******************************************* Jack Blocker History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada (519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 09:24:04 +1000 From: H-Urban <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: H-NET Urban History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> To: Multiple recipients of list H-URBAN <[log in to unmask]> Subject: REVIEW: Schwartz on Paulsson _The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854-1920_ Atlantic City Under Siege Reviewed for H-Urban by Joel Schwartz, Montclair State University, <[log in to unmask] > Martin Paulsson. _The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854-1920_. New York: New York University Press, 1994. xvi + 245 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. (paper) Paulsson, professor of history at the College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State College) wrote _The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform_, in the attempt to get behind what he calls "the myth of Kuehnleism," the political regime of Republican Louis Kuehnle, Jr., in Atlantic City after the turn of the century. According to Atlantic City lore, Kuehnle bossed the resort with the support of saloon keepers, gamblers, and compliant African-American voters, until New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson broke his power in 1911. Paulsson undertakes a sophisticated revisionism, concluding that Kuehnle, for a brief moment, was an influential political coordinator, hardly a boss, much less a corruptionist. Kuehnle presided over an understanding, the so-called "liberal policy," elaborated by Atlantic City's major hotel owners, civic leaders, and prominent black residents which allowed pervasive but discrete violations of the Sunday closing laws. The book describes how the delicate arrangement became unglued, and analyzes the interests, who banded together to prompt Governor Wilson's intervention. Paulsson explains that Kuehnle's 1911 fall from grace was accelerated by the entrenchment of commercialized amusements at the resort, which stretched the boundary between diversions and licentiousness and finally breached organized Protestantism's acceptance of what Atlantic City residents euphemistically called "resort Sundays." The issue was brought to a head by the mobilized Sabbatarian movement, which gained strength in the 1890s, and "crested," says Paulsson, in New Jersey in 1909. The rise of the one-day excursion in the 1870s and 1880s, and "moonlight" sojourns by black people (after the August 31 Labor Day Weekend) made Atlantic City a resort for the working class. Completion of the permanent Boardwalk in 1879, which made the beach accessible, coincided with the new vogue in ocean bathing. By the 1880s, mass excursions, cheap Pennsylvania Railroad fares, and the first recreation piers, all made Atlantic City the mecca for thousands of "shoobies"--daytime visitors who packed lunches in shoe boxes. By 1910, Atlantic City, with about 52,000 year-round residents, counted a weekend population of 250,000 and seasonal visitations by 3 million. The city's attractions included 587 hotels, which ranged from modest cottages in the excursion district to Boardwalk castles, like the Marlboro-Blenheim, built in 1906, soon followed by the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall and the Traymore. Paulsson also emphasizes that Atlantic City could not have existed without a large work force of African Americans and institutionalized Jim Crow. Blacks made up 21 percent of Atlantic City's population in 1910, and they constituted 95 percent of the hotel work force. They dominated the resort's service trades--at least until a strike at the Marlboro-Blenheim in 1906, replaced many black menials with white workers, including increasing numbers of women. While central to the city's economy, blacks remained on the margins, dependent on seasonal work and floating to and from Philadelphia and other regional cities. By the turn of the century, the color line also sharpened. Blacks were increasingly turned away from Boardwalk attractions, limited to the "designated" beach on Missouri Avenue. Hoteliers justified Jim Crow as the obeisance that the resort had to give its growing Southern trade. While official segregation was forbidden by New Jersey's northern laws, "discrimination on the Boardwalk," writes Paulsson, was carried out by "innumerable private acts" (p. 38). African Americans concentrated in a small enclave called the Northside, where a Bronzville developed of black enterprises, including saloons, brothels, and other illicit joints which authorities refused to license elsewhere. During the mid-1880s, the constant irritation of police raids and saloon keepers' defiance shaped the outlines of the liberal policy. Raucous Boardwalk amusements remained closed on Sundays, while most saloons, particularly in the large hotels and restaurants, remained open. By the late 1890s, "low," sideshow amusements were largely uprooted from the Boardwalk and confined to the Inlet, where gathered more and more of the attractions for the shoobies. In July, 1900, limited raids were staged on North Carolina Avenue gambling dens and brothels, where the liberal policy got out of hand. Slot machines were shut down, prostitutes arrested, and gambling joints suppressed, but local opinion would not sanction anything further. Yet another crisis occurred in 1902 after a spasm of law enforcement against Sunday saloons. Liquor interests and hotelmen, hurting for business, hammered out a compromise response. Hotels would stay closed on Sunday, but conduct business as usual through side doors, while concert saloons would shut down their orchestras, particularly those that persisted in the most vulgar popular tunes. In 1907, came "Regulations" of the Royal Arch, Atlantic City's lodge hall of licensed saloon keepers, which maintained the side-door system, but suppressed Sunday gambling. Atlantic City skirted the edge of Victorian morality. Civic leaders, working closely with politicians, made certain that the system never ran over it. Atlantic City's politics was not equipped to recognize these wider cultural issues. Kuehnle, an erstwhile Democrat, started his political career as a populist, who attacked the resort's dependence on the Pennsylvania Railroad. A coordinator and a broker, he came to power because, says Paulsson, Democratic ineptitude gave the GOP dominance "by default." Kuehnle struck the right balance as the "people's" utilities operator, the easy saloon keeper, and avuncular