ATTENTION
Page 7
Call it the American Daydream, an idyll that’s intimated and hinted at everywhere in AC: on billboards, on postcards, in the lobby of the Professional Arts Building, which is festooned with giant photomurals of all the old, since-demolished, European-style grand hotels that lined the Boardwalk at its bustling heyday, the totality of the scene captured in a black-and-white that’s been touched up, that’s been rosied, with pastels. Every day, taking the elevator up and down for cig breaks, I’d study these murals—I’d try to resist their calliope charms. Put starkly, the danger at the heart of sentimentality or nostalgia is how directly it’s predicated on racism. That Great America that will be Made Again and the politics of racial oppression are, like the ingredients of any decent melting pot, inseparable.
AC was founded in 1854, the year before Castle Garden opened in New York. Before then, Absecon Island was just a desolate sandspit that had been fishing-and-hunting grounds to the Lenni Lenape, and then a farmstead to the Quakers, and finally a minuscule, ramshackle village inhabited by the family of Revolutionary War veteran Jeremiah Leeds, whose cousin, “Mother Leeds,” was said to have spawned the Jersey Devil.
The idea to turn the island into a faddish summer health resort on the Victorian British model belonged to Dr. Jonathan Pitney, a physician, while the financial support and practical infrastructure were supplied by Samuel Richards—the scion of a rich South Jersey bog-iron and glass dynasty—who built the Camden-Atlantic line, a railroad that connected AC with the cross-Delaware cities of Camden and Philadelphia. The railroad’s engineer was Richard Osborne, who named the city after its ocean, and predicted that it’d become “the first, most popular, most health giving and most inviting watering place” in America.
But the city’s first megahotel, the United States Hotel—in the mid-1850s the largest in the nation, with more than six hundred rooms—was initially mostly vacant. The Philadelphia elite balked at the rude accommodations, the grime and smoke of the open-air train, and the rapacious swarms of greenheads and mosquitoes. However, the main reason that the moneyed set wasn’t overwhelmingly attracted to AC seems to have been tradition: The good old families tended to already own good old second homes, to which they’d repair not for a weekend—because weekends, then, didn’t exist—but for the duration of the summer. To give further context: Beachgoing and ocean swimming didn’t become established forms of recreation in America until well after the Civil War, and at the time of AC’s founding, the coastal towns that later became famous as resorts—the closest to AC being Cape May, but also Rehoboth, Delaware; Newport, Rhode Island; and Cape Cod, Massachusetts—were still significantly active as ports.
AC’s regular clientele, then, turned out to be regular people, “red-bloods” with “blue collars”: people, usually of recent immigrant stock, who couldn’t afford second summer homes and typically had short vacations, or just a short single day—Sunday, God’s day—to profane with their pleasure. The first time a Camden or Philadelphia carpenter and his family could afford to pay another person to cook for them; the first time a Newark/Elizabeth or New York longshoreman and his family could afford to pay another person to eat and sleep in their house—to room and board in their roominghouse or boardinghouse—they went to AC: the only vacation destination on the East Coast to which there was direct rail service; a city clapped together out of water and sand and dedicated almost exclusively to making the Irish, Italian, and Jewish urban poor feel rich, or richer. This is the process that created the American middle class, which in America—unlike in Europe, where the middle class had always been a feudal characterization of artisans and merchants—became more of an ideology, or more of a delusion.
For nearly a century—the 1850s through the 1950s—new immigrants and their native-born children would come down to AC, dress in their finery, and stroll along the Boardwalk, which was invented to keep sand out of the hotels but became a lucrative commercial property that was also publicized as an education and an exercise. This raised wooden and later wood-and-metal midway featured displays of America’s emergent production power (exhibitions of Edison’s innovations stretching out over the piers) along with ample opportunities to consume (branches of the most fashionable Philadelphia and New York boutiques selling ready-to-wear clothing at the very advent of mass tailoring), establishing in the imaginations of promenaders the commensality of industrial progress and personal, familial, and even ethnic progress. At its height—say, the turn of the century—at the height of the day—say, once the sun had tipped toward the bay—this grand boulevard took on the aspect of a nonstop parade route, a pageant of freshly minted Americans floating by, all showing off and being shown off to, mutually reveling in having “arrived,” in having “made it.”
Of course, this sense of success was premised on a fundamental injustice. Check out any of the old photographs, any of the old film reels, and note the rolling chairs—AC’s signature white, wheeled wicker chairs that were first introduced for the use of the disabled back when the city was still being touted as a retreat for the infirm, but later adopted by able-bodied patrons. The people pushing those chairs are black—the only black people on the Boardwalk. In the surviving images of nearly all the early hotels, restaurants, and bars, it’s the same: blacks in white uniform, their faces almost always averted from the camera.
