4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  First off, he lost his job. Asbury's Daily Journal attacked Crane's reporting as "slanderous," and the Tribune agreed. His assignment as the resort-town stringer was to boost tourism, not make fun of it. Typical shore reports were full of who was dining with whom and which visitor had the fanciest horse and buggy. How dare the twenty-one-year-old say that Asbury Park made nothing? It made people happy. To attack wealth and leisure was to attack the basis of the city's economy.

  At the same time, Crane had managed to offend the workingman. The Junior Order of United American Mechanics resented his description as an "uncalled-for and un-American criticism" of their appearance and parading abilities. If he thought calling them "stolid" and "dignified" made the artist and the worker allies, he had another thing coming. They were patriotic Americans, the mechanics declared, dedicated to restricting immigration, teaching the Holy Bible in public school, and protecting business from "the depressing effect of foreign competition."

  But the reason the article made Stevie Crane famous was that it came out just as his boss, the Tribune's owner and editor, was running for vice president on the Republican ticket. A gleeful opposition jumped on the column as evidence that the owner/ candidate was an enemy of the workingman. In the resulting scandal, the article was reprinted and discussed nationwide, and Crane (who was still a year away from self-publishing Maggie) had the beginning of the bad-boy reputation he would ride to fame.

  "I seemed to have forgotten for the moment that my boss on the Tribune was running for Vice-President," he would write, years later. "You'd hardly think a little innocent chap like me could have stirred up such a row in American politics. It shows what innocence can do if it has the opportunity!" Crane's piece is a complicated mix of criticism, provocation, satire, and admiration— but the element it does not show is innocence. He isn't innocent about Asbury Park's class distinctions— which he describes from a street-smart perspective— and there's nothing innocent about his choice of subject matter. Crane may not have known how big a stink he was going to make, but this is a calculated piece of, among other things, self-promotion.

  What he hadn't gone after was the town's racial politics. Back in a July 1890 dispatch, he had mentioned, "There is considerable feeling here against the running of excursion trains to Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, loaded with colored people." But it was Town-ley Crane who took on this issue. A piece by Townley in the New York Times ends with a pointed scene where a black man describes the awful singing and proselytizing of a Salvation Army band, "containing a noisy dwarf and some young women with tambour­ines." Townley quotes the colored citizen of Asbury as saying that his race would never "disgrace God or man in such a manner." The barb is aimed at Bradley's contention that Asbury only segregated against vulgar behavior.

  Stephen was certainly aware of racial issues. A couple of months before the mechanics parade, he'd been back visiting Port Jervis when a drunken mob had come marching up East Main Street. Behind them, at the end of a length of rope, they were dragging a Negro. Like the Mingo Jack incident six years earlier and others across the country, this was about a white man accusing a colored man of attacking a white girl. As the mob pulled Robert Lewis through downtown Port Jervis, townspeople came out to watch. Women threw garbage at the colored man, and men snapped riding whips. On the corner of Ferguson Avenue, a rope was thrown over the branch of a tree. According to an article called "Depravity not Justice," which Townley Crane wrote for the Tribune, lightning and thunder lit the sky "as if God was trying to say something." Stephen and his brother Judge William Crane reportedly fought to pull Lewis down, but the mob won out. Later, Lewis's white accuser turned out to have beaten the woman himself. But instead of shame, Port Jervis commemorated the 1892 lynching with pride, displaying Lewis's shoes and the rope in a local museum.

  Crane never wrote about the incident, although his short story "The Monster" describes a small town's "accustomed road of thought" with children reciting rhymes of "Nigger, nigger" and adults referring to "coons." Did Asbury Park's segregation offend him? The closest he comes to revealing his racial attitudes is in a private letter written to an old friend from boarding school. The friend has apparently complained that his sex life in Norfolk, Virginia, is miserable to nonexistent. Crane, six months shy of turning twenty-one, writes back:

  "So you lack females of the white persuasion, do you? How unfortunate! And how extraordinary! I never thought that the world could come to such a pass that you would lack females, Thomas! You indeed must be in a God forsaken country. Just read these next few lines in a whisper:-I-I think black is quite good-if-if it's yellow and young."

