Newark
Newark, New Jersey
Newark in 1910 was the nation’s 14th largest city—just above New Orleans and just below Cincinnati—holding a very diverse ethnic and racial population totaling almost 350,000. Located just across the river from New York City, Newark, led by a weak mayor and a pronounced series of ethnic neighborhoods jealously preserving their prerogatives through the ward-based city council (32 aldermen in sixteen wards). Numerous independent boards and commissions operated as fiefdoms—beyond any effective control or coordination. Patronage politics was evident and while no formal Tammany-style machine operated, neither could it be said that the Gilded Age mayor/businessman/chamber nexus kept affairs on an even keel.
During the 1890’s the Republican businessman Julius Lebkuecher (a gold and jewelry manufacturer) did an outstanding job with making up for lost time—installing much infrastructure and restoring the city’s fiscal administration. Newark, one of the “littlest” of America’s cities, always had a serious problem with what today is called suburbanization. In the mid 1890’s, Lebkuecher was defeated in his ambitious attempt to consolidate the Oranges and several other growing areas. In 1910, Newark included only 24 square miles within its boundaries, the third smallest major city in the nation (Jersey City and Milwaukee). In these early years, however, population Newark population grew rapidly, more than 200,000 moving in during the thirty years after 1880.
The city’s economic base captured considerable overflow from New York City. As of 1911 a train connected Newark to Hoboken, Jersey City and New York City (eventually this was the base for the contemporary PATH train line) and in 1927 the Holland Tunnel connected Jersey City with Manhattan. In that same year Newark started construction on a subway. In 1928, Newark Airport was one of the nation’s busiest airports. By 1910 was heavily industrialized, with an insurance agglomeration (Prudential) alongside. By 1914 its port could accommodate deep water vessels. While the city had installed a basic infrastructural foundation, including water, streets, electricity, and a growing downtown with a limited parks and boulevard/City Beautiful presence and four flourishing department stores, the quality of life and a rather “vibrant” bar, gambling, prostitution presence suggested to its inhabitants and visitors that a certain “grittiness” permeated the city. Scandals, government corruption, and a crime culture suggested to many citizens that all was not well and that all sorts of reform, moral as well as governmental, were in order.
A Commission Form of Government—What a Great Idea!
So in 1917, joining in the commission-herd diffusion, Newark voters gave it a whirl. Only the mayor registered any opposition, asserting that the commission was “certainly made for [political] bosses”. Newark’s Essex County boss agreed, and he supported the changeover—as did the Board of Trade. Voters approved the commission by over 3-1 margin and the Newark Evening News cheered, saying Newark had “cast off the outworn system which has been a dead weight to its progress”.[1]
The non partisan, at large elections that followed selected from 80 candidates, yet managed to elect the same very familiar faces—individuals active in the previous mayoral form—including its police commissioner William J. Brennan (father of the future Supreme Court Justice). The initial commission membership lasted, with little change, through the 1920’s—when literally they began to die off. In the blissful twenties, policy-making was described as quiet; there were few squabbles—not always a good sign. The quietness rested on the deference of each commissioner to the others; “you do your thing, and I’ll do mine”. Each operated his assigned department without interference from the others. Five policy dictators reigned—quietly. Brennan, for example, ran the police department which during the Prohibition years was not exactly known for its aggressiveness, but was associated with deference to the police union. In any event, some said at the time that organized crime flourished in the city—Dutch Schultz was killed there in 1928. Crime families were alleged to be headquartered in Newark neighborhoods, taking advantage of Prohibition and such.
Saying Good-Bye is so Hard-to-do
The Depression and passing of first generation commissioners brought into office a new group of commissioners. Depression stress combined with a less cohesive commission membership meant squabbles became more open and policy-making gridlocked. Relief programs, welfare and public works were tinged with corruption and racial discrimination (the Great Migration was in full flow). In the mid-1930 a huge $10 million dollar downtown project collapsed, due, the developed claimed, to Newark politics. Instead of downtown development, the commission, in these lean Depression years, embarked on a land assembly project around the Meadowlands and the airport. The land purchased seemed awfully expensive to many, and in short order grand jury investigations and newspaper reports of corruption, no-bid contracts and outright graft followed. A state investigation commenced; in 1937.
After a long and public trial, a mistrial resulted with the mayor and commissioners let off the hook. The investigation was picked up, however, and a new Grand Jury indicted the entire commission, mayor and all. Pressure being what it was, the Mayor went on an extended European tour on the Queen Mary, properly paid for by the city of Newark. The Newark Housing Authority (which operated the city’s slum clearance program) got mixed up with bribes, kickbacks and dealings with local organized crime. When that trial was over, the mayor and his fine associates were found not guilty—with pretty aggressive claims of jury-fixing being made. Voters had enough and in 1941, the Mayor was voted out of office—only to be returned to office in 1949, receiving more votes than any other candidate. He continued to serve in office through 1953.
