Frank Hague (1876-1956) is a forgotten name among many outside Jersey City today, but he was among the foremost political bosses of his time and the control he exerted over Jersey City was so extensive and the means he used to win were such that they surpassed election law. He had a strong quid pro quo relationship with FDR and used Hudson County to decide races for governor in New Jersey.
Early Life and Political Start
Born to a working class Irish family in the Horseshoe area of Jersey City, Frank Hague did not excel at school, in fact, he was expelled for his bad behavior at 13, thus he only had a sixth grade education. Indeed, some of Hague’s enemies would later swear that he was barely literate and could read no more than headlines in a newspaper (Fleming). Although school ended early for him, his political career started early too. At the age of 20, after securing a loan from bar owner Ned Kenny, he began his campaign for constable and won by 3 to 1 margin. Through his effectiveness at voter turnout for Boss Bob Davis, he was rewarded with the post of deputy sheriff and continued to rise in the political organization of Jersey City, including delivering his ward to the Democrats when Republican Mark Fagan won the mayoral election. Hague had an early scandal when in 1904 he and Deputy Sheriff Thomas “Skidder” Madigan covered for Red Dugan, a friend of his, who had been passing fraudulent checks in Boston by providing a false alibi under oath (Watkins). Dugan would subsequently admit he had done it, and the Boston court wanted to indict Hague for perjury but couldn’t extradite him. This didn’t hurt Hague with many working class Irish voters, as helping a friend, especially doing so at the behest of said friend’s mother, which Hague said was the case, was a sufficient excuse (Watkins). He made a break with Boss Davis in 1906 over an appointment and he sided with reformer H. Otto Wittpenn for mayor, who when he won in 1907 he appointed Hague city custodian. He also made an important connection with Wittpenn’s secretary, A. Harry Moore, who would become a close ally, as well as with John Milton, who would serve as his lawyer throughout his political career. After Davis died in 1911, Wittpenn sought to lead the Democratic Party in Hudson County only for Hague to turn on him and accuse him of bossism, yet Wittpenn would win. He would also critically back a new reform figure in New Jersey politics in Governor Woodrow Wilson, including his destruction of the machine of Boss Smith of Newark (Fleming). Indeed, in this time, Hague was thought of as a reformer or at least he put on the mask of one.
Hague: The Reformer?
In 1911, Hague won the post of street and water commissioner, in which he quickly cut the budget from $180,000 annually to $110,000 and fired half the staff, only to quietly bring in more than the number he fired with his own men after he won praise in the press (Watkins). He also quietly and with success requested the city council to reverse the budget cuts. Hague then set his eyes on the police department, which had become a bad joke under Boss Davis, who freely allowed all sorts of vice. Hague did so by ruthlessly enforcing regulations, including having 125 officers tried in a day for violating them, and ruthlessly demoted or fired police officers (Fleming). These men were replaced by men Hague could count on. These men would serve as a surveillance network within the police force, and soon petty bribery was stamped out. Laws against prostitution and after-hours drinking were enforced, and women were barred from saloons with legal (and possibly extralegal) punishments threatened for violations by saloon owners (Fleming). Streets were also literally cleaned. While previously the streets would have a fair amount of garbage at any one time, Hague mandated the spraying down of the streets with a fire hydrant every night (Watkins). In 1913, his efforts were crucial in netting the Democratic gubernatorial candidate James Fielder a victory. Hague managed to produce a 25,959 vote lead in Hudson County (Fleming). After this, he was widely acknowledged as the leader of the Hudson County Democratic Party. Despite being a Democratic leader, there were occasions in which he tacitly supported a Republican candidate. The first instance of this was to counter his chief rival, Otto Wittpenn.
The 1916 Election: Hague Makes a Deal
In the 1916 gubernatorial election, Hague got some bad news in the Democratic primary: Otto Wittpenn was the winner! Fearing that his influence would be countered if he managed to be elected governor, he got into contact with Republican candidate Walter Edge’s campaign manager, Nucky Johnson. Hague worked out a deal with Johnson to get Edge elected governor, and this would be done by Hague not pushing for Wittpenn’s election partly in exchange for the Holland Tunnel, to be constructed, to end in Jersey City (Murphy). Edge was elected governor with Hudson County reporting a mere 7,430 vote lead for Wittpenn, the worst for a Democratic nominee for governor in decades (Fleming). His electoral career was over, and in the following year’s municipal election, Hague won after Mark Fagan decided to step down.
