by Daniel Wolff
Walter Tindall's testimony that Saturday evening confirmed what the Civic-Church League had long believed: sin flourished in Asbury Park, the leading members of the merchant class were among the worst offenders, and the city government was deeply involved. The party at the Deal Inn was dubbed the Merchants Orgy, and the city's preachers hurried home to rewrite their Sunday sermons.
At the First Methodist Episcopal Church, the Reverend Fur-man A. DeMaris told his congregation he wouldn't read Tindall's affidavit aloud— it was too disgusting— but they should know it was a document "the like of which I never dreamed could be written in the twentieth century." The reverend demanded that the Deal Inn be padlocked and that the accused officials resign immediately. The Reverend Shaw at the Presbyterian church agreed. So did Rabbi Davidson at the Temple Beth-El.
Walter Tindall's own minister, the Reverend David A. MacMurray, was a leader of the Civic-Church League, and he called down a full quota of fire and brimstone. The Reverend MacMurray opened his sermon by quoting from the twelfth psalm: "Sinners walk on every side and the vilest men are exalted." That was just a warm-up. "No matter how beautiful the town," the Reverend MacMurray told his congregation, "the soul of the community is determined by the soul of the people. Unless we are honest, moral and clean, we shall wake up and find ourselves the cynosure of the entire world. They will think of Asbury Park as hell."
James Bradley had died three years earlier, age ninety-one, resigned to the fact that his promised land was never to be. But the Merchants Orgy proved something worse: that Asbury Park had become the devil's playground. That Sunday, as news spread across the city, the ministers had what amounted to an exclusive. On Monday morning, the New York Times front-page headline read ASBURY PARK MAYOR ACCUSED IN PULPITS. Local papers reported that a number of the accused had already filed affidavits claiming Tindall made the whole thing up. Some offered proof that they hadn't even been at the Deal Inn that night. "There was no lewdness, no vulgarity and no drunkenness," Mayor Hetrick declared. "I had no liquor and saw no liquor. The charge that a nude woman sat in my lap is a damnable lie. In the first place," he spluttered, "there were no nude women, and in the second place nobody sat in my lap."
The agitated mayor was backed up by, among others, Isaac Berger. Berger, a founding member of Asbury's conservative synagogue, explained that he couldn't have been drunk because he didn't drink. "Of course we didn't have any booze, and I didn't see anyone sitting on the mayor's lap," he added. "Everybody said that it was a rotten party. By that I mean they thought it was too tame and that the girls were not lively enough."
Berger, a Jew, taunting the Christian moralists? Suggesting that their crusade against drink was as old-fashioned as button-down spats? Implying that not just the party, but the city was too tame? To the Civic-Church League this must have seemed like clear evidence that Berger and the merchant class had taken over the city and now felt themselves invulnerable.
For his part, Mayor Hetrick saw "a political aspect" to the charges. Hetrick had been mayor since 1915, elected as part of a citywide reform movement. After Bradley had sold the beachfront to the city and the West Side was annexed, there had been an upwelling of optimism. The city was going to run in a progressive, businesslike way; profits were bound to follow. But the first decade of democracy had been laced with corruption. Asbury's council members were accused of renting prime boardwalk real estate to their friends and cronies, who were often the lowest bidders. Income on the Casino— once $4,000 to $6,000 a season— had mysteriously dropped to nothing. Finally, in 1915, the city had voted to switch from a seven-person council to a five-person commission, hoping to clean house and end "the old partisan politics."
The entire city government had resigned, and fifty-seven candidates had announced for the five new openings. There were "dry" candidates and pro-business candidates, even colored candidates. Straw polls had showed Clarence Hetrick as, at best, a squeak-in fifth commissioner. But on election day, he pulled in the most votes, 1,091 out of 2,007, making him the new mayor.
The day before the election, James Bradley himself had taken out a full-page ad under the headline SOUND THE ALARM. The founding father had warned his children that, with the annexation of the West Side, Asbury's tramps threatened to play a decisive role in a city election. Now, Bradley called on the city to follow his advice by "voting down the colored man." And it did, electing Hetrick instead. Which began what the Civic-Church League saw as their city's slide toward hell.
