Tip O'Neill Said They Hung Him in Effigy in Truro

They put out folding chairs at Salt Pond on the sixth of August. There was a citation from the governor. Hyannis Sound sang on the lawn. The Cape Cod National Seashore turned sixty-five, and Superintendent Jennifer Flynn stood up and said the park "was not created to be a government reservation or something to be set aside as an island or a castle on a hill."

Nice morning. Warm. The kind of thing you'd bring a folding chair to.

And not one person at that gathering mentioned that the towns now sitting inside this park spent years trying to strangle it in the crib.

The bill that said "whatever he deems suitable"

Tip O'Neill would later keep a house in Harwich Port. That came afterward. In 1958, when he and Ed Boland first filed legislation to create a Cape Cod national seashore, he was a Massachusetts congressman from somewhere else entirely, and what he was proposing landed out here like a summons.

In January of 1959 he came back with H.R. 3050, one of several bills then moving through Congress. Truro's selectmen wrote up what those bills would actually do and put it into the Senate record, and their summary is worth reading slowly. Two of them would let the Secretary of the Interior "take not more than 30,000 acres of Cape Cod land for a national park."

Then there was O'Neill's. Truro's description of it runs one sentence: "The third bill merely stated that the Secretary could take what amount he deemed suitable for a park."

Whatever he deems suitable.

Imagine reading that in your own town's paperwork. Imagine you own eleven acres off Old County Road that your grandfather bought, and the operative legal standard for whether you keep it is what a man in Washington deems suitable.

O'Neill later recalled that he and Boland were booed out of the town hall in Eastham and hung in effigy in Truro.

Here's the part that gets left out of the anniversary speeches: they came down and looked. Eastham's own submission to the record notes that when the two congressmen finally walked the ground they'd drawn a line around, they "expressed amazement at the size of the proposed taking and thought it was much too severe."

They sponsored it, then they saw it, then they agreed it was too much.

Two Decembers in Eastham

Congress came to Eastham more than once — hearings in December of 1959 and again the following December — and the transcripts are one of the strangest, best documents about this place that exists. It is hundreds of pages of Cape selectmen explaining a peninsula to men who had never wintered on one.

John C. Snow chaired the board in Provincetown, and he opened with a saying rather than an argument.

"As oldtimers in Provincetown and on the cape used to say," he told the subcommittee, "'I was Cape Cod born and Cape Cod bred, and when I die I am going to be Cape Cod dead.' That is about the way I feel."

Then: "We must watch that in the creation of something we do not destroy something greater."

He wasn't finished. Somebody had been out here explaining what the park would do for a town like his — that Provincetown would live off visitors, off scenery, off being looked at — and Snow took the whole idea apart in a single swing. It would all work, he said, if the town could just post itself out in the dunes "with berry scoops and look like characters and the rest of us dress in pilgrim suits."

"Unfortunately," he added, "the facts of life are otherwise."

Sixty-seven years later, in the third week of August, on Commercial Street, you may want to read that one twice.

Maurice Moore came down from Eastham. He was a painting contractor and he had no interest in the rhetorical approach: "That area has been acquired and still the insane land-grabbing attempts continue."

Charles Frazier Jr. had chaired Wellfleet's selectmen for two decades, minus the war years, and he arrived with a number and a grudge. Three hundred fifty-five dwellings and cottages sat inside the proposed taking in Wellfleet alone. And the federal investigators, he told them, "in spite of having spent a year and a half on the cape, were unable to determine whether any houses were taken in the town of Wellfleet."

A year and a half on the ground. Three hundred fifty-five houses. Couldn't say.

Truro, meanwhile, had done the work nobody asked them to do. In June of 1959 the selectmen mailed 1,140 questionnaires and got 680 back — a sixty percent return, which is a figure no survey on earth gets anymore, and which tells you exactly how frightened that town was. Two hundred seventy-seven of the responses, forty percent, wanted no park at all. A petition went around and 325 voters and taxpayers signed it; copies went to Senator Kennedy, Senator Saltonstall, and Representative Keith. Town meeting passed a resolution against the O'Neill and Boland bills, 50 to 30. An earlier one had passed 64 to nothing.

The arithmetic behind all that: seventy percent of Truro's land sat inside the proposed line. So did roughly eighty percent of the town's income.

Over in Eastham, Prince Hurd told the subcommittee his town stood to lose more than a third of its area.

It was never one Cape against one park

This is where the story stops being simple, and it's the part I'd want you to carry out of it.

John Worthington chaired Truro's board and testified for a park. His reasoning was the reasoning of a man watching a place change faster than it should: "particularly since the advent of the bulldozer and the new highways to the cape, the rate of change has accelerated." His objection was narrow and it was sharp. The homes they meant to remove "have a history dating back nearly 300 years."

And out at the tip, the math ran the other direction entirely. A developer named Van Ness Bates wanted fifteen hundred acres of the Province Lands. A heliport. A garage. Houses. And, depending on whose version you got, a bridge from Provincetown to Plymouth.

The painter Ross Moffett and Josephine Del Deo ran the Emergency Committee for the Preservation of the Province Lands against him. Years later, Del Deo said the quiet part with both hands: "A lot of people hated the idea of the park because they knew goddamned well it would stop development."

On March 13, 1961, Provincetown town meeting voted 144 to 61 to hand the Province Lands over.

So: Truro voting no, twice. Provincetown voting yes. Wellfleet counting its cottages. A Truro selectman arguing for the park, and a Provincetown selectman arguing against it. That's not a Cape united against Washington. That's a Cape arguing with itself, town by town, house by house, the way it always has.

One date, and everything hangs on it

What passed in 1961 was not what O'Neill first proposed, and the difference is the protection they built around houses that already existed.

The law defined "improved property" around a detached one-family dwelling begun before September 1, 1959. It suspended condemnation for a year, and after that, in any town whose zoning met federal standards. Owners who were condemned anyway could keep use and occupancy for twenty-five years, or for life. And Congress wrote in a ten-member advisory commission with seats for all six Seashore towns — Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, Chatham.

Congress authorized up to sixteen million dollars for land acquisition and related expenses. Roughly 3,800 undeveloped tracts were eventually assembled into something on the order of forty-four thousand acres.

Saltonstall, to the subcommittee, named the whole problem in one sentence: "The most important and complicated problem before us is to preserve the scenic and historic features of Cape Cod without injuring and unduly restricting the towns and individual citizens directly concerned."

Kennedy signed it on the seventh of August, 1961.

The fight didn't end. It moved indoors.

September 1, 1959.

That date is not a museum piece. It is the live wire running under half the Outer Cape.

Wellfleet, Truro and Eastham adopted three-acre minimums — Eastham and Truro asking 150 feet of frontage, Wellfleet 200. And when somebody inside the Seashore wants to put up an accessory dwelling for their kid today, or rebuild something bigger than what's there, the argument runs straight back through language drafted for a subcommittee that sat in Eastham sixty-seven Decembers ago.

The compromise Snow and Frazier and Worthington shouted their way toward is not sealed in a transcript. It still decides what people can build.

Bill Burke has been the park's historian longer than most of us have lived here, and at the anniversary he put it about as plainly as it can be put: "Sometimes you have to be bold and daring."

He's right. But stand at Coast Guard Beach some Thursday in August and look north up forty miles of shoreline that nobody was permitted to subdivide, and hold two things at once. That view is the product of boldness. It is also the product of a fight that a lot of people out here lost.

The opponents lost much of it. The compromise survived. And sixty-five years later, the park they were terrified of creating has become part of the Cape's definition of itself.

Bring a folding chair. But know what you're sitting in.