Mayor Frank Hague: When Jersey City ruled politics

by John Farmer/ The Star-Ledger
Sunday May 17, 2009, 5:02 AM


Franklin D. Roosevelt, center, prepares to launch his successful bid for the White House with his first campaign rally at Sea Girt on Aug. 27, 1932. Second from the left is New Jersey Gov. A. Harry Moore. On the right is unsmiling Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague who turned out an estimated 100,000 people to hear FDR attack incumbent Republican President Herbert Hoover and call for an end to Prohibition.

The mayoral election in Jersey City last Tuesday, like most recent elections there, was no big deal outside that city. But it wasn't always that way. Sixty years ago this month the city's mayoral election was a national event, one that turned New Jersey politics upside down.

The Democratic machine of Frank Hague, the most powerful urban boss in the country and mayor of Jersey City for 30 years, elector of governors and U.S. senators and sponsor of judges, was defeated in a stunning upset engineered by a protege, John V. Kenny.

With the loss went Hague's long domination of Democratic politics in New Jersey, access to the White House and his clout in national politics. It was front page news across the country.
Hague wasn't on the ballot that fateful day. He had delegated the mayor's job to his nephew, Frank Hague Eggers, but continued to control the Democratic machine from the shadows. Even after his ticket's defeat in the city election, Hague still controlled the Hudson County government.

But it was Jersey City, with its array of tax-rich railroad property and heavy industry property and the jobs they generated, that provided the mountains of money and votes that nourished his machine. With its loss, Hague's days atop the political pile were numbered.

They ended for good when his candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1953, Elmer Wene, lost to Kenny's choice, Robert B. Meyner, who went on to victory that November.

Hague's defeat was as improbable as his rise from poverty in the city's grimy Second Ward, the "Horseshoe," a gerrymandered home to the Irish who served as foot soldiers in the city's Protestant-dominated Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century.

Born in 1876 of immigrant Irish parents, Hague was a big, tough, red-haired kid with a sixth-grade education (expelled from school) when he tied his future to the Second Ward Democratic Party and one of its leaders, tavern owner Ned Kenny, father of John V. Kenny. (More on their life and death connection later).

Hague was a ward heeler and a good one. It got him elected constable at the turn of the century and later won him appointment as City Hall custodian, a post with plenty of patronage. Few politicians in American history have exploited patronage as skillfully as Hague.

In 1913, Hague won election to Jersey City's new five-member commission government -- and with it control of the city's police and fire departments and even more patronage. Four years later, a reelected Hague, running as a reformer, was chosen mayor, and in 1920 took control of state government with the election of Edward I. Edwards, his candidate for governor.

So powerful and far-reaching was the Hague machine that its candidates won five of the eight gubernatorial elections between 1920 and 1941. Hague even managed to have his son appointed to the Court of Errors and Appeals, New Jersey's highest court at the time. Young Hague had passed the bar but never graduated from a law school.

"The Boss" fancied himself a reformer. Women were barred from bars and prostitutes were run out of town. So was Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas. Hague suppressed unions too, especially the CIO, which he regarded as communist.

Though he was never convicted of anything, Hague was dogged by charges of corruption throughout his long career. His lavish lifestyle invited it -- trips to Paris, a duplex apartment on the boulevard in Jersey City, homes in Deal at the Jersey Shore and in Palm Beach, Fla., and an apartment at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. All on a salary that never exceeded $8,500.

His lifestyle and political prominence, and the widespread academic and journalistic interest in his machine and its success, kept Jersey City in the headlines even as it began an industrial and population decline at the start of the 1940s.

Hague was without a peer as a political organizer. He built his machine from the bottom up, beginning with Irish Catholic resentment in his early years and swelling the machine's ranks with payroll jobs in the city and county governments. He made the police and fire departments arms of the Democratic Party and apportioned power among the "twelve apostles," his designated leaders and eyes and ears in the city's 12 wards.

Hague spread the wealth. But beneficiaries had to deliver on election day -- man telephone banks, chauffeur voters to the polls, stuff envelopes and mailboxes with campaign literature, talk up the ticket, rat out non-believers.

Then there was the infamous "rice pudding" day -- when workers were assessed the 3-percent paycheck kickback the machine demanded. So vast was the windfall that it enabled Hague to finance Democratic primary campaigns in counties around the state -- a prime source of his wide-ranging power.

Allegations persisted that Hague himself benefited from these collections and from the huge number-racket play in the city. Never proved, but likely. As a young reporter in Jersey City in the mid-1950s I was told, however, that Hague, in his early days on the city commission, benefitted from the purchase (through straw men) of farm land in the Greenville section, later sold for industrial development at great profit.

Hague's election-day muscle produced massive majorities in the city and Hudson County for Democratic candidates -- usually late in the day. Many a Republican statewide nominee came to the Hudson line with a substantial 20-county, lead only to see it vanish in an avalanche of Hudson County votes.

Republicans and assorted good-government critics regularly cried foul, claiming Hague's minions cast more votes than there were live voters, a not unrealistic claim. Voter lists were rarely purged in Hague's day, always a temptation for "ghost voting." Indeed, former governor Brendan Byrne has joked he hopes to be buried in Jersey City "so I can remain active in politics."

Hague, who first opposed Franklin Roosevelt's presidential ambitions, earned his lasting regard by turning out a crowd of 120,000 supporters at a Sea Girt rally during the 1932 campaign. A grateful FDR poured New Deal money into Jersey City, constructing Roosevelt Stadium and completing the vast Medical Center. A generation of residents paid no medical bills in Frank Hague's Jersey City, where a form of universal health care was provided.
Hague's machine was aging as the 1940s deepened and so were his chief lieutenants and ward heelers. A younger generation was growing restless and the city's expanding Italian and Polish populations chaffed under Hague's all-Irish rule. The stage was set for John V. Kenny's 1949 revolt.

Kenny, like Hague before him, was leader of the Second Ward, the "Horseshoe," and aspired to something grander -- a seat on the city commission. He boiled over when Hague handed the seat to his nephew. Building his campaign around Italian and Polish ambitions (Kenny named Louis Messano and Charles Witkowski to his ticket) and on returning World War II veterans with no allegiance to Hague, Kenny swept to power at the head of the "Freedom Ticket" in 1949.

Kenny cemented his place in the state Democratic power structure and ended Hague's by backing Meyner's successful campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1953 and subsequent election. Kenny never acquired Hague's broad influence in the state -- a declining Jersey City no longer produced the millions for the machine it had in Hague's day,
He even lost control of Jersey City for a time in the late 1950s before regaining it at the start of the 1960s and playing a backstage role in city and state politics for the rest of the decade.

"The Little Guy," as his admirers dubbed Kenny, was, like Hague, the subject of constant corruption charges. But not as lucky. Unlike Hague, he was convicted on federal charges of masterminding a massive kickback scheme involving millions of dollars in city and county contracts. Kenny died in Jersey City in 1975.

Like Hague, who died Jan. 1, 1956 in New York, Kenny is buried in Holy Name Cemetery on the West Side of Jersey City. They lie near each other, linked in death as they were in life.

John Farmer is The Star-Ledger's editorial page editor.