4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  The next day, T. Frank Appleby defeated Major Washburn by sixteen thousand votes. In Asbury Park, he won by an overwhelming fifteen hundred votes. The New York Times announced Appleby's victory under a subheadline: KU KLUX BEAT WASHBURN. "It is clear that my refusal to dismiss my Catholic secretary has lost me many votes throughout the district," said the major in his concession speech, "but I would far rather be defeated on so fundamental an issue than be elected by any compromise whatsoever." Statewide, some moderate Republicans won nominations, which the Times described as a "crushing blow to the Anti-Saloon League and to the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan." But approaching the general election, the power of the Klan, if anything, seemed to be growing.

  Just before the November vote, concerned citizens formed the Monmouth County Equal Rights Association to "combat the political influence of the Ku Klux Klan." The umbrella group combined the efforts of the Klan's various "invaders," drawing from the Long Branch Hebrew Political Club, the Italian Tammany Club, the Irish Catholic Monmouth League, and the Tiger Club, "a colored organization." According to the Asbury Evening Press, the Fourth of July parade in Long Branch had been the main "impulse" for forming the association. The Equal Rights Association saw the spectacle of the Klan marching down Main Street not only as a "direct insult" but a terrible business decision. One leading Jewish merchant said he'd spoken to more than three hundred "members of his race" who were threatening to cancel their summer reservations because of the Klan presence.

  But that fall's election made clear which America the majority of Monmouth County's voters preferred. They elected Appleby to Congress by a margin of more than twenty thousand votes. The two Klan-backed candidates for Assembly also won. And nationally, gubernatorial and senatorial elections featured, as the New York Times front-page headline put it, VICTORIES BY KLAN. KKK-endorsed candidates won in Indiana, Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma.

  T. Frank Appleby never got to occupy his congressional seat: he died of an intestinal tumor that December 1924. Overt demonstrations of Klan power soon faded in Asbury Park and across the country. Locally, Mayor Hetrick got the reputation as the man who had saved the city from the KKK. That, along with certain favors he handed out, solidified his power base on the West Side. Dedicating a new two-story Child Welfare home, Hetrick declared he was "in closer touch with those in need . . . than the general run of people."

  But whom had he saved the city for? The West Side still didn't receive basic services. The city government still didn't represent Negroes or Italians. Beneath Asbury's benign Fourth of July celebration, the Klan's doctrine of "one-hundred percent Americanism" hadn't so much disappeared as been absorbed into the system. In the broadest terms, Mayor Hetrick had sided with the merchants and against the Civic-Church League. But the two sides were in basic agreement on Asbury Park's future.

  The Civic-Church League, the Klan, the businessmen, and Mayor Hetrick all supported the same vision of their city: the Merchants' Vision. Asbury Park depended on tourists. Tourists would be attracted by modern accommodations, exciting amusements, and, of course, the beach. But they would only come if it was safe. And everyone knew what that meant. Segregation was one of the foundations of the Merchants' Vision, the underpinning that allowed the attractions to attract.

  When a disastrous fire destroyed four shoreside hotels in 1923, private investors led by the Steinbachs rushed to the rescue, replacing the lost rental units with the eight-story, brick Berkeley-Carteret Hotel. And Mayor Hetrick took his reelection victory as a mandate to push forward on a major beachfront renewal that included the new Convention Hall. The architects responsible for New York City's Grand Central Station would design it, and the result would be a huge beaux arts building housing a theater, arcade, and exhibition space and studded with glittering copper sculptures and carved stone relief. Fourth of July, 1924, marked Clarence Hetrick's lock on power. He became the city's new boss, taking over where Bradley had left off, and reigning for a quarter of a century. Convention Hall was the embodiment of his Asbury: the high church of the Merchants' Vision.

