4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  Which didn't mean that his government championed equality— or was even very tolerant. Colored men looking to work for the city's fire department watched their applications get marked with a red C and rejected. Negro children weren't allowed on the Casino's merry-go-round, and the only African-Americans permitted to attend Arthur Pryor's band-shell concerts were nannies accompanying white children. The week of the orgy, when a city resident named J. Bently Mulford proposed erecting a memorial to the recently deceased Lenin, a member of the American Legion publicly offered what he called a tip: "If you know what is good for you, you will not linger in Asbury Park." When Mulford turned to the Asbury Park police for protection, he got a response that sounded a lot like the KKK. "If Mulford is a Bolshevik," the city's police commissioner told the paper, "he ought not to be permitted to stay."

  Despite the collapse of the Merchants Orgy accusations, the Klan continued to recruit among the Methodists of the Jersey shore. In 1924, the new imperial wizard, H. W. Evans, proudly declared, "The Klan is Protestantism personified." Protestantism and what the KKK called "one-hundred percent Americanism," Evans explained, "spring from the same racial qualities, and each is part of our group mind." One historian estimates that during this period as many as forty thousand fundamentalist ministers joined the Klan. The Jersey shore was no exception. A month after the grand jury had dismissed the orgy accusations, the senior bishop and president of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting invited District Kleagle Bell and his wife to speak at Sunday school. According to the paper, an "exceptionally large audience" came out to the Grove's famous auditorium, listened to the Bells speak on the goals and values of the KKK, and responded with "frequent applause."

  The Klan appealed to the religious in Asbury, but it recruited more broadly than that. People wanted someone to blame for the hard times— and the KKK had an enemies list. Of course, colored people and their amoral, intoxicating music were part of the problem. The now seventy-year-old John Philip Sousa had preceded the Bells into Ocean Grove's auditorium, and the March King was still railing against those "primitive rhythms" that appealed to "the basic human impulse." People said that ragtime had died with Scott Joplin in 1917, but there was this new syncopated sound called jazz, and as far as Sousa was concerned, it was more of the same: a symptom of the decline of social standards. The March King declared jazz would soon disappear, "unwept, unhonored and unsung." This time, Asbury's own Arthur Pryor agreed. Ragtime had been one thing, but improvised jazz, Pryor announced, was "the parasite of music." There was something un-American about it and its dances: the Shimmy, the Toddle, the Black Bottom. Both bandleaders were on the side of the Ladies' Home Journal in its 1921 crusade against "the abominable jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory center."

  One of those minors was the nineteen-year-old William Basie, raised in Red Bank but hanging out that summer of 1924 in Asbury Park's jazz scene. Basie loved ragtime and the even faster stride piano style that had followed it. His father, a caretaker for the white-owned mansions in Red Bank, and his mother, who took in laundry, had managed to pay for piano lessons. Basie had won a piano contest down in Asbury and played at some dances there. Despite the city's promise of a "complete house-cleaning" after annexation, Springwood Avenue had flourished, especially as a musical breeding ground. The Ellington family had vacationed in the area back in 1913, and it was here that the fourteen-year-old Duke Ellington had got wind of a ragtime sound that gave him his first "real yearning to play." So when Bill Basie decided it was time to leave home and make it as a musician, Springwood Avenue was a logical destination.

  Basie took to hanging out around Brown's poolroom. "That was like the main stem," he recalled, "and it was also where you found out about gigs." That spring, he got a job at the Hong Kong Inn, a roadhouse on the outskirts of town. His quartet— piano, horn, drum, and violin— played rags and speeded-up parlor music and tunes they'd learned off piano rolls: anything that got the crowd moving. In the dawn hours, when the joint finally closed, he'd go back to what he called "a very big house with a lot of rooms" in another part of Asbury. "I won't say exactly what kind of business Uncle Ralph was in," Basie writes of his host, "but there was always a lot of very good-looking and very, very friendly female companions." The great stride piano player Willie Gant stayed in a place next door, and one day Basie got to witness a cutting contest between Gant and the equally talented Don Lambert. Even the great Fats Waller performed in the area.

