By David Dayton McKean
This book challenges some of these assumptions. Jersey
City offers to the student of American life a boss as powerful
and ruthless as any that New York or Chicago ever had.
The Hague organization, far from being injured by the New
Deal, has flourished under it, been preserved by it. The
machine has shown itself sufficiently adaptable to make
necessary adjustments to a national leadership which has
very different avowed objectives. No reawakening of civic
consciousness can take place, moreover, against a political
group which, like the one in Jersey City, controls newspapers
and buys off or intimidates opposition leaders. When no
effective criticism can be organized, the normal reaction to
public corruption is frustrated, and a political machine can
go to any length it may desire. In doing so it may, without
any effective local opposition, nullify those civil rights upon
which Americans pride themselves.
It is too commonly assumed that the methods by which
the totalitarian regimes have maintained themselves in
power have no American counterparts. Frank Hague has
not only used many of their methods with success, but he
used them twenty years ago, so that a certain political originality and inventiveness must be attributed to him. These
devices are not, however, totally new, but are rather variants
of old principles and practices, as the brief quotations beginning each chapter, taken from The Prince, written by that
sixteenth-century master of practical politics, Niccolo Machiavelli, will show. The Hague organization, alone among
American city machines, has systematically and successfully
utilized the methods of terrorism, the infiltration of groups
and associations, the suppression of criticism, and the hierarchical principle of leadership that have characterized the
fascist regimes in Europe. It has been shown in Jersey City
that these devices are not incompatible with American party
politics.
This Web version, edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003
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