  According to those who planned "scientifically and economically," by the time the hall was completed— around the Fourth of July, 1930— the business climate would be reaching new heights. Never mind that this model hadn't worked for Bradley or his successors. So committed were the city fathers to their vision of the promised land that when, instead, the stock market crashed, and Asbury entered a deep economic spiral, they kept right on course. They rebuilt the Casino that had burnt down in early 1928, and they filled their new Convention Hall with the finest big bands of the day: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman. The finest white-led bands, that is. It would be years before Duke Ellington or Count Basie would play Convention Hall. The music drew segregated crowds, but it wasn't enough to keep the city afloat. The scene on the boardwalk was like some exquisitely designed, perfectly white engine, spinning ineffectively onward. "I pressed my nose against the door," an African-American resident recalled. "We were not permitted in [Convention] hall. Our amusement was watching the whites dance."

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1941

  IT RAINED ON the Fourth. Independence Day in 1941 was supposed to feature a "gigantic patriotic parade and rally" sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It was going to include a long list of fraternal organizations, high school bands, even blimps flying over Main Street. Soldiers and rolling equipment were scheduled to come down from Fort Hancock, Fort Monmouth, and Fort Dix. The local papers hoped for some twenty thousand marchers and crowds "matching those of the old palmy days of the city's famed baby parade." Asbury had even lured the seventy-one-year-old Arthur Pryor out of retirement to kick off the festivities on the third.

  It was a typical mix of patriotism and nostalgia, cranked up to new heights because war was right around the corner. Nazi forces were invading the Soviet Union. On July 3, after a day of stifling ninety-eight-degree weather, the citizens of Asbury Park opened their papers to read of the Germans capturing one hundred thousand Russian troops and Stalin calling for a scorched-earth policy. The editorial cartoon was of a nervous Uncle Sam watching a bomb-bursting "pyrotechnic display," while over his head the thought bubble read, "1942?"

  Over at the St. James movie house, Robert Taylor was starring in Billy the Kid, to be followed by the Marx Brothers in The Big Store. There was roller-skating at the arena, and Tepper's Department Store was holding a holiday sale of bathing suits as low as $2.95, complete with "floating bras." Out Springwood, on the West Side, the great boogie-woogie piano player Meade Lux Lewis was playing Jackie's Cotton Club, and Cuba's was offering three floor shows nightly that included "Congo Dancers," the comedian Spo Dee-O Dee, and an all-black swing band. The white equivalent would be down in Sea Girt, where the Harry James band was appearing. His singer, Dick Haymes, had replaced James's discovery and 1941's most popular vocalist, Frank Sinatra.

  According to the local papers, some 250,000 people swarmed into Asbury Park over that weekend, filling the hotels and the boardwalk, ending the shore's "patient" wait to "feel the full impact of the nation-wide boom."

  Except it rained on the Fourth. Some indoor celebrations went on. Springwood Avenue residents complained about the loud, late partying at the clubs.

  And then it rained again on the fifth.

  So, it wasn't until Sunday that the parade finally set off down Main Street. The Asbury police force strode in front. Behind them, according to the Evening Press, "members of Holy Name societies marched side by side with Jewish war veterans in a great outpouring which would be possible only in democratic America."

  The paper's point was that, compared to the fascism overseas, here Jews were coming down Main Street side by side with Catholics. Which was certainly a shift from the height of Klan power in the 1920s. But if this Fourth of July parade was about democratic America, the main evidence was in the lead car. There, waving to the crowds, rode the city's newly elected mayor and councilmen. Never mind who they were; it's who they weren't that mattered.
After more than a quarter of a century, Asbury Park was no longer led by Clarence Hetrick.

  Democracy— if that's what it was— had certainly taken its time. After Hetrick's 1924 mandate, his government had floated some $8 million in municipal bonds, almost all of it going to the massive overhaul of the beachfront. As well as the spectacular Convention Hall, new buildings included a pool, bathhouse, heating plant, and two solariums. Hetrick also put money toward the endless fight to hold on to Asbury's beaches. Old maps showed the city's shoreline had receded 180 feet between 1839 and 1920. In 1925, an eight-hundred-foot-long, $100,000 stone jetty was completed at the northern border, and two others followed. The overall investment was huge. By the end of the decade, the city's bonded indebtedness had jumped from $2.75 to $15 million. But Asbury believed in this future. "Tremendous revenue" was bound to follow. That's how the city's promotional brochure put it. "No one who has knowledge of business enterprises doubts."

