for the governor's chair in 1938. Lehman, New York's first Jewish governor who served a total of four terms, barely defeated him.
Four years later, Lehman abdicated his gubernatorial throne and Dewey beat the State Attorney General in a three-way contest that included an American Labor Party candidate. Dewey was elected governor again in 1946 and 1950, serving three terms in a row, 1943-54. Famously, Dewey was heavily favored to beat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 presidential election, but lost in one of the greatest upsets in American political history.
Less famously, but more telling, Dewey supported and signed the Ives-Quinn Act in 1945. It was the first comprehensive ban on racial discrimination in employment in the United States. It also banned discrimination based on religion or national origin and established a state commission to enforce it. It directly led to Jackie Robinson breaking American baseball apartheid in 1947.
Dewey retired to a Pawling, New York farm he named Dapplemore. It was on Quaker Hill—where the real first shots of the American War for Independence were fired in 1766. He died, of a heart attack, in 1971.
The Keystone State pioneered the modern superhighway when it opened the Pennsylvania Turnpike Oct. 1, 1940. It had two-lanes going in both directions, slightly slanting hills and wide, slow curves. These characteristics distinguished it from previous highways, and defined all superhighways built after it.
Maine's legislature authorized a state-wide superhighway the next year, 1941, but World War Two put large-scale public works projects on hold. The war ended in 1945 and the first section of the Maine Turnpike was completed in 1947. Funded with bonds based on projected revenue from tolls, it was "a national model for how states and municipalities fund major infrastructure projects today," the Maine Turnpike Authority proudly says.
Left unsaid is that tolls are a regressive double tax that disproportionately impacts lower income drivers.
Abbott Low Moffatt brought the New York State Thruway to life as Chairmen of the State Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee in 1943, then left for a career in the Foreign Service. Here he is in 1982 being interviewed about that career, including meeting the Vietnamese Communist rebel Ho Chi Minn. Photo credit: screengrab via WGBH.
Abbot Low Moffat, Assemblyman and Chairman of the Assembly's Ways and Means Committee, 1936-43, first proposed building a multilane highway from New York to Buffalo after repeatedly riding from his Manhattan home to Albany on Route 9.
"They told me, 'You'll never get that bill through,'" Moffat told the New York Times in 1984. "I said, 'If the chairman of Ways and Means says he'll get the bill, he'll get the bill.'"
While drafting the bill, Moffat said, he grew weary of seeing long words like "superhighway."
"I wanted something with no more than seven letters that could fit on a sign," Moffat said. He came up with "Thruway.”
Abbot quit the Assembly and went to work for Washington as a Foreign Service officer the same year Dewey was elected governor: 1943.
"I still begrudge naming it after him," Moffat revealed. "I thought that was a little extreme just because he got the financing going. But that's all right, except I just call it the New York State Thruway and let it go at that."
Gov. Dewey authorized the Department of Public Works to begin scouting a route and acquiring land to build the Thruway in 1944. Ground was broken at Liverpool, New York, outside Syracuse, July 1946. Four years later, the New York legislature passed the Thruway Authority Act. The Act created the New York State Thruway Authority, and charged it with funding, finishing, maintaining and operating the Thruway.
New York's legislature followed Maine's example and chose to fund the Thruway through bonds based on projected toll revenue.
The first section of the Thruway, a 115-mile stretch from Rochester to Lowell, opened June 24, 1954. Dewey was there to cut the ribbon. 500 cars paraded down the superhighway. The caravan included a 1912 Ford, 1929 DuPont Speedster, emergency service vehicles, school buses, milk trucks, "sports cars from Mercedes, Jaguar, and Ferrari, and brand new model cars from Ford, Chevrolet, Plymouth, and 15 other manufacturers," according to the Onondaga County Historical Society.
The three superhighways Pennsylvania, Maine and New York built spurned the federal Government to create the modern Interstate Highway System in 1956. The Federal Highway Act authorized creation of an interstate network of superhighways extending 41,000 miles that supported heavier weights, more direct, quicker travel and higher speeds. Not only did it make personal travel easier, it supercharged interstate commerce.
Supporters also said it was essential to national defense because it speeded the deployment of troops and tanks in case of enemy invasion.
New York State Thruway shown as red line on map of New York. Photo credit: screengrab via Wikipedia.
Ending inter-tribal warfare among native American tribes in what would become New York state, Senecas joined Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga and Cayuga to form the Iroquois Confederacy in 1142. Of these tribes, Seneca was the largest. They call themselves Onödowa’ga, "Great Hill People." The group admitted another tribe, Tuscarora, in 1722. The Iroquois Confederacy inspired American Democracy.
