On the Dotted Line
July 2, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 257 WHAT NEW JERSEY MEANS THE monumental victory of Dwight W. Morrow at the New Jersey Republican primaries is everywhere commented on as a heartening...
...To outsiders, and in a degree to Jerseymen themselves, New Jersey is politically a baffling state...
...he rather expected to lose, but even the Morrow leaders did not count on over 10,000 plurality, and Salmon thought that was too high...
...The New York gangs, of course, have their interest in a territory so near...
...in the Senate he voted for the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Law, and this year he calculated on winning by being wet, but less wet than Morrow, and so catching the great mass of voters who prefer the middle of the road...
...It has and vote dry...
...But all this is a long way from the rod rule of the Colosimos, O'Bannions and Al Capones...
...That result astounded all Newark...
...The wet Jerseyman differs from that, alas, too numerous brand of wet which is wet because it wants lawful liquor and for that reason only...
...That's why we have today the courageous Morrow, and, what is more important, the courageous and honest state in which he won his victory over pussy-footing...
...When the local beer satraps run short, they will invite the New York and Philadelphia gangs to lend a hand and help out, but not otherwise...
...So Superintendent Shields of the Anti-saloon League was using the "one-day Republicans," as Jerseymen call such voters, as a last chance...
...New Jersey is wet, but its wetness is not of the objectionable kind to be found in other wet centres like New York City and Chicago...
...The local Democratic bosses might naturally wish to see the Republicans nominate a beatable candidate...
...that, for instance, Paterson won't tolerate beer brought from Newark, and that no outsider dares to bring beer into Atlantic City without invitation...
...Well, the returns as I write this—of course they will be somewhat changed by the time this issue is printed—show that Morrow got 77,263 votes and Fort 22,602, Frelinghuysen trailing as elsewhere...
...Suppose, to be ludicrously magnanimous, that 200,000 of Morrow's majority was made up of these supermen who don't exist in any other state...
...He tried to retire as a gangster, and the supposition is that the "mobs" who had been feeding on him didn't want him to and were angry when he persisted...
...But this year the farmers of south Jersey maturely decided, on a plain and clear-cut issue, to make an end of political hypocrisy...
...there are, as there are twenty-one counties in the state, and there may be half everywhere, large areas where the voters not only drink of them that are preponderantly agricultural...
...The police attitude toward speakeasies in such cities is, "This is a workingman's town and the workingman needs his beer, and as long as he behaves himself he is safe from us...
...The Anti-saloon League did herculean work for Fort, and descended so far as to beg the dry Democrats to go into the Republican primaries and beat Morrow...
...but you can't cross off the If this statement seems to be bromidical, it will industrial centres as being of the same mental mold, seem so only to those who do not know the state of for men of agricultural heritage and breeding live in New Jersey...
...New Jersey, says the author, is "courageous and honest...
...It is true, according to all inside information, that there are beer monarchs in New Jersey, dividing the territory...
...and voted accordingly...
...Outside New Jersey, no political expert understands New Jersey...
...why he should have subsequently explained on the stump that he meant non-intoxicating home-brew...
...and it was in the Republican, not the Democratic, primaries, that they made that decision...
...They but manufacture liquor and yet rigidly vote dry...
...and the following paper, written after careful study of the scene, is an effort to provide as complete a panorama as possible...
...The driest of the dry sections, politically, is south Jersey, and it was there that Representative Fort counted chiefly on piling up such a majority that he the calculating politician, probably dry...
...The Italians' only interest is that they make their own wine...
...Morrow's defiant and uncompromising wetness showed him a quick opening to his ultimate goal, the senatorship, and as Frelinghuysen was a middle-of-the-road wet, and would presumably divide the wet vote with Morrow, a third candidate who got all the dry vote might win through the division...
...This are mainly Republican, and therefore, to the mind of year, for the first time, the voters in those areas— areas which can be limited and traced on the map and are perfectly well known—decided to vote wet...
...Dwight Morrow was courageous, but so were the New Jersey Republicans...
...It has two great commuting populations, but they too are alien to each other...
...Those pre-primary figures show again what I said at the outset, that not even Jerseymen can count on Jersey politics...
...Four days before the primaries one of the shrewdest of political observers, George Van Slyke of the New York Sun, reported the claim of Morrow's Essex County managers, which was that he would carry that county by 10,000, and added: "If the Ambassador gets it by even 2,500 he will be performing a great political feat...
...It might be called "respectably" wet...
...In most sections your neighbor does not speak the same political language that you his brain...
...While everybody knows the state is wet, no one was sure whether Republican drys could or could not block so outright a demand for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment as Mr...
...There is no state quite like it...
...they seem to date from the murder of Frankie Dunn in Hoboken...
...Heretofore drys haven't done that sort of thing anywhere...
...It is not, for instance, gang-ridden...
...This is the last chance they would have to do any such thing, for the Legislature, at its last session, prohibited voters from voting in the opposition primaries by providing that if you voted Republican or Democratic, two years must elapse before you could vote the other way...
...New York politics are the devil's own politics," said John Adams a century and a quarter ago, giving it up as a bad job...
