BOARDWALK
EMPIRE
BOARDWALK
EMPIRE
The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of ATLANTIC CITY
Nelson Johnson
Foreword by
Terence Winter
Plexus Publishing, Inc.
Medford, New Jersey
Copyright
First printing, HBO series tie-in edition, September 2010
Copyright © 2002 by Nelson Johnson
Cover Art and Interior Photographs © 2010 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
HBO® and Boardwalk Empire® are service marks of Home Box Office, Inc.
Published By:
Plexus Publishing, Inc.
143 Old Marlton Pike
Medford, NJ 08055
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover design by Lisa M. Conroy
www.boardwalkempire.com
In memory of an extraordinary person,
my mother, Jennie Johnson, from whom
I acquired my passion for the printed word.
If the people who came to town had wanted Bible readings, we’d have given ’em that. But nobody ever asked for Bible readings. They wanted booze, broads, and gambling, so that’s what we gave ’em.
— Murray Fredericks
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword, by Terence Winter
Prologue
Chapter 1: Jonathan Pitney’s Beach Village
Chapter 2: The Grand Illusion
Chapter 3: A Plantation by the Sea
Chapter 4: Philadelphia’s Playground
Chapter 5: The Golden Age of Nucky
HBO Series Photo Insert
Chapter 6: Hard Times for Nucky and His Town
Chapter 7: Hap
Chapter 8: The Painful Ride Down
Chapter 9: Turn Out the Lights
Chapter 10: A Second Bite at the Apple
Historical Photo Insert
Chapter 11: It’s a New Ballgame
Chapter 12: The Donald Comes to Town
Afterword
Source Notes
About the Author
Index
FOREWORD
Shortly after sunrise on a cool August morning in 1987, my friend Chris and I walked along the beach in Atlantic City, its Boardwalk and hotel-casinos looming directly to our right. With our ties undone, bellies full, and pockets empty after a night of gambling, drinking, and general debauchery, we were completely exhausted and wiped out financially; we couldn’t have been happier. As we trudged along, the waves crashing at our feet, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the last few coins I had. Twenty-three cents. I hurled them all into the Atlantic Ocean and turned to Chris. “Now we’re really wiped out.” After a good laugh, we headed up to the Boardwalk and started our long trek home, two hard-luck characters with another fun story to tell about our time in Atlantic City. What I didn’t know then was that versions of this scenario had been playing out there for over 100 years.
Ever since the railroad made it accessible to the average working person, Absecon Island—or Atlantic City, as it came to be known—was “The World’s Playground,” a kingdom of dreams built on sand, a place where, for a reasonable sum of money, any man, woman, or child could be treated like visiting royalty. With luxury hotels, theaters, and restaurants lining its famous Boardwalk, there was nothing the city didn’t offer—legal or illegal. Food, drink, and entertainment of all kinds, from highbrow to low. If you couldn’t find it on the Boardwalk (or on one of its many side streets), it didn’t exist.
When I was first approached by HBO to use Nelson Johnson’s book as the basis for a TV series, my biggest challenge was choosing a time period in which to set it. From the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons, to the Roaring Twenties and the Prohibition Era, to the Glamorous 1950s of Skinny D’Amato, to the city’s decline and subsequent resurgence with the advent of legalized gambling in the 1970s, Atlantic City and its people have been nothing if not compelling.
Ultimately I settled on the 1920s of Atlantic City’s legendary Treasurer Nucky Johnson (fictionalized as Nucky Thompson in the HBO series), which was the era that most struck my creative fancy. Atlantic City at that time was a place of excess, glamour, and, most of all, opportunity. Loud, brash, colorful, full of hope and promise—it was a microcosm of America. A place of spectacle, shady politics, fast women, and backroom deals, but also a real community with real people, not only on its Boardwalk, but in its churches, schools, and neighborhoods. It was a place of real Americans, a melting pot of ideas and cultures.
On my last trip there, I walked the same streets as Nucky, stood in his hotel lobby, ate in one of his favorite restaurants. I strode the Boardwalk where he reigned as king, looking out at the vast ocean that he considered his own. I was taken back in time and imagined the place as it had been, and though I enjoyed it all immensely, I needn’t have traveled so far to recreate the experience. Nelson Johnson had already taken me there in his wonderful book.
—Terence Winter
Emmy Award-winning writer of The Sopranos
and Executive Producer of Boardwalk Empire
PROLOGUE
Luxury hotels weren’t something she knew about firsthand. Until now, she had never been inside the Ritz Carlton. The closest she’d come to the grand hotel was when walking on the Boardwalk. But here she was in the anteroom of a large suite of rooms, seated in a chair that nearly swallowed her. She was frightened, but there was no turning back. She sat there trembling, folding and refolding her frayed scarf.
As a housewife and summertime laundress in a boardinghouse, she felt out of place and her nervousness showed. Flushed and perspiring, she noticed that her dress and sweater needed mending and she grew more self-conscious. It was all she could do to keep from panicking and running out. But she couldn’t leave. Louis Kessel had told her Mr. Johnson would see her in a moment and she had to wait. To leave now would be embarrassing and, worse still, might offend Mr. Johnson. If it weren’t winter, and if there weren’t so many unpaid bills, she never would have worked up the courage to come in the first place. But she had no choice; her husband had been a fool and she was desperate for her family. Louis Kessel appeared a second time and motioned to her. She followed him, not knowing what to expect.
As she walked into Mr. Johnson’s sitting room, he took her hand and greeted her warmly. It was several years since she met him at her father’s wake, but Johnson remembered her and called her by her first name. He was dressed in a fancy robe and slippers and asked what was troubling her. In an instant her anxiety vanished.
In a rapid series of sentences she recounted how her husband lost his entire paycheck the night before at one of the local gambling rooms. He was a baker’s helper, and during the winter months his $37 each week was the family’s only income. She went on and on about all the bills and how the grocer wouldn’t give her any more credit. Johnson listened intently and, when she was finished, reached into his pocket and handed her a $100 bill. Overwhelmed with joy, she thanked him repeatedly until he insisted she stop. Louis Kessel motioned, telling her there was a car waiting to drive her home. As she left, Johnson promised that her husband would be barred from every crap game and card room in town. He told her to come back any time she had a problem.
Enoch “Nucky” Johnson personifies pre-casino Atlantic City as no one else can. Understanding his reign provides the perspective needed to make sense of today’s resort. Johnson’s power reached its peak, as did his town’s popularity, during Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933. When it came to illegal booze, there was probably no place in the country as wide open as Nucky’s town. It was almost as if word of the Volstead Act never reached Atlantic City. During Prohibition, Nucky was both a power broker in the Republican Party and a force in organized crime. He rubbed elbows with presidents and Mafia thugs. But to Atlantic City’s residents, Johnson was hardly a thug. He was their hero, epitomizing the qualities that had made his town successful.
Originally conceived as a beach village by a doctor hoping to develop a health resort for the wealthy, Atlantic City quickly became a glitzy, raucous vacation spot for the working class. It was a place where visitors came knowing the rules at home didn’t apply. Atlantic City flourished because it gave its guests what they wanted—a naughty good time at an affordable price.
Popular recollections of the old Atlantic City, believed by many, is that it was an elegant seaside resort of the wealthy, comparable to Newport. Such a notion is fantasy. In its prime, Atlantic City was a resort for the blue-collar workers of Philadelphia’s industrial economy. The resort was popular with people who could afford no more than a day or two stay. These working poor came to town each summer to escape the heat of the city and the boredom of their jobs. Atlantic City gave them a place to let loose.
There were four ingredients to the resort’s success. Each was critical. Remove any one of them and Atlantic City would have been a very different place. The first ingredient was rail transportation. But for the railroad, the development of Absecon Island would have waited at least 50 years. The second was Philadelphia and New York real estate investors. They brought the money and expertise needed to build and manage dozens of hotels and hundreds of boardinghouses on an island of sand. The third was a large volume of cheap labor to run things. There was only one labor source: freed slaves and their children. The final ingredient was a local population willing to ignore the law in order to please vacationers. From the turn of the 20th century and for the next 70 years, the resort was ruled by a partnership comprised of local politicians and racketeers. This alliance was a product of the relationship between the economy and politics of the city.
From its inception, Atlantic City has been a town dedicated to the fast buck. Its character as a city is uncommon because it never had any other role to perform than that of a resort. It has always had a singular purpose for its existence—to provide leisure time activities for tourists. Atlantic City’s economy was totally dependent on money spent by out-of-towners. Visitors had to leave happy. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t return.
The key was to cater to patrons’ tastes in pleasure, whether those desires were lawful or not. Resort merchants pandered to the visitor’s desire to do the forbidden, and business owners cultivated the institution of the spree. Within a short time after its founding, Atlantic City was renowned as the place to go for a freewheeling good time. It grew into a national resort by promoting vice as a major part of the local tourist trade. However, maintenance of the vice industry required Atlantic City’s government to make special accommodations. It was inevitable that the principals of the vice industry would make an alliance with the local political leaders. Without some type of understanding between these two spheres of power, Atlantic City’s major tourist attraction would have had a tenuous existence.
The resort’s guests couldn’t be harassed while enjoying themselves. It would be bad for business. That gambling, prostitution, and Sunday sales of liquor violated state law and conventional morality didn’t matter. Nothing could interfere with the visitors’ fun or they might stop coming. Atlantic City’s leaders ignored the law and permitted the local vice trade to operate in a wide-open fashion as if it were legitimate.
The resort’s singular purpose demanded a single mentality to manage its affairs. This need, combined with the dominance of the Republican Party in southern New Jersey for several generations after the Civil War, produced a mind-set that didn’t permit traditional politics. Reformers and critics were a luxury that couldn’t be tolerated. Success of the local economy was the only political ideology. There was not to be a “loyal opposition” nor a bona fide Democratic Party. You went along with the system or you were crushed. By the beginning of the 20th century a political juggernaut bearing a Republican label, and funded with money from the rackets, was firmly entrenched.
The first “boss” of Atlantic City politics was Louis “The Commodore” Kuehnle, who ruled from approximately 1890 to 1910. The Commodore recognized the potential of the local vice industry as a reliable source of income for his political organization. It was Kuehnle who established the procedure for assessing and collecting extortion payments from the racketeers who provided unlawful entertainment. Under the Commodore, gambling parlors, speak-easies, and brothels operated as if they were legal. The only time the local police clamped down on anyone was if they were late with their payment. Money from extortion, together with bribes and kickbacks paid by government contractors and vendors, formed the financial basis of Kuehnle’s machine. After banging heads with Woodrow Wilson in the gubernatorial election of 1910, Kuehnle went to jail for election fraud.
Kuehnle’s successor, Nucky Johnson, was the absolute master of Atlantic City politics for the next 30 years. Johnson understood people and power and knew how to handle both. There was not an elected official or city or county employee who did not owe his job to Nucky. He shared in the profits of every municipal contract and gambling operation in town. Prior to going to jail, Kuehnle tapped Johnson as his successor because he had the support of both the politicians and racketeers. By this time, the people of Atlantic City were conditioned to political bossism, and they accepted Nucky as the resort’s new boss. Atlantic City’s residents expected, and wanted, the type of government from Johnson they had known under the Commodore. They weren’t disappointed.
By means of guile, finesse, and the shrewd use of money obtained through various types of extortion, Nucky Johnson established himself as a force in two different worlds. He was both the most powerful Republican in New Jersey, who could influence the destinies of governors and senators, and a racketeer, respected and trusted by organized crime.
Nucky Johnson gave Atlantic City the brand of leadership it needed. The political and economic power structure that had evolved was thoroughly corrupt. If Johnson had refused to work with the racketeers he would have been replaced. However, Nucky took one giant step beyond what the Commodore had achieved in terms of his alliance with the vice industry. Johnson included the key racketeers as members of the Republican organization, making him head of both the political machine and the rackets. Under Nucky, the two rings of power became one.
The repeal of Prohibition in 1934 marked the beginning of the end for Atlantic City’s days of glory. Two years later, at the prompting of William Randolph Hearst, President Franklin Roosevelt sent the FBI to town and it didn’t leave until it had a conviction against Johnson for income tax evasion. It took five years, thousands of investigative man-hours, dozens of indictments of Johnson’s associates, scores of witnesses who perjured themselves, and several incidents of jury tampering, but Nucky was finally dethroned. In 1941 Johnson went to jail and served four years.
The power structure Nucky left behind was far more complex than the one he inherited from the Commodore. Atlantic City’s next boss had to be someone who could command the respect of the local politicians and racketeers alike. Johnson’s successor, Frank “Hap” Farley, was the Irish American lawyer/politician par excellence. His career and method of operation have striking similarities with the fictional character Frank Skeffington, created by Edwin O’Connor in The Last Hurrah. Prior to Johnson’s troubles with the FBI he hand-picked Farley to run for the state assembly in 1937. During the next several years Hap Farley ingratiated himself with two of Johnson’s most influential lieutenants—Jimmy Boyd, clerk of the board of freeholders and Johnson’s political right hand, and Herman “Stumpy” Orman, a streetwise real estate salesman who had done well for himself during Prohibition and was well-connected with the national crime syndicates.
Farley, Boyd, and Orman—it was the perfect relationship. Farley was the leader who went off to Trenton and dealt with the public at large. Boyd was the hatchet man, the political enforcer who kept the troops in line. Orman controlled the rackets and collected the protection money used to finance the organization. Boyd and Orman were Farley’s buffer and insulated him from anything that might send him to jail. Hap inherited Jimmy and Stumpy. He couldn’t have replaced them if he wanted to.
Farley’s relationship with Boyd and Orman gave him the opportunity to be a full-time legislator and public servant. Hap immersed himself in the problems of his town and never hesitated to use his power to promote Atlantic City’s interests. He was out in front on every issue affecting the resort’s economy. During the 30 years he served as state senator from Atlantic County, Hap Farley established a record of accomplishment that made him a legend in Trenton. His seniority, combined with his mastery of the legislative process, made him, for more than 25 years, an insurmountable reality with whom every governor had to contend when creating an agenda. Farley dominated the senate so thoroughly that it was political suicide to oppose him. The governors either dealt with Hap or saw their programs frustrated. To his disappointment, much of Farley’s effort as a legislator was directed at delaying the deterioration of his town. It was like trying to stop the tide. Atlantic City was a victim of post-war modernization and as its fortunes declined, so did Hap’s. Farley clung to power as long as he could and was ousted by a Democrat in 1971.
The several years following Farley’s departure were a desperate scramble to revive Atlantic City through casino gaming. The adoption of the Constitutional referendum in 1976 legalizing gambling in Atlantic City is a tribute to the resort’s long-time knack at promoting itself beyond its true worth. Gambling and the money it brought to the resort has breathed new life into a sorry town, and the climb back to national stature has begun. Regardless of how this experiment in urban renewal ultimately plays out, Atlantic City will remain a creature of the values that made it great the first time around.
1
Jonathan Pitney’s Beach Village
Medicine wasn’t enough. He needed to be something more than a country doctor. Jonathan Pitney had been caring for the sick and injured for more than 30 years, and he was growing weary. A medical practice in 19th-century America wasn’t yet a path to wealth and prestige, and Pitney hungered for both. He knew he’d find neither caring for his patients.
Jonathan Pitney looked like a character out of a Dickens novel. Tall and lean, nearly always draped in a long black cape, Pitney’s piercing blue eyes and long thin hands were the first thing others noticed. His pale craggy skin, together with his large hooknose and high forehead crowned by flowing gray locks, made him a striking figure. Jonathan, the son of Shubal and Jane Pitney, was born in Mendham, New Jersey, on October 29, 1797. The Pitney family had arrived in this country circa 1700. As told to a biographer, Pitney’s great-grandfather and his brother had come from England to “enjoy civil and religious liberty, of which they were deprived at home.” They eventually settled in Morris County, New Jersey. After graduating from medical school at Columbia College in New York, Jonathan left his parents’ home in Mendham and headed south to the bayside Village of Absecon. He was 23 when he arrived in southern New Jersey, and he remained there the rest of his life.
There wasn’t much to New Jersey south of Trenton in 1820. During the two generations following the American Revolution, things had changed little. With the exception of the city of Camden along the Delaware River and the summer resort village of Cape May at the southern tip of the state, southern New Jersey was a vast pine forest. This pine wilderness was interrupted by narrow, sandy stagecoach roads that followed the footpaths of earlier residents, the Lenni Lenape. Sprinkled throughout this green expanse from the Delaware River and Bay to the Atlantic Ocean were tiny villages whose residents descended from the British Isles and Northern Europe. Their lives were centered on farming, fishing, and the manufacture of glass, bog iron, and charcoal. In time, these pioneers became known as “Pineys.” Absecon Village was part of that world and the place Jonathan Pitney chose to begin his medical practice.
Pitney was dedicated to his profession and worked tirelessly. He made rounds by horseback up and down the South Jersey coast to places a doctor had never been. Eleven years after his arrival, on April 21, 1831, Jonathan Pitney married Caroline Fowler, daughter of Rebecca Fowler, owner of the Sailor Boy Inn in Elwood, 15 miles west of Absecon and one of the many villages Jonathan Pitney visited. For years, Pitney was the only doctor many families knew and it was common for him to be called away from dinner or awakened in the middle of the night. Delivering babies, comforting the dying, stitching wounds, and setting broken bones from farming and fishing accidents made him well known throughout the region and loved by his patients. But his income was meager. Oftentimes he had no choice but to barter, and some say he relied upon his mother-in-law to get by. As the years piled up Pitney’s enthusiasm shrank, and he became as weather-beaten as his doctor’s bag.
Pitney wasn’t satisfied just being a doctor, and about 15 years into his medical career he took to politics. A Democrat in a region overwhelmingly Republican, Pitney had his own agenda and bucked the status quo. In 1837 he led the successful fight to have a new county, “Atlantic,” carved out of what was at the time Gloucester County. On the strength of that victory, Pitney was elected the first chairman of the new county government. He was also chosen Atlantic County’s representative to the State Constitutional Convention in 1844. In 1848 he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives. South Jersey wasn’t ready for a Democratic Congressman and Pitney lost, bringing his political career to a dead-end.
Political power beyond his grasp, Jonathan Pitney decided to reinvent himself—this time as an entrepreneur. His hopes lay with a sandy little island off the South Jersey coast.
Early in his career, Pitney crossed Absecon Bay in a rowboat to treat a patient at a site known as “Further Island.” Created by the tides and storms, this barrier island was a wild place dominated by sand dunes, marshes, and waterfowl. The Lenni Lenape had called this island “Absegami,” meaning “Little Sea Water.” Before the American colonists arrived, Absegami was a campground for the Native Americans who came to avoid the summer heat. Further Island was a desolate place with a handful of residents all from the same family, living in seven cottages scattered about the island. Aside from these solitary cabins, there were only “shanties for oystermen and fishermen, and a rude hostelry that served the purposes of the jolly fellows from Philadelphia, who came down in wagons to fish and shoot or to rough it.” Early Americans enjoyed Further Island much the same way as the Lenni Lenape.
