Chapter 35
FRANK (“I am the Law”) J. HAGUE, boss of Jersey City since 1917 and its mayor for eight successive terms, is no longer quite the law in New Jersey, now that the twilight of the great city bosses has seemingly set in. But, even if he is an anachronism today, this satrap of the urban spoils still runs a machine that for many years was the most successful in America, and that still has weighty pull, push, and power not only in city and county but in state affairs.
H.g.e is such a formidable institution that he has, as it were, become disembodied. He is often referred to, not by name, but merely as the “Hall,” i.e. City Hall. One of his more notorious remarks is, “I decide—I do—me!”1
Let us summarize his personal characteristics briefly, if only because he is not at all a boss “type” in several respects. The Hall is a tall lean man with a ruddy face, so excessively well dressed that you notice it. To conceal baldness, he almost always wears a hat. His collars are stiff and high, even on the hottest of days, because he has a hypochondriacal fear of throat infections. Twice a year, if possible, he goes to a sanitarium in Michigan, and he likes Florida for long holidays in winter. Mr. Hague is a teetotaler, and has not smoked for a quarter of a century. He likes good food, and often comes into New York for lunch at the Plaza, where, as a rule, he sits in the Oak Room just inside the door. He loves racing and ball games. For years he took a brisk walk, actually for six or seven miles every evening after supper, whereupon he went promptly to bed. He likes to rise early, and the whole Hague machine is often alerted by telephone at seven in the morning. He can abuse the English language marvelously on occasion. Like all great city bosses he rules by having jobs to give—and take. Like most of them (except Crump) he is an ardent Catholic, and the fact that Jersey City is 70 per cent a Catholic town has something to do with his hold on power.
Hague’s father and mother both came from County Cavan, and he was born in 1876 in a Jersey City slum called the “Horseshoe.” The Hall was expelled from public school as an incorrigible at the age of thirteen,2 and his biography in Who’s Who says that his education was continued by “private tutor.” He went into politics practically by the time he was shaving, and was collecting votes before he could vote himself. For some years he was City Hall Custodian (= chief janitor) and in 1911, the first great step, he was elected street and water commissioner. A mayor in Jersey City does not run as such. Five commissioners are elected, who then choose a mayor from among themselves. Hague became mayor for the first time in 1917, though another commissioner, A. Harry Moore, got a bigger popular vote. He and Moore became close friends and remained so for years, and Moore is the only man who has ever been a governor of New Jersey three different times.
Guess who delivered himself of the following:
There are no alibis in politics. The delivery of the votes is what counts. And it is efficient organization in every little ward and precinct that determines national as well as local elections. National elections, national politics are just … a city on a big scale. It boils down to the wards and precincts. The whole thing is to have an organization that functions in every ward and precinct. That’s where the votes come from. The fundamental secret is to get the vote registered—and then get it out after it’s registered. That’s all there is to it. All the ballyhoo and showmanship such as they have at the national conventions is all right. It’s a great show. It gives folks a run for their money. It makes everybody feel good. But the man who makes the organization possible is the man who delivers the votes, and he doesn’t deliver them by oratory. Politics is a business, just like anything else.
Actually it was not Hague who said this. It was Boss Pendergast of Kansas City. But every word might easily have come from Hague’s mouth.3
Politics is not only a business in most American cities; it is also a business often corrupt. Lincoln Steffens in his Autobiography has a relevant passage about another town, much smaller and of a totally different kind, Greenwich, Connecticut. The stout burghers of Greenwich indignantly denied Mr. Steffens’ allegations (of course this was a good many years ago and now Greenwich is an honestly run city), whereupon he summoned a mass meeting and explained exactly what he meant. A young journalist who, as a volunteer leg man, had helped him collect his material and had assisted his lecture, then drew a diagram on the blackboard. I wish I could reproduce it here, for it demonstrates as well as anything I have ever seen the various intercoggings that can exist among business, taxes, politics, police, and the community at large. Incidentally the young journalist was Walter Lippmann.
