4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  A few months later and a dozen miles down the shore, the Daily Journal reopened the issue of colored people being allowed on Asbury's beaches. The lead editorial of July 29, 1886, began by quoting "a man who has been very prominently identified with this place." The thinly disguised Bradley stated, in convoluted prose, that "the people who make their living out of Asbury Park have no rights that our visitors are bound to respect." Elaborating on the theme, the editors explained that if it were a crowd of white workers monopolizing the pavilion every evening, they'd have to be censored, too. But it happened to be "crowds of negroes who nightly swarm in the vicinity of Asbury Avenue." The paper didn't want "to stir the matter as was done last year, but the evil must be abated or our place will suffer." Having begun the piece by implying that Bradley supported them, the editors concluded that hotel and cottage owners might be "compelled for self preservation to cease to employ colored help."

  That was the first threat. The next day, a letter to the editor signed simply "Citizen" applauded the Journal's position and argued that "nine-tenths of our people would be inclined to use much stronger language" on the subject of "crowds of Africans infesting every promenade and public place, day and evening." As its follow-up editorial, the Daily Journal printed a letter from a writer who had been visiting Asbury for the last decade. He wondered if Mr. Bradley couldn't be persuaded to build a separate pavilion down the beach for colored people, who, the writer felt sure, "would be glad to know they had at last a place of their own." The same issue noted that Asbury Park's Opera House was presenting the Wilson &L Rankin minstrel show, featuring the "burnt-cork acts" of George Wilson, whose "drollery is irresistible, natural and infectious."

  In mid-August, under the headline "A Colored Man's View," another voice was heard. William H. Dickerson described the entire issue as one of the "relics of America's barbarous institution of slavery." Why not enforce the law for anyone, black or white, who acted as a public nuisance? Wasn't that the principle of our republican form of government? "For whites and blacks to sit in the same pavilion and bathe in the same ocean does not make the white man any blacker nor the black man any whiter . . . As long as both are well-behaved, neither suffers from unavoidable juxtaposition." Finally, Dickerson pointed out that he'd had several conversations with Mr. Bradley and did not believe "he can be induced to change his broad and liberal views for a narrow and discriminating prejudice."

  That Saturday, the Journal went back on the offensive, interviewing an unnamed hotel man who, again, suggested that "one way out of it" was for businesses to stop hiring colored people. "Then the annoyance will be at an end, and the cure will be accomplished without any damaging publicity and without any trouble."

  The Bradleys were back in Europe during the summer of 1886. But this time, in a letter from Wiesbaden, Germany, the founder of Asbury Park finally made his opinion public. Wiesbaden had been a successful resort since Roman emperors had come for its mineral waters and hot baths. While the waters were free to all, Bradley wrote, one side of the stream was set apart for townspeople so they wouldn't interfere with the pleasure of the tourists. That's how a resort town should behave, where "every person in the town, whether landlord, storekeeper, servant, car driver, or railroad employee seems to do their best to impress the stranger with the fact that he is a welcome guest."

  This was, Bradley wrote, "in strong contrast" to Asbury Park, where millions of dollars in capital had been invested (much of it, he didn't have to say, his own) "and a like care must be shown by us, as is shown by the frugal and clear-headed Germans." Then, just in case anyone missed the parallel, Bradley drove his point home:

  "The best seats on the board walk and the pavilions must not be monopolized by colored servants, who in addition to the fact that they intrude themselves into places that belong by right to others, are often impudently intrusive [his emphasis]. The time is coming, indeed may have arrived, when some decided action must be taken to show our colored friends that the board walk and pavilions are private property." All this, Bradley concludes, "for the permanency of the town and the protection of the capital invested."

  Bradley's promised land had its limitations. They were realistic and necessary ones. The country itself had begun with a Declaration of Independence, but did that mean all men, or women, had equal rights? No. That was impractical. A poor man might want to be rich, the same way a rich man might want to be king, but that had never been part of the promise.

