American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine 9780813562148

Citation preview

American Dictators

2

Rivergate Regionals Rivergate Regionals is a collection of books published by Rutgers University Press focusing on New Jersey and the surrounding area. Since its founding in 1936, Rutgers University Press has been devoted to serving the people of New Jersey and this collection solidifies that tradition. The books in the Rivergate Regionals Collection explore history, politics, nature and the environment, recreation, sports, health and medicine, and the arts. By incorporating the collection within the larger Rutgers University Press editorial program, the Rivergate Regionals Collection enhances our commitment to publishing the best books about our great state and the surrounding region.

American Dictators

2

Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine

Steven Hart

rutgers university press new brunswick, new jersey, and london

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hart, Steven, 1958– American dictators : Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the perfection of the urban political machine / Steven Hart. pages cm. — (Rivergate regionals) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–6213–1 (hardcover : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6214–8 (e-book) 1. Hague, Frank, 1876–1956. 2. Johnson, Nucky, 1883–1968. 3. Politicians—United States—Biography. 4. Political culture—United States—Case studies. 5. Metropolitan government—United States—Case studies. 6. City and town life—United States—Case studies. 7. Mayors— New Jersey—Jersey City—Biography. 8. Politicians—New Jersey—Atlantic City—Biography. 9. Jersey City (N.J.)—Politics and government—20th century. 10. Atlantic City (N.J.)—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. E747.H29 2013 974.9⬘0430922—dc23 [B] 2012051438 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2013 by Steven Hart All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: The One Who Got Away, and the One Who Didn’t 1 1

In the Court of the Emerald King

2

Lines of Power

3

Boom Times

4

Hard Times

5

Public Works

6

A Choice of Enemies

7

Decline and Fall

11

30 53 78 88 105

127

Epilogue: The Machines That Didn’t Stop Notes 163 Bibliography Index 177

157

171

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the beginning there was McKean. The Boss: The Hague Machine in Action, published in 1940 while Frank Hague was firmly in control of Hudson County, established a timeline and pulled together all the stray facts about the rise of the Boss. Dayton David McKean has been rightly knocked for the prosecutorial tone of his book, his animus against Hague, and his flashes of anti-Irish prejudice, but no one has ever laid a glove on his research or his reporting. Three decades later, Richard S. Connors filled in the rest of the story with valuable demographic spadework and shrewd analysis in A Cycle of Power. Anyone who writes about Hague stands on the shoulders of those two giants. Similar acknowledgment is due novelist and historian Thomas Fleming, who grew up in Hague’s shadow and heard many stories from relatives who were on the machine’s payroll. Once again I offer my gratitude to the staff at the Archibald S. Alexander Library on the New Brunswick campus of my alma mater, Rutgers University. My research into the life and times of Nucky Johnson was considerably aided by the staff at the Atlantic City Free Public Library, where the Alfred M. Heston Collection provides many an opportunity for time travel into the resort’s vii

viii

acknowledgments

storied past. Thanks also to Nelson Johnson, author of Boardwalk Empire and The Northside, for a most helpful telephone conversation. Thanks once again to the staff of the New Jersey Room of the Jersey City Free Public Library, which remains a valuable resource. Special thanks to Marlie Wasserman, my editor at Rutgers University Press, for her Olympian patience during what proved to be an unexpectedly long gestation period for this book. And, once again, my gratitude to my literary agent, Michele Rubin of Writers House, for watching my back while thinking about the future.

American Dictators

2

2 Introduction the one who got away, and the one who didn’t Many political machines flourish—and have flourished—in America, but none has approached the perfection of the Hague organization in the completeness of its control over the society in which it exists. Even Tammany Hall, the prototype of all machine politics, never dominated New York as Hague and his political associates have dominated Jersey City and Hudson County. While no political institution can be entirely complete and successful, the one under examination here so nearly approaches the most finished machine that can be expected that others may be measured against it. —Dayton David McKean, The Boss: The Hague Machine in Action

Enoch L. Johnson made a lifetime career out of being a crooked politician and he did it under a most trying handicap. This handicap was his inordinate devotion to old brandy, young girls, and new Cadillacs—three items extremely difficult to keep hidden from the eyes of even the most supine of electorates. Enoch, therefore, didn’t bother trying to hide his gaudy pastimes, 1

2

american dictators

but resigned himself to being investigated and prepared himself well for such occupational hazards. —Elmer L. Irey, former chief, U.S. Treasury Department intelligence unit

One man was tongue-tied and awkward around women, in many ways a mama’s boy at heart, though his reputation for thuggery was well earned. The other was a playboy with a sweet tooth for showgirls; full of easy charm and ready jokes, he made his appetite for high living a matter of public record. One man tolerated gangsters and bootleggers as long as they paid their dues to his organization. The other was effectively a gangster himself, so crooked that he hosted a national gathering of America’s most ruthless killers. One man never drank alcohol. The other, from all available evidence, seldom drank anything else. One man was a bluenose who railed against vice and called his domain “the most moralest city in America.” The other was a sybarite who wallowed in vice and openly mocked his critics as ineffectual prudes. One man was a Democrat, the other a Republican; but while party loyalty officially made them antagonists, they were often indistinguishable in the way they used power. In terms of character and temperament, Frank Hague and Enoch “Nucky” Johnson were mirror images; in terms of power and influence, they exemplified that misunderstood breed known as the urban political boss. In fact, each brought the role of the boss, and the operations of his underlying political machine, to a peak of smooth-running, voter-shepherding, money-burning perfection. In terms of power and longevity, only Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley rates as Hague’s peer as a political boss.

introduction

3

Each was a kingmaker with enough clout to choose governors, to sway elections, to influence, bedevil, and even intimidate presidents. Each owed his ascension, ironically, to the efforts of Progressive reformer Woodrow Wilson during his attenuated term as governor of New Jersey. Each wielded virtually unchecked power for three decades and held a fairly nondescript title that belied his influence. Hague became a city commissioner in 1913, then mayor of Jersey City in May 1917 and kept the title until he stepped down in June 1947. Johnson served a single term as sheriff of Atlantic County, then became county treasurer in 1914, a position he held until 1941. Both men made plenty of political enemies and fended off attempts to depose them. In the end, one man was jailed and ruined while the other was able to leave office on his own terms and live out his years in comfort. By a few twists of fate, one man edges out the other for the title of ultimate political boss. By another twist of fate, each man operated within New Jersey during roughly the same period of time. Though technically political opponents, Hague and Johnson behaved more like colleagues. On at least one occasion they collaborated to bring down a troublesome rival, and at other times their schemes proved mutually beneficial. Each man came to personify all that was right and wrong with his political turf: in Hague’s case, the roughneck factory town of Jersey City; in Johnson’s, the gaudy seaside resort of Atlantic City. Each man was venerated and vilified out of proportion to his accomplishments and failings. Each can be shown, on balance, to have done well by his constituents, though in each case the departing boss left his town with long-term problems that went unsolved for decades. If Hague ultimately outranks Johnson as the benchmark for bossism, it is because Johnson was brought down by a federal tax probe, ruined, and jailed, while Hague left office of his

4

american dictators

own volition and on his own terms, albeit with hellhounds snapping at his heels. Add in the three years Hague spent as commissioner of public safety, a crucial period during which he consolidated enormous power over the police and fire departments, and the two years he spent using his nephew as a cat’s paw, and his career encompasses thirty-five-years of state and national influence. The irony is that Hague, an Irish Catholic, never fit the stereotype of the Irish American politico. “Perhaps no political boss ever looked less like one than Mayor Hague; he is no paunchy, cigar-chewing, lounging politician,” wrote journalist David Dayton McKean in 1940. “He stands erect, walks vigorously, talks forcefully. His physique is that of a prizefighter, now elderly but excellently preserved.” Other bosses might have glad-handed and backslapped their way through a crowd, but not Hague. “His characteristic facial expression is one of confused resentment, as if he had just been insulted or expected to be at any minute,” John McCarten told readers of The New Yorker in 1938. “Even when he draws himself up to his full six feet, folds his arms, pulls back his head, and announces that he is ‘the leading citizen of New Jersey,’ he looks gloomy. His pale blue eyes are heavy-lidded and suspicious, his long, thin lips curve morosely downward, his chin sets pugnaciously in the folds of the dewlaps that dangle over his high, Berry Wall collar.” Abstemious and constantly aware of his health—growing up in a pestilential Jersey City slum had given him a lifelong dread of disease—Hague never smoked or drank and enjoyed brisk walks to keep trim. Had he not dropped out of school in the seventh grade, Hague would have made a plausible headmaster for a particularly grim boarding school. Nucky Johnson, of Scots-Irish heritage, was much closer to the boss stereotype, with a few touches all his own. He famously slept until about five in the afternoon in his hotel suite overlooking the

introduction

5

city’s Boardwalk, submitted to a hearty rubdown at the hands of his valet, showered, and gorged on a large breakfast before selecting one of the hundred or so tailored silk suits that would be his uniform for the evening. After a long session holding court on the Boardwalk, dispensing tips, favors, and jobs to nightly crowds of supplicants, Nucky would begin the serious work of cruising cabaret shows and whatever else caught his fancy in the city he proudly kept open to just about every form of vice known to man. At six in the morning, when most of his constituents were rising to greet the day, Nucky was usually still whooping it up, and if a floor show won his approval, it was not unusual for the boss to pay the management to keep the fun going until lunchtime. The contrast in temperaments was not lost on contemporary observers. As Jack Alexander noted in the Saturday Evening Post in 1939: “Mayor Hague abstains from liquor and tobacco, prides himself on his city’s moral tone and is, on the whole, something of a sourpuss. Johnson reflects the happier outlook of Atlantic City. He smokes, and he drinks and kicks the gong around with frequency and enthusiasm.” During its heyday in the 1920s, Nucky Johnson’s resort kingdom was known as an open city where gangsters could move without fear of assassination. Many bosses of the era inhabited the gray area between legitimacy and criminality, but none lived there as comfortably or as largely as Nucky Johnson. During Prohibition, rumrunners anchored outside the territorial limit off Atlantic City; smugglers’ boats plied the swampy backwaters surrounding the island; bootleggers trundled through the piney woods to the west of the city, driving truckloads of hooch to the thirsty citizens of Philadelphia; and a portion of every transaction was absorbed by the Atlantic City political machine. During the waning years of Prohibition, Johnson became part of the Seven Group that

6

american dictators

controlled the East Coast liquor traffic, and when the nation’s crime lords decided to gather in 1929 to hammer out the rules for their post-Prohibition activities, Atlantic City was the perfect place to do it, and Nucky was the perfect host. The “open city” status was also true for politicians: Hague was no stranger to the Boardwalk, and when the rise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened the mayor’s influence within the national Democratic Party, Atlantic City was the setting for the boss’s peace offering to James Farley, FDR’s campaign manager. Thus began a strategic alliance that ensured the survival of Hague’s machine through the bleak years of the Depression. Though not a drinker himself, Hague was happy to allow bootleggers to operate within his jurisdiction, so long as they paid tribute to his organization. One bootlegger in particular, Longy Zwillman, also became a source of hired muscle on those occasions when Jersey City’s legendarily tough policemen were not suited to the task of silencing a critic. Hague had found Jersey City a wide-open town and clamped down on it with an idiosyncratic blend of moralism and pragmatism. Vices that would lose him the support of church leaders and women voters—notably prostitution and narcotics— were dealt with harshly, but liquor smuggling and gambling rated only a wink, so long as there was also a payoff. Though sleazeball politicos were a staple of screwball comedies like The Great McGinty and His Girl Friday, the popular image of the political boss remains Democratic overlord William M. Tweed, immortalized by cartoonist Thomas Nast as the bearded, corpulent ruler of New York City’s Tammany Hall. But these American dictators came in both Republican and Democratic flavors. Some even switched parties: Albert “Doc” Ames had a good start as a Republican alderman in Minneapolis, but when he couldn’t wrangle the party’s mayoral nomination, he happily became a Democrat.

introduction

7

For others, party affiliation was irrelevant. St. Louis power broker Edward Butler, nominally a Democrat, once said, “I always preferred to let the other fellow hold the office and then get acquainted with him.” (When the city’s streets went unlit for months because of a dispute over Butler’s graft payment, Republican mayor Henry Ziegenhein defended him against irate citizens by saying, “You got the moon, ain’t you?”) But Democratic and Republican political machines, so alike in many ways, had some crucial differences. Those differences shaped the careers of this book’s subjects. These men were not inclined to write things down: like other bosses, they kept their files under their hats. We can only guess at the evidence that went up in smoke the night Hague was deposed as mayor; the victorious challenger arrived at City Hall to find ashes and empty drawers. Nucky himself had been brought down several years earlier, in large part because of a document he thought had been destroyed. Nor were these men given to reflection: there are no diaries or journals filled with private thoughts that would add shading and nuances to the picture created by newspaper headlines and legislative records. For this reason, it is unlikely that either man will be the subject of a full-scale, formal biography—the necessary material simply doesn’t exist. But Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson were public men who left enormous marks on the public record, and they were often remarkably bold and forthright about the way they conducted their affairs. Hague was the target of legislative probes and newspaper investigations; his campaign against labor organizers in the 1930s led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that remains the cornerstone of law regarding public expression of political views. The struggle also made him the subject of damning magazine articles, a devastating photo essay in Life magazine, and a book-length accumulation of evidence

8

american dictators

condemning him as an American dictator. The paper trail for Nucky is far less extensive—he simply did not cast as long a shadow as Hague—but he was the subject of an unflattering newspaper series instigated by his archenemy William Randolph Hearst and the target of a lengthy federal tax investigation, the report for which remains the Ur-text of Nucky studies. The public record may not give us the complete picture for each man, but it still gives us plenty to go on. We can compare and contrast the ways by which they acquired power, how they maintained and strengthened their control, how they defended it from challengers, what they accomplished while in power, and how the reins of power were finally taken from their grasp. The political boss is a much misunderstood creature, one that continued to exist in diminished form long after its demise was announced with Hague’s death in 1956. Similar eulogies were delivered in 1976 upon the death of Chicago boss Richard J. Daley and in 1983, when Erastus Corning (successor of Dan O’Connell) left a power vacuum in the Albany machine in upstate New York. Smaller figures, such as Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia, have tried to build machines of their own, only to falter and fail under pressure from volatile ethnic coalitions. Contrary to much popular opinion and homegrown mythology— abetted by the popular television shows The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire—New Jersey is not a uniquely corrupt place. We in the Garden State are as country bumpkins when compared with the sharpers in, for example, Texas, where the profits generated by the petrochemical industry make possible a level of grifting unimaginable even on Hague’s old stomping grounds. But our brand of corruption does have a distinctive aroma, thanks to our antiquated structure of county governments and our hodgepodge of municipalities wedded to notions of local control, where cronyism and

introduction

9

mutual back-scratching are almost inevitable. County governments serve no public function that could not be reassigned to the state or municipal levels, but these twenty-one miniature kingdoms are a matchless avenue for dispensing patronage, and they serve as secure power bases for regional barons and power brokers. These miniHagues and neo-Nuckies exercise nothing like the power wielded by their predecessors, but within their spheres they sometimes act with a high-handedness that brings to mind the days when Hague could not only say “I am the law!” and mean it, but also go unchallenged. American Dictators is in some ways a continuation of my book The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway. Frank Hague was a key player in that narrative, and it was often hard to avoid digressions into particularly juicy anecdotes about this endlessly fascinating figure. This book makes use of that research and also gives space for a consideration of Nucky Johnson, who seems destined to generate at least as much political folklore as the man once called “the Hudson County Hitler.” If at times the book’s narrative seems to wander far afield, all I can do is ask for patience. Good history requires context, and some of the practices that most outraged Hague and Johnson’s critics— their flouting of Prohibition, for example, or their tolerance of gambling—barely rate a shrug in our time. Viewed this way, some of the bosses’ higher profile crimes may seem small while lesser-known ones grow in importance and menace. The swelling tides of immigrants flooding into American cities in the nineteenth century gave rise to a new form of political organization. Coming to it in the early twentieth century, Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson imposed a higher degree of order and efficiency than any other boss had managed to that point, and they turned the urban political machine into a mechanism for serving their voters

10

american dictators

as well as their own fortunes. Viewed from the first decades of the twenty-first century, the striking combination of venality and charity embodied by the old-style machine may yet turn out to be more attractive—and more laudable—than the arrangements that succeeded it. It is often said that history is written by the winners. With regard to political bosses, history was written by the critics—who were usually also the losers. “Boss” and “machine” are terms coined by reformers of the Gilded Age and the Progressive era; thanks to them, we habitually treat “reform” and “bossism” as polar opposites. This book will show that these distinctions are not nearly as clear as we think and that the men denounced as enemies of reform— demagogues, crooks, dictators—may actually have been the first to grapple with the problems that we have yet to acknowledge, much less solve.

1

2 In the Court of the Emerald King A leader with fair organization can get away with bad government for a while, but sooner or later the people boot him out. . . . Twenty-five years ago I had the gumption to see the difference between what was temporary and what was perm’nent, and I went for perm’nency. And you’ll notice I’m still here. —Frank Hague, 1936 interview

For Frank Hague, politics was the last and most lucrative of a series of career choices, one he pursued with notable skill and resourcefulness, embracing and discarding mentors, allies, and causes as need dictated. For Nucky Johnson, political power was the family birthright, the legacy of a father who saw politics as the means to escape the endless work and worry of farming. If any boss can be said to have been born rather than made, it would be Nucky Johnson. It is one of the great ironies of history that these most ruthless and venal bosses were brought to power with the unintended help of a reform-minded governor, Woodrow Wilson, and kept that power partly through some of the first great governmental reforms of the twentieth century. Each man was succeeded by a boss who would quickly equal and even exceed his predecessor’s vices, if not his virtues. 11

12

american dictators

Each man’s career reflected the circumstances in which he was born and his efforts to transform and improve his city. One man’s efforts would be a guarded success. The other man’s efforts would be an almost complete failure.

A separate book could be written about the ways New Jersey has been shaped and warped by railroad interests. Entire towns began their existence as real estate ventures by railroad executives or as means to capitalize on revenues from train stations; communities dwindled or thrived depending on the location of rail lines. And wherever the actual railway lines led, the lines of political power all flowed into Trenton and the state legislature. At the start of the twentieth century, the cabinet of Republican governor Foster MacGowan Voorhees was a veritable Who’s Who of railway men. His attorney general, Robert H. McCarter, was counsel for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad and the Lehigh Valley Railroad. His state comptroller, J. Willard Morgan, was also president of the Camden, Gloucester, and Woodbury Railway Company. Even the chief justice of the state supreme court, William S. Gunmere, was counsel to the Pennsylvania Railroad prior to his appointment in 1895. This studied indifference to any real distinction between government and big business led muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens to decry New Jersey as “a traitor state,” at least in the eyes of anyone hoping to clean up politics. The grip of railroad interests on state government was such that municipalities received a bare pittance in property tax payments from the companies that reaped immense profits from the use of their land. Jersey City, which served as the terminus for nine separate railway lines, was a textbook example of railroad exploitation. Most of its waterfront was owned by railroads, which increased

in the court of the emerald king

13

the size of their holdings by landfilling with garbage to create ferry slips; most of its streets were blocked at one point or another by lines of rail cars waiting to offload cargo or passengers. The Pennsylvania Railroad even blasted a canyon through the traprock of Bergen Hill, right through the center of the city, to upgrade its passenger service. Railroad influence in Trenton ensured that Jersey City realized little if any monetary benefit. Jersey City’s utilities also enjoyed an exceptionally low tax rate, thanks to the state legislature. Nor did the interference end there. If Jersey City’s location rendered it vulnerable to railroad exploitation, its population density and history of delivering large pluralities to Democratic candidates made it the target of partisan “ripper” legislation whenever Republicans gained control of the statehouse in the late nineteenth century. One of the most thorough attacks took place in 1871, when the GOP summarily ousted the entire Democratic city government and replaced it with a swarm of local boards, each with members handpicked by GOP partisans. For good measure they gerrymandered the city’s political map as well, concentrating the mostly immigrant, mostly Catholic voters into the Second Ward, the residents of which referred to it as “the Horseshoe” or simply “the ’Shoe.” Frank Hague was born five years later in what was intended as an isolation ward but became an incubator for the state GOP’s most resourceful and long-lived antagonist—another example of how prejudice often creates the very thing it fears. Class expressed itself in Jersey City’s geography. The better-off residents—mostly Protestant, mostly Republican, mostly scornful of the immigrant classes—lived in the “hill wards” on the long spine of rock that ran the length of the city. Anti-Irish prejudice was rampant. Political cartoonists like the sainted Thomas Nast often depicted Irish citizens with simian features, and the list of complaints made about them—chiefly that they were too dissolute,

14

american dictators

too ungovernable, and too culturally alien to assimilate into American society—will have a familiar ring to anyone tracking the immigration controversies of the early twenty-first century. The Horseshoe was a slum district with some forty saloons and a roughneck approach to politics that condoned fistfights, physical intimidation of rivals, and stolen ballot boxes on election days. One particularly blighted stretch was nicknamed the Lava Bed because dried effluent from the nearby Colgate soap factory, combined with the lights from cooking fires, gave it the appearance of an old lava flow. Horseshoe teenagers in search of amusement would head to nearby Hamilton Square to scrap with the “lace curtain” Irish. The first public mention of the Hague family appears to be a passage in an 1891 history of the Jersey City police force, in some chapters describing the city’s street gangs. Among the more colorful players are the Lava Bed gang (which once distinguished itself by stealing the entire contents of a Brunswick Street residence, including the furniture and a red-hot heating stove), the Glass House Angels (broken up by police following a series of burglaries in the Heights), the High Toned gang (“They are not dangerous, but they are a nuisance to female pedestrians”), and an unnamed gang at Hudson and Morris streets that “will eat you if they can.” Standing tall among this rabble were the Red Tigers, “composed entirely of the Murrays, the Hagues, and the Flynns.” Formed in 1884 in the north end of the Horseshoe, the Red Tigers were known for strong-arm robberies, assaults on women, and the occasional saloon stickup until an 1887 police push sent most of the gang members either to jail or to less risky occupations. Listed “among the worst” of the Tigers are Hague’s brothers Hugh and John and “John Tully, alias Munk.” Young Frank, only nine years old when the Red Tigers formed, was born to Margaret and John Hague, both natives of County

in the court of the emerald king

15

Cavan. From all accounts, John Hague was a henpecked nonentity. In the parlance of the times, Margaret wore the pants in the family. At least one neighbor called her “a bitch on wheels,” and she kept the apron strings so tightly knotted that Jimmy Hague, younger brother of the future mayor, remained an unmarried mama’s boy his entire life. Frank Hague himself stayed with the family until he took a wife in his late twenties. Thanks to his mother’s iron rule and the unforgiving environment of the Horseshoe, the young bossto-be grew up as an interesting bundle of paradoxes: brutal and direct with men, tongue-tied and shy around women, uneducated but deeply shrewd, dressed like a gentleman but always prone to violence. The family lived in a section dubbed Cork Row, in a building local wags called “The Ark” because it was usually surrounded by sheets of water after a rainstorm. John Hague worked for years as a blacksmith for the Erie Railroad but eventually landed a job as a bank guard through the good offices of Robert “Little Bob” Davis, reigning boss of Hudson County, and Dennis McLaughlin, leader of the Second Ward. Frank was kicked out of school at the age of sixteen and joined his brothers in the daily round of pilferage, strong-arm robberies, and stealing merchandise and fixtures from the rail cars waiting to offload their cargo. This period of Hague’s life tends to bring out the urban folklorist in many would-be historians. A classic of the genre is The Powerticians, former mayor Thomas F. X. Smith’s chronicle of Jersey City’s machine era, which describes Hague’s decision to enter politics in a passage that evokes The Boy’s King Arthur recast for the Dead End Kids: One of eight children, Frank Hague joined a teenage gang along with his brothers John and Hugh. The boys’ prey was the

16

american dictators numerous fruit stands and clothing stores where loose change or loose merchandise was there for the taking. But one night after a warning blast from a policeman’s whistle had sent the gang scattering, Hague hid in the shadows and whispered to a pal, “This ain’t for me, Munk.” His companion raised a knowing eyebrow. “You got somethin’ that’s goin’ to make you rich, I guess.” “Hell, I got six years o’ school behind me, and that’s enough,” said Hague, trying to squeeze his lanky, red-headed figure into the darkness and squinting with blue eyes at the silhouette of a policeman on the corner. “You want to know where I’m heading? Politics, that’s where.” At the end of the block, the policeman strolled away. Waiting long enough to make sure it was not a ruse of some sort, the boys slipped out into the light. Hague’s friend looked at him for a long moment. “Politics? What d’you know about politics?” Young Hague twisted his wide mouth into a sneer. “Enough to know how to get dead men’s ballots into a voting box.”

We know that Hague worked a number of jobs before entering politics. In 1892 he joined his father on the Erie Railroad payroll, working as a blacksmith’s assistant—a job Hague later scorned as playing “a nursemaid to locomotives.” A boxing enthusiast, Hague tried his hand at managing Joe Craig, a Brooklyn lightweight whose brief career chiefly served to pay for the first of the stylish suits that would be Hague’s trademark. It was not until 1897 that the twenty-one-year-old son of the Horseshoe walked into the political conflict that would launch his rise to unrivaled power. The Irish American political machine in Hudson County adopted the template established by Tammany Hall, the Democratic

in the court of the emerald king

17

organization just across the Hudson River in New York City. Political aspirants followed a well-delineated path: It all began at the entry level with the precinct captain, who was hand-picked by the ward boss. Each ward was divided into numerous precincts: the local captain was almost always a saloon owner whose place of business served as a central meeting hall for disseminating information throughout the neighborhood. Next up the chain of command was the ward boss, a figure of note in the community who probably started as a precinct captain and rose above the fray by way of physical and political muscle. The ward boss was chosen by consensus from within the controlling democratic club or society, which voted semiannually on such matters. Both the precinct captain and the ward boss were commonly referred to as ward heelers, a term used to describe anyone who “worked the ward” by giving out turkeys to the poor and needy on holidays and soliciting votes and support for the organization.

At the time, Hudson County was the domain of boss Robert “Little Bob” Davis, whose ward heeler in the Horseshoe was Dennis “Denny” McLaughlin. McLaughlin was repeatedly irritated by the behind-the-scenes machinations of saloonkeeper Nat Kenny, nicknamed the “Mayor of Cork Row.” Kenny was a Democrat but an opponent of Davis. He was under pressure from McLaughlin, who had just opened an opulent new tavern, the Park House, to cut into Kenny’s business. Kenny, trying to build his local political influence, cast about for a candidate to support. One of his customers suggested Joe Craig’s manager. Invited to meet with Kenny, Hague agreed to run for constable but asked for $75—“to make friends.” Those purchased friends, added to the ones Hague had already made, were enough

18

american dictators

to win him the election. Hague continued to learn his way around the tricky byways of Jersey City politics, and two years later he was made a deputy sheriff at $25 a week. During this period he married Jenny Warner, a Horseshoe girl, and took her to live among the lace curtain Irish of Hamilton Square. Their first child, a daughter, died in infancy; their second child, Frank Hague Jr., not only survived but eventually grew to some stature while remaining securely within his father’s ever-lengthening shadow.

A key element in the Frank Hague saga is the story of Thomas “Red” Dugan, a Horseshoe lad who had tried his hand at burglary, bunco, ballot-box stuffing, and robbery. In 1900 he shot and severely wounded a pastor’s wife; sentenced to fourteen years in jail, he was paroled after serving only four. Once he hit the streets, Dugan headed for Boston and promptly got himself arrested for passing a bad check for $500 cash. Hague and another deputy sheriff, Thomas Maddigan, headed to Boston to speak on Dugan’s behalf. Unfortunately, their claim to have seen Dugan in Jersey City during the period of the crime conflicted with Dugan’s confession. Hague returned to find himself charged with contempt of court for having ignored a grand jury subpoena in order to help Dugan. He was fined $100 and stripped of his authority. Hague may have angered the judge, but he impressed his future Horseshoe constituents, who admired his loyalty to a friend and, even more importantly, his decision to honor a request from Dugan’s mother. Two years after the incident, Hague was popular enough in the ward to seek a job from “Little Bob” Davis. Even though he had been canvassed by an anti-Davis Democrat, Hague’s loyal service was enough to get him the post of sergeant-at-arms in the state assembly.

in the court of the emerald king

19

Hague switched loyalties again in 1908, when Jersey City’s reform-minded mayor, H. Otto Wittpenn, offered him the post of City Hall’s head custodian at $2,000 a year. Among the other benefits of the job was the chance to reward friends and supporters, including childhood pal John Malone, nicknamed “Needlenose,” who in later years would serve as Hague’s deputy mayor and chief bagman. He also met two future allies: Wittpenn’s secretary, an amiable young man named A. Harry Moore, who would serve three terms as governor with Hague’s backing; and John Milton, a young lawyer who would manage Hague’s increasingly clandestine financial affairs. Hague won election to the street and water commission in 1911, at which point he promptly forgot about any loyalty to Wittpenn. With some crucial allies in place and a better-paying job, Hague began planning his next big move. A new wind was rising in New Jersey politics, and it would carry the Horseshoe boy higher than anyone could have imagined at the time.

If the influence of railroads in Jersey City was mostly negative, in Atlantic City it was entirely beneficial. The seacoast resort was literally raised from the sands of Absecon Island by a railroad investment scheme led by Jonathan Pitney, a local physician, and Richard Osborne, a Philadelphia civil engineer. The first step was taken in 1852, when the New Jersey legislature granted a charter for a rail line from Camden, just a ferry ride across the Delaware River from the steaming streets of Philadelphia. Two years later, the investors built an excursion house on Absecon Island to draw working-class and middle-class trekkers who couldn’t afford the tonier resorts of Long Branch and Cape May. Osborne laid out the street grid for the resort that would rise from the sands and give the city its

20

american dictators

name. On July 1, 1855, a trainload of newspapermen and civic leaders arrived for the official unveiling of New Jersey’s new seaside resort. Atlantic City’s growth was initially hampered by the outbreak of the Civil War, and until 1870 the place was less a city than a scruffy seaside village where high tides periodically flooded streets and visitors were tormented by bloodthirsty mosquitoes and greenhead flies. The construction of the first boardwalk in 1870 set the stage for real growth by giving visitors a chance to meet nature on something like their own terms. New rail lines extended to the city from New York and Philadelphia, a bigger and better boardwalk was constructed in 1880, and Colonel George W. Howard commissioned the first amusement pier in 1882. By 1888 there were more than five hundred hotels and boarding houses to accommodate the tourists streaming in from Philadelphia and other parts of the country. One local bard was so overcome with admiration for the expanded boardwalk—or Boardwalk, as it shall now be identified— that he made it the centerpiece of a 1906 poetry collection celebrating Atlantic City’s post office, its new public library, the Atlantis Club, and even Lucy, the giant wooden elephant just to the south in Margate. To the poet, the Boardwalk stood alongside the Colossus of Rhodes and the works of the pharaohs: So arches and arches, by the deep Atlantic, City by the Sea, A jewel still of greater worth Adds to her crown of majesty. Of which the coming age will talk. Unto the “Seven Wonders of the World” She adds the eighth—Her Walk.

For all the boosterism about the family-friendly nature of Atlantic City, gambling and other forms of vice were a feature of the

in the court of the emerald king

21

city’s attractions from its earliest decades, and the Boardwalk was known as a place where merchants stayed open and beer was served in casual disregard of the Lord’s Day. This brazenness so incensed Governor John Franklin Fort that in 1908 he threatened to impose martial law in Atlantic City unless Sunday closing laws were observed. The city government and its leading businesses made a show of complying with Fort’s order, then after a decent interval returned to business as usual. A good chunk of that business was transacted by Louis Kuehnle Jr., whose father had emigrated from Germany in 1849 to work as a chef in New York City. By 1858 Louis Sr. was doing well enough to settle his family in Egg Harbor City, site of a prosperous German American community served by the Camden and Atlantic Railroad, and to open the New York Hotel. The senior Kuehnle became a player in local politics, serving several terms as mayor, and in 1875 he opened Kuehnle’s Hotel at the corner of Atlantic and South Carolina avenues, with his eighteen-year-old son as the manager. The younger Kuehnle worked obsessively at making the hotel a success, and he enjoyed a huge stroke of good luck when the Pennsylvania Railroad, having absorbed the Camden and Atlantic, built its main depot across the street. Soon so many travelers packed the hotel’s sixty-foot bar to await their trains that conductors took to shouting “All aboard!” at the bar for departures. Tall and wideshouldered, broad in the beam and willing to be kidded about it, Kuehnle made friends easily and naturally drew people to him. But he was no pushover: when the Pennsylvania Railroad attempted to encroach on his property, Kuehnle led a group of citizens in standing down the work crew sent to remove curb stones from his sidewalk. The confrontation made young Kuehnle a local hero, and he plowed his growing personal fortune into new enterprises within the

22

american dictators

ever-expanding resort city. An enthusiastic civic booster, Kuehnle spearheaded several ventures that broke the stranglehold of Philadelphia telephone, water, electric, and gas utilities on Atlantic City customers. In 1900 he bought a brewery, then joined a group of citizens working to make Absecon Inlet a yacht basin that would attract swells from up and down the East Coast. Kuehnle’s sixtyfour-foot vessel became the flagship of the newly formed Atlantic City Yacht Club, and Kuehnle became known as “the Commodore,” a tag that would stick with him the rest of his life. His hotel’s huge bar, called “The Corner,” served as a watering hole and clearing house for political gossip. Local legend has it that when Governor Fort threatened to send militiamen to Atlantic City, Kuehnle joked that he would have the city’s whores meet them at the train station. Kuehnle’s below-ground activities grew out of his association with County Clerk Louis Scott and County Sheriff Smith Johnson, who controlled jury selection, doled out patronage, and collected protection money from the city’s warren of vice dens. (When Governor Fort’s anti-vice commission demanded to know why he hadn’t arrested anyone for violating the Sabbath closing laws, Johnson replied that he was too busy to “go looking for trouble.”) They formed a triumvirate that informally managed the city’s affairs—legal, semi-legal, and otherwise—from the hotel’s wraparound porch. And many of those decisions and machinations were witnessed by the sheriff’s son, Enoch L. Johnson, soon to be known as “Nucky.” Nucky was born on January 20, 1883, in Smithville, a farm community a few miles north of Atlantic City. The New Jersey constitution at the time barred officeholders from consecutive terms, a requirement meant to keep incumbents from developing too much power and influence. Nucky’s father rendered the provision moot through the simple expedient of alternating terms as sheriff and

in the court of the emerald king

23

undersheriff with Sam Kirby. Nucky spent his childhood in Atlantic City and Mays Landing, depending on the rotation. In terms of temperament, he favored his mother, Virginia “Mommy” Johnson, who made friends easily, threw herself into charity work, and enjoyed nothing better than a good political argument. Unlike Frank Hague, Nucky finished high school, attended a year of college, and spent some time reading law at the office of a wellconnected local attorney. But his true education had taken place on the Kuehnle’s Hotel porch, and at the age of twenty-one he was appointed his father’s undersheriff. In 1908 he was elected sheriff— at twenty-five, the youngest man to have held the post. (An aunt marked the occasion by giving him a book of political oratory to study.) It was the ideal classroom in which to learn politics, and it was the perfect vantage point from which to witness the Commodore’s downfall.