Boss Hague, it will be said, copiously renders “service” to his flock. Indeed, ward heelers deal adequately with local complaints, and pass out cookies to the children of the poor. Nobody need be cold on Christmas Eve, and the fire department is zealous. There is no vice, no prostitution, in Jersey City, and dance halls and night clubs are severely frowned upon. Mr. Hague wants a nice clean town. Saloons, of course, proliferate, because they are good places in which to promote friendliness among Democratic voters, but women are discouraged from attending them. On the other hand Jersey City has slums as filthy, and debasing as any in the East. Thirteen per cent of all its buildings are, according to a federal survey, “unfit for human habitation.”4 Gangsters find short shrift in Hague’s citadel; sometimes they are met at the ferry, and expelled back to New York in a downright ungentlemanly fashion. But Jersey City is one of the biggest “handbook” towns in the nation. “It is,” writes Mr. Van Devander, “the home and sanctuary of the nation’s biggest handbook horse race betting syndicate.” “The Horse Bourse,” writes Westbrook Pegler, “is a protected racket handling millions of dollars, and it would not exist for an hour if the local administration were not interested in its preservation.”
What counts above all this is the cost. Jersey City pays through the nose to be, depending on the point of view, “Hague’s paradise” or “the worst city in the country.” The local tax rate is the steepest in America, having risen from $21 per $1,000 in 1917 to the glittering and almost unbelievable sum of $76.80 in 1947. The city spends more on itself on a per capita basis than any other in the United States, by far. Listen to Newsweek, not a muckraking or insurrectionary organ:5
The reasons for Jersey City’s plight are so numerous that they almost defy cataloguing. To build his machine, Hague in 1917 began loading up the city and county payrolls with political workers. … To finance the bulging payroll (there have been ‘cuspidor cleaners’ at $1,950 a year, a judge drawing two salaries at once, a multitude of henchmen receiving fat pay for questionable municipal tasks while operating private businesses on a full-time basis) the tax rate has risen … to the highest in the nation. Property assessments have risen correspondingly until they now approximate 100 per cent of true value, and, in some proven cases, more. Jersey City’s bonded debt is the highest per capita in the nation, and its financial rating is so poor that it pays premium interest rates to holders of its bonds. In return, the city receives the benefits of a gigantic municipal hospital, operated at costs far in excess of comparable units, enjoys the worst-littered streets in the nation and the most antiquated school buildings, but is “protected” by the largest and most expensive (for the city’s size) police force in America, which devotes itself to searching innocent motorists and pedestrians without provocation.
How does Hague rule? How does any boss rule? By pulling in the votes. The Hall has a solid block of 100,000 Hudson County voters. Hague does not go in for really rough stuff—there are no “pineapple primaries” as in Chicago—nor does he, as Pendergast did, have to call on “the cemetery vote.”6 He doesn’t need to. Except when he is in a jam, the vote is his anyway. It is, as the phrase goes, “beautifully regimented.” But the question is not yet fully answered. Jersey City is a broken-down city of ramshackle tenements with magnificently excessive taxes. Why does the citizenry continue to vote for Mr. Hague? The simplest answer is that he is an utter master at all the political devices that can be used in a city (and county) which has never known superior or even decent government. Most Americans love what I once heard described as “an extra portion of prestige.” The Hague faithful receive little “niceties” in police protection, their children get the best schoolteachers, and they are assigned low number license plates.7 Conversely, anybody who is known to oppose Hague openly—or worse, surreptitiously—may encounter discomforts. You may get a parking ticket no matter where you park. Or, if your offense is more serious, you may be subjected to a variety of discriminatory sanctions. Or, if you become an overt political antagonist, you may go to jail. The renowned Longo case is to the point. Mr. Hague is one who knows all, sees all. He is nobody to fool with, unless you really mean it.
Again to proceed. Hague has the votes, but what else? I quote now an extremely responsible journalist, James Kerney Jr. of the Trenton Times. The Kerneys, father and son, have been distinguished in New Jersey public life since the days of Woodrow Wilson.