  And then the Depression hit.

  Asbury Park reacted slowly. Maybe its capital-spending spree temporarily floated the local economy. For a year or so after the crash of 1929, while the rest of the country suffered through bank failures and unemployment lines, the promised land almost seemed immune. And even when the situation began to fall apart— tourist income dropping, taxes rising— the city stuck doggedly to its vision. Surely, this was a hitch, not a major flaw? Surely, the gleaming new beachfront would prime the pump? Surely, their mayor— a corporate executive with offices in Washington, D.C., and a mansion in upstate New York— would lead them through the darkness?

  Given how long Clarence Hetrick had run the city, Asbury knew surprisingly little about him. The local papers called him "an enigma." Childless, he was rarely seen on the streets. He seemed to spend most of his time out of town on unspecified and slightly mysterious business. Even at election time, the mayor stayed "remote from the crowds," delegating responsibility and often speech making to his "henchmen." He was as unassuming as James Bradley had been extroverted. And when Hetrick was in Asbury, he mostly holed up in a suite of offices in the Electric Building, where, as the papers would write, he was "ostensibly operating a real estate business."

  It turns out that Hetrick's employer was actually a complex, interstate holding company called Utilities Power &L Light. With its corporate center in Chicago, UP&JL held investments in 366 towns and cities across the nation. Because it operated in so many states under so many different names, its business was almost impossible to decipher— or regulate. Utilities like this faced accusations of price fixing and hiding profits, of shifting money from state to state to avoid taxes, of milking consumers through regional monopolies. In 1927, UP&LL'S octopus-like corporation had shown an annual net income of over $2.5 million. That year, it sank some of its profits into construction of the eleven-story Electric Building in Asbury's business district. The city boasted that it was "the tallest office building on the entire Jersey coast." The first three floors were occupied by UP&LL'S Asbury subsidiary, Eastern New Jersey Power Company: a mini-conglomerate that included electric transmission lines serving over five thousand customers, gas plants, and even a yellow cab company. In 1930, as the Depression was swallowing the rest of the country, UP&JL's profits climbed to over $15 million.

  Through the end of President Hoover's term, the Depression only got deeper. Part of the blame, candidate Franklin Roosevelt maintained, had to fall on unregulated, undemocratic monopolies, especially large utilities like UP&LL. One of the first acts of Roosevelt's New Deal was to force such holding companies to operate in a single state and answer to federal regulation. UP&L was soon denouncing the "radical nature . . . of political attacks on the electric utilities." Meanwhile, the Asbury Park Evening News hailed FDR as "the savior of the capitalistic system of govern­ment."

  It's a phrase worth examining. According to the textbooks in the Asbury school system, America had a democratic system of government. But by this time, in Asbury Park anyway, the Merchants' Vision had ruled decision-making for a long time. Democracy and capitalism had strolled the beach hand in hand. Now, like thousands of communities across the country, Asbury was trying to figure out why its prosperous future— scientifically formulated— still seemed so far off. Was there something wrong with capitalism itself? With democracy? Both? The gleaming new Convention Hall jutted out from Asbury's boardwalk, pointing the way to . . . what?

  In his inaugural speech, President Roosevelt tried to reassure the country. The only thing to fear was fear itself. And, the new president added, "We do not distrust the future of essential democracy." It was a sign of the times that there was even a need to say such a thing. Roosevelt's New Deal promised to restore the capitalist economy and save democracy. The fault wasn't in the system; it simply needed to be reformed. As cities and towns across the country took a hard look at their elected representatives, Asbury Park launched its own version of the New Deal.