It could be said that Frank Hague rode to power on the back of a hurricane. In this case, the hurricane was the unnamed storm that wiped out the Texas resort of Galveston in 1900. The city council, overwhelmed by the task of reconstruction, was reorganized into a group of commissions, each with a specific mission and the authority to carry it out. Within a few years, the city that had been smashed to kindling was rebuilt, raised to a more protected level, and sheltered behind a brand new sea wall. Progressive reformers took note of this remarkable achievement and embraced the commission government format as the model for the future. One of its biggest boosters in New Jersey was Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson. He made it a central feature of his campaign for state governor, and the first months of his abbreviated term saw passage in 1911 of the Geran Act, which

24

american dictators

required direct primary elections of candidates, and the Walsh Act, which authorized the adoption (through referendum) of commission government by the state’s municipalities. Each town would form a five-member commission to assume “all administrative, judicial, and legislative powers and duties now had and possessed by the mayor and city council and all other executive or legislative bodies.” The commissioners themselves would pick the mayor from their ranks, preferably by naming the commissioner who had garnered the largest number of votes. Progressive reformers saw the commission model as a means to promote accountability and to simplify the often byzantine complexity of municipal governments. (As Wilson put it in his 1912 address to the legislature, “Why should every oyster bed have a commission of its own?”) The need for such rationalization could not have been greater anywhere than in Jersey City, where legislative meddling had created a riot of boards and commissions that acted with greater or lesser degrees of autonomy. Hague’s support of governmental reform opened the way to power. For Hague, the reform label was not a sure thing. Wilson was already in bad odor with the city’s Irish American population because of the circumstances under which he had accepted the help of the Newark and Jersey City bosses, James Smith and Robert “Little Bob” Davis. Upon his arrival in Trenton, Wilson had broken his promises to let the bosses turn state jobs into a patronage mill and to back Smith for a seat in the U.S. Senate. As historian Thomas Fleming put it: “The inside word was that he was honest but not ‘level’ (as in on the level). That meant he wouldn’t take a bribe but he was more than willing to make a promise and then break it—the lowest thing a politician can do in an Irish-American’s opinion.” Indeed, Hague was originally among the anti-Wilson faction when the governor ran for president in 1912. Wittpenn was

in the court of the emerald king

25

considered the main player in Hudson County, having stepped into the vacuum created by the death of “Little Bob” Davis. Hague joined forces with Essex County boss James Smith’s Stop Wilson movement, which took a beating when Wilson won the party nomination. Wittpenn lined up the Hudson County delegates for Wilson and strengthened his power over key Hudson County positions. It is a testament to Hague’s political cunning that within a year of that defeat, he was once again in a position to challenge Wittpenn, thanks in large part to some maladroit moves by the reform mayor himself. Wittpenn hoped to succeed Wilson as governor, and he backed one of Wilson’s favorites in a party fight, thinking he might win an endorsement. When Wilson stayed noncommittal, Wittpenn faced competition from James Fielder, president of the state senate, who would become acting governor once Wilson left for the White House in March 1913. Wittpenn’s troubles multiplied when the cry for commission government erupted in Jersey City, Bayonne, Union Hill, and Hoboken. Local Democratic leaders opposed the change, which was a pet cause of Joseph Dear, editor of the Jersey Journal. Wittpenn dithered over whether to endorse charter reform until less than a week before the referendum, at which point he issued a weak statement of support. By then, charter reform advocates had found a new paladin: Frank Hague. With the benefit of hindsight, it is richly ironic to see Hague inveighing against “Boss Wittpenn” and promoting himself as a progressive reformer by adopting Joseph Dear’s cause (which he had opposed in 1911) while piggybacking on Fielder’s gubernatorial push. When the charter change was approved on April 15, 1913, Wittpenn—abandoned by Wilson and alienated from many of his local voters—was a man without a country as a riot of

26

american dictators

candidates, some new and some familiar, took out petitions to enter the preliminary commission election. A total of ninety-one names finally made it to the ballot. The crowded field quickly narrowed to a running battle between the five Wittpenn-endorsed candidates, who accused Hague of being a cat’s paw for the Essex County boss, and the Hague-led slate, which blasted Wittpenn as corrupt and incompetent. Wittpenn, still pursuing his dreams of governorship, was absent from the race until a few days before the runoff election. When the new commission government of Jersey City was put into place, the mayor’s title was given to Mark Fagan, a former mayor whose campaign had largely consisted of newspaper ads. Hague was commissioner of public safety. Though Hague’s long reign as mayor did not begin until 1917, it makes sense to mark his term as public safety commissioner as the true beginning of the Hague era. It was during this period that he set out to reshape the police and fire departments in the image he preferred. The police, in particular, were in need of a drastic makeover: The police department was a mess. A lot of cops were drunks. Almost all were on the take from saloonkeepers who wanted to stay open until dawn and madams of brothels who did not want anyone hassling their visitors. The real boss of the department was the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, which had faced down previous police commissioners who tried to change the system. For instance, if a cop had a ticket to a political dinner or dance, he didn’t have to show up for work that night. Often that meant instead of thirty men on duty in a precinct, there were five or six. The new public safety commissioner took to cruising the streets of Jersey City in a touring car, materializing like a loafer’s

in the court of the emerald king

27

nightmare whenever he saw a visibly drunk or out-of-shape policeman on the street. These fact-finding drives were often done with a couple of “Zeppelins,” or “Zepps,” the nickname for the inner circle of Hague loyalists who cracked down on dissidents within the force—or, as Hague’s control tightened, on the streets.

While cleaning up the police force, Hague also launched a series of high-profile crusades against threats to the public safety, from public drunkenness in the police ranks to corner stores supposedly selling unsafe candy to children, all designed to promote him as a shrewd man of action who knew how to get things done. When the next commission election rolled around in 1917, Hague’s entire fiveman slate easily won the day. The commissioners promptly named Hague mayor, the title he would hold against all challengers for the next thirty years. Hague’s first major act as mayor was to pick a fight with the railroads, raising their combined property taxes from $67 million to $160 million. He also raised the tax on Standard Oil from $1 million to $14 million and the tax on the Public Service Corporation from $3 million to $30 million. To the surprise of no one, the state board of taxation voided the increases, but Hague had made his point. The state may have slammed the door in his face, but in two years he would return to kick that door down.

If Woodrow Wilson’s passage through the governor’s office roiled the politics of Hudson County, its effect on Atlantic County was akin to a tsunami. By 1910, Atlantic City had cemented its self-appointed status as “America’s Playground.” Its summer population could reach

28

american dictators

250,000, its Boardwalk was lined with towering hotels, and trains brought visitors from all over the country in search of every imaginable form of amusement. It was a wide-open town, and keeping it that way was Commodore Kuehnle’s policy. Every city enterprise, legitimate or otherwise, paid tribute to Kuehnle, and every municipal employee owed him a portion of his salary. With the city on the verge of astonishing prosperity, the high cost of the Commodore’s reign was viewed as a necessary evil. In the eyes of Woodrow Wilson, however, it was a stain on New Jersey’s honor, and during his gubernatorial campaign he used Atlantic City’s graft-sodden political machine as a prime example of the bossism he meant to eradicate. Wilson’s campaign struck a deep chord with voters disgusted by decades of corporate favoritism and machine rule, and once he became governor, Wilson promptly deputized Assemblyman William P. Macksey and sent him to root for evidence of electoral fraud in Atlantic City. The Macksey Committee conducted nineteen sessions, during which it found ample evidence of graft being used to pay for votes, particularly on the resort’s predominately black Northside, where African American residents were paid $2 a head to cast their own ballots and those of deceased citizens who remained on the voting rolls. A wave of indictments from the investigation drew headlines, but Kuehnle emerged unscathed. Young Nucky Johnson, at that time the county sheriff, also got away clean. He had been indicted on charges of illegally removing voter registration books and official election returns from the office of the county clerk. He was acquitted of both counts. Wilson got better results from a probe into the Commodore’s continued ownership stakes in the enterprises that had helped foster Atlantic City’s growth. His award of a water contract to the utility he co-owned proved his undoing. Kuehnle was prosecuted and

in the court of the emerald king

29

convicted on this conflict-of-interest charge in 1913 and, at an age when men were ready for retirement, sentenced to a year of hard labor. Outside of Atlantic City, newspapers hailed the downfall of a notorious boss. “If you were to take all the power exercised by Boss Tweed, the Philadelphia Gang, the Pittsburgh Ring, Abe Ruef in San Francisco, and Tammany Hall, and concentrate it on one man, you would still fall a little short of Kuehnle’s clutch on Atlantic City,” the New York Sun cried. But just as Woodrow Wilson’s pet reforms paved the way for Frank Hague’s acquisition of dictatorial powers, his campaign to bring down Louis Kuehnle Jr. opened the way for a younger, even more venal successor. During the sunset years of the Commodore’s reign, Nucky had moved from sheriff to county treasurer, along the way acquiring the title of secretary to the Republican County Committee. As nondescript as the position may sound, it effectively gave Nucky control over the party’s agenda and membership. When the Commodore fell, a seasoned political operator was ready to fill his shoes—and, in the coming decades, leave even larger footprints.

2

2 Lines of Power There is only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin’. You can’t study human nature in books. . . . To learn human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen. —George Washington Plunkitt (1905)

In his study of Irish Americans and urban political machines, Steven P. Erie distinguishes between “top down” and “bottom up” machines. The latter, rooted in “the institutional life of ethnic neighborhoods—saloons, clubhouses, volunteer fire departments, ” extend lines of power up into the municipal, county, and state governmental levels. Republican machines, Erie argues, functioned as adjuncts to state organizations and relied heavily on state and federal patronage rather than the local variety. “Designed to prevent Democratic control of the cities and a possible challenge to GOP state hegemony, Republican organizations encouraged political passivity and nonparticipation on the part of the immigrant working class.” Both Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson sat atop tightly run organizations in which precinct captains reported to ward bosses, who in turn delivered results to the top boss. Both machines went into overdrive on election days, and ward heelers who failed to deliver voters quickly found themselves out in the cold. But the similarities end there. Nucky’s operation certainly fits the definition 30

lines of power

31

of a top-down regime: he enjoyed close relations with the Republican machine in Philadelphia and the GOP-dominated New Jersey legislature, and his machine did little to encourage political activity beyond eager participation on election day. Hague’s operation—he hated the impersonality of the term “machine” and demanded his be described as an “organization”—was very much a bottom-up affair, built on relationships formed by ward heelers and solidified through community political associations. Hague built his own organization as he rose to prominence in Jersey City, battling competitors every step of the way, even clashing with a sitting Democratic president when it suited his aims. Nucky simply assumed control of an existing operation and made it even stronger—the Boardwalk peacock’s job was to keep the party (and the Party) going. In this as in other things, the Hague organization and Nucky’s machine operated as mirror images.

Even his most bitter enemies acknowledged Hague’s ability to mobilize and command his political legions. The city government was in more or less perpetual campaign mode, accelerating into overdrive during primary and general elections. Precinct captains were expected not simply to match but to exceed previous voter turnouts in their districts. By state law, each political candidate submitted nominating petitions; by Hague decree, petitions for machine candidates had to be submitted with enough signatures to awe and demoralize potential competitors. “Before the opposition gets started, let us show them their cause is hopeless,” an operative told the Jersey Journal on the eve of one campaign. City employees might not have been much good at their jobs—as will be seen, many of them were barely aware of what their jobs entailed—but their real task was never in doubt. Here is the voice

32

american dictators

of City Hall speaking in a form letter distributed to municipal workers in February 1921: As a Democrat, as a citizen and as an employee your duty is plain. . . . It is your duty to bend every effort to obtain as many signatures to the [nominating] petition as possible. It is also your duty to become acquainted with your neighbors in order that you may be able to register them and present your side of the issues as early as possible to the voters of your district. It is our wish that you . . . immediately get into this contest and not wait until the closing days of the campaign to begin your activities. GET BUSY NOW.

This emphasis on personal contact—on canvassing—was the hallmark of Hague’s operation right up to the end. During his salad days as an aspiring boss, Hague founded a political club he called “Tammanee,” a tip of the derby to the older Tammany Hall operation across the Hudson River. But in the eyes of Jersey City players, Thomas Fleming explains, Tammany Hall quickly went from role model to relic: The people in Jersey City laughed at Tammany. They regarded them as sort of weary, worn out guys who didn’t know how to do it anymore. They didn’t canvass. My father used to say that in an appalled tone—“They don’t canvass!” That was like saying a pilot didn’t have a license or something to fly the plane. This was so basic in Jersey City: To get that vote out, you had to visit—that’s all there was to it.

Both organizations required municipal employees to kick back a portion of their salaries: 3 percent in Jersey City, as high as 7 percent in Atlantic City. Nucky’s people called it “macing,” while Hague’s workers called it “rice pudding”; by either name, it was necessary to the machine’s smooth operation, and those who balked stood to

lines of power

33

lose their jobs. Usually it didn’t come to that, since the recalcitrant employee could be subjected to varying degrees of persuasion. Thomas Fleming, a Jersey City native, recalled an uncle who not only refused to kick back the required share of his firefighter’s salary, but loudly denounced Hague to his friends and acquaintances. The uncle was reassigned to a different fire station. Since the job essentially required him to live at the firehouse while on duty, the move to another station required considerable effort in packing clothes, supplies, and equipment. Upon arriving and unpacking at his new station, the uncle was ordered to report to a different station across town. After several days of this treatment, with the hapless uncle reassigned three or four times in a single day, the idea of spooning out his share of rice pudding became much more palatable. But while employee kickbacks helped to finance each machine’s day-to-day operations (and to discipline workers by reminding them of their dependence on each boss’s favor), these contributions were dwarfed by the twin bounties of graft and patronage. Jersey City, with its diversified industrial base and strategic location on one of the world’s busiest harbors, offered many more opportunities than Atlantic City, which existed solely on tourism, but in both cases the reigning boss lived like a king.

In a 1939 profile for the Saturday Evening Post, writer Jack Alexander took readers through a typical day for Nucky Johnson, starting with his habit of rising just as the sun was setting and submitting to the ministrations of Louis Kessel, the former wrestler who served as Nucky’s bodyguard, valet, and driver: Johnson, although fifty-six, possesses immense physical reserves and he drew on them to go through with a typical day’s program.

34

american dictators When he sat down to breakfast it was five o’clock in the afternoon—his customary breakfast time. He had awakened at four o’clock, his usual time for rising, and as soon as he had stirred the handy Louie Kessel had gone to work rubbing down his master’s taller-than-six foot frame. There was pounding of muscles, snapping of loose flesh and rubbing sweet ointments and oil of wintergreen. Thus gently eased into full wakefulness like a Persian satrap, Johnson rolled out of bed and made his way to the shower bath for a cold dousing. Afterward Louie rubbed his skin pink with towels, draped his silk dressing gown about him and pulled a chair out from a portable table. A Negro maid brought in the groaning breakfast tray. . . . After Johnson had finished his breakfast Louie helped him into a suit, one of more than 100 tailored numbers which hang in the natty politician’s wardrobe, and pinned a fresh carnation in a lapel.

After an invigorating hour or so on the Boardwalk, followed by political work, Johnson would then adjust his fedora—worn at a rakish slant, Jimmy Walker style—heft his cane, and head off for a night’s entertainment. At practically every step, Nucky was besieged by people seeking jobs, asking favors, or begging for a meeting. One could rise in the world by catching the boss’s eye. Jimmy Boyd, a bellhop at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel (where Nucky leased an entire floor), made himself so useful to the big man that he became a ward boss and, eventually, overseer of all four of Atlantic City’s wards. It was Nucky’s custom to take an evening ride in a Boardwalk rolling chair, stopping to dispense dollar bills to children and beggars, enjoy a good dinner at one of the Boardwalk hotels, then jump into one of his luxury cars—depending on his mood, it could have been one of his two sixteen-cylinder Cadillacs, his Ford, or his Rolls Royce, all painted in bright, eye-catching colors. The ever faithful Kessel would drive him

lines of power

35

to a political meeting, a nightclub, or a whorehouse—sometimes all three—and wait in the street while the boss took care of business. The shadow across Nucky’s joie de vivre was Mabel Jeffries, the childhood sweetheart he married in 1906 and lost to tuberculosis in 1913. By all accounts Nucky had been an exceptionally devoted and faithful spouse, and her death caused a sea change in his personality. The days and nights without Mabel would be filled with parties, floor shows, and a succession of compliant showgirls. Meanwhile, his grip on power tightened and his influence expanded—so much so that when Kuehnle was released after serving six months of his sentence, he soon abandoned any thought of contesting Nucky for the unofficial title of city boss. With Nucky’s backing, Kuehnle ran for the post of city commissioner in 1920, and he was duly reelected until his death in 1934. One of the most important lessons Nucky had learned during those sessions at Kuehnle’s Hotel was the need to cultivate African American voters. Blacks had started flocking to the resort in the 1870s, drawn by the jobs available at the hotels and restaurants springing up along the Boardwalk. By 1905, 95 percent of the hotel workforce was black, and the Northside—defined by Atlantic, Arkansas, and Connecticut avenues—had been established as the resort’s African American community. By 1915, the resort’s black population topped 11,000, or 27 percent of the city’s year-round residents—a proportion far greater than in any other northern city. Atlantic City’s dependence on black labor was quickly recognized as a source of power. One mid-1920s arrival to the Northside visited the Boardwalk and had an epiphany: Atlantic City was the place to be, better than Philadelphia or New York City even. It held the promise of long-term work as waiters, waitresses, cooks, porters, doormen, bellhops, busboys,

36

american dictators chambermaids, and more, and there was room for advancement in every field, especially if you were educated . . . plenty of colored people were already buying houses, cars, and modern appliances, and owning their own businesses too, right there on the Northside. As we walked home, it was clear to us that this city could not survive or progress without our community. . . . I aimed to get a piece of this American dream too.

The relative permeability of the color barrier in Atlantic City dismayed many whites. “What are we going to do with our colored people?” the Philadelphia Inquirer asked in 1893. “That is the question . . . both the boardwalk and Atlantic Avenue fairly swarm with them during bathing hours, like the fruit in a huckleberry pudding.” In the summer of 1900 a Washington Post editorial complained about the local blacks who flocked to the bathing areas. “After the colored waiter serves his master’s supper he can go out and elbow him on the Boardwalk, crowd him in the cars, or drink at the very next table to him in almost any café.” But at a time when the specter of Jim Crow subjected black Americans to a daily ordeal of indignities great and small, the resort’s political machine was uncommonly solicitous of their needs. Expanding on Kuehnle’s well-established generosity, Nucky became the Northside’s patron during the grim winter months, arranging free coal deliveries and subsidizing jobless families. In return for his help, the Northside contributed to large Atlantic County pluralities for the GOP in every election, just as Hague’s virtuoso management of Democratic voters made Hudson County a force to be reckoned with.

If Nucky enjoyed playing the Boardwalk grandee, Frank Hague preferred to meet the public through parades, speeches, and other forms of pageantry. Anyone hoping for face time with the Boss had

lines of power

37

to make arrangements through his right-hand man, John “Needlenose” Malone. Hague’s pinched, puritanical personality did not encourage intimacy with anyone outside his closed circle. His attorney, John Milton, nicknamed him “the commissar,” and only Milton was able to get away with such impertinence. Along with his tightly disciplined network of ward heelers, Hague managed a constellation of patronage appointments extending from the waterfront, where longshoremen and stevedores transferred cargo from trains and ships, to the numbers operations and gambling parlors woven into the daily texture of Jersey City life, to the police and fire departments, and beyond. Though Hague threw bones to other ethnic groups, the core of his Jersey City organization was Irish Catholic, and fealty to the faith was mandatory. Hague himself was a daily communicant, as were many of his lieutenants, and he demanded that his ward heelers be stable family men well known to their parish communities. Combined with support from local clergy and his organization’s zeal to co-opt any social groups that might generate potential critics and competitors, Hague’s moralism made Jersey City into a prototheocracy. Monsignor John Sheppard of Saint Michael’s (the parish situated squarely in the Horseshoe) backed Hague’s work as commissioner of public safety and remained one of his staunchest allies throughout his career. Municipal employees regularly cleared the snow from parochial school facilities without a murmur of churchstate objections. Catholic schoolchildren referred to the public Henry Snyder High School and Dickinson High School as “Saint Henry’s” and “Saint-Richard’s-on-the-Hill.” The majority Catholic population even came up with its own barbed catechism: T EACHER : Who made the Jersey City Fire Department? P UPIL : Mayor Hague. T EACHER : Who made the Jersey City Police Department? P UPIL : Mayor Hague.

38

american dictators T EACHER : Who made the world? P UPIL : God made the world. C HORUS

OF

P UPILS : You dirty Republican!

Scores of Catholic clergymen, along with some from other Christian denominations, were “on the pad,” or the city payroll. Hague was a faithful Catholic, but his approach to corruption was ecumenical: employees at the Bureau of County Mechanics had two chaplains, one Catholic and the other Protestant, as well as a rabbi to tend to their spiritual needs. As Hague’s influence extended through the legislature, the organization was alert for any proposed laws that might interfere with church activities. During the state’s fitful attempts to reform its antiquated constitution, Hague rallied Hudson County voters by falsely claiming the new constitution would make church bingo illegal. “Church and state knew no separation in the Jersey City of my youth,” recalled Star-Ledger columnist John Farmer. “Together they presided over a strict private morality and a thriving public pilferage.” The opportunities for such pilferage started at the Hudson River waterfront, where in the days before containerized shipping became the norm, trains and freighters coming into Jersey City left their cargoes on the docks. Teams of longshoremen and stevedores transferred the goods to lighters and ferries for transport to Manhattan’s West Side docks, where the whole process was repeated. It was hard, brutal work that produced men to match. Labor journalist Malcolm Johnson described the New York and New Jersey waterfront in 1950 as “an outlaw frontier”: Murder on the waterfront is commonplace, a logical product of widespread gangsterism. Organized crime and racketeering add literally millions of dollars annually to the cost of the port’s shipping. Pier facilities, representing an investment of almost a billion dollars, are controlled by ex-convicts and murderers who

lines of power

39

compete for the lucrative dock rackets. This situation of the piers, which has existed for years, is made possible by a powerful labor union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, an American Federation of Labor affiliate. Gangsters have attained official positions in the locals of this union. The union leaders condone waterfront crime and racketeering, protect the racketeers, and foster unhealthy labor practices.

Isolated from the rest of the town by railroad tracks and rightsof-way, Jersey City’s waterfront district was a menacing world unto itself. (The Hoboken waterfront, just to the north, was closer to the rest of the community—walking east of Washington Street was considered unwise, to say the least.) Control of the combined Hudson County waterfront gave the Hague machine a portion of the proceeds from smuggling, narcotics trafficking, numbers running, cargo theft, wage skimming, extortion, and loan sharking. Second Ward boss John V. Kenny (son of the man who ushered Hague into politics in 1897) oversaw the waterfront for Hague, who counted among his friends Joseph P. Ryan, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). It was upon Ryan’s recommendation that Happy Keane and Cornelius McKeon were made “loaders-in-charge” of ILA Local 1247, where they enjoyed long tenures channeling funds to Kenny and City Hall. As Hague’s man on the waterfront, Kenny was preeminent among the ward bosses; already well-off from the inheritance of his father’s saloons and his early career as a bookkeeper for the Erie Railroad, Kenny could afford to show enough independence that at one point he was approached by dissident Republicans hoping to use his clout to challenge Hague’s power. When Hague got wind of this, he summoned Kenny to City Hall and ordered him to swear an oath of loyalty. Kenny would not threaten the organization again until Hague himself had left the scene.

40

american dictators

Even though his reformation of the police and fire departments had involved threats to fire any officers who attempted to unionize, Hague was considered a friend of organized labor during roughly the first half of his reign. He secured his relationship with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by sending city police officers to turn back strikebreakers—something virtually unheard of at the time—and was invited to address the AFL’s national convention in 1916. The Hudson County Building Trades Council and the Hudson Central Labor Union—a collection of teamsters’ locals and small trade unions—were securely in Hague’s corner. The biggest player in the Building Trades Council was a swaggering labor czar named Theodore Brandle, who had brought all the construction and ironworker locals of North Jersey under his sway. Brandle was Hague’s right-hand man in dealing with labor unions throughout the 1920s. During the AFL’s national convention in 1924, Brandle followed Hague’s wishes by pushing against the reformers who wanted to endorse the Progressive Party candidacy of Robert LaFollette, convincing the AFL to stay out of the presidential race. When Hague was slammed with a large tax bill he couldn’t immediately pay, Brandle fronted him a loan for $60,000. Brandle formed a bond company with a Hudson County assemblyman, and Hague’s designated governors obligingly funneled state construction projects through the firm, Branleygran. When Brandle pooled the dues of his satellite locals to form the Labor National Bank in the mid-1920s, the bank’s new office tower (designed by Hague’s favorite architect, John T. Rowland Jr.) stood proud in the brandnew Journal Square.

Though he relied on Irish Catholics for his inner circle—with one exception—Frank Hague took pains to reach out to Jersey City’s

lines of power

41

other ethnic groups. Flattering them with recognition and enticing them with patronage, the mayor sought to win their loyalty or, failing that, to prevent them from developing into threats to his power. Though the GOP was still known as the “Party of Lincoln,” Hague told black voters in 1922: “Forget Lincoln. We give you more.” To cultivate Italian Americans, who outnumbered the Irish in the 1920s, Hague sponsored the political career of Michael Scatuorchio, a contractor widely respected in the city’s heavily Italian Fifth Ward. Under the mayor’s tutelage, “Mike Scat” rose to become boss of the Fifth Ward—the only non-Irish ward boss in the Hague machine— and a wealthy man, after the mayor awarded him the city’s garbageand ash-hauling business. Nor was the city’s Jewish population neglected. Several rabbis were on the pad, and their influence was such that when Rabbi Benjamin Plotkin began raising issues of free speech in Jersey City, the machine was able to field plenty of Jewish politicians to denounce him as a communist troublemaker. The clearest example of Hague’s ambiguous political legacy is his reaction to women’s suffrage. The mayor had already courted the good opinion of women through his moralistic, family-oriented political organization; when women achieved the right to vote in 1920, Hague sponsored the career of one of the first women legislators, Mary Norton, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1925 to 1951. A fellow Irish Catholic, Norton had been a secretary and stenographer prior to her marriage. When her infant son died in 1910, Norton assuaged her grief with volunteer work at the Queen’s Daughters Day Nursery. Norton’s work ethic and organizational skills quickly moved her up the ladder, and she was president of the nursery when she was introduced to Hague in 1916. By that point Norton had developed into an indefatigable fundraiser, with a huge network of contacts, and when she met with the mayor to solicit municipal support for the nursery, it quickly became apparent

42

american dictators

that Hague had something a little more ambitious in mind. As Norton wrote later, the mayor used all his powers of persuasion to flatter, cajole, and strong-arm Norton into running for the 12th District congressional seat. “It’s your duty to organize the women of Jersey City!” he said, and when Norton protested that she knew nothing of politics, Hague replied: “Neither does any suffragist.” Norton was not the first woman to enter Congress, but during her long career in office she managed to accrue many other distinctions while she served as the mayor’s point woman in Washington. The peak of her career came with her role in pushing the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which codified the forty-hour work week, established a working minimum wage, and banned child labor. Throughout her government service, Norton maintained that Hague never pressured her on any piece of legislation. If that is in fact the case, it may be because Hague chose his candidate wisely. Norton’s interest in labor issues dovetailed with Hague’s own program, as did her opposition to any legislation allowing for wider dissemination of birth-control information. For all the credit due to Hague for his sponsorship of Norton’s political career at the national level, it is worth noting that closer to home only one woman ran for the city commission during the Boss’s reign, and that one an independent. Grace Billotti-Spinelli, a social worker for the Jersey City YWCA, joined the fusion ticket assembled in 1941 by GOP county leader William Sewell. Though she was never more than a nuisance in electoral terms, the diminutive BillottiSpinelli was an energetic campaigner against “the deplorable conditions of Hague rule,” particularly the way public schools had been allowed to deteriorate—a byproduct of the mayor’s alliance with Catholic leaders—and the Board of Education’s habit of sending students home with pamphlets that were little more than administration propaganda. When a Hague supporter tried physically to

lines of power

43

block her from entering a classroom, Billotti-Spinelli, though she stood only five feet, simply plowed through. Not only did the candidate have to endure the attacks of Hague’s machine, her candidacy was undercut by an anti-Sewell faction within the local GOP. Her husband, author Marcos Spinelli, was denounced by public safety commissioner Daniel Casey as a communist and author of obscene literature. Meanwhile, a Republican women’s group sponsored a disapproving review of one of his novels and used it as a springboard to condemn the candidate and her backer. Even the mayor’s nephew, Frank Hague Eggers, weighed in with a speech decrying her “pagan ideas” and “radical political philosophy.” The fusion ticket went down in flames, and Hague went on to find another manifestation of the Red menace. Mary Norton aside, there were limits to Hague’s progressive tendencies.

The final necessity for any long-lived machine is a timid, or at least ineffectual, local press. In 1910 a consortium of Boardwalk hotel owners bought the Atlantic City Review and hired Harvey Thomas, a former political writer for the Newark Evening News, to turn it into a muckraking bellwether of reform. The paper’s attacks on Kuehnle played a large role in his downfall, but the subsequent rise of Nucky Johnson baffled and frustrated Progressive reformers. During Nucky’s 1941 trial for tax evasion and conspiracy, the defense disclosed that his payroll included three local newspaper publishers who had agreed not to publicize or cover the activities of the city’s many numbers-running syndicates: At the time [Nucky’s attorney] was making the statement, it did not seem possible that any newspaper publisher would openly admit in court that he accepted money from Johnson in order to

44

american dictators keep him from printing stories about violations of the law. It was not surprising, therefore, when those publishers took the stand, that they denied upon cross-examination receiving money for such purposes and denied knowing that any of the money they received was from the numbers syndicate. Their testimony, however, did show the corrupt political methods used by Johnson since they admitted that they received the money for the purpose of publicizing Johnson’s personal political organization and that their editorial policy was favorable to Johnson’s candidates.

So, were the newspapers corrupt, or merely complaisant? The federal investigators didn’t press the matter—they had a much bigger fish to fry. Hague’s situation was more complicated. He received an early, significant boost from Joseph and Walter Dear, owners and publishers of the Jersey Journal, by signing aboard their crusade for commission government, and he enjoyed their support throughout the first half of the 1920s. Joseph Dear, who was also editor of the paper, was slow to warm to Hague and quick to remind readers of the disgraceful Red Dugan affair as Hague rose through party and local politics. Hague’s support for commission government and charter reform, coupled with his undeniably effective steps to clean up the police and fire departments, finally brought the Dears around. The cause of their falling-out, and the role it played in the municipal election of 1929—when anti-Hague forces at the state and local level combined in a formidable challenge to the mayor’s power—will be dealt with in a later chapter. Hague had pledged to run an efficient, businesslike government, and for a time the Dears saw him as the businessman’s dream: The Man Who Could Get Things Done. His ambition for the expansion of Journal Square dovetailed with their long-cherished vision of an

lines of power

45

uptown business and transportation hub for the city, and Hague made sure the Dears received a handsome settlement for condemnation of property they owned within the development area—a payment that amounted to half of the monies allocated for property acquisitions. Naming the commercial center after the Dears’ newspaper was the finishing touch. Hague even went so far as to arrange chauffeur service for Jersey Journal reporters. Nor did the mayor’s generosity end there. A. Harry Moore, then in his first term as Hague’s handpicked governor, named Walter Dear vice chairman of the North Jersey Transit Commission in 1926 and saw to it that Joseph Dear became a lay judge on the Court of Errors and Appeals, at that time the state’s highest court. Other, more obliging newspapers received party favors as well. The editor of the Hudson Dispatch, Haddon Ivins, was appointed state librarian in 1934, and John Toohey, political reporter for the Hudson Observer, was named state labor commissioner. The favor to the Hudson Dispatch was hardly necessary: it seldom took issue with Hague, and the death of publisher Thomas Martin in 1925 allowed Hague associate Thomas Boyle to take control of the paper, after which it became a City Hall housecat.

A smart political boss knows how to protect his flanks, and both Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson understood that survival required friends in high as well as low places. As a Republican player in a GOP-dominated state, Nucky Johnson had less to fear than Hague; moreover, his brother Al was county sheriff, which gave him control over the selection of grand and petit jurors. Hague, managing a bigger and more vulnerable operation, began maneuvering for state-level influence as soon as he became mayor in 1917, reaching for the statehouse from the bottom up.