Hague has for years manipulated the juries, prosecutors, judges, election boards, and tax assessors of Hudson County. They were outright agents of the machine, and powerful ones. Any critic of His Honor was likely to find his tax assessment raised, his right to vote impugned, and he was lucky, indeed, if he wasn’t arrested for fraudulent voting or gambling, or any of a dozen other offenses.8
Of course taxes are a prodigious weapon. Until recently, the Hall controlled both the Hudson County Tax Appeals Board and that of the state. During Governor Walter Edge’s administration Hague lost this latter. In the picturesque idiom of a member of the governor’s staff, “What we did was cut into Hague’s tax territory.” One does not need labor the point why taxes are so important. Any business, any family can be sent to the poorhouse if the tax assessor puts the tax high enough, and if there is no recourse to honest courts. A quarrel over 34 million dollars in delinquent railway taxes has been a thorn in the New Jersey body politic for almost twenty years. The railways—five main trunk lines—must go through Jersey City to reach New York. They can’t move. So what they can or should pay in taxes becomes a major battleground between Hague and the city on one hand and the state on the other. Prudential Insurance, one of the great insurance companies of the world, threatened to pick up bag and baggage and quit the near-by city of Newark forever, in February, 1945, unless taxes were reduced. It was complaining about state taxes, however, not Hague’s. Standard Oil of New Jersey has moved four times in recent years, because of what it thought were exorbitant local taxes. I do not say that these great corporations should not pay their proper share of the tax burden: I am saying merely that they considered conditions to be intolerable. For instance Jersey City could, by arbitrary procedure, suddenly lift an assessment on a company, as it did in one case, from $1,500,000 to $14,000,000 overnight, while at the same time reducing to a bagatelle that of another which it favored.9
One reason why Hague is no longer so powerful as before is that, as he grows older, and his absences in Florida become more pronounced, he finds it more difficult to impose discipline on his own men. Also many of his cronies and henchmen, who got their jobs a generation ago, are getting older too. Hague is loyal, however, and will not sacrifice them. As a result the younger men in the machine, the district leaders who actually get the vote out, find promotion very slow. All they can look forward to, as I heard it put, is funerals.
Turn now to the state. The simplest way to illustrate Hague’s power on a pan-New Jersey plane is to point out that six out of the last ten administrations were supported by him, including those of the aforementioned Mr. Moore.10 But since 1941 Hague has not had such easy sledding with governors. A notably decent man, Charles Edison, the son of the inventor and a former secretary of the navy, took office then, and refused to be bossed by the Hall, although a Democrat. The noise of the ensuing three-year quarrel could have been heard in Saturn. Then came Edge, a stalwart old Republican and a former ambassador to France, who fought Hague stubbornly for three years more. This was the first time that Hague had been faced by two hostile governors in turn; before this, even if unfriendly administrations did exist, he had managed to get one of his own men in between. Finally, in November, 1946, Hague got the beating of his life, when Alfred E. Driscoll, another able and hard-hitting Republican, succeeded Edge.
Few states have more volatile and energetic politics than New Jersey. Even United States senators pop in and out of office like balls in a pin game. The number that have held office in the past twenty years is beyond belief; there have literally been thirteen since 1929. Then consider judges. I could make this chapter fifty pages long. I will not do so. To trace out the interrelations among various members of the judiciary, pro-and anti-Hague, since the Hall has controlled most of the courts, is an adventure like going through the maze of Hampton Court blindfold and full of marijuana.