The Lenni Lenape gave up their rights to all of South Jersey in exchange for finished goods such as woolen cloth, iron kettles, knives, hoes, and axes. The first record owner of the land comprising Further Island was Thomas Budd. He bought 15,000 acres on the north and south sides of the Great Egg Harbor River in 1678 from William Penn and a group of trustees of the Quakers. The Quakers had become owners of the land—together with the rest of South Jersey—in payment of a debt owed to them. Budd sold off his holdings to other settlers for sale prices of 4 cents per acre on Further Island and 40 cents-plus per acre for mainland property.
When Pitney arrived the only people living on the island were all descendants of a Revolutionary War veteran, Jeremiah Leeds. Several years after the war, Leeds built a cedar log cabin on Further Island and settled there with his wife, Judith. (The Leeds’ homestead was the site of what was later to become Columbus Park and after that the “Corridor” at the foot of the Atlantic City Expressway.) Leeds and those who followed him called their home “Absecon Island.”
Jeremiah Leeds was a bear of a man, standing six-foot-tall and weighing 250 pounds. With the help of his 10 children, he cleared the fields around his home and raised crops of corn and rye. The crops he grew and sold, plus his catches from fishing and hunting, allowed the Leeds family to want for little. Leeds enjoyed the solitude of the island. The thrifty farmer bought land every chance he could but never sold any. At the time of his death, Jeremiah Leeds owned nearly 1,200 acres on Absecon Island, having title to everything except a single tract of 131 acres.
Pitney was charmed by the serenity and unspoiled beauty of Absecon Island. He returned often and grew convinced that this was where he would make his mark. Pitney believed that Absecon Island had potential as a vacation retreat for the wealthy. As a doctor, Pitney felt the island could be promoted as a health resort. He wasn’t going to get rich from his medical practice, nor would he ever have any real clout in politics, but as the founder of a resort he might gain both money and power.
Pitney’s dream was to build a “city by the sea.” He tried selling his idea by touting the healing powers of salt water and sea air, recommending a stay at the beach for every ailment. The problem was getting people to South Jersey and then to the island.
Rail transportation was the answer. During the second half of the 19th century, railroads opened vast tracts of land, otherwise inaccessible, to development. In Pitney’s time the railroad locomotive became a symbol for progress and opportunity. Pitney knew it was his best and only hope to exploit Absecon Island.
Pitney began his campaign by writing letters to any newspaper that would print them, concentrating on the Philadelphia dailies. He recognized the potential for a link between Philadelphia and Absecon Island. If his plans were to become a reality he needed to position his health resort within the orbit of a major population center. Philadelphia was his only choice. In his letters, from “Doctor Pitney,” he expounded upon the health benefits of Absecon Island. In all his letters he stressed that the only thing necessary to make this health-giving island available to everyone was a railroad from Philadelphia to the seashore. Pitney’s letter campaign continued for years without success. The only people excited about his idea were the descendants of Jeremiah Leeds. Some of them had no desire to farm and hoped to sell their land.
But even the Leeds family had trouble believing Pitney could ever make anything of Absecon Island. The island that existed in 1850, as Pitney wrote in his letters, consisted “almost exclusively of fine white sand, piled in hills like snowdrifts.” There were “several ridges found on these old beaches separated by long, narrow valleys in which were found coarse grasses, rushes, low bushes, and vines in addition to oak, cedar, and holly timber.” The summit of one of these sand dunes was more than 50 feet high. The island was covered with a growth of trees: “wild fruits, beach plums, fox grapes, and huckleberries were found abundantly in some places.”
Less appealing than the holly trees and wild fruits were the insects. Between the months of June and September, the mosquitoes and greenhead flies ruled the island. During the summer, whenever the ocean breeze subsided, the greenhead flies were everywhere. They were so large they cast a shadow as they swarmed about their victims. These flies were nasty creatures and the pain of their bites lingered for days. Cider vinegar was the only lotion that helped ease the sting. Absecon Island may have been a pristine wilderness, but it wasn’t a vacationer’s paradise or a place one would think of as a health resort. No one reading Pitney’s letters who was familiar with South Jersey’s barrier islands could have taken him seriously.
With no success from his letter campaign, Pitney decided to pursue a railroad charter by presenting his idea to the state legislature. The right to construct a rail line would give him credibility with investors. In 1851 he made several trips to Trenton to meet with political leaders and lobby for his railroad. The trips by horseback were long and lonely, and the reception wasn’t friendly.
The legislators labeled his idea “Pitney’s folly.” They rejected it with almost no debate and ridiculed it as the “Railroad to Nowhere.” The consensus of the legislature was that it wasn’t possible for a new seacoast resort to compete with Cape May, which was America’s first seashore resort. Wealthy businessmen from Philadelphia and Baltimore, as well as plantation owners and tobacco brokers from Maryland and Virginia, had been vacationing in Cape May since the 1790s and there was no reason to believe that would change.
Cape May had evolved from a sportsman’s fishing village where the upper class went to “rough it.” Staying overnight in cedar log beach houses and tents, these early vacationers spent their days fishing and hunting waterfowl. With the help of slaves, visitors prepared their own meals and passed the evenings gathered around campfires. Over the next several decades, businessmen from Philadelphia and Delaware constructed hotels and boardinghouses, extending the pleasures of a summer vacation at Cape May’s beach to the less hardy.
One visitor to Cape May in the summer of 1850 wrote to her readers at home describing the “parti-colored scene” created by the new sport of “seabathing.” She reported that thousands of people, “men, women and children, in red, blue, and yellow pantaloons and yellow straw hats adorned with bright red ribbon, go out into the sea in crowds, and leap up and down in the heaving waves amid great laughter and merriment.” The reporter, Swedish novelist and travel writer Frederika Bremer (1801–1865), reporting on the scene at Cape May’s beach continued, “White and black people, horses and carriages, and dogs—all are there, one among another, and just before them great fishes, porpoises, lift up their heads, and sometime take a huge leap, very likely because they are so amused at seeing human beings leaping about in their own element.”
In pre-Civil War days, Cape May was renowned as a “Southern resort” and was a mecca for the cream of Southern society. Southern planters and the elite of the North brought their gleaming horse-drawn carriages and paraded in the sun along the water’s edge. Nationally celebrated bands performed for the ladies in the fine hotels, while the men passed their time gambling. The most popular gambling house was The Blue Pig—for “gentlemen” only.
By 1850, no resort in America could compare to the Jersey Cape in terms of attracting the rich and famous. More national figures made Cape May their summer retreat than any other place. Saratoga made claims to the contrary, but only Cape May could boast of frequent visits from presidents; several made it their summertime headquarters. The only resort that rivaled Cape May in the quest to be the Summer White House was Long Branch, New Jersey, more than 100 miles north. There was no need for a third resort, especially one in the southern part of the state.
A majority of Cape May’s visitors made the trip by sailing sloop and steamship, though some arrived by stagecoach. Regardless of how one traveled, the trip was expensive and time-consuming. But Cape May’s vacationers were loyal and their resort prospered. It was popular with Trenton’s leaders and most of the legislators believed that if there were to be a railroad to the Jersey Shore, it should be to Cape May.
Another obstacle facing Pitney was the monopoly of the Camden-Amboy Railroad. In 1832 the legislature gave this North Jersey-based railroad an exclusive right-of-way across the state. While the Camden-Amboy had no plans to construct a railroad in South Jersey, the legislators were not about to permit someone like Pitney to get into the railroad business. Having neither financial resources nor the right political contacts, Pitney’s idea for linking Philadelphia to an obscure, undeveloped island was nonsense. In rejecting his idea, the legislators asked, “Whoever heard of a railroad with only one end?”
Pitney’s humiliation before the state legislature forced a change in his strategy. He quit trying for popular support and set about selling his idea to the rich and powerful. In the mid-19th century, the elite of South Jersey were the bog iron and glass barons. A dozen or so families, these barons controlled most of the wealth, owned nearly all of the undeveloped land, and employed almost anyone who wasn’t a farmer or fisherman. Pitney cited the need of iron and glass factories for better transportation and argued that their goods could be shipped more cheaply by the iron horse. Things began to happen for Jonathan Pitney when he won the support of Samuel Richards.
The name “Richards” cast a spell. From the American Colonial era to the Civil War, the Richards family was the most influential in southern New Jersey. Centered in villages of Hammonton and Batsto, the Richards’ empire included iron works, glass furnaces, cotton mills, paper factories, brickyards, and farms. As a family, the Richards were among the largest landholders in the Eastern United States for several generations. At their peak the Richards’ family holdings collectively totaled more than one-quarter million acres.
Samuel Richards, as one biographer noted, “looked like a bank president and worked like a horse. For all his handsome appearance and meticulous dress, no task was too small, no problem too intricate for him to tackle personally.” Richards was a buccaneer-type entrepreneur who lived the high life. He owned a beautiful mansion with sprawling grounds and servants in South Jersey, as well as a palatial Victorian home in Philadelphia. He was part of the aristocracy. Vital to Pitney’s dreams, Samuel Richards understood the importance of a rail line between Philadelphia and Absecon Island. He saw the economic potential of Pitney’s railroad and realized it could make his family even wealthier.
Railroading was high adventure for entrepreneurs in the 19th century, and Samuel Richards was anxious to become an investor. More than anything else, it was the rise of the railroad that transformed the American economy in the 1840s and ’50s. The development of railroads throughout the country had an enormous effect on the economy as a whole. While the demand for iron rails was first met mainly by importation from England, the railroads, in time, spurred development of America’s iron industry. Because railroads required a huge outlay of capital, their promoters pioneered new methods for financing business. At a time when most manufacturing and commercial concerns were still owned by families or private partnerships, the railroads formed corporations and sold stock to the general public. This type of financing set the pattern for investment, which led to the creation of the modern corporation. Railroads were a catalyst to economic growth the likes of which the country had never known.
Richards knew that a rail line linking his landholdings to Philadelphia would increase their value and make it possible for him to turn some of his vast acreage into cash. Even if a land boom didn’t materialize, Richards and his fellow businessmen would still benefit from reduced costs of transporting their glass and iron. At the time, goods manufactured in South Jersey were shipped to Philadelphia by horse and wagon over sandy trails, which were often impassable in bad weather.
Samuel Richards latched onto Pitney’s idea and all but made it his own. Richards took charge of the lobbying effort for the railroad charter. At the time he was approached by Pitney, Samuel Richards had just turned 30 years old. But his family’s name alone was enough to get the attention of the state legislature. Richards made a sales pitch that his Republican friends in Trenton understood well. He convinced them that the railroad was necessary for the local glass and iron industries to remain competitive. As for Pitney’s plans to build a railroad to a sand patch of only seven cabins, and the expense of laying rail all the way to Absecon Island, that would be the risk of the investors.
There were no objections from the Camden-Amboy Railroad, which probably didn’t take any of it seriously. In the end, the legislators yielded to the force of Richards’ personality and the common belief that nothing would ever come of Pitney’s schemes. Thus, what had been the Railroad to Nowhere in 1851 became the newly chartered Camden-Atlantic Railroad the following year.
With the granting of a railroad charter Pitney’s dream took one giant step forward. Richards and Pitney then proceeded to secure investors; nearly all were in the iron and glass industries or large landowners. Pitney could dream the big dream, but he wasn’t much help in raising money. Of the initial 1,477 shares of stock issued, Pitney purchased 20 and made a sale of 100 shares to his friend Enoch Doughty of Absecon. Samuel Richards secured the remainder of the investors, with a majority of the stock controlled by his family. For most of the investors, the success of Pitney’s beach village was irrelevant. Their factories and landholdings were in Camden and western Atlantic Counties, 30 to 50 miles from the seashore. As long as the railroad reached their properties, they cared little whether the train made it to the seacoast and even less what became of Absecon Island.
Samuel Richards later admitted that he first saw Absecon Island in June 1852, only a week before the organization of the railroad, and three full months after the legislature had granted the charter. “We drove down in a carriage to Absecon Village, then went over in a boat to the beach. We landed on the usual landing place on the thoroughfare, not very far from the Leeds’ farm.”
Richards was overwhelmed by all of the sand. Years later he confessed, “In my mind … it was the most horrible place to make the termination of a railroad I had ever seen.” Several other investors made the visit with Richards and they nearly scuttled the project. “The island appeared uninviting to their eyes, and its sterile sand heaps, naked in their desolation, gave it a weird, wild look, a veritable desert. …”
The investors were skeptical that this place could ever be turned into a health resort and felt that “to build a railroad to such a wild spot would be a reckless piece of adventure.” Richards’ friends doubted that a rail line could be installed across the meadows leading to the bay side of the island. Richards reminded them that the main reason for the railroad was to link their factories and land to the growing population centers of Camden and Philadelphia and assured them that Pitney’s health resort was secondary.
The money raised by the new Camden-Atlantic Railroad was used for more than acquiring a right-of-way and laying track. Richards and Pitney set about purchasing all the land they could on Absecon Island. Only 10 miles in length and little more than a mile at its widest, the island offered tempting possibilities for monopolization. For the small sums involved, Richards couldn’t resist speculating that real estate values on Absecon Island might increase after the rail line was completed. Because Jonathan Pitney had the trust of the locals, title to the property was taken in his name and later transferred to the railroad company.
The Camden-Atlantic Railroad gobbled up real estate so aggressively that the state legislature adopted a law prohibiting it from buying any more land, but that didn’t stop Richards and Pitney. They promptly formed the Camden-Atlantic Land Company and continued to purchase property. With Jeremiah Leeds gone and his heirs no longer interested in farming, Richards and Pitney were able to acquire most of Absecon Island. All the real estate needed to satisfy the investors was acquired in less than two years, with the Leeds family selling the bulk of their holdings by 1854. Together, the Railroad and Land Companies bought nearly 1,000 acres at prices between $5 and $10 per acre.
While Pitney negotiated land purchases, Richards saw to the construction of the railroad. The original choice as contractor was Peter O’Reilly. Ground was broken in September 1852 but after several months of floundering, it was obvious O’Reilly wasn’t up to the task. Richards decided O’Reilly had to go. He was replaced by Richard Osborne, who had previously managed the Richmond and Danville Railroad. British born and educated, Osborne was a civil engineer trained in Chicago, the boomtown of the 19th century. Osborne was formidable looking, distinguished by his sideburns and mustache, both of which grew down below his chin. He was working in Philadelphia when approached by Samuel Richards to serve as consulting engineer to the Railroad and Land Companies in the development of their bathing village. Osborne knew an opportunity when he saw one and was excited at being on the ground floor of Richards’ venture. He hoped that the raw landscape of Pitney’s island might allow him to carve out a fortune.
Richard Osborne’s first task was to select a right-of-way for the construction of the rail line. It was an uncomplicated matter. He set the course for the tracks in a straight line from Cooper’s Ferry in Camden to the middle of Absecon Island. Osborne and his survey crew mapped the train route directly through the heart of South Jersey’s pine forest. Stagecoach roads and existing rights-of-way used by wagons or horsemen were ignored. The tracks would go around nothing.
Construction of the railroad under Osborne’s direction began in earnest in August 1853. Starting from Camden, trees were cut, hills leveled, and swamps filled as the Camden-Atlantic Railroad chopped its way through the forest. There were no curves in Osborne’s steel ribbons. The only thing that broke the woodlands was the railroad itself. The single most difficult portion in constructing the railroad was over the marshes between the mainland and the island.
The weather that winter had been favorable to work on the railroad, “but in February a storm tide made a clean sweep of the roadbed which had been graded on the meadows.” Osborne’s crew worked for two months to restore the rail line when again in April “a terrible Northeast storm prevailed for a week, flooding the meadows, sweeping away miles of the graded roadbed which was ready for the track and scattering the ties and wheelbarrows for miles along the coast.” Finally, the weather relented and the rail line was extended to the bay across from Absecon Island in July 1854.
At the same time work was progressing on the rail line, the Camden-Atlantic Land Company had Osborne prepare a street plan for Pitney’s beach village. Having acquired nearly all of Absecon Island, the investors were eager to create lots for resale. As he had in drawing the right-of-way for the rail line, Osborne’s map for this new village paid no regard to the virgin landscape. Any physical obstacle in the way of the street lines, such as sand dunes running the length of the island, fresh water ponds, and nesting areas for waterfowl, had to go. Under Osborne’s direction, Absecon Island was cut into neat little squares and rectangles, creating lots ideal for maximizing profits from land sales.
When Richard Osborne unveiled his map of this new seashore town, the words “Atlantic City” appeared across the top on a background of breaking waves. According to Osborne, the investors accepted his suggestion for the name immediately. Hoping to appeal to visitors beyond Philadelphia, the street map assigned each state in the nation its own avenue. Richard Osborne believed that it was this new resort’s “manifest destiny” to become “the first, most popular, most health giving and most inviting watering place” in the country. While he knew Philadelphia would provide the bulk of the visitors, Osborne dreamt that Atlantic City would become a national resort with patrons from around the country.
Opening day for the Camden-Atlantic Railroad was July 1, 1854. The first train, an “official special,” consisted of nine passenger cars and left from the Cooper’s Ferry terminal in Camden. Ferryboats from Philadelphia brought a stream of guests, each with a printed invitation, and hundreds of curiosity seekers who came to see the first iron horse leave for the seashore. “Finally, a bit after 9 A.M., the engine whistle sounded, the iron horse belched a great cloud of black smoke, there was a grinding and creaking—and the train got under way.”
The 600 passengers on board were chosen carefully by Samuel Richards and Jonathan Pitney. They were newspapermen, politicians, and wealthy notables of the day—all having been invited to help in promoting the resort. There were several stops along the way to permit the major shareholders to make speeches and show off their investment to their friends and employees. One of the riders wasn’t terribly impressed with the trip, describing the ride as a “desolate succession of pine trees and cedar swamps,” adding, “No towns or cities were found along the way; only here a woodcutter’s or charcoal burner’s hut and there a rickety saw mill.”
Two and a half hours after leaving Camden the train ride ended at the mainland, and the passengers were taken across the bay in row-boats to Atlantic City. A bridge linking the mainland to the island would be completed several months later. After arriving in Atlantic City, a second train brought the visitors to the door of the resort’s first public lodging, the United States Hotel. The hotel was owned by the railroad. It was a sprawling four-story structure built to house 2,000 guests. It opened while it was still under construction, with only one wing standing and even that wasn’t completed. But by year’s end, when it was fully constructed, the United States Hotel was not only the first hotel in Atlantic City but also the largest in the nation. Its rooms totaled more than 600, and its grounds covered some 14 acres.
Upon their arrival, the resort’s first visitors were treated to an extravagant meal followed by speeches and music. After dinner many of the guests strolled on the beach where they entertained themselves exploring the remains of shipwrecks. Following this private debut, the Camden-Atlantic Railroad was opened to the public on July 4, 1854. For the remainder of the summer, nearly every train that left Camden was sold out.