46

american dictators

Edward I. Edwards, a Jersey City banker who had sided with Hague during the struggle against Woodrow Wilson’s gubernatorial candidacy, was the budding boss’s choice for governor in 1919. Right away he encountered opposition from James Nugent, who had succeeded James Smith as Essex County’s Democratic boss and who decided to enter the primary campaign against Edwards. Nugent’s defeat in the primary marked Hague’s debut as the boss of the New Jersey Democratic Party. During the general election, Edwards won only five of New Jersey’s twenty-one counties, but his 36,113-vote plurality carried the day. At a time when New Jersey was still largely a rural state with only three cities of any appreciable size, Hudson County’s outsized Democratic majority was a force to be reckoned with, and Hague had it under his command. The state constitution did not allow for consecutive terms, so when Edwards’s three-year term ended, Hague was ready to advance George Silzer, a New Brunswick circuit judge. Silzer’s plurality of 45,894 was made possible by the 79,905 votes delivered by Hudson County. And in 1925 Hague promoted his fellow commissioner, A. Harry Moore, and saw to it that he won by 38,000 votes, boosted by the 103,000 he garnered in Hudson County. With each victory, Hague was able to armor his flanks by arranging the appointment of state officials friendly to his organization. Under Edwards, Hague’s man Theodore Smith was appointed to the state Civil Service Commission in 1920 and made president of the commission in 1922. He assumed responsibility for the enforcement of civil service regulations in Jersey City and Hudson County, giving Hague even more control over municipal employees. Throughout the 1920s, Hague was able to vet judicial and prosecutorial appointments, ensuring that legal challenges to his actions would be slow in coming. The Boss’s campaign to penetrate the judicial system reached its literal apex with the appointment of his former

lines of power

47

corporate counsel, Thomas Brogan, to chief justice of the state supreme court, a position Brogan held from 1933 to 1946. One high-profile beneficiary of this strategy was the mayor’s son, Frank Hague Jr., a career underachiever who spent years trying, and failing, to earn a law degree from a succession of universities. Uninterested in politics and unsuited to following in his father’s footsteps, the junior Hague was guided through the New Jersey bar exam and given an undemanding clerkship in the office of John Milton, his father’s personal attorney. Despite his notable lack of legal acumen, the boss’s son was nominated to the Court of Errors and Appeals as a lay judge in 1939. A. Harry Moore, then serving his third term as governor, said the nomination would “make his dad happy.” Republican dismay at Hague’s tactical skills turned to fury in 1928, when the Boss, having mastered the art of picking Democratic governors, picked a Republican one. With no acceptable Democrat on hand to succeed Moore after his first term, and a dedicated Republican enemy, Robert Carey, likely to win the GOP nomination, Hague moved to support a Perth Amboy engineer named Morgan Larson, who appeared less likely to cause him any headaches. The deciding factor was a bloc of 22,000 Hudson County Democrats who switched party allegiance for the primary. The Morgan Larson affair was a tour de force exhibition of Hague’s political skills, but it came at a steep cost. Larson, badly stung by criticism that he was Hague’s pet Republican, proved not nearly as tractable as the mayor had planned. The uproar over the “One-Day Republicans” also sparked a state senate investigation that would become the focal point for a major challenge to Hague’s reign.

How much money did Nucky Johnson and Frank Hague reap from their respective operations? The federal tax investigation that

48

american dictators

brought Nucky down estimated his illicit yearly income at something approaching $500,000. He was so indifferent to his $6,000 official salary as county treasurer that he let his paychecks accumulate for months at a time before cashing them. Not content with commanding an entire floor of the Ritz-Carlton, Nucky maintained a Manhattan apartment at 128 Central Park South that would be his refuge during the winter months when the Boardwalk action slowed to a crawl. Hague’s salary as mayor never exceeded $8,000 a year, but his family enjoyed a luxurious duplex apartment at 2600 Hudson Boulevard as well as a seaside mansion in Deal, between the Jersey Shore communities of Long Branch and Asbury Park. Hague also owned a mansion in the Florida Keys and took his wife on regular cruises to Europe. Though he didn’t share Nucky’s taste for showgirls, Hague matched his enjoyment of horse racing and boxing, and the mayor could be seen flashing wads of cash wherever he went. For his constituents, Hague’s taste for fine clothes—like Nucky’s epic finery—made the boss a symbol of aspiration rather than a source of resentment. Or so thought Thomas F. X. Smith: “Wasn’t he one of them underneath the expensive, tailor-made suits he usually wore with a vest and stiff, high collar? That pearl stickpin, costly necktie, shining patent leather shoes, and tilted derby—weren’t they only the signs of a local boy who had made good? And if Frank Hague, the kid from the Horseshoe, could make it, well, couldn’t they make it, too?” Nucky himself phrased it more succinctly: “When I did good, everybody did good.” One piece of urban folklore, frequently referenced in stories about Hague’s organization, is a desk with a bank drawer in the front that opened out to receive payoffs. The desk does exist, though its provenance is far from clear; but while the idea of the bank drawer has a certain amount of wit, it doesn’t really jibe with what is

lines of power

49

known about Hague. “The big fellow had nerve—maybe too much nerve,” Thomas J. Fleming suggests, recalling a story told by his father’s friend, Billy Black: Hague called Billy into his office and handed him an old battered suitcase. “Take this to New York and give it to the names on this list,” he said, slipping an envelope into Billy’s hand. Billy got on the Hudson Tubes and found himself walking up Wall Street. He went to a brokerage house and handed the suitcase to a guy who was obviously waiting for it. Ditto to a bank, and then another brokerage house. Billy noticed that the suitcase kept getting lighter. It was unquestionably empty by the time he got it back to Hague. “What the hell was in that thing?” Billy asked. “Money, you idiot!” Hague growled.

A desk with a bank drawer seems out of keeping with Hague’s hands-on governing style. From all accounts, the mayor never passed up a chance to make employees understand that he, Frank Hague, was the man who pulled their strings, or cut them, as he saw fit. Offering his marks the relative anonymity of a bank drawer would imply the kind of distance Hague would never have allowed.

The tale of the first time Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson made common cause actually predates Hague’s assumption of mayoral powers. The stage was the 1916 gubernatorial election, in which Hague—by then firmly in control of the Hudson County Democratic organization—moved to rid himself of Wittpenn once and for all. James Fielder, a Jersey City Democrat and president of the state senate, had become acting governor when Woodrow Wilson

50

american dictators

departed for the White House in 1913. Walter Edge, a self-made Atlantic City businessman, was running with Nucky Johnson as his campaign manager. Hague, in an early demonstration of his virtuosity at managing Hudson County’s bloc of Democratic voters, supported Wittpenn in the primary, then withdrew his backing in the general election. Edge won the governorship easily, and Hague was relieved of a Democratic enemy who could have destroyed his career just as it was getting started. Dayton David McKean, whose 1940 investigation remains the cornerstone of Hague studies, decided there had been no direct collusion between Hague and Nucky, just an instance of that ancient political principle, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”: Probably no outright deal was made with Walter E. Edge, the Republican candidate, but Edge benefited, nonetheless, from Hague’s hostility to Wittpenn. When [Woodrow] Wilson ran for governor in 1910 he carried Hudson County by a 26,122 majority; Fielder, the Democratic candidate in 1913, received 25,959 more votes than his Republican opponent; but when Wittpenn ran in 1916 he received a meager 7,430 majority, which was easily overcome by Edge majorities in the normally Republican counties. Organization Democrats were not urged to vote Republican in that election; they simply were not urged to vote.

In his 2002 account of Atlantic City’s most notorious bosses, Nelson Johnson attributes the move to a deal between Hague and Nucky Johnson. Edge’s exceedingly dry 1948 memoir contains no mention of Nucky and blandly credits the 1916 victory to his success as founder of the Atlantic City Press. (“A Business Man with a Business Plan” was his somewhat less than rousing campaign slogan.) There is strong circumstantial evidence for an agreement, especially in light of Hague’s career-long penchant for making temporary

lines of power

51

alliances with GOP politicians. It was a trait that won a measure of admiration even from his critics. “Many American state bosses have been able through control of the majority party to dominate a state,” McKean wrote, “but none except Mayor Hague has been able to dominate his state through the minority party.” As for Nucky, his reward from Edge was to be named a clerk to the state supreme court in 1918. The five-year appointment added another $6,000 to Nucky’s official, traceable income. At a Republican gathering, Edge was reported to have toasted him as “a great campaign manager, but too expensive.” With a cluelessness that bordered on the sublime, the Atlantic City Gazette hailed Nucky’s appointment as a “reward of merit rather than political considerations” and saluted Edge for eliminating politics in higher court nominations. Hague’s ability to cut deals with agreeable Republicans would come to be denounced as “Hagueism,” and Edge would make it a theme of his second run for governor. Alfred Hirsch, a writer for The Nation, found this hypocrisy amusing: “Neither Hague’s staunchest supporters nor Walter Edge’s Republican followers have ever disputed the strange friendship existing between the two political enemies. Upon numerous occasions they have been seen emerging wreathed in smiles from private conferences in leading New Jersey hotels.” It is worth noting that even though Republicans remained firmly in control of the legislature, Hague managed to place three of his men in the governor’s office, the last of whom, A. Harry Moore, served three separate terms. None of these Democrats showed any inclination to follow Woodrow Wilson’s example by calling for probes into the Atlantic City machine. The Atlantic City boss’s hand was also seen in a bit of 1926 legislation that required a voter to renew his registration only once every

52

american dictators

twenty years so long as he remained in one community. This revision aided political machines by making it easier to keep dead voters as active participants in the democratic process, and it benefited Hague as much as Nucky. In this instance, there is no reason to suspect collusion. For all their political and personal differences, Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson were bosses, and as such they had more in common than not.

3

2 Boom Times I cannot recall a national issue [Prohibition] where unadulterated hypocrisy played such an important part. —Walter E. Edge, New Jersey governor, 1917–1919 and 1944–1947

We have whisky, wine, women, song, and slot machines. I won’t deny it and I won’t apologize for it. If the majority of the people didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be profitable and they wouldn’t exist. —Enoch L. “Nucky” Johnson, Atlantic City political boss

During his 1919 gubernatorial campaign, Democratic candidate Edward I. Edwards promised that even though Prohibition had become the law of the land, New Jersey would continue to be “as wet as the Atlantic Ocean.” Defiance of the Volstead Act of 1919 was such a consistent theme for Edwards that one newspaper christened his candidacy “the applejack campaign.” There was no small amount of irony in the fact that Edwards was running with the full support of Frank Hague, a man who never touched the stuff; but Hague was certainly aware that anti-immigrant, anti-Irish prejudice was a significant factor in the drive for Prohibition. For a man whose political career had been launched by a tavern owner, scorn for dry laws was simply another link to his power base. It was also good business. The Roaring Twenties proved to be the high noon of power for both Hague and Nucky, whose respective 53

54

american dictators

organizations derived enormous benefits from the Noble Experiment. For Nucky, it ensured prosperity for his island kingdom by enhancing its disreputable allure: Atlantic City was never more popular than in its days as the Land Where Prohibition Never Happened. For Hague, it created new opportunities for control through selective enforcement and closure of speakeasies that failed to pay tribute to his regime. For both men, Prohibition meant a steady flow of under-the-counter revenue in the form of payoffs from the bootleggers, rumrunners, and smugglers who sprang up everywhere to satisfy the public’s raging thirst. The historian Thomas Fleming, a Jersey City native who grew up in a family with several members on the Hague payroll, notes that Prohibition gave Hague latitude to crack down on prostitution and brothels, burnishing the civic reformer image that pleased women voters and the local clergy. Meanwhile, bootleg booze and gambling flourished—but only with the approval of City Hall. “The bootleggers, bookies, numbers men, and card sharks were told to pay a nice split to the ward leader, who was supposed to send most of it to City Hall,” Fleming recalls. By the end of the thirteen-year dry spell, Hague had acquired a notable ally and sometime enforcer from among the gangsters, while Nucky had brazenly joined their ranks.

Whatever Prohibition may have accomplished for the public health, there can be no doubt that it also turned gangsters into celebrities and made contempt for the law a mark of sophistication. As journalist A. J. Liebling observed, well after the fact: People whose youth did not coincide with the twenties never had our reverence for strong drink. Older men knew liquor before it

boom times

55

became the symbol of a sacred cause. Kids who began drinking after 1933 take it as a matter of course. For us, it was a self-righteous pleasure, like killing rabbits with clubs to provide an American Legion party for poor white kids. Drinking, we proved to ourselves our freedom as individuals and flouted Congress. We conformed to a popular type of dissent—dissent from a minority. It was the only period during which a fellow could be smug and slopped concurrently.

As one historian of the era put it: “Sometimes it almost seemed that the American Congress and the Canadian federal and provincial legislatures must have secretly held a grand conclave to decide one issue: How could they draft anti-liquor laws and regulations that would help maximize . . . bootlegging profits.” Certainly politicians praised the aims of the Volstead Act, but they underfunded and undermanned the means to carry it out. The exemption of Prohibition agents from civil service requirements was probably the biggest factor in crippling enforcement while bolstering cynicism. Across the nation, enforcement bureaus swelled with political cronies and friends of ward heelers. When Ohio Republican Warren G. Harding succeeded Woodrow Wilson as U.S. president in 1921, the chief of the federal Prohibition Bureau, John F. Kramer—a competent man but a Democrat—was replaced with the ineffectual but politically palatable Roy A. Hanes, a Republican whose bungling further hobbled the bureau until 1925, when Lincoln C. Andrews was put in charge. By then, the whole enterprise had become so rotten with cynicism that more effective enforcement only increased the public’s hostility. Colonel Ira Reeves, named head enforcement agent for New Jersey in 1926, stormed out of his Newark office after only four months, declaring that “Prohibition laws are unenforceable.”

56

american dictators

Alcoholic beverages could still be produced for export and “medicinal purposes,” and pure alcohol was authorized for industrial uses or for grooming products such as hair tonic. Across the country, thirty denaturing plants blended the pure alcohol with chemicals that made it unfit for personal consumption. Much of that alcohol was diverted before it reached the denaturing facilities. Exactly how much is a matter of conjecture, but it should be noted that total U.S. production jumped from 21 million gallons in 1920 to 81 million gallons by the middle of the decade. The alcohol that did get tainted was later subjected to various treatments by underground chemists and bootleggers to remove the poisons, sometimes with fatal or crippling consequences for the unfortunate drinker. The bizarre logic that had the U.S. government trying to protect the health of its citizens by threatening them with poison gave ammunition to Prohibition’s critics, who compared the government to the Borgias, that Renaissance clan reputed to be fond of serving lethal dinners to selected guests. Advocates of dry laws merely shrugged. Breweries were also allowed to produce a reduced-alcohol beverage, but this uninviting “near beer” could be made only by brewing real beer and then processing it to lower the alcohol content. It was a simple matter for bootleggers to divert shipments of full-strength suds before they could be rendered impotent. When beer did undergo the treatment, bartenders at speakeasies refortified the beverage with direct injections of alcohol under the counter—hence the nickname “needle beer.” According to Elmer Irey, who as director of the Treasury Department’s Internal Revenue Service Enforcement Branch would become the scourge of crooked Prohibition agents and bootleggers alike, the favored method for diverting alcohol and alcoholic beverages from government-bonded warehouses was a document called a “permit for withdrawal,” which theoretically could be issued only by

boom times

57

the director of each Prohibition district. “In the earliest days of Prohibition any distillery would deliver what you wanted if you surrendered a Permit,” Irey recalled. “The standard price for a counterfeit Permit was $500, or $1 a case.” Typically, a permit released 120 drums of alcohol, which was enough to fill a railroad boxcar. Alcohol sold for 62 cents a gallon at the warehouse. It was in turn sold for a minimum of $8 a gallon to bootleggers, who promptly cut it three times, bringing its value to $24, also a minimum in both value and number of cuttings. There being fifty gallons in each drum and 120 drums in each boxcar, a boxcar of pure alcohol therefore was worth $144,000. Again minimum. This minimum is important, because a price of $12 a gallon was not unusual and only three cuttings was quite unusual. One freight car filled with alcohol could, and often did, mean a quarter of a million dollars for a basic outlay of $3,720, plus bribe, plus transportation.

Overseas, the reaction of the Scotch whiskey distillers of the United Kingdom went through several distinct phases, according to industry historian Ronald Weir. Initially, Distillers Company Ltd., the firm that dominated the whisky trade, reacted with “a mixture of surprise and despondency,” accompanied by “an unseemly haste to ship as much Scotch as possible before the amendment was ratified.” There was also fear that what distillers called the “dry rot” of prohibitionist sentiment would strengthen and spread. Then, Weir writes, hope returned: Finally, there was the cheerful realization that prohibition had not extinguished the demand for Scotch whisky and that there was money to be made. But what was the best way to make money without offending the American government, the British

58

american dictators government (which was under pressure from Washington to curtail exports to America), or becoming involved with the criminal elements in the illicit market for alcoholic beverages?

Shortly after Prohibition became the law of the land, residents of coastal areas—Cape Hatteras, New Jersey, Long Island, and Massachusetts—heard rumors from sailors who had seen ships running without lights near the sea lanes, often with cargo booms unlashed and ready for use—a puzzling sight on the open ocean. Some ships were decent enough to the eye, others were rust-dripping scows; but they all remained silent when hailed by radio. People living near the water often saw light signals passing between ships and unseen figures on the land. Chances are, many of those coastal residents knew more than they were letting on. The public at large got its first clue about what was happening from the New Bedford, Massachusetts, Evening Standard, which on August 10, 1921, published an account of a local man who had been treated to a visit aboard the Arethusa, a schooner anchored off Nomans Land, a small island southwest of Martha’s Vineyard. The news of an open-air liquor store operating on the ocean beyond the three-mile limit—and beyond the reach of American law—was so intriguing that the newspaper sent reporter Earle D. Wilson to take a look for himself. Wilson persuaded a Martha’s Vineyard fisherman to ferry him to the Arethusa, which he reckoned to be stationed about twenty-eight miles out: Business was rushing when we arrived and we waited for other customers, mostly in swordfishing vessels, to board and be served. Finally, somebody aboard the Arethusa waved to us to come ahead; our vessel hove to, we got into a dory, rowed up to her rail, and we climbed aboard. The crew resembled as wicked a gang of cutthroats as ever bade a luckless victim walk the plank.

boom times

59

All were unshaven, some looking as though their faces had been innocent of the influence of a razor for the nearly four weeks they had been out there. Nobody said anything, so I piped up, “How’s chances of getting a drink?” I am not a drinking man, never have been, never will be, but I had to buy something in order to stay aboard and take a look around. The man I took to be a mate said in startlingly good Yankee, “Anything from a drink to a barrel. What’ll you have?” “Got any scotch?” I countered. “Sure, we’ve got everything, but we can’t break a case.” “Well, let’s see it.” He conducted me below decks, and my view on what constitutes a large quantity of illicit booze—previously based on peeks at piles of confiscated liquor in police headquarters—underwent a decided change. The liquor aboard the Arethusa was divided into sections according to brand and kind. One section held nothing but champagne, another nothing but gin, and so on.

Wilson described the whiskey room—“Where I presume the greatest volume of business had been done”—as a twenty-by-ten-foot bay packed to its twelve-foot ceiling with gunny sacks full of quart bottles. The reporter ended up buying two bottles of Calvert’s whisky and two more of Cedar Brook—both American brands, evidently shipped out as export goods only to reappear in a ship outside American territorial waters. Wilson’s story, impossible to ignore on the front page of the Evening Standard, was furiously denied by customs officials and Prohibition agents, but a legend had been born. It quickly became known that the master of the Arethusa was Bill McCoy, a tall man with Gary Cooper looks and an Errol Flynn lifestyle who had abandoned a failing shipbuilding business in Florida to become a rumrunner. McCoy developed a reputation as an honorable rogue who sold unadulterated liquor at prices that were not unduly high. Whether this policy

60

american dictators

made him the inspiration for the encomium “the real McCoy” is far from clear, but in later years McCoy himself was more than happy to claim it for his own. More than seventy-five years after the end of the Noble Experiment, he is unequivocally remembered as the unofficial mayor of the amorphous maritime region called Rum Row. McCoy operated out of the Bahamas, the British-owned coral archipelago barely forty miles from the Florida shoreline, where captains of rum boats like the Arethusa would meet with American smugglers to arrange shipments of European and Canadian liquor. While cutting deals with unsavory characters in Nassau, McCoy also struck up a friendship with Lorin A. Lathrop, an aging career diplomat right out of a Graham Greene story, who spent his time painting Bahamas seascapes and writing colorful potboilers with titles like The Huge Black One-Eyed Man and The Girl with the Golden Hair under the nom de plume Kenyon Gambier. Lathrop’s plans for an undemanding assignment in a pleasant climate were disrupted by McCoy and his fellow rumrunners: as U.S. consul, he was duty-bound to notify his stateside superiors whenever rum ships left the harbor. But Lathrop was a broad-minded man, and when the consul’s office shut down for the day, he was happy to savor the evening breeze with McCoy and gently urge him to find a more honest line of work—advice, it turned out, that McCoy probably should have taken. The Bahamas (and later Cuba) anchored the southern extreme of Rum Row. The French-owned islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, the center of a small fogbound archipelago off Newfoundland, were the northernmost point of this floatable fête. Prior to passage of the Volstead Act, Saint-Pierre’s chief claim to distinction was to have hosted the only known use of the guillotine in North America on August 24, 1889. Once that bit of excitement was over, Saint-Pierre resumed its identity as a French-owned fishing

boom times

61

outpost near the rich waters of the Grand Banks. At the start of the 1920s, the village of Saint-Pierre was essentially a company town dominated by Morue Française, a Paris-based fishing and trading firm that controlled a fifty-vessel fishing fleet, the village bakery and bank, various local stores, and even the government contract for mail deliveries. All that changed when America went dry. The islands, described by one traveler as “little dots of gorse and granite,” became strategic outposts in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, within striking distance of the New England coast but well beyond the reach of American and Canadian law. In December 1921 the New York Times noted the sudden increase in the number of “well-dressed, black-cigar-smoking gentlemen” at the Cape Breton town of North Sydney. “Steamers that ply between North Sydney and those attractive isles of the North Atlantic, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, are carrying everincreasing numbers of very busy American ‘business men’ these days,” the paper reported. Once ashore, those American businessmen found no shortage of Canadian and European counterparts eager to help them break American laws, albeit at arm’s length. One of the first entrepreneurs to capitalize on Saint-Pierre’s location was local merchant Paul Chartier, who formed the St. George Import and Export Company in partnership with W. George Ltd. of Montreal. (Quebec had remained defiantly wet while the rest of Canada’s provinces adopted varying degrees of dryness.) St. and W. George already served as export agents for the Hiram Walker operation in Ontario, and the partners were ideally placed to serve as middlemen for distillers on both sides of the ocean, accepting consignments and collecting broker’s fees of 25 cents to 50 cents on every case. A Montreal-based distiller, John J. Bradley, also foresaw the good times to come and became the first off-islander to open a sales office on Saint-Pierre.

62

american dictators

They soon had competition. Julien Moraze and his son Henri commissioned several poured-concrete warehouses on the island and even did a little rumrunning themselves to Canadian customers. F. Paturel, who had started out as a clerk for Bradley, founded his own business after Bradley died. Paturel mostly brokered shipments of German-made “Hand Brand” white alcohol, highly popular with bootleggers as a base ingredient in their underground blends. Harold Waters, a crewman aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tampa, recalled what happened when his captain, a fervent teetotaler known to his men as Old Goosey, decided to pay a visit to Saint-Pierre to gather information and fly the flag. If the captain’s intent was to intimidate, he failed miserably: Tampa’s arrival was greeted by a raucous, ear-numbing barrage of derisive din. Screaming steam sirens, hooting whistles, clanging bells, noise-making devices giving off sounds suggestive of the Bronx cheer, the rum fleet went all out in “giving us the bird.” Tampa stood up harbor, passing on either hand a motley collection of anchored trawlers, ancient tramps, rust-streaked coasters and a few battered old fishing schooners. Most were fugitives from the knackers’ yards, reprieved for a last fling at the highly lucrative smuggling trade. Their crews added to the bedlam as our cutter steamed sedately by, with jangled, off-key versions of “How Dry I Am,” “Pickle My Bones in Alcohol,” “Whiskey for My Johnny” and “What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor”; “Pussyfoot Johnson,” a leading apostle of Stateside Aridity, was hanged in effigy from the yardarm of a Canadian barkentine.

According to Waters, Scotch whisky sold for $8 a case along the Saint-Pierre waterfront, bourbon and rye for $7, gin for $6. Rum ships departed with manifests listing Nassau or some other non-U.S. port as their destination, though the magnetic pole of

boom times

63

commerce invariably drew them off course. In the magic offshore realm created by Prohibition, the value of liquor increased exponentially as it neared land. The island also afforded access to the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. A case of Scotch purchased for $4 in Saint-Pierre was worth up to $65 along Rum Row, then $120 as contact boats brought it to the bootleggers. Once the bootleggers had finished extending the Scotch with grain alcohol and distilled water—or, later on, less benign adulterants—the case was worth $400, each bottle sealed with counterfeit bond strips and even a few artful scraps of seaweed to gull landlubbers into thinking it was right off the boat. For members of “the Sunset Navy” that appeared after dark along the eastern seaboard, the risks were few and the returns were lavish. When Bill McCoy made his first rum voyage with a cargo of rye whiskey— ostensibly bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, but in fact sold off in St. Catherine’s Sound, Georgia—he cleared $20,000 in profit. The liquor trade even had an impact on Saint-Pierre’s local architecture. Rumrunners routinely saved space and increased load size by transferring bottles to “hams,” or jute sacks packed with straw. The virtually treeless island became forested with discarded whiskey and champagne cases, which locals were invited to use for firewood. Before long, the wood panels became popular as a building material, helped along by the example of the manager of Consolidated Traders, who built a single-story house entirely from cases of Cutty Sark whiskey, the brand he handled. The house remains as a private residence, pointed out to tourists as a survivor from le temps de la fraude.

If Rum Row had a capital, it would have been the Atlantic waters a few miles outside the mouth of New York Bay, where rum captains

64

american dictators

could make fortunes slaking the thirst of countless speakeasies in New York City and its urban satellites. At its greatest extent, this rum line stretched from Montauk, at the extreme eastern tip of Long Island, all the way down to Cape May at the southern tip of New Jersey. “At night on Rum Row, you’d think there was a city out there,” one sailor told an interviewer. From the colonial era onward, the tangle of barrier islands and waterways along the New Jersey coastline had been ideal for smuggling, and Prohibition merely provided material for another chapter in the region’s secret history. The Hudson River, Newark Bay, and the confluence of the Hackensack and Passaic rivers provided scores of hiding places for small boats in the Meadowlands. A little to the south, the kills around Staten Island joined New York Bay to the mouth of the Raritan River and the South River, allowing smugglers to travel deep into central New Jersey. Running east along the southern shore of Raritan Bay, creeks afforded access to the labyrinthine waterways of Cheesequake Swamp, where no patrol boat could follow. At the eastern end of the Raritan bayshore, where the long peninsula of Sandy Hook angles into Lower New York Bay, the hilly terrain of the Atlantic Highlands afforded an ideal vantage point to scan for ships, while the waters of the Shrewsbury River, flowing north alongside Sea Bright and Sandy Hook, offered yet another avenue for illicit commerce. South of Sandy Hook, the Jersey Shore had an equally inviting line of barrier islands, as well as the swampy expanse of Barnegat Bay and, last but not least, the roaring seaside resort of Atlantic City, an island surrounded by brackish creeks and marshes and presided over by a Republican-run political machine that turned a blind eye and an open hand to all manner of rumrunners. Any booze not immediately slopped up by Atlantic City revelers could easily be loaded into trucks and driven west to Philadelphia through the dark

boom times

65

expanse of the Pine Barrens. Atlantic City has often been called the “lungs of Philadelphia”; during Prohibition, it also served as the city’s liver. Rum schooners and rust-smeared freighters from Europe would anchor well past the Ambrose Lightship, the floating lighthouse with the bright red hull that marked the entrance to Ambrose Channel, the major shipping lane into Lower New York Bay. There, riding the waves outside the three-mile U.S. territorial limit, they decorated their rigging with signs listing the day’s prices and waited for the swarms of contact boats that emerged after dark from the nooks and crannies of the shoreline. Rum captains had to be on guard for hijackers. The Mulhouse, a French-registered steamer with a half-million dollars’ worth of booze in its hold, was seized off the New Jersey coast. For three days, the hijackers kept the crew locked in the forecastle while they sold and drank up much of the cargo, finally sailing for New York with what was left. The crew headed back to France, broke, but at least able to console themselves that they’d survived the hijacking. After a couple of voyages, Bill McCoy, the bellwether of change along Rum Row, installed a swivel-mounted machine gun on his ship and used the passage up from Nassau to teach his crew how to use it, with passing sharks for targets. Even with the onboard artillery, McCoy never allowed more than one or two customers to come aboard at a time, and thus he was never robbed. For crewmen on a rum ship, it was hard to be cooped up only an hour or two from the ultimate shore leave of Manhattan or Atlantic City, but there were compensations. Inbound fishermen would frequently come alongside to barter swordfish or lobsters for liquor. “Amenity boats” would bring call girls out to service entire crews. Sometimes they brought musicians as well, and the decks of rum boats would become impromptu dance floors. Pleasure craft and

66

american dictators

excursion boats would swing by for a look at the floating black market, and the bolder young women from the sleepy precincts of Cape May or Long Island might come aboard to buy some booze, dance with the crew, then head home to brag about their walk on the wild side. In the raffish years from 1921 to 1924, Rum Row was as much about excitement as it was about commerce. Even one of the Coast Guard men charged with breaking up Rum Row sounds wistful about the early years: Call girls from New York City, Cape May, Atlantic City, Wildwood, and other ports always regarded it as a signal honor to be “invited” out to Rum Row, where they received double the shoreside price for their favors, plus what was quaintly called a “hazard bonus.” No form of impressment was ever necessary to shanghai ladies of negotiable virtue into visiting Rum Row. Occasionally it would happen, generally because of a storm having blown up, that an entire night club troupe would be marooned aboard overnight, even for a few days. These were regarded as red letter days, and rummy crews went flat out in seeing to it that their guests, especially girls of the chorus line, were regally entertained. Protocol was strictly observed along Rum Row in its early days, especially national holidays. On these auspicious occasions the ships were fully dressed, their riggings ablaze with multicolored signal flags and bunting. There was much ship-to-ship visiting, and toasts were drunk in honor of the King’s Birthday, Bastille Day, and other national holidays. Of nights, Chinese lanterns were displayed in the rigging.

The floating city even had, briefly, its own ministry—a refitted schooner called Beacon of Hope, captained by a white-bearded zealot who called himself Skipper Salvation and crewed by elderly

boom times

67

volunteers who bellowed gospel hymns to the wheezing accompaniment of an accordion. The more tolerant rum captains even allowed Skipper Salvation to come aboard and distribute Bible tracts to their bemused crewmen. “Skipper Salvation could not have chosen a more exclusive mission field,” rum war veteran Harold Waters recalled. “None of the established denominations had ever been known to evince the slightest interest in Rum Row.”

There is no evidence that Bill McCoy and Nucky Johnson ever met, but Johnson’s kingdom by the sea was the scene of McCoy’s first serious brush with the law. In August 1923, McCoy chartered another of his schooners, the Henry L. Marshall, to a Georgia bootlegger. Sailing to Atlantic City with fifteen hundred cases of rye whiskey, the captain joined the crew in sampling some of the wares. With the lights of the resort only a few miles off, the captain decided to jump into a launch and head for shore, leaving the drunken crew to neglect their duties and allow the ship to drift inside U.S. territorial waters. A Coast Guard cutter, the Seneca, swept in and towed the ship to New York Bay. Word got back to McCoy that his ship had been seized and that he was a wanted man. McCoy stayed one step ahead of the law, hiding out on an Indian reservation and getting word to his crew on the Arethusa through his bootlegging contacts. McCoy kept himself out of the law’s clutches, but the seizure of the Henry L. Marshall was the Coast Guard’s first big score against the rumrunners. Not that there were many others. Unable to do more than harass the rum ships, the Coast Guard did its best to make life difficult for the contact boats. In the first years of Prohibition, that effort didn’t add up to much. There were literally swarms of contact boats with high-powered engines making the ship-to-shore runs, and the Coast

68

american dictators

Guard didn’t have the manpower to catch them in any significant numbers. Savvy rumrunners quickly learned that open-cockpit boats were better for their line of work: the absence of a cabin meant easier loading and unloading, and gave the boat a lower profile. Exhaust pipes below the waterline helped mask engine noise, and black-painted hulls rendered the contact boats virtually invisible. Coast Guard sailors called them “the sunset fleet” because they always appeared after dark. It didn’t help that the Coast Guard’s efforts were viewed with hostility and contempt by many landlubbers. In May 1924 the Atlantic County prosecutor, Louis Repetto, brought charges against Chief Petty Office Edward Robert and three crewmen for firing on a rumrunner, Daniel Conover, in the Inlet. Though Conover had been caught with seventy-five cases of booze in his hold, Repetto charged the crewmen with abuse of authority for shooting at Conover, who was, after all, accused of only a misdemeanor.