  " Black"— not a human being at all, just a color—" is quite good"; it's like a master describing his slaves. No more than a tossed-off sentence in a private letter and obviously meant to shock, it still reveals a lot about the values of the time and about Crane himself. It's written as a kind of joke, complete with mock stutter, as if to say, "Is this really so terrible?" If there's any truth to the boast, Crane is exactly what Bradley feared: the kind of tramp who hung around the boardwalk and "intermingled." The founding father's values made that morally repulsive and bad for business. Crane seems to have found the idea exciting and somewhat amusing: another chance to thumb his nose at middle-class convention.

  Those conventions were Stephen Crane's real target. He didn't challenge Bradley by writing about racial issues. Maybe segregation didn't bother the young Crane. ("The Monster" was written six years later.) Maybe he suspected he'd get more attention if he focused on the slope-shouldered workingmen. For Crane, the mechanics parade was the perfect opportunity to throw the town's hypocrisy into hilarious, gruesome relief. And that middle-class moral hypocrisy was an issue he never quite shook. As late as 1896, after The Red Badge of Courage had become a best seller and Maggie had cemented his literary reputation, the twenty-five-year-old Crane looked back on his hometown in a New York Journal piece. By that time, the merry-go-round pavilion on Kingsley was known as The Palace. Next door, the owner had cashed in on the craze that had begun at the Chicago Exposition by installing a modern Ferris wheel.

  "Coney Island is profane," Crane wrote. "Newport is proper with a vehemence that is some degrees more tiresome than Coney's profanity. If a man should be goaded into defining Asbury Park, he might state that the distinguishing feature of the town is its singular and elementary sanity."

  So far, the town fathers must have thought, so good. "Distinctly American, reflecting all our best habits and manners," Crane writes, Asbury is a town of "restrictions," with "an ordinance whenever one wishes for novelty or excitement" and a "deep feeling of isolation." If this is distinctly American, then the country is about control. And the city's "elementary and singular sanity" begins to sound like a national tradition of repression.

  The living embodiment of these values, of course, is James Bradley, whom Crane describes as the founder of "the greatest Summer resort in America— the vacation abode of the mighty middle classes." Bradley at age sixty-six is "the one star in the sky over Asbury Park," and, according to Crane, a laughable, outdated figure who "invariably walks under a white cotton sun umbrella," while "red whiskers of the Icelandic lichen pattern grow fretfully upon his chin. [He] carries his sublimity," Crane goes on, "with the calmness of a man out of debt. . . [and] for purposes too mystic, too exaltedly opaque for the common mind . . . placed a marble bathtub in the middle of a public park." Crane has this demigod moaning about how his will is not being done: "I own the pavilions and the bath houses, and the fishing pier and the beach and the pneumatic sea lion, and what I say ought to go."

  For all Crane's bile, the native son clearly loves the place. He ends his piece looking out beyond the fishing piers to where "the incoming waves are shot with copper beams and the sea becomes a green opalescence." Bradley and his ilk— men who "define virtue as physical inertia and a mental death"— can enact all the ingeniously silly restrictions they want, but in the end, "the brave sea breeze blows cool on the shore, a
nd the far little ships sink." Before he died of tuberculosis, aged twenty-eight, Stephen Crane proudly described himself as "about as much a Jerseyman as you could find."

  But it wasn't love of the place that kept bringing him back to writing about Asbury Park. And it wasn't just his fight with Bradley, or even with the ghost of his father, the reverend doctor. For Crane, Asbury Park was a battleground in a national struggle. He saw the work of "extraordinarily optimistic architects" in the fun houses, the bathing pavilions, the domes and wheels. They reminded him of "youthful dreams." It wasn't just Asbury's rules and regulations that were distinctly American, but also the raunchy, unquenchable honky-tonk idealism. The brass bands, the barkers calling to the crowd, the calliope music drifting out of the merry-go-round, were Crane's pop culture: the product of that "wiggling, howling mass of humanity." Sure, the pleasure was fleeting, no more permanent than saltwater taffy. But the best part of Asbury Park didn't try to hide that. In the off-season, Crane wrote, "There is a mighty pathos in these gaunt and hollow buildings, impossibly and stolidly suffering from an enormous hunger for the public."