New Jersey governors, uniquely in the union, serve three-year terms. They may not be re-elected until after an interval. The legislature, especially the senate, is elected by a rotten borough system which favors the rural districts, and is invariably controlled by the Republicans. Now the power of the governor rests almost solely on appointments But all appointments to the judiciary and in fact to all really good jobs in the state must be confirmed by the senate. Customarily the governor and senate, even if of the same party, are as suspicious of each other as blackbirds, and therefore, to prevent a governor from slipping through appointments it may not like, the legislature remains almost continuously in session. In fact it usually stays alive until five minutes before its successor convenes, to obviate the possibility of ad interim appointments by the governor. There are more than seventy-five different state bodies in New Jersey, many of them overlapping, to which appointments may be made. So jobs are plentiful and keenly fought for. Some governors, instantly on being elected, set out to build a machine of their own, so that (a) they will be sure of a satisfactory job on leaving office, and (b) will be in a good position to run for re-election after the three-year interval. As a rule a governor wields effective power only in his first two years of office. After that, nobody pays much attention to him, since everybody is concentrated on maneuvering for the succession.11
Now this whole situation plays perfectly into the hands of a boss like Hague. He can balance almost anybody against anybody else by promising favors in return for support, to say nothing of the fact that appointees all over the state are still his men, appointed by “his” governors. Moreover there are many consequential Hague Republicans in New Jersey, not only in the rural areas but in cities like Atlantic City. Hague has, or had, cordial relations with Enoch L. (“Nucky”) Johnson, the Republican chieftain there who went to the federal penitentiary on an income tax conviction in 1941, and with lesser princelings in other towns.
Finally, we reach the national level. Why should a man great and serene like Roosevelt, who compares to Hague as the Parthenon to a chicken coop, have stooped to the level of dealing with the Hall? Do not be innocent. Mr. Hague has a steely grip on the Democratic state machine; he has been the leader of the New Jersey delegation to every national convention since 1920. Mr. Roosevelt had to deal with him because the structure of American politics imposes on every president the necessity of being a politician, and all folk running for office not only like votes but surplus votes, even when they’re not necessary. As a matter of fact FDR would not have carried New Jersey without Hague’s support in several campaigns. In 1932 for instance he won the state by only 30,000; Hague’s plurality in Hudson County was a walloping 117,000. About the various shenanigans that accompanied the candidacy of Mr. Edison (after FDR “toured the state by telephone”), and some excessively opaque and unsavory matters in federal patronage, we cannot speak here for lack of space. One extraordinary fact is that Hague himself was once an Al Smith man, violently anti-FDR. He arrived at the 1932 convention stating that, if nominated, Roosevelt “would not carry a single state east of the Mississippi, and very few in the West.”12
The way Hague plays with politics is accepted by many Americans with a certain moral lethargy; when he started playing with civil liberties sharper resentment was aroused. Some years ago, in consequence of a vindictive campaign to drive the CIO out of New Jersey, the Hall among other things passed an ordinance forbidding public meetings without a police permit. Later this was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But not until fierce local alarums had been sounded. It is one of the strangest of strange developments that, years later, the CIO should have re-entered the state in a quite different role, as a vehement supporter of Hague and the Hague machine. Of course this was to assist Roosevelt’s re-election. Politics makes—but you finish it.
The Hall has a son, by name Frank Joseph Hague Jr. This young man, who subsequently did a perfectly good and correct job as an official in Leo Crowley’s Foreign Economic Administration, was in 1939 appointed by Governor Moore to a seat on New Jersey’s highest court, that of errors and appeals. He was at this time only thirty-four; he had only begun to be well known as a lawyer; he had been unable to finish Princeton, and to make a place for him on the bench a vast and complex reshuffling was necessary, with repercussions that reached Washington and permeated judicial affairs all over the state for years. That this young man, whose legal experience can best be described as meager, should have been given this appointment to a court as proud of its historic tradition and impeccability as any in the land naturally provoked comment. Judge Hague resigned his post in January, 1945, just before his term was to expire. His chances of being reappointed by Governor Edge were not considered good.
Most New Jersey observers do not think that the junior Mr. Hague will be the successor to his father; the succession rests, it is thought, with the Hall’s nephew, Frank Hague Eggers, the old man’s secretary and a member of the city commission. One description I heard of him is that “he is personable in a Jersey City sort of way.”
Hague’s salary as mayor of Jersey City, the only public post he holds, is $8,000 per year. Yet his fortune is estimated by such an authority as Professor McKean of Dartmouth, author of The Boss, at four million dollars. Hague lives in an expensive Jersey City apartment building, which he owns; his summer house at Deal cost, according to public record, $125,120.50 cash. Several times he has had brushes with the income tax authorities; in 1929 he was fined $60,000 for tax delinquency.13 He has been questioned on occasion as to sources of his income and once, when accused of having accepted financial help from the bookmakers, he replied, “It’s all a goddam lie. I’d be crazy to take that kind of money. Hell, if I wanted to be dishonest, I could have dealt with the big companies whose assessments I raised.” Hague’s own explanation of his wealth is that well-informed friends gave him tips on the Stock Market.
