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I begin today’s offering with an apology. Last week I neglected to put a title on my piece, leaving some people in the dark as to whether I was writing about transcendental meditation or baseball. It wasn’t either; it was about websites like “Cops Suck” and “Off the Pigs” which caused me to wonder if the internet was really such a blessing as it has been advertised to be. I conclude that it is because after all, in spite of the hostility I’m still around to answer back and what more can I ask for?
I’ve complained often enough here that I’m so far out of circulation that I never can deliver any first-person news of events involving myself, but can only reminisce about those and for any other subjects have to resort to the news of the day gotten from the media. For instance today I’m once more going to write about a book I’ve read, and not a personal experience, but I will salt and pepper the book review with a little seasoning from them.
The Book is “Mysteries of My Father” by Thomas Fleming (Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2005). Mr. Fleming is a journalist-novelist-historian as he describes himself, with forty books to his credit, but his background is in New Jersey politics in the days of the Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and, trailing its way through all of these excitements, the Jersey City political machine of Mayor Frank Hague.
The number of people who remember all this grows less every day, so that the above references have less and less meaning, but I recall when they were the daily diet of the newspapers, in which Hague was often the star figure on the front page, with all the history serving as only as a background to his exploits. Thomas Fleming had no need to read the papers for this information. He had a front-row seat for Hague’s circus from his birth in 1927 to the day of Hague’s retirement in 1947. He had this access because his father, also Tom Fleming, was the godfather’s lieutenant in the Sixth Ward of the city. The Sixth was Hague’s showplace ward that always delivered the biggest majorities for the Democratic ticket in every election, federal, state or local. Tom Fleming Sr. stood high with the boss as a result.
Unlike Hague, though, he didn’t get rich from his political activity. That was because all income from illegal gambling in the ward went to City Hall. So did the three-percent annual kickback from municipal employees’ salaries, on “rice-pudding day” as it was called., so did the thirty percent commission on new appointments to city jobs, so did a whole river of other income that poured into the pockets of Frank Hague to supplement his mayor’s salary of $8,000 or so.
Hague spent freely on his pleasures and preferences, but also knew how to return something to the community. In the Depression Tom (“Teddy”) Fleming Sr. would distribute 1,500 Christmas turkeys to the unemployed in his ward. He and the rest of the Hague organization worked hard on finding jobs for constituents. Hague built a huge municipal hospital as a tribute to his mother. “Have a baby on Haguey” was the byword of the patients, as I read at the time in the Saturday Evening Post. Jersey City’s streets were clean, crime was not allowed, and parks and playgrounds sprang up the same way they did in New York for Mayor LaGuardia. The federal Works Progress Administration, the WPA, built them for these two loyal supporters of President Roosevelt.
Hague was in high favor with the Administration. His huge majorities in Jersey City were the deciding factor in state elections. He himself was re-elected in 1937 by a vote of 110,743 to 6,798! Figures like that were enough to carry Hudson County all the time and the state most of the time. New Jersey was a swing state that could go either way for President, so Hague was indispensable.* In 1938 though he put a strain on this relationship by blocking another member of the Roosevelt coalition, the CIO, from organizing labor in Jersey City.
He got a bad press from this, which I well remember from those days even though I was only a schoolchild. The Daily News had a picture on the front page of Norman Thomas, a Socialist and a CIO ally, with a bloody forehead from a Hague cop’s nightstick, which he got when he tried to speak at a rally. The headline read “I Am The Law!: Hague”, something the Mayor had said in rescuing one of his followers from court one time, but which now became identified with him as his theory of government. He was never allowed to forget it after that.
All the same it took nine years to catch up with him. In 1947 he finally resigned as Mayor, having been in office for thirty years. His reputation for arrogance and greed had been growing and a new generation of voters weren’t prepared to line up with him in the way their parents had. His strongest supporter, Teddy Fleming, continued in his post however. The new mayor John V. Kenny recognized his popularity in the Sixth Ward, where he had outpolled even President Truman in the 1948 election, running for reelection as sheriff of Hudson County. This was the highest post in the Hague organization, earned by years of work getting out the vote for the straight ticket.
Thomas Fleming hasn’t written a history of Jersey City politics, in spite of the amount of it that gets into this book. He had written it as an act of self-examination to enable him to come to terms with his mixed feelings about his father, and also his mother. He had a strict Catholic upbringing, which had to make him uneasy about the Hague connection, even though he banished his doubts to the back of his mind. He doesn’t admit to any doubts about his father’s honesty, but doesn’t dwell on it either. His father never pretended to be a paragon in politics and in fact breathed a sigh of relief when he finally left office “without a jail sentence”.
His father was a hero to him most of the time for his courage and toughness (he got a battlefield commission in World War I). Probably his worst fault in his two sons’ eyes was his reserved nature, which prevented him expressing his love for them, who were troubled enough by the quarrels of their parents over what their mother considered their father’s disreputable occupation. Son Tom was privileged, he knew, but alienated all the same. He waited for a breakthrough, but…well, read the book.
*When FDR died Jimmy Cannon said he “transcended” his shady pals like Hague. Of course.
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