  That was it! There was a hunger at the very heart of the thing. Crane's definitive take on Asbury is an 1893 story about a summer romance on the shore, "The Pace of Youth." It takes place mostly at Stimson's Mammoth Merry-Go-Round. Stimson is a man of "granite will" who believes he reduces those who oppose him to "quick and abject submission." Is he a stand-in for the founding father, James Bradley? No more than the merry-go-round stands for Asbury Park.

  Stimson makes his living by selling wholesome "fun": the controlled pleasure of riding the wooden horses and stretching for the brass ring. None of this allows for any real passion. So when his daughter starts to fall for one of his employees, Stimson orders it to stop. Otherwise, the boy's fired. Crane has the two continuing to exchange glances around the cashier sign that hangs in their way. Finally, they arrange to take a walk along the shore.

  "The electric lights on the beach made a broad band of tremoring light, extending parallel to the sea, and upon the wide walk there slowly paraded a great crowd, intermingling, intertwining, sometimes colliding." Despite all the censor's attempts to stop it, the crowd pushes the lovers closer and closer, until they make contact. It's then that the paper lanterns out on Wesley Lake, "flashing, fleeting, and careening, sang to them, sang a chorus of red and violet, and green and gold; a song of mystic bands of the future."

  Call that chorus what you will— the American Dream, or just an enormous hunger— it was the great possibility that Crane felt rising out of Asbury Park. If it sounds like something Springsteen would write one day, both men were, after all, looking at the same city. And beneath Asbury's honky-tonk promise of getting away, of having fun, Crane saw a real dream of freedom. Once the crowd pushes them together, and they touch, Crane's lovers realize they have to get out from under. They jump into a horse and buggy and start driving. At the climax of the story, when Stimson sees he's not going to be able to catch them, the owner is struck by "the power of their young blood, the power to fly strongly into the future and feel and hope again."

  But Crane's story doesn't end there. As a student of Jacob Riis, Crane knew there was no escaping the system. The "elementary sanity" would try to control you wherever you went. So, at the end of his story, as the lovers race down the highway, the dusty beach road "vanished far away in a point with a suggestion of intolerable length." As if that flashing, fleeting, careening song was somehow always in the future. As if being born to run was both a blessing and a curse. As if Asbury Park were forever.

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1903

  THE EVENING NEWS called July 4, 1903, Asbury Park's "greatest patriotic celebration." More accurately, it was its greatest celebration of independence. Because on this Fourth of July, for the first time ever, Asbury Park's beachfront belonged not to James Bradley, but to the elected government. The colony had broken from the king.

  Maybe not completely. New Jersey governor Franklin Murphy came to Asbury to celebrate its newfound freedom. "You are trying to outdo Atlantic City," the governor shouted over applause, "and I hope you will succeed. You are leaving off the old to put on the new, but let me tell you that this city owes its greatness to James A. Bradley, who was a good man— better than any of us. He builded for the future. He believed in the right. He was a good senator, and I hope you will place his statue on the new boardwalk."

  It was a glorious obituary except that James Bradley— the founding father, the man whom Stephen Crane called the "one star in the sky over Asbury Park"— wasn't dead. He had merely been eclipsed.

  Sixteen years earlier, when Crane was publishing his first newspaper piece, Asbury Park had officially incorporated under a city council system of government. That hadn't affected Bradley's power. "In reality he was the government," the local papers admitted. "He owned the beachfront and the riparian rights," not to mention most of the other real estate in town. Some of the king's subjects had been trying to rebel for years, but always within gentlemanly bounds and always without success. Even in this year of independence, 1903, the council had no intention of altering Asbury in any radical sense. There was no move to change the basic economy, for example, or somehow embrace Stephen Crane's vision of a sensual, democratic future.