Mayor Hague
Although Hague was now in power, he did not have some of the conventional skills of a leader. I mentioned earlier that his education was limited, and even though he got training for public speaking once mayor, he would still have problems. Hague was on record, for instance, saying that “One hundred ten thousand voters has endorsed my administration”, that Jersey City was “the most moralest city in America”, and once ended a speech with “And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the privilege of listening to me” (Fleming). Fortunately for Hague, he was not short of other means for power.
The source of Hague’s power as the mayor of Jersey City and the leader overall of Hudson County lay in the economic circumstances of Jersey City. All railroad lines that had terminals in Jersey City with cargo intended for New York City had to go through the Port of Jersey City to be shipped across the Hudson Bay, as no freight lines existed between the two cities. This gave Hague the power to control the conditions in which such goods would be transported out to New York City. This was a rich source for kickbacks and shakedowns that immensely profited Hague and others who wielded control over the Hudson Waterfront (Murphy). He also maintained his power through expanding the number of public employees. Jersey City had the highest number of public sector employees of any city of that size, some of these were rewards for help in political campaigns and some had no duties, rendering them welfare by another name (Watkins). This extensive public payroll had to be funded somehow. He did so through multiple means. One was requiring that public employees kick back 3% of their pay to fund the Hague machine. Another was through raising taxes. After 20 years of Hague’s rule of Jersey City, taxes had been increased threefold, property assessments had doubled, and the city’s debt was increased by 500% (Life Magazine). He also, popularly for many of his constituents, sought huge tax increases on major businesses. In 1917 and 1918, he dramatically increased annual tax assessments on Standard Oil (from $1.5 million to $14 million), the Public Service Corporation (from $3 million to $30 million), and railroads (from $67 million to $160 million), to which they promptly went to the State Board of Taxes and Assessments, which canceled all his increases (Fleming).
This State Board was a problem, and he needed it replaced, and to replace it, he needed an ally, not Walter Edge, as governor. Hague denounced the board as beholden to special interests and pushed for the election of Jersey City’s First National Bank president, Edward I. Edwards, an important ally (Fleming). Major turnout in Hudson County netted Edwards the governorship. Indeed, Hague’s turnout machine was unrivaled in its time; 92% of eligible voters in Hudson County were registered and 85% or more went to the polls (Murphy). However, Hague was able to secure even more votes than that. It was not legal for names to be removed from Hudson County’s voter registration rolls, thus deaths or moves had to be noted on the rolls, but the Hudson County Board of Elections was deliberately lax on doing this. After all, the appointees to this board were on paper Republicans but in truth, owed their jobs to Hague. This was a rich source of data to produce fraudulent ballots when they were needed (Murphy). Hague needed to use such trickery to the fullest when it came to the 1920 municipal election, in which Democrats were very unpopular with Irish voters given their anger at President Woodrow Wilson, and they were facing an electoral slaughter. Hague’s machine desperately wanted to elect Skidder Madigan to the post of sheriff of Hudson County. Madigan, Hague’s old pal when they were both deputy sheriffs, could be counted on to select grand juries that were to Hague’s liking, in other words, those who would not vote to convict on any activities of Hague’s machine or would vote to convict those that Hague needed convicted. However, Madigan had a problem that year aside from being a Democrat, and that was he couldn’t read or write (Fleming). The Hague machine went all out to get him elected sheriff while other candidates went down to defeat. Violence, fraud, every trick that needed to be pulled was pulled to elect Madigan (Fleming). He also appealed to the Irish voters of the city, capitalizing on their resentments of Republican WASPs and of big businesses.