presence on the black Northside. While Paulsson does not explicitly state it, the city's center of political gravity lay in the class of year-round homeowners and cottage operators at the Inlet, who looked upon Boardwalk hotel operators with suspicion and expected Kuehnle to limit costly local improvements. On Kuehnle's left, his chief GOP rival, William Riddle, an ex-Henry George Democrat, championed business efficiency and a square deal for labor. Riddle made a political reputation fighting franchise "grabs" and upholding the rights of small property owners. By 1908, Atlantic City had become a "national symbol" of the Sabbatarian crisis. Paulsson documents the growing strength, cohesion, and determination of the Sunday-closing militants and their notable achievements in New Jersey. The Vorhees Act, an enforcement law, was passed by the state legislature in 1901; and the Bishops' Law of 1906, called for license revocation for Sunday liquor sales. New Jersey Governor J. Franklin Fort, a Republican, was under increasing pressure to carry out the Bishops' Law, or at least to jawbone its local enforcement. He replied in 1908 by appointing investigation bodies, the Crimes Commission and Excise Commission. The latter visited Atlantic City and was astounded by flagrant violations of the Sunday closing laws and the thumbing of the Bishops' Law by a sheriff who refused to arrest and grand juries that would not indict. The Excise Commission was particularly scandalized by the Royal Arch's 1907 "Regulations," which called for locked front doors, no music, no gambling, but which countenanced side-door liquor sales. In August, 1908, proclaiming Atlantic City gripped in a "saturnalia of vice," Governor Fort threatened to call out the national guard. Mayor Franklin P. Stoy backed down, and the Royal Arch whipped liquor dealers into line, but within months saloons returned to Sunday business. The liberal policy equilibrium broke with Kuenhnle's ambitions for a minor-league baseball franchise in Atlantic City and his misguided attempt to mount Sunday baseball in 1908. The Lord's Day Alliance was up in arms, determined to go after Sunday movies as well as the den of iniquity at the Inlet. They pursuaded Governor Fort to invoke the Vorhees Act, which led to the arrest of Mayor Stoy. While business leaders closed ranks around Kuehnle and the embattled mayor, a People's Republican Organization emerged, representing Boardwalk hotel interests and their friends in the black Northside, who attacked Kuehnle's recklessness on Sunday baseball. A more decisive threat to Atlantic City's autonomy was the ambition of the Princeton professor, Woodrow Wilson, for the governor's mansion. In 1910, efforts by the Boardwalk interests to wrest control of the GOP from Kuehnle coincided with Wilson's 1910 gubernatorial campaign and the electoral landslide, giving Democrats control of the state legislature. Mobilized by Hudson County boss James Nugent, Democrats proceeded in 1911 to convene the Macksey Commission to investigate vote fraud in Atlantic City. The comission had little trouble dredging up damaging evidence, which sent Kuehnle reeling. But when an Atlantic County grand jury failed to act against the main culprits, Governor Wilson convened a special panel, which brought quick indictments of Kuehnle and 61 others as well as Sunday liquor sellers. Local editors finished the process by depicting Kuehnle as a rapacious villain, a portrait that was picked up by the muckraking press across the country, which helped propel Wilson's presidential candidacy in 1912. The liberal policy--or what was left of it--still had a remarkable vitality. While Kuehnle was indicted on corruption charges and later sent to prison, Atlantic City opinion regarded him as a local boy, who stood for the people's interests, however perverse. In 1912, Atlantic City adopted the commission form of government under New Jersey's Walsh Act, and William Riddle was chosen by the commission as the new mayor. That year, after yet another spectacular investigation--this time by detective William J. Burns's agency in cahoots with Atlantic County Sabbatarians--the reform sweep of Atlantic City was nearly complete. For the next three years, the city's lid was down. Bars closed on Sunday, censorship suppressed risque amusements on the Boardwalk, and gambling greatly diminished. As the Great War drew near, a consensus gathered around reform, led by Boardwalk hotelmen, who learned that wholesomeness might have put a dent into the excursion business, but big hotels could prosper. Paulsson never really pins downs what overturned the equipoise that was the liberal policy. He presents so many seasons of outrage and reform that we begin to wonder what made the difference in 1911, as opposed to (say) the mid-1890s, 1900, 1902, and 1907. We can take him at his word that Sabbatarianism crested in 1909, but that merely begs the question, Why then? The question is probably unfair, given Paulsson's general argument that militant Protestantisism was on the rise during the late nineteenth century, provoked in good measure by the industrialization of pleasures and vice at seaside resorts like Atlantic City. We are left to conclude that ethnocultural forces provided the structural background for the 1911 confrontation, which Governor Wilson's electoral triumph brought into decisive focus. Ironically, the Sabbatarian cause would be consummated by Democrats under James Nugent, the Hudson County Democratic boss, no mean protector of saloon keepers on his own home grounds. Paulsson's presentation is further marred by a rather elliptical chapter organization that brings the reader back three times to the 1911 confrontation, and a narrative style that leaves crucial evidence out of chronological order. The book is a frustration to historians who want to know what decision makers knew and when they knew it. He also throws in too many details about Atlantic City's illicit affairs. The stuff is absolutely fascinating, and is enough to convince any remaining skeptics about the ethnocultural interpretation of Progressive reform. But readers will drown in the details. The book is an engaging and readable account of a middle-size city in the throws of Progressive reform. Paulsson documents the impact of the Sabbatarian in enormous and overwhelming detail. But I wish for more clarity and more control over the narrative. Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserve. This work may be copied for non-profit euducational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact [log in to unmask]