  By the time Bradley's letter appeared, it was late in the season, and the matter rested through a second winter. Bradley, meanwhile, focused on the temperance issue. In a letter to the Asbury Park Journal, he accused Asbury's drugstores of being "dens of iniquity, containing private rooms where young girls were taken, drugged, and ruined."

  But in its first issue of 1887, the Daily Journal devoted a large part of the editorial page to reprinting Bradley's letter from Germany. It was the third summer in a row that the local papers had featured the racial issue, and this time, the minority population organized. On the last Sunday of June, 1887, it was announced from the pulpit of the A.M.E. Zion Church, across the tracks on Lake Avenue, that there would be an indignation meeting held the next evening.

  Bradley wrote an open letter he distributed throughout Asbury. While he encouraged the idea of a public meeting, the founding father asked that if there was one, his entire article (the letter from Germany) be read aloud "in a distinct and clear voice," because he could only conclude that some "wrong deductions" or inference had been drawn.

  Monday evening, the church was filled with over 250 people, many of them women. Tubs of flowers covered the altar, and kerosene lamps flickered dimly (the town had run electricity to light the boardwalk, but not apparently to the colored part of town). After "America" was sung and following an opening prayer, the pastor of the church, the Reverend James Frances Robinson, denounced Bradley in what the Journal would later call the "most offensive and incendiary language."

  "We will take no dictation from James A. Bradley or any other white man on the face of the earth," the Reverend Robinson began to general applause. "We are seven million five hundred thousand strong. We own land; we raise the wheat, the corn, the cotton, and we helped save the Union . . . Mr. Bradley and the white people object to the negroes on the beach, where the free air of heaven blows, and yet in the dining room they are willing to have the negro sweat right over them."

  The congregation interrupted with applause and laughter.

  "In the barbershop the white people are willing to have our black hands upon their faces, and yet they object to our presence on the beach. What an intelligent man this Bradley is!"

  Again, the crowd laughed.

  "Shall we sit and bear it?" the reverend called, and the crowd answered, "No!"

  "We will go on the beach, and, however bitter the pill for Mr. Bradley," the speaker concluded, "he shall be made to swallow it."

  After the applause, public-school teacher Moses Newsome followed with a much more mild-mannered resolution. Since Bradley's article was "unwholesome to the tastes of cultivated and respectable colored citizens," from now on Bradley and his colleagues should "specify more definitely the class to whom they refer." Respectable colored people, the resolution concluded, were just as eager to censure troublemakers as the man they called the Boss. What were unacceptable were "the slurs hurled at us as a nation."

  That might sound reasonable, but what Asbury's colored people were forgetting, according to the Shore Press, was that whether they were "respectable" or not, whether they lived on the West Side or took a train in for the day, they were all merely visitors. The New York City papers had it wrong in declaring that Asbury had colored residents who owned property worth $200,000. They were assuming the shadow city was in Asbury. "The fact is that there is not a foot of land in the borough owned by a colored person." Then the Shore Press reprinted with its approval an editorial from the Newark Evening News that reminded colored people that Bradley, as owner of the beach,
had a "legal and moral right" to decide who could come on his beach "as long as private ownership of land is recognized."

  And that was tolerant compared to the Daily Journal. Its lead editorial began by denouncing radical colored "agitators" like the Reverend Robinson. These sorts weren't satisfied with the Negroes' progress from slave to citizen. They wanted to be "treated not only as well but even better than the whites." As an example, the paper quoted Robinson's statement that "if there was a sign up over the gates of hell, 'no colored people allowed,' we would go right in, because we've a right there." An amusing flight of fancy, but the concept went against all rules of law, including and especially property rights. "Respect and equality can never be gained by such a course," the Journal declared, "and our colored brethren surely must have reasoning power enough to understand it." And if they didn't? How to deal with those who couldn't or wouldn't understand? "Whether their skin is black or white," the editorial concluded, "they should be effectually extinguished."