The historical Seneca territory lay between Central New York's Finger Lakes region and the Genesee River Valley to the west. As the western-most tribe in the Confederacy, Seneca became known as "Keepers of the Western Door." They lived along rivers in longhouses organized by matriarchal clans. Their settlements were protected by rudimentary wooden walls. Marrying inside a clan was banned, forcing individuals to mix with other clans, bonding the Confederacy by blood. Men hunted, fished and fought other tribes to defend and expand Seneca land. Women tended children and farmed the Three Sisters: corn, beans and squash.
The American War for Independence broke the Iroquois Confederacy. Seneca sided with the British. With the Colonists' victory, the tribe lost its historical territory. They signed a treaty with the United States in 1794 which guaranteed them the right to certain areas of western New York, but some of it was later sold by tribe members.
About 10,000 acres of the tribe's Alleghany Territory were flooded by the Federal Government when it built the Kinzua Dam. The dam turned the Allegany River into a lake 25-miles long. 133 Seneca families, totalling 830 people, were displaced, according to the Government. The Seneca fought a fierce legal battle against the dam, but lost. They were paid about $15 million in compensation.
As of 2020, 8,469 verified Senecas survive, according to the tribe. Slightly more than half live off tribal land. 1,733 live on the tribe's largest land-holding, the 48.7 square mile Allegheny Territory. The rest, about 2,650, live on the 34.4 square mile Cattaraugus Territory, so-named because it runs along Cattagarus Creek to Lake Erie. It's a 300 acre chunk of this tribal land a three mile stretch of Thruway cuts across.
In 1954, New York was under intense political pressure to make its state-wide superhighway a true "Thruway." That meant building a spur off the Buffalo end of its main stem running 120 or so miles west to the Pennsylvania border. Combined with the Thruway's Berkshire spur, the planned Erie Spur would allow traffic to speed through New York, to Boston and all the rest of New England—generating millions in toll income.
The Seneca's Cattaraugus Territory stood in the way.
The State started pressing the tribe in 1946 for the right to build its Thruway across Seneca land, according to the tribe. Financial "interests," trucking companies and local chambers of commerce all leaned on New York state officials to build the superhighway through to Pennsylvania. Dewey himself publicly announced, in April 1954, "the link between Buffalo and Erie would be built."
Final talks between the tribe and New York occurred four months later, on two days, Aug. 28 and Sept. 17.
The tribe accepted a lawyer hired by the State to represent it. He had little experience representing tribes.
"Several hours of very frank talk" led to the tribe being "finally hammered down," New York State's lead negotiator wrote afterwards.
The Seneca said they wanted a perpetual one-third share of toll revenue, but agreed to a paltry one-time payout of $75,000.
"This was much lower than any of us expected to acquire these lands for," the State's negotiator wrote.
The Seneca have been fighting in federal court to undo the 1954 deal since 1993.
The first round ended with them losing in the Second Circuit in 2004. The Court, somehow, arrived at the questionable conclusion "equity and good conscience" required the lawsuit be dismissed because New York State wasn't a party to the lawsuit—and couldn't be because the Constitution immunized it from the tribe's lawsuit.
The tribe filed another lawsuit in 2018. This time the tribe was very specific about what it wanted.
It only wanted a declaration the State was violating federal law by not having a valid easement for the Thruway and a judgment requiring the State "obtain a valid easement." It also sought an injunction requiring the State Comptroller “'segregate and hold in escrow all future toll monies collected on the Thruway that are fairly attributable to the portion of the Thruway' on the Nation’s lands until defendants obtain a valid easement."
This time, the Second Circuit allowed the tribe's lawsuit to proceed because it "does not assert property rights over land to which New York State has traditionally held the title and does not seek a declaration that the State’s laws and regulations do not apply to the area in dispute."
Seneca Nation President Rickey Armstrong Sr. called the court ruling "an important victory" for the Seneca, in a statement.
"The Thruway is a 300-acre scar on our Cattaraugus Territory," Armstrong added. It violated "promises made to us by treaty."
The Thruway collected a total of $69.8 million in tolls in Mar. 2023, according to the Thruway Authority's most recent monthly financial report. $5.1 million of that was collected in the Erie Spur alone.
The Federal court overseeing the case in Buffalo issued an Order Aug. 1 requiring New York and the Seneca's to renegotiate the agreement. The first meeting must happen before Oct. 1.
This time, the tribe has its own lawyers.
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