Clarence Hetrick was born in Ohio in 1873 and had come to Asbury when he was fourteen. While Stevie Crane was hanging around the boardwalk, Hetrick had been working at his father's real estate office. He eventually ran the place. At age thirty-one, he became tax receiver for the town of Neptune, which borders Asbury on the inland side. Through (he claimed) his "financial acumen and business ability," Hetrick had reduced the town's debt from $45,000 to $1,500. That gave him credibility as a fiscal reformer, and he had gone on to serve for two years as Asbury Park's treasurer. But it was his next job, as sheriff of Monmouth County, that made Clarence Hetrick's political career. Which is to say that Asbury's future evolved out of a sensational, racially charged murder case.
On November 9, 1910, a ten-year-old white girl, Marie Smith, disappeared on her way home from school on Asbury's West Side. A search of the area turned up nothing. It was front-page news, and the Asbury Evening Press coverage included a list of likely suspects. A band of gypsies had camped in the area the week before. An Italian "had been in the habit of selling whiskey" to Marie's mother. One witness came forward to say she'd seen Marie standing in front of Kruschka's nursery on Asbury Avenue while a German worker, Frank Heidemann, watched from behind a hedge. Finally, there was Thomas Williams, a colored man who worked for Marie's aunt. According to reports, the day after the girl's disappearance, Williams, "better known as 'Black Diamond,'" had been drinking heavily. The papers announced that the police were looking for him.
Two days later, Marie Smith was found in some sandy woods near Asbury Avenue. She had been raped, strangled, and beaten to death. "Strong evidence is hourly being produced," the Asbury Press declared, "to show that Williams is the man." Black Diamond had been found. A detective brought him to the city morgue, showed the colored man the corpse, and thundered, "Swear that you did not murder this child!" To which Williams replied, "I swear to God I didn't touch the girl." But by then, it was almost too late.
It didn't matter to Asbury that Williams denied the murder, or that there was no evidence linking him to it. To the contrary. According to a front-page story, "Everything points to the negro [51c] as the slayer, and the fearless attitude he has assumed seems to bear out the contention of the police that he could be guilty of the murder and still show no sign of shrinking." A lead editorial entitled SWIFT JUSTICE claimed, "The honor of Asbury Park is at stake." And a front-page news story (that read like an editorial) laid out the self-fulfilling logic behind the city's rush to judgment. "Criminal assault plainly was the motive of the crime. This is a negro crime. 'Black Diamond' was the only negro known to have been near the scene at the time the murder was committed."
It was an old equation with an equally old solution. The night of Williams's arrest, a surging mob of would-be lynchers arrived at the jail with sledgehammers, axes, and crowbars. The paper reported that the mob was made up of citizens from all over Monmouth County, many of them bragging they'd been part of the Mingo Jack lynching years before. Black Diamond was smuggled out of the city and rushed to the county seat in Freehold.
In all of Asbury Park, only three citizens seemed to have had any doubt about the colored man's guilt: the city coroner, the man who employed Marie Smith's father as his chauffeur, and Sheriff Clarence Hetrick. Because Asbury Park's detectives were " positive" about William's guilt the three men went outside the city and hired the nationally known Burns Detective Agency. The head of its New York City bureau was brought to the shore and, with the quiet help of Sheriff Hetrick, investigated the var
ious witnesses and theories. Suspicions returned to Frank Heidemann, the German- born employee of Kruschka's nursery.
Heidemann had since left Asbury Park, but the Burns Agency sent a German-speaking detective to befriend the man. Two weeks after Marie Smith's body was found, with Black Diamond still in the Freehold jail, the Asbury Press announced that Heidemann had been arrested and held on two thousand dollars' bail. Having discovered that Heidemann had left Germany after molesting a young girl, the Burns detective had worked out an elaborate scheme to prove his guilt, including a faked second murder and a bogus newspaper. Finally, he'd employed the then revolutionary technique of taking fingerprints off Marie Smith's clothes and comparing them to the suspect's.
