The root cause of ‘Treegate’
I really hoped using “gate” as a shorthand for scandals was going to be retired after the tortured “Monicagate” in 1998.
Yet here we go again, dealing with “Treegate” in Connecticut after Gov. Ned Lamont and his neighbors reportedly had more than 180 trees cleared from a protected wetland behind his Greenwich home. Even “Treegate” isn’t original, as the phrase was used during last year’s strike in Hollywood, when studios were accused of pruning trees to deprive picketing actors and writers of shade.
To be clear. I am on the side of the trees. But I’m tired of the wealthy Greenwichites who bark (first of too many intended puns) whenever Eversource wants to clear trees in their hoods to protect power lines. Megarich tree-huggers have a habit of forgetting that once upon a time, hundreds of trees were axed to make way for their cribs.
But my inner history (and conspiracy) buff has me wondering if the latest brouhaha could simply be payback for a century-old rivalry between two names that were shorthand for wealth in the 20th century: Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. John D. Rockefeller once threw shade at John Pierpont Morgan. While crediting Morgan with helping avert a national panic decades before the Great Depression, Rockefeller couldn’t resist adding “And to think he wasn’t even a rich man.” Classifying an $80 million man that way was only possible for someone worth $1.4 billion.
The Rockefeller family owned 500 acres of land in Greenwich at the dawn of the 20th century, part of which is the forest allegedly denuded by Lamont and some neighbors. The governor took umbrage that the phrase “clearcutting” appeared in news coverage of “Treegate,” so “denuded” is probably taboo as well. But you can’t turn 180 trees into sawdust without leaving some bald spots.
The governor is not related by blood to Morgan, but let’s consider the deep political roots in his (yes, you knew I was going there) family tree.
Lamont’s great-grandfather was Thomas W. Lamont, who was J.P. Morgan’s chief executive. That
didn’t merely grant Lamont keys to the executive toilet a century ago. Just after the stock market crashed in 1929, Thomas Lamont landed on the cover of Time magazine. J.P. Jr. was off grouse shooting in Scotland, so Lamont did most of the talking to reassure the public. It wasn’t the first time he was on the front lines of history. At the end of World War I, he represented the United States at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
My research of Thomas Lamont only revealed one hobby. He liked to walk in the woods.
He became a very rich man. Even a Rockefeller might have approved. But the patriarch of the Lamont dynasty was so poor as a boy that he once recounted being unable to attend a school football game because he didn’t have enough coin to pay for the roundtrip on the bus. By 1947, he was so wealthy that he donated a halfmillion dollars to the restoration of Canterbury Cathedral in England, which had sustained damage during the war. Back in America, he advised presidents Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt.
Before becoming a financier, though, he killed trees for a living. In other words, he was a journalist.
Yes, Thomas Lamont was grooming a promising career at several newspapers, including the Albany Evening Journal, the New York Tribune and Boston Herald. Then he wrote some finance stories and figured out there is no such thing as a “wealthy journalist.” If he had stuck with writing, his great-grandson would probably not be governor today. Ned, in fact, started out as a journalist before learning the same lesson.
Ned Lamont’s family roots dig deeper into American history. One of Thomas’ sons, Corliss Lamont, refused to answer questions before U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” subcommittee that hunted for Communists in 1953. Corliss, an
educator and author, had written the book “The Peoples of the Soviet Union.” He was charged with contempt for refusing to answer questions during McCarthy’s grilling, and boldly countered that the senator and his fellow witch-hunters were not authorized to conduct such an investigation. Lamont prevailed. He also denied ever being a Communist, though he owned up to being a “free-wheeling liberal.” His grand-nephew, Ned, was born a few months later.
Ned Lamont’s father, also named Edward, brings us to the era of the OG “gate,” as he worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Nixon administration.
It’s a family with a “Zelig”-like knack for making cameos throughout American history. Ned Lamont’s tree scandal raised some questions, such as whether he should have gotten ahead of the story sooner. But that all seemed trite in a week when former President Donald Trump was in a New York courtroom enduring damning testimony from former National Enquirer Publisher David Pecker and former Trump aide Hope Hicks. Trump, Pecker and Hicks have all resided in Greenwich.
Fun fact: Lamont first entered the political scene as one of the three members of the Greenwich Board of Selectmen in 1987. Another member was Paul Hicks III, father of Hope.
World War I. The Great Depression. World War II. The McCarthy hearings. Wilson. Hoover. Roosevelt. Nixon.
There are more branches, but you get the point. The Lamonts were notches on tree rings tracing American politics, yet Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont wound up getting stumped by something called the Greenwich Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Agency.