Atlantic City residents of a certain age remembered Prohibition as a time when anyone could play outlaw. Leslie Kammerman, who grew up on Carson Avenue on the city’s north side, recalled a small railway alongside his house that was used for trundling cargo offloaded from contact boats. “As a little tot, my older brothers used to show me the machine gun slugs that sometimes lodged in the wooden framework of these boats,” Kammerman said. “The Coast Guard officers would speak to the rumrunners, joke about shooting at each other the night before.” The liquor would be served at many of Atlantic City’s poshest clubs—the Golden Inn (later Babette’s, after the stage name of the owner’s showgirl wife), the 500 Club, the Bush and Turf Club, Paradise Café, Club Harlem, Little Belmont, and the Cliquot Club.

boom times

69

Nor was there any attempt to conceal what was going on. The gambling parlors and nightclubs carried on as though the Eighteenth Amendment had never been proposed, much less ratified. Louis Repetto, the Nucky-approved Atlantic County prosecutor, was on hand to block any attempts at enforcement; should his efforts ever fail, U.S. Attorney Walter G. Winne— appointed in 1922 by President Harding with Nucky’s full approval—was ready to step in. Winne’s six-year term was marked by frequent criticism of his evident lack of interest in enforcing dry laws in Atlantic City and the rest of the state. Winne later repaid Nucky’s favor by serving as defense counsel at his trial for income tax evasion. Municipal employees grew accustomed to offloading booze as one of their occasional duties. “Everybody helped out,” a city fireman recalled. “If you worked for the city you could count on one time or another working a night shift and being told to go to such and such a place and help unload a boat. You weren’t supposed to know what it was, but everybody did.” The Keystone Kops aspect of the Coast Guard’s offshore enforcement efforts started to change in 1924, when the federal government came to some embarrassing conclusions about the effectiveness of its patrols. Anywhere from 160 to 300 rumrunning schooners and freighters were operating along the Atlantic seaboard, drawing numberless swarms of contact boats and bringing roughly 100,000 cases of liquor into the country per month. But years of interdiction efforts had resulted in the seizure of only about 150 ships and a mere 30,000 cases of booze. The Coast Guard’s response was to throw more resources into the chase: more funding, more manpower, and a beefed-up fleet that included twenty reconditioned navy destroyers. For enforcement purposes, Great Britain, one of the countries most closely

70

american dictators

linked with overseas suppliers, agreed to let America extend its territorial waters from three miles to “one hour’s steaming.” Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Cuba, France, and Belgium fell into line, and suddenly the Coast Guard had a wider range in which to do its hunting. Its ranks were still studded with moles in the pay of bootleggers, which led to a notable fiasco code-named “Dark of the Moon,” in which Coast Guard cutters tried to interdict rumrunners on Barnegat Bay but mainly succeeded in endangering pleasure craft and firing on each other. The renewed enforcement program, launched in the spring of 1925, soon put an end to the jolly days of floating speakeasies and “amenity boats” bearing newspapers, call girls, and fresh provisions. The more or less friendly antagonism between the Coast Guard and its quarry became increasingly vicious: fishermen used their nets to tangle the propellers of pursuing ships and contact boats began to return fire. When Skipper Salvation attempted to spread the good news to an ill-tempered crew, he was met with curses and jets of water from an onboard fire hose. After a few more similar incidents, the floating prophet reportedly sold his ship and took up missionary work in the Bowery.

The Coast Guard’s biggest success actually predated the crackdown. In March 1924, Bill McCoy was caught off the New Jersey Shore town of Sea Bright in his schooner Tomoka (actually the Arethusa, rechristened) with just over a hundred cases of Bacardi rum in the hold. When a boarding party came over from the cutter Seneca, the same ship that had seized the Henry L. Marshall off Atlantic City, McCoy had blood in his eye and ordered the ship to get underway. The threat of being charged with kidnapping as well as rumrunning, and a warning shot from the Seneca, finally changed his mind.

boom times

71

Rather than face trial, McCoy pleaded guilty to smuggling charges and served a nine-month sentence in the Essex County Jail in Newark. Upon his release, McCoy returned to Florida and resumed a boat-building business with his brother. Real estate speculation proved every bit as lucrative, though not nearly as thrilling, as rumrunning. Though he may not have realized it at the time, McCoy’s arrest was a blessing in disguise, for it took him out of the rumrunning business just as a sea change was taking place. Along with the renewed push from the Coast Guard, the dangers of hijacking had increased. “Go-through guys,” essentially waterborne gunmen, prowled the waters between the rum ships and the mainland, preying on contact boats. Rather than playing cat-and-mouse with cutters over a wider span of territorial waters, the go-through guys outsourced the risk. They waited for the contact boats to outrun the Coast Guard, then pounced. Even the Coast Guard despised the go-through guys as human jackals, but there was little to be done. The Coast Guard’s picket lines had, in effect, created them.

On dry land, the immense profits of the bootlegging trade sparked bloody conflicts all over the country as gangsters went to war over turf. The Chicago “Beer Wars,” fought with Thompson machine guns and bundles of dynamite, are still the template for civilian notions about gangsterism. The underworld had already been rocked by the murder of gangland financier Arnold Rothstein in 1928. Matters came to a gory head in February 1929, when six members of Bugs Moran’s Chicago gang (and a seventh unfortunate who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) were trapped in a warehouse by some Al Capone gunmen and shredded with

72

american dictators

machine-gun fire. The killing, dubbed the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre by newspapermen, drew national attention. At least one gangland observer noted that Atlantic City, one of the biggest beneficiaries of bootlegging, was serene and untouched by the strife: Technically, the Atlantic City system was a beautiful thing to behold. There were none of the bloodstains that blotched most racket landscapes. Racketeers shoot only when outsiders try to “muscle in,” or when they get into competition with each other. In Atlantic City, if a New York or Chicago racketeer set up a casino or bordello, the local lads merely complained to the police vice squad, which drove the interlopers out of town. And there was no unseemly competition.

All of which made the resort the perfect spot for what one writer has called “the most disreputable assemblage since Satan gathered up his army after the Fall.” The so-called gangster conference was a semi-public affair. Sightings of Capone and other mobsters on the Boardwalk were given matter-of-fact coverage in the local prints. “Al Capone Suns Self in Roller Chair,” the Atlantic City Daily Press informed its readers on May 16. “Chicago Gangster and Henchmen Forget ‘Business’ Worries, Make Whoopee and Enjoy Boardwalk.” The headline matched the story’s insouciant tone: In return for the “great time” he showed some dozen Atlantic City politicians and officials in Chicago during their visit to that city to witness the Dempsey-Tunney championship battle some time ago, “Scarface” Al Capone, machine gun maestro, beer baron and nationally known racketeer, today holds the welcome key to Atlantic City with full privilege to enjoy himself and partake of the resort’s famous hospitality like any distinguished visitor.

boom times

73

It’s a little astonishing to read such a passage—describing Capone as a “machine gun maestro” barely two months after the Saint Valentine’s Day butchery!—and realize just how thoroughly Prohibition had delegitimized law enforcement while turning bootleggers into folk heroes. The contemporary “war on drugs” has been every bit as ineffectual at curtailing sales of narcotics, but cocaine dealers are not household names, and if it should come to light that the nation’s heroin distributors were convening in Atlantic City, the reaction would go well beyond a smirking headline at the bottom of page one. An account of the gathering, written by a trusted reporter with gangland connections, appeared in the Literary Digest in June 1929 and certified that America’s gangster-capitalists were trying to cool the violence by establishing clearly defined territories. Only after the fact did civilians learn that Nucky Johnson’s kingdom by the sea had been the scene of a convention featuring such luminaries as Al Capone, John Torrio, Lucky Luciano, Owney Madden, Dutch Schultz, and Moe Dalitz, as well as representatives from Detroit’s Purple Gang, Kansas City’s Pendergast machine, and of course the Philadelphia mob. Nucky Johnson had hosted the gathering with his usual lavishness, and, as a member of the Seven Group bootlegging alliance, joined them as a colleague and equal. There is very little reliable information about the Atlantic City conference, and the few facts available have been embroidered with conjecture and urban myth. Damon Runyon used the conference as the backdrop for one of his better stories, “Dark Dolores,” in which a gangland widow takes revenge on her husband’s slayers by luring them into the surf to drown. Historians and crime buffs usually cite the conference as the true beginning of organized crime in America. According to the crime historian T. J. English, the most

74

american dictators

important aspect of the conference was the relative absence of Irish American mobsters: When viewed this way, the Atlantic City conference can be seen for what it really was: not the nation’s first gathering of a multiethnic underworld coalition, but the beginning of a process by which Sicilian, Italian, Italian American, and Jewish gangsters would move the Irish to the fringe of the underworld. The reasons for this development were more complex than mere ethnic animosity. To Italian and Jewish gangsters, the argument for marginalizing the Irish had more to do with the fair distribution of criminal spoils. The Irish, after all, already controlled the police departments and a sizeable portion of the political organizations in many of the underworld’s most lucrative domains. Why should they also be acceded equal share in the underworld as well? What’s fair is fair, right?

A photo of dubious provenance surfaced that purported to show Nucky striding the Boardwalk alongside Capone, but the picture— just like the legendary Hague desk with the bank drawer for payoffs—is best taken with more than a few grains of salt. Though the Saturday Evening Post and other publications gave it credence, the image shows an obviously cropped-in Nucky standing slightly behind Capone, even as their feet are side by side. Given the brazenness with which the Boardwalk peacock hosted gangsters, it’s hard to believe such a forgery was even necessary. One of the more fanciful stories emerged decades after the fact in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, in which the retired mobster claimed to have seen Capone, enraged at being denied admittance to the WASP-only Breakers, smashing pictures and furniture in the hotel’s lobby until Nucky Johnson arrived to deal with the commotion.

boom times

75

“Nucky and Al had it out right there in the open,” Luciano recalled. “Johnson was about a foot taller than Capone and both of them had voices like foghorns. I think you could have heard them in Philadelphia, and there wasn’t a decent word passed between them . . . so Nucky picks up Al under one arm and throws him into his car and yells out, ‘All you fuckers follow me.’” According to Luciano, Nucky arranged lodgings at the Ritz-Carlton, where the boss already lived. This story is preposterous on a number of levels. Given the importance of the conference, it’s a stretch to think that such a mistake would have been made in the first place. While it’s true that Nucky had a strained relationship with the Boardwalk hotel owners— who tended to view the machine and its supporters as parasites and crooks—it’s also true that the hotel would have had nothing to gain by making the boss look bad. Not only would such roughand-tumble work have been out of character for Nucky, it’s hard to imagine anyone giving the vengeful Scarface such humiliating public treatment only two months after the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Luciano also claimed that while the gangsters whooped it up, with Nucky playing the gracious host, the real work of the meeting was conducted on the beach, where these habitually overdressed mobsters supposedly rolled up their trouser cuffs and talked business with the surf breaking around their ankles. If the sight of Capone in a Boardwalk rolling chair made the front pages of the local papers, it’s hard to imagine the sight of him being slung about by Nucky Johnson in a hotel lobby, or chatting on the beach with his colleagues, could have escaped attention. A more plausible story centers on Moses Annenberg, a semigangster from Chicago who had come to America as a teenager in 1885 and had found success as a circulation manager for newspaper

76

american dictators

magnate William Randolph Hearst. There had already been a great deal of street-level violence and intimidation involved in newspaper competition, but Annenberg added arson, beatings, and even the occasional murder to the task of expanding readership for his boss’s papers. Consorting with thugs had given Annenberg access to all sorts of clandestine business lines, and by 1922 he was wealthy enough to buy the Daily Racing Form and, a few years later, the General News Bureau racing wire. He quit working for Hearst in 1926 to tend his publishing empire and, according to various mobster accounts, was a mutual friend of Capone and Nucky. The rumor that Annenberg came to Atlantic City to round up investors for an illicit racing wire, which would give a huge advantage to gambling parlors and policy shops, is plausible enough, but like so much else about the Atlantic City conference, it cannot be verified. It is true, however, that when Annenberg’s playboy son Walter was caught in the October 1929 stock market crash, the father covered the son’s $3 million in losses without batting an eyelash.

New Jersey’s representative at the Atlantic City gathering was Abner “Longy” Zwillman, a flashy dresser and ladies’ man who acquired his nickname growing up on the streets of Newark’s Third Ward. Reef der Langer—Yiddish for “Get the tall one”—was the call that went out from the Jewish pushcart peddlers whenever Irish toughs appeared to rob and harass them. Zwillman and his friends would come running to repel the invaders. By the time he reached his teens, Longy already topped six feet in height. He was quick with his fists and more than a match for anyone who cared to test him. Born in 1904 to Jews who emigrated from Russia in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Zwillman dropped out of school in the eighth grade after his father died, leaving young Longy to

boom times

77

support his family. Though he started out as a fruit-and-vegetable vendor, Zwillman quickly entered the rackets, first as a numbers runner, then as head of his own gambling operation. Smart and observant as well as tough, Zwillman started making real money by providing shipping and protection for bootleggers. At the tender age of nineteen, Zwillman shot and wounded a rival who had been harassing his employees, and a few years later he served a short prison term for beating an African American numbers banker. Zwillman’s patron was Joseph Reinfeld, a First Ward–based bootlegger who received deliveries of liquor from contact boats in Port Newark and shipped them on to New York. While providing security for Reinfeld, Zwillman launched his own bootlegging concern in the Third Ward and quickly grew strong enough to demand—and get—a partnership in Reinfeld’s operation. By the mid-1920s, Zwillman dominated gambling and bootlegging in New Jersey and joined the “Broadway Gang”—Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Meyer Lansky—that called the shots (often literally) in the New York area. Zwillman used his considerable wealth to support charitable causes, and he became a political player as well, helping to sponsor the career of Meyer Ellenstein, Newark’s first Jewish mayor. As a bootlegger and political moneyman, Zwillman naturally joined the orbit of Frank Hague, whose domain on the other side of the Meadowlands was the choke point for bootleggers shipping their wares to New York. Hague was even a guest at Zwillman’s wedding. The association was a mutually profitable one, and the relationship lasted well past the end of Prohibition. As will be shown later, when Hague wanted to chastise an enemy beyond the reach of Jersey City’s notoriously heavy-handed police force, he called on Zwillman to provide the muscle. But there were a few other battles to wage before that.

4

2 Hard Times Beneath the gay exterior which [Atlantic City] presents is the heart of a city in hock. —Jack Alexander, “Boss on the Spot”

The W.P.A. was a godsend to Hague. Virtually every person who got a W.P.A. job in New Jersey was told he got it thanks to Frank Hague. —Thomas Fleming

The passage of time has so burnished the reputation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that it’s startling to see how much resistance and even ridicule he had to endure on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932. It’s even more astonishing to realize that for many pundits, the unlikely hero of the national convention in Chicago was . . . Frank Hague. With the Depression sinking its fangs into America’s neck while President Herbert Hoover made empty promises of prosperity just around the corner, it was clear that the Democrats would easily take the White House, and a strong faction wanted the nomination to go to Al Smith, who had been the party’s standard bearer four years earlier. As the first Irish Catholic presidential candidate, and a product of the Tammany Hall political machine to boot, Smith was the 78

hard times

79

personification of everything WASP America hated and feared about big-city politicians, and his 1928 campaign had been the target of extraordinary bigotry. Burning crosses greeted his campaign train in the Midwest, and postcards of the Holland Tunnel construction were circulated in rural backwaters with the claim that the pope was secretly building a tunnel to connect the Vatican with the White House so as to give direct orders to Smith. Moreover, Smith was a loud and enthusiastic “wet” who wanted to see Prohibition ended immediately—a cause dear to any politician with an immigrant or Irish base to please. For the Happy Warrior and his supporters, 1932 promised to be the year of vindication. FDR, on the other hand, was trying not to alienate the “drys” in his party while letting everyone know he hated the dry laws; he was also trying to talk reform without unduly alarming the city political machines he needed in his corner. For some pundits, this strategy made him a professional fence-straddler. H. L. Mencken mocked his “Christian Science smile,” and four of the five New York City boroughs supported Smith in the Democratic primary, denying Roosevelt the unanimous backing of his home state. Hague, who was Smith’s floor manager at the Chicago convention, warned the delegates that Roosevelt, if nominated, would be unable to carry any states east of the Mississippi. Smith may never have had a chance to win the party’s nomination a second time, but with the formidable Jersey City boss in his corner, he held on through three ballots against the Roosevelt juggernaut. The Stop Smith movement, led by the Happy Warrior’s archenemy William Randolph Hearst, managed to win the day, but Hague’s tactical skills handed the Roosevelt faction some embarrassing defeats and forced the party platform to include a full-throated call for repeal of Prohibition, rather than the evasive,

80

american dictators

noncommittal position FDR’s faction would have preferred. For one New Yorker correspondent, the Boss was the man of the hour: Hague is the man who raised gooseflesh on the country and kept it there for the duration of the convention. Except for Hague’s political genius, Roosevelt would have captured the nomination on the first ballot and the platform would have been so worded as to be equally cheery to the hearts of Bishop Cannon and Clarence Darrow. Hague rewrote the entire plot. What would otherwise have been a lifeless convention the Jersey boss changed into a blood-curdling melodrama. . . . Hague was beaten, but he is the man we have to thank for the excitement, the suspense, the mystery, the surprises, cold chills, and soul-stirring climaxes of the Democratic convention. We also have Hague to thank for the imminence of beer and wine.

The pundits may have been impressed, but once the convention was over, Hague was in a bad position. The Democratic nominee and certain winner of the presidency was a man who had spent his political career inveighing against political bosses. Not only did Hague stand to lose out on any patronage plums from having a Democrat in the White House, he might just find himself afflicted with a federal prosecutor, should FDR choose to pay him back for the convention floor fight that had so excited the press. Hague’s response to this predicament was a characteristic blend of guile, boldness, and luck. Because of it, he was able to sustain his machine through the bleak years of the Depression. In the decade of the 1930s the Boss proved his mettle. The Depression marks the point at which the fortunes of Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson truly diverged. For one boss, it was the chance to consolidate and even increase his power. For the other,

hard times

81

it was the beginning of a long decline that would end in disgrace and prison.

The effect of the Depression on Atlantic City was swift and devastating. As jobs disappeared and household incomes dwindled, luxuries like expensive vacations were the first things to be cut back. Visitors from Philadelphia still came during the summer for a day on the beach, but they quickly went home. Then something even worse happened: Prohibition was repealed. The return of John Barleycorn may have been celebrated everywhere else in the country, but in Atlantic City it was a mortal blow. The city’s swaggering disregard of dry laws had been one of its biggest draws, attracting convention business from all over the country. Now Nucky’s pleasure domain was just another resort at a time when few could afford to travel. Atlantic City’s finances were already shaky. With municipal contracts treated as patronage and never awarded to the lowest bidder, the city carried a crushing amount of debt that resulted in a property tax rate among the highest in the state—higher even than Jersey City’s. The Depression erased millions of dollars in property value, and lost incomes led to a wave of foreclosures that further diminished tax revenues. Ten of the city’s fourteen banks went under, taking life savings with them, and the Boardwalk hotels were technically under water even as they struggled to stay open. The city officially hit bottom in February 1933, when municipal employees—who had not been paid since November 1932— received 85 percent of their wages in the form of scrip, to be redeemed later at a 4 percent interest rate when the financial picture improved. Businesses quickly began charging higher prices for scrip

82

american dictators

transactions, adding to the pressure on families trying to guard their cash reserves. The scrip payments ended in July 1937. Throughout the Roaring Twenties, the Atlantic City machine’s finances rested securely on a four-cornered foundation of graft from public contracts, payoffs from bootleggers and brothels, fees charged to numbers bankers, and the take from betting parlors. As the newly wet climate caused the resort’s speakeasies to dry up, Nucky was forced to lean harder on the betting parlors and brothels that had gotten off easy during the years when bootleggers and speakeasies kept Nucky’s machine swimming in money. He even cut back slightly on his roistering: starting in 1935, he began a regular relationship with ex-showgirl Florence “Flossie” Osbeck, with whom he shared a stucco bungalow near the Boardwalk. Nevertheless, Nucky continued to spend money like a madman. The federal tax probe estimated Nucky’s two Atlantic City residences cost $5,000 a year to rent, with another $2,200 a year for the Manhattan apartment. The annual clothing bill for Nucky and Flossie (with an emphasis on tailored suits at $150 each) topped $3,000; food (with an emphasis on lobsters, caviar, and thick steaks), another $3,000; and liquor (with an emphasis on champagne and eighteen-year-old brandy), more than $4,000. Add in the expense of maintaining four sixteen-cylinder Cadillacs for the purpose of ferrying the couple’s entourage about town, and it was clear that the hard times weren’t too hard for Nucky. Atlantic City’s vice industry generated an estimated $10 million in 1936, from which Nucky skimmed a total of $250,000. But hard times were hard times, and in 1935 the boss had to step in to cool unseemly competition that had broken out among the city’s underground policy banks. The numbers game, involving small bets on numbers announced the next day, had been the poor man’s casino long before Atlantic

hard times

83

City was even a gleam in Jonathan Pitney’s eye, and in most cities there was an underground economy composed of residents betting the grocery money, merchants and tavern keepers collecting the bets, and numbers runners carrying the money and betting slips to the policy banks. (The term “policy bank” echoed “insurance policy,” another bet on the future, with the bank every bit as ingenious in finding reasons not to pay out.) Under pressure from the collapsed economy, numbers banks tried to undercut each other on the rates they charged bettors. The competition grew so fierce as to threaten payoffs, so Nucky ordered the creation of a co-op (headquartered in the Little Belmont Hotel) in which the numbers banks pooled their daily take and took equal shares at the end of the week. Each policy bank was also expected to kick in a weekly payment, called “ice,” as Nucky’s tribute. Another, more personal, blow came in 1936 with the death of Virginia “Mommy” Johnson at the age of eighty-three. Nucky’s irrepressible mother had been stricken with pneumonia following a political rally on a cold night. As the illness deepened, she asked to spend her last days at the county sheriff’s residence in Mays Landing. The funeral services were held in the courtroom where Smith Johnson had served as bailiff. Thousands of mourners crowded outside the building; fifteen carloads of flowers and a blanket of two hundred orchids decorated her grave. When a federal grand jury indicted Nucky on tax-evasion charges in May 1939, the timing was particularly grim. The boss had scheduled a lavish Mother’s Day memorial service at the First Presbyterian Church in Atlantic City. With the indictment hanging over his head, Nucky arrived with an honor escort of National Guardsmen and police; then he sang hymns with an African American choir and listened to speakers praise the work of the Virginia Johnson

84

american dictators

Memorial Welfare Center in distributing clothing to his Northside constituents.

Though Jersey City had a more diversified industrial base than Atlantic City, that advantage had been dwindling as employers relocated, driven out by soaring property taxes. This shift would lead to a drastic change in Hague’s approach to labor and a violent break with a former ally, but his immediate concern was the effect the Depression had on jobs and wages, the cornerstones of the Jersey City machine’s influence. The unlikely rescuer would turn out to be the man Hague had fought right up to the end—Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Once the bruising floor fight at the national Democratic convention was over, Roosevelt went to Albany for a public reconciliation with Al Smith in front of thousands of cheering New York delegates and visitors. James Farley, Roosevelt’s campaign manager, headed to Atlantic City for a few days of salt air and relaxation. Though he had kept his destination a secret from anyone outside the FDR campaign’s inner circle, he had barely arrived at the resort before he received a telephone call from Frank Hague: “He said there was no soreness on his part over what had happened, that he had been whipped in a fair fight, and that if Governor Roosevelt would come to New Jersey to open his campaign, he would provide the largest political rally ever held in the United States.” Roosevelt agreed, and the Hudson County machine went into overdrive for the August rally, which took place in front of Governor A. Harry Moore’s summer mansion in Sea Girt. Hague’s people chartered excursion trains, packed lunches, and signed up thousands of families and party operatives. Newspaper reporters

hard times

85

estimated the size of the crowd at anywhere from 100,000 to 115,000. Farley was more than impressed: It was a lovely summer day, although a bit hot, and a flat field of many acres stretched out in front of the speakers’ platform, every square foot of which seemed to be filled with people. They were standing up, packed tightly together in solid ranks, and at first glance the crowd seemed endless . . . [c]ertainly the throng was vast enough to cover the playing field of a couple of major ball parks. If it wasn’t the biggest rally in history up to that time, it must have been very close to it.

Besides the public fence-mending, the rally served to remind FDR that Hague was a matchless organizer in control of a well-oiled machine. After his landslide presidential victory, Roosevelt was careful to maintain cordial relations with the Jersey City boss. Though FDR loathed bosses like Hague, he was well aware that bigcity votes had provided his margin of victory. In 1932, the nation’s twelve largest cities accounted for a quarter of his vote plurality; by 1942, that share would grow to two-thirds. If Roosevelt wanted New Jersey in his corner, he needed Frank Hague on his side. The net result was that when the Works Progress Administration jobs program got under way, Hague was allowed to treat WPA jobs as patronage appointments from which he skimmed off a portion of the salaries. In other states, WPA appointments might be made through the governor’s office or one of the state’s senators. In New Jersey, all WPA jobs were handled by the mayor of Jersey City. “I do not have the power to appoint to these positions,” Governor A. Harry Moore told a Newark job seeker in August 1933. “They are made upon the recommendation of the local organizations to Mayor Hague, who, in turn, sends them in. . . . I would suggest that you also get in touch with the mayor.”

86

american dictators

Hague was not the only machine boss to benefit from WPA largesse, but he was treated with a degree of care not accorded the others. Only strongmen with the demonstrated ability to carry their states were given unrestricted access to WPA patronage. In cities where Democrats were weak or divided, FDR would use patronage to promote dissident factions or even create new ones. Thus, Jim Curley of Boston—best known as the model for boss Frank Skeffington in Edwin O’Connor’s novel The Last Hurrah—was circumvented in favor of anti-Curley reform Democrats. Curley had failed to keep Massachusetts delegates from siding with Al Smith during the 1932 primary, revealing his weakness and incompetence as an organizer. The dominance of the Republican machine in Philadelphia had fostered a group of tame Democrats who served at the GOP’s pleasure; FDR spurned those ward bosses and channeled federal funds to the Democratic Warriors Club led by Joseph Clark Jr. and Richardson Dilworth. And the Tammany Hall sachems who had stayed with Al Smith in 1932 were kept on the outside looking in. Funds were instead channeled to Edward J. Flynn, who had made the Bronx the only borough to favor FDR, while Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (a Republican, but one favored by FDR) was given all the federal help he needed to starve the Tammany Tiger. Meanwhile, Frank Hague became de facto relief czar for New Jersey. In 1937, for example, he commanded the entire state allocation of 75,000 WPA jobs and Hudson County’s 10,000 slots. He also received another layer of protection from prosecution. At one point James Farley, the campaign manager who became FDR’s postmaster general, was enraged by the news that Hague’s minions were opening the mail of Jersey City political opponents. When he confronted Roosevelt with the information, FDR declined to prosecute, though he did authorize a warning to Hague. “Tell Frank to knock it off” was the harshest thing Roosevelt could bring himself to say.

hard times

87

In all, enough federal money was funneled into Jersey City— some $50 million during FDR’s first two terms—to sustain Hague’s machine through the bleak years of the Depression while Nucky Johnson’s operation languished. Moreover, Hague was able to realize some of his most ambitious visions. All dictators have a taste for monuments, and those built by Hague—and, to a lesser extent, by Nucky—reflect the idiosyncratic character of each ruler’s domain.

5

2 Public Works “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” —Percy Bysshe Shelly, “Ozymandias”

In 2006, the New York development firm Metrovest Equities went to work on the biggest project in its history: the conversion of the sprawling Jersey City Medical Center into a cluster of luxury condominium towers called the Beacon. The ten-building complex, which loomed over the city from a ridge along Bergen Hill, had been unused for eighteen years and would require extensive renovation, but the structure of each tower was more than sound. After all, no expense had been spared during the construction of the complex throughout the 1930s. Flush with cash from the Works Progress Administration and certain of the gratitude of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Frank Hague wanted the medical center to have the finest fixtures, personnel, and equipment available. Even the ambulance garage had a terrazzo floor—and the ambulances were Cadillacs. Growing up in the squalor of the Horseshoe made Hague a lifelong hypochondriac. No matter how much wealth he acquired, he could always remember growing up in a tenement where children were often delivered on kitchen tables and didn’t always live long afterward. The first building was the Margaret Hague Maternity 88

public works

89

Hospital, named for the mayor’s mother—who, unlike her husband, had lived long enough to see her grade-school dropout son turn into the first citizen of Jersey City. During the renovations, a Metrovest work crew smashed through some drywall and uncovered a door. It proved to be the entry to Hague’s inner sanctum: a mahogany-lined office where the mayor spent more time than in his ostensible headquarters in City Hall, frequently venturing forth for impromptu inspections. No one could be sure of when or where the towering mayor might materialize, enraged by the discovery of a piece of paper or stub of a cigarette in an otherwise immaculate marble hallway. It was no joke: everyone knew the story of how Hague, after phoning in an emergency call, decided the doctor had been too slow in arriving and punched him in the face. Some staffers even tied bells to strings stretched across corridors, hoping to get some warning of the mayor’s approach. Legend has it that the 510-bed Pollak Hospital, with its terraced sun decks, was the only building safe from Hague’s impromptu inspections. Pollak housed tuberculosis patients, and Hague was so fearful of catching the disease he never ventured any farther than the lobby.

All but two of the medical center buildings were designed by John T. Rowland Jr., who became the Christopher Wren of Jersey City through Hague’s favor. Rowland’s modified Art Deco style can be seen in all four of his public high schools—Dickinson, Ferris, Lincoln, and Snyder—as well as in the A. Harry Moore School for students with physical disabilities, more than twenty elementary schools, and seven parochial schools. Rowland’s presence on Journal Square encompasses the Jersey Journal building, the Public

90

american dictators

Service building, the Labor National Bank building (commissioned by labor czar and then Hague ally Theodore Brandle), and the southern wing of the old Trust Company Bank. Rowland’s preference for a certain type of dark yellow brick gave a degree of uniformity to Jersey City’s municipal buildings, including the medical center. One Hague critic noted in 1940 that some city politicians lived in houses built with the same kind of brick: “Such coincidences add to the romance of Jersey City hospital history.” Rowland’s choice also created headaches for Metrovest decades later. The bricks were made in kilns that embedded flecks of charcoal within the hardened clay, and the company that had used this method was long out of business. Metrovest had to order bricks from an Italian company for any exterior work on the historic buildings.

The maternity hospital, opened in 1931, predated the New Deal, but Roosevelt’s largesse allowed Hague to make the complex something much bigger and grander than he would have accomplished without federal help. The medical center amounted to an early American experiment in socialized medicine; few patients, if any, paid for their care. “Have your baby or your operation on the mayor,” was the organization’s slogan, and the policy made loyalty to the machine literally a cradle-to-grave affair. Hague, ever the canvasser, made a point of visiting the wards to speak with each patient. Sick children were treated to visits from Santa Claus during the holidays, with the mayor standing by as a silent reminder that not all presents originated at the North Pole. In the depths of the Depression, Hague was savior as well as mayor to many Jersey City residents. He was fortunate to have opponents

public works

91

who seemed to consider a high tax rate a greater evil than a high infant mortality rate: Once a Republican prober accused Hague of allowing the affluent as well as the poor to have their babies and operations free. With oracular sincerity the Mayor proclaimed: “If they say they cannot pay, that is good enough for me. . . . We do not argue with a sick person.” “If the patient is trying to get something for nothing,” the prober demanded, “notwithstanding his ability to pay?” “My God, he is welcome to be restored to health!” “At the expense of the other taxpayers?” “Of anybody, of anybody. When you give me a sick man I will restore him to health at anyone’s cost.”

In 1940, Dayton David McKean estimated the annual cost of running the 2,000-bed medical center at anywhere from $25 million to $30 million. The medical director, George O’Hanlon, collected a $12,000 annual salary and lived in a rooftop penthouse; his subordinates also enjoyed salaries of about $10,000 and penthouses furnished at a cost of about $50,000 each. (“If the construction and furnishing of twenty-five million dollars’ worth of Medical Center buildings did not establish some Hudson County fortunes,” McKean observed, “then the Center is unique among public buildings in the area.”) Nurses, interns, and other staffers were also well paid, but Hague’s system of assigning certain expenditures to other city departments— for example, the ambulance costs were carried in the police budget— made it impossible to pinpoint costs. McKean estimated that each of the center’s 2,000 beds cost $2,351 a year, roughly twice the figure at other hospitals. The longevity of staffers contributed significantly to that amount. One doctor who had quit the staff and moved to Brooklyn returned to Jersey City for a party several months later

92

american dictators

and met a colleague who asked: “Where have you been lately? I see your salary checks going out, but I never see you around.” It was a simple matter to denounce the Jersey City Medical Center for being too big, too expensive, too riddled with corrupt practices. The critics hardly ever seemed to factor in the societal benefits of the vital medical services provided to county residents during the Depression or of the unofficial orphanage that operated in the basement of the maternity hospital, providing care for children whose parents were laid up. Among Jersey City residents of a certain age, there is unmistakable pride when they say they were born in “the Margaret Hague.” To be fair, McKean’s criticism of the center went beyond dollars and cents: The doctors find themselves constantly hampered by the political control over them. Mayor Hague, who is an expert on many things, thinks of himself as also an expert on hospitals; he does not have an office in the Center only to get away from City Hall. He is the real superintendent, and on occasion has countermanded doctors’ orders, even those of Doctor O’Hanlon. It is well known that most of the physicians receive no written record of their appointments, so they can be dismissed without notice. The doctors cannot depend upon the political appointees who are on the payroll, but obey orders or not as they please. When subordinates can go over the doctors’ heads to the Mayor, the normal relationship between physician and staff is impossible.