To recapitulate: Hague himself is important not for his own qualities, or lack of them, but as a type. He is the end product of a system of society rather than a protagonist. But the system he represents is an affront to the Democratic party, to the American political system, to the memory of Mr. Roosevelt, to President Truman and the Democratic National Committee, and to civilization in the United States.
Note in Futurity
If, like Enoch Soames in Max Beerbohm’s famous story, I could be projected a hundred years into the future, to find myself browsing in a library, one of my first curiosities would be about a man like Hague. What will Hague—and Jersey City and so many other American cities large and small—look like in the perspective of a new century? What we of 1947 can hope for, at least, is that in 2047 our present modes of political behavior, our manner of life in great cities, will seem as museum like, as silly and archaic and also profanely cruel and wasteful, as conditions of child labor in England during the industrial revolution, or the peasantry in Russia under the czars, seems to us today. A clean brightness and briskness of civic spirit; enlightened and orderly democratic processes; tenements and slum encrustations abolished; scientific criteria for city management; a more generous community interest; schools well built and teachers well paid; the rubble of old neighborhoods torn out and rebuilt according to broad plan—all this can be in 2047, it people in 1947 will only will it so.
Garden State Foreshortened
New Jersey, a raucous little state, is marked off on its whole western edge by the sharp bending ribbon of the Delaware River, and is, in a manner of speaking, almost an island. The Gulf Stream warms the Atlantic along most of the Jersey shore; there is a 20 per cent difference in temperature between the water at Sandy Hook and Cape May; ice-breakers are at work near Bayonne when the strawberries are blooming below Atlantic City. The ocean frontage not only means a great fishing and tourist industry, but also a considerable income to the state from riparian rights.
As Edmund Wilson once wrote in the days when he was Edmund Wilson Jr., New Jersey is the slave of two cities. It is the commuter state par excellence. Hundreds of thousands of its citizens lead a “hybrid” life between New York, Philadelphia, and their homes in Jersey itself; at least a third of the population is suburban. Newark is as much a part of New York City, as we have already noted, as the Empire State Building. The Port of New York Authority embraces, with full New Jersey co-operation of course, the whole Hudson River estuary, and Newark was for years New York’s chief airport. To get to Times Square, say, from Jersey City, takes much less time than from the outer fringes of the Bronx or Staten Island. One odd point is that Jersey City, with its 300,000 people, has no department store. It must be the only American city of such size without one. Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Wana-maker’s, Saks, all the others on Manhattan, are only a half hour away.
Anybody who has ever doubted that American civilization is industrial has only to take a train from New York to Philadelphia or, better, get lost driving in the Newark-Jersey City area, underneath the Pulaski Skyway. The roads here are, I think, incidentally, the most confusingly marked of any in the United States. Here the fangs of industry really bite. There is not a blade of grass, if one may exaggerate slightly, in a dozen square miles. In a small car, at dusk, as the giant trucks and trailers grind their way through loops in smeary roads, one feels like a grasshopper caught in a stampede of iron elephants. The whole area is a kind of demonic metal shambles. Then it is almost impossible, emerging, not to reflect on one of the sharpest of all American paradoxes: the illimitable profusion of wealth in this country, created by men as well as machines, and the degrading poverty that accompanies it or, put in slightly different terms, the titanic amount of energy that goes into industrial production, compared with the meager residue allotted to the amenities of life. Look at any of the sleek factories on the road to Trenton. Then glance at the creaking black hovels along the tracks where people live.
