The Q — Friendly politics and tea

This is the latest in an occasional series of posts about history of The Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls.

“We have a joint checking account, so we ought to have a joint idea account by now,” after 39 years of marriage, said Dorothy Goldberg, speaking Oct. 23, 1970 at a Democratic Women’s Tea at The Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls.

She was campaigning on behalf of husband Arthur Goldberg, the Democratic challenger to Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who had campaigned at The Queensbury Hotel in April.

Exchanges between the candidates had gotten heated in the final stretch of the campaign, but Dorothy Goldberg kept her remarks civil.

“She likes speaking out on the issues as well as the pleasantries of chatting and sipping tea at friendly gatherings,” Hermine Sherman of The Post-Star reported the next day.

Arthur Goldberg was a labor attorney who had been U.S. Secretary of Labor, a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, and Ambassador to the United Nations.

Dorothy Goldberg had credentials of her own.

She was co-founder of the advocacy groups Citizens for Better Public Education and Friends of the Juvenile Court, and at the time was serving on President Richard Nixon’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped.

She was an artist and writer who wrote the 1963 book “The Creative Woman” and was co-founder of the Associated Artists Gallery in Washington, D.C.

She called for government transparency and said her husband, if elected, would hold regional public state budget hearings across New York.

She said 40 additional votes in each election district for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 1966 would have swung the election to the Democrats.

In the end, the 1970 election was more lopsided.

Rockefeller would easily win a fourth term, defeating Goldberg by about 700,000 votes.

Click here to read the most recent previous post in this series.

Click here to read a previous post about Rockefeller at The Queensbury Hotel.