Asbury Park was unimpressed. In jail, Heidemann continued to deny his guilt, and the front-page headline in the local paper read SUPREME EFFORT TO GET CONFESSION FROM NEGRO. The paper went on to accuse the Burns Agency of conducting an expensive and unnecessary investigation that had created "an open breach" between the city's coroner and its police force. But in the end, Heidemann confessed. On his way to the electric chair, he would declare death "no more than I deserve." So, four years later, when Hetrick ran for city office, he didn't have to woo the key West Side vote. He was the progressive candidate who had saved Black Diamond's life and uncovered Marie Smith's real murderer.
The hero of the West Side had (inevitably?) become the enemy of the Anti-Saloon League. Hetrick shunned its endorsement, and when he ran for reelection, the League issued an eighteen-page pamphlet, "Why Prohibition Did Not Prohibit." It came right out and accused Hetrick of taking graft from bootleggers and gamblers. The mayor had denied it, a grand jury had refused to indict, and Hetrick had ended up trouncing the League's candidate, attorney Joseph Turner. Now, in 1924, the mayor saw the same forces at work. This Merchants Orgy was just a way to get the old "dry" Bradley forces back in power. What's more, Hetrick didn't believe Walter Tindall could have come up with the affidavit on his own. Tindall was, in the mayor's words, "weak-minded but . . . harmless." Hetrick suspected that the lawyer Turner was behind the whole thing.
When the papers interviewed Turner, he not only admitted having advised Tindall but confessed that he "knew before the 'party' was held that an expose was slated." Still, that didn't mean the orgy hadn't happened. Turner denied he was out to get anybody. "Of course everyone knows that I am Mayor Hetrick's bitter political enemy," he explained, "but outside of that I am not opposed to him. It's just the administration I am opposed to." The next day, Turner took back even this concession when he told a reporter he'd been misquoted: "I am opposed to Mayor Hetrick personally."
Hetrick was a Republican in good standing. He publicly sup ported Prohibition and opposed gambling. But as the leader of a resort town, as the merchants' ally, as a politician who needed the West Side's vote, he refused to toe the strict Methodist line. Back in 1919, he'd introduced a resolution to allow Asbury Park theaters to show movies on the Sabbath. That kind of permissiveness drove the Civic-Church League crazy. Less confrontational than Isaac Berger, Hetrick had a similar, relaxed view of sin and sinners. "Asbury Park," he would say in the fall of 1924, "is not the worst place in existence. Nor do I contend that it is the best place in existence. It is a city made up of a great number of human beings subject to human foibles in which there is no more immorality than in any other town its size."
You could almost hear the Civic-Church League's response. Asbury Park is not just "any other town." It was never meant to be. It's the city James Bradley founded as a moral community. When the League met again the Monday evening after the Merchants Orgy, it declared it was "determined to continue its fight for good government" and, specifically, to "clean-up" Asbury Park. The New Jersey Anti-Saloon League pledged its support. So did a number of other organizations, including one that vehemently announced it was "back of the Civic-Church League in this move" and would "do everything within our power to aid it." That power was considerable. The organization was the Ku Klux Klan.
By 1924, the Klan was no longer the largely Southern, rural phenomenon of the post-Civil War era, but "the most powerful fraternal and nationalistic organization in American history" with four and a half million members nationwide. Of those, New Jersey could claim sixty thousand— more than Alabama, or Louisiana, and just behind the state of Georgia. And within New Jersey, as one researcher noted, the Klan "felt most at home among the Methodists of Asbury Park."
The original "Invisible Empire" had peaked during Reconstruction when hooded night riders had fought equality with arson, torture, and lynching. That manifestation of the Klan had eventually dissolved, partly because it was outlawed but also because it had won its fight to "save the South." With the Hayes-Tilden "compromise" of 1876, former slave owners regained control. Twenty years later, Plessy v. Ferguson made segregation a national law, and leading historians such as Professor Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University would go on to characterize Reconstruction as a period of corruption, carpetbaggers, and laughable colored politicians.