Hague’s regime, however, did come with its benefits. The poor were assisted in finding jobs and given free food, clothing, and coal (Watkins). The city streets were, as mentioned before, literally clean. Prostitution was no longer a significant presence in Jersey City, and the mob was kept out. Police, fire, and emergency services were pushed to efficiency, and Hague would sometimes personally test this efficiency by making emergency calls from a public phone booth at night. If the responding people did not come in a timely manner that satisfied Hague, he would berate them and occasionally even punch them in the face (Watkins). One example was when he was angered that an ambulance he called had taken 15 minutes to arrive. When he began berating the head intern, the young man responded, “It took me a while to wake up”, to which Hague answered by knocking him down into the gutter (Fleming). It was also due to Hague that Journal Square, the Pulaski Skyway, and the Jersey City Medical Center and a maternity hospital named after Hague’s mother, Margaret were constructed. A major benefit of living in Hague’s Jersey City was that medical care could be obtained by a fee of $35 but it would be waived if you said you couldn’t pay for it, and some of the best doctors in the nation were employed at the Jersey City Medical Center. This resulted in a hospital that cost $3 million to operate annually and received only $15,000 in revenue (Watkins). Public funds made up for the rest.
Don’t Mess With Hague
The consequences for challenging Hague could be quite serious. In 1937, a man named John Longo sought to challenge Hague from within the Democratic Party and formed an anti-Hague slate, but this was met with arrest and a Hague judge sentenced him to nine months imprisonment on fabricated charges (Watkins). He would be screwed over again by Hague after getting an appointment as deputy clerk in 1943 for Hudson County. He would once again be arrested, and six witnesses committed perjury against him, resulting in another Hague judge sentencing Longo to prison between 18 months and 3 years (Watkins). Hague also employed violence to keep power; he had campaign workers and police beat up people who opposed him. This included one particularly notorious incident in which 245 Princeton students were sent by the Honest Ballot Association to monitor a 1920s election, which resulted in all students being blocked from the polling places and five were beaten so badly they had to be hospitalized (Watkins). Hague’s use of police to violently enforce his will was reinforced with incentives. The police force of Jersey City was the highest paid and most staffed of any police force of a city that size (Fleming). As previously mentioned, Hague could engage in physical violence himself. In one incident, he knocked out cold one of Jersey City’s commissioners, Michael Fagen (Fleming).
Further Rise to Power
In 1924, Hague’s power grew when Al Smith, thankful for his efforts on his behalf to secure the Democratic nomination (albeit unsuccessfully), managed to get him the vice chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, and he would remain in this position until 1952. This gave Hague considerable influence over who the Democrats would select for president, and he certainly played his part in getting Al Smith the nomination in 1928.
Hague Fixes the 1928 Republican Gubernatorial Primary
Frank Hague’s influence did not exist only within the Democratic Party…he extended his grip to the Republican Party in a number of ways as well. A particularly notable event was the 1928 Republican primary, in which the favorite was widely regarded as former judge Robert Carey, who was a prominent critic of Hague and promised to take on his machine. He didn’t want to risk this man winning the election, thus he managed to get 20,000 of his supporters registered as Republicans to vote in the primary, resulting in the victor being State Senator Morgan F. Larson, a mild presence. As it turns out, Hague’s scheme was 100% legal, as New Jersey law permitted a person who had not voted in the last primary to switch party registration without penalty, thus Hague, anticipating 1928 as an important election, had 20,000 of his followers not vote in the preceding primary (Fleming). It was a good thing for Hague that he had done so, as Larson won the election.
More will come on Hague in a follow-up post, as he is a considerable subject.
References
Fleming, T. (1969). The Political Machine II: A Case History “I Am the Law”. American Heritage, 20(4).
Retrieved from
https://www.americanheritage.com/political-machine-ii-case-history-i-am-law
Jersey City’s Mayor Hague: The Last of the Dictators. (1938, February 7). Time Magazine.
Retrieved from
https://www.cityofjerseycity.org/hague/life/life020738.shtml
Murray, J.M. (2022, November 2). The Real Stolen Election – Frank Hague and the NJ Governor’s Race of 1937. YouTube.
Watkins, T. The Political Machine of Frank Hague of Jersey City, New Jersey. San Jose State University.
Retrieved from
Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 