  Major players like these came out to the shore to cash in on the tourist money. During the winter, they mostly stayed in Harlem, which is where Basie wound up. After studying there with Waller, the Red Bank kid hit the road, landing in Kansas City, where he eventually acquired his own band and nickname. But Count Basie's stay in Asbury gives some idea not only of what a fertile musical town it was, but how its "primitive rhythms" were hooked into a nationwide culture. No wonder Arthur Pryor and others denounced the jazz influence. It was the tip of a renaissance that had a political aspect, too. That winter of 1924, Marcus Garvey, billed as "the greatest living Negro leader and orator," spoke at Springwood Avenue's Roseland Hall. Garvey's black separatism grew out of what he called the "hopeless economic and industrial state" of his people. "It is time for the Negro to be radical," Garvey declared in 1924, "and let the world know what he wants."

  The dangers of all this were obvious to the Klan— but worth repeating. District Kleagle Bell announced that he had personally "learned of eighty-seven thousand cases of white girls living with Negroes and men of the yellow race." But the white folks of Asbury Park had long ago figured out how to contain the "negro question." It wasn't a threat, and it wasn't the basis of the Klan's appeal on the shore. A failing, small-time businessman like Walter Tindall might dislike the coloreds, but as the Klan's imperial wizard declared in 1924, "The Negro is not a menace to Americanism in the sense that the Jew or Roman Catholic is." As a Klan speaker explained it during a rally down the shore at the Pt. Pleasant First Methodist Episcopal Church, "Foreign people have it on the Klansmen because they come to this country with clothes on, and Klan members did not."

  Asbury Park could narrow the menace down even further. Certainly the city's Jews were a threat and a target of the Merchant Orgy accusation. But these "foreigners" had been part of the city's makeup since the turn of the century when they'd held services over Meyer Sharfstein's butcher shop on Springwood Avenue— and then at Morrow's Hall, a "black entertainment center." By 1905, James Bradley was donating land for Asbury's first official synagogue on the white side of the tracks, near the business district on Cookman Avenue. And by the 1920s, most of the big stores along Cookman were Jewish-owned, including Steinbachs. The Klan didn't like the wise guy Isaac Berger and his alliance with Mayor Hetrick, but the Jews— like the colored— weren't the real issue.

  No, for men like Walter Tindall, the direct threat was foreigners willing to work long hours cheap. And according to the Klan, Roman Catholics were "the most dangerous of all invaders." Back when Asbury Park was founded, only fourty-four thousand Italians lived in all the United States. By now, that figure had jumped to nearly five million. In New Jersey, one out of five white people was now foreign-born.

  Tindall's church knew what to do about it. The Reverend MacMurray brought in guest speakers, like the one from the YMCA who assured the congregation, "Any nation has an inherent right to decide who shall compose its citizenship." Afterward, the reverend urged his congregation to go to the rear of the church and sign the petition supporting an anti-immigration bill. And it wasn't just the Civic-Church League that felt this way. President Warren Harding might not have gone as far as the Klan, which called for a five-year national ban on all immigration, but he had supported an Immigration Restriction Act. Hadn't he won the 1920 election on the backward-looking, fundamentalist theme of a "return to normalcy"? The threat was everywhere. According to District Kleagle Bell, Catholics were "extending their power over the armed services." And anyone with
eyes could see that Italians were deep into bootlegging. What Asbury had once looked upon as the "warm impulsive heart of the Italian" was now seen as part of the city's slide toward hell.

  That Fourth of July, 1924, Asbury Park did its best to cover up these deep streams of hate. They weren't, after all, good for business. Tourists came to forget their cares. It was the Roaring Twenties, the era F. Scott Fitzgerald called a "borrowed time" between World War I and the Great Depression. "Flappers danced merrily along" is how the paper reported the city's Fourth, "wouldbe flappers pranced with more or less grace; [and] floppers— the male specie— in squadrons studded." Women wore their hair short with long, swinging strands of pearls and favored yellow that season. The men dressed in white linen suits and snappy straw boaters.