It was a proud time for Jonathan Pitney. While his profits didn’t begin to measure up to those of Samuel Richards, Pitney had saved himself from obscurity. The railroad made it possible for the populations of Philadelphia and Camden to visit the seashore in a single day without the need or expense of a long vacation. It also fulfilled Samuel Richards and the other investors’ hope of generating a land boom along its route. In less than three years, 15 train stations sprang upon between Camden and Atlantic City. The Richards family sold much of their land and reaped a huge windfall. Land values on Absecon Island skyrocketed. Sand dunes and meadowlands purchased for as little as $5 per acre were resold several years later at prices of up to $300 per acre. Jonathan Pitney never made this kind of money practicing medicine.
Success at real estate speculation came quicker than the development of a full-fledged resort. Pitney was pleased with his beach village, but it was a long way from being a serious resort. He knew that a permanent community had to be established, which would take time and a great deal of money. The obstacles to be overcome were many. First, there was the trainride itself—at best, it was an adventure. The early trains had no windows, only canvas curtains, and it was common for visitors to arrive covered with soot, their clothes and skin pocked by flying cinders from the coal-fired locomotive. A linen duster with hat and goggles were important accessories to the traveler’s wardrobe.
One of the early conductors of the Camden-Atlantic Railroad recalled his experience: “Atlantic City in 1854–55 was reached through sand hills and forests of pine and scrub oaks. Most of our cars were open coaches. My, how the dust did fly!” The early trains weren’t equipped with signals of any kind and, “When I wanted to stop the train to let off passengers, I went through the train and attracted the engineer’s attention by striking him with a splinter of wood and by holding up my fore finger told him a passenger was to get off at the next station.”
The adventure didn’t end with the train ride. When travelers arrived, they found a much bigger dose of nature than the resort’s promotions had led them to believe. The island was dotted with hundreds of wet places where insects could breed, and early guests were greeted by swarms of greenhead flies and mosquitoes.
Summer 1858 saw a plague of insects that nearly closed the resort down. Greenhead flies, gnats, and mosquitoes tormented the visitors all summer long. By mid-August most guests had stopped coming to town. One vacationer wrote home, “In my last letter I said mosquitoes were numerous here. They have since become a plague and there is no peace in this place.” The resort’s inability to deal with the problem was painfully obvious to its guests. “Last week the place was crowded with visitors; now they are escaping the scourge as rapidly as possible. This house is now surrounded with bonfires, in the hope that the smoke therefrom will drive off the enemy. The horses attached to carriages containing guests from the United States Hotel became so maddened from the attack of greenhead flies that they ran away demolishing the carriage, and broke the arm of one of the ladies.”
It was a nightmare that summer. According to reports from the time, horses covered with blood laid down in the streets, and cattle waded out into the ocean to escape the torture of the insects. Men, women, and children scratched and screamed and day visitors begged the conductors to start home ahead of schedule. For the next 10 to 15 years, the problem with the mosquitoes and greenhead flies was dealt with by pouring coal oil on the water of the ponds and wet spots that dotted the islands. The pests were eventually eliminated when the dunes were graded and the ponds filled with sand.
During these early years, the only refuge from insects for the visitor who went down to the beach was to either go into the water or hide in a bathhouse. The bathhouses were crude wooden structures that were carried down to the water’s edge in the spring and dragged back to the dunes in the fall. Another difficulty was the lack of something to separate the developed portion of the island from the beach. Sand was everywhere and it was common for the streets to flood at high tide.
Though seawater was everywhere, it wasn’t drinkable. For the first 30 years of Atlantic City’s existence, residents and visitors alike had to rely upon rainwater collected in cisterns as the sole source of water. True to its beginnings as a farm island, the cattle of local farmers were allowed to run free during the first decade of the resort. “Prior to 1864, the cattle, swine, and goats were permitted to run at large in the city. Up until that time every permanent resident of the place owned one or more cows.” Atlantic City’s main thoroughfare, Atlantic Avenue, was originally a cow path for cattle driven by farmers in the inlet area to the lower end of the island. As late as the 1880s one could see herds of cows being taken from one end of the town to the other and returned at night through the center of the village on Atlantic Avenue.
Finding the money for the improvements needed to establish a permanent community on Absecon Island was a lot more difficult than securing investors for the railroad. The original investors had gotten what they wanted and cared little about Pitney’s dream of a city by the sea. The Camden-Atlantic Railroad and the Land Company would finance only so much to help build Pitney’s resort. Plans for cutting through streets, leveling the dunes, filling ditches, and beginning the infrastructure needed for a city simply had to wait. The result was that for the first 20 years of its existence, Pitney’s beach village limped along, remaining a wilderness island.
As predicted by some of Pitney’s critics, Cape May remained a popular resort and posed stiff competition. Pitney had envisioned his resort as an exclusive area for the rich. The wealthy were slow to change their habits and while a few of them visited the fledgling resort, Cape May held a strong attraction. Anyone with enough money for an overnight stay generally preferred to visit Cape May. As for the working class, whose numbers in Philadelphia and Camden were growing steadily, the cost of vacationing remained beyond their reach. The blue-collar masses couldn’t afford the price of both a train ticket and the cost of lodging. The few who visited arrived in the morning and returned home at night.
At first, the Camden-Atlantic Railroad was barely able to break even financially. As an early observer noted, “Unpropitious times, flooding and washing away of tracks, and depression of bonds threatened to overwhelm the enterprise at its beginning. For 16 years it was one continuous struggle against these difficulties.” The railroad was forced into bankruptcy during the Panic of 1857, and if not for cash from the Land Company, the train would have gone under. The financial uncertainty produced by the Civil War denied the new resort badly needed investors and retarded the town’s growth. By 1872 things began to look up. The quality of the ride had improved and the passenger cars were clean and comfortable; there was even glass in the windows. The railroad was carrying more than 400,000 passengers annually to the resort and was able to pay a dividend to its stockholders. The volume of passengers continued to grow, and by 1874 nearly 500,000 passengers were brought into Atlantic City by rail.
After 20 years, Atlantic City had finally gained a foothold. Pitney finished out his years living quietly in Absecon Village and passed away in 1869. But for the younger Samuel Richards, Atlantic City was still a long way from its potential. There remained hundreds of undeveloped acres and no new investors to inject sorely needed capital. The businesses that survived the first two decades were only marginally successful. Their owners returned to Philadelphia each fall, leaving the resort a ghost town. Samuel Richards realized that mass-oriented facilities had to be developed before Atlantic City could become a major resort and a permanent community. From Richards’ perspective, more working-class visitors from Philadelphia were needed to spur growth. These visitors would only come if railroad fares cost less.
For several years Samuel Richards tried, without success, to sell his ideas to the other shareholders of the Camden-Atlantic Railroad. He believed that greater profits could be made by reducing fares, which would increase the volume of patrons. A majority of the board of directors disagreed. Finally in 1875, Richards lost patience with his fellow directors. Together with three allies, Richards resigned from the board of directors of the Camden-Atlantic Railroad and formed a second railway company of his own. Richards’ railroad was to be an efficient and cheaper narrow gauge line. The roadbed for the narrow gauge was easier to build than that of the first railroad. It had a 3½-foot gauge instead of the standard 4 feet 8½ inches, so labor and material would cost less.
The prospect of a second railroad into Atlantic City divided the town. Jonathan Pitney had died six years earlier, but his dream of an exclusive watering hole persisted. Many didn’t want to see the type of development that Samuel Richards was encouraging, nor did they want to rub elbows with the working class of Philadelphia. A heated debate raged for months. Most of the residents were content with their island remaining a sleepy little beach village and wanted nothing to do with Philadelphia’s blue-collar tourists. But their opinions were irrelevant to Samuel Richards. As he had done 24 years earlier, Richards went to the state legislature and obtained another railroad charter.
The Philadelphia-Atlantic City Railway Company was chartered in March 1876. The directors of the Camden-Atlantic were bitter at the loss of their monopoly and put every possible obstacle in Richards’ path. When he began construction in April 1877—simultaneously from both ends—the Camden-Atlantic directors refused to allow the construction machinery to be transported over its tracks or its cars to be used for shipment of supplies. The Baldwin Locomotive Works was forced to send its construction engine by water, around Cape May and up the seacoast; railroad ties were brought in by ships from Baltimore.
Richards permitted nothing to stand in his way. He was determined to have his train running that summer. Construction was at a fever pitch, with crews of laborers working double shifts seven days a week. Fifty-four miles of railroad were completed in just 90 days. With the exception of rail lines built during a war, there had never been a railroad constructed at such speed.
The first train of the Philadelphia-Atlantic City Railway Company arrived in the resort on July 7, 1877. Prior to Richards’ railroad, round-trip tickets on the Camden-Atlantic were $3, and one-way fares were $2. The train fares for the narrow gauge railroad were $1.50 and $1. The device, which packed Richards’ trains, was the “excursion.” Richards understood that the majority of the people visiting Atlantic City could only afford a day trip. His railroad exploited that reality and related businesses provided attractions for people of modest means who were only able to visit for the day. The development of a resort where people would stay overnight in hotels would come later.
Richards geared his new railroad to a class of customers who cared little that the cars they rode in were the dregs of the train yards. They didn’t mind that there were no windows, which meant they’d be a sooty mess by the time they reached the shore. Nor did they mind riding on seats made of wooden planks with cushions. The train may have jerked and creaked the entire trip over the iron rails, but that didn’t matter either. Excursion rates were $1 round trip, and to a majority of Richards’ customers the price was all that mattered. Richards’ new railroad was eventually sold to the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company in 1883 and converted to a standard gauge railroad line.
Despite its short life, the impact of the Philadelphia-Atlantic City Railway was enormous. It spurred development in a new part of the island and brought in hundreds of thousands of first-time visitors. Richards had unleashed Atlantic City’s potential as a resort for the masses. In time, new hotels went up, investment capital was attracted, and Atlantic City launched upon a growth period spanning more than 50 years. Business in every town with a railroad station was stimulated, particularly in lumber, glass, and agricultural products. New development sprang up along the train route and real estate speculation was rampant, with fortunes being made overnight.
More than a generation after its founding, Jonathan Pitney’s beach village was finally on its way to becoming a major resort.
2
The Grand Illusion
Thud! The huge net hit the floor of the pier and the crowd squealed with joy. Salt water splashed everywhere as hundreds of fish squirmed about. Presiding over it all was John Young, grinning from ear to ear, while the people crowded around him gaped in amazement. These landlubbers had never seen such creatures of the deep, and Young played his role as “The Captain” for all it was worth.
John Lake Young was the owner of Atlantic City’s largest amusement pier, “Young’s Million Dollar Pier,” and his twice-daily, deep-sea net hauls were famous, attracting thousands of wide-eyed tourists. Wearing knickers, an old sweater and cap, he was a wiry and weathered, red-faced man with sparkling blue eyes, reminiscent of a leprechaun. As he lowered the net to the floor of the pier, Young went into his routine of identifying the sea animals he had caught. It was an animated performance that mesmerized his customers. He was able to name as many as 48 species and bluffed on the ones he couldn’t. With a little luck, there might be a shark or a horseshoe crab, which always excited the crowd. They went away thrilled, likely to return on their next visit to Atlantic City.
Young was the resort’s answer to P.T. Barnum. He had his finger on the pulse of his times. The Captain knew his customers and gave them what they wanted. The people who came to town on the cut-rate excursions had simple tastes. They wanted a high time at a bargain price—something to tell the folks about when they got home.
Samuel Richards’ second train to Atlantic City ignited a war for the visitors’ dollars and local businessmen learned quickly that working-class tourists had money to spend, too. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in numbers. Shortly after Richards’ narrow gauge railroad, a third train, the West Jersey and Atlantic Railroad, was organized purposely to transport “the medium and poorer classes.” The fare was “the astonishing sum of $.50 each—less than hack fare from Market Street, Philadelphia, to the Park.”
Travel to Atlantic City, especially on the weekends, increased dramatically. Competition among the railroads for the excursion ticket buyer guaranteed a large volume of working-class patrons, most of whom came only for the day. While there were families and single people who came to town for week-long vacations, the weekends were vital to a profitable season. Success, and oftentimes survival, of many resort businesses hinged on 12 to 13 weekends, with Sunday being the day everyone anticipated. The six-day workweek of most visitors forced them to squeeze every bit of pleasure they could into their one day off. The result was that “the crowds in the city were so large at times, especially over Sunday, as to nearly exhaust the supply of meat, milk, bread, and provisions in stock.”
In the early years following the second railroad, weekend tourists were entertained in excursion houses. These large open-air structures were built at the end of the railroad tracks entering the city. They were more than a reception point. Excursion houses generally included an entertainment pavilion with vaudeville acts, a dining hall, which sold food and provided space for visitors who brought their own, and an amusement park for the children. The West Jersey Railroad excursion house was known for its affordable all-you-can-eat meals, including fish, chicken, roast meats, vegetables, pies, pudding, ice cream, tea, and coffee. It also provided free music and dancing in its ballroom, a bar, a bowling alley, and a poolroom. Bathing suits and lockers were available, too, at a daily rental of 25 cents. Most excursion houses admitted customers at 5 or 10 cents apiece, aiming at high-turnover, low-cost entertainment. At the end of each season, most excursion houses offered their lowest priced outings for what were known as “Colored Excursion Days.” It was all made possible by affordable train fare.
After the narrow gauge railroad there was no turning back. Within a few short years Atlantic City was a boomtown. Pitney’s sleepy little beach village had awakened. Each summer found dozens of new hotels and boardinghouses, appearing like mushrooms, popping up from nothing at sites that had been beach sand the year before. Year after year, late winter through spring, Atlantic City was a beehive of activity swarming with construction workers sleeping on cots, living in tents, eating in temporary cafeterias and working seven days per week. Workers signed on for the season, knowing they would work every day until the weather became too nasty. For nearly three decades, from the latter part of the 19th century into the second decade of the 20th century, a “Tent City” rose up from the sand every spring, pitched at a different location, following the growth of the resort. The residents of Tent City were mostly itinerant laborers and tradesmen, sometimes with their families, usually not. These crews of workers were brought to town by Philadelphia contractors and established businesses looking to get in on the action at the shore. They worked at a fever pitch from sunrise to sunset and made the city hum.
The air was filled with the sounds of shovels, hammers, saws, and masonry tools. A walk down any street would bring sounds of men working: from bricklayers shouting at their helpers, “brick, block, mud” as they worked to complete a foundation, to carpenters calling down from a roof for more shingles and nails. Going from one job site to another were women and young children hawking sandwiches and beverages. At the end of each day, make-shift beer gardens were packed with thirsty workers. There was never enough beer, nor women, to go around, and late evening brawls were common. During peak building periods the local police had their hands full. Except for the most serious crimes, arrest and jail weren’t the answer. Local authorities relied upon employers to keep their laborers under control. For them it was back to Tent City, where the offender could sleep it off and return to work the next day.
The resort quickly became a blue-collar town. Thousands of building tradesmen and laborers came to Atlantic City looking for work and many remained to make it their home. For nearly two generations after the second railroad, the resort was a place where strong hands could always find work. While things slowed down with the coming of fall, a laborer’s wages, along with odd jobs in the off-season, were usually enough to see a family through to spring. Between the years 1875 and 1900, the resort’s year-round population increased from less than 2,000 to nearly 30,000. Pitney’s beach village had become a city. By the turn of the 20th century, there were several neighborhoods taking shape. First- and second-generation Irish, Italians, and Jews, most by way of Philadelphia, came to town and brought their citified ways.
The Irish were part of the work gangs that built the original railroads and laid out the city’s streets. They formed construction companies and established taverns and boardinghouses. Italian craftsmen followed the Irish and worked with them in building hotels, boardinghouses, and homes. The Italians started local firms involving all the building trades and opened restaurants, food markets, and bakeries. Jewish merchants arrived at the turn of the century establishing retail businesses and playing a vital role in commercial development. Many were involved in banking, finance, the law, and accounting. Within a single generation after Samuel Richards’ second rail line, Absecon Island was transformed from a quiet beach village that shut down at the end of each summer to a bustling city based solely upon tourism.
Nationally, tourism and the hotel and recreation industry were in their infancy. There were only a handful of vacation spots and they were reserved for the wealthy. Outside of cities, the hotels that existed were generally large guesthouses and no one viewed the working class as potential patrons. But Atlantic City did and tourism became the only game in town. Scores of Philadelphia and New York businessmen saw the opportunity to profit from the hotel and recreation business and came to town in a frenzy. They brought the capital—in amounts Pitney and Richards could have only dreamt of—needed to build a city. In no time there was a fourth railroad providing direct rail service to New York City.
The speed in constructing new rail lines was matched only by the swiftness in constructing new hotels. The seven-story, 166-room, and 80-bath Garden Hotel, constructed in the 1880s, was erected in 72 working days. The five-story Hotel Rudolph, with a dance floor to accommodate 500, was constructed in 100 days. The 10-story landmark Chalfonte Hotel was erected in six months, breaking ground on December 9, 1903, and opening for guests on July 2, 1904, the 50th anniversary of the coming of the train. Year after year, construction on dozens of small hotels and boardinghouses began in the early spring and was completed in time for the summer season.
Boardinghouses lodged the bulk of Atlantic City’s visitors; by 1900, there were approximately 400 of them. Though lacking the glamour of most hotels, boardinghouses made it possible for blue-collar workers and their families to have an extended stay at the seashore. The accommodations were simple to the point of monotony but they were clean and comfortable, which was more than what most of the visitors had come from. It was common for strangers to double-up in a single room, and there were no private baths nor room service. Regardless, patron loyalty was strong and many guests returned to the same boardinghouse summer after summer. During the peak season, one could usually find a room in the large first-class hotels, but the low-end, smaller hotels and boardinghouses were always crammed to capacity.
Boardinghouse owners and their patrons were a critical cornerstone of the resort’s tourist economy. The visitor who came to town by an excursion couldn’t afford a stay in any of the larger hotels. If blue-collar workers and their families were to vacation for an entire week they needed a place within their means. Despite today’s notions of Atlantic City as a vacation spot for the wealthy, the resort could never have survived by catering to the upper class. It was the lower-middle and lower classes that were the lifeblood of Atlantic City. They comprised the great mass of visitors to the resort and the rates of most rooms were structured for them. That wasn’t true of the large hotels along the ocean, which charged rates ranging from $3 to $5 per day. Generally, the larger the hotel, the more expensive the rates and the more limited the clientele.
Rooms in the low-end smaller hotels could be rented for only $1.50 to $2, and that included food. Weekly rates of $8 to $12 were common. While there are no records of the rates charged by boardinghouses, it’s known their rooms were less than the cheapest hotels. As for a precise number of boardinghouses in the resort during its heyday, one can only speculate. There was no obligation for an owner to call his lodging a “boardinghouse” or “hotel.” Many small guesthouses of four to six rooms included “hotel” in their name. To make things more confusing, many establishments used the term “cottage.”