At the turn of the twentieth century, one out of four AC residents was black, a ratio that gave the city the highest per capita black population of any city above the Mason-Dixon Line—which, if it didn’t take a sharp turn to form the Delaware border, would overlay the county line between Atlantic and Cape May counties. Much of this porter and kitchen and laundry workforce was made up of freed slaves and their descendants, who came north because the hospitality industry was more profitable, and had more opportunities for promotion, than, for instance, sharecropping. What this meant was that black AC was occupied with its own—more precarious, more constrained—attempts at achieving upward mobility: Compared with black communities elsewhere in America, black AC was prosperous.
These symbiotic or parasitic middle-class fantasies based on racial oppression were the great sustainers of AC—along with vice, which unites people of all colors. An economy reliant on seasonal tourism wouldn’t countenance Prohibition, and from 1920 to 1933 the city just outright ignored the Eighteenth Amendment. Forget speakeasies and clubs: Alcohol was sold out in the open in the city, whose wharves had ample docking space for bootleggers’ ships. Opium dens and brothels were tolerated, but the numbers games were more popular, as were more formal card parlors. All this vice was allowed to flourish under the dispensation of the local machine, which was nominally Republican but operationally total: It had no opposition, and it even handpicked which Democrats would lose to it. The first boss of this machine was Louis “Commodore” Kuehnle, owner of Kuehnle’s Hotel, and its most infamous was Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, who spent three decades remuneratively installed in the nothing position of Atlantic County treasurer. Kuehnle and especially Johnson exacted money from the rackets in exchange for police protection—turning the police into a mercenary force for the rackets—and after pocketing shares for themselves, invested the rest into purchasing peace from the state and federal authorities, and in acts of patronage both major (building Boardwalk Hall) and minor (charities for orphans and widows). This unlawful but effective arrangement wouldn’t just grow in scale, it also served as blueprint for allied endeavors. In May 1929, the summer before the stock-market crash, Johnson assembled a conference in AC—the prototype convention of this convention town—that attracted the emissaries of organized crime from Philadelphia, New York, Kansas City, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, et al. This was the founding of America’s first national crime syndicate, and it was Capone who—in a late-life interview he granted the FBI from Alcatraz—most succinctly summarized their agenda: “I told them [in AC] there was business enough to make us all rich a
nd it was time to stop all the killings and look on our business as other men look on theirs, as something to work at and forget when we go home.”
Capone’s statement was prophetic—just not for the gangsters, or the “illegal” gangsters at least. Hard times came to AC with Prohibition’s repeal, and were compounded amid post-WWII prosperity—under the machine of state senator Frank “Hap” Farley, and the more independent and so less effectually venal city governments that followed—with the gradual nationwide legalization of nearly every vice that previously had been most safely and most dependably available within the city limits. More than the rise of air travel or the proliferation of private car ownership and the interstate system—more than the miracle of air-conditioning—this was the greatest threat to AC: permissiveness abroad, as municipalities throughout the States became more accepting of sin, or just more interested in taxing it.
Nevada approved gaming in 1931 in response to the crash. By the end of the ’50s, Las Vegas had emerged as the gaming capital of America, and by the end of the ’70s—when New Jersey finally caught up and officially approved gaming in AC—the precedents were already in place for the rash of both tribal and nontribal approvals that followed.
And so the continued expansion of casinos, and the continued extrapolation of casino principles into governmental policy—into the scaffolding of a state that can deny its citizens all but the barest amenities of welfare and healthcare, only because it sanctions their conviction that they’re all just one bet, one lever tug, away from becoming rich, chosen, elect, the American their ancestors had aspired to be, the American that God had intended.
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I FOUND MYSELF—AMERICA finds itself now—at the very end of the Boardwalk. The very end of this immigrant’s midway lined with cheap thrills and junk concessions, pulsating with tawdry neon and clamoring moronically. The end of this corny, schmaltzy Trumpian thoroughfare that entertains us with its patter and enthralls us with its lies.
And yet we stay here, on the Boardwalk, because it’s safer than stepping down. Because we trust the Boardwalk, at least we trust that it can’t be trusted, and so we’re reassured by how straight it seems, how direct it seems, the way it lulls us back and forth. We’re threatened by the pavement, by the city that we might find there. The ghost streets off Pacific Avenue and Atlantic Avenue, off Arctic and Baltic—all the broken roads and dead-end alleys left behind by Wall Street, which underlies every street of the Monopoly board.
Here, unlike on the Boardwalk, everything is real. Here everything is both ghostly and real. Vacant houses. Apartments boarded up to protect against squatters. Eviction and foreclosure papers flap from the doors like tongues. NOTICE TO CEASE, NOTICE TO QUIT, papers keeping the sun out of the windows. The apartment houses rubble away into empty lots pierced by wind and drowned in the shadows cast by shuttered penthouses. Empty lots spontaneously converted for parking, a sign in the windshield of a Saturn: PLEESE DONT TAKE ME. Walking between the Boardwalk and the Professional Arts Building, walking between the Professional Arts Building and my car spontaneously parked in a dirt and, after the rain, mud lot, meant passing the porn store, which, especially if I was making the trip after sunset, meant getting accosted. By men who slept on the beach and spent their waking lives on the street, where there were fewer police and more chances to hustle. Corner of Pacific and MLK Jr. Boulevard. Guy trying to bum cigarettes. Guy trying to bum a dollar for booze. Guy trying to deal to me. “Yo, got coke, yo.” “Molly, molly.” “Got syrup.” Taking my money and not coming back. Trying it all over again the next day unabashed, and then when I told him I’d rather just talk, he got in my face, called me gay, called me a cop. A woman telling me how the check-cashing place would only cash checks made out to people with addresses in Atlantic County by people or businesses with addresses in Atlantic County. Telling me she lived in Georgia, or had once lived in Georgia, and her only hope of returning was this check from her cousin in Camden. “Ain’t Camden Atlantic County?” “No.” “What Camden then?” “Camden County.” “Goddamn.”