According to McKean, the medical center had a poor reputation among area physicians, and young doctors avoided serving internships there if they could find places elsewhere. “It is also well known in the schools that no important piece of medical research has come from the Medical Center in the twenty years it has been in operation,” McKean claimed.

public works

93

A largely forgotten reason for the size and scale of the complex was its place in Hague’s grand scheme for a Greater Jersey City incorporating Bayonne, Hoboken, and other Hudson County municipalities, which would have given him the power to confront the Republican-held legislature on his own terms. It was a prospect that terrified the GOP, and for all his power and political cunning, Hague was never able to bring it about. Without that consolidation, the medical center was far too large for its purpose, and the complex went into a steep decline after Hague left power. Starting in 1954, it housed the Seton Hall College of Medicine and Dentistry, which was eventually acquired by the state and relocated to Newark as the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry. The complex closed in 1988, and Metrovest acquired the site in 2005. The current Jersey City Medical Center is a more modestly scaled facility. As with many WPA projects, the medical center was as much an art object as a public works endeavor. Hague insisted on using a gold alloy for decorative inlays, and the foyer of the main building was dominated by an immense frieze, From Myth to Medicine, that offered an eccentrically telescoped history of medicine, from cavemen and Pandora’s Box to Egyptian physicians and modern surgeons. It was the work of sculptor Allen George Newman, who carved his name along the edge of a cloud, where it remained unnoticed until a historic restoration expert came across it during the Metrovest renovation. As for Hague’s old office, Metrovest decided to honor his memory by making it a poker room. To anyone familiar with Hague’s career, it was a fitting tribute.

Another New Deal legacy was Roosevelt Stadium, built at a cost of some $1.5 million and opened in 1937 as the home of the Jersey City Giants. Hague, who knew as much about filling stadium seats as he

94

american dictators

did about rallying voters, declared an afternoon holiday for the April 23 inaugural game, which was attended by 31,234 fans—a minor league record. Hague’s reach was long, but not long enough to keep the Giants from losing, 4–3, to the Rochester Red Wings. The opening-day holiday became a Jersey City tradition, and for the next two decades Hague’s sports temple on the banks of Newark Bay prospered. The stadium secured a place in the history books when the Jersey City Giants played the Montreal Royals on April 18, 1946. The second baseman for that game was Jackie Robinson, an African American whose appearance on the field broke the color line that had kept organized baseball segregated. City residents of a certain age also remember the stadium fondly as the place where the Saint Peter’s Prep and Dickinson High School football teams honed their rivalry. The Jersey City Giants folded in 1961. Lacking a steady draw, the stadium turned into a decaying white elephant. Despite attempts to bring in rock concerts and a second minor-league franchise, Roosevelt Stadium was costing the city tens of thousands of dollars to maintain, and its parking lot had become a late-night party spot for local youths. (One shudders to think what Hague would have made of the Deadheads who packed the stadium for the Grateful Dead in August 1976.) With repair costs estimated at some $4 million, the city decided in the early 1980s to raze the decrepit arena and use the site for middle-income housing. William Bromirsky, a funeralhome director who sat on the city planning board, delivered the eulogy: “It’s a healthy plan to replace a dead facility, and if anybody can talk about the dead, I can.”

A little over a decade before Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson came into their own as bosses, William Riordan, a reporter for the

public works

95

New York Post, published a collection of observations by George Washington Plunkitt, an operative of Tammany Hall, the Democratic club that took its name from a Delaware Indian chief and styled its members as sachems and braves. Along with enduring insights into the workings of power and politics in America’s teeming cities, Plunkitt articulated the difference between what he called “dishonest” graft, which involved outright theft and extortion of criminal enterprises, and “honest” graft: My party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there’s a rush for my land, which nobody cared particularly for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course it is. Well, that’s honest graft. Or supposin’ it’s a new bridge they’re goin’ to build. I get tipped off and I buy as much property as I can that has to be taken for approaches. I sell at my own price later on and drop some money in the bank. Wouldn’t you? It’s just like lookin’ ahead in Wall Street or in the coffee and cotton market. It’s honest graft and I’m lookin’ for it every day in the year. I will tell you frankly that I’ve got a good lot of it, too.

There was also a good lot of it for Nucky Johnson and Frank Hague. Jersey City lore has it that while most of the old Horseshoe was being cleared to build approaches for the Holland Tunnel, shell companies connected with Hague and his cronies bought up crumbling tenement properties, the value of which soared upon condemnation. Shortly after becoming mayor in 1917, Hague made two payments totaling $63,000 for a property at Duncan Avenue and

96

american dictators

Hudson Boulevard, which was subsequently cleared for construction of a luxury apartment building. (In what would be his standard practice, Hague paid cash for the property through his attorney, John Milton.) The apartment was built by the Duncan Company, in which Hague received $65,000 in stock. He also received the right to occupy, rent-free, a duplex apartment worth $7,000 a year. While Hague and Nucky were no slouches at dishonest graft, the honest graft generated by the public works constructed during their respective tenures proved their mettle as bosses. They accomplished genuinely good things for their constituents, even as they padded their pockets. Like Plunkitt, they saw their opportunities and they took ’em.

As a Republican with no pull at the White House, Nucky Johnson had no access to WPA funds. His two great public works legacies to Atlantic City were built in the 1920s. Both were far-sighted and eminently practical, reflecting his awareness that the resort needed to foster off-season business and end its dependence on railways at a time when the automobile was transforming America. During the reign of Louis Kuehnle Jr., contractors in Atlantic County routinely kicked back as much as 33 percent of a public project’s cost to the machine, a practice that continued under Nucky Johnson. The single most favored contractor of the Nucky era was Morrell Tomlin, whose firm was awarded virtually all the major road construction and paving contracts between 1929 and 1936. This influence was the patrimony of his father, John Tomlin, a Republican player at both the city and the county levels. The enormous sums of money coming in from bootleggers and racketeers no doubt helped fund the construction of the Convention Hall, which upon its opening in May 1929 was hailed as an

public works

97

architectural marvel. Built for $15 million under the aegis of Edward Bader, the boss’s pet mayor, the Convention Hall had no roof posts or pillars to block anyone’s view of the stage. Built to accommodate more than 14,000 spectators, the Convention Hall also had the world’s largest pipe organ, the Main Auditorium Organ, a 33,000pipe behemoth capable of filling the cavernous space with music. The Miss America beauty pageant, which had begun on the Boardwalk in 1921, adopted the hall as its home and remained there until 2004. Less showy, but even more practical, was the Black Horse Pike, a highway link from Camden to Atlantic City that benefited from federal funds, courtesy of President Warren G. Harding. Harding, an affable newspaper publisher and Ohio senator whose taste for high living matched Nucky’s own, had been considered a dark horse candidate at the 1920 GOP national convention in Chicago. An upgraded highway for Atlantic City was not the least of the favors he would offer as thanks for Nucky’s delivery of New Jersey’s Republican delegates. Nucky was also free to pick the contractor on the project, and in due course Morrell Tomlin’s company went to work. Little construction work of any kind was carried out during the grim years of the Depression, but in 1933 the state Public Utilities Commission handed Nucky a windfall by ordering the two railroads serving Atlantic City to merge. The move was not exactly a surprise. Harry Bacharach, once again serving as Nucky’s pet mayor, was the city’s representative on the PUC, and the boss had plenty of friends in Trenton to write the enabling legislation for the merger. The newly consolidated Pennsylvania–Reading Seashore Lines would require a new railway station in Atlantic City, with the railroads and the PUC dividing the cost. To no one’s surprise, the $2.5 million contract went to A. P. Miller Construction Co., a local firm in which Nucky Johnson was a silent partner. The 1934 dedication ceremony for the

98

american dictators

appropriately named Union Station was held on October 24— Bacharach’s birthday—and the capacious new building was presented to the public as the fulfillment of one of Bacharach’s longtime dreams. Hague was not among the notables attending the ceremony, but his handpicked governor, A. Harry Moore, was present for the occasion. Every now and then, a boss liked to tip his hat to a colleague. The Union Station project added to Nucky’s coffers, but it also contained the germ of future problems. A. P. Miller’s legal counsel was Joseph A. Corio, the machine’s liaison to the Italian American community, and Corio’s ability to get out the ethnic Duck Town vote was amply rewarded. Nucky steered clients his way, arranged for Corio to serve as a state assemblyman and county recorder, and would eventually have him appointed judge of the Common Pleas Court. A few years after the railway station was finished, Corio’s ties to Nucky, and a $60,000 check for “legal fees” arising from the project, would come to the attention of federal agents who did not share George Washington Plunkitt’s enthusiasm for “honest graft.”

The immense swamp called the New Jersey Meadowlands offers two landmarks, one natural and one manmade. The first is Snake Hill, sometimes called Laurel Hill, the volcanic remnant that looms over the New Jersey Turnpike as it cuts through Secaucus. The second is the Pulaski Skyway, a three-mile causeway of black-painted steel that connects Jersey City and Newark, crossing through south Kearny and spanning the Hackensack and Passaic rivers. It is all that remains of the Route 1 Extension project, America’s first superhighway and unintentional memorial to a sordid and violent chapter in the history of the Hague administration. The extension was planned and built as a limited-access thoroughfare that would carry traffic from the mouth of the Holland

public works

99

Tunnel in Jersey City to Newark and Elizabeth. The need for the extension was obvious even as Clifford M. Holland was named chief engineer of the tunnel project in 1919. Planners realized the impact that millions of cars and trucks emerging from the tunnel would have on Jersey City’s chaotic street grid and the local roads across the Meadowlands. When a round of dithering and political scandals in the New Jersey Highway Department delayed work on the Meadowlands extension project, Governor George Silzer made a clean sweep with new appointees. Silzer also sounded the alarm at a May 1924 conference on New York regional traffic problems: We know that when the vehicular tunnel opens and the streams of cars that come from that tunnel are brought into the congested streets of Jersey City and Newark and the rest of that section, the tunnel will be absolutely worthless unless we make some provision to take care of those vehicles. . . . We had legislative sanction this winter for diverting some of our highway money in order that relief might be given. We cannot wait until the tunnel is opened, and then start to solve the question.

In the story of the Holland Tunnel construction project, Hague was an obstructionist and grandstander. The Jersey City boss was able to get one of his men, John F. Boyle, appointed to the commission overseeing the daunting project. Boyle, whose box- and paper-stock companies made him one of Jersey City’s leading businessmen, became Hague’s main ally in making endless demands for street improvements on the Jersey City end of the tunnel—improvements that would enable the Boss to secure kickbacks from contractors. There was no small amount of irony involved when one of the Holland Tunnel exit plazas was named in his honor in 1936. But where the Route 1 Extension project was concerned, Hague was not an obstructionist but an expediter. He went to Trenton to

100

american dictators

argue from the floor of the state legislature that the $40 million tab should be borne by the state since the benefits of unimpeded traffic to and from the tunnel would be felt throughout New Jersey. Hague even had a face-to-face meeting with Fred Lavis, one of the key design engineers on the Route 1 Extension project, when it seemed that Lavis’s residence in New York would keep him from being hired for a New Jersey project. Lavis, who had served as a consulting engineer on projects in Central and South America, Europe, and even China, was the personal choice of William G. Sloan, the New Jersey state highway engineer. Sloan took Lavis with him to meet the Boss, and with Hague’s backing Lavis was appointed in 1924 to plot out the course of the extension, which during its planning and construction was known as, variously, the Meadowlands viaduct, the “diagonal highway,” and the Meadowlands causeway. Hague’s influence was also felt in the design of the causeway across the Meadowlands, which Lavis and state engineer Sigvald Johannesson envisioned as an elevated roadway with a pair of drawbridges over each river, raised high enough to allow for passage of most ship traffic. Hague wanted an access ramp that would promote development in Kearny. This modification posed no problem until the U.S. War Department stepped in at the eleventh hour to demand that the drawbridges be replaced with fixed spans 135 feet above the water. To satisfy the War Department while preserving the Kearny ramp, the causeway had to be redesigned with a swooping midsection to prevent the ramp from being impossibly steep. The bloodiest part of the project’s history began when work started on the causeway in 1930. The four bridge companies building the span were fervently anti-union, but labor boss Theodore “Teddy” Brandle—a former Hague ally who controlled ironworker and building trade locals throughout northern New Jersey—swore he would unionize the project at any cost. The toll in blood and

public works

101

strife was high, and most of it was borne by Brandle and his men. When a non-union worker died following an attack by union picketers in February 1932, Hague used the incident as the pretext to launch a comprehensive war against labor organizers in Hudson County and beyond. (As will be shown in a later chapter, Hague had his own reasons for wanting to cut Brandle and all other union men down to size.) When the completed span was opened to traffic on Thanksgiving Day 1932, twenty-one union men languished in jail, awaiting trial for the murder of the strikebreaker. The boss of Hudson County had previously been a friend to unions, but the Skyway labor war marked the end of that relationship.

Roosevelt Stadium and the Jersey City Medical Center, the projects closest to Hague’s heart, are either gone or modified for new purposes. What is arguably his greatest legacy—still functioning decades after his death—was one of his earliest projects: Journal Square. With the Holland Tunnel slated to open in 1927, Hague pursued plans for a new business and transportation center that would not only benefit from the flow of drivers coming from Manhattan but also provide a true uptown commercial area for a city that had been cobbled together from disparate communities. The natural place for such a center was the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad stop at Summit Avenue, just south of Bergen Square. The heart of the development was a huge open spandrel concrete bridge spanning the Bergen Hill Cut, a canyon carved out in 1834 by the Pennsylvania Railroad. The bridge was designed by civil engineer Abraham Burton Cohen, whose 2,375-foot-long Tunkhannock Viaduct in Nicholson, Pennsylvania, was and is the largest concrete bridge ever constructed. The old Hudson Tubes rail lines were

102

american dictators

eventually incorporated into the Port Authority Trans-Hudson subway system, and travelers stepping off at Journal Square often pause to stare at the immense concrete arches supporting Kennedy (née Hudson) Boulevard, which could have doubled as a set for the 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis. Hague was not the only local notable to envision a central business district. Such a plan had long been cherished by Joseph and Walter Dear, owners and publishers of the Jersey Journal, and their decision in 1926 to relocate their newspaper’s headquarters to the district (helped, as we have seen, by under-the-table financial inducements arranged by Hague) led the mayor to christen it Journal Square. A few years later, when Hague and the Dears were at sword’s points, he renamed it Veterans Square, but the name never caught on and was abandoned once the opponents reconciled. The property condemnations that preceded the Journal Square project produced a windfall not only for the Dears but also for a shadowy New York figure named H. S. Kerbaugh, who within a fiveyear period turned up as the owner of three crucial properties in addition to a parcel of land referred to as “the bowl,” for which he realized a $101,930 profit. The state legislature’s Case-McAllister probe of 1928–1929 found that the mysterious Kerbaugh had also gained a total of $526,000 from two other county projects prior to the Journal Square expansion. The committee’s report found this an “extraordinary coincidence.” The principal contractor on the $3.2 million Journal Square project was a firm headed by John J. Ferris, who also happened to have been appointed by Hague to the Jersey City Board of Education. After Ferris died during the construction, there were found among his personal effects a pocket diary and a memorandum listing what appeared to be a payment of $200,000 to “Hague and Freeholders.”

public works

103

When Hague was questioned about the memorandum during his appearance before the Case-McAllister Committee, the mayor dismissed it as a Republican forgery.

Throughout Hague’s reign and well into the 1960s, Journal Square was the heart of Jersey City, its broad avenue lined with department stores, specialty shops, and three movie palaces grand enough to rival anything seen in New York City. The largest of these was the 4,300-seat Stanley, which opened in 1928 with an invitation-only gala for a screening of The Dove, starring Jersey City native Norma Talmadge. Hague himself took the stage to welcome the new theater, an architectural marvel with an enormous copper marquee, a three-story-high lobby, gorgeous murals, the huge original chandelier from the Waldorf-Astoria, and an enormous ceiling decorated with twinkling lights, with projected clouds providing the illusion of an open-air theater. In 1942, Journal Square was name-checked in “Jersey Bounce,” a swing-era classic written by Tiny Bradshaw, Eddie Johnson, and Bobby Plater, with lyrics by Buddy Feyne. In its first year the song was a hit for Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, and Shep Fields, and it would also be recorded by the King Sisters, Glenn Miller, and Ella Fitzgerald. During World War II the title was used as a nickname by several bomber squadrons. Journal Square lost a good deal of its bounce during the urban declines of the 1970s and 1980s, and even now it is a shadow of its old self. But the real estate gold rush that began in Hoboken during the 1980s and spread to other communities clustered along the Hudson waterfront is finally reaching portions of Jersey City. As of this writing, the Grove Street PATH station has become an open-air arts market, and neighborhoods that seemed hopeless only a decade

104

american dictators

earlier are becoming trendy. Journal Square continues to function as a transportation and commercial hub, and with the rise of new office developments along the Jersey City waterfront, it may yet see a renaissance as a major shopping district. Unlike Hague’s other pet projects, it has shown itself able to adapt to changing times in ways the mayor might have done well to emulate.

6

2 A Choice of Enemies We hear about constitutional rights, free speech, and the free press. Every time I hear these words, I say to myself, “That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.” You never heard a real American talk in that manner. —Frank Hague, addressing the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, April 2, 1938

The statement by which Frank Hague is best known to history was made in November 1937, during a speech on juvenile offenders and the law, given at Jersey City’s Emory Methodist Episcopal Church. Hague, who knew a thing or two about the ways boys can get into trouble on the streets, talked about being at a police station when two boys were brought in for truancy. The boys told the mayor they would sooner go to jail than go back to school, so Hague tried to get them jobs through the city Bureau of Special Services. Told that the boys were ineligible under the state’s “working papers” law, Hague exploded: “Listen, here is the law! I am the law! These boys go to work!” The speech was widely publicized, and “I am the law!” quickly became Frank Hague’s middle name as far as the public was concerned. As Hague’s defenders correctly point out, “I am the law!” is hardly a dictatorial statement when you understand the circumstances, and it actually reflects credit on the man. But the reason 105

106

american dictators

it stays with him is that it applies entirely too well to his use of power against his critics and opponents. This is the area in which epithets like “Hudson County Hitler” carry the ring of truth and pose a dilemma for anyone inclined to praise Hague for his more humane and far-sighted programs. Simply put, if you were a Jersey City resident and you criticized the mayor, you were asking for trouble. Your property taxes could double or triple overnight, or your business could be ruined. If the mayor was sufficiently angry, you might find yourself on the wrong end of a nightstick or even be jailed on a trumped-up charge. Jersey City police routinely opened mail and read telegrams that arrived in Journal Square. Nor was the mayor any gentler with opponents in public life. As late as 1944, when a string of Republican victories left him looking vulnerable, Hague was quite capable of going the extra mile with troublemakers. When Walter Edge began his second term as governor in 1944, he sent freshly appointed state attorney general Walter D. Van Riper to investigate the illegal gambling parlors in Jersey City. These betting shops were an open secret— newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler caustically referred to Jersey City as the “Horse Bourse”—but they were also a rich source of payoffs for the machine, and the attorneys general appointed by Hague’s pet governors had shown curiously little interest in closing them down. Within a few months after Van Riper went after the gambling dens, he was under federal indictment on charges that he had been kiting checks and selling black-market gasoline through a gas station in which he held a part ownership. Van Riper fought back and was eventually acquitted on both charges, but his reformer image had been irreparably tarnished, and his plans to run for governor were ruined.

a choice of enemies

107

“Play ball with me and I’ll make you rich,” was a characteristic Hague boast. The corollary was that anyone who didn’t play ball would still get the bat.

The contented ruler of a self-contained political kingdom with little to fear from Trenton could afford to view his enemies with amused contempt rather than vengeful anger. “Nucky Johnson does not have to tamper with anyone’s civil liberties,” one reporter observed. “Atlantic City has only one industry—providing a good time for seekers of pleasure. Its atmosphere must be, and is, joyously free and easy.” From all accounts, Nucky was not a hands-on kind of boss when dealing with opponents. Though there were occasional reports of too-insistent critics getting some teeth knocked out by Nucky’s supporters, his approach seems to have been to ignore them or to drive them out by making it impossible for them to earn a living in Atlantic County. One of Nucky’s most persistent local critics was Samuel Comply, an attorney who chaired the Committee of One Hundred, a group dedicated to cleaning up the resort. Comply hired private detectives to document the seamy goings-on in Atlantic City. His reports were duly forwarded to the office of the Atlantic County prosecutor, Louis Repetto, where they were duly ignored. Comply tried moving up the chain of command but found judges and state officials no more attentive. Unable to make headway against official corruption and public indifference, Comply organized a rally against the machine’s corruption on July 31, 1930. About six hundred attendees, most of them out-of-town clergymen and reformers, listened to a series of speeches decrying Sodom-by-the-Sea. Unfortunately for Comply, Nucky Johnson picked the same night to hold one of his “Nucky’s

108

american dictators

Nocturne” galas, the annual banquets to show appreciation for the Trenton legislators, both Democratic and Republican, who helped to keep the party going. Conspicuous among the revelers was Governor Morgan Larson, who had begged off an invitation to attend the Committee of One Hundred’s event. Rather than fight his enemies, Nucky had simply drowned them out. Even Comply’s choice of venue—the Odd Fellows Hall on New York Avenue—was ironically appropriate. Anyone who tried to spoil Nucky Johnson’s party was an odd fellow indeed. One of the few times Nucky dabbled in Hague-style rough stuff was the 1924 mayoral election. Mayors in Atlantic City were chiefly sock puppets for the boss, so it aroused little comment when twoterm mayor Harry Bacharach opted not to run for reelection in 1920. Edward Bader, another compliant Republican, took his place. With the arrival of Prohibition and the limitless opportunities for graft flowing through the resort, Bacharach decided he wanted back in and announced he would run against Bader. For Nucky, this was a tricky situation. Bacharach had been a popular mayor, a tireless booster with a taste for showmanship that went over well with the citizenry. On the other hand, Bader had cultivated plenty of friends and allies in his first term. Unwilling to alienate a substantial bloc of voters, Nucky held off on supporting either candidate. To make matters more complicated, Bacharach had spent four years studying the ways of power at Nucky’s feet. As would be the case for Frank Hague two decades later, the master was being challenged by his own student. When he decided to stick with Bader, however, Nucky showed Bacharach he still had plenty to learn. The boss’s first step was to borrow a page from the Hague playbook and cut a deal with the opposition. Nucky approached local Democratic leader Charles Lafferty and agreed to add one

a choice of enemies

109

Democrat, Harry Headley, to the Bader slate. The fusion ticket’s prospects were further enhanced by preparations for a trainload of “floaters” from Philadelphia on election day. When Nucky learned that Bacharach’s people were paying Northsiders a higher per-vote fee, the boss upped his price. Upon word that Bacharach had put the members of the Board of Elections on his payroll, Nucky bided his time until election day; then, in a display of Boardwalk brass he swept out Bacharach’s allies and replaced them with loyal appointees. It was an unusually violent election day by Atlantic City standards, punctuated by brawls at polling places and underhanded tricks on both sides. But when the dust cleared, Bader had been reelected. The New York Times announced that Bader’s ticket won “amidst fistfights, telephone wire-cutting, election officials being dismissed on election day, and the vehicular deaths of two detectives hired to serve warrants on the ‘floaters’ alleged to have been planted.” Nucky’s control was secure. Moreover, thanks to his deal with Lafferty, GOP leader Nucky was now effectively the head of the local Democratic Party as well. As for Bacharach, he mended fences with Nucky and in 1930 returned to the mayor’s office for another three terms.

Frank Hague was a product of the Horseshoe, and until his rising fortunes took him uphill to a duplex on Hudson Boulevard, he was a member of Saint Michael’s Parish in downtown Jersey City. From there, Monsignor Leroy E. McWilliams was able to watch the fledgling boss and his minions, and marvel at the control he exerted over the city. “A good psychologist might tell you that the answer to the Hague riddle is that he represented the father image to the people,” McWilliams noted. “That is, they looked up to him as one would to

110

american dictators

an old-fashioned father, a person who is benevolent and vengeful, just and harsh—one who knows better than you what is good for you.” Socialist Norman Thomas was more succinct, accusing Hague of “dispensing bread, circuses, and punishment.” If Frank Hague was a father figure, he was one in the spare-therod-spoil-the-child mold. Though he was never reluctant to deliver punishment himself—tales were legion of the mayor kicking and punching city officials who annoyed him—more often the rod was applied in the form of a policeman’s nightstick. Jersey City had one of the largest and best-paid police forces of any city of similar size; as of 1940, the police payroll showed 867 officers, 566 of them patrolmen. That’s not including Hudson County’s 68 officers or the 103 officers paid by the Hudson County Boulevard Commission to patrol the eighteen miles of Hudson Boulevard (which was already under city police jurisdiction). “The number of policemen to be seen on the streets of Jersey City is so great,” Dayton David McKean observed, “that a visitor feels there is one on every corner. Jersey City always looks as if there were about to be a parade or a riot.” The readiness of Jersey City police officers to use violence became legendary early on, and they had the full support of the man at the top. “We don’t give our cops nightsticks for ornaments,” Hague told the newspapers proudly. A frequent recipient of Hague’s chastisement was James “Jeff” Burkitt, an Alabama-born ironworker and street corner critic whose speeches against corruption and waste in City Hall regularly ended in beatings at the hands of Jersey City police. On one occasion, Burkitt was whisked off to the courthouse basement and beaten so thoroughly that he had to be held up in court the next morning while Judge Leo Sullivan sentenced him to ninety days in jail (his offense was using abusive language to a police officer). Burkitt’s street corner speeches always drew crowds, not so much in support

a choice of enemies

111

of his message—few city residents were bold enough to back him publicly—as in anticipation of the inevitable mayhem. During one famous confrontation, Burkitt appeared at a city council meeting, heavily bruised and bandaged, to ask Hague to show mercy and designate a place where he could speak without fear of reprisal. Hague, admiring his men’s handiwork, simply laughed. When Burkitt protested, Hague said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t help it. You look so goddamn funny with all those bandages on your head.” Another Hague critic, John Longo, incurred the Boss’s wrath in 1937, when he tried to field an anti-Hague slate of Democrats in the primary. Hague’s handpicked governor, A. Harry Moore, was running for a third term; among Republicans jockeying for the GOP gubernatorial nomination was the Reverend Lester H. Clee, a Protestant who inveighed against Irish Catholic corruption every Sunday and promised to be a large thorn in the Boss’s side if he won. Longo acknowledged after the fact that he had heard rumors that Hague was planning a reprise of his “One Day Republican” maneuver, by which Democrats voted as Republicans in the primary, and so put together a group of candidates “to keep the Democrats busy in their own primaries,” thereby boosting Clee’s prospects. All of Longo’s primary petitions were thrown out by the county clerk, and Longo himself was later prosecuted for election fraud and sentenced to nine months in jail. Clee won a court order to impound the Jersey City ballot boxes, but when state troopers arrived at the county courthouse to seize them, their way was barred by about forty of Hague’s loyal police officers. A few hours later, the troopers went back to Trenton empty-handed. Thomas Brogan, Hague’s choice for chief justice of the state supreme court, found no need to impound the boxes because there was no evidence of widespread fraud. Longo, like Burkitt and other persistent annoyances for the Hague machine, did his time in the county prison, a former leprosy

112

american dictators

hospital located in the fetid swamps of Secaucus, where hog farmers flushed offal into the marshes and high tides often brought filthy water swirling into the ground floor. When the Honest Ballot Association sent a contingent of Princeton University students to monitor a Jersey City election in 1920, five were quickly beaten up and hospitalized while others were ejected from various polling places. They pleaded their case to the mayor himself, but he had little sympathy: “Well, you fellows can go back there if you wish, but if you get knocked cold it will be your own hard luck.” Hague was still chuckling about it years later during a conversation with a Collier’s writer. “Animal spirits, that’s all. I told my boys to lay off, but it was a pretty dull election, and they couldn’t resist the temptation to have a little fun.” A big part of that fun must have been the obvious amusement the Boss took in their handiwork. In a city where the police were encouraged to be as aggressive as possible, with the implicit knowledge that Hague would back them up, it became very easy to get into trouble. In 1934, a labor writer attempted to question a Jersey City police officer on the street and was arrested for disorderly conduct. In the city jail, he found plenty of men whose chief offense seemed to have been the venerable one of being in the wrong place at the wrong time: Unlike me, most of the men were ignorant of the charge against them. . . . One man, a Swede who had been looking for a job and had asked an officer for directions, was taken to the courtroom on Thursday, June 28, only to have his case postponed to July 5. Bail may have been set but he failed to mention it to me—he had no way of getting it. I was in court on July 5 and as I entered a man said, “Hello.” It was the Swede. He had been discharged. He borrowed ten cents from me to get out of the city.

a choice of enemies

113

Leon Wilson, a young Negro, had been picked up as he was waiting for a street car on Sunday, June 25, at 7:45 p.m. He had shown the patrolman his work card indicating that he was employed as a cleaner in the Pennsylvania Station, New York, and that he had worked there earlier that day. He explained to the officer that he had come over to Jersey City to visit a friend. Wilson had been allowed to make one telephone call since his arrest; having failed to reach his employer, who was out, he was not permitted to call again. When I left jail on Friday, June 29, to be transferred to the county jail, Wilson was still locked up awaiting trial. Bail of $1,500 had been set—Wilson earns $15 a week.

Snoops hung out at Bickfords, the popular Journal Square eatery, to listen in on idle chatter and report anything that might have constituted criticism of the mayor. Madeline Butler, a Jersey City native who lit out in 1957, recalled growing up with the oppressive sense that Hague’s minions were monitoring every move made or word spoken: It was a way of life, mixed now with my memories of school and home and church: my classmate Peggy, on the morning after one of Frank Hague’s victorious elections, offering me a glance at a large white mint wafer on which was written in green sugar script, “From Uncle Frank.” “Uncle” Frank! What glory! Of course she was no more Hague’s niece than I was, but her father belonged to the inner political circle and mine did not. Other memories: my mother refusing to tell my father whom she would vote for in the next day’s election (the walls had ears, we felt). The ugly neighborhood tomcat we privately nicknamed “Mayor Hague” because he bossed all the other cats—and my mother’s horror when my four-year-old brother called the cat just that in a crowded butcher’s store. Politics seems even to be

114

american dictators mixed with my memories of St. Aloysius Church: the smell of dust and sin in the confessional, the scent of candles and innocence at Sunday Mass. Did the knowledge that my father and his father before him (it ran in families) were not favored at city hall carry over into a feeling of unworthiness before the Lord?

Hague’s efficiency at co-opting Republicans had led in 1921 to the formation of an investigative committee headed by State Senator William B. MacKay, which generated some headlines and unearthed some interesting information on payroll padding and other machine practices. But it would take another seven years, and the uproar over Hague’s manipulation of GOP primary votes to win the nomination of gubernatorial candidate Morgan Larson, to bring about a truly determined legislative inquiry. The joint committee was formed in June 1928, with State Senator Clarence E. Case as chairman. Upon his elevation to the state supreme court, Case was succeeded by Albert R. McAllister in February 1929. The CaseMcAllister Committee questioned a total of 335 witnesses over the course of forty-four public hearings. The resulting 8,200-page report remains the single best source of information on the inner workings of the Hague machine. The committee’s chief purpose—to uncover fraud in the appearance of the 22,000 “One-Day Republicans” from Hudson County who made Morgan Larson the GOP gubernatorial nominee in 1928—was immediately frustrated when it became clear that nothing illegal had taken place. The voters on record had stayed out of the 1927 primary elections altogether and could therefore vote in the GOP primary the following year. Like most of Hague’s most cunning political tactics, the maneuver didn’t break the law so much as exploit its weaknesses. Though the final report cited “many irregularities opposed to the intent and spirit of the law, if not its letter,”

a choice of enemies

115

some involving the connivance of Republican officials, attempts to prove conspiracy ran aground on the rocks of Hudson County omerta: Henry Waring of 203 13th street, Jersey City, New Jersey, a Democrat, voted in the Republican box, “Because I just felt I was going to vote that way.” Arthur J. Foley, a lieutenant of the Hudson County Police, a member of the Hudson County Democratic Committee, voted in the Republican Primary. When asked whether he was a Democrat or a Republican, he testified, “Well, I don’t know. At night time I changed my mind, at twelve o’clock. I had some friends I wanted to vote for.” The hearings quickly turned into opera buffa as the committee questioned a parade of imperturbably obtuse Jersey City employees— the City Hall maintenance staff and its six cuspidor cleaners; the street laborer whose duties were restricted to a two-block stretch of road; the county sheriff unable to identify most of his staff or describe their duties with any certainty—about payroll padding. A seasoned performer, Case frequently registered his astonishment by lowering his face and peering over his granny spectacles. A high point was the testimony of Albert H. Mansfield, the county health and sanitary inspector, who appeared to spend most of his time tending bar at a speakeasy called the Seminole Club. Asked to produce membership records for the speakeasy, Mansfield—unreachable and unreadable behind a walrus moustache—said the records had been stolen, most likely by vengeful Republicans. The committee members also heard testimony about the thousands of dollars in payoffs collected from movie theaters that stayed open on Sundays and the well-connected property owners who realized huge profits when the city condemned their land for public improvements.

116

american dictators

Hague himself was summoned to appear before the committee, and his testimony was a masterpiece of Horseshoe hauteur. The committee’s counsel, Russell Watson, wanted the mayor to explain how a public servant on his salary could maintain mansions on the Jersey Shore and Biscayne Bay, a luxury duplex apartment in Jersey City, and an enviable itinerary of overseas cruises with his family. Anyone contemplating the question of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object will want to read the transcript of Hague’s testimony before the committee: Watson: Up to that time [1921] you had no other gainful occupation than the offices you outlined at the beginning of the testimony? Hague: Only my brain and ability to see things. Watson: Did Mr. Milton purchase for your account the remainder of the land on which [the Duncan Hall apartment building] stands and pay for it $51,000? Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: Did you reimburse him in cash for the $51,000? Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: If you reimbursed him to the extent of $51,000 in cash, why did you handle business that way? Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: Was there any reason for making a cash payment, the payment not being made by check? Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: Why didn’t you draw a check on your National City Bank account for these two items of $12,000 and $51,000 to reimburse Mr. Milton. Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: Why did you use a dummy in these transactions? Hague: I decline to answer.

a choice of enemies

117

Hague’s stonewalling became hilarious as the questioning turned to his purchase of a mansion in the Jersey Shore town of Deal: Watson: June 16, 1923, you bought another piece of property at Deal, didn’t you? Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: You took title in the name of John J. McMahon as dummy, didn’t you? Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: Now, the amount of money you paid at that time was $30,000 and the amount of money Mr. Milton paid was $30,000. He testified he paid the purchase price by check, and that you reimbursed him in cash. Hague: I decline to answer. Watson: Was there any reason why in a business transaction between you and Mr. Milton, you should not give him a check? Hague: I decline to answer.