  There was no mistaking that. Especially just down the shore and barely a year after the lynching of Mingo Jack.

  The evening after Independence Day, 1887, the Reverend Robinson took the issue to St. Mark's Church on West Thirty-fifth Street in New York City. There, the church pastor started things off by objecting to the "ante-war spirit of race distinction that still prevailed" in Asbury. "They have resurrected the old kuklux idea in the North," he declared, "and there ought to be as much indignation against it as when it was south of Mason and Dixon's line."

  When it came the Reverend Robinson's turn to speak, he was introduced as the only one of the town's four colored pastors "who had dared to cry out against Mr. Bradley." Now, the Reverend Robinson announced that he understood the language of the Daily Journal editorial perfectly well. It was enough, he said, "to make one think it was edited in Georgia."

  "Boycott it!" someone shouted, and the church applauded.

  "The fact is," the reverend continued, "that neither the paper nor Mr. Bradley can keep us all off the beach. I went down there last night and saw some elegant colored ladies. There were Chinamen there, too, and Italians. Mr. Bradley himself is an Irishman." There was more applause, and the reverend concluded, "Mr. Bradley might as well try to hang his handkerchief on the horns of the moon as to keep the colored people off God's beach."

  The next day the Daily Journal insisted that this had nothing to do with race. The paper was against "all nuisances white or black." Bradley repeated this position in a statement to the Shore Press. "I am free to admit that I wish to discourage the great number of colored people coming here," he told a reporter, "not because I have any feeling against them as a race, but because I find that the patrons of the Park object to their great number." He declared that he was "and always have been a firm friend of the race, but I would not be doing justice to the vast amount of capital that is invested in every way in Asbury Park if I allowed my sentimental feelings to assert themselves."

  It was a fine turn of phrase, this doing justice to capital. It implied that money had its own rights. Maybe all men were created equal, but that was a "sentimental feeling" next to the basic freedom to turn a profit. (Add this to the list of Bradley's contradictions. Because when it came to selling booze, the founding father believed a man's right to make a living was trumped by the higher moral truth of temperance.)

  Still, Bradley insisted, this was not about skin color. As an example, he brought up the Italian workers who were in Asbury that summer installing an electric railway. "Now if they would stay on after their work is done there would be nothing for them to do, and the same principle will hold good in regard to the colored people, and any impecunious class."

  By the following Fourth of July, Bradley had instituted what he called "commission hours." During those identified times only, colored people would be allowed to swim at the Asbury Park beach. He didn't "feel it would be right to shut the colored people out entirely," so he was trying this experiment. "Personally," the Boss concluded with a smile, "I have esteem for a respectable person whether his skin is white or black." But he couldn't afford to offend his paying (white) guests.

  Bradley may have thought this solved the problem. But the Asbury Park Journal news piece describing that Fourth of July, 1888, suggested otherwise. And does so without mentioning race or class.

  "Before sunset the promenade was thronged," the piece began, "by 8 o'clock it was almost impossible to move. Baby carriages made confusion; babies made noise; likewise the torpedoes and fire-crackers, rockets, candles and toy pistols. The small boy had his innings, and a happier collection of juvenile humanity it would be hard to find anywhere. Some had been on the sand all day and showed burned fingers, scorched clothing, sunburned and dirty faces, but the merry twinkling eyes gave evidence that these misfortunes didn't count. The stereoptician show was looked at by an immense crowd that packed every inch of space clear back to the lawn. Both floors of the pavilion showed a mass of heads above the railing. From one end to the other, the Pier was alive with people."

  Nowhere does this unsigned piece mention Bradley's distinctions between white and black, respectable or not. But the sheer exuberance of the description and its clear sympathy with the mass of celebrating people argue against the founding father. These are the democratic throngs, and they— not Bradley— are what bring the pier to life.