  Asbury needed their business. James Bradley had lost money on the beachfront. His successors hadn't produced the flood of revenue people had expected, leading to Hetrick's election as mayor. And even now, with the Business Men's Show bragging about prosperity, the local newspaper noted that this was "the first time in many seasons that the bathing pavilions from one end of the boardwalk to the other were jammed to capacity on the Fourth of July." A "monster crowd" attended the free concert at the Arcade, and another danced through the heat at the Casino. According to the Asbury Park Evening Press, under the spell of the boardwalk even "old maids and stern businessmen forgot the cares of life and agreed that it was great to be living."

  Inland, Springwood Avenue celebrated apart from the tourists. At sophisticated jazz clubs like Joe Mikes, patrons drank blackberry wine and smoked cigarettes in holders. At spots like the Smile-A-While and the Two-Door Tavern, the music was louder, the dancing raunchier. You couldn't hear jazz on the radio because the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) had banned the broadcast of its "primitive rhythms" the year before. But live bands like Bill Basie's quartet made up for that. And by now, record companies had targeted the Negro audience with "race records." Asbury's West Side jumped to Bessie Smith's latest, "Jailhouse Blues," and Jelly Roll Morton's own "Jelly Roll Blues." If the Civic-Church League needed proof of the tramp conspiracy, they didn't have to look any further than the first jazz record, laid down seven years earlier. It had been cut by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, an all-white group led by an Italian-American who had grown up in a New Orleans neighborhood not that different from the mixed-race cultural breeding ground of Springwood Avenue.

  Asbury Park's Fourth passed with the city managing to keep its separate Americas separate and its tensions hidden. Not so up the shore in Long Branch. There, the Independence Day parade consisted of four thousand men, women, and children— all dressed in white robes, all hooded— led by a man (also hooded) riding a white horse and carrying an enormous American flag. According to the promotional literature, it was the largest Ku Klux Klan gathering ever held in the United States. Twenty-five thousand people lined Long Branch's streets to watch. Men in black bowlers stood by their Model T's. A Boy Scout held up a sign that read, WE WANT THE HOLY BIBLE IN OUR SCHOOLS.

  The parade highlighted a daylong celebration that took place out at the old Monmouth Park site. With horse racing still banned, the KKK had been able to purchase 175 acres for its new Imperial Palace. The Klan's daylong, all-American affair included a midmorning baseball game between the Pennsylvania and New Jersey klaverns, a christening, an egg-and-spoon race, and a "Minister's Race." In the evening, fireworks were shot off and the Lakewood Klan Orchestra played. The Fourth of July souvenir program featured an etching of a Klansman pointing to a flaming cross, and inside, portraits of local supporters, including Kompany A of the Asbury Park Kavaliers. "Amid the bluffs, dunes and beaches of Monmouth County," as one historian put it, "the Klan was king." Imperial Wizard Evans had to send his regrets to Long Branch, but the day's speakers echoed Evans's position that hardworking men like Walter Tindall were being driven out of business by " cosmopolitans . . . assailing the foundations of our civilization." The dangers were Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Judaism, and "especially" Roman Catholicism. American civilization, Imperial Wizard Evans declared in 1924, was based on the principle "that each race to be worthwhile must be kept pure."

  When one of the speakers in Long Branch specifically promised the crowd that "no one but a Protestant will ever sit in the White House," everyone knew he was referring to the Democratic National Convention taking place up the coast in New York City's sweltering Madison Square Garden. There, under what the Associated Press called "the cloud of the Ku Klux Klan," the Democrats were hung up in a brutal, two-week-long political deadlock. Their most charismatic and potentially their most popular presidential candidate was Governor Al Smith, but Smith hailed from what the Imperial Wizard called "the most un- American city of the American continent," New York. The Klan and its allies saw him as being soft on Prohibition. Most importantly, Smith was Catholic. And according to the Imperial Wizard, a Catholic's "first allegiance is to a foreign temporal sovereign." Outside of Long Branch that Fourth of July, the Klan set up a booth where a nickel got you three chances to throw hardballs at a poster of Smith. By day's end, the governor's face was in tatters.