...But the gang outbreaks in New Jersey are not Jersey products...
...But they went for Morrow...
...Nobody was more astounded than the Newark boss, Jesse R. Salmon, who was undertaking to deliver Essex to FrelinghuyTHE COMMONWEAL July 2, 1930 sen...
...Frelinghuysen has been on both sides of the fence...
...Essex County means, principally, Newark...
...Frelinghuysen, not only a politician of long experience but born that way—he is the third Frelinghuysen to have sat in the United States Senate: the first ran for Vice-president with Henry Clay and the second became Arthur's Secretary of State—was also fooled about his state...
...Fort's confidence seemed justified...
...But that law was not to take effect until after this last primary...
...But give the drys the benefit of that tenuous argument, and assume that the Jersey voters are supermen who can rise above the one great issue could wipe out Morrow's lead in the north and east, and coolly decide in favor of a candidate by weighing It is a farming region, where the farmers make applejack—and sell it to bootleggers, or many of them do— and yet vote piously for the Anti-saloon League...
...If there is any police grafting from speakeasies, I have not found any informed Jerseyman who knows of it...
...It is, as one Jerseyman said to me just before the primaries, "a patchwork state...
...they have asked themselves only one question, "Is this candidate dry or wet...
...A Jerseyman of long political experience, he discounted that poll and thought the Protestant churches and the Anti-saloon League could put him over, with the usual aid of the people who drink wet and vote dry...
...That, of course, is true, but there is something more...
...Hence, say my informants, that speech for "non-intoxicating" home-brew was made to sweeten the Italians without losing the drys...
...He is peaceable and not noisy, but red-hot for his own convictions to an extent probably unmatched in any other state...
...There was every likelihood that not only dry Democrats but wet Democrats would follow Shields's advice, for this reason...
...The Editors...
...great industrial centres...
...There are politicians and plain people...
...There is much else of political interest in New Jersey, however...
...Everybody, including Fort himself, expected him to run for reelection to the House...
...July 2, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 257 WHAT NEW JERSEY MEANS THE monumental victory of Dwight W. Morrow at the New Jersey Republican primaries is everywhere commented on as a heartening proof that it pays a man to be courageous and speak his mind on the prohibition question...
...inside New Jersey no Jerseyman is absolutely sure he is right about the next county...
...Morrow ventured to express...
...Fort himself, though not so obvious as Frelinghuysen, was an angler...
...Of course the drys accounted for their debacle on the generous assumption that their voters forsook them on account of Morrow's personality and mental stature...
...In such industrial centres as Newark, the police keep their hands off unless the speakeasies are also dens of vice, and the federal agents raid not speakeasies but stills and breweries...
...that pussy-footing and dodging have had their day as votegetters...
...At this writing there is no indication that they swallowed the Anti-saloon bait, and there are even rumors that in the Democratic stronghold, Hudson County, the Democratic leaders told their followers to keep out of the Republican primaries...
...Another proof of it is Fort, whose comment, "Obviously the Literary Digest poll was right," shows how his mind was working...
...The result is now clear...
...There have been gang killings in northern New Jersey...
...If Fort had won, the Democrats, with a wet candidate, would have had a good chance in November, for New Jersey has never yet elected a dry senator or governor...
...and if they were wet, that need not have hindered them from voting for Fort, since Alexander C. Simpson, the Democratic candidate, is wringing wet, and Fort would be a good man for him to beat...
...and he jumped in...
...It is one of the wet states, but straddling them in great numbers, cheek by jowl with the workthe issue has been a popular attitude there both among ingmen and thinking different thoughts...
...there was no confusing of the issue, though ex-Senator Frelinghuysen worked like a horse to draw red herrings across the trail...
...They resolved, by a majority whose size makes it impossible to argue By CHARLES WILLIS THOMPSON From the very day it started, Mr...
...It is crisscrossed not only by diverse interests but by diverse habits of thought...
...for one commutes from about its meaning, that they would no longer drink wet New York and the other from Philadelphia...
...Even Morrow's backers, while hoping that Senator Baird could hold the voters in line pretty well, were shaky about south Jersey until the last gun was fired...
...Morrow swept south Jersey as he swept every nook and corner in the whole state...
...Outside that mysterious state nobody could understand why he, a dry, should have advocated home-brew in Congress...
...when you talk with him your mind and his are alien to each other...
...Impartial political Jersey observers told me that while Fort's district is dry, there are two or three sections in it where the Italians are strong and might have made trouble, especially as Daniel F. Minahan, Democrat, has been elected twice to Congress and is still strong...
...Salmon had no illusions, being a shrewd man...
...and still he swept the state, swept it overwhelmingly...
...but New York is simplicity itself compared to New Jersey...
...Morrow's race for the lead in the New Jersey primaries attracted nationwide attention...
...they lap over from New York...
...why he should have jumped into the race as late as May 16, when it was all set between Morrow and Frelinghuysen...
...They did it with their eyes open...
...Neither does one see policemen in uniform at speakeasy bars, as one does in New York and Chicago...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 9
