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By David Dayton McKean
There is no civic league, no city betterment association, no
group to offer trenchant criticisms of public policies and to
demand reforms. The nearest, perhaps, is the Junior Service
League of Jersey City, an organization of women. In 1935
the league published an eighty-nine-page booklet called a
community survey, prepared by twenty-four clubwomen.
The report deplored the fact that `Jersey City's per capita
cost of general government was the highest of all the cities in
the United States with a population of over 100,000,' and
concluded from this that `the city administration has not always
been efficient.' This masterpiece of understatement
was followed by a recommendation for `further study' of the
expenses of running the government and a timid suggestion
for `a self-survey by the city administration.' The ladies
also regretted that the collection of garbage was inefficient,
and they hoped that before the next contract was let the
city would `insist upon a sanitary method of covering cans
and wagons.' They deplored overcrowding in schools, and
recommended that more public schools be built. They noted,
too, that `There is an anti-spitting ordinance which is not
well enforced.' The Hague organization is in no danger from
the Junior Service League.
An unorganized group has no chance of impressing the
machine. There is a story current in Jersey City that a group
of business men a few years ago got Mayor Hague to attend
a private meeting at which they recounted all their grievances
against his administration : high taxes, high assessments,
inefficient government, poor schools, and all the
rest. They made their complaints, and then they asked him
what he was going to do about them. He arose and told each
man what favors he had received from the organization,
what laws he was violating or had violated, or what money
he owed to banks of which the Mayor was a stockholder or
director. He reminded others of the relatives they had on the
public payroll, and he told some of them of business practices
in which they had engaged that would not make good
publicity. Then he put on his hat and walked out. As recently
as January, 1940, there was talk among certain Jersey
City bankers and business men of taking some sort of concerted
legal action against the new budget and the record-breaking
tax rate, but after secret meetings in Newark and
New York nothing was done. There was only one banker
who felt that he could risk a fight with the organization; he
said (privately), 'They all ran out on me.' The thesis advanced
in some national periodicals that the business men
of Jersey City like the regime because of its anti-labor policies
cannot be sustained; they tolerate the machine because they
can do nothing else.
This Web version, edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003
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