When the committee members cited Hague for contempt, the Hague-friendly judges on the Court of Errors and Appeals ruled that the committee had overstepped its bounds. Sawed off at the knees, the committee had to settle for bringing as much embarrassing information to light as possible. The hearings received close attention from the Jersey Journal, which had for a time backed Hague. But the cozy relationship had turned chilly in 1927, when the Dears refused to muzzle Dr. Francis L. Golden, one of Hague’s most viperish and effective critics, whose acid-etched letters to the Jersey Journal were a rallying point for city residents growing tired of the Boss’s rule. The chill grew downright frosty in 1928 as city police began “discouraging” news vendors from selling the Journal and the administration stopped running legal

118

american dictators

notices in its pages—a standard tactic for punishing uncooperative newspapers. City Hall tried to cut further into the newspaper’s revenues by getting large businesses to pull their advertising, and in October the city commissioners adopted a measure changing Journal Square’s name to Veterans’ Square (rail lines refused to recognize the name change, and residents never acquired the habit). When the Hoover landslide of 1928 buried Al Smith and a number of other Hague-backed candidates, the Journal pronounced the election a referendum on Hague’s administration and looked forward to seeing the mayor deposed in the next election. The municipal election of 1929 was the high noon of antiHagueism in Jersey City. The Jersey Journal went all out, spotlighting the ongoing Case-McAllister hearings, promoting Golden to full columnist status, and cheering the efforts of anti-Hague crusaders. As historian Richard S. Connors has noted, the Jersey Journal may have done its work too well: no fewer than six reform tickets coalesced as “old opposition” figures like Mark Fagan, John Morris, N. Peter Wedin, and James Meehan emerged from retirement. They were joined by James F. Murray, president of the Jersey City Businessmen’s Association, and Joshua Ringle, a well-known German American businessman. Such a flurry of reformers could only confuse voters and divide the opposition. A fusion ticket of two Republicans and three Democrats formed in April, only five weeks before the election, and campaigned hard with the Journal’s loud support. The editorial page featured a succession of anti-Hague cartoons: Hague as “King Frank, The Last,” trampling on constitutional rights; Hague with sacks of cash bound for the Bank of London and Banque de Paris; Hague’s head slowly sinking out of sight within his high-collared shirt (“Going, going, gone!”); a policeman threatening a stump speaker representing freedom of speech while the Boss called out encouragement; and,

a choice of enemies

119

on the eve of the vote, a despondent Hague riding a donkey into the darkness of “political oblivion.” Political oblivion beckoned for several of the candidates, but Hague was not one of them. The Boss’s supporters—working alongside the police—met campaign workers with violence and intimidation. When the dust cleared, Hague had won with a plurality of 24,000 votes. The Dears backed off, and for the rest of Hague’s reign the Jersey Journal served as a reliable booster of his organization. The reappointment of Joseph Dear to the Court of Errors and Appeals in 1931 helped salve old wounds, and deputy mayor John “Needlenose” Malone became friends with the Journal’s new editor, Fred Gainsway. Though Hague was always ready to apply the stick, he also knew when to be generous with the carrots. The 1929 election marked a turning point for Hague. He had been attacked on several fronts by a coalition of determined enemies, and he had beaten them so decisively that many either gave up or—in the case of Burkitt—pulled up stakes and left town. Burkitt, the self-styled “Jeffersonian Democrat,” did manage one parting shot by urging the Hoover administration to look into Hague’s finances. The Case-McAllister probe had turned up plenty of dirt, but Hague’s habit of making cash-only transactions on property through his attorney was a formidable obstacle to investigators. Nevertheless, the U.S. Treasury Department reviewed Hague’s income tax returns in 1929 and, finding them wanting, ordered the mayor to pay a $60,000 penalty. The money was paid on Hague’s behalf by an associate, Theodore “Teddy” Brandle, an ally who was about to become the antagonist in another political drama.

Brandle had been Hague’s right-hand man in dealing with labor voters, and the association made him a wealthy man. A more dapper

120

american dictators

and less thuggish version of brawling “labor czars” like Sam Parks, Brandle had consolidated the ironworker and building trades locals of northern New Jersey under his leadership. With Hague’s endorsement in his pocket, Brandle teamed up with a Hudson County assemblyman, Joseph Hurley, to found Branleygran, a bonding company that reaped commissions from a stream of state construction projects. He also ran his own construction company and in the mid-1920s launched the Labor National Bank, which towered over the newly rebuilt Journal Square. No ironworker or construction laborer could get a job in northern New Jersey unless his name was in Brandle’s file, and if he failed to pay his dues or meet any other union obligation, his name went into the do-not-hire file until he set things right. The change in Brandle’s fortunes began in the fall of 1931, when a Newark contractor named Leo Brennan was hired to build a powerhouse at the Jersey City Medical Center, Hague’s pride and joy. Brennan hired union men for the job, but failed to go through Brandle’s system. Brandle called a strike on the job site and then sent some bruisers to rough up Brennan’s men. Brennan wouldn’t back down, and Brandle threatened to shut down all work on the medical center if Hague didn’t resolve the dispute. Brennan was paid off, but Hague was now angry with Brandle. His means for dealing with the irritant was provided by the Route 1 Extension project, the last leg of which was being constructed over the expanse of Meadowlands between Newark and Jersey City, in south Kearny. The four bridge companies building the elevated roadway (now known as the Pulaski Skyway) belonged to the anti-union National Erectors’ Association, and Brandle had sworn to unionize the project or shut it down. The association, founded in 1907 during the brutal Sam Parks era of labor clashes, had plenty of experience in warring with unions, and the bridge companies had hired thugs of their own. Clashes between the work crews and Brandle’s picketers

a choice of enemies

121

grew so intense that local newspapers referred to them as “the war of the meadows.” Hague, obviously realizing that Brandle was overmatched, held back and watched as the cost of the strike (and the medical expenses of his men) drained the labor czar’s resources, already strained by the sudden loss of state contract monies and the onset of the Depression. (The causeway construction lasted from 1930 to 1932, the cruelest years of the collapse.) Brandle tried to mend fences with Hague, but the Boss refused to hear him out. On the morning of February 27, 1932, a carload of non-union workmen bound for the Kearny worksite was attacked by pipewielding thugs. Most of the men made it to safety, but William T. Harrison suffered a fractured skull and died the next morning at the Jersey City Medical Center. Hague ordered a dragnet to bring in as many of Brandle’s men as the police could find. By April, twentyone ironworkers were under indictment, including William “Star” Campbell, a former prizefighter who had worked picket duty for Brandle. Campbell was charged with Harrison’s murder, then with attempted suicide after he tried to hang himself in jail. The charges against most of the union men had been dropped by the time the case went to trial in December, and it ended in acquittals for the remaining defendants. Harrison’s slayer would never be found, but the uproar served its purpose for Hague, who launched a war against all union activity within Jersey City. Locals were thrown into receiverships under the supervision of John Lenehan, a Hagueassociated judge who immobilized union activity and drained the locals’ finances until they were no longer a threat. A 1937 report released by the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners found “an unusually high percentage of trade-union receiverships in Hudson County.” The report described how “a number of officials close to the Administration have been involved, often to their considerable financial gain. These receiverships have

122

american dictators

also been protracted to extraordinary lengths of time, during which the assets of the unions have been disbursed in receivership expenses. In many cases, the unions have been virtually destroyed.” The Jersey Journal and other Hudson County papers, for their part, dutifully reported Hague’s denunciations of “gorilla labor leaders” and endorsed his repeated calls for police to use their nightsticks freely and frequently in dealing with organizers and picketers. The subtext to this anti-labor campaign was the realization that Jersey City’s heavy property tax burden was chasing away industries. Running the machine was a costly affair, and Hague’s answer to the flight of businesses was to guarantee labor peace for the sweatshops he could induce to stake their claims to the city’s workers. Jersey City, once accommodating to union locals, quickly became known as “Scab City.”

During what Thomas Fleming called “the gray, dismal years of the Depression,” the character of Hague’s rule became more dictatorial, more intrusive, and more violent: For the next two decades, his operation became an exercise in the retention of power for its own sake. Having doublecrossed the two leaders who had given him his start, Hague trusted no one. Phones were tapped regularly. “Every night,” declares a man who is still an important Hudson County official, “a police lieutenant sat in the Western Union telegraph office in Journal Square and read every telegram that came in and went out of Jersey City that day.” Hague spies in the U.S. Post Office maintained similar surveillance on the mail of all those who were labelled untrustworthy. There were informants in every bank in Jersey City, quick to alert City Hall to any unusual surplus in a man’s account.

a choice of enemies

123

Though he had neutralized Teddy Brandle and put labor unions on the ropes, Hague faced a new threat during the Depression: the recently formed Congress of Industrial Organizations. The leadership of the well-established American Federation of Labor had long been seen as a stooge for management interests. Moreover, it was chiefly interested in skilled laborers. The CIO aimed to organize unskilled workers—precisely the employees used by the types of industries Hague was encouraging to come to Jersey City. Hague’s police met the CIO threat head-on, arresting organizers and breaking up picket lines, denying them the use of meeting halls, even turning back CIO organizers arriving in Journal Square from New York or Newark. A seamen’s strike that began in late 1936 along the Hudson River waterfront—the wellspring of the Hague machine’s graft and patronage operation—was crushed within several weeks. The mayor took to branding troublesome labor leaders as gangsters. After breaking up a job action at the McArdle Trucking Company, Hague said the police “arrested the ringleaders and we did apply the nightsticks because we found it necessary to apply nightsticks on an element of that character, and we will apply it again tomorrow if they make their appearance.” When he did not see gangsters in the ranks of labor, Hague saw communists. Denunciations of “Reds” became a mainstay of his speeches when the CIO launched its organizing drive in 1936. Even the American Labor Party, founded that same year in New Jersey, was given a coat of red paint because of its close association with the CIO. Forget their support of FDR, Hague said: “I have branded the American Labor Party as being a communistic group. I can prove that they are communistic.” The mayor’s crusade had plenty of support from the business community and even religious leaders. The second best-known Hague incident—second only to “I am the law!” in cementing his image as an American dictator—came

124

american dictators

on May Day of 1938, when Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas announced in Manhattan that he would travel to Jersey City that night to make a speech supporting the CIO. Thanks to their network of informers, Jersey City police knew exactly when Thomas arrived in Journal Square, and they immediately swept him up and sent him back across the river on the Pavonia Ferry. Thomas was not yet licked. He announced that he would make a speech entitled “The Role of Hagueism in New Jersey” in Newark’s Veterans Park on June 4. When Hague failed to get Thomas’s speaking permit rescinded, he fell back on his longtime association with Longy Zwillman, the Newark gangster whose bootlegging and gambling operations had flourished under Hague’s benevolent gaze. Zwillman sent his “Minutemen,” local bruisers usually employed as strikebreakers, to disrupt Thomas’s speech. As some two hundred onlookers stared, aghast, Zwillman’s thugs pelted Thomas with eggs and tomatoes, and a twenty-five-piece American Legion marching band faced him from the foot of the stage and blared patriotic anthems whenever he opened his mouth. A newspaper photographer snapped a picture of Thomas just as an egg splattered on his forehead. The Socialist leader later joked that if history remembered him for one thing, it would probably be that photo. He considered filing a lawsuit against Hague, but abandoned the idea when he realized that the machine’s phalanx of loyal judges would halt him in his tracks. The CIO pressed on, however, and in league with the American Civil Liberties Union it took its case against the mayor all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The worst damage to Hague’s case came in Newark federal court, where the CIO had asked for an injunction against enforcement of Jersey City’s ordinances against labor activities. The ACLU had shrewdly shifted the legal argument away from

a choice of enemies

125

union rights and into the realm of free speech. With that in mind, CIO attorney Dean Spaulding Frazer encouraged the mayor to speak freely, and the Boss happily did so as Judge William Clark looked on. Never had the adage “Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself” been so thoroughly and amusingly demonstrated by a public official as during Frank Hague’s June 1938 testimony. The mayor spoke at length, offering such pearls of Horseshoe wisdom as the idea that “objectors to the form of government that we enjoy here” be forcibly relocated to camps in Alaska. Clark’s ruling against Hague was hardly surprising, and when his decision was upheld by the Supreme Court the next year, Hague v. CIO became a cornerstone of law regarding political speech in public places. The CIO promptly went to work with leaflets and organizational meetings, free of interference from the suddenly deferential and accommodating Jersey City police force. Unfortunately for Hague, the fight against the CIO and the resulting Supreme Court decision put Jersey City in the public spotlight, and the picture was anything but flattering. National publications—The New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, and Life magazine—commissioned brutal investigative pieces. The most wounding was the Life article. Then in its heyday as the showcase for photojournalism, Life ran images of Jersey City’s squalor and ugliness. One surrealistic image, taken during a January 6, 1938, rally at the city armory, showed ranks of citizens meekly sitting beneath a banner reading: MAYOR HAGUE APPEALS TO YOU TO STAY. DON’T LEAVE—YOUR PRESENCE REGISTERS YOUR AMERICANISM. One was left to wonder what time they were finally allowed to go home. Hague’s response was to order city newsstands to stop carrying Life magazine, and Journal Square was suddenly bare of one of

126

american dictators

America’s most popular magazines. But the word was out in Jersey City and beyond: Hagueville was the laughingstock of America. And yet, even with these defeats, the machine would continue to function well into the next decade. Hague wasn’t going anywhere. Like Nucky Johnson, he knew that scandals always blow over. And, like Nucky, he could hardly imagine the means by which his power would be ended.

7

2 Decline and Fall Jason: You notice how it’s Monopoly out there? Remember Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens? David: Go directly to jail? Jason: Well, that’s me. Don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200. —The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972)

Kenny after Hague was like Khrushchev after Stalin. The celebration on the night of his election was the only spontaneous one I ever saw in Jersey City. —Madeline Butler, “Recollections of a Jersey City Childhood”

As Frank Hague’s battle with the CIO started to heat up in 1936, Nucky Johnson was facing a challenge of his own. Though the financial pressures of the Depression were as worrisome as ever, the Atlantic County boss had much to be thankful for. Like Hague, Nucky had come under fire from a newspaper, in his case the New York Evening Journal, owned by the immensely wealthy William Randolph Hearst. Early in 1930, the Journal made Atlantic City and its boss the focus of a series of exposés covering vice, political corruption, and carefree flouting of Prohibition laws, written with all the sensationalism associated with the master of yellow journalism. The chief effect of the series, which continued on an irregular basis over the next few years, was to convince Nucky that 127

128

american dictators

the city’s forty horse-betting parlors were too numerous and visible. He issued an order in August 1935 that the horse rooms double up and share space to lower their collective profile. Atlantic City legend has it that the Journal series was sparked by a conflict between Nucky and Hearst over a showgirl; since Hearst was already living openly with actress Marion Davies, that story may have to be taken with more than the usual number of grains of salt. Another legend has it that Nucky made belittling remarks about Davies, enraging Hearst, who would have even more cause for anger when gossip about his relationship with Davies provided a wounding subtext for the 1941 film Citizen Kane. The real threat to Nucky began in 1936, and the Boardwalk grandee was probably not even aware of it at the time. The U.S. Treasury Department and the Department of Justice had launched a joint investigation into Nucky’s finances. Working methodically for more than four years, suffering maddening reversals and disappointments every step of the way, the team patiently laid siege to Nucky’s financial foundations like termites tunneling within the Boardwalk to bring down the entire structure. The details of the investigation make up a highly readable 163-page report that offers a top-to-bottom examination of the workings of Atlantic City’s underworld.

The operation that brought down Nucky Johnson began in November 1936, when three federal Treasury agents—William Frank, Edward Hill, and Leo Marshall—rented a furnished apartment under assumed names and spent the next five months identifying the locations and owners of the resort’s brothels, horse-betting parlors, numbers banks, and casinos. Given the city’s small size and the openness with which the vice industry operated, the team

decline and fall

129

concluded early on that the city police were well aware of the situation. Horse-betting parlors each paid $160 a week in protection money, while numbers banks paid $100 a week. Brothels paid $100 a week during the summer season, $50 a week in the winter. “It was also ‘understood’ by the public that none of this graft went to the police officials themselves,” according to the team’s report. “Everyone ‘knew’ it went to ‘Nuck’ Johnson.” Meanwhile, Walter Doxon Jr., the city’s Internal Revenue agent, assembled the income tax returns of the racketeers the agents identified; it was no great surprise to see that their stated incomes fell far short of the revenues the agents had estimated for the city’s dens of iniquity. In addition, the Treasury agents went trolling through the city and county contracts for garbage hauling, road construction, and other services. They had no trouble ascertaining that Nucky collected monies from every contractor and even owned a piece of A. P. Miller Construction Co., which had built the new $2.4 million Pennsylvania-Reading railroad station—the only construction project of any size carried out in Atlantic City during the long slog of the Depression. The next step was to connect the graft with Nucky Johnson, and here the agents faced a daunting task. The Depression had laid waste to the city’s banks; of the fourteen open during the Roaring Twenties, ten had closed by 1935, and within the next year another two shut their doors. In the words of the official report, “very few of the taxpayers had bank accounts worth mentioning.” So one obvious route of investigation was closed. Nucky Johnson had been investigated twice before by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, in 1928 and 1934, and each time he had paid additional taxes but escaped criminal charges. Like his brother in bossism Frank Hague, Nucky worked on a cash-only basis whenever possible and was careful to balance his official income with any

130

american dictators

expenditures that could be traced to him. Moreover, Nucky kept no ledgers or accounts, nor did any of the racketeers operating under his wing. Time and again, the agents came up against a wall of silence. Nucky’s functionaries kept quiet out of loyalty, confident that the machine could shield itself from all attacks; the citizenry, even those opposed to the machine, likewise kept quiet because the Boardwalk boss seemed to have the luck of Satan. After all, in three decades nobody had even come close to nailing him. The first line of attack was the contract graft paid to John and Morrell Tomlin, the father-and-son team that had benefited from so many Atlantic County road projects, particularly the Black Horse Pike work in 1932. Many of the banks Morrell had worked through between 1929 and 1932 were closed and in the process of liquidation, adding another layer of difficulty. Two months of prospecting through Morrell Tomlin’s chaotic accounts found that Tomlin fils had not even bothered to file income tax reports between 1928 and 1935, despite having made bank deposits totaling $1.7 million. The bank accounts of Tomlin père showed huge discrepancies between bank deposits and reported income. Figuring that much of the income had been paid over to Nucky as graft, the federal agents threatened the Tomlins with criminal prosecution, but the two refused to roll over. Apparently Nucky’s flair for theatrics had rubbed off on the Tomlins: they showed up for a Department of Justice hearing in threadbare suits, pleading poverty and claiming they had lost everything when the banks folded. However, the government had photographs of John Tomlin in evening wear at a swank GOP banquet held only a few nights earlier, as well as evidence of extensive real estate holdings and investments. Father and son were indicted for tax evasion in March 1938, but they refused to implicate the Boardwalk boss.

decline and fall

131

The agents had better luck with their probe into garbage-hauling contracts, which turned up the names of Charles L. Bader, brother of a former Atlantic City mayor, and James J. Donahue, a Republican ward leader in Philadelphia and court attaché to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Presented with evidence of their tax evasion, they admitted to paying $10,000 in bribes to Nucky Johnson in order to win the contracts. It was a small amount of money, relatively speaking, but now the agents knew they were on the right track. They got another break when a trip through the ledgers of the A. P. Miller Construction Co. turned up a $60,000 “legal fee” paid to Joseph A. Corio, the common pleas judge for Atlantic County and, naturally, a close associate of Nucky Johnson. This amount didn’t quite jibe with the $20,800 in gross income Corio had reported for 1935. When they saw Corio had deposited only about $20,000 with his bank, the agents deduced that the remaining $40,000 had gone to Nucky Johnson. Questioned in his chambers, Corio faced his accusers with a display of judicial dignity, then judicial high dudgeon, accusing them of exceeding their authority and hinting that he would take unspecified action against them. Unfortunately for Corio, his bank was the only one in Atlantic City to use a Recordak machine (an early form of microfilm) to photograph checks. After long hours of reviewing his deposits and withdrawals, the investigators confronted Corio with proof that he had been lying about his expenses. No longer able to hide behind his judicial robes, Corio claimed he had made innocent mistakes on his tax returns and offered to make good. From October 1937 to May 1938, Corio (with Nucky working behind the scenes) vainly tried to stave off prosecution with a series of settlement offers, then suffered a nervous breakdown following his indictment for tax evasion and making false statements to Treasury agents. With his trial date set

132

american dictators

for January 1939, Corio finally admitted that the $60,000 had been a graft payment from the railroad station construction contract—part of a complicated scheme Miller devised to save money on taxes, accidentally revealed through Corio’s fumbling attempt at a double cross. Corio admitted that Nucky Johnson had agreed to swing the Union Station construction contract to Miller in exchange for threefifths of the net profit, once income taxes had been paid. Miller and Corio had cut their own side deal to split what was left after Nucky took his share. But when the first $70,000 profit payment arrived in September 1935, Miller proposed that he pay $60,000 of the amount to Corio as a legal fee, allowing Miller to deduct it as a business expense and thus avoid paying income tax. Miller would pay $13,200 to Corio to cover the tax payment on the $60,000. This would leave $46,000 to be divided among Corio, Miller, and Nucky Johnson, with Nucky getting some $28,000. Corio, feeling burned by the size of his share, decided to pocket the $13,200 payment from Miller and leave the $60,000 off his own tax report for 1935. The agents now had testimony linking their primary target to a $28,000 graft payment. The first chink in Nucky’s armor had been found, but it was only a small one. Under the Union Station agreement, which guaranteed him three-fifths of the profit from the contract, Nucky would have received over $240,000. But the probe could link him to only a $28,000 payment, which was not enough to establish a tax evasion charge because Nucky had reported $56,000 in net losses for 1935. Investigators were left with a conspiracy charge on a comparatively small amount of money. The Treasury agents received unexpected help in August 1937 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which swept through Atlantic City’s eight large brothels and arrested madams, prostitutes, procurers, and customers—some two hundred in all. Though

decline and fall

133

it had staged the sweep in response to evidence that women were being transported from New York and Pennsylvania to work as prostitutes—a violation of the Mann Act—the FBI was also interested in rumors of weekly payoffs that kept the brothels in operation. George Whitlock, a jitney inspector, testified before a grand jury that he had collected the protection money and turned it over to Ray Born, another city employee. The grand jury also heard testimony implicating Leo Levy, a special investigator for the mayor’s office, and none other than Louie Kessel, Nucky Johnson’s bodyguard, masseur, and valet. Kessel, Levy, and Born were indicted on charges of violating the Mann Act, but the U.S. attorney’s office declined to move the indictments for trial. Nucky had dodged another bullet. Nevertheless, the FBI sweep gave the Treasury agents a chance to interview more than a hundred prostitutes and madams who were in jail and awaiting trial. The initial investigation had already shown that when prostitutes were paid by their johns, half the proceeds automatically went to the house. Through jailhouse interviews, the Treasury agents came up with estimated revenues for each of the eight brothels and cross-checked their figures by examining laundry bills and records of physicians who administered blood tests. The investigation report noted, with an unmistakable touch of pride, that “the agents arrived at computations of net income that were so accurate that a number of the madams immediately conceded that the numbers were correct.” The agents managed to get indictments on tax evasion charges against seven of the madams and Born. The Treasury investigation continued to poke and probe at Nucky’s operation, turning to the horse-betting parlors, then examining the workings of numbers runners and policy shops. By April 1939 the agents had secured twenty-one indictments for income tax evasion against a colorful cast ranging from Judge Corio to

134

american dictators

betting-room operator William “Willie Wallpaper” Kanowitz, with another nine complaints awaiting grand jury action. They were also feeling enough political pressure from Nucky’s cronies at the state level to ask for a special prosecutor to organize their case. Joseph W. Burns, a tax investigator with the Department of Justice, was appointed on April 27, 1939. A month later, the first indictment against Nucky Johnson was handed down; based on Corio’s confession, it charged him with taking part in a conspiracy to evade paying the A. P. Miller firm’s taxes in 1935. Burns and the Treasury agents knew the case was weakest against Nucky himself, being based solely on the word of Corio, an accomplice, but they wanted to show Nucky’s subjects that the boss himself was no longer beyond the reach of the law. Following this strategy, they pressed ahead with the other indictments, confident that if they could keep pushing, the dominoes would start to fall.

The first case to come to trial targeted Austin Clark, also known as Dick Austin, a numbers banker who had divided his time between Atlantic City and Washington, DC. More than sixty witnesses were interviewed in preparation for Clark’s trial, which began on May 22, 1939, and ended on June 7 with his conviction for evading income taxes and making false statements to Treasury agents. At one point in the trial, three thugs identified as strong-arm men for Nucky Johnson were ejected from the courtroom because their presence was visibly disturbing the government’s witnesses. Clark was sentenced to three years behind bars and fined $2,000. Next up were Benjamin Rubenstein and John F. Malia, partners in another numbers operation. Malia pleaded guilty; Rubenstein’s trial ended quickly in a conviction. Meanwhile, James Donahue and Edward S. Graham, principals in the A. P. Miller tax

decline and fall

135

conspiracy case, had pleaded guilty. Yet, such was Nucky’s aura of confident power that others under indictment remained silent, refusing to deal with the investigators. Even the convicted defendants claimed they had no idea who benefited from the protection money and graft they paid out. “The penitentiary sentences imposed upon Austin Clark and Benjamin Rubenstein were substantial, but did not in any way weaken their resistance or the resistance of the remaining numbers bankers,” the agents noted. “They seemed perfectly willing to go to jail to protect Johnson, hoping by his influence to be paroled by an early date.” To make matters worse, Morrell Tomlin’s three-day trial ended with a conviction and a fine for $3,500—but no jail time and no leverage for the Treasury investigators. The Nucky Johnson probe was spinning its wheels. A “John Doe” grand jury was called in July for further questioning of the men the Treasury agents had already bagged, with the threat of additional jail time for continued evasive and vague answers. Horse-room operators William Kanowitz and David Fischer, already doing time in the Mays Landing jailhouse, continued to stonewall, but Fischer’s wife demanded that he come clean rather than risk more time behind bars. Fischer and Kanowitz agreed to an August 15 interview at the jail, during which they admitted that county sheriff Al Johnson—Nucky’s brother— allowed them to continue taking horse bets from their cells, and even order out for meals. They were promptly transferred to the Hudson County jail, beyond the reach of Nucky’s apparatchiks, and the two horse-room operators spilled their guts. Pressure was brought to bear on other horse-room operators, though once again results were slow in coming, stalled by legal maneuvers from Nucky’s stable of attorneys. So little progress had been made by September that the heads of the investigation met for a conference in Washington to decide whether they should cut their losses and

136

american dictators

concentrate on the single conspiracy charge they had been able to pin on Nucky. They decided (somewhat naively) that putting Nucky in jail would open the way to clean government in Atlantic City and that the probe would continue. The January 1940 trial of Leroy Williams, a Northside numbers banker, resulted in an acquittal but brought the investigators an unlikely ally in the person of Isaac Nutter, the African American attorney who was part of Williams’s three-man defense team. Nutter and his two colleagues were in over their heads defending a federal tax case, and their obvious ineptitude actually had the Treasury investigators fearing the jury might rule in Williams’s favor, simply out of sympathy. Nutter’s novel legal methods included stroking a rabbit’s foot in the courtroom and putting a hex on one of the prosecuting attorneys by sprinkling salt behind his back. His summation scrupulously avoided any mention of the details of the prosecution’s charges, but he delivered it with all the hellfire intensity of a Sunday morning sermon, at one point slamming his hand on the jury rail with enough force to send his cufflinks flying. After nine hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Williams—the first time any of the probe’s targets had walked away clean—but the numbers banker showed no gratitude when it came time to pay his lawyer. Miffed by what he considered an insufficient payment, Nutter offered his services as an informant to the Treasury investigation, giving them insider tips and helping to persuade witnesses that they should come forward. But every apparent breakthrough in the investigation became another dead end. The Treasury agents decided their best strategy was to hammer away at the numbers bankers, threatening them with more indictments and additional jail time for perjury. Not only did the racketeers perjure themselves with reckless abandon, confident that Nucky would reward their performance once the feds

decline and fall

137

gave up, but the probe also had to cope with resistance even from outwardly honest merchants and citizens, thanks to decades of pervasive corruption: For many years rackets were the most lucrative and profitable enterprises in the community. For example, the numbers syndicate brought a net profit of $300,000 a year to its fourteen members, while million-dollar hotel establishments operated at a loss. This resulted in the racketeers in Atlantic City attaining a prestige not usually enjoyed elsewhere. It also changed the attitude of many otherwise honest individuals in that they condoned gambling, vice and corruption provided they obtained a direct or indirect financial benefit. This attitude was demonstrated time and again throughout the investigation by hotel operators, bankers and storekeepers and applied not only to the owners, but to employees who reflected the attitude of their employers. . . . Widespread corruption in Atlantic City had created the impression that corruption existed on a national scale and that there was no power great enough to break Johnson.

When he wasn’t able to delay or derail prosecutions, Nucky could reach into the juries to protect his operatives. A fresh attack on numbers bankers began in April 1940 with the trial of fourteen defendants connected with numbers running on charges of perjury and income tax evasion. The trail ended with a deadlocked jury. While prosecutors prepared for a retrial, they received a tip that some of the jurors on the first trial had been bribed. The same fourteen defendants were tried on conspiracy charges in July—and acquitted outright. Some follow-up questioning revealed that one of the jurors, Joseph Furhman, was a friend of two of the defense attorneys, Carl Kisselman and Scott Cherchesky, though none of them had seen fit to mention that fact during jury selection. Though eight

138

american dictators

of the twelve jurors had been inclined to vote guilty at the start of deliberations, Furhman had single-handedly turned them around through sheer force of personality and ceaseless mockery of the government’s case. A more carefully screened jury was seated for the March 1941 retrial of the fourteen defendants, and this time the government prevailed. The numbers runners were immediately threatened with another round of indictments and additional jail time if convicted. The wall of silence finally started to crack. Most notably, Ralph Weloff, a partner in one of the numbers banks, confessed that between 1935 and 1940 he and other bankers had paid Nucky Johnson a minimum of $1,200 a week in protection money. With Nucky himself set to stand trial within weeks, the break came none too soon. The prosecution bagged another trophy with the conviction of numbers banker Joseph “Zendel” Friedman in May, but it also found a fresh source of worry. One of the prospective jurors for Nucky’s trial had already been interviewed and rejected for the Friedman panel. While being screened by Treasury agents, the prospective juror reported a bribe offer from Freidman. Another juror said he’d been offered a bribe by a representative from the county sheriff ’s office, Joseph Testa; when confronted, Testa told the agent he’d been the go-between for Louie Kessel, who had apparently added jury tampering to his list of services for Nucky Johnson. When the trial of the Boardwalk boss began in July, the prosecution could only wonder how many other cards he would have up his silk sleeve: If they had gone to such lengths to protect one numbers racketeer, to what lengths would they go to protect the “boss”[?] The livelihood of every racketeer in Atlantic City was at stake in Johnson’s trial. Even without Johnson’s knowledge some of them might try to bribe jurors. There were a hundred persons who

decline and fall

139

might do anything to keep Johnson from going to jail so that they could rely upon him to protect them in the operation of their own criminal enterprises.

Acting on Testa’s statement that he had offered a juror a bribe on behalf of Louie Kessel, a federal marshal went to Johnson’s bungalow and arrested the bodyguard as Nucky looked on, unable to do anything. Two days before the start of his trial, the boss had been served notice. The sunset of Nucky’s long reign began on July 14, 1941, with the selection of jurors for his trial. The federal courthouse in Camden was packed with spectators; sidewalk vendors catered to the lines outside the courtroom. More than thirty reporters from all over the country, notepads at the ready, waited to see if the elusive boss would finally be run to ground. The first half of the government’s case focused on graft from the Union Station construction contract. The star witness was Joseph Corio, who had resigned his judgeship in disgrace following his indictment and subsequent nervous breakdown. The government had a surprise of its own. When cutting the deal to save taxes on Miller’s profits from the Union Station project, Nucky had insisted that a formal contract be drawn up. Corio’s stenographer was instructed to use a separate notebook for the deal, then destroy it once she had transcribed her notes. The parsimonious secretary had just started a new notebook; whether from inexperience or obliviousness to the criminal doings going on in front of her, she added her notes on the Johnson deal to her other work, then kept the notebook. When the notebook was produced in court, Nucky, who had denied the existence of any such agreement, was left to argue that he had pulled strings on Miller’s behalf in awarding the contract but had righteously refused all offers of payment for his services.

