Hague's End

An old man with a hawk nose, hard eyes and a trap-door mouth stood in the auditorium of a Jersey City high school and harangued a crowd. He had given them the great Jersey City Medical Center, the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital, he declaimed, his ancient dewlaps shaking above a high, old-fashioned collar. "Will we turn over these buildings," he demanded, "and desert motherhood?" The 5,000 yelled: "No." On & on the old man went, pleading, threatening, appealing for consideration of favors graciously done by a corrupt political machine.

Frank Hague had left his rococo Miami Beach winter home to rush back to Jersey City and take a hand in a city election. Defeat was in the wind. His stooge and nephew, Frank Hague Eggers, was on the run. Eggers, who had succeeded aging uncle Frank as mayor two years before, and four other Hague city commissioners were facing a well-heeled and powerful opposition which was determined to throw them out. The man in the high collar, who admits to 73 but is probably past 75, was fighting for political survival.

It was a political miracle that he had held on as long as he had. He had not elected a Democratic U.S. Senator in New Jersey since 1936, he had not elected a governor since 1941. He was still a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but his once powerful voice in national councils had faded. He could no longer guarantee to deliver the whole of New Jersey; only Hudson County remained in his clutch, and it was slipping from him.

The old man did his best. But the familiar, arrogant zip had gone. Jersey City had heard him out when it went to the polls last week. That day, after 36 years of pious corruption and political tyranny, Boss Hague was toppled from his throne.

New Boss. He had one meager item of consolation. The man who beat him was neither an independent, a reformer, nor a Republican upstart. He was John V. Kenny, onetime Hague lieutenant, whose own father, Eddie, had taught Frank Hague the ropes and got him his first political job as a constable more than 40 years ago. Young John Kenny became boss of the Second Ward. Then, a year ago, Hague had tossed him out because John was getting "too popular." Said Kenny frankly: "If Hague had not thrown me out, I probably would still be a member of the machine. I have to admit it."

Kenny lost no time striking back. He whipped together a fusion "Freedom Ticket": himself, three other Democrats and one Republican. They spent money lavishly. Kenny, small, dark, quietly confident, was himself a wealthy man, owner of a trucking business. Organized labor, civic groups, even suddenly hardy souls in the courthouse and city hall flocked to their side. Kenny had powerful connections. In Kenny's office on election night, listening to the returns, sat the Teamsters' czar, Dave Beck.

No More Rice Pudding. So Hagueism became a memory. Rice Pudding Day (when city, county and state job holders kicked back 3% of their annual salaries to a Boss Hague "campaign fund"), the fixed ballot boxes, the voting of the dead, the bullyboys beating up poll watchers, the cops swinging nightsticks on labor organizers--all that became history.

Left to Mayor Kenny was a city fairly free of crime and vice (Hague always boasted of his kingdom's purity), and a city with a first-class medical center and maternity hospital. Left to Mayor Kenny also was a city with one of the highest tax rates in the nation, rigged assessments, discouraged businesses, factories deserted by fleeing industry, a city turned into a huge patchwork of slums by political graft. Left to historians was the problem of discovering, if they could, the exact details of how Frank Hague, on a salary never bigger than the mayor's $8,500 a year, became several times a millionaire. Left to Frank Hague were his declining years--to spend in his suite at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, in his $7,000-a-year apartment in one of Jersey City's few good residential sections, in his $125,000 Deal (N.J.) summer home, or in his $100,000 winter home on Biscayne Bay. Doubtless old Frank Hague also had some pleasant memories.

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