  The author of the piece might have been Townley Crane, a well-known local reporter. Or conceivably his mother, Mary Helen Crane, who also wrote occasionally for the Asbury papers. But the most likely suspect is Townley's youngest brother, sixteen-year-old Stephen Crane. Whether Asbury Park knew it or not, an observer with a conscience, a predilection to sympathize with the "mass of humanity," and a wicked sense of humor had already focused in on the city. Soon enough, the social realism he championed would stand in opposition to this idea of doing justice to capital— and to the founding father himself.

  AMERICAN DAY, 1892

  STEVIE CRANE WOULDN'T have struck James Bradley as much of an opponent— if the founding father even noticed the kid.

  Thin, with almond-shaped, gray eyes and dirty-blond hair, he had a hacking cough fed with a constant string of cigarettes. Though he came from a respectable Methodist family, by the time he was a teenager Crane was hanging around the beach with the local riffraff. He worked part-time as a reporter and spent the rest of his day walking in the dunes, playing baseball, or shooting his pistol at nothing in particular. He was, in short, exactly the moral type that Bradley's handwritten signs warned against: sarcastic, sensual, happy to give in to whatever temptations the boardwalk life offered. He was a tramp in the sense Springsteen would use the word nearly a century later: an outcast, a renegade, "tramps like us."

  Stephen was born in Newark, New Jersey, the winter after Bradley bought his oceanfront jungle. He came from high Methodist stock. His father, the Reverend Doctor Jonathan Townley Crane, was the presiding elder of the Methodist churches in Newark. His mother, Mary Helen Peck, was the daughter of the Reverend George C. Peck— editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review — and the niece of the Methodist bishop, Jesse Truesdell Peck. Crane would later write that everybody on his mother's side of the family "as soon as he could walk became a Methodist clergyman of the old ambling nag, saddle bag exhorting kind." Not quite. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, the beach tramp came from the aristocracy of American Methodism.

  Stephen's father outlined his brand of Methodism in a series of tracts: "An Essay on Dancing" (1849), "Popular Amusements" (1869), and "Arts of Intoxication" (1870). Contact with any of these, from whiskey to waltzing, exposed the soul to "inexpressible evil." According to the reverend doctor, something as seemingly innocent as the popular parlor music of the day could lead a man so far astray that he might end up "guilty, condemned, corrupt, helpless, the wrath of God resting on him, and hell waiting his coming, with its eternal darkness and despair."

  This was post-Civil War orthodox Methodism and shows just how far the church had move
d since the days of John Wesley. The part of the population Wesley had reached out to—" the poor and less educated"— weren't going to find much comfort here. Instead, by the late nineteenth century, they were often turning to new Holiness sects that promised the kind of immediate, ecstatic experience that had once been part of the Love Feast: talking in tongues and visions. Like James Bradley, the Reverend Doctor Crane opposed this born-again revivalism. Stephen grew up in a church and a family that fought the wickedness of sensual pleasure. It verged on a sin to be glad you were alive.

  If anything, Stephen's mother may have been even more judgmental. At forty-five, she had already given birth to thirteen children when he was born. Like Bradley, she'd had alcoholism in her family: a brother who died of drink. As the daughter and wife of clergymen, Helen would have been pro-temperance anyway, but she was passionate on the subject. She was often out on the lecture circuit, where her specialty was a graphic demonstration of the physical effects of alcohol. She'd drop the white of an egg into a glass of liquor and show the audience how it hardened into a solid mass "much resembling the state of being cooked."

  Despite his ferocious beliefs and his wife's family connections, the Reverend Doctor Crane doesn't seem to have had a very successful church career. Starting in Newark, the family moved three times before Stephen was ten, ending up in the sticks: Port Jervis, New York, out by the Delaware River. Stephen's father tried to make the best of it, but it's hard not to hear a hint of disappointment when he writes, "I am much more concerned that we should live truthfully and kindly here than that we should be busy in condemning the luxuries and sins of New York."