By that point Newark was heavily implicated in the famous Kefauver Senate hearings[2] of organized crime. The Kefauver report criminal rings, widespread government corruption and “Politicians and cops blatantly protected organized crime operations … Police officers, city commissioners and other public servants could inexplicably afford $100,000 summer homes and other extravagances”.[3] In 1951, our friend the former Newark mayor/then current city commissioner was the first subpoenaed witness before the Kefauver committee where he testified that “his city responsibilities rarely required him to be present in City Hall, or anywhere in Newark—‘I operate by remote control’” he testified[4]. Former Mayor Ellenstein, shortly afterward, retained his seat on the commission in a May 1953 election.
But the same election approved the creation of a commission to reassess the commission form of government and recommend changes. This reform commission’s report concluded: “Municipal government in Newark has proved to be wasteful, extravagant, uncoordinated, and not responsive to the basic needs of our city”. Ignoring the obvious corruption evident in the city, it went on to further conclude “There has been an overemphasis on patronage, political bickering and unwarranted appeals to racial and religious interests. The long range interests of the city have been sacrificed to political expediency”.[5]
Two months after the report, voters approved a change to the mayor-council form by a 2-1 margin.
To be sure this was an interesting story, well outside our Progressive Era time period. The Newark example, however, vividly displays the deficiencies of the commission in Big Cities. But more importantly, the story suggests that, however important form of government is in setting the processes and parameters of a municipal policy system, form of government and elections rest on forces and dynamics much more profound and impactful. Why these abuses and misrule continued for almost forty years, with few notable checks by local or state authorities and courts, seems a reasonable question. There were no serious voter push backs in these years—and reform efforts could not get traction until the very end. An earlier description of politics in the next city down the road, Jersey City, and Atlantic City (of Boardwalk Empire fame) suggest something is going wrong at higher levels–and lower levels, with voters and the dominant political culture which seemingly pervaded the New Jersey state SSS.
[1] Brad R. Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark: the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 92-93.
[2] Held in 1950-1951, the committee held hearings in fourteen cities, of which Newark was one.
[3] Brad R. Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, op. cit., p. 115.
[4] Brad R. Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, op. cit., p. 116.
[5] Brad R. Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark:, op. cit., p. 117.
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Some of this private sector involvement we would rather forget, such as the neighborhood and housing slum renewal projects conducted in Newark[1]. In that instance the Newark Housing Authority, its aggressive executive director Louis Danzig launched projects, with private financing, before the FFHA’s Division of Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment had ever been formed. In almost every respect Danzig’s aggressive redevelopment programs, virtually unrestrained by politics or mayors, with or without federal dollars, corresponded to the worst stereotypes of urban renewal and truly justified the allegation of “negro removal”. Sadly, the ambition, finance versatility, and even creativity exhibited by Danzig and his gifted Director of Urban Redevelopment, the former Public Housing Administration staffer, Joseph Nevin demonstrated the flawed excess that neighbor-hood and housing-based urban renewal could inflict, but also supported how that program produced a generation of future economic developers.
Danzig was, for example, a pioneer in the “city within a city” concept, and as early as 1955 partnered with local corporations in various industrial redevelopment projects (his Jeliffe Avenue Project, for example). His partnership with Rutgers University (1958), and later Seton Hall downtown campus (1959), cultural entities including the Newark Museum, Newark Public Library, and the 1959 multi-functional CBD restoration, the Penn Plaza Project reveal not only the diversity of projects constructed during the Age of Urban Renewal, but the audacity and the expertise required to close the deals and bring the projects to completion. The array of corporate, institutional, construction, finance and real estate partners that Danzig’s redevelopment program encompassed, certainly a dark underside for many in the Policy World, display a sophisticated ability to link Newark redevelopment into the nation’s financial, corporate and property development sectors.
It seems that Danzig’s urban renewal bulldozer owed much of its free-ranging, project success to the City’s political environment. The private sector worked with Danzig’s NHA because “it could make a deal and carry it out” without getting embroiled into local politics and payoffs. To what extent this was literally true, I tend to doubt, but it would be fair to observe that Danzig got more or less a “free hand” in a city where politics was brutal. Kaplan describes what he perceives as “the pattern of policy formation in Newark’s urban redevelopment program … [as depending] upon the existence of a stable and permissive local environment”. Physical redevelopment of a CBD, even slum removal in a neighborhood touches, even in this period, a lot of actors and people. For such a project to happen “some person or agency must bring all the parties together, negotiate support for the project, and quiet immediate opposition”.[2]
[1] Harold Kaplan, “Urban Renewal in Newark”, in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit, p.233ff and Brad R. Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark: the Rise, Fall and Rebirth of an American City; Richard Curvin, Inside Newark: Decline, Rebellion and the Search for Transformation (Rutgers University Press, 2014)
[2] Harold Kaplan, “Urban Renewal in Newark”, in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit, pp. 257-258.
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Ron W. Coan 