  Asbury Park didn't have a Ku Klux Klan parade, but the city didn't denounce the organization, either. Instead, the next day's lead editorial in the Asbury Park Evening News declared that the major threat to 1924 America was "the multitudes of new-comers of lower quality and alien cultures." Congress should enact quotas, the paper went on, to limit immigration to those "of the stock built into the original fabric of the nation." (Which Congress soon did, passing a law that reduced the number of Italians who could enter the United States to fewer than four thousand a year— ten percent of the number of British and Germans allowed.) The Asbury Park Evening News position was the Klan's, just without the hoods.

  After their show offeree on the Fourth, the Monmouth County KKK announced it was going to concentrate on the upcoming elections. It would support only those candidates who promised to "protect the public and close some of the notorious places that exist [in Asbury Park] today." Missing from the statement was how the Klan would deal with those it didn't support. That summer, Frederick W. Vanderpool— a professional songwriter (" 'Neath the Autumn Moon")— decided to campaign for the Republican nomination for assemblyman. Vanderpool declared he was antiProhibition and anti-Klan. A few weeks after the start of his campaign, he appeared at the Asbury Park police station seeking protection and a permit to carry a handgun. He'd gotten anonymous phone calls whispering that he had "only a short time to live" and been mailed death threats "marked with a fiery cross."

  But the Klan's main focus was the congressional primary. T. Frank Appleby was running for the Republican nomination against Major Stanley Washburn. Appleby's support of Bradley's old American ideas had helped get him elected to Congress once before. He had long been "one of the most earnest workers of the First Methodist Episcopal Church." But now Appleby was facing a tough challenge from Major Washburn, a war veteran and a personal friend of President Coolidge's.

  Washburn's platform included a plank that called for revising Prohibition "to a point where public opinion will back its endorsement." As if that weren't heresy enough, the major's personal secretary was a Roman Catholic. Five days before the primary, a delegation of Klansmen visited Washburn and demanded that he fire the secretary. Washburn refused. According to the New York Times, the KKK immediately endorsed Appleby.

  The political maneuvering that followed underlines just how powerful the Klan was on the Jersey shore. Appleby didn't want to be labeled an extremist and quickly declared the rumor that he was a member of the KKK "absolutely false." At the same time, he didn't decline the Klan's endorsement: it meant too many votes for that. Major Washburn, meanwhile, announced that he had never sought the KKK's endorsement— and then proceeded to cozy up to its membership. He predicted that "80 percent of the Klansmen" would support him because they shared the same essential values. (Despite this supposed sympathy, the major sp
ent his last days on the campaign trail traveling with a security force of twenty bodyguards.) District Kleagle Bell, responding to this elaborate courtship, issued a statement from the Imperial Palace. "The Klan is not a political machine," he told the press. "It doesn't take upon itself the authority to tell its members how they should vote."

  That was a lie. On the day before the primary, a full-page ad appeared in the Asbury Park Evening Press. Under its headline SHALL THE KLAN RULE? two letters were reprinted. One, signed by Kleagle Bell, was addressed to "Faithful and Esteemed" Klansmen. It recommended that they study an enclosed, confidential voting card that named the Klan's "Preferred List" of candidates. The other letter was much the same, except it went to Klanswomen and was signed by Mrs. Bell. In an added flourish, she reminded female voters "the Klan has been raised up to save America."

  The ad was taken out not by the KKK but by a private citizen who wanted to reveal the Klan's strategy. He urged voters to exhibit their "TRUE PATRIOTISM" by defying this "un- American organization." Caught in the act, the Klan argued that the letters had never actually been sent. In fact, Walter Tindall (in whose shop the voter cards had been printed) called the Asbury Park police to report that someone had stolen the mailing.