Another woman giving me some woe chronicle of how she was running to catch a jitney and fucked up her knee, and how with this one knee blown and all the weight on the other, the other got fucked up too, and how she got laid off, either because of the injury or unrelated to the injury, and was homeless now, and how every time she went to the doctor’s office she just got a referral to another office that was never open, and no lawyer would take the case and sue the jitneys. Man standing in the midst of the lot holding up either a raincoat or construction tarp, screening a woman squatting pissing or shitting.
Down at the Boardwalk’s terminus, by Oriental Avenue, by night, the seagulls keep flying into the Revel and dying. Or they flap and limp around a bit before dying. You never see or hear the impact, you just get what happens after. Immense white gulls, flapping, limping, expiring. They fly into the Revel’s giant vacant tower of panes and break their necks, because without any lights on, the glass is indistinguishable from the sky.
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P.S., OFFSEASON
On November 1, the New Jersey State Department of Community Affairs rejected Atlantic City’s budget and rescue plan. On November 8, Election Day, the New Jersey Casino Expansion Amendment failed. New Jersey itself went for Clinton, but the country went for Trump. The morning after, while Clinton delivered her concession speech, New Jersey’s Local Finance Board voted 5–0 to approve Governor Christie’s immediate takeover of Atlantic City. I am writing this on that morning—it is November 9. A gray day, humid and rainy. My parents called to say that it was the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
NOTES ON THE CONCESSION
IN WRITING THE CONSTITUTION, AMERICA’S Founders privileged the electoral vote over the popular vote both to protect states’ rights—to ensure that each state had a proportional voice in its federal governance—and to mitigate the passions of populism. Here’s Alexander Hamilton: “A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” So, the way it was supposed to work, the way it used to work, was that people didn’t vote for a candidate directly, but for an (elite, educated) elector—one per district—who would evaluate the nominated candidates and vote on the people’s behalf. After the Civil War, however, all that changed, as the party apparatuses went about choosing their own electors, who weren’t free agents, then, but prepledged—meaning they weren’t expected to “deliberate” (Hamilton’s term), they merely had to certify: They rubberstamped the popular will. And so Trump has just won the highest office in this country, the highest office in the world, by the very mechanism intended to squash his type of candidacy—a candidacy based not on policy, but on destruction. By electing Trump, by not electing Clinton, the folks the Founders never trusted have gotten their revenge: “Deliberate” liberalism has once again been circumvented and the tyranny of Obama-era “discernment” overturned.
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THIS MUST BE SAID: Nothing in this election was rigged. Sure, there was external meddling (Russia, WikiLeaks), and, sure, the FBI’s pursuit of Clinton for keeping her secret public emails on her secret private server was unfair (and rendered moot by the external meddling of Russia, WikiLeaks), but no one has yet argued that the voting machines were tampered with, or that the totals were altered. Everyone seems to be in agreement (perhaps because everyone seems scared not to be in agreement): The system worked. That is, the system worked by failing—the evidence that it worked is that it failed, and it appears that it will continue to fail as long as the citizenry remains so divided, which is to say as long as opportunistic and conscienceless demagogues are able to muster Christian whites from the middle of the country (most of them working-class and male) and “identify,” or, as they say online, “identitarize,” them in
to a reliable voting bloc—indeed, into America’s first majoritarian voting bloc. Never have so many people of the same race all voted the same—rather, never have so many people of the same race all been manipulated into voting the same, in a brazen campaign that recast their unreconstructed fear of the Other (blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, empowered women) as a modern fear of empowered robots and globalism’s exportation of American jobs.
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AS A JOURNALIST WHO covered Trump’s campaign, I daily experienced the effects of this manipulation, in the form of his supporters’ rabid opposition to nearly everything I was: journalist, Jew, New York. I was routinely accused of conspiring with fellow members of “the tribe” and the “shady” global capital “cabals” that finance “the media” to deprive nonurban Christian White America of its economic supremacy, by transferring the resources that’d enabled that supremacy (college admissions, financial aid, insurance, jobs) to urban minorities, in order to purchase their votes for Clinton and to forestall their (innate, biologically innate) violence. The bulk of the swastikas I encountered at the rallies were backward: rightfacing. I laughed then, out of pity, out of angst. I laughed until I was told: Backward was on purpose; rightfacing was the point.