New Jersey, though only the forty-fifth state in area, is sixth in value of manufactured products. The historic reason for this, aside from proximity to the sea, is that its axis is the shaft of a kind of dumbbell, of which New York and Philadelphia are heads; New Jersey feeds them both. It produces a greater variety of industrial products than any other American state, from steel rope to television sets (New Jersey will be “the first television state,” I heard it said), from battleships to silk to calculating machines, from gasoline to industrial tape to jinrickshas. Passaic and Paterson are great textile towns, famous for early struggles in the labor movement, and it has no fewer than seven cities greater in population than 100,000.
Then—two minutes off this seething industrial highway-—New Jersey bursts open like a rose. It produces a multifarious agriculture, mostly in vegetables, poultry, and dairy products. Not only agriculture. When the small-game season opens every autumn, at least 100,000 people hunt. New Jersey is a great state not merely for electronic tubes but for pheasants, rabbits, quail.
Much else about New Jersey should be said. It has one town, Flemington (the site of the Lindbergh kidnapping trial), which was once the home seat of some ninety corporations, including Standard Oil of New Jersey, because its property taxes are so light. It has the biggest court of last resort in the United States, with sixteen judges (“slightly bigger than a squad, slightly smaller than a mob”), of whom six lay members need not be lawyers. It has part of the Hudson Palisades, than which nothing in the eastern United States is more dramatically beautiful, the headquarters of the Gallup Poll, and the home of Walt Whitman. It has an important Ukrainian newspaper, and it is one of the few states where the Communist party, as such, advertises in the local press; it has one city, Hoboken, where there is a bar for every 207 citizens, the “Yarb Folk” of the southern shore, and a law obliging all high school students to take two years, not merely one, in American history and government. It has a strong Quaker underlay, also a strong Dutch underlay, and it believes so strongly in states’ rights that it once appropriated $25,000 to test the constitutionality of the Social Security law, while its citizens were benefiting from its provisions.
Finally, consider education. New Jersey has Rutgers, founded in 1766 and later a land grant college, which is one of the largest universities in the country with 16,000 students, and also the Institute for Advanced Study where Einstein works with a handful of exalted spirits. Princeton, the most sophisticated of all American universities as well as one of the best, is of course a New Jersey institution. Sometimes this pleasant school is referred to as a kind of ivory tower plus a country club. Nothing could be further from the truth. About a third of Princeton’s boys are on scholarship, and many wait on table eleven meals a week. Princeton differs from Harvard and Yale first because it is so much smaller, with attendance normally limited to 2,400, second because it is rural, not urban. Princeton, about which pages might be written, is crammed with strange distinctions; for instance every president has either been a Presbyterian minister or the son of one. It takes its splendid history for granted, and the campus has no statue, monument, or tablet to Woodrow Wilson.
1 Cf. article by Prof. Dayton David McKean in Public Men, p. 440.
2 According to John McCarten in the New Yorker. This two-part profile, which appeared early in 1938, is an indispensable source for material on Hague. Also see the essay in Public Men just cited, and a chapter in The Big Bosses, by Charles Van Devander.
3 From an interview with Pendergast by Ralph Coghlan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the best interview with an American boss I have ever read, except possibly one with Boss Murphy of New York in the New York Times many years ago (April 7, 1924) by Richard Barry. Mr. Coghlan's interview has been reprinted in Running the Country, p. 287.
4 New Republic, January 31, 1944.
5 May 21,1945. The comparable tax rate in New York City is $27.00.
6 Mr. Coghlan (op. cit.) mentions two specific wards in Kansas City where 41,805 votes were cast by the 38,401 babies. children, adults, and dead men living there. The registration was greater than official census figures for the population.
7 A whole elisay might be written on the strange snobbery implicit in this phenomenon.
8 The Nation, August 26, 1944.
9 According to the New Yorker, which names the names.
10 A wonderful glimpse of Moore’s political philosophy may be gathered from his opposition to social security on the ground that “it takes the romance out of old age.” Public Men, p. 442.
11 The fact that New Jersey gubernatorial elections are held every three years has another odd effect; they only jibe with Presidential elections once every twelve years, instead of every four.
12 Public Men, op. cit., p. 447.
13 According to the New Yorker, February 12, 1938. This is also the source for the quotation that follows.