The rebirth of the Klan came about thanks to two modern inventions: the motion picture and the public relations firm. In January 1915— as Hetrick was winning his first mayoral election and President Wilson was finishing his first term in the White House— D. W. Griffith released The Clansman, soon to be retitled Birth of a Nation. The movie presented Klansmen as heroic freedom fighters and immediately raised protests from the NAACP and others. Threatened by a boycott, D. W. Griffith arranged private screenings for both President Wilson and for the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Edward White, himself an exKlansman. With their endorsements, the movie went on to become the first blockbuster, grossing an estimated $18 million.
Among those Birth of a Nation inspired was one William Joseph Simmons. Simmons had been a Methodist circuit preacher in Alabama and Florida: what Stephen Crane called a "clergyman of the old ambling nag, saddle bag exhorting kind." In October 1915, Simmons chartered the new Ku Klux Klan, memorializing the event by climbing Stone Mountain in Georgia and burning a cross. (This symbol of the new Klan, "the fiery cross," hadn't existed during Reconstruction; it was popularized through Griffith's movie.) Four years later, despite massive post-World War I race riots and a national "Red scare," the KKK was still a tiny fraternal group of fewer than five thousand members. Then in 1919, Simmons hired the Southern Publicity Association. The firm agreed to take over recruitment with the understanding that it would receive eight out of every ten dollars in membership fees. "If you are a Native Born, White, Gentile, Protestant, American citizen," the association proclaimed, "eventually you will be a Klansman and proud of that title."
The publicity campaign worked. Within fifteen months, the Klan grew to almost one hundred thousand members with fully half coming from urban areas. In 1921, a lawyer named Arthur H. Bell of Bloomfield, New Jersey, established a klavern near Asbury Park and made himself district kleagle. That fall, the New York World published a two-week-long expose, listing 152 "Klan outrages," including four murders. Imperial Wizard Simmons was called to testify before a congressional investigation. Instead of slowing the spread of the organization, "Congress," according to Simmons, "gave us the best advertising we ever got. Congress made us."
Asbury Park's weak-minded printer Walter Tindall was a perfect fit for the new Klan. As the operator of a small business, he was having an increasingly hard time making a go of it. Construction on the Jersey shore was at an all-time high, as were rental fees, especially, the New York Times reported, "the larger and more pretentious places." But the expanding economy wasn't reaching all people equally. Across the country, the top one-tenth of one percent of the rich were receiving as much income as the bottom forty-two percent of American wage earners. Tindall was in that bottom group. Three days before the Merchants Orgy, he'd bounced a seven-dollar check at the cigar store down on Cookman Avenue. He was due in court for failing to pay $197 to the grocer Shoendorff, who was one of the men he'd accused of being at the lewd party. And he even ow
ed Joseph Turner, the lawyer for the Civic-Church League. "It is my opinion," Turner candidly told the press, "that Tindall is broke."
As soon as the Merchants Orgy story had gone public, reporters had rushed to Tindall's home in Ocean Grove. He was nowhere to be found. Instead, two young men met them at the door and explained they were there to protect Tindall's "considerably disturbed" wife. They wouldn't say who had hired them, but as the newspapermen were leaving, one of the guards whispered a phone number. It turned out to be District Kleagle Bell's. Bell insisted that he had nothing to do with the orgy affidavit and didn't know where Tindall was. But the next day, when the printer reappeared at his Asbury shop, he was riding in Bell's touring car.
The story of the Merchants Orgy quickly began to disintegrate. Within a few days, the Asbury Park Evening Press was calling it "a more or less unsubstantiated charge." Within a week, front-page headlines had shifted to the upcoming bond vote to build a new high school. And within the month, a grand jury had officially exonerated Mayor Hetrick and the others, calling Tindall's affidavit a fabrication that had "irrevocably damaged . . . the fair name of Asbury Park." Hetrick had now added to his reputation by becoming the man who had saved Asbury Park from the Klan.