One historian has estimated that boardinghouses accounted for about 60 percent of all businesses renting rooms to tourists. With annual real wages of $1,000 or less for positions such as office clerks, government workers, postal employees, ministers, teachers, and factory workers, boardinghouse rates brought a week at the shore within the means of most visitors. Even the lower classes could afford a week at the shore if they planned ahead and saved for their vacation. Thousands of families did just that, setting aside small sums throughout the year for a week-long fling at the shore. With Atlantic City the only vacation spot to which there was direct rail service in the Northeast, hoteliers who treated their guests well could count on repeat business. And the railroads and resort merchants worked together to keep their working-class patrons coming.
One of the gimmicks used to lure visitors was to continue touting the resort as a health spa, with Pitney’s original promotional efforts evolving into pamphlets distributed by the railroads. Exaggerated claims of the health benefits of Absecon Island’s environment were an important part of selling Atlantic City to both Philadelphia and the nation. After Pitney died, the railroads hired other “distinguished men of medicine” who continued the tradition. These doctors were paid to make written endorsements and to prescribe a stay at the beach as the cure for every ailment. The railroads supplied the doctors with complimentary passes, which were passed on to those patients who had yet to visit the resort. Handouts published at the expense of the railroad distributed this medical advice to the general public and invariably described the resort’s air as “hostile to physical debility.”
There were no limits to the hype. “Next to being an inhabitant of Atlantic City, it must be one’s highest privilege to find rest, health and pleasure at the City by the Sea.” A favorite subject of the railroads’ doctors was ozone, “the stimulating, vitalizing principal of the atmosphere,” which was in large supply only at the seashore, especially Atlantic City. According to the railroads’ pamphlets, “Ozone has a tonic, healing, purifying power, that increases as the air is taken into the lungs. It strengthens the respiratory organs, and in stimulating them, helps the whole system.” But that wasn’t all. By breathing Atlantic City’s air, “It follows naturally that the blood is cleansed and revived, tone is given to the stomach, the liver is excited to healthful action and the whole body feels the benefit. Perfect health is the inevitable result.”
In addition to the pamphlets cranked out by the railroads, there were a series of travelers’ handbooks published from 1887 to 1908 by Alfred M. Heston, a self-appointed cheerleader for the resort. Heston was well-educated and had worked for several newspapers prior to making Atlantic City his home. An owlish, scrawny little man, Heston’s appearance was marked by pince-nez eyeglasses and a closely groomed mustache. Somewhat eccentric, he was drawn to the study of ancient civilizations and progressive Republican politics. Heston was the editor of a local newspaper, the Atlantic City Review, and served as city comptroller from 1895 to 1912. His annual handbooks described a life of enchantment waiting for all who came to Atlantic City. They were filled with sketches of charming scenes of vacationers, hotel listings, recommended merchants and restaurants, activities for the family, and romantic little tales all intended to present Atlantic City to the world through rose-colored glasses. According to Heston, “The endless panorama of life upon the water, the strand, and the Boardwalk, constantly in motion and ever changing” made Atlantic City the “queen of watering places.”
Heston used his contacts in the publishing world to have his handbooks reviewed and publicized in major newspapers of the day while the railroad subsidized and circulated them. A traveler waiting for a train in Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, or in nearly any of the thousands of railroad stations throughout the United States could always find a free copy of the Heston handbook.
As the resort grew in popularity, one of the main themes of its promoters was to dispel the belief that Atlantic City was attractive only in the summer. Not everyone was like Walt Whitman, who found that Atlantic City “suits me just as well, perhaps best, for winter quarters.” Whitman enjoyed riding in a horse-drawn carriage along the beach and in January 1879 wrote to a friend, “I have a fine and bracing drive along the smooth sand (the carriage wheels hardly make a dent in it). The bright sun, the sparkling waves, the foam, the view—the vital vast monotonous sea … were the items of my drive … How the soul dwells on their simplicity, eternity, grimness, absence of art!”
But Whitman’s prose attracted few wintertime visitors, so the railroad’s publicity agents conjured up another law of nature to convince vacationers that Atlantic City had mild winters. Promotional literature claimed that the warm Gulf Stream, coursing its way northward, made a westerly turn just beyond Cape May and swept within a few miles of the stretch of the Jersey coast where Absecon Island was located. The Gulf Stream then, as if guided by an unseen hand, turned out to the sea on its way to the frozen North, thus preventing any other northeastern seacoast town from receiving its warmth. As one early publicist later admitted, “During blizzards or just plain snowstorms, we plastered the metropolitan dailies with No snow on the Boardwalk even though sometimes we had to sweep it off before placing the copy.”
The Boardwalk, which began as a way to keep the tourists from tracking beach sand all over town, was another marketing tool for the railroads and local merchants. Without any idea of what they were doing, Jacob Keim, a hotelier, and Alexander Boardman, a train conductor—both of whom were annoyed with the sand brought indoors by their patrons—created a novelty that would in time win hundreds of thousands of new converts for Atlantic City. In the spring of 1870, Keim and Boardman called a meeting of other business people at Keim’s hotel, the Chester County House. Boardman opened the meeting by stating:Gentlemen, we brought you here to present an idea we feel will benefit everyone in this room. Our visitors are no longer satisfied with the rough facilities once offered them here. Today we must supply fine carpets, good furniture and other luxuries. These cost money. Our carpets and even stuffed chairs are being ruined by the sand tracked into our places from the beach. Walking on the beach is a favorite past time. We can’t stop this. We propose to give the beach strollers a walkway of boards on the sand, which we believe will overcome our sand problems.
Keim and Boardman presented sketches of their idea and a petition to city council was circulated. It was an easy sell. The first Boardwalk was a flimsy structure, eight-foot wide, in 12-foot sections, so it could be taken up and stored at the end of summer. Extending from the Seaview Excursion House to the Absecon Lighthouse, it turned “tiresome areas of mosquito marsh and soft sand” into a crowded little thoroughfare of tourists eager to prance upon every plank. Stretched out across the dunes, filled with people scurrying about, this little promenade must have been a curious sight.
At the time the Boardwalk was originally built, city council adopted an ordinance prohibiting the construction of any buildings within 30 feet of the walkway on the city side, and prohibited construction entirely on the ocean side. By 1880, after the success of the second railroad was evident, local businessmen saw the potential for locating shops along the Boardwalk. Property owners near the walkway pressured council to reverse itself to make retail shops available to the strollers. In less than three years after the ordinance was rescinded, the Boardwalk became a busy street with more than 100 businesses facing the beach. As demand for access to the Boardwalk increased it was improved, becoming more elaborate and permanent. In 1884 it was elevated to get it off the sand and moved closer to the shoreline. In 1896, the city made a major commitment, constructing a Boardwalk that rested upon steel pilings driven into the beach sand. After 1896, the Boardwalk was truly a “grand promenade,” with nothing like it anywhere in the world. By the end of the 19th century, the Boardwalk was a major attraction unto itself, with many visitors coming to the resort for the first time just to walk on it. There was something magical about being so near the sand and water, yet removed from it, that captured the public’s imagination.
The businesses along the Boardwalk helped to foster an emphasis on buying and selling that would pervade the Atlantic City scene for years to come. Every foot of this grand promenade was dedicated to assisting its strollers to part with their money. If the people walking on the Boardwalk weren’t gazing at the ocean, they were certain to be looking at something for sale. The Boardwalk merchants understood their customers and did everything they could to divert their attention from the surf. The industrialization and urbanization of America were, for the first time, creating expendable income for the masses. Atlantic City played a significant role in fostering the illusion that the route to happiness was by way of materialism. The Boardwalk merchants appealed to the impulse to consume and convinced their patrons they couldn’t have a fun time at the shore unless they purchased some of their goodies. Through the commercialization of the Boardwalk, recreational buying came into vogue. The spending of money as a sort of pleasure was introduced to the working class and became part of popular American culture.
More than conveniences for their strollers, the Boardwalk’s shops became a medium of entertainment and a chance to fulfill the American dream, if only temporarily. Hundreds of small stores and kiosk-like structures were constructed in front of the hotels on the city side of the Boardwalk. While there were more refined shops featuring expensive jewelry and furnishings in the hotels, their numbers were few. There were many more stores along the Boardwalk making sales from nickels and dimes selling trinkets. With the grand hotels as a backdrop, these small stores offered visitors, most of whom could never afford a stay in the hotels, the opportunity to purchase gifts and mementos so they could take home a taste of the high life.
There was no limit to the wonderful junk Boardwalk merchants offered for sale: postcards with sexual innuendoes, paintings on shells, tinsel jewelry, handmade Native American moccasins, kewpie dolls, Bohemian cut glass, and an endless inventory of nonsense that the visitor would never buy any place else except when vacationing in Atlantic City. In addition, the Boardwalk merchants pioneered walk-away eateries offering an incredible array of food and beverages. There was everything from deviled crabs, tutti-frutti, saltwater taffy, caramel popcorn, and pretzels to all the “Natural Saratoga Water” you could drink for five cents.
The Boardwalk became Main Street, Fantasy Island. It was a wonderland of glitz and cheap thrills. “The Boardwalk was a stage, upon which there was a temporary suspension of disbelief; behavior that was exaggerated, even ridiculous, in every day life was expected at the resort.” By the beginning of the 20th century, the resort attracted the attention of the New Baedeker, a publication for the sophisticated traveler, which remarked, “Atlantic City is an eighth wonder of the world. It is overwhelming in its crudeness—barbaric, hideous, and magnificent. There is something colossal about its vulgarity.”
Atlantic City’s grand promenade created for its strollers an illusion of social mobility that couldn’t be found at other resorts. Elias Howe’s invention of the sewing machine in 1846 laid the foundation for the ready-to-wear clothing industry. Its widespread use in the last half of the 19th century produced a fashion revolution in America. The working class could now afford stylish garments. Ready-made clothing blurred class lines and for many of the resort’s patrons, the Boardwalk became a showcase for their new clothes. A trip to Atlantic City was an excuse for getting dressed up. Strolling on the Boardwalk made visitors feel they were marchers in a grand fashion parade. The working class craved opportunities to participate in festive occasions and the Boardwalk gave them just such a chance. During the summer months, the resort became a huge masquerade party, with everyone trying to appear as if they had arrived socially. At the same time the resort was growing in popularity, American society was groping toward a popular culture to suit the new industrial world. The average worker wanted to be free of the limits imposed by farm life and small villages. Atlantic City was an outlet for that urge. The Boardwalk created the illusion that everyone was part of a huge middle class parading to prosperity and social freedom. There were no class distinctions while strolling the Boardwalk; everyone was someone special.
For visitors to the Boardwalk, the glorification of the common man reached its peak with the rolling chair. The rolling chair was first introduced to the Boardwalk in 1887 by William Hayday, a hardware store merchant, as a part of Atlantic City’s role as a health resort. Invalids could hire a chair and enjoy the pleasures of the view of the surf, the salt air, and the wares for sale in the Boardwalk’s many shops. Harry Shill, a wheelchair manufacturer, was so impressed that he began producing rolling chairs in mass. They quickly evolved from an aid for invalids into a means for transporting every visitor from a working stiff into royalty, even if it was only for a short while. What better way to stroke the ego of the working-class visitor than to wheel him around in a beautifully decorated vehicle, thickly padded with comfortable cushions, and driven by an obliging servant? They couldn’t get that kind of treatment back home, making the Boardwalk something special in their memories.
The Boardwalk brought resort patrons to the water’s edge, but the five amusement piers built on the ocean side lured them farther, overtop the ocean itself. The excitement at the very thought of it was more than most visitors could resist and they spent their money on any attraction offered on the piers. The first three piers that were built didn’t last beyond a single summer; winter storms destroyed them all. John Applegate, a Boardwalk photographer, built a sturdier one in 1884, a 670-foot-long pier consisting of an upper and lower deck, with an amusement pavilion at the outer end. Applegate’s pier was a profitable investment for its owner but it was small time compared to the success had by John Young, who purchased it in 1891.
John Young understood what Atlantic City was all about. Born across the bay in Absecon Village to an oyster man, he was fatherless at the age of three. He left school early for work to support himself. While working as a carpenter doing repair work on the Boardwalk, he met Stewart McShea, a Pennsylvania baker. McShea had money and Young had ideas. Together, they opened a roller-skating rink and a carousel, both of which were successful. When Applegate’s pier went up for sale they grabbed it, with Young in charge of the show.
Young extended Applegate’s pier to a length of 2,000 feet, then searched the world over for attractions to lure the masses. His pier was a glittering palace: It contained the “world’s largest ballroom,” a hippodrome, an exhibit hall with everything from butterflies to mutants, a reproduction of a Greek temple, and an aquarium where he kept special finds from his daily fish hauls. Young held dances, promoted contests, gave away prizes, featured exhibitions, and sponsored productions of both contemporary and classical plays in Young’s Pier Playhouse. He even brought Sarah Bernhardt to his pier to star in a performance of “Camile.” The Captain had something for everybody.
The pier Young bought from Applegate was destroyed by fire in 1902. Young bought out McShea and rebuilt in time for the next summer, calling his new pier “Young’s Million Dollar Pier.” His pier was a tinsel palace that dazzled Boardwalk strollers. Highlighted by gobs of gaudy Victorian gingerbread, it housed attractions designed to lure a wide cross-section of patrons. It worked like a charm. At the height of his success, Young was reaping an annual income of more than a million dollars, and all before the income tax.
Young didn’t hide his wealth and erected a marble mansion on his pier so he could, to use his own words, “fish out my kitchen window.” The home included furnishings from around the world and was recognized by the U.S. Post Office as “No. 1, Atlantic Ocean, U.S.A.” Although it was constructed on a pier, there was a formal garden fronting Young’s mansion. The garden included statues imported from Florence, Italy. “They were undraped in the classic tradition and considered daring for their time. His Adam and Eve group especially caused a sensation when a bolt of lightning struck Eve in an embarrassing spot. The humor of the situation hit the press. Newspapers and newsreels gave them nationwide coverage.” The lighting and landscaping for Young’s palace were designed by his long-time friend, Thomas Edison. The Captain and the inventor spent many an afternoon together fishing off the end of the pier behind the mansion. Eventually washed into the sea by a winter storm, Young’s mansion was the envy of his customers.
Young and other Boardwalk merchants who modeled themselves after him were, in large part, responsible for institutionalizing the concept of the spending spree in American culture. Thanks to them, Atlantic City developed into a place where visitors came knowing they would part with their money. The tourists did so gladly, because the Boardwalk merchants were able to convince them that they were having the time of their lives.
The counterpart of the Boardwalk merchants were the resort hotel and boardinghouse owners who were pioneers willing to sink their money into the sand in hopes of making a fortune. Many of them came out of Philadelphia and viewed Atlantic City as a new frontier of the hotel industry. For them, the resort was Philadelphia’s summertime playground, and they claimed the market as their own. While they participated in the national advertising campaign of the railroads, the resort’s hotel and boardinghouse operators knew they couldn’t survive without Philadelphia.
The first hotel owner to experience a large success was Benjamin Brown, who purchased the 600-room United States Hotel. Constructed by the Camden-Atlantic Railroad, the hotel had changed hands several times before he acquired it. Shortly after acquiring the hotel, Brown was wooing his visitors with ads stating, “Large rooms, furnished in walnut … gas in every room … morning, afternoon and evening concerts by celebrated orchestras.” Benjamin Brown was every bit the showman that John Young was. Working together with the railroad, he launched an aggressive campaign toward attracting the rich and famous, using them as a draw for nouveau riche social climbers. He gave well-known visitors all expenses paid vacations, provided he was permitted to use their names in his promotional literature. On one occasion Brown was able to attract President Ulysses S. Grant. “My father’s friend, Al, said Grant drank so much when he was in town that he probably doesn’t remember being here.” A holiday was declared for Grant’s arrival and ads were taken in the major newspapers of the Northeast, showing that Cape May wasn’t the only resort that could host a president.
Another influential hotelier was Charles McGlade, owner of the Mansion House, which stood at the corner of Pennsylvania and Atlantic avenues. A low, rambling three-story frame structure, the place was floundering when McGlade took it over. He turned things around quickly. McGlade, a restless bundle of energy, supervised every aspect of his hotel. He began by promoting his property and was the first resort hotelier to use bold commercial display print for his newspaper advertising, like the ads run by retailers. Prior to McGlade, hotel advertisements were routinely set in a style comparable to today’s classified ads: five or six lines, in modest type, under the heading “resorts” was the conventional practice of the staid Victorian era. McGlade ignored convention. He shouted his message using eye-catching bold print ads in the major Northeastern newspapers. It worked and his competitors soon followed his example, creating a revolution in hotel advertising.
The master of the Mansion House was responsible for innovations that went beyond advertising. Prior to McGlade, most of the town’s hotels and boardinghouses were sparsely furnished, creating a sober, almost spartanlike environment—what one might expect to find on a religious retreat. McGlade brought creature comforts to Atlantic City, which local hoteliers hadn’t considered worth the investment for businesses operating only during the summer season. The first thing he did was to transform the “parlor” into a sophisticated hotel lobby. Bare walls and sparse furnishings gave way to frescoed ceilings of flowers and figures painted by local artist, Jerre Leeds.
McGlade created an aura of glamour. He installed elegant carpeting, expensive wallpaper, cushioned lounge chairs, crystal chandeliers, polished glass, and mahogany paneling. The bare walls and stiff furniture of McGlade’s competitors soon gave way to a whole line of improvements that transformed the resort hotel industry. “The bar, a principal part of all successful hotel operations, was transformed from a saloon to salon” and became a popular meeting place for visitors from the other hotels and boardinghouses. He also installed an outdoor dance pavilion, permitting guests to enjoy the open air rather than a hot dining room, which is where his competitors permitted dancing. More importantly, McGlade set a standard for entertaining his customers that soon became an Atlantic City trademark. He arranged for his guests to be met at the train station by an elegant horse-drawn carriage and had them transported to his hotel where he would personally greet them. He oversaw every service offered his patrons and made them feel as if they were personal guests. Upon their departure, he was there to wish them farewell with “Hope you will return again soon.” McGlade set the standard for hospitality. Other hoteliers followed his example. One such hotel pioneer was Josiah White, who started a resort dynasty.
Josiah White III was the great grand-nephew of Josiah White, a Pennsylvania pioneer who had constructed the Lehigh Canal. The Whites were eager to become involved in new businesses in Pennsylvania, much the same way the Richards family did in southern New Jersey. Josiah White could see that Atlantic City was Philadelphia’s playground and in 1887, he purchased the Luray Hotel, a 90-room boardinghouse on Kentucky Avenue near the beach. He quickly acquired the land between the Luray and the ocean and, with his sons, John and Allen, expanded the Luray into a hotel of more than 300 rooms. White and his sons built stores along the Boardwalk and erected the resort’s first hotel sundeck. The Whites added another first, hot and cold running seawater for those rooms that had private baths.
From the success with the Luray, White and his sons purchased a nearby property used for retreats by the Academy of the Sacred Heart. In 1902, the Whites erected the Marlborough House. A short time later, the Luray was destroyed by fire. Rather than rebuild, White and his sons acquired additional property near the Marlborough and constructed the Blenheim Hotel. It was one of the first fireproof hotels in Atlantic City and the first hotel with a private bath for every room, something unheard of in the hotel industry. Another first of the Blenheim was that it was constructed of reinforced concrete. It was a new process and its inventor, Thomas Edison, was on hand to supervise the construction.
