Edison's Magna Carta

The good citizens of New Jersey are getting ready to deal Mayor Frank ("I Am the Law") Hague of Jersey City the worst blow of his undisputed 27-year career as boss of the state. The weapon: a new state constitution, up for ratification this year. If it is ratified, one of the three most notorious U.S. political machines* may be broken once & for all.

The 100-year-old present constitution is tailor-made for men of bad will who would make themselves the law. Under it, a governor has so little power that he cannot appoint his own cabinet; he is subject to the will of boss-appointed "department heads." A fabulous bureaucracy has arisen: 135 separate state departments, and an archaic, top-heavy judicial setup of 17 different state court systems--many controlled by Hague. The new constitution would give the governor his own cabinet and more power, would cut the departments to 20 and the court system to six, would replace the bulky 16-man Court of Errors and Appeals with a Supreme Court of seven. Worst of all for Boss Hague: a provision requiring public officials to answer legislative inquiries or lose their jobs.

The man responsible for this attempt to reform New Jersey is Boss Hague's fellow Democrat and archfoe, former Governor Charles Edison, 54, son of Inventor Thomas A. Edison and onetime Assistant Secretary of the Navy. From the start of his three-year term in 1941, smart, mild-mannered Governor Edison defied Hague more openly than any other governor has dared to. He dented Hague's armor badly, using the old state constitution as his bludgeon. Edison stumped the state, denouncing the inefficient basic law. Before his term was up, he got the people to vote for the submission of a new constitution at the 1944 election.

At first Frank Hague was not alarmed. Edison's term ended in 1944--ten months before the constitution would come up for ratification. But the new Republican governor, Walter Edge, took up the battle against Hague, and Edison, as a private citizen (president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.), stumped harder than ever, covering every county in the state. Governor Edge pushed a new constitution through the legislature.

By last week Boss Hague, now 68, was out stumping the state, too, and rumored to be spreading $500,000 among politicians. He was not boosting Term IV very hard: in one speech, he devoted two minutes to Franklin Roosevelt and 45 minutes to the "diabolical" constitution.

*Others: Boss Ed Crump's Memphis machine; Mayor Ed Kelly's Chicago machine.

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