140

american dictators

The second half of the government’s case, which focused on the numbers syndicate, was even more devastating. Ralph Weloff ’s decision to testify had emboldened other racketeers, and a total of twelve witnesses described the amounts they had paid Nucky through Weloff to operate without police interference or outside competition. Weloff even disclosed that in the event of a problem with an inexperienced or greedy cop, detective Ralph Gold, the head of the police vice squad, would put things right. Nucky’s defense attorney was Walter G. Winne, who owed his Prohibition-era career as U.S. attorney to Nucky’s pull with thenpresident Warren Harding. His defense strategy was a series of flanking maneuvers and tactical withdrawals, based on what he thought the government could prove. For example, Weloff had been deposed as head of the numbers syndicate by Martin Michael, aka Jack Southern, on November 1, 1937. Southern had acknowledged taking over, but maintained that he never paid protection money to Nucky himself, instead claiming that the collector was a police inspector, conveniently dead by the time of the trial. The government therefore did not indict Nucky for any activities in 1938, 1939, or 1940. Winne expended considerable legal firepower trying to establish that Southern had in fact taken over the syndicate in March 1936. Had he succeeded, the judge would have had to dismiss the third count against Nucky, and the second would have been seriously, possibly fatally, weakened. The first count, based solely on Corio’s testimony about the $28,000 graft payment, was already shaky. Winne’s strategy collapsed under the sheer weight of testimony from the numbers racketeers, and the defense shifted to the claim that Nucky had taken the money, but solely for political purposes. When Nucky Johnson took the stand, the report crowed, “the public was treated to a spectacle perhaps never before witnessed—a political boss openly admitting in court that he received payments

decline and fall

141

from an illegal racket to use his political influence in their aid . . . the [g]overnment had not only proven the link between crime and politics, but had forced the political boss to admit it.” The boss may have been unflappable on his own turf, but in the courtroom he was prone to gaffes. At one point, to the visible consternation of his lawyer, Nucky said on the stand that he didn’t consider numbers shops illegal “unless they got caught.” During cross-examination, when suddenly asked if he had ever taken payoff money in 1938—one of the years not covered in the indictment— Nucky unthinkingly said “yes.” Winne immediately objected, but the judge refused to close the door Nucky had carelessly opened. When the prosecution hammered him with more questions about his activities in 1938, Nucky repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, further eroding his already damaged credibility. Winne, going for broke, told the jury that Nucky needed “plenty of oil to run his political machine,” but also used the funds for his role as a professional soft-touch uncle to any constituent in need of help with a coal delivery or a doctor bill. Former New Jersey governor Harold Hoffman and former U.S. senator David Baird topped a parade of character witnesses who spoke on Nucky’s behalf. Shortly after noon on Friday, July 25, the jury retired to consider its verdict. Both the defense and the prosecution had anticipated at least two days of jury deliberation, so they were caught off-guard when news of a verdict came down at 5:10 P.M.—right about breakfast time for Nucky in less troubled days. Though the boss was acquitted on the first, weakest count, he was found guilty on the other two. The verdict caused an immediate sensation, but many still doubted that the Boardwalk boss would ever see the inside of a jail. Such doubts were erased on August 1, when Judge Albert B. Maris

142

american dictators

sentenced Nucky, then age fifty-eight, to serve ten years in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and to pay a $20,000 fine, plus court costs. In handing down his sentence, the judge reminded all present that the case was not a referendum on the morality of gambling or on Nucky Johnson’s good works, but a careful examination of the serious crime of income tax evasion. “I am satisfied . . . that he has made large expenditures and helped many people,” the judge said. “I am also satisfied that he has done that from selfish motives for the purpose of perpetuating his own political power, and that he has made those expenditures out of funds which personally were no sacrifice for him to pay.” Rather than fulfill his duty to show the public the responsibilities of a civic leader, Judge Maris added, Nucky Johnson “set them an example of cheating and defrauding the government, which is, to say the least, shocking.” The investigation did not end with Nucky’s conviction. Once the boss’s receipt of graft payments from gambling rooms, numbers banks, and brothels had been established, the investigators went after numerous suspects for perjury and conspiring to influence juries. But the federal team had accomplished its goal: Nucky Johnson was finished.

Nucky Johnson was a man who liked to throw a party, and on the day before he was to be sentenced, he hosted a particularly lavish one. After three decades as a widower, Nucky married Flossie Osbeck, the showgirl he had been seeing for years, at the First Presbyterian Church, then presided over a bash for several hundred guests at the Ritz-Carlton. The next day, the man who had never ventured out without a tailored silk suit and red carnation was taken to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where he worked in the prison laundry while his attorney filed appeals.

decline and fall

143

Upon his release on parole four years later, Nucky returned to an Atlantic City securely in the hands of a new boss, Frank “Hap” Farley, a state legislator whose family had flourished under the Kuehnle and Nucky organizations. Unlike the Commodore, Nucky knew there was no point trying for a comeback. Here is where the contrast between top-down and bottom-up organizations is sharpest. The defeat of Frank Hague, who had moved up through the party ranks, building his machine along the way, was a calamitous struggle within Jersey City. Years of pent-up resentment met decades of political entrenchment, and the results were explosive. The conviction of Nucky Johnson certainly caused a stir, but the daily operations of Atlantic County scarcely missed a step as Hap Farley took the controls. Meet the new boss, not the same as the old boss—more canny, more careful, and certainly less flamboyant. For the next twenty years, the former boss led a fairly colorless life, playing grand old man to visiting politicians and staying on the sidelines at political functions. He and Flossie lived in a house on South Elberon Avenue, then moved down the island to Ventnor. Nucky worked for a time as a sales representative for Richfield Oil Company; then he and Flossie signed on as sales reps for the Renault Winery, the Little Egg Harbor vineyard that had managed to survive Prohibition thanks to its proximity to Atlantic City. Hap Farley retained Nucky as the machine’s liaison with the Northside black community. World War II provided unexpected benefits when Atlantic City was made a training center for troops about to be shipped overseas. The windfall of government money—and soldiers’ paychecks— helped soften the war’s economic impact by filling hotel rooms that otherwise would have stayed empty. But the postwar prosperity did little to halt the resort’s decline. The new, more mobile American

144

american dictators

society had more options for vacation travel, and the siren by the sea looked more like an aging frump. It became an annual tradition for the Atlantic City Press to send a reporter to chat with Nucky on his birthday, and the resulting story invariably took note of the deposed politician’s continued appetites for food and alcoholic beverages (Flossie, an alumna of the Ziegfeld Follies and Earl Carroll’s Vanities on Broadway, did not drink), his age-defying wit and keenness of mind, and his generous nature. On his seventy-fifth birthday in 1958, the paper found Nucky “dapper, philosophical,” and Nucky in turn declared: “The future of Atlantic City is boundless.” He claimed in 1961 to have completed four hundred pages of a memoir with the working title Boardwalk Empire, which would cause no end of embarrassment to people who already had it coming. “I’ve no sad memories,” Nucky told the world. “Time marches on and you can’t do anything about it.” During his last decades, Nucky was the Dorian Gray of Atlantic City, staying sharp and funny as the resort decayed into a blowsy dowager with the ocean at its back and block after block of slums menacing the Boardwalk. Nucky witnessed the city’s humiliation during the 1964 Democratic National Convention, when delegates arrived at the decrepit hotels to find cramped rooms, antiquated plumbing, and—worst of all—no air conditioning during a particularly scorching summer. Nucky died in a Northfield nursing home on December 9, 1968, at the age of eighty-five and was eulogized as the living embodiment of the resort’s peak years—a period that was very much in the past. The Atlantic City Press bid adieu to Nucky in terms almost as flamboyant as the deceased boss’s lifestyle: “In another age he would have been the mutton-munching baron on the hill, or the Roman pro-consul who ruled from his bath. It was easy to imagine him

decline and fall

145

landing with William the Conqueror at Hastings, or riding with the Viking Harald Hardrada in a longboat as they preyed the British coast.” It’s hard to imagine Viking marauders in silk suits and red carnations, but like Nucky, they certainly knew how to have a good time. When the marauders did arrive, they came by bus instead of longboat, and they brandished not battleaxes but rolls of quarters. Nucky had been only one of many advocates for using legalized gambling to reverse Atlantic City’s decline, and by 1970 the idea started to gain traction in Trenton. After three failed attempts in the state legislature and a 1974 referendum defeated by a “No Dice” coalition of gambling opponents, a pro-legalization measure was approved by New Jersey voters in 1976. The first Atlantic City casino, Resorts, opened on May 26, 1978, and by the start of the 1980s the first wave of casino development was under way. The wave stalled in the face of lackluster revenues and the state’s insistence on strict regulatory controls. Casino mogul Steve Wynn, whose Golden Nugget had been the city’s third casino, sold the property to the Bally’s chain in 1986 and huffed back to Las Vegas, scorning Atlantic City as a slum by the sea. A determined marketing effort brought in New York–based property developer Donald Trump, whose celebrity status gave the resort a fresh coat of glitz as the state legislature adopted a more lenient attitude toward casino regulation. By the turn of the twentyfirst century, most of the city was walled off from the ocean by a line of hulking casino hotels looming over the Boardwalk. Unfortunately, other states had joined the gambling rush, and the resulting glut of casino properties depressed Atlantic City’s market share of suckers. Meanwhile, the construction of a traffic tunnel in 2001 through one of the city’s oldest African American neighborhoods— a project meant to promote casino development away from the

146

american dictators

oceanfront—signaled a definitive end to the solicitude once shown to black residents and voters.

As Nucky was being led off to jail in 1941, Frank Hague was still very much the Boss of Jersey City, though there were signs of trouble all around. The old man was spending less time in Jersey City and more time in Florida and New York, leaving John “Needlenose” Malone to handle daily operations. Factional disputes disrupted the regime in Bayonne, and in 1943 a slate of anti-Hague Democrats swept all five city commission seats. There were also stirrings of revolt in North Bergen and Hoboken. The troops no longer feared their general. There was pressure from above as well as below. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who despised Hague personally as much as he feared him politically, decided to test the Boss—albeit not in a direct way. As the 1940 gubernatorial election loomed, FDR persuaded Hague to back Charles Edison, son of the renowned inventor, even though Edison was an independent-minded reformer with no regard for the rules of political horse-trading. The first warning of trouble came during a Hague-orchestrated rally in Sea Girt, where the candidate faced 150,000 or so onlookers and said, “It is my happy privilege to stand here today and tell you that if you elect me, you will have elected a governor who has made no promises of preferment to any man or group.” Just in case the message hadn’t gotten across, Edison declared, “I will never be a yes man except to my conscience.” With Hague’s help, Edison cruised to an easy victory, but the two quickly clashed over appointments and Edison’s support for a redrafting of the state constitution. The final straw was Edison’s decision to help the state’s barely solvent railroads by forgiving some $81 million in back taxes. A substantial portion of those monies had been owed to Jersey City, and Hague denounced Edison as a sellout

decline and fall

147

to the railway interests. Perhaps FDR had seen Edison as another Woodrow Wilson who would beat the Boss at his own game. If so, he badly underestimated Hague, who happily resurrected his antirailway rhetoric from the early years of his administration. He even had assistance from Congresswoman Mary Norton, who publicly laced into Edison by calling him a turncoat and a hypocrite. After Norton administered her tongue-lashing, FDR sent her a memo calling her “a grand old girl.” With FDR pulling back his support, Edison was left to twist in the wind. Hague’s troubles only increased after Edison left office in 1944. The governor’s chair was assumed once again by Walter Edge, and this time the Republican was in no mood to work with the Boss. The tussle with Edison, followed by the Republican governorships of Edge and, after him, Alfred Driscoll, meant Hague had no pull in Trenton for most of the 1940s. Judges, commissioners, and board members were either retiring or seeing their terms expire, and the steady erosion of Hague men was weakening the Boss’s defenses. He managed to fend off another referendum to redraft the antiquated state constitution in 1944, but by then Democrats and Republicans alike recognized the need to update New Jersey’s governmental structure. Driscoll won Hague’s support for the 1947 constitutional convention by offering him a role, but reform of the state’s byzantine court system was turned over to one of Hague’s worst enemies in the legislature, Arthur T. Vanderbilt, whom Driscoll then appointed as the first chief justice of the state supreme court under the new constitution. Along with streamlining the state court system, the new constitution made county prosecutors directly accountable to the state attorney general, further eroding the Hudson County machine’s legal armor. Finally, and most devastatingly, Hague was no longer in touch with his own electorate. The end of World War II brought home

148

american dictators

waves of veterans who had defeated dictators overseas and were not inclined to bend the knee to a homegrown version. New ethnic coalitions were simmering in Jersey City’s melting pot. The brawling Irish of the Second Ward had given way to Polish, Italian, and Slovak voters with closer ties to John V. Kenny, the “little guy” who had faithfully managed the ward for Hague all those years. Though Hague’s organization delivered services throughout the city, it was chiefly a patronage-based, jobs-oriented political machine. During the Depression, when the mayor’s tense alliance with FDR created a steady stream of WPA-funded jobs, the emphasis on patronage had been an advantage. By the late 1930s, Hague’s patronage army numbered nearly 20,000 employees in a city with a voting population of some 120,000. Since each employee was expected to proselytize family members, relatives, and friends, as well as participate enthusiastically in rallies and parades, the machine’s influence extended well beyond its immediate circle of payroll patriots. But the end of the Depression, coupled with the changing ethnic dynamics of the city, turned this clannish strength into an Achilles heel. Italians and Poles in particular made up nearly one-half of the city’s voters by 1940, while the Irish contingent had shrunk to onefifth. Hague had quelled a potential revolt among Italian residents in the mid-1930s with more ethnic appointments to the city school board, the judiciary, and the state assembly ticket. But the core of the machine remained Irish; eastern Europeans had not been given a stake in Hague’s operation. So when Frank Hague formally announced his resignation as mayor on June 4, 1947, it seemed that even the great dictator of Hudson County was bowing to the inevitable. What became clear two weeks later, during an hours-long ceremony at Dickinson High School devoted to singing his praises, was that Hague had no

decline and fall

149

intention of relinquishing control. His nephew, Frank Hague Eggers, commissioner of parks and public works, was to serve as mayor while Hague himself continued as chairman of the state and county Democratic organizations. Eggers had long been third in Hague’s chain of command. Needlenose Malone, the second, was too old to serve as successor, and the accumulated ill will from decades as Hague’s hatchet man would have made him a poor choice at any age. Kenny was not the only Hague man to feel betrayed by this development, but he was the only one who tried to do something about it. When Hague learned that Kenny was putting together a fusion ticket with Republican backing, he denounced the little guy as a backstabber and stripped him of authority. Kenny bided his time during the 1948 presidential election, in which Hague’s machine performed so superbly that observers might have thought the old man was once more on top. He and Harry S. Truman detested each other, but Hague pulled out all the stops as Truman scored his underdog victory against Thomas Dewey. New Jersey went for Dewey, but local Democrats resisted the tide and scored easy victories. Once the confetti had settled, Kenny’s forces came out swinging in the 1949 mayoral election. Kenny’s “Freedom” ticket was ethnically mixed, while Hague fielded an all-Irish slate of handpicked yes men backing Eggers. The Freedom Party mocked Hague as an absentee dictator and published copies of his extravagant clothing bills. Even the Irish vote split along generational lines, with Kenny bringing younger Irish war veterans over to his side. Years of pentup resentment over Hague’s heavy-handed methods were coming to a head: younger politicians, firemen, and police officers who had chafed under the machine’s restraints saw their chance to get out from under the thumbs of the old guys. In Journal Square, cops were

150

american dictators

seen directing traffic with their fingers forming the Freedom slate’s “V” for victory sign. When Hague himself led a May 3 parade through the old Horseshoe, he and Eggers were greeted with catcalls and eggs. The tectonic shift in the city’s power structure became apparent when Hague, enraged by a heckler waving a sign in his face, ordered the police to arrest the man. For three decades, such an order would have brought down a storm of nightsticks, followed by a trip to the hospital for the offender. This time, the cops did nothing. Changing times might have made Hague’s decline inevitable, but he had hastened it by trying to retool his bottom-up Democratic political machine into a top-down Republican-style operation. On election night, Kenny’s Freedom ticket carried every ward in Jersey City except one of the hilltop wards. As demonstrators paraded through Journal Square with a coffin marked “The Hague Machine,” Kenny and his lieutenants rushed to City Hall to seize records and begin prospecting for evidence of Hague’s malfeasance. Instead, they found charred scraps of paper. Even the walk-in bank vault in the mayor’s office had been emptied. Several witnesses reported seeing Jersey City police officers carrying suitcases full of cash to the First National Bank. Hague, ever the tactician, had seen the handwriting on the wall and taken steps to ensure that Kenny would have no fodder for investigations. Kenny had won an astonishing victory, but Hague was still in control of the county and state Democratic organizations. He found a strong candidate for governor in Elmer Wene, a Cumberland County millionaire whose money and charm looked to be an unbeatable combination. Kenny’s revolution would be smothered in its cradle should Hague manage to get another of his men into the governor’s mansion while he still controlled grand juries in Hudson County. If Wene sicced prosecutors on City Hall, Kenny and his

decline and fall

151

allies could be looking at jail time. “We’ll be back in the driver’s seat in Trenton in January,” Hague crowed on the eve of the November gubernatorial election. That unfortunate burst of candor galvanized the Republicans. Alfred Driscoll, running for a second term (the new state constitution had removed the ban on governors serving successive terms), made the threatened return of Hagueism his statewide campaign theme. Kenny, meanwhile, had solidified his new ethnic coalition by increasing the number of ward leaders from sixteen to fifty and appointing loyal Italian and Polish operatives. Driscoll buried Wene at the polls, but there was an even more bitter pill for Hague to swallow after the ballots had been counted. Hudson County, the Boss’s kingdom, had gone for the Republican. Kenny had told his Democratic troops to stay home instead of voting—exactly the same maneuver Hague had used to such devastating effect against H. Otto Wittpenn. The student had bested the teacher with his own weapons. On the night of Wene’s defeat, Hague resigned from his posts as chairman of the state and county parties. The last days of the Hague era form the basis for Thomas J. Fleming’s 1961 novel All Good Men, a far more cold-eyed and detailed look at bossism than Edwin O’Connor’s overrated The Last Hurrah (1956). As noted earlier, Fleming literally grew up in Hague’s shadow, and his insider knowledge gives the book tremendous punch. The novel’s boss, Dave Shea, is a close match for Hague, right down to his icy blue eyes and short fuse. The climax is a raucous campaign rally invaded by supporters of Shea’s opponent, a stand-in for John Kenny, who are momentarily cowed by the old boss’s aura of power: The roar of the crowd was cut off as if it were a mechanical thing dismissed by a switch. Dave Shea had his overcoat off, and his

152

american dictators neck was thrust forward. His fighter’s chin was rigid with rage and determination. The silence—the incredible silence that was almost as shocking as the pandemonium—continued. By his mere presence, by the power emanating from those blazing eyes and that outthrust jaw, Dave Shea stilled them. This was the boss, and around him stretched the streets he called home. For thirty years his word had been law here more than any other place in the city, because the First Ward talked Dave Shea’s language—fist, club, the power of power. It was a miraculous tribute to the habit of years and to Dave Shea’s own unique personality. They were stilled. Would they be captured by his words? The moment, the turning moment hung there in the silence, while Dave Shea glared down at the tumultuous subjects of his home ward. Then, before he could speak, a thin, scrawny little man leaped over the rope which separated the crowd from the platform and scampered across the intervening ten yards. He had a placard on a long swaying pole which declared in red letters: FREEDOM FOREVER. . . . About ten feet from the platform he stopped and thrust the sign forward so that it came twisting crazily into Dave Shea’s face. At the same time he screamed, “G’wan back to Florida!” Dave Shea had to step back to avoid the sign. He smashed it to one side with a ferocious swing of his arm, and charged to the edge of the platform. “Arrest that man!” he roared. These were the words every enemy of Dave Shea dreaded. For thirty years they had been the signal for the crunch of clubs on bone. [The] skinny figure shrank back instinctively, but he did not run. Better to see where the clubs are swinging than get hit from behind. Waiting in the silent turning moment, staring at the ring of blue-coated men around the platform, unbelievingly at first, then with gathering tension everyone saw the incredible

decline and fall

153

happen before their eyes. Not a policeman moved. They stared past the offending object of Dave Shea’s rage into the crowd with blank, utterly indifferent eyes. “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHY!” Nothing they had produced so far equaled the explosion of sound which erupted from the mob when the truth came home to them. Dave Shea stepped back as if the sound was a fist which had struck him in the face. Then he stood there, feet apart in his fighter’s stance, while the derision and hatred and triumph poured over him. He took it for a full minute, then he turned and strode off the platform.

No equivalent novel exists for Atlantic City, but two films offer glimpses of the crumbling resort in the years just before the legalization of casino gambling in 1976 gave it a new lease on life. The first, The King of Marvin Gardens, is a character study of two brothers (played by Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern) involved in a doomed get-rich-quick scheme. A flop upon release in 1972 and still unwatchable decades later, the film shows the hulking old resort hotels barely functioning as welfare warrens overlooking a deserted Boardwalk. (The film was shot in the depths of winter to add to the sense of desolation.) Even the African American gangsters who give the film a brief jolt of energy come across as vultures picking at an already scavenged carcass. The other, far more interesting film is Atlantic City, a quirky 1981 drama starring Burt Lancaster as an elderly numbers runner lost in a haze of nostalgia for his glory days as one of Nucky’s go-fers. Directed by Louis Malle from a script by playwright John Guare, Atlantic City was filmed literally on the fly, using locations that were about to be demolished in the first wave of casino construction.

154

american dictators

As such, the film serves as an accidental record of the city’s transformation, with scenes taking place on streets about to be rendered unrecognizable by new construction, sometimes merely days after shooting was completed. One scene even gives viewers a glimpse of the late 1970s stand-off between Penthouse porn mogul Bob Guccione, who was building a casino on the Boardwalk, and boarding house owner Vera Coking, whose intransigence so frustrated Guccione that he redesigned the casino to create an alcove around her property. The bankruptcy of his empire ended the standoff, but Vera herself can be spotted watching from the top floor of her boarding house as Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster act out their scene on the Boardwalk. Some forty years after Nucky’s death, the old boss was reborn as the ambiguous hero of Boardwalk Empire, a cable television series that used the title and setting of Nelson Johnson’s nonfiction chronicle of Atlantic City’s most notorious bosses. While an absorbing drama in its own right, Boardwalk Empire seemed to take place in a parallel universe where actual historical figures acted out Hollywood notions about gangsters and Prohibition. The Nucky Johnson figure (fictionalized as Nucky Thompson) bore no resemblance to the original in appearance or temperament, and other historical personages were scarcely more accurate. Kuehnle, referred to only as “the Commodore,” was a bizarre figure with a collection of pikes and quarterstaffs. Even Frank Hague was shown as a boozeswilling womanizer, a characterization so grotesquely off the mark that it’s a wonder the mayor didn’t return from the afterlife to give the show’s creators a few whacks with a spectral nightstick.

Unlike Nucky Johnson, Frank Hague never saw the inside of a jail cell, though he never again set foot in Jersey City for fear of being hit

decline and fall

155

with subpoenas. Any hopes for a long retirement as the grand old man of Hudson County politics, paid court by young pols seeking advice and benediction, had been dashed in the struggle with Kenny. Hague’s exile was a luxurious one, with his time divided between his mansion on Biscayne Bay and a posh Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue, but his nights were plagued by bad memories and old regrets: When [Hague] was out of power and out of politics, living over in New York, he had trouble sleeping. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and he’d start thinking of how things had gone over the years, and he’d remember some family that he had ruined. Whether he’d driven the guy out of Jersey City or he’d ruined his law practice because he’d come out against him, or fired him off the cops because he’d talked too much in a bar against Hague, that sort of thing. And he would get the person’s phone number and he’d call them up in the middle of the night, and he’d say, “You know, I was thinking of the old days, and I was a good friend . . .” Maybe he’d get the daughter, or the son, something like that, very often the guy would be dead by then. And he’d say, “You know, I was thinking of the old days, and I was a good friend of your father before we had that falling out. Is there anything I can do for you?” And now this—you’ve got to be Irish to understand this—every single one of them said, “No, we don’t want anything from you.” As somebody said, the definition of Irish Alzheimer’s is: You forget everything except your grudges.

Hague died of complications from bronchitis and asthma on New Year’s Day, 1956. Once his soul was in the Lord’s keeping, beyond the reach of process servers, Hague’s body returned to Jersey City in a seven-hundred-pound hammered copper casket borne by eight professional pallbearers from the Lawrence Quinn funeral

156

american dictators

home. The Jersey Journal dutifully reported the funeral as a public event: “Frank Hague has come home to Jersey City for the last time.” Publications from outside Jersey City that had never acquired the habit of bending the knee painted a more somber picture of the small crowd on hand to witness the Horseshoe boy’s return. When a reporter asked a funeral home aide about the lackluster turnout, the man shrugged. “When the Big Boy goes,” he said, “it means he can no longer do anything for anybody.” Kenny’s administration proved every bit as venal as Hague’s, but without the efficiency and emphasis on constituent service. Kenny didn’t have Hague’s domineering personality or his tendency to use his fists when angered, which at first seemed refreshing, but neither did he have the old man’s vision and ambition. Kenny won a second term but abruptly resigned in 1953, pleading ill health. He remained a formidable player in Hudson County politics until 1970, when he and two other Jersey City politicians were indicted as part of a federal probe into kickback and extortion in the awarding of county contracts. Kenny died of a heart attack on June 2, 1975. His funeral was no better attended than Hague’s.

2 Epilogue the machines that didn’t stop

It remains an article of faith in many political science departments that old-school city bosses were rendered obsolete by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. This analysis was best articulated by two characters in Edwin O’Connor’s novel The Last Hurrah, about the last days of a boss modeled on Boston’s Jim Curley. Adam, a nephew of benign tyrant Frank Skeffington, is trying to understand what brought Skeffington down. His friend Jack boils it down to a name: Roosevelt. Adam stared at him. “Roosevelt?” “Sure. F.D.R. Nobody else but. Because he’s the man, sport, who really put the skids under your uncle, and he did it years ago. It’s just that it took until now to catch up with him.” “I don’t get that at all,” Adam said. “Why Roosevelt?” “Because,” Jack said patiently, “he destroyed the old-time boss. He destroyed him by taking away his source of power. He made the kind of politician your uncle was an anachronism, sport. All over the country the bosses have been dying, thanks to Roosevelt. Your uncle lasted this long simply because he was who he was: an enormously popular man whose followers were 157

158

american dictators devoted to him. Your uncle wasn’t an ordinary boss, sport; the ordinary boss doesn’t get that kind of loyalty. But he operated on the old-style principle, and it was just a question of time before what was happening to the rest happened to him, too. . . . Well, of course, the old boss was strong simply because he held all the cards. If anybody wanted anything—jobs, favors, cash—he could only go to the boss, the local leader. What Roosevelt did was take the handouts out of the local hands. A few little things like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the like—that’s what shifted the gears, sport. No need now to depend on the boss for everything; the Federal Government was getting into the act. Otherwise known as a social revolution.

O’Connor’s view, codified in his 1956 bestseller and given even wider circulation by the film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy, is quaint, condescending, and quite wrong. Far from destroying political machines, Roosevelt provided many of them with a lifeline that kept them afloat through the grim years of the Depression, while helping to build new organizations in cities where the existing Democratic factions were weak or uncooperative. New York City mayor Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a Republican who behaved like a classic demagogic political boss without acquiring the label, became the instrument through which Roosevelt starved the sachems of Tammany Hall, whose power declined throughout the 1930s. The bosses weren’t strong because, as O’Connor would have it, they “held all the cards.” They were strong because they dealt out plenty of cards to people who were otherwise left out of the game. In his 1930 survey of American political bosses, Harold Zink tried to establish the profile of a typical boss. After studying twenty

epilogue

159

examples—neither Frank Hague nor Nucky Johnson was included—Zink concluded there was no such animal: A consideration of twenty city bosses does not bolster up the theory of the “typical” boss. One would have a difficult time identifying any appreciable number of them were he to go forth into the highways and byways with any single preconception. The classic description of the derby-hatted, sport-suited, flashy-jewelried, plug-ugly boss, with coarse, brutal features, protruding paunch, and well-chewed stogy, who has no morals and is socially impossible, is about as accurate as most of the other “typical” portrayals. Political bosses are not a distinct species of human beings but possess the physical, mental, and moral variations of men in general.

As there were many types of bosses, so too were there many styles of governance by bosses. It is this book’s thesis that Frank Hague and Nucky Johnson, by virtue of their longevity and the extent of their power, may be considered the ultimate political bosses. But there were other, less formidable bosses whose methods were not nearly as punitive and dictatorial. Anton Cermak, whose term as mayor of Chicago was cut short in 1933 by an assassin’s bullet, was neither dictatorial nor ethnically exclusive. (Slurred as a “Bohunk” by a political rival, Cermak said, “It’s true my people didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but we came as soon as we could.”) The suffocating social control of the Hague administration was no more inevitable than the unbridled criminality of Nucky Johnson’s reign. As noted earlier, the history of political machines has been written by the critics, reformers harkening to an abstract ideal of good government. The bosses they decried were doing something new in the politics of the time by using new ethnic coalitions to take power.

160

american dictators

Very often, those coalitions included ethnic groups that were disenfranchised and often despised by the majority. Edward H. Crump of Memphis, Tennessee, was denounced by his political enemies for including African Americans within his coalition: “to Crump the people of Tennessee owe the odium of first bringing the negro into state Democratic politics,” one pamphlet declared. Our ambivalent view of political bosses reflects America’s ambivalent view of its cities. We still cherish our images of yeoman farmers of the corn-fed heartland, even though the majority of Americans live vastly different, urbanized and suburbanized lifestyles. The lingering notion that cities represent something decadent, corrupt, and antithetical to “American values” informs the way we talk about urban political machines. This is a notion we need to abandon, because the urban political bosses were trying to come to grips with problems and realities our current political discourse refuses to acknowledge.

As this book goes to press, America is staggering out of an economic crisis almost as severe as the Great Depression. Along with the misery it has inflicted on millions, there are disturbing parallels with the rhetoric of the 1930s. Then as now, there were pitched political battles over increased government spending versus costcutting and austerity. The imposition of government spending cuts in the late 1930s sent the recovering economy spinning back into recession; the same cult of austerity today has choked off the benefits of an economic stimulus program. Entirely too many people in politics solemnly invoke Friedrich Hayek whenever the need for government intervention is discussed, as though leaving the citizenry at the mercy of business interests were not a separate road to serfdom.

epilogue

161

What was obvious in the 1930s is no less obvious today. A twentyfirst-century technological society cannot be run like a nineteenthcentury village. An entity with the size and scale of a major city requires a high level of intervention and regulation simply to function; hundreds of thousands and millions of people cannot live stacked atop one another without a strong government presence ready to step in when an emergency threatens. The magic of the marketplace did not rescue people from disaster in the Depression; government intervention did. The urban political machines came into existence because of this reality—in fact, they were vitally necessary. The established political order of the time despised the immigrant masses streaming into the cities. The urban machines helped integrate them into American society and gave them a stake in political power. The process was not universally effective, and it could be short-circuited by racism. The possibility that African American and Latino citizens would inherit the machines became a joke when white flight from the cities, and the shrinking of the tax base, left them fighting over the scraps left behind. One of the great weaknesses of Dayton David McKean’s inquiry into Hague’s machine is the assumption that his dictatorial excesses were an inevitable result of machine politics. Hague’s personal limitations—his ignorance, suspicion, and instinct for control— undermined his machine. Democracy produced Hague, and democracy deposed him. The city’s tragedy was that Hague’s successor was not really interested in reform. John Kenny’s biggest problem with Hague was that he was in the driver’s seat that Kenny wanted to occupy. With Nucky Johnson, the story becomes even more complicated. Unlike the Jersey City machine, which grew from the ground up by using the tools of democracy, the Atlantic City machine functioned to hold democracy at bay. In part, this purpose reflected the

162

american dictators

artificiality of a city created by a group of investors and devoid of the diversified economic base that keeps other cities viable. Nucky was able to flourish because of the immense profits to be had from flouting Prohibition; aside from building the convention hall to entice off-season business, Nucky did nothing to prepare Atlantic City for a future in which vice was no longer a draw. The basic components of machine politics are still very much with us. They are not particular to any one ethnic group or economic class. Politicians come to power with the backing of certain interest groups, and their actions while in power tend to reflect the interests of their backers. The innovation of modern-day machine politicians is to sunder the operation from a geographic base. A further innovation has been to remove real services to the machine’s power base. When culture-war politics keeps voters frothing in anger at imaginary foes, they lose the benefits of functioning public schools and adequate public utilities (and, possibly, Social Security) in exchange for the dim satisfaction of keeping gays from being able to marry. The ground-up political machines of the mid-twentieth century extended their benefits to a wide base of voters, and as such were able to cushion the impact of the Depression on their citizens. The social safety net enacted by federal government action in the wake of the Depression has, despite the best efforts of its opponents, done much to soften the impact of the current recession. But the need for further action is still with us: America needs a countervailing force to keep corporate interests from running roughshod over the populace. The bosses provided that countervailing force in a flawed and often corrupt form, but they answered a need. We should not copy their example in coping with that continuing need, but we must recognize that it exists. In that respect, at least, the bosses of the past saw the future more clearly than we in the present.

NOTES

introduction 1 7 7

“Enoch L. Johnson made a lifetime career . . .”: Irey, Tax Dodgers, 245. “I always preferred to let the other fellow hold the office . . .”: Zink, City Bosses in the United States, 302. “You got the moon, ain’t you?”: Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 111.

chapter 1 — in the court of the emerald king 11 12 12 13 14 15 17 18 20 21

“A leader with fair organization . . .”: Creel, “Complete Boss.” Makeup of Voorhees cabinet: New Jersey Legislative Manual (1903), 340, 355–366. “New Jersey: A Traitor State?” in Steffens, Struggle for SelfGovernment. Gerrymandering in Jersey City: Sackett, Modern Battles of Trenton, 86–87. Jersey City’s gangs: Costello, History of the Police Department of Jersey City, 220, 230–231. “One of eight children . . .”: Smith, The Powerticians, 34. “It all began at the entry level . . .”: English, Paddy Whacked, 85. The Red Dugan affair: Goldensohn and Cohen, Life and Times of Frank Hague. “So arches and arches, by the deep . . .”: North, “The New Boardwalk.” This brazenness so incensed Governor John Franklin Fort . . .: Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea, 103–104.