The Whites’ hotels, together with several other large hotels that followed them, created a magical aura along the Boardwalk. They were magnificent sand castles that captured the public’s attention and enhanced Atlantic City’s reputation. The Marlborough, named after the home of the Prince of Wales, was built in the Queen Anne style of architecture. The Blenheim, named after the Blenheim Castle, home of the Duke of Marlborough, was designed in a Spanish-Moorish architecture. While most of Atlantic City’s visitors could never afford to stay at the Marlborough-Blenheim, the Whites’ properties set a tone of elegance adding to the illusion of Atlantic City and its Boardwalk.
Through the leadership of hoteliers such as Benjamin Brown, Charles McGlade, and the Whites, Atlantic City’s hospitality industry gained a reputation as a destination where the vacationer could count on being treated well. They set the standard for the entire hospitality industry, including the smaller hotels and boardinghouses. Regardless of their financial means, upon arrival in Atlantic City, guests knew they would be fussed over. But the pampering of hotel guests—especially before modern conveniences—was labor intensive. The resort’s hotel industry couldn’t function without large numbers of unskilled workers. Cooks, waiters, chambermaids, dishwashers, bellboys, and janitors were in constant demand. These jobs were filled almost entirely by freed slaves and their descendants who had migrated north following the Civil War. These African-Americans were essential to Atlantic City’s surge to prominence as a destination for vacationers. While the money to build a national resort came primarily from Philadelphia and New York investors, the muscle and sweat needed to keep things going was furnished by Black workers, lured north in hope of a better life.
3
A Plantation by the Sea
“Elegant” was a word often used to describe the Windsor Hotel. In the late 1800s, it was one of Atlantic City’s most talked about places. Originally built in 1884 as a small boardinghouse called the Mineola, it was combined with the Berkely Hotel several years later under the name “the Windsor.” The Windsor was a tony place. A small hotel, noted for its service, it had the city’s first French-style courtyard and was a center of social life year-round.
Until the summer of 1893, everyone at the Windsor understood their place in resort society. That June saw the first effort by hotel workers to stage a strike. It failed miserably.
Unhappy with the meal he had been given during break time, a Black waiter in the Windsor’s dining room placed an order with the kitchen for himself. When the White headwaiter learned that the meal was for one of his Black staff, the meal was canceled. The workers were told that if they wanted to eat, they could do so in the Black-only help’s dining area, which was off to one side in the kitchen. At the next dinner break, the food was inedible. The waiters refused their meals and politely advised the headwaiter they would strike if they didn’t receive better food. The headwaiter was unfazed by the threat. He… cooly told them to strike out for another job and summoned all the chambermaids attired in their knobby white caps and aprons to wait at supper and the next morning he had a new force of colored waiters.
Typical of the era, the name of the waiter who led the strike remains unknown. To White society, African-Americans, generally, were anonymous. As for the meal that prompted a strike by workers accustomed to third-rate treatment, one can only imagine how putrid it was. White hoteliers viewed Blacks as little more than beasts of burden. They were brought to town in much the same way Northern farmers recruited migrant farm hands. Any worker who questioned a hotel’s rules was replaced.
As Cape May had done years earlier, Atlantic City’s hotels reached out to the Upper South for domestic servants. In a short time, the resort became a mecca for Black men and women as hotel workers. Between the years 1870 and 1915, thousands of Blacks left their homes in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and ventured to Atlantic City in search of opportunity. By 1915, African-Americans accounted for more than 27 percent of the resort’s population, a percentage more than five times that of any other northern city. At the same time, they comprised 95 percent of the hotel workforce. And with the treatment they received, Atlantic City’s hotel industry was akin to a plantation.
Atlantic City’s evolution into a plantation by the sea is a product of its unique status in the era in which it was growing from a beach village to a major resort. For nearly three generations after the Civil War, as America was shifting from an agricultural-based economy to a manufacturing economy, racial prejudice excluded Blacks from industrial employment. During the years between the American Civil War and World War II, the only occupations realistically available to Black Americans were either as a farm laborer or domestic worker. Domestic work was thought to be peculiarly “Negro work,” with the attitude of most Whites being, “Negroes are servants; servants are Negroes.”
African-American history is filled with many cruel ironies. Following the Civil War, thousands of skilled Black tradesmen were forced to abandon finely honed skills to become servants. During slavery, many Blacks worked at crafts and became masters. Entire families of slaves were engaged in highly skilled trades, one generation after another. Beyond farm labor, male Blacks were trained as ironworkers, carpenters, wheelwrights, coopers, tanners, shoemakers, and bakers. As for female slaves, they were capable of far more than household chores. Many were skilled at sewing, spinning, weaving, dressmaking, pottery, nursing, and midwifery. Upon emancipation, Black artisans became a threat to White workers.
When freed Black tradesmen were thrown into competition with White workers, there was often open social conflict. White workers, in both the South and North, reacted violently. They wouldn’t permit one of their own to be displaced by a Black worker, regardless of how skilled he might be. Despite their newfound freedom, few employers risked hiring skilled Blacks, regardless of how cheap they’d work, for fear of reprisals by White workers. African-American historian E. F. Frazier found that at the end of the Civil War there were approximately 100,000 skilled Black tradesmen in the South as compared with 20,000 Whites. Between 1865 and 1890 the number of Black artisans dwindled to only a handful. That such a large reservoir of talent was permitted to dry up confirms the ignorance and inutility of racial prejudice.
For Blacks who had moved North, their existence was precarious. Ill-equipped to deal with the economic and social realities of post-Civil War America, a disproportionate number of Blacks found themselves in poverty. In Philadelphia, between 1891 and 1896, approximately 9 percent of the inmates in the almshouse were Blacks, although they constituted only 4 percent of that city’s population. Unable to gain a foothold in the expanding industries of the region, and the opportunities at farming limited, freed slaves and their children had little choice but to accept domestic work. Shut out of high-paying, skilled jobs, it was domestic work or the poor house.
The situation in New Jersey was typical. In 1903, of the 475 industrial concerns surveyed by the New Jersey Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industry, only 83 employed Blacks in any capacity, mostly janitorial. An illustration of the closed doors confronting Blacks in New Jersey’s industries is Paterson, which was a major industrial center not only in the state but the nation. By 1915, 50 years after the Civil War, the percentage of Black male workers employed in Paterson’s factories, at any job, was less than 5 percent.
The distribution of Blacks throughout the American economy is revealing of the prevailing racial attitudes of the day. Prior to 1890, the United States Census did not distinguish occupational classes by race or color, but from that date forward, it did. In the population counts, for 1890 and 1900 upward of 87 percent of all Black workers were employed in either agricultural pursuits or domestic and personal service. The remaining 13 percent breaks down as follows: 6 percent in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, 6 percent in commerce and transportation, and 1 percent in the professions.
In the North Atlantic region, more than two-thirds of all African-Americans earned their income in domestic work. Most Blacks hired to work in a White household were general servants. Routinely, a family hired a single domestic servant who was required to be a cook, a waitress, and a housekeeper. The work of a household servant was hard and the hours were long. The typical general servant worked a 12-hour day and was responsible for maintaining the household seven days a week. Days off were dependent upon the generosity of the employer. Domestic service was a field of work sought out of necessity rather than choice. For most Blacks, working as a domestic servant was only a small step up from slavery. No other group in the American population—including new immigrants from Europe—had such a large proportion of its members in such menial employment.
But the menial employment in Atlantic City was different. Hotel work was an attractive alternative. There was a crucial difference between the work experience of Blacks in Atlantic City and those of other cities at the time. The work opportunities were more varied and stimulating. The hotel and recreation economy had many types of positions requiring strong backs and quick hands and feet. To keep the resort running smoothly during its peak season, hoteliers, restaurateurs, Boardwalk merchants, and amusement operators relied heavily upon the affordable labor provided by Blacks. While it was often difficult work, an employee was part of something bigger and more dynamic than were Blacks hired to perform domestic work in private homes.
Those Blacks who came to Atlantic City in search of work found they could make four to five times the wages available in the South. The Civil War had devastated the South and left it destitute. The Union Army had scarred the Southern landscape and wrecked its economy. While there was no longer slavery in the Old Confederacy, freedom had simply lifted the Black man from slave to sharecropper. Both Blacks and Whites were unfamiliar with a free-labor, market economy and upward of 90 percent of the Black population fell into the sharecropping and crop-lien system. Sharecropping produced a nasty, feudal-like economy in which the Black man was a loser. Black sharecroppers were tied to the land in the hopes their efforts would produce enough for them to survive. “Wages,” per se, did not exist. To many freed slaves, any type of work in the North was better than sharecropping. Domestic service and hotel work were welcomed alternatives.
While the wages of a domestic servant in most Northern cities were comparable to that of hotel employment, work in a hotel was easier than domestic service and more exciting, with the hours fewer and more predictable. Finally, the Blacks who came to Atlantic City found employment as a hotel worker had less social stigma than domestic work. Working as a general servant was synonymous with social inferiority. Unlike other occupations, the individual was hired, not their labor. The use of the word “servant” was a mark of social degradation.
In Atlantic City, Blacks were not servants but, rather, employees in a hotel and recreation economy that relied upon them heavily for its success. Based upon data available from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, historian Herbert J. Foster concluded that at the turn of that century the weekly wages of hotel workers in Atlantic City compared favorably with other cities and may have been the highest paid at the time. The resort’s reliance upon Black workers evolved swiftly following the boom period ignited by Samuel Richards’ second railroad. Between 1854 and 1870 Atlantic City’s Black population did not exceed 200. But after the narrow gauge railroad in 1877, tourists flocked to town and the hotel industry flourished. Hotel owners recruited Black workers from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia for the summer season. Working for hotels and boardinghouses, these workers were provided food, lodging, and wages far better than anything they could earn at home. Beginning in the 1880s, Blacks came to Atlantic City primarily for the summer months and then returned to their homes. As the resort grew in popularity and the number of hotels operating year-round increased, Blacks found work beyond the summer months, and many made the resort their permanent home.
Atlantic City became the most “Black” city in the North. By 1905 the Black population was nearly 9,000. By 1915 it was greater than 11,000, comprising more than one-fourth of the permanent residents. During summer, the Black population swelled to nearly 40 percent. Of those Northern cities having more than 10,000 Black residents, Atlantic City was without any serious rival in terms of percentage of total population. These numbers are critical in terms of understanding the status of Atlantic City’s Black experience in American history.
Following the Civil War, between 75 and 90 percent of all African-Americans who traveled North gravitated to cities, with most living in larger cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Those who settled in smaller cities and towns found a bitter isolation. Without sufficient population of their own to establish a separate community life, many Blacks had no life but work. This was especially true of the smaller communities in New Jersey where there had been support for the Confederate cause. New Jersey’s reaction to Lincoln’s election in 1860 included talk of secession. When war broke out, former Governor Rodman Price and other Democrats openly stated that the state should join the South. Local sentiment didn’t change during the War. In addition to being the only Northern state where Lincoln failed to gain a majority, New Jersey selected pro-Southern Democrat James Wall to serve in the U.S. Senate in 1863. The same year, Democratic Governor Joel Parker denounced Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as an improper trespass on state’s rights and the New Jersey legislature adopted legislation banning Negroes from the state. Finally, the Legislature elected in 1864 rejected the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which ended slavery.
For many years following the Civil War, in the towns and cities throughout New Jersey, there was a deep division between Blacks and Whites. The vast majority of the African-American population was relegated to blighted areas, which were located “across the tracks,” “over the creek,” “by the dump,” or “back of the hill.” Nearly all were employed at unskilled labor and domestic work.
U.S. census statistics show that by the beginning of the 20th century the overwhelming majority of Blacks in Atlantic City were “domestic and personal service workers.” But the recreational orientation of Atlantic City’s economy makes those numbers misleading. The variety and pay of domestic service positions and, consequently, the social structure of the Black community differed greatly from other Northern cities, both large and small. Hotel/recreation work in Atlantic City paid more than domestic service in other cities, not only because of higher wages, but also because Black hotel workers came in contact with tourists and earned tips. Additionally, most employees were provided with regular daily meals in the hotels. Equally important, there was a hierarchy of positions within the hotel and recreation industry. As a result, the Atlantic City tourist economy provided Black workers with the ability to move from one type of job to another. Such mobility in the workplace was unavailable to Blacks in other cities. The result of this phenomenon was development of a Black social structure in Atlantic City far more complex than other Northern cities. By virtue of their higher income, property ownership, and greater responsibility attached to their hotel positions, a substantial portion of Atlantic City’s Black residents were, by comparison to other Blacks nationally, part of the middle and upper classes.
The social structure among African-American workers in Atlantic City roughly broke down along the following lines: Upper—hotel-keepers, boardinghouse keepers (and owners), headwaiters, stewards, cooks, head bellmen, and rollingchair managers; Middle— waiters, waitresses, chambermaids, elevator operators, lifeguards, actors, musicians, entertainers, and performers; Lower—bellmen, busboys, porters, dishwashers, kitchen helpers, and rollingchair pushers. Intelligence, experience, and personal initiative counted for much in the hotel and recreation industry. Unlike many other cities where Blacks were simply servants, those in Atlantic City had a realistic chance for advancement in the tourist economy.
But the mobility available in the workplace did not translate into social mobility. As Blacks grew in numbers, the racial attitude of Atlantic City’s Whites hardened. While White racism has been a strong force throughout American history, historians have noted that at the close of the 19th century race relations began to develop more formal patterns.
History rarely marches in a straight line. Succeeding generations have a way of retrenching as they reject portions of social changes made earlier. Time and again, positive social advancements are made only to be followed by negative reactions. Weariness of the federal government’s role in the South and political expediency prompted Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and James Garfield to preside passively over the dismantling of efforts to bring about interracial democracy. Northern Republicans, Hayes’ and Garfield’s attitudes reflected the views of their constituents.
As part of a bargain to hold on to the White House following the disputed Hayes-Tilden election, in which he was actually the loser in the popular vote, President Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South and “home rule” was restored. Hayes and the Republicans wanted tranquility and promoted an alliance of “men of property,” both North and South. In expressing his views in letters to friends, Hayes stated, “As to the South, the let-alone policy seems now to be the true course.” In another letter he advised, “Time, time is the great cure-all.” Hayes’ successor, James Garfield, was no more eager to confront the South. Shortly after being sworn into office in 1881, he wrote to a friend, “Time is the only cure for the South’s difficulties. In what shape it will come, if it comes at all, is not clear.”
Upon the federal government’s withdrawal from the South, the forces of White Supremacy were unleashed. Following the fall of Reconstruction governments in the South, “Jim Crow” laws became popular throughout the Old Confederacy. The 1890s saw a wave of segregation laws adopted by southern state legislatures. These laws were a constant reminder to Blacks that they were unfit to associate with Whites on any terms that implied equality. Jim Crow laws hastened the migration of Blacks to the North. Although Northern Whites did not institute a legal system of segregation and disfran-chisement, they did develop subtle but identifiable discriminatory patterns of employment and housing. This discrimination led to racial polarization and the growth of Black ghettos in most Northern cities. Blacks were forced out of White neighborhoods into segregated areas by so-called neighborhood improvement associations, boycotts, high rents, anonymous acts of violence and intimidation, and, finally, with the help of lawyers and real estate brokers who devised restrictive covenants in housing.
As Blacks thronged to Atlantic City in ever-growing numbers in search of jobs, little thought was given to their housing. Until they could save money and make a place for themselves, newcomers were huddled like cattle at the rear of luxurious hotels on dirt floors in windowless shacks with little or no ventilation and with accesses that formed a labyrinth of alleys. They were forced to live in worn-out abandoned homesteads and poorly constructed houses without baths or modern lighting, most of which were neither sanitary nor waterproof. The worst living conditions were found among the families of the fishing boat helpers. They lived in houseboats hauled up on the marshy islands near the bay, most of which were so low it was impossible to stand upright and so cramped that parents and children had to sleep together in a single bed.
The results of such living conditions were painfully dramatic. The Black infant mortality rate was double that of White children, and the death rate among Blacks from tuberculosis was more than four times that of Whites. The numbers of persons, especially during the summer months, overwhelmed the supply of housing affordable to Blacks. Few Blacks could afford their own homes. In 1905, the percentage of Black households with their own homes was less than two percent. Decent housing available for rent to Blacks was so expensive that households were forced to double-up. Many of Atlantic City’s Black tenants dealt with high rents by taking in boarders with “privilege of the kitchen” during the summer season. As the Black population swelled, the percentage of households that took in boarders increased from 14.4 percent in 1880 to 57.3 percent in 1915. As the number of Blacks grew, racial discrimination created a chronic condition of crowded, substandard housing.
The growth in the size of the Black workforce became a major concern to the local White establishment. Many readings from the time, which express White attitudes, have an unreal quality. It was almost as if White society wished Blacks would disappear at the end of the workday. Blacks were acceptable as hotel workers, but their presence on the Boardwalk and other public places was unwelcome. The thought of mingling with them socially was intolerable.
The irony of it all was cruel to Blacks. They earned a respectable wage, could vote, and own property. They performed the most personal of services and were entrusted with important responsibilities, but they were barred from restaurants, amusement piers, and booths; were denied shopping privileges by most stores; were admitted to hotels only as workers; were segregated in clinics and hospitals; and could only bathe in one section of the beach, but even then had to wait until after dark. An article appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1893 expressed the revulsion felt by Whites:What are we going to do with our colored people? That is the question. Atlantic City has never before seemed so overrun with the dark skinned race as this season … both the Boardwalk and Atlantic Avenue fairly swarm with them during bathing hours like the fruit in a huckleberry pudding … Of the hundreds of hotels and boardinghouses … it is improbable that not a dozen could be found in which White help is employed. And when to the thousands of waiters and cooks and porters are added the nurse girls, the chambermaids, the barbers and boot blacks and hack drivers and other colored gentry in every walk of life, it will be easily realized what an evil it is that hangs over Atlantic City.
The “evil” hanging over the resort was a necessity. Take away all the Black waiters, cooks, porters, and chambermaids complained of by the Inquirer and there would have been no one to wait on the reporter who wrote the article.
Without Black workers, Atlantic City would have been a very different place. Absent the cheap labor provided by Blacks, a tourist economy could never have developed and Jonathan Pitney’s beach village would have remained just that. Between the Civil War and World War I, America’s economy was exploding with job opportunities for Whites, both skilled and unskilled. Atlantic City couldn’t compete for White workers in the economy of the late 19th century. The nearest population center large enough to generate the required numbers of unskilled workers was Philadelphia. The expansion of that city’s industrial economy sucked up every able-bodied person and at wages greater than hotels could afford. There was no chance for Atlantic City’s hotels to attract the numbers of White workers needed for such menial work.