  Asbury's faith in capitalism remained unshaken; its city's central article of faith was that the beachfront made money. Never mind that James Bradley had claimed for years that the boardwalk cost him more than it brought in. That was because he was an eccentric and unrealistic businessman. Never mind that in 1926, two decades after the city had taken it over, the beachfront was running a $42,000 annual deficit. That was because the boardwalk needed to be revitalized. And never mind that in 1932, after revitalization, the beachfront was losing even more money: over $600,000 a year. That, a newly organized reform group argued, wasn't because of the Depression or the "capitalistic system of government." It was because Hetrick's administration was corrupt. He had saved the city from the Klan in order to sell it to the Mob.

  Asbury's reformers— calling themselves the Citizens and Taxpayers Association— called on the governor of New Jersey to investigate "close connections existing between public officials, both city and local, and certain undesirable individuals." Page-one headlines revealed that Mayor Hetrick's police chief had endorsed gun permits for three well-known gangsters, amongst them Irving Wexler, "known throughout the state as the 'big boss' in the beer racket." Wexler, aka Waxey Gordon, was a junior partner of mobster Arnold Rothstein and ran an East Coast beer distribution network out of northern Jersey. His Asbury Park gun permit listed his residence as the newly built Berkeley-Carteret Hotel. The Citizens Association suspected more ties between these " undesirable individuals" and Mayor Hetrick's political machine.

  During his more than fifteen years in office, Hetrick had survived numerous attacks on his character. These had all been in the James Bradley/"merchant orgy" tradition of purging the city of sin. The attacks hadn't: worked because the majority of the city's voters profited from Hetrick's laissez-faire attitude toward the underground economy. As one commentator put it, the core of his support had always been "south of Asbury Avenue and west of the railroad tracks." His coalition of beachfront concessionaires, Jewish merchants, Italians, Negroes, and others made their living off the "undesirables." And that voting bloc handed Hetrick victory after victory. But now the two-thousand-member Citizens Association threatened the mayor not on moral as much as fiscal grounds. Among other things, corruption equaled bad management. Asbury needed new leadership to survive the Depression. The Asbury Evening Press called the reform movement "a city-wide upheaval."

  First, the Association initiated a referendum that called for a city manager, rather than elected representatives, to run Asbury's finances. Towns across the nation were switching to this system, hiring outside fiscal experts as a way of guaranteeing more efficiency and honesty. When the referendum carried, the Association smelled blood. It launched a campaign to unseat the mayor, with its star witness Hetrick's former Casino manager, John Osgoodby.

  Osgoodby claimed that, in 1930, the Casino had regularly drawn between twenty-five hundred and five thousand people a night. He had personally deposited over $50,000 in its account. Yet at the end of the year, the city government had reported a $32,000 loss. The reason, according to Osgoodby, was tha
t Hetrick's machine skimmed profits at any and every opportunity. For example, in 1931 and 1932, the beachfront commission had budgeted $1,550 a week for a dance orchestra to play the Casino. But the musicians never received more than $1,100 in pay. "The difference for those 22 weeks," Osgoodby stated, "was more than $9,000. Where did that go?" When he tried to report the situation to his superiors, Osgoodby was told, "It's none of your damn business." Nor was it any of his damn business that his workers were hired because they were friends of the Hetrick machine. When Osgoodby caught one stealing admission tickets (and selling them on the side at half price), he was ordered to keep the man on the payroll.

  Asbury Park had suspected this kind of corruption for a while, but the details had never been made public before. Now, Osgoodby went on to outline the cushy deal set up for his boss, Thomas Burley. Burley was made beach director with a salary of $3,000 a year, plus additional fees for any special events he organized. He received another $5,000 to be secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, "when any merchant can tell you," Osgoodby declared, "there isn't any such body in the city." But the beach director's real money came through WCAP, the local radio station. The "Chamber of Commerce" had transferred ownership of the AM outlet to Burley, and then Hetrick's government paid WCAP $25,000 a year to broadcast city-sponsored music programs. The broadcasts originated from two storefronts in the Convention Hall complex: storefronts that the city advertised for rent at $6,000 a year but let Burley have for free, throwing in heat and electricity.