  But the city's growing business class did agree with Crane that Bradley's restrictions were "ingeniously silly" and amounted to an economic stranglehold. As one leading property owner wrote in the fall of 1902, "With the number of wideawake merchants and hotel men in our community there is no reason in the wide world why Asbury Park should not lead the summer and winter resorts. We cannot do it, however, unless we own the beach and make a number of needed improvements at once."

  Bradley, at seventy-two, had been managing every detail of the city for over thirty years. His vision was widely acknowledged. Many praised how he'd laid out a city both functional and forward-looking; how he'd tried to set a high moral tone; how his boardwalk, pavilions, and fishing piers were— in the words of Dr. Bruce S. Keator, president of Asbury's Board of Trade—" well made and in keeping with the earlier days of this place." But by the fall of 1902, the pavilions had become "dingy by day and poorly lighted by night" and the beachfront "old and dilapidated." The metaphor Keator used was that "the child Asbury Park has matured to manhood and should be clothed as a man."

  For years, the founding father had listened to such talk, often nodding his agreement, even writing letters full of promises to change things, but nothing had happened. The last time the council had asked him to improve the boardwalk, Bradley had smiled and replied that the walk "suited him very well and his next walk would be to the Golden Gate." He was an old man. He'd accomplished a lot. Couldn't his children respect him during the brief time remaining?

  In the past, this benevolence— and the old-fashioned values behind it— had carried Bradley through. A decade earlier, in the fall of 1893— even as Stephen Crane had been making fun of his values— Bradley's antidrinking, antigambling position had gotten him elected to the state Senate. He'd run as a member of the Prohibitionist Party, touring Monmouth County in an elegant carriage with a brass band and an old tree stump. Crowds would gather as his immaculately liveried coachman drove him into town. Then, Bradley would have the stump pulled out of the back, mount it, and exhort the audience to join him in cleaning up the morals of their beloved but corrupt state of New Jersey. He'd finish by handing out free scrub brushes (from his Pearl Street factory) bearing the slogan "Brush Up."

  His opponents accused him of trying to bribe voters with handouts. They also claimed that Bradley was prejudiced: Asbury's beaches were still segregated. But Monmouth County supported Bradley's Methodist values and wrote off the rest as eccentricities. He was elected to the Senate and immediately set to work to clean up the state, starting with what Bradley called "the Mecca of gamblers": the racetrack at Monmouth Park. Recently renovated, with a new monumental iron grandstand, Monmouth was setting national records for daily and monthly g
rosses. To cynics, the founding father was out to close one of Asbury's closest competitors. But the bill on which Senator Bradley cast the deciding vote, March 21, 1894, prohibited gambling in the entire state. Monmouth Park wouldn't reopen for another fifty-three years.

  Less successful was Senator Bradley's bill to have city governments take over all the riparian rights on the Jersey shore. In fact, the proposal was the butt of statewide ridicule: understandable, since even as the founding father stumped for his bill, he refused to give up his own beachfront holdings. The shore was the key to how Bradley controlled not only Asbury's economy but its morals. During the summer of 1902, for example, the city council had passed a resolution licensing the use of slot machines on the city sidewalks. It had stipulated that there would be no gambling involved, that these were merely pleasure machines where a gentleman could win his lady a souvenir. But Bradley disapproved so vehemently that the city council had to pass a second resolution requesting that he stop harassing this licensed and legal business.

  For the founding father, Asbury Park was still an island of Christian values— and he its Robinson Crusoe. But as well as losing the battle against amusements, he hadn't solved the problem of the shadow resort on the West Side. The quarter-mile square neighborhood was officially in Neptune township, but its economy depended totally on Asbury's. And vice versa. The city's tourist trade functioned thanks to Southern blacks drawn North by the relatively well-paid and dignified jobs. Lenora Walker McKay, author of The Blacks of Monmouth County, recalls how "in May or June, many students from Black colleges converged on the seashore seeking resort related work." McKay herself had a regular summer job in an Ocean Grove hotel, where she earned a dollar a day plus tips.