The resort had no choice but to pursue Black workers. What none of the White hoteliers could foresee as they began recruiting Blacks was the extent to which their operations would come to rely upon them. Nor could the operators envision what a large presence they would have in the city. And, finally, the last thing business owners gave any thought to was how it would all play out in terms of social integration.
During the early years, Blacks were integrated throughout the city. However, as their numbers increased they were forced out of White neighborhoods and into a ghetto known as the “Northside,” an area that was literally the other side of the railroad tracks that ran through that section of town. The Northside was bounded by Absecon Boulevard to the north, Connecticut Avenue to the east, Atlantic Avenue to the south, and Arkansas Avenue to the west. Between 1880 and 1915, the pattern of residence made a radical shift. In 1880, more than 70 percent of the Black households had White neighbors, by 1915 only 20 percent. In a single generation the population had diverged, with Blacks to the Northside and Whites to the Southside and other areas. By 1915, Blacks only went to the Southside to work, to walk on the Boardwalk, and to bathe on their restricted section of the beach.
The Northside became a city within a city. As Blacks encountered racial prejudice, they reached inward to construct a social and institutional life of their own. While White racism had created the physical ghetto, it was civic-minded upper- and middle-class Blacks who led their community to create an institutional ghetto in order to provide services that the White community had denied Blacks. The first major institution established by Blacks in Atlantic City was the church.
According to historian and prominent turn-of-the-20th-century African-American leader, W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Church is the only social institution of the Negroes which started in the African forest and survived slavery.” In support of his conclusion, Du Bois argued that the transplanted African priest, “early became an important figure on the plantation and found his function as the interpreter of the supernatural, the comforter of the sorrowing, and as the one who expressed, rudely, but picturesquely, the longing and disappointment and resentment of the stolen people.” Black historians, such as Du Bois, have noted that the first established Black churches had only “a veneer of Christianity.” Over the years, Blacks found in evangelical sects, such as Baptist and Methodist, a set of beliefs and an opportunity for emotional expression relevant to their everyday experiences in slavery. From the beginning of the importation of slaves, Blacks received Christian Baptism. Initially, there was strong resistance to baptizing slaves. The opposition subsided when laws made it clear that slaves did not become free through the acceptance of the Christian faith. As long as they continued to be property of Whites, Blacks were free to develop their own religions, taking from White churches those practices and tenets that they found relevant to their condition.
African-American historians have characterized their church in slavery as the “invisible institution.” The chaos brought about by the Civil War caused a major disruption in that institution. Despite emancipation, the African-American’s world had been turned upside down. The social disorganization throughout the South was enormous. The dismantling of Reconstruction caused further deterioration for Blacks. Out of this turmoil the “invisible institution” became visible. It began this process by affiliating with existing independent Negro churches in the North; initially, the most prevalent were the Baptist and Methodist Negro organizations. These denominations, and others, grew rapidly and the church became the glue of Black society. The church was the only effective agency for helping Blacks to cope with racial prejudice. Its growth was a product of necessity. Throughout its development, between the Civil War and World War I, the church was shaped by not only the Biblical teachings of White denominations but, more importantly, by the cultural forces and collective experiences of their isolated social world, both as slaves and freed people.
Through no choice of their own, Blacks who decided to make Atlantic City their home became socially isolated. Out of necessity, these new residents clung to their churches, which became the center of social life in the Black community. It was here that Blacks could freely express themselves through worship and attain status and recognition by participation in the hierarchy and social organizations of their churches. It was common during the off-season for Blacks to combine both religion and recreation on Sundays. Families and friends frequently met at church and brought picnic lunches or uncooked meals with them. After the religious services, they walked to the beach, gathering firewood along the way. There, they camped out for the remainder of the day, eating meals prepared over an open fire and spending the afternoon talking, singing, and playing games.
African-American scholars who have studied the development of their churches in Northern cities have argued that there was a relationship between Black social classes and church affiliation. The upper class usually formed the majority of the relatively small Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches; the middle class primarily comprised the more numerous Baptist and Methodist churches; and the lower class gravitated toward the small and numerous Holiness and Spiritualist churches.
The first traditional Black church in Atlantic City was the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church founded in 1875. In 1884, it was renamed St. James AME Church. The next traditional Black church came a year later in 1876. That year, Price Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion was founded by a group of locals headed by Clinton Edwards, Dr. George Fletcher, and Cora Flipping. Clinton Edwards was the first Black born in Atlantic City. Dr. Fletcher was the city’s first Black physician. Cora Flipping and her son, John, founded one of the first funeral homes in Atlantic City. These people were not only leaders of a new church, but also leaders in their community. Their stature attracted many members. St. James and Price Memorial are only two examples. To this day, both churches remain a vital force in Atlantic City’s Black community.
In the two generations between 1880 and 1930, many church organizations took root in the Black community. By 1930, Atlantic City had a total of 15 traditional Black church organizations. In addition, there were numerous storefront churches that served the needs of migrant Blacks newly out of the South.
The migration of Southern Blacks to the urban North was traumatic for many of them. Stripped of the practices and social structures they had created in order to cope with their lowly status in Southern society, many felt lost in a strange land. Without the customs of the invisible church, these new migrants found it difficult to adjust to the tumult of urban life. The loss of the customary religious practices, which had been their only refuge during slavery, produced an ever-present crisis in the life of the average Black migrant. In order for the visible Black church to play the role needed by its followers, it had to be transformed.
The transformation of the African-American church began with secularization. Black churches began to lose their other-worldliness and focused their energy on the conditions of their congregants in this world. Churches became increasingly interested in the affairs of the community as they impacted upon their members. Another transformation that occurred in Black religious behavior was the emergence of Holiness and Spiritualist churches. Originally formed as personality cults, their leaders had a message directed to the post-slavery experience. In Atlantic City most such churches had their inception in storefronts, side-by-side with row houses and businesses. These storefront churches were usually located in the poorer neighborhoods and served the lower class, especially the newly arrived migrants from the South. As was the case in other Northern cities, storefront churches flourished because they adopted the rural church experience to city life by providing the face-to-face association of a small church. Their existence was due partly to the poverty of their members and the fact that congregants could participate more freely in services during prayers by “shouting.”
The inability of the more traditional denominations to serve the needs of Black migrants stimulated the growth of storefront churches. These churches made it possible for Blacks to worship in a manner in which many had practiced in the South. Their religious rites were highly emotional, creating a personal form of worship in which all the members of the congregation became involved. Their pastors preached about a very real heaven and hell. Their church services appealed to those Blacks searching for relief from the insecurities of this world through salvation in the next.
The first Spiritualist church in Atlantic City was founded in 1911 by Levi and Franklin Allen. From that church, 10 other churches sprang up almost immediately. While the sermons of their ministers were other-worldly, these tiny sects never lost sight of the hardships their members had to overcome in this world. The Spiritualist church provided material as well as spiritual assistance to help Southern migrants deal with urban life. A fundamental teaching of Spiritualist doctrine was to serve the community by raising funds to help feed and clothe the poor. Like the Spiritualist churches, the Holiness churches of Atlantic City also found support among the lower class, who were as much devoted to the community as to God. A cornerstone of their church doctrine was never to permit a member to be without the bare necessities of food, shelter, and clothing.
Over time, Atlantic City’s Black churches became a social safety net for their members in need. But Sunday was only one day in the week. To build what was required to deal with White racism, namely, a city within a city, Blacks needed more than their church.
Confronted by discrimination and forced segregation, Black leaders began to establish social agencies in the Northside at the turn of the 20th century. The first social agency established by Blacks was a home for the elderly. The Old Folks Home and Sanitarium opened its doors shortly around 1900. Its purpose was to provide convalescent care for Blacks in need, regardless of religion, 65 years or older. The home was run by a Board of Managers consisting of 15 persons who investigated and approved all admissions and established charges depending upon need. The home, which was located at 416 N. Indiana Avenue, was managed well and on July 14, 1922, the Board of Managers had a formal ceremony at the Price Memorial Church, where the mortgage was burned in celebration.
Local Blacks were denied access to the city’s Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Prominent businessman George Walls organized a group that conceived a plan for the Northside YMCA. Walls was a successful bathhouse operator and a dynamic leader of the Northside who spearheaded numerous causes and lent a helping hand to many Blacks. The “Northside Y” was only one of his accomplishments.
The Northside YMCA operated out of a small cottage on North New York Avenue for more than 30 years. In 1930 it moved to a new building on Arctic Avenue, which contained a gymnasium, recreation room, showers, and dormitory accommodations. Funded entirely through private donations, the Northside YMCA was constructed at a cost of approximately $250,000. The Arctic Avenue branch of the YMCA, as it came to be known, was directed by C. M. Cain. In 1930, a staff of seven secretaries carried on a general character-building YMCA program, with a membership of more than 250 young men. The Arctic Avenue YMCA became the headquarters for many Black community organizations and clubs. Among them were the Northside Board of Trade, the Northside Business and Professional Woman’s Club, the Lincoln University Alumni Associates, the Young Men’s Progressive Club, the Great Building and Loan Association, the Lion’s Social Club, two of the four Black Boy Scout Troops, and the Woman’s Home Missionary Society.
In 1916 the Northside Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) was founded by Maggie Ridley, an active civil leader who was co-owner of the popular Ridley Hotel and one of the founding members of the Jethro Memorial Presbyterian Church. The Northside YWCA operated an employment bureau and provided counseling services to young women. Its facilities were too small for recreational programs so young women used the gymnasium facilities at the Arctic Avenue branch of the YMCA.
As the permanent Black population increased, numerous social societies were established. These groups were often “secret societies,” akin to the Masonic Order. These secret societies were one of the vehicles used by Blacks to cope with their minority status. As early as the Revolutionary period, free Blacks found it desirable to join together for social and cultural improvement, economic self-help, and mutual relief. They did this through secret societies. These societies provided their members with one of the few opportunities they had for group expression and cooperation outside of the church. By 1900, Atlantic City had more than a dozen secret societies, among which were the Prince Hall Masons, the Independent Order of Good Samaritans, the Grand United Order of True Reformers, and the Elks. Societies such as the Masons and Elks emphasized moral and social uplift of their race through the conduct of individual members and provided charity to the less fortunate. The Good Samaritans and True Reformers took the lead in providing insurance and business loans for their members. All these societies met at Mason’s Hall at North Michigan and Arctic avenues.
Meeting places like the Mason’s Hall and the Northside YMCA were critical to a Black social structure. But informal opportunities were also needed. Denied access to the hotels, restaurants, and recreational facilities of the Southside, enterprising Blacks created their own places of amusement. The first known amusement house where Blacks could gather to drink and socialize was established by M. E. Coats in 1879. Another early café and dance hall was Fitzgerald’s Auditorium on North Kentucky Avenue. Built in 1890, Fitzgerald’s grew in popularity, becoming a bar, restaurant, nightclub, and gambling room. During the Depression, Fitzgerald’s was renamed “Club Harlem” and became one of the most chic and talked about nightclubs in the Northeast, frequented by stylish Blacks and Whites. In 1919, the “Waltz Dream,” a large recreation center and dance hall at North Ohio Avenue, was established by a Mrs. Thomas, a White woman from Philadelphia. There were weekly wrestling and boxing tournaments, as well as basketball games, to sold-out crowds. The Waltz Dream was the site of many Black charity events and when dances were held at the hall, popular Black orchestras played to capacity crowds of more than 2,000, young and old alike.
In time, the Northside became a self-contained, vibrant community with a wide range of successful Black-owned businesses. The main street of the Black community was Kentucky Avenue. In addition to night spots like Club Harlem, the Northside had its own retail stores, boardinghouses, restaurants, funeral homes, and theaters, which provided a rich life serving most of the Blacks’ needs. As for the fire safety needs of the densely populated Northside, there was an all-Black fire company. Engine Company #9 with two platoons and Truck Company #6 with two platoons had their own segregated firehouse at Indiana and Grant avenues. Engine Company #9 earned a national reputation for excellence throughout the country. It played a major role in fighting all the city’s fires and held the city record for efficiency six years in a row.
Blacks had developed their own city in response to the racism of Atlantic City’s White population. However, there remained two areas where Blacks were unable to build their own institutions and continued to be the victims of racial prejudice: education and healthcare.
There was no discrimination in the school system during the early years of the resort. As long as their numbers remained small, Blacks posed no threat. But as the White community hardened its stance on integrated neighborhoods, so too did it shrink from integrated schools as the number of Black pupils grew.
Prior to 1900, the resort had a single school system with Black and White children being educated together, entirely by White teachers. In 1881, community leader George Walls organized a Literary Society and used it as a vehicle to push for improved education for Black children. Walls presented the local school board with a resolution of his group demanding the hiring of a Black teacher. The board responded by adopting a resolution of its own supporting the idea, but waited 15 years until 1896 before finally yielding and actually hiring a Black teacher.
The lengthy gap in time between the resolution and hiring was in large part a product of the controversy in the Black community caused by Walls’ proposal. Walls wanted Black teachers for Black children. He was, in effect, promoting an early Black nationalistic policy of separation of the races, which many Black leaders rejected. Those Blacks favoring integration believed that if the cost of securing Black teachers was the loss of integration, then the price was too high. Walls had his opponents. M. E. Coats, owner of a popular Northside amusement house, and C. Williams, secretary of the Price Memorial AME Zion Church Literary Society, were bitterly opposed to Walls’ idea. They feared that Walls’ proposal would do more harm than good.
As the controversy raged, Coats and Williams organized a mass meeting of all Blacks. According to historian Herbert J. Foster, Walls might have been physically attacked but for several articles in support of Walls, which appeared in the Atlantic City Review. One such article stated:This young man is right. The child is at a disadvantage with a white teacher because she does not know his history and environment. She does not have the patience and understanding. When a boy’s mother leaves home at six o’clock in the morning, her child is not out of bed, at school time he jumps up, rushes to school without his face washed or his hair combed, a white teacher does not take that boy aside and make him wash his face, she just goes on with the lesson, ignoring that boy, because she does not know that he is not able to get attention from home. If Negro children have Negro teachers, they will have an inspiration, they will have members of their own race, for ideals and not white ideals that are so diligently instructed about in the schools.
Over time, Walls’ proposal gained acceptance and the school board hired Hattie Merritt. Merritt was born in Jersey City and was a graduate of Jersey City Teachers Training School. She was assigned to teach an integrated class at the Indiana Avenue School. Things didn’t go well.
Miss Merritt found teaching in an integrated system more than she had bargained for. Her problem wasn’t the children but rather the parents. The White parents made her job impossible by coming to school and standing outside the classroom, glaring and taunting her as she tried to teach. Many of these parents demanded that the school board remove their children from her class. Merritt complained to Walls and he in turn complained to the school board. The end result of the controversy came in 1900 when the board decided on a policy of separate education for Black children and the employment of additional Black teachers to instruct them.
With the school board’s decision made, Black children were moved out of the city school system and into the basement of the Shiloh Baptist Church. This didn’t work out, and the following year the Black students were moved into the Indiana Avenue School, one of the older school buildings, which was converted to an all Black school. As the resort’s population grew, the building wasn’t large enough to handle the number of school-age Blacks. The next move was to divide the New Jersey Avenue School; half for Whites and half for Blacks. There was a door for “White” and a door for “Colored,” and separate play yards to keep the children from mingling.
By 1901, W. M. Pollard, Superintendent of Atlantic City School, claimed proudly that separate classes for Black children was a good thing. In his annual report he stated:The employment of colored teachers for separate colored classes has worked very successfully in our city. We employ ten colored teachers. These teachers occupy rooms in the same building where white children attend. The separation is continued as far as the seventh grade, after that the colored pupils attend the same grades with the white children. This plan has been in many respects beneficial for the race.
It’s difficult to determine who was vindicated by the results—Walls or his critics. But the outcome was segregation for as long as it could be maintained.
Unfortunately, there was no one like Walls to lead the charge on healthcare for the Black community. Health services for Blacks were as segregated and meager as Whites could make them. Blacks were not permitted in White doctors’ offices and routine medical services were dispensed out of a separate Blacks-only clinic in a back room in city hall until 1899. In that year, the first public hospital was opened, but it would only treat Blacks in wards separate from Whites. While the hospital hired Blacks for cooking and cleaning, there were none to care for patients. As late as 1931, nearly 100 Blacks were employed as orderlies, cooks, janitors, waiters, and maids, but not one was employed as a nurse or doctor. The few local Black physicians there were could not see their patients in the hospital, and qualified applicants for training as nurses were turned away by the hospital’s administration, forced to go to other cities for their education. The message was clear: African-Americans were servants and that was all they could ever hope to be in Atlantic City.
While upper- and middle-class Blacks of the Northside prospered, the seasonal employment, squalid housing, and poor health services for a majority of Blacks took their toll on the quality of life. Without proper food, clothing, shelter, or medical care, many Black babies didn’t make it through the winter months. A large percentage of their parents contracted tuberculosis at a rate more than four times that of Whites.
A city that could host millions of tourists refused to provide facilities for combating tuberculosis among its Black population. To openly admit to such a problem would have been bad publicity for the tourist economy, and Atlantic City would have none of that.
4
Philadelphia’s Playground
Prostitution was a ticklish subject in the resort. The presence of brothels in turn-of-the-20th century Atlantic City was well known, but talked about little. That’s why the exposés on the local prostitution trade published in the Philadelphia Bulletin in early August 1890 caused such a stir.
August was the resort’s busiest month, and the locals felt the Bulletin’s timing was deliberate. The summer was going well for the entire community. The weather was cooperating and tourists flocked to town, spending freely. The Bulletin was Philadelphia’s most popular newspaper, and many of its readers were regular visitors to Atlantic City. The newspaper had tracked down the infamous Lavinia Thomas and Kate Davis, together with dozens of other veteran prostitutes. They had been chased out of Philadelphia for operating “disorderly houses” and found refuge in Atlantic City. In a series of front-page articles, trumpeted by banner headlines, the Bulletin listed the names and addresses of more than 100 local madams and their houses, and righteously condemned their presence. A page one editorial scolded the resort, “What community would hail, as a blessing, or as an evidence of prosperity, the establishment of a vile brothel in its midst?” The newspaper continued its scorn adding, “There are more than 100 of these dens of infamy in Atlantic City. Just think of it—100 such places in a city of this size!”
Resort merchants were upset with the coverage their town was receiving at the hands of the Bulletin. They worried it might scare away some of the family trade. Everyone knew the resort was a sanctuary for out-of-town whores, especially during the summer, but no one was comfortable reading about them. A few of the merchants panicked and suggested the brothels be closed temporarily until things calmed down.
Despite the uproar, level heads prevailed and business continued as usual amid reports that local police officers were confiscating the Bulletin from Boardwalk newsstands as quickly as the papers arrived. The Bulletin responded with more page one editorials demanding city government to wipe out public prostitution, close down the gambling dens, and shut off the illegal booze. The paper preached at Mayor Harry Hoffman and city council members, “Do you gentlemen realize that you are called upon in your official capacity to take some action in these cases that have been brought to your attention? Can you imagine that gambling houses and brothels will bring wealth and prosperity to your city?” But gambling houses and brothels did bring wealth and prosperity to his city, and the mayor knew something the newspaper’s editors did not: The coming of fall would fade the Bulletin’s exposés and by next summer everything would return to normal.
