It will come as little surprise to students of municipal corruption and Jersey City, New Jersey — but I repeat myself…

Which is to say that for well over a century, the two have been entwined in infamy. Jerramiah T. Healy, the last mayor of Jersey City, the Hudson County seat and New Jersey’s second-largest metropolis after Newark, was once photographed passed out nude on his stoop, insisting later that three young Hispanic girls had pulled his towel off and “started doing other stuff”…and — huh, what towel? Oh, never mind!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/nyregion/22HEALY.html

Does it mean anything that Healy was mayor in 2005 when Donald Trump unveiled his $415 million condo project in Jersey City, the tallest residential development in New Jersey? Given the city’s history, who knows? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/nyregion/latest-trump-venture-is-in-jersey-city.html

On the subject, the first name that comes to mind, of course, is Healy’s notorious predecessor, Mayor Frank Hague (1917-1947) and we’ll get to him.

The point is, scandal has a long history in the Garden State, particularly this corner of the garden called Jersey’s gateway to New York.

We’re not even talking Bridgegate.

The great muckraker Lincoln Steffens nailed it as far back as 1906 in his book “The Struggle for Self Government”  http://www.amazon.com/struggle-self-government-American-political-corruption/dp/B00ADM24LS/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449676737&sr=1-3&keywords=The+struggle+for+self+government

He devoted two pungent chapters to what he called “New Jersey: A Traitor State.” Why traitor? Others states were crooked, too, Steffens wrote. But “New Jersey is selling out the rest of us.” It was chartering the trusts that were raping America. While Teddy Roosevelt was struggling to curb the monopolists, New Jersey was licensing corporations “to do in those other States what those States would not license; she licensed them to to do in those other States what she would not let them do in Jersey.” Translation: “New Jersey sold us out for money.”

Researching his iconic “Shame of the Cities,” Steffens went on, he found that most big cities had benighted satellite towns where the vicious could retreat to wait out periods of reform. St. Louis had East St. Louis, Philadelphia had Camden, and New York had Jersey City (as well as Hoboken, Greenwich and…Brooklyn?). It went way back to Alexander Hamilton, who chose Jersey Heights for his fatal duel with Aaron Burr, and enshrined the business class in the state.

During the Civil War, Steffens wrote, New Jersey alone in the north leaned south and didn’t let its soldiers vote in the field, so its electoral vote in 1864 went against Lincoln, for McClellan. By the 1870’s, Steffens wrote, the state government ended up representing not the people but the railroads, and New Jersey became “the State of Camden and Amboy”, ushering in a period he called “the most disgraceful in the history of the commercial corruption of American politics.”

The Republicans gerrymandered the Democrats out of Jersey City, creating a horseshoe-shaped district to contain the Democrats while allowing a Republican minority to elect the Legislature, which essentially turned the state over to the Pennsylvania Railroad. But the Democrats were just as bad. The cynical press asked: “Do the Pennsylvania people own the Legislature, or must they buy it?” Answer: they owned it but the corruption was such that they had to buy it over and over again.

It got so brazen that a lawmaker once rose, waving five $100 bills that he declared was a bribe for his vote. The House adjourned, a committee was appointed to investigate and reported back that it was all a joke. The laugh, alas, was on the people.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

As the 19th century neared a close, one-quarter of the state’s property was exempt from county and local taxation –property owned by the railroads and totaling what today would be in excess of $6 billion. As the twentieth century dawned, Jersey City’s Republican Mayor Mark Fagan tried his best at reform, Steffens found, but he was up against the Legislature. http://www.kean.edu/~NJHPP/proRef/muckrakers/pdf/muckrakersDoc3.pdf

Which is all to say that once again the Baruch Archives’s IPA Collection has important scholarly light to shed here too. Specifically, a 1913 report by the Bureau of Municipal Research on “the books of Jersey City, New Jersey.”

Pause for knowing laughter.

The study was undertaken at the behest of the city’s Board of Commissioners and mayor Henry Otto Wittpenn, who also seemed a good sort. He married an heiress to the Stevens fortune and was not particularly tainted by scandal. https://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/pages/W_Pages/Wittpenn_H_Otto.htm

But the city of 270,000 people was a mess, as the Bureau’s 1913 report set forth.

“The books of account contained so many errors of every kind that it was impossible for a staff of ten trained accountants, working constantly from ten to twelve hours a day for 17 days, to produce a statement in which the figures could be considered reliable.”

In fact, the report went on: “The accounts were so kept that the financial condition of Jersey City is not now and never has been accurately known.”

“As far as is known, the books have never been in balance.”

The city comptroller had last examined the books five years earlier when the accounts were found to be the equivalent today of $75 million out of balance.

Consequently, city officials were doing business with no idea of what the city owed or what funds were available. To redeem so-called sinking funds they were also keeping on hand the equivalent today of more than $15 million above what was needed — excess cash that increased the tax burden and invited misuse.

There were uncollected state and county property taxes of another more than $12 million in today’s dollars, just for 1906, 1907 and 1908.

Another part of the report dealt with Jersey City’s Street Cleaning Department, 1912.

Another pause for hilarity.

As illustrated by a remarkably clear set of black and white photographs, the stonework paving had no waterproof foundation or tarred or waterproof joints, investigators found. Hence the joints were being perpetually washed out “giving the street the appearance of a sea of billowy waves.”

The sweeping staff lacked uniforms and badges, making it impossible to know who was on the job when. Sweeping crews were deployed in wasteful fashion and the rickety horse-drawn wagons, bumping along the ill-kept streets, left “a tell-tale trail of litter”…

Alas, the report did not usher in an enlightened new chapter in Jersey City’s tarnished history. Frank “I am the law” Hague  took over City Hall in 1917, holding it for an astounding 30 years, hitching himself to FDR and becoming a byword for big city bossism while skirting prosecution. http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/H_Pages/Hague_Frank.htm

For one family’s embodiment of Jersey City’s rollicking renegade past, see Helene Stapinski’s  best-selling memoir, “Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History,” now being filmed for a big-screen documentary. /jersey_city_familys_unvarnished_history_headed_to_film_di_ionno.html