163

164 24 24 26 29

notes to pages 24–42 “Why should every oyster bed . . .”: New Jersey Legislative Manual (1912), 611. “The inside word . . .”: Fleming, Mysteries of My Father, 85. “The police department was a mess . . .”: ibid., 75. “If you were to take all the power . . .”: “Kuehnle, Arch Boss, to Prison,” New York Sun, December 8, 1913, 1.

chapter 2 — lines of power 30 30 32

33 33 35 36 37 37 38 38 39 40 40 41

42

“There is only one way to hold a district . . .”: Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. “Designed to prevent Democratic control of the cities . . .”: Erie, Rainbow’s End, 43. “The people in Jersey City laughed at Tammany”: Fleming in the audio documentary compiled by Goldensohn and Cohen, Life and Times of Frank Hague. Fleming’s tale of Uncle Walter can be heard in Goldensohn and Cohen, Life and Times of Frank Hague. “Johnson, although fifty-six . . .”: Alexander, “Boss on the Spot,” 7. “Atlantic City was the place to be . . .”: Raheem, Growing Up in the Other Atlantic City, 21. “After the colored waiter serves his master’s supper . . .”: quoted in Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea, 30. Catholic schoolchildren . . .: Fisher, On the Irish Waterfront, 32. The Jersey City catechism is from McWilliams, Parish Priest, 234. “Church and state knew no separation . . .”: Farmer, Star-Ledger, November 11, 1999. “Murder on the waterfront is commonplace . . .”: Johnson, Crime on the Labor Front, 91. Second Ward boss John V. Kenny . . .: Fisher, On the Irish Waterfront, 38–39. The biggest player in the Building Trades Council . . .: Hart, Last Three Miles, 85–92. Though he relied on Irish Catholics . . .: Connors, A Cycle of Power, 92–97. For information on Mary Norton’s career, see Burstyn, ed., Past and Promise. Also, “Mary Norton, 84, Legislator, Is Dead,” New York Times, August 3, 1959. Though she was never more than a nuisance . . .: Jersey Journal, May 2, 1941, 1.

notes to pages 43–55 43 43 44 46 46 47 47 48 49 50 50 51 51

165

In 1910 a consortium of Boardwalk hotel owners . . .: Paulsson, Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform, 155. “At the time [Nucky’s attorney] was making the statement . . .”: Frank and Burns, “Case of Enoch L. Johnson,” 133. Hague had pledged to run an efficient, businesslike government . . .: Connors, “Local Political Career of Hague,” 40. The state constitution did not allow for consecutive terms . . .: McKean, The Boss, 50. Under Edwards, Hague’s man Theodore Smith . . .: Connors, A Cycle of Power, 64–65. A. Harry Moore, then serving his third term as governor . . .: McKean, The Boss, 78. For more on the Larson affair, see McKean, The Boss, 69, and Hart, Last Three Miles, 83. “Wasn’t he one of them . . .”: Smith, The Powerticians, 61. The Billy Black story appears in Fleming’s contribution to Goldensohn and Cohen, Life and Times of Frank Hague. “Probably no outright deal was made with Walter E. Edge . . .”: McKean, The Boss, 68–70. For the 1916 election, see Johnson, Boardwalk Empire; Edge, A Jerseyman’s Journal; and McKean, The Boss. With a cluelessness . . .: “Gov. Edge Eliminates Politics in High Court Nominations,” Atlantic City Gazette, February 13, 1918, 1. Alfred Hirsch, a writer for The Nation . . .: Hirsch, “Scab City, New Jersey.”

chapter 3 — boom times 53 53

54 54 55 55

“I cannot recall a national issue . . .”: Edge, A Jerseyman’s Journal, 137. “We have whisky, wine, women . . .”: quoted in “Enoch L. Johnson, Ex-Boss in Jersey: Prohibition-Era Ruler of Atlantic City, 85, Dies,” New York Times, December 10, 1968, 47. “The bootleggers, bookies, numbers men, and card sharks . . .”: Fleming, Mysteries of My Father, 137–138. “People whose youth did not coincide with the twenties . . .”: Liebling, Between Meals, 159. “Sometimes, it almost seemed . . .”: Waters, Smugglers of Spirits, 56–57. “Prohibition laws are unenforceable”: Reeves, Ol’ Rum River, 12.

166 57 57 60

60

61 62 64 66 68 68 69 72 72 72

notes to pages 57–72 “Alcohol sold for 62 cents a gallon . . .”: Irey, Tax Dodgers, 245. “Finally, there was the cheerful realization . . .”: Weir, History of the Distillers Company, 252. Lathrop was born 1858 in Gambier, Ohio, the name of which he combined with Kenyon College to arrive at his pseudonym. After working as a journalist in San Francisco, Lathrop became a political player and in 1902 was rewarded with the post of American consul to England, serving there from Bristol until 1914, then from Wales until 1919, when he was appointed consul to the Bahamas. After retiring in 1924, Lathrop moved to Paris, where he died in 1929. His six novels under the Gambier name were run as serials in the Saturday Evening Post, and one of them, a 1917 spy thriller called The Huge Black One-Eyed Man, was adapted as a 1919 silent film, Love in a Hurry. He also wrote for U.K. publications under the pseudonym Andrew Loring. See the online records of the Knox County Historical Society: http://www.knoxhistory.org/authors/lathrop.htm. The veuve was employed for the execution of a fisherman convicted of murder some eight months earlier. The guillotine had to be shipped all the way from Martinique in the eastern Caribbean, then reassembled while the village fathers searched for someone willing to serve as headsman. The story of how the guillotine came to Saint-Pierre inspired a 2000 French film, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre (The Widow of Saint-Pierre). All that changed . . . : Curtis, “Bootleg Paradise.” “Tampa’s arrival . . .”: Waters, Smugglers of Spirits, 31–32. “At night on Rum Row . . .”: Allen, Black Ships, 43. “Call girls from New York City . . .”: Waters, Smugglers of Spirits, 31–32. It didn’t help that the Coast Guard’s efforts . . .: Johnson, Boardwalk Empire, 87. Atlantic City residents of a certain age . . .: ibid., 87. “Everybody helped out . . .”: quoted in ibid., 87. “Technically, the Atlantic City system . . .”: Alexander, “That’s How They Got Nucky Johnson.” “The most disreputable assemblage . . .”: Fried, Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster. On the gangster conference, see Gosh and Hammer, Last Testament of Lucky Luciano.

notes to pages 74–94 74 76

167

“When viewed this way, the Atlantic City conference . . .”: English, Paddy Whacked, 65. For details of Zwillman’s rise to power and his relationship with Hague, see Stuart, Gangster No. 2, 19–76. Also Grover, Nazis in Newark, 224.

chapter 4 — hard times 78

80

81

82 83 84 85 85

86

“The W.P.A. was a godsend to Hague”: Fleming quoted in Terry Golway, “W.P.A. Projects Left Their Stamp on the Region,” New York Times, April 15, 2009. “Hague is the man who raised gooseflesh . . .”: Alva Johnston, “Talk of the Town: Boss Hague, the Bandwagon, and Beer,” The New Yorker, July 16, 1932, 17. The city officially hit bottom in February 1933 . . .: “When the Chips Were Down, Resort Used Scrip,” Atlantic City Press, September 27, 1977, 17. The federal tax probe estimated . . .: Frank and Burns. “Case of Enoch L. Johnson.” Another, more personal, blow . . .: Alexander, “Boss on the Spot,” 49. “He said there was no soreness on his part . . .”: Farley, Behind the Ballots, 158. In 1932, the nation’s twelve largest cities . . .: Erie, Rainbow’s End, 137. “I do not have the power to appoint to these positions . . .”: quoted by Richard S. Connors in the audio documentary compiled by Goldensohn and Cohen, Life and Times of Frank Hague. “Tell Frank to knock it off”: quoted by Thomas Fleming in Goldensohn and Cohen, Life and Times of Frank Hague.

chapter 5 — public works 90

91 94

Rowland’s preference for a certain type of dark yellow brick . . .: interview with Ulana Zakalak, historic restoration consultant on the Jersey City Medical Center condominium project. “Once a Republican prober accused Hague . . .”: Fleming, “Political Machine II.” William Bromirsky, a funeral-home director . . .: Joseph Malinconico, “Roosevelt Stadium: Glory Fading Fast,” New York Times, November 28, 1982.

168 95 96 98 99 99 100 101

notes to pages 95–117 Shortly after becoming mayor . . .: Case-McAllister Committee, Commission to Investigate. During the reign of Louis Kuehnle Jr. . . .: Johnson, Boardwalk Empire, 106–107. The Union Station project . . .: Frank and Burns, “Case of Enoch L. Johnson.” Silzer also sounded the alarm . . .: Hart, Last Three Miles, 70. In the story of the Holland Tunnel construction project . . .: Jackson, Highway Under the Hudson, 97–99, 219. The bloodiest part of the project’s history . . .: Hart, Last Three Miles, 92–95. For the financial dealings surrounding the Journal Square project, see Case-McAllister Committee, Commission to Investigate.

chapter 6 — a choice of enemies 107 107 108 109 110 110 110 111 112 112 113 115 117

“Nucky Johnson does not have to tamper . . .”: Alexander, “Boss on the Spot,” 5. Unable to make headway against official corruption . . .: Johnson, Boardwalk Empire, 97–98. The Bader/Bacharach mayoral race is described by Johnson in Boardwalk Empire, 88–89. “A good psychologist might tell you . . .”: McWilliams, Parish Priest, 235–236. Socialist Norman Thomas . . .: quoted in McKean, Boss, 202. “We don’t give our cops nightsticks for ornaments”: Hague quoted in McKean, Boss. A frequent recipient of Hague’s chastisement . . .: Connors, A Cycle of Power, 119. Also Hart, Last Three Miles, 80. Another Hague critic . . .: Connors, A Cycle of Power, 109. Hague was still chuckling about it years later . . .: Creel, “Complete Boss,” 58. “Unlike me . . .”: Hirsch, “Scab City,” 509. “It was a way of life . . .”: Butler, “Recollections of a Jersey City Childhood,” 12. Testimony is taken from the Case-McAllister Committee transcript, 1443–1444, and 1449. The hearings received close attention from the Jersey Journal . . .: Connors, “Local Political Career of Hague,” 48.

notes to pages 119–160 119 121 122 123 125

169

Brandle’s background and relationship with Hague are covered by Hart, Last Three Miles, 89–90, 92, 145–146. A 1937 report . . .: quoted in Fleming, “Political Machine II.” “For the next two decades . . .”: Fleming, “Political Machine II.” For Hague on Reds, the Norman Thomas incident, and the CIO trial, see Swanberg, Norman Thomas, 223–224. The most wounding was the Life article: “Jersey City’s Mayor Hague: Last of the Bosses, Not First of the Dictators.” Life, September 7, 1938, 44–51.

chapter 7 — decline and fall 128 143 144 144 144 146 146

149 151 155 156

For details of the federal operations, see Frank and Burns, “Case of Enoch L. Johnson.” He and Flossie lived in a house on South Elberon Avenue . . .: “Nucky, 75 Today; Dapper, Philosophical,” Atlantic City Press, January 20, 1958. He claimed in 1961 . . .: profile, Atlantic City Press, January 20, 1961. “I’ve no sad memories . . .”: profile, Atlantic City Press, February 1, 1959. “In another age . . .”: Paul Learn, “Johnson Is Dead at 85,” Atlantic City Press, December 9, 1968. Factional disputes disrupted the regime in Bayonne . . .: Fleming, “Political Machine II.” For more information about Charles Edison’s relationship with Frank Hague, see Venable, Out of the Shadow, 167. See also Fleming, “Political Machine II.” Once the confetti had settled . . .: Fleming, All Good Men, 381–382. “We’ll be back in the driver’s seat in Trenton . . .”: Fleming, “Political Machine II.” The anecdote about Frank Hague’s regrets is told by Fleming in Goldensohn and Cohen, Life and Times of Frank Hague. When a reporter asked a funeral home aide . . .: “When the Big Boy Goes . . .,” Time, January 16, 1956.

epilogue 159 160

“A consideration of twenty city bosses . . .”: Zink, City Bosses in the United States, 62–65. Edward H. Crump of Memphis, Tennessee . . .: Dorsett, Roosevelt and the City Bosses, 19.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Jack. “Boss on the Spot: The Case History of Nucky Johnson.” Saturday Evening Post, August 26, 1939. ———. “That’s How They Got Nucky Johnson.” Reader’s Digest, May 1942. Allen, Everett S. The Black Ships: Rumrunners of Prohibition. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1979. Andrieux, Jean-Pierre. Prohibition and St. Pierre. Lincoln, Ont.: W. F. Rannie, 1983. Behr, Edward. Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. Burstyn, Joan N., ed. Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Butler, Madeline. “Recollections of a Jersey City Childhood.” Time, January 11, 1971, 12. Caldes, Charles P. Jersey City’s Journal Square with McGinley and Bergen Squares. Ridgefield, NJ: Journal Square Publishing, 2007. Carse, Robert. Rum Row: The Liquor Fleet That Fueled the Roaring Twenties. 1959. Reprint, Mystic, CT: Flat Hammock Press, 2007. Case-McAllister Committee. Commission to Investigate the Violations of Law and the Conduct of Public Officials. Trenton, 1929. On file at the New Jersey State Library, Trenton. Clark, Norman H. Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. Connors, Richard S. A Cycle of Power. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971.

171

172

bibliography

———. “The Local Political Career of Mayor Frank Hague.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966. Costello, August E. History of the Police Department of Jersey City from the Knickerbockers to the Present Day. Jersey City: Police Relief Association, 1891. Creel, George. “The Complete Boss.” Colliers, October 10, 1936, 12–13, 58–60. Curtis, Wayne. “Bootleg Paradise.” American Heritage 58, no. 2 (April/May 2007). Available online: http://www.americanheritage.com/content/bootlegparadise. D’Amato, Grace Anselmo. Chance of a Lifetime: Nucky Johnson, Skinny D’Amato, and How Atlantic City Became the Naughty Queen of Resorts. Harvey Cedars, NJ: Down the Shore Publishing, 2001. Dorsett, Lyle. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977. Edge, Walter E. A Jerseyman’s Journal: Fifty Years of American Business and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948. English, T. J. Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster. New York: Regan Books, 2005. Erie, Steven P. Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Farley, James A. Behind the Ballots: The Personal History of a Politician. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938. Field, Van R., and John J. Galluzzo. New Jersey Coast Guard Stations and Rumrunners. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004. Fisher, James T. On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Fleming, Thomas J. All Good Men. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1961. ———. Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. ———. “The Political Machine II: A Case History, ‘I Am the Law.’ ” American Heritage 20, no. 4 (June 1969). Available online: http://www.american heritage.com/content/political-machine-ii-case-history-%E2%80%9C i-am-law%E2%80%9D. ———. “Us Against Them: How the Irish Ruled Jersey City.” New Jersey History 127, no. 1 (2012). Available online: http://njh.libraries.rutgers.edu/ index.php/njh/article/view/1757/3196.

bibliography

173

Frank, William E., and Joseph W. Burns. “The Case of Enoch L. Johnson: A Complete Report of the Atlantic City Investigation, Conducted Jointly by the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice.” Unpublished manuscript, c. 1942. New Jersey State Library, Trenton. Available online: http://slic.njstatelib.org/slic_files/digidocs/j66/J329j66.pdf. Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Funnell, Charles E. By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort Atlantic City. New York: Knopf, 1975. Goldensohn, Martin, and David Cohen. The Life and Times of Frank Hague. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, NJN Radio, 2001. Transcript available online at http://www.academia.edu/1395056/The_Life_and_ Times_of_Frank_Hague_Radio_documentary_; online audio can be found at http://www.albany.edu/talkinghistory/arch2001july-december.html. Gosch, Martin A., and Richard Hammer. The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1975. Grover, Warren. Nazis in Newark. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003. Harris, Cynthia, and Leon Yost. Changing Jersey City: A History in Photographs. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2009. Hart, Steven. The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway. New York: New Press, 2007. Hirsch, Alfred. “Scab City, New Jersey.” The Nation, October 31, 1934, 509–511. Irey, Elmer L. The Tax Dodgers. New York: Greenberg, 1948. Jackson, Robert W. Highway Under the Hudson: A History of the Holland Tunnel. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Johnson, Malcolm. Crime on the Labor Front. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950. Johnson, Nelson. Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City. Medford, NJ: Plexus Publishing, 2002. Katcher, Leo. The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein. New York: Harper, 1959. Kobler, John. Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973. ———. Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974. Kyvig, David E. Repealing National Prohibition. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2000.

174

bibliography

Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Liebling, A. J. Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. 1962. Reprint, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986. McCarten, John. “Evolution of a Problem Child: Frank Hague.” The New Yorker, February 19, 1938, 21–28. McKean, Dayton David. Boss: The Hague Machine in Action. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940. McWilliams, Leroy. Parish Priest: A Man of God Tells His Story. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. Musto, David F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Nelson, Derek. Moonshiners, Bootleggers, and Rumrunners. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1995. North, James. “The New Boardwalk.” In Atlantic City in Picture and Poem. Camden, NJ: Sinnickson Chew & Sons, 1906. O’Connor, Edwin. The Last Hurrah. Boston: Little, Brown, 1956. Paulsson, Martin. The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854–1920. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Pegram, Thomas R. Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998. Petrick, Barbara Burn. Church and School in the Immigrant City: A Social History of Public Education in Jersey City, 1804–1930. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Raheem, Turiya S. A. Growing Up in the Other Atlantic City: Wash’s and the Northside. N.p.: Xlibris, 2009. Reeves, Ira. Ol’ Rum River: Revelations of a Prohibition Administrator. New York: Thomas S. Rockwell Co., 1931. Riordan, William L. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics. 1905. Reprint, New York: Signet Classic, 1995. Sackett, William Edgar. Modern Battles of Trenton: Being a History of New Jersey’s Politics from the Year 1868 to the Year 1894. Trenton: John L. Murphy, 1895. Simon, Bryant. Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Smith, Thomas F. X. The Powerticians. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1982. Sokolic, William H., and Robert E. Ruffolo Jr. Atlantic City Revisited. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006.

bibliography

175

Stuart, Mark A. Gangster No. 2: Longy Zwillman, the Man who Invented Organized Crime. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1985. Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904. ———. The Struggle for Self-Government. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1906. Stoneburg, John. “The Boardwalk Empire: The Nucky Johnson Story.” Unpublished manuscript, 1960. Typescript available in the Alfred M. Heston Collection, Atlantic City Free Public Library. Swanberg, W. A. Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Bantam Books, 1961. ———. Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. Van de Water, Frederic F. The Real McCoy. 1931. Reprint, Mystic, CT: Flat Hammock Press, 2007. Van Meter, Jonathan. The Last Good Time: Skinny D’Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, and the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City. New York: Crown Publishers, 2003. Venable, John D. Out of the Shadow: The Story of Charles Edison. Newark, NJ: Charles Edison Fund, 1978. Wallace, Ryan C. “Frank Hague: A Study of Politics and Power.” Master’s thesis, East Stroudsburg University, 1994. Waters, Harold. Smugglers of Spirits: Prohibition and the Coast Guard Patrol. New York: Hastings House, 1971. Weir, Ronald B. The History of the Distillers Company, 1877–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Willoughby, Malcolm F. Rum War at Sea. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964. Woodiwiss, Michael. Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Zink, Harold. City Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses. Durham: Duke University Press, 1930.

INDEX

Adonis, Joe, 77 A. Harry Moore School (Jersey City), 89 Alexander, Jack, 5, 33 All Good Men (Fleming), 151 Ambrose Channel, 65 American Civil Liberties Union, 124 Ames, Albert “Doc,” 6 Annenberg, Moses, 75–76 Annenberg, Walter, 76 A. P. Miller Construction Co., 97, 98, 131 “applejack campaign,” 53 Arethusa (ship), 58, 60, 67, 70 Atlantic City, 3, 19–21, 27–28, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73–76, 80, 82, 83, 84, 96, 97, 127, 128, 137 Atlantic City (film), 153–154 Atlantic City Gazette, 51 Atlantic City Press, 144 Atlantic County, 127 Atlantic Highlands, 64 Austin, Dick, 134 Bacardi rum, 70 Bacharach, Harry, 97, 108–109 Bader, Charles L., 131 Baird, David, 141 Bally’s, 145 Bahamas, 60 Barnegat Bay, 64, 70 Beacon of Hope (ship), 66

Bergen Hill, 13, 88 Bergen Hill Cut, 101 Bickfords (restaurant), 113 Bilotti-Spinelli, Grace, 42–43 Black Horse Pike, 97 Boardwalk Empire (HBO series), 8, 154 Boardwalk Empire (E. Johnson memoir), 144 Born, Ray, 133 Boss, The: The Hague Machine in Action (McKean), vii “bottom-up” political machines, 30 Boyd, Jimmy, 34 Boyle, John F., 99 Bradley, John J., 61 Brandle, Theodore “Teddy,” 40, 90, 101, 119–121 Branleygran (firm), 40 Brennan, Leo, 120 “Broadway Gang,” 77 Bromirsky, William, 94 Bureau of County Mechanics, 38 Burkitt, James “Jeff,” 110–111, 119 Burns, Joseph W., 134 Butler, Edward, 7 Butler, Madeline, 113–114, 127 Camden, 19 Camden and Atlantic Railroad, 21 Camden, Gloucester, and Woodbury Railway Company, 12

177

178 Campbell, William “Star,” 121 Cape Breton, 61 Cape May, 64, 66 Capone, Al, 71–73, 74–75 Case, Clarence, 114 Case-McAllister Committee, 102, 114–117, 118 Casey, Daniel, 43 Cermak, Anton, 159 Chartier, Paul, 61 Cheesequake Swamp, 64 Cherchesky, Scott, 137 Civil Service Commission, 46 Clark, Austin, 134 Clark, Joseph Jr., 86 Clee, Lester H., 111 Club Harlem (Atlantic City), 68 Cohen, Abraham Burton, 101 Coast Guard, U.S., 67, 68, 69–71 Coking, Vera, 154 Committee of One Hundred, 107–108 Comply, Samuel, 107–108 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 123–125 Connors, Richard S., vii, 118 Conover, Daniel, 68 Consolidated Traders, 63 Convention Hall (Atlantic City), 96–97 Corio, Joseph A., 98, 131–132, 133, 134, 139 Cork Row (Jersey City), 15 Corning, Erastus, 8 Costello, Frank, 77 Craig, Joe, 16 Crump, Edward H., 160 Curley, Jim, 86, 157 Cutty Sark whiskey, 63 Cycle of Power, A (Connors), vii Daley, Richard, 2 Dalitz, Moe, 73 “Dark Dolores” (Runyon story), 73 Davis, Robert “Little Bob,” 15, 17, 18 Dear, Joseph, 25, 44, 117, 119 Dear, Walter, 44, 117 Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, 12

index Democratic National Convention (1932), 79 Democratic Warriors Club, 86 Depression, 78, 80–84 Dern, Bruce, 153 Dewey, Thomas, 149 Dickinson High School (Jersey City), 37, 94 Dilworth, Richardson, 86 “dishonest graft,” 95 Distillers Company Ltd., 57 Donahue, James, 134 Doxon, Walter Jr., 129 Driscoll, Alfred, 147, 151 Duck Town (Atlantic City), 98 Dugan, Red, 18, 44 Duncan Avenue apartments (Jersey City), 95–96 Earl Carroll’s Vanities, 144 Edge, Walter, 50–52, 106, 147 Edison, Charles, 146 Edwards, Edward I., 46, 53 Eggers, Frank Hague, 43, 149 Ellenstein, Meyer, 77 English, T. J., 73–74 Erie Railroad, 16 Essex County Jail, 71 Fagan, Mark, 26, 118 Farley, Frank “Hap,” 143 Farley, James, 84–85 Farmer, John, 38 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), brothel investigation in Atlantic City, 132 Ferris, John J., 102 Fielder, James, 49 First National Bank (Jersey City), 150 First Presbyterian Church (Atlantic City), 142 Fischer, David, 135 Fleming, Thomas, 24, 32, 33, 49, 122 Foley, Arthur J., 115 Fort, John Franklin, 21, 22 Frazer, Dean Spaulding, 125 Freedom Party, 149–150 Friedman, Joseph “Zendel,” 138 Furhman, Joseph, 137

index Galveston, Texas, 23 gambling referendum (1976), 145 Geran Act (1911), 23 Glass House Angels (gang), 14 Gold, Ralph, 140 Golden, Francis, 117 Golden Nugget casino, 145 Graham, Edward S., 134 Grateful Dead, 94 Great McGinty, The (film), 6 Grove Street PATH station (Jersey City), 103 Guare, John, 153 Guccione, Bob, 154 Gunmere, William S., 12 Hague, Frank, 1, 2, 3, 4, 31–32, 36–38, 39–43, 44–47, 49–52, 53–54, 77, 78–96, 98–104, 105–107, 109–126, 143, 148; “Hagueism,” 51 Hague, John, 14, 15 Hague, Hugh, 15 Hague, Margaret, 14–15 Hague v. CIO, 124–125 Halifax, Nova Scotia, 63 “Hand Brand” white alcohol, 62 Hanes, Roy A., 55 Harding, Warren, 55, 140 Harrison, William T., 121 Hayek, Friedrich, 160 Hearst, William Randolph, 8, 79, 127–128 Henry L. Marshall (ship), 67 Henry Snyder High School (Jersey City), 37 High Toned Gang, 14 His Girl Friday (film), 6 Hoffman, Harold, 141 Holland Tunnel, 79, 95, 98–99, 101 Honest Ballot Association, 112 “honest” graft, 95 Hoover, Herbert, 78 Horseshoe, The (Jersey City), 14, 17 Hudson County, vii, 1, 86, 121 Hudson County Building Trades Council, 40 Hudson Dispatch, 45 Hudson Tubes, 49

179 “I am the law!” (Hague), 9, 105–106 International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), 39 Irey, Elmer L., 1, 56 “Jersey Bounce” (song), 103 Jersey City, 1, 3 Jersey City Board of Education, 102 Jersey City Businessmen’s Association, 118 Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, 105 Jersey City Giants, 93–94 Jersey City Medical Center, 88–89, 90–93, 121 Jersey City YWCA, 42 Jersey Journal, 25, 31, 44, 89, 117–119, 156 Johannesson, Sigvald, 100 Johnson, Al, 135 Johnson, Enoch L. “Nucky,” 1, 2, 33–35, 80, 126, 129, 141, 142, 144, 145 Johnson, Malcolm, 38 Johnson, Nelson, vii Johnson, Smith, 22 Johnson, Virginia “Mommy,” 83–84 Journal Square (Jersey City), 44, 101–104, 125, 150 Kammerman, Leslie, 68 Kanowitz, William “Willie Wallpaper,” 134, 135 Keane, Happy, 39 Kenny, John V., 39, 148, 149–150, 156 Kenny, Nat, 17 Kerbaugh, H. S., 102 Kessel, Louis, 33, 133, 138, 139 King of Marvin Gardens, The (film), 127, 153 Kirby, Sam, 23 Kisselman, Carl, 137 Kuehnle, Louis Jr., 21–22, 96 Labor National Bank (Jersey City), 40, 120 Lafferty, Charles, 108 La Guardia, Fiorello, 86, 158 Lancaster, Burt, 153, 154 Larson, Morgan, 47

180 Last Hurrah, The (O’Connor), 157 Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, The, 74 Lathrop, Lorin A., 60 Lava Bed Gang, 14 Lavis, Fred, 100 Lawrence Quinn funeral home (Jersey City), 155 Lehigh Valley Railroad, 12 Lenehan, John, 121 Levy, Leo, 133 Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, 142 Liebling, A. J., 54–55 Life magazine, 125 Longo, John, 111 Luciano, Lucky, 74–75 “macing,” 32 Macksey, William P., 28 Macksey Committee, 28 Maddigan, Thomas, 18 Malia, John F., 134 Malle, Louis, 153 Malone, John “Needlenose,” 37, 146, 149 Mann Act, 133 Mansfield, Albert H., 115 Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital (Jersey City), 88–89 Maris, Albert B., 141–142 McArdle Trucking Company, 123 McCarten, John, 4 McCarter, Robert H., 12 McCoy, Bill, 59–60, 65, 67–68, 70–71 McKean, Dayton David, vii, 1, 91–92, 161 McKeon, Cornelius, 39 McLaughlin, Dennis “Denny,” 17 Meadowlands, 98 Meehan, James, 118 Mencken, H. L., 79 Metrovest Equities, 88, 90 Milton, John, 37, 96, 116 “Minutemen,” 124 Miss America beauty pageant, 97 Montreal Royals, 94 Moore, A. Harry, 51, 84, 85, 111 Moran, Bugs, 71 Moraze, Julien, 62

index Morgan, J. Willard, 12 Morris, John, 118 Morue Française (firm), 61 Murray, James F., 118 Nassau, Bahamas, 62 Nast, Thomas, 13 Nation, The, 51 National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, 123 National Erectors Association, 120 Newark, 76, 77, 120, 124 New Yorker, The, 4, 80 New York Sun, 29 Nicholson, Jack, 153 “No Dice” coalition, 145 Northside (Atlantic City), 35–36 Norton, Mary, 41–42, 147 “Nucky’s Nocturne” (gala), 107–108 numbers banks, 82–83 Nutter, Isaac, 136 O’Connell, Dan, 8 O’Connor, Edwin, 151, 157 O’Hanlon, George, 91 “One-Day Republicans,” 47, 111 Osbeck, Flossie, 82, 142, 143, 144 Osborne, Richard, 19 Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, 26 patronage, 85 Pegler, Westbrook, 106 Pendergast machine, 73 Pennsylvania Railroad, 12 Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Line, 97 Penthouse magazine, 154 permit for withdrawal, 56–57 Philadelphia Inquirer, 36 Pitney, Jonathan, 19 Plater, Bobby, 103 Plotkin, Benjamin, 41 Plunkitt, George Washington, 30, 95–96, 98 political machines, 30 Pollak Hospital (Jersey City), 89 Powerticians, The (T.F.X. Smith), 15 presidential election (1948), 149

index Princeton University, 23 Prohibition, 53–77 Public Service Corporation, 27 Pulaski Skyway, 98–101 Renault Winery, 143 railroad interests, 12–13 Recordak machine, 131 Red Tigers (gang), 14 Renfield, Joseph, 77 Repetto, Louis, 68 Republican National Convention (1920), 97 “rice pudding,” 32 Ringle, Joshua, 118 Riordan, William, 94 “ripper” legislation, 13 Ritz-Carlton (New York), 48 Rizzo, Frank, 8 Robinson, Jackie, 94 Rochester Red Wings, 94 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 6, 78–80, 84–87, 88–89, 90–94, 95–96, 98–104, 105, 146–147, 157–158 Roosevelt Stadium (Jersey City), 93–94 Rothstein, Arnold, 71 Route One Extension project, 98, 99 Rowland, John T., 89–90 Rubenstein, Benjamin, 134, 135 Rum Row, 60–71 Runyon, Damon, 72 Ryan, Joseph P., 39 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, 71–72 Sandy Hook, 64 Sarandon, Susan, 154 Saturday Evening Post, 5, 33, 125 Scatuorchio, Michael “Mike Scat,” 41 Schultz, Dutch, 73 Scott, Louis, 22 scrip, 81–82 Sea Bright, 70 Seneca (Coast Guard cutter), 67, 70 Seven Group, 73 Sewell, William, 42 Sheppard, John, 37 Silzer, George, 99

181 “Skipper Salvation,” 66–67, 70 Sloan, William G., 100 Smith, Al, 78–80, 84 Smith, James, 25, 46 Smith, Theodore, 46 Smith, Thomas F. X., 15, 48 Sopranos, The (HBO series), 8 Spinelli, Marco, 43 Standard Oil, 27 Stanley theater (Jersey City), 103 Steffens, Lincoln, 12 St. Pierre and Miquelon, 60–63 Talmadge, Norma, 103 Tammany Hall, 1, 16–17, 32, 95 Testa, Joseph, 138 Thomas, Harvey, 43 Thomas, Norman, 123–124 Tomlin, John, 96 Tomlin, Morrell, 96 Tomoka (ship), 70 “top-down” political machines, 30 Torrio, John, 73 Tracy, Spencer, 158 Treasury Department investigation of Nucky Johnson, 56, 128–142 Truman, Harry S., 149 Trump, Donald, 145 Tunkhannock Viaduct, 101 Tweed, William M., 6 Vanderbilt, Arthur T., 147 Van Riper, Walter D., 106 Vatican, 79 vice, 82 Volstead Act (1919), 53, 55, 60 Voorhees, Foster MacGowan, 12 voter registration, 51–52 Waldorf-Astoria (New York), 103 Walsh Act (1911), 24 Waring, Henry, 115 Warner, Jenny, 18 Watson, Russell, 116–117 Weir, Ronald, 57 Weloff, Ralph, 138, 140 Wene, Elmer, 150 Whitlock, George, 133 Wildwood, 66

182 Williams, Leroy, 136 Wilson, Earle D., 58–59 Wilson, Woodrow, 11, 23–24, 27–29, 50, 51 Winne, Walter G., 140, 141 Wittpenn, H. Otto, 19, 24–25, 49–50 Works Progress Administration, 85–87 Wynn, Steve, 145

index “Zeppelins,” 27 Ziegenhein, Henry, 7 Ziegfeld Follies, 144 Zink, Harold, 158–159 Zwillman, Abner “Longy,” 6, 76–77, 124

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Journalist and freelance writer Steven Hart has written for the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the online magazine Salon. He has been a featured guest on National Public Radio and is a popular speaker on the topics of political bosses and corruption. His first nonfiction book, The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway, was hailed by critics as a first-rate work of narrative history. His first novel, a police procedural called We All Fall Down, made the New York Post’s “Required Reading” list. He is also the author of a dark psychological thriller called Echo and an essay collection, Let the Devil Speak: Articles, Essays, and Incitements. He lives in central New Jersey. http://stevenhartsite.wordpress.com/