While Atlantic City could survive without prostitution, it was an important part of the resort’s entertainment package and there was no way the whorehouses would be closed. The Bulletin could condemn the peddling of flesh if it wanted, but most of the “johns” were from Philadelphia and Atlantic City was giving them what they wanted. Located only 60 miles from Philadelphia, it was inevitable the resort would be drawn into that city’s orbit. Despite present-day myths of the old Atlantic City’s grandeur and elegance, Jonathan Pitney’s beach village had become to Philadelphia what Coney Island would be to New York—a seaside resort dedicated to providing a cheap, good time for the working man. Cape May could keep the rich—Atlantic City welcomed Philadelphia’s blue-collar workers who came to escape Quaker Philadelphia.
The City of Brotherly Love has never been known as a party town. Founded in 1681 as a religious experiment by William Penn, a wealthy Quaker from England, Philadelphia was envisioned as a place where Christians could live together in spiritual union. Penn dreamt of a city governed by the rules of a Friends Meeting. He was committed to liberating his new city from the divisive politics and religious wars of Europe and refused to set up a conventional government, relying instead on brotherly love. Penn’s vision never became reality, but the mix of Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Baptists, drawn to his city by the policy of religious tolerance, produced a God-fearing population with strict standards of social morality. Honesty and success in business, together with a virtuous life centered on one’s church and family, were the ideals of Quaker Philadelphia.
Among no group was the principle of blood being thicker than water more faithfully observed than with the Quakers. Persecuted throughout Europe for their religious beliefs, the Quakers were dispersed around the world and could be found in most seaports with which Philadelphia had commercial relations. Quaker tradition required them to share information on pricing and availability of goods, and their merchants prospered. It’s little wonder that Philadelphia, which did not exist until a half-century after the founding of Boston, had become the leading city of the colonies by the time of the Revolutionary War. It was also the most successful seaport in the New World. The city’s prosperity was in large part based on the exchange of Pennsylvania farm products for finished goods from Europe. During the Colonial period, Philadelphia was famous for its merchants, shipbuilders, and seamen. It was a major port and played a pivotal role in England’s relationship with the American colonies. Following the Revolutionary War, Quaker money transformed Philadelphia into America’s first industrial city.
The first half of the 19th century saw Philadelphia turn away from the sea, directing its energies inland. By 1825 the City of Brotherly Love was reaping profits from the coal and iron of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Philadelphia merchants cornered the market on the transportation of coal and were the first to excel in iron manufacturing, gaining notoriety for heavy machinery and ornamental cast iron. However, iron and coal were only part of the economy; finished cotton and wool were also major products of the city. By 1857 Philadelphia had more textile factories than any other city in the world. There were more than 260 factories manufacturing cotton and woolen goods. Cheap coal provided ready steam, giving Philadelphia a decisive edge over other cities in supporting its textile and garment industry. During the American Civil War, it was Philadelphia’s textile factories that clothed the Union Army.
The period from the Civil War into the new century saw William Penn’s experiment grow to be an industrial giant. In 1860 the city’s population stood at 565,000; by 1900, it had reached 1.3 million. Turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania was America’s foundry, the center of heavy industry—coal, iron, and steel. New York was the melting pot and Chicago the city of broad shoulders, but Philadelphia is where the Industrial Revolution was won in the United States. The factory mode of production was first introduced to America before 1840 in the cotton mills of New England. After the Civil War, the factory system came to full bloom in Philadelphia. For nearly three generations, Philadelphia had the most diversified and extensive economy of any American city. Its workers produced warships for foreign powers and steam engines for railroad companies around the world. They built tractors and trucks, knitted sweaters and dresses, refined sugar, and manufactured countless other products for the booming American economy.
Philadelphia was home to a staggering number of manufacturers in the iron and steel industry. Its foundries produced one-third of the country’s manufactured iron, turning out everything from nuts, bolts, rivets, horseshoes, machine tools, and power hammers to cast iron building fronts, ship plates, locomotive turntables, elevators, ice cream freezers, and sewing machines. In addition, the textile and garment industry continued to rank first in the world. By 1904 more than a third of the city’s one-quarter million industrial workers were employed in textile plants, processing one-fifth of all wool consumed in the United States.
A flood of unskilled immigrants was absorbed into Philadelphia through the jobs created by the city’s factories. The work wasn’t always pleasant, and for many employees the adjustment to the industrial age was traumatic. Mass production of the factory system involved the division of labor into a series of simple, repetitive tasks. This process contrasted sharply with the traditional European craft mode of production in which a single worker produced the end product out of raw materials. Bound in service to machines from dawn to dusk, these unskilled workers were part of a system that had no regard for the Old World order of apprentice-journeyman-master. No longer could a worker attain rank and status according to his skill and experience. For most employees, factory work was degrading, having lost all hope of ever gaining independence through being the master of a craft. The new industrial world broadened the gap between rich and poor by emphasizing the role that capital played in the control of one’s life.
As Philadelphia grew into an industrial powerhouse many immigrants made their fortunes. But it took more than money to break into Philadelphia society. As one British traveler noted, “The exclusive feature of American society is no where brought broadly out as it is in the City of Philadelphia … it is, of course, readily discernible in Boston, New York, and Baltimore; but the line drawn in these places is not so distinctive or so difficult to transcend as it is in Philadelphia.” While William Penn’s vision of a Christian community never materialized, the religious beginnings produced a conservative and traditional town.
The Philadelphia establishment grudgingly accepted the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants who manned their factories, but it refused to compromise the rules on social behavior. A phenomenon that developed in response to the city’s growing blue-collar population was the “corner saloon,” which were little more than shacks placed outside the factories. There were thousands of them, and they provided beer and liquor to workers for a penny a glass. A strong temperance movement, fostered by the local establishment, rose up to stamp out the corner saloon. In 1887 the Pennsylvania Legislature was pressured into adopting the Brooks Law, which severely restricted who could hold a liquor license. In a single year, the number of liquor licenses in Philadelphia was reduced from 5,773 to 1,343. Statutes regulating hours and Sunday Blue Laws further limited the flow of booze to the working class. The patricians who ran Philadelphia were determined to keep their town God-fearing and sober.
Philadelphia’s blue-collar workers soon found out there was a place they could go for a hell-raising good time. Quaker morality had no place in Atlantic City. Prudish standards preaching abstinence from the vices of alcohol, gambling, and casual sex might be observed at home, but while vacationing at the shore, pleasure was the standard and virtue was put in the closet. As Atlantic City entered the 20th century, it acquired a reputation that made it popular with Philadelphia’s factory workers. Sharing the commitment of Boardwalk merchants like John Young were saloonkeepers, madams, and gambling room operators, all determined to give visitors whatever it took to make them happy. The resort existed to make its guests happy. As one long-time resident who understood what Atlantic City was all about has said, “If the people who came to town had wanted Bible readings, we’d have given ’em that. But nobody ever asked for Bible readings. They wanted booze, broads, and gambling, so that’s what we gave ’em.”
Philadelphia’s factories were infernos during the summer. After six days of sucking textile dust or dodging burning cinders, most workers were ready to bust out. Hot summer Sundays weren’t spent in church; it was onto the train and down to the seashore. When they arrived, tourists found a city bent on providing pleasures to satisfy every taste, whether lawful or not. For many of Philadelphia’s workers, the Sunday excursion was their only chance to get away and the last thing they wanted to hear was Atlantic City’s bars were closed on Sunday. Like Pennsylvania, New Jersey’s laws prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages on the Sabbath. In Atlantic City, Sunday wasn’t a day of worship but rather the biggest day of the week, and when it came to making a buck, state law was irrelevant. The booze flowed seven days a week with bartenders willing to serve anyone except children.
For the visitor who relished the excitement of gambling, there were plenty of opportunities. Gambling had been popular with tourists and a moneymaker for the resort since the 1860s. Roulette, faro, and poker were popular games found in most of the taverns, as well as in hotels and clubs. There was no problem for a gambler to find a game, regardless of the size of his pocketbook. In one of its annual series of exposés a writer for the Bulletin reported,As to gambling houses, I can only say this, they are run from away down below Mississippi Avenue where they place a $.05 limit, up to Dutchy’s on Delaware Avenue where some of the best known politicians and down-grade businessmen of Philadelphia stake their $5 to $10 on the deal of the little cards. The Lochiel (a gambling casino) is the center of the gambling in the resort … Dutchy (a gambler who had been driven from Philadelphia) rules the Roost.
The prevalence of gambling, prostitution, and unlawful sales of liquor were admitted to openly by local officials. Hundreds of local families relied on illegal sources of income and as long as the visitors were happy, no one interfered. This brazen violation of the law created a furor in the Philadelphia newspapers nearly every summer. In time, resort businessmen and politicians built up immunity to the newspapers’ criticisms. They learned that being so remote geographically had its advantages. In the years prior to the automobile, other than direct rail service from Philadelphia or New York, Atlantic City was a difficult place to get to. A judge or legal officer sent to enforce the Sunday Blue Laws would have to be dispatched from Trenton. Whether by horseback or stagecoach, such a trip would take an entire day. The powers that be in Trenton were aware of the goings on in the resort, but no one went to the trouble to do anything about it. Thus, the Philadelphia newspapers banged out their editorials condemning the resort, but they never heard from Atlantic City’s officials. Resort politicians knew best how to deal with such complaints—ignore them. When it came to negative news articles about their town, the prevailing attitude among Atlantic City’s politicians was always, “Newspaper is what you wrap fish in.”
Nothing prevented the resort from providing illicit thrills to its patrons, not even a crusading governor in the New Jersey Statehouse. John Fort was elected in the fall of 1907 campaigning on a promise to enforce the Bishops’ Law, which prohibited sale of alcoholic beverages on Sunday. In response to the annual summertime exposés of the Bulletin, Governor Fort declared war on Atlantic City. In July of 1908 he vowed to clean up the town. He appointed a special commission to investigate the resort’s illegal activities and demanded to know why the county prosecutor refused to file complaints against the saloon keepers, gambling room operators, and madams cited by Philadelphia’s newspapers.
In August 1908, Atlantic County Prosecutor Clarence Goldenberg appeared before the governor’s commission. Goldenberg testified that personally he saw nothing wrong with the way the resort was run, but that if someone had evidence of wrongdoing, he would prosecute the cases. The prosecutor admitted that witnesses had brought complaints to him, but that on each occasion after a “courteous hearing,” the grand jury refused to return an indictment. “It has been impossible to get indictments … the grand juries are representative of the business interests of the city and the county. The people of the city are getting the government they want.”
The grand juries were handpicked by the county sheriff, Smith Johnson. Sheriff Johnson understood the legal system and knew how to protect Atlantic City’s businessmen. He controlled the selection of the grand jury and saw to it that everyone chosen to serve was “safe.” He even chose jurors who were tavern owners themselves or local businessmen who benefited from vice. When asked why he made no arrests, Johnson told Governor Fort’s commission that he had enough to do already and saw no need to “go looking for trouble.”
The preliminary reports from his commission enraged Governor Fort. On August 27, 1908, Fort issued a Proclamation branding Atlantic City a “Saturnalia of Vice,” demanding the city close the saloons on Sunday and threatening to exercise Martial Law by sending in the state militia. The Governor’s Proclamation read in part:No one in office or before the Commission questioned the fact that street walking, gambling, houses of ill-fame, people of ill-repute, and obscene pictures and open violations of the Excise laws exist in Atlantic City … never have the notorious street walkers been worse than they have been recently. Never has gambling been more open and more of it in the city than it is right now and the police department and officials of the city all know it.
The resort’s political leaders countered the governor with their tried and true defense—they ignored him. But the business community was incensed and launched a counterattack. On September 8, 1908, a joint letter from the Atlantic City Board of Trade, the Hotel Men’s Association, and the Businessmen’s League was sent to Governor Fort. It amounted to an “Atlantic City Manifesto,” arguing that the governor was being heavy-handed and had treated the resort unfairly. As for the gambling, prostitution, and illegal sale of liquor, the businessmen asserted the “peculiar needs” of a vacation town. It was simply the local custom of entertaining guests and the traditional way of doing business in Atlantic City. This broadside at the governor appeared in the Bulletin and stated in part:The Excise Commission came down and substantially demanded that the sale of liquor on Sunday should immediately cease. This demand, coming as it did in the midst of the summer season, after 50 years disregard, was not complied with … She (the resort) hopes that the State Legislature will not permit to remain longer upon the statute books, in their present shape, laws so crudely drawn that, in their endeavor to prevent a wrong, they, without necessity, have prohibited a right which all consider it without harm to anyone, and which is necessary to the welfare of one of the State’s principal industries, namely, its seashore business.
Governor Fort’s commission never got around to issuing its final report until late December. By that time, the furor had subsided and the report’s recommendations were forgotten, as were the governor’s complaints. The notoriety didn’t hurt any, and by the following summer it was business as usual.
The more popular Atlantic City became, the greater was the need for cooperation between the resort’s businessmen and politicians. Everyone in town lived off the profits from the three months of summer. If the season was slow, it could mean a long, cold winter. Without the blessing of the community, the racketeers who provided the “booze, broads, and gambling” would have had a tenuous existence. Atlantic City’s residents understood the role of the local vice industry and appreciated the need for protecting it from interference by law enforcement officials. From the beginning, the police were instructed to turn their heads. Whatever the attraction, if it brought visitors to town and helped to generate a few dollars for the local economy without hurting anyone, then it was legal by Atlantic City’s standards.
As the resort’s economy matured, the vice industry’s relationship with the local government became more structured. The politicians saw the easy money being made by the racketeers and demanded a piece of the action. Prior to the beginning of the 20th century, an informal partnership between the politicians and racketeers ran the town with broad-based consent of the community. Day-to-day decisions were made by a three-man coalition consisting of County Clerk Louis Scott, Congressman John Gardner, and County Sheriff Smith Johnson. Scott was the unofficial leader of the threesome. His most trusted lieutenant and protégé was a young hotelier, Louis Kuehnle.
Born on Christmas Day 1857, Louis Kuehnle was tall and broad-shouldered. He had a ruddy complexion, dark brown eyes, and a bald head nearly always covered with a hat. Kuehnle smoked big cigars, wore dapper clothes, and enjoyed a good time with the boys. He also had a fondness for dogs. His terrier, “Sparkey,” was his constant companion, following him around town for nearly 15 years. Sparkey went everywhere with his master, including city council meetings, restaurants, and church. Kuehnle’s parents were German immigrants from New York, where his father was renowned as a chef. The Kuehnles were attracted by Atlantic City’s growing tourist economy.
Kuehnle’s father had acquired a small fortune working in New York and quickly made a successful transition from chef to hotel owner. He purchased a large hotel in the mainland community of Egg Harbor City, the New York Hotel, and another in Atlantic City known as Kuehnle’s Hotel. The latter was built shortly after Richards’ second railroad and was located in a prime spot on the north side of Atlantic City near the railroad station. It was a typical “hotel,” a large boardinghouse, for its day, with a wraparound porch highlighted by Victorian gingerbread and wicker furniture. Kuehnle’s Hotel was a popular meeting place year-round for local residents.
By age 18, Louis Kuehnle took over the management of the hotel in Atlantic City. In a short time, Kuehnle was running the hotel on his own, looking after every detail and overseeing everything from changing sheets and cleaning the barroom to waiting on guests in the dining room. Kuehnle was a typical resort hotelier and enjoyed playing the role of host. Through the management of his family’s hotel Kuehnle became well known by everyone in town. He was free with his money; he entertained generously and never denied a request for help from the resort’s poor. Kuehnle joined the Atlantic City Yacht Club and became active in its affairs, serving as chairman. He earned the unofficial rank of “Commodore,” a moniker that stayed with him the remainder of his life. In time, the entire town referred to him only as “the Commodore.” During the next 20 years, the Commodore created a loyal crew of supporters by doing favors and offering his hotel as a meeting place for anyone who needed it.
Kuehnle’s Hotel became known by both politicians and the general public alike as “the Corner.” The ruling coalition of Scott, Gardner, and Johnson met regularly at the Corner to plan their strategy and to hear requests from their constituents. From the porch of Kuehnle’s Hotel, these three power brokers dispensed patronage and favors. In time, people seeking political favors had to first clear their petitions with Kuehnle who had the ear of Scott and his partners. Trusted implicitly by the members of this ruling coalition, Kuehnle’s voice soon became a potent factor in political decisions. At the time of Scott’s death in 1900, his two cohorts had neither the youth nor desire to assume control and Kuehnle became the unchallenged leader. In a short time after Scott’s death, the Commodore was Boss and nothing was done without his okay; every candidate, employee, city contract, and mercantile license required his nod of approval.
When things got hot everyone turned to the Commodore. The scorching attacks of Philadelphia’s newspapers and the threats made by reform governors caused anxious moments nearly every summer. The Corner was the scene of many late night meetings with Kuehnle calming the politicians’ fears by reminding them that publicity of any kind was good for business. One popular story has it that the Commodore assured his lieutenants and the local merchants that if the governor ever did send down the militia, then Kuehnle would have the local whores greet them at the train station.
Kuehnle’s closest ally was Smith Johnson, who served as sheriff every other three years from 1890 to 1908. State law prohibited a sheriff from succeeding himself and Johnson was forced to alternate from sheriff to deputy sheriff. When his first term for office was up, Johnson nominated his loyal deputy, Sam Kirby, to run for sheriff. Upon his election, Kirby appointed Johnson his deputy and so on and so on for 20 years. As sheriff, Johnson doled out political patronage and controlled the fees collected by his office. There were charges for such things as serving summonses, conducting real estate foreclosure sales, executing on civil judgments, and housing inmates in the county jail. These fees totaled $50,000 annually at a time when a round-trip excursion ticket from Philadelphia cost $1. The fees were the personal income of the sheriff and he answered to no one except his political allies. Johnson’s fees together with the protection money paid by the gambling rooms, brothels, and saloons financed Kuehnle’s organization. When the fee system was abolished by state government and the sheriff limited to an annual salary of $3,500, the Commodore squeezed the racketeers harder, making protection money from the vice industry the life blood of the local Republican Party.
The source of Kuehnle’s power included more than protection money. The Commodore was embraced by the business community, which supported his efforts to build up the resort. Kuehnle’s favorite slogans were “A bigger and better Atlantic City,” and “Boost, don’t knock.” He succeeded in identifying the local Republican Party with the welfare of the community. Any criticism of the Commodore’s regime became an attack on the city. Hoteliers and Boardwalk merchants would shudder at reformers complaining of corruption. “It will hurt the town,” they said, “don’t spoil the season.” Success of “the season” was everything to local residents. With tourism the only industry in town, the months of June, July, and August were crucial. Nothing could interfere with the visitors’ happiness and the last thing merchants needed was some reformer tampering with things.
