HAGUE RIDES AGAIN

...Hague Rides Again By McALISTER COLEMAN ONE of the by-products of the late and unlamented election about which the so-called liberal press keeps a strange editorial silence is the outstanding victory of that great and good defender of the New Deal _ and its Founding Father—the Honorable Frank Hague of Jersey City...

...When Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist cronies wanted to put over something a bit dubious they were ferried across the Hudson to Jersey where no one was watching...

...Edison was back of the measure with all his shining integrity, every intelligent voter in the state was for revision, and we patted ourselves on the back with a vision of some day being admitted to the company of states with decent Constitutions like Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington...

...Naturally all these shenanigans could not have gone on, had there been a State Constitution which could be of any use to the champions of the people such as Mark Fagan, Hague's honest predecessor, George Record, the elder La Follette's great friend, James Blauvelt, John A. H. Hopkins, founder of the old Committee of Forty-eight, and a handful of other determined liberals and progressives...

...If Gov...

...It is by no means a local issue...

...F.D.R., Dewey Silent Nobody knows, nobody will ever know, how much money was spent by Hague and his corporation backers to do the dirty job, but believe me, brothers and sisters, it was plenty...

...And then too, maybe the Hudson River will dry up tomorrow night...

...It was, and is, the ark of the covenant for those seeking to exploit the plain people, politically and economically...

...The plain people' understood the issue and wanted that hoary document liberalized...

...The legislature voted to submit the matter to a referendum this Fall, and we all felt mighty good...

...New Jersey has always been, as Carl Sandburg put it, "a strange bailiwick.'' Its last Colonial governor, Benjamin Franklin's natural son, was a Tory who was forced to flee the state when the Revolution broke...

...When the first trusts appeared on the horizon, the magnates hurried to incorporate in New Jersey where the basic laws were high, wide, and handsome for them, so that soon New Jersey was known all over the country as "The Mother of The Trusts...

...No one could get elected in the most remote county unless he had the okay of the rail executives in New York and Philadelphia...

...Some years ago some of us over in Jersey made up our minds that nothing much could be done in the way of fundamental reform inside the state unless we got rid of this smelly albatross which'was hanging around our collective necks, though we hadn't even shot it...

...Just this...

...But that "if" is out, and Hague rides again...

...So the League of Women Voters, Socialists, brave-hearted liberals—men and women who believed that the election of Democratic Gov...

...It's hard to get dead men to pull levers on voting machines, though the boys might have done it, if the waterfront fuehrer had so ordered, and anyhow the crucial issue in New Jersey was not, as Frank saw it, the election of Roosevelt, but rather the defeat of the attempt of the genuine liberals and independents of the state to revise New Jersey's hundred-year old Constitution...

...Then the White House cruelly and deliberately crucified Edison for the sake of the Hague plurality of what was then 150,000 Democratic votes from Hudson bounty in which Jersey City is located...

...The Mayor of Jersey City didn't bother much about the voting for President due to the fact that the nasty, old ex-Gov...

...PM, for example, which did a fine job in the early free-speech fights in Jersey City and is once more in the open against Hague, soft-pedalled Hague during the campaign because that might have been a subject unpleasant to "The Champ...

...At any time in the long infighting against the most corrupt man in national politics one short, repudiating statement from the White House could have crumpled Hague— not necessarily in his tightly-held bastion of Jersey City, but most certainly in the state at large...

...The century-old Constitution written for an agricultural state, with loopholes in it through which you could drive the lousiest special privilege, was just dandy for the Fat Boys...

...Jersey had more Tories than any other of the thirteen original states, and, for that matter still has...

...Hague got the grreen signal and sent his hatchetmen through the state to kill Constitutional revision, as he had killed all vestiges of civil liberties in his own town...

...Hague was suspiciously quiet as the evidence of a popular demand for revision mounted steadily...

...And he has headed off this attempt handily and will now presumably go marching on under the Roosevelt aegis until the mind of man in Jersey will recollect no other political name than that of Hague...

...Mother Of Trusts' The matter of the revision of the State Constitution is one that should interest all students of the democratic process...

...Edison had forced him to put voting machines in the booths in place of the usual pre-and-overstuffed ballot boxes...

...Edison, with Roosevelt's backing and Hague's most reluctant support, might really mean a New Deal for the state, came together to organize a movement for the complete revision of the antiquated Constitution...

...Dewey had taken a day off from distorting five-year old speeches of the President to run across the river to make a prosecuting attorney's speech against Hague, he could have carried the state and saved revision...

...So he only came up with a miserly 70,000 plurality for the great causes of internationalism, world vision and all, in place of the usual 150,000...

...So how is this a national issue...

...This, of course, was a complicated issue to present to the rank and file voter, but the result of a well-planned educational campaign surprised the skeptics...

...Well, maybe now, in view of the shrinkage of the Hudson County vote, "The Champ" will pluck up enough courage to say a few unkind words about the goings-on in the foully corrupt water-front town that is Jersey City...

...But the President did not speak, and all the pseudo-liberal world kept silence before him in this last campaign...

...The electric utilities took up where the railroads left off, so that today modern Jersey is as completely at the mercy of the ironically named Morgan-dominated Pablic Service Corporation of N. J., monopolizer of electricity, gas, and transportation, as was old Jersey at the mercy of the Pennsylvania Road...

...For generations Jersey was no more than a satellite of the Pennsylvania Railroad which dominated every phase of its economic and political life...