The Commodore understood that Atlantic City’s business owners would gladly sacrifice honest government for a profitable summer and he gave them what they wanted. Kuehnle protected the rackets from prosecution and worked with the tourist industry to ensure its success. In exchange, the community let him call the shots.
Louis Kuehnle used his power to help transform a sprawling beach village into a modern city. He understood the need for making investments in public facilities to accommodate the growth generated by Atlantic City’s increased popularity. He believed the resort needed a larger, permanent Boardwalk and saw to it that a new Boardwalk with steel pilings and girders was constructed. Resort residents, in particular the hotels and shops, were the victims of a telephone monopoly. Kuehnle broke it up by starting an opposing company, which later was controlled by an independent telephone system with reduced rates. The city’s electric lighting was inadequate and expensive; the Commodore backed a competing utility and prices came down. Natural gas was selling at $1.25 per 1,000 feet and Kuehnle organized a gas company, which resulted in prices going down to $.90 per 1,000. The local trolley system, important to the convenience of both tourists and residents, was a mess. Kuehnle organized the Central Passenger Railway Company, which was eventually sold to the Atlantic City and Shore Company, that gave residents and visitors alike first-rate street and railway service.
Kuehnle was corrupt, but he had a vision for his town’s future and he worked the levers of power to make that vision a reality. Vitally important, the Commodore realized that without a secure source of fresh water, this island community would never become a true city. His foresight was the driving force behind the purchase of several large tracts on the mainland that were used as sites for wells for Atlantic City’s water system. (A portion of this acreage would years later become the site of the Atlantic City International Airport.) It was also his regime that established the city’s first modern sewage treatment facility. Additionally, street paving, or the lack of it, had been a sore point ever since the resort was founded, with visitors and locals having to constantly dodge mud puddles. Kuehnle went into the paving business, and in a short time the resort had safe and clean paved avenues and streets. Under Kuehnle’s reign, all the elements for the infrastructure of a modern city were put into place.
Atlantic City prospered and so did the Commodore. The companies organized by Kuehnle were all sold at handsome profits to buyers who knew they would have no difficulty obtaining franchises and contracts from the city. Kuehnle was one of the owners of the Atlantic City Brewery, and its beer was the most popular in the resort. If a saloonkeeper wanted his liquor license renewed and not be cited for selling brew on Sunday, he bought the right beer. Kuehnle amassed a fortune.
Money was only part of the foundation for the Commodore’s machine. As the County Republican leader, Kuehnle had control over the appointment of the county prosecutor and judges. Only loyal party people got into power. Working closely with the county sheriff’s office, Kuehnle set up a network that insulated his organization from the legal system. It was the sheriff who selected the persons who served on grand juries. The juries, handpicked by Smith Johnson, would never indict any of the Commodore’s people.
During Kuehnle’s years in power there was no Democratic opposition. Atlantic City’s population accounted for more than 60 percent of the population in Atlantic County. The remainder of the county was populated by people either dependent on the Atlantic City tourist trade or small farmers who tended to vote Republican. The strength of the Republican Party in Atlantic County was typical of South Jersey at that time. For more than 30 years after the American Civil War, the politics of the southern New Jersey counties was dominated by United States Senator William J. Sewell of Camden. Sewell, an Irish immigrant, had served as a major general in the Union Army and fought at both Gettysburg and Chancellorsville. After the war, he entered politics and served as state senator for nine years, becoming president of the Senate in 1880. The next year he was elected by the legislature to the United States Senate, where he served two terms. Sewell’s long public service and forceful personality made him a leader of the New Jersey Republican Party and the dominant force of the Republican Party in South Jersey. With Sewell in power, there was no hope for a Democratic Party anywhere in South Jersey. As Jonathan Pitney had learned, Democrats had no chance at real political power.
The Commodore wasn’t content just having control of Atlantic City politics. If he were to catch the attention of the state Republican organization, he would need to dominate things totally. In order to do that, he had to run up election margins in a big way. A key ingredient to his strategy was the manipulation of the resort’s African-American voters. From the time of the Civil War until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, the overwhelming majority of Blacks who voted in this country voted Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln. The presence of such a substantial minority, with a predictable voting pattern, made Atlantic City’s African-American population a pawn in Kuehnle’s rise to power. He exploited them for every vote he could.
The Commodore became enormously popular in the Northside by providing for needy Blacks out of work during the winter months. The off-season could be a harsh struggle for many year-round residents of the Northside, and Kuehnle helped them make it through the winter. Under the Commodore, the Republican Party established its own private welfare system, dispensing free food, clothing, and coal and paying doctor bills. At Kuehnle’s prompting, the hotel and boardinghouse owners required all of their employees to register to vote. Any African-American worker who failed to register was harassed until he did. On Election Day, Kuehnle’s lieutenants went into the Northside and rousted Black voters out of their homes. Groups of about 20 Blacks at a time were taken in wagons from ward to ward voting repeatedly, for which they were paid $2 a ballot. The scheme of election fraud was denounced by a national magazine of the day as “the rawest ever known in the country.”
Republican election-day workers stood outside the polls with their pockets crammed with $2 bills. They each had a list of deceased and fictitious voters whose names appeared on the voter registration rolls. As the African-American voters entered the polls, they were assigned a name and given a sheet of carbon paper, the size of the regular ballot, together with a sample ballot. “There is your name and there is your address. Now, for God’s sake, don’t forget where you live.” The voter then took his carbon and the sample into the booth with him and marked the regular ballot on the carbon over the sample ballot. When he returned outside, if the markings were right, the voter received his $2. Voters who wanted a second try at the same poll would wait for another Black voter and exchange a hat or an overcoat and then receive another name under which to vote.
Atlantic County’s small population kept the Commodore’s machine from being a major influence in a statewide general election; however, it often was a decisive factor in a primary. The ability to crank out lopsided votes in a Republican primary made Kuehnle a power broker on the state level. Politicians respect votes no matter how they’re gotten and Kuehnle was wooed by every Republican seeking statewide office. Within the first decade of the 20th century, the Atlantic City machine was one of the key political organizations in New Jersey, able to influence the selection of candidates for governor, senator, and congressman. Kuehnle’s stature as a statewide leader increased his power at home. But not everyone was a fan of the Commodore.
There was a small but vocal reform movement made up of the owners of family-oriented businesses and the large hotels along the Boardwalk. Some of the large Boardwalk hotel owners, like the White family of the Marlborough-Blenheim, were from Philadelphia with Quaker backgrounds. They opposed Kuehnle’s tactics and wanted Atlantic City to be a middle-class family resort without relying on “booze, broads, and gambling.” Others—a small minority—continued to dream of Atlantic City as a genteel resort for the upper crust as Jonathan Pitney had envisioned. Both the Quakers and the dreamers felt things had gone too far under the Commodore. They wanted the resort cleaned up and, though a tiny minority, were a source of tension in the community. This reform group made itself heard through the Atlantic City Review and its editor, Harvey Thomas. A coldly serious, steely looking, hard-hitting muckraker, cut from the same cloth as Lincoln Steffens, Harvey Thomas had been brought to town by a clique of wealthy Boardwalk hoteliers who resented Kuehnle and wanted him out of power.
There was a definite class distinction between the large hotel owners along the Boardwalk and the smaller hotels and boardinghouses throughout the town. The Boardwalk hotels featured themselves as hosts to the refined elements of society. “Booze, broads, and gambling” were offensive to them and their clientele. But the backbone of the resort were the blue-collar visitors who stayed in boarding-houses. They came to town to let loose and enjoy the pleasures they couldn’t find in Philadelphia. The boardinghouse owners were firmly in Kuehnle’s camp, while the Boardwalk hoteliers viewed him as a power hungry bully. Their chance to launch an attack on the Commodore came in the gubernatorial election of 1910.
The election of 1910 was a milestone for both Kuehnle and New Jersey. The Republican candidate for governor was Vivian Lewis, a favorite of the Commodore. The Atlantic County Republican Organization was the first to endorse Lewis’ bid for governor. Kuehnle was friendly with Lewis and knew his candidate could be counted on to overlook the way things were done in the resort. Lewis’ opponent was a scholarly reformer, Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned on a pledge to wipe out corruption at all levels of government.
Woodrow Wilson was the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers. While a religious background was common among politicians of his day, Wilson was a crusader who saw things in black and white. Impersonal in his relations, he attracted supporters in much the same way people latch on to an abstract principle. A visionary and idealist, he never permitted personal feelings to interfere with his policies and couldn’t forgive supporters who failed to measure up to his standards.
When Wilson entered New Jersey politics, the state was a prime example of what reformers throughout the country were battling. In New Jersey, according to one observer, “The domination of politics by corporation-machine alliances had reached its full flower.” The state was ruled by an oligarchy composed of the captains of industry, in particular, the railroad and utility interests. Republican and Democratic bosses working hand-in-glove had permitted these special interests to become entrenched in New Jersey’s political machinery. Throughout the state there was a deep-seated hostility to large corporations and the special privileges they received from state government. There were progressives in both parties who had managed to elect candidates to the legislature, but the governor’s office remained a captive of the special interests. By 1910, the party bosses knew the public was primed to elect a reform governor. The state Democrats were desperately seeking a new leader who could carry their party into power on the crest of the progressive wave that was rolling over the country.
Woodrow Wilson was there at the right time. A transplant from Virginia, Wilson had come to New Jersey to serve as president of Princeton University. His background as a Southerner and a minister’s son blended well with the contempt for machine politics that prevailed in educated Northern circles. Wilson was a political scientist and a noted author. His book Congressional Government, published in 1885, had attracted widespread interest and won lasting acclaim as a classic of American political analysis. From the mid-1880s to 1910, he was recognized as the country’s most authoritative writer on political science. Wilson was also the master of the spoken word and used his talents to generate support for the academic community in a way no university president before him had. While at Princeton, he attracted greater attention than any other college president in American history.
Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton University gave him a pulpit from which to speak out on political issues of the day. Shortly after the 1904 election, Wilson emerged as a spokesman for conservative Democrats in opposition to William Jennings Bryan. In 1906 he received several votes in the New Jersey Legislature as a minority Democratic candidate for United States Senator. There was even talk of him as a dark horse candidate for President or Vice President in 1908. As spokesman for the anti-Bryan Democrats, Wilson won the attention of a number of Wall Street financiers and politicians who began boosting him as a presidential candidate. Several prominent editors, including George Harvey of Harper’s Weekly, Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier Journal, and William Laffin of the New York Sun went out of their way to give Wilson positive exposure.
George Harvey became a loyal supporter of Wilson after hearing him make an address at Princeton. In 1906, Harvey began printing a headline across the cover of each issue of Harper’s Weekly; it read, “For President—Woodrow Wilson.” The publisher wanted to be a kingmaker and assigned a staff writer to begin “advertising” Wilson with a view to making him Governor of New Jersey in 1910 and a presidential candidate in 1912. Harvey took it upon himself to run interference for Wilson’s candidacy, making the initial contact with the state’s Democratic boss, former U.S. Senator James Smith.
Jim Smith was an old-time political boss, likeable and gentlemanly, who had held a prominent position in both the business and political life of New Jersey for more than a generation. From his headquarters in Newark, he dominated the powerful Essex County Democratic machine and was the state’s most powerful Democratic power broker. Smith didn’t need much convincing. New Jersey’s Democrats were a minority and if they were to have any hope of succeeding in the election of 1910, they had to run a reform candidate. The nomination for governor was offered to Wilson with no strings attached. If elected, he would have a free hand as governor.
Wilson was a dynamic campaigner. Sounding much like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, he pounded away at his opponent’s weaknesses. He reminded voters that his opponent had been handpicked by the Republican machine and would be no more than a caretaker for the special interests. Wilson campaigned against the boss system and asserted he could break it up through political reforms and by helping independent men gain election to the legislature. His candidacy held out the promise of not only the regeneration of the Democratic Party, but of all state government.
During his campaign, Woodrow Wilson appeared in Atlantic City before a group of prohibitionists and reformers. The rally had been organized by Kuehnle critic, newspaperman Harvey Thomas. Speaking before a crowd of 2,000—mostly out-of-towners—Wilson promised that one of the first places he would root out corruption and bossism was in Atlantic City.
The Commodore saw this preacher’s son for the very real threat he was. Kuehnle knew that a zealous moralist in the governor’s office would be trouble for Atlantic City. It’s likely there was more than one all-night strategy session at the Corner presided over by the Commodore. The Republican organization pulled out all the stops in an effort to elect Vivian Lewis. In less than six months time, there were 2,000 new voters registered in Atlantic City and the turnout on Election Day was a record one, with Lewis carrying the town handily. Much to the Commodore’s dismay, Wilson was elected together with Democratic majorities in both houses of the Legislature. Upon checking the election returns in Atlantic City, Woodrow Wilson noticed that his Republican opponent had received more votes than the city had registered voters.
Governor Wilson was determined to drive Kuehnle from power. Riding the crest of popularity created by his victory, Wilson had the legislature form a committee to investigate election fraud, focusing on Atlantic City. The “Macksey Committee,” named for its Chairman, Assemblyman William P. Macksey, found an abundance of evidence. The committee held 19 sessions at which it took testimony of more than 600 witnesses, producing more than 1,400 pages of sworn statements. The committee’s findings could have served as a basis for another political treatise by Wilson.
To no one’s surprise, the Macksey Committee learned that votes were purchased on a broad scale, primarily in the Northside. One witness called by the committee testified of his confrontation with a Republican poll worker who was doling out cash to African-American voters outside one of the voting places. “You are getting that man to vote in somebody’s name. Every one of you ought to go to prison.” To which he was told, “If you don’t get out of here they [referring to the Blacks] will trample you to death.” The dialogue continued, “I said, ‘Before they trample me to death there will be a few dead negroes here.’ He says, ‘Don’t call them niggers.’ I said, ‘I didn’t call them niggers, I called them negroes, but if you are buying your votes you are worse than a nigger for buying votes.’”
There were key leaders of the Northside who were part of Kuehnle’s organization. One such poll worker was discussed before the Macksey Committee. “So after that, men came out from the polls and would hand the man a slip; he was a very well dressed darkey, a dude, rather, he was too well-dressed for his color, he walked up the street with them and he would take out his roll and give them money. I saw him do that time and time again.”
In all, there were approximately 3,000 fraudulent votes cast in Atlantic City in the election of 1910, but there’s more to the story. In one district, two persistent Democratic challengers who protested fraudulent votes were drugged. They were given drinking water with a “shoe fly” in it. Shoe fly is a concoction of tartar emetic, which induces vomiting, and eleatarium, which causes diarrhea. It is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. One drink of a shoe fly and a Democratic challenger was done for the day. New registrants were added to the voter registration books on Election Day by the officials at the polls. Ballot boxes were removed from the view of the general public and challengers who objected were forcibly removed from the polls by local police officers.
Kuehnle’s people engaged in a practice known as “colonizing” voters, which involved hundreds of fictitious voters being registered at local hotels. The fraud was so widespread and well organized that it couldn’t possibly have occurred without a close working relationship between the Republican organization and dozens of small hotel and boardinghouse owners of Atlantic City. Additionally, many transient seasonal workers of various hotels, restaurants, shops, and arcades, referred to as “floaters,” registered to vote in Atlantic City by using their place of summer employment as their address. They returned from out-of-town to cast their vote on Election Day. That year, hundreds of floaters were given train fare and paid to come back to town to vote for Vivian Lewis.
The Commodore himself was called before the committee and was asked what he knew of “the padded registration in Atlantic City last Fall.” In response to a question concerning his involvement in voting fraud, Kuehnle replied, “Why my instructions to the workers was that we didn’t want any padded lists, because we had enough Republican votes in Atlantic City and county to win the election at any time.” Despite the Commodore’s testimony, the Macksey Committee had more than enough information to prove widespread voter fraud.
The next step for Governor Wilson was to convert the committee’s report into criminal indictments. That wouldn’t be easy, and assuming an indictment could be obtained, securing convictions would be even harder. The last line of defense for Kuehnle’s machine were key players in the criminal justice system who could be counted on to frustrate the process. Realizing that County Prosecutor Clarence Goldenberg was a pawn of the Commodore, Wilson asked the legislature to enact special legislation enabling the attorney general to go into any county and conduct an investigation, replacing the local prosecutor. The legislature gave the governor what he wanted, and Attorney General Edmund Wilson moved in to put together criminal charges. But there was one more obstacle, the county sheriff. The sheriff was now Smith Johnson’s son, Enoch. Sam Kirby had moved on to county clerk. Enoch Johnson had learned how to draw a grand jury from his father and there was no way any grand jury he chose would return an indictment against an Atlantic City politician.
The first presentation of evidence secured by the Macksey Committee was to a grand jury sitting before Judge Thomas Trenchard, a product of the Commodore’s machine. After hearing the evidence presented, the grand jury deliberated and found no basis for an indictment. Governor Wilson was incensed and made a move to replace both Sheriff Johnson and Judge Trenchard. Wilson used a vacancy in the court system to appoint Samuel Kalish, an independently wealthy and respected trial attorney from Mercer County. Upon arriving in Atlantic County, Judge Kalish ordered the sheriff to draw a grand jury and to present the members in court to be admonished prior to commencing their duties. When the jurors appeared, Attorney General Wilson noticed that one of them was Thomas Bowman, who had been named in the Macksey Committee report. Bowman was one of the defendants to be charged with election fraud. Judge Kalish dismissed Bowman and the entire grand jury.
Over Johnson’s protests Kalish utilized a little known statute to appoint a committee of “elisors” and empowered them to choose a grand jury of 23 men, comprised of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Prohibitionists. The Commodore was powerless to stop Attorney General Wilson. With Sheriff Johnson and his hand-picked grand jury out of the way, the criminal justice system proceeded.
The new grand jury returned indictments naming more than 120 defendants, many of whom held positions in city government or the Republican organization. There was Kuehnle, Sheriff Enoch Johnson, Mayor George Carmany, City Councilman Henry Holte, City Clerk Louis Donnelly, Building Inspector Al Gillison, Health Inspector Theodore Voelme, Atlantic City Electric President Lyman Byers, and on and on. These indictments all dealt with election fraud and it was naïve for Governor Wilson to expect an Atlantic County jury to return guilty verdicts against officials of the Republican Party. Nearly everyone was acquitted.
One of the defendants acquitted was Enoch Johnson. His trial helped launch him on his way to becoming Kuehnle’s successor. Represented by long-time friend and political attorney Emerson Richards, Johnson took the stand in his own defense and arrogantly defied Attorney General Wilson. He referred to the presiding judge by his first name and addressed the jurors directly, many of whom were supporters of the Republican machine. Neither Johnson nor anyone else of importance in Kuehnle’s organization was convicted of election fraud.
Simultaneous with the investigation into election fraud was an inquiry of official corruption in Atlantic City’s government. It was no secret that Kuehnle and his lieutenants had been personally benefiting from municipal contracts. The requirement of public employees to pay a portion of their salary to the Republican Party and kickbacks on city contracts were common knowledge.
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