Greatest Show in Jersey

In a cold drizzle, on a blocked-off avenue near the big armory in Jersey City one evening last week John Serpico, president of International Fireworks Co., started setting off bombs as fast as he could light them. Slowly a crowd gathered, staring at the huge street banners proclaiming: TIME TO STRIKE AGAINST THE RED MENACE. Children thought it was the Fourth. Around the armory a regiment of Jersey City policemen barked: "Right inside, folks, right inside."

The rally, ostensibly sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce to demonstrate the city's faith in Mayor Frank Hague and his high-handed tactics against C. I. 0., was staged with a brassy precision which only the Hague machine could produce. For to Frank Hague, who has kept himself in office for 20 years, often rolling up election majorities that would be a credit to Adolf Hitler, the problem of turning out 16,500 people* for a rally was duck soup. In Jersey City, as the Mayor has said, "I am the law."

On written orders to come early and stay to the bitter end, the faithful began to arrive in free busses by 8 p. m. They filed into the armory to face a banner as big as a barn hung over the speakers' platform : JERSEY CITY 100% AMERICAN. REDS KEEP OUT. After an interlude while entertainers kept the crowd amused, suddenly a green-jacketed, tin-hatted Hudson County Legion Band swung down the aisle blaring The Stars & Stripes Forever, followed by a color guard, a regiment of white-capped Legionnaires. The band wheeled, played the Star-Spangled Banner, a black-gowned woman sang it. Then the lesser speakers began to warm up.

At last a terrific salvo of bombs stopped everything. "It's the Mayor. Hooray!" "Three cheers for the Mayor," shouted the Legionnaires. "Everybody up!"

"Yay-y-y!" brayed the Legionnaires.

"Yay-y-y!" brayed the crowd.

Finally U. S. Senator Harry Moore, New Jersey's Governor-elect and a Hague henchman, rose and introduced his boss as "the most fearless public official in the country."

Smiling benignly at the crowd, Dictator Hague began his prepared speech (broadcast by the Chamber of Commerce to let other cities "see how we settle our labor problems"), soon slipped into a harangue described by Columnist Westbrook Pegler as "largely incoherent noise."

Its keynote: "As long as I have the power to represent the people of this great city the Russian Reds will never come in and destroy industry." Singled out for special attention as "Russian Reds" were C. I. 0. leaders from John L. Lewis down; Roger Baldwin, head of the American Civil Liberties Union; its counsels, Arthur Garfield Hays and Lawyer Morris Ernst.

When he came to Morris Ernst who is also counsel for the American Newspaper Guild, the Mayor in his peculiar idiom cried that Lawyer Ernst had "organized newspapermen into Communism." From a Guild reporter in the press section, clear and loud, came one word: "Nuts!"

"Who interrupted?" shouted the Mayor. A policeman shouldering through the crowd to find the culprit tapped the elephantine shoulder of Columnist Heywood Broun, Guild President, who denied his guilt. But the Mayor noticed nothing. He was launched on his peroration. Thus last week, was the C., I. O. exorcised from Jersey City.

It did not end, however, C. I. O.'s attempt to exorcise Mayor Hague. One of the chief legal problems in fighting Mayor Hague is difficulty of getting arrested in Jersey City. Anyone the Mayor considers undesirable is simply bundled out of town, and for years Arthur Garfield Hays has been battling for the "Constitutional right of every American to be arrested." Last week in Manhattan several days before the great rally, while Mr. Hays was delivering a radio attack on Mayor Hague over station WEVD, an unidentified young woman, passing as a reporter, slipped into the studio. Edging up to the speaker, she hurled a handful of pepper into Mr. Hays's face (see cut, p. 20). "You lie, goddam you," she shouted into the microphone and fled before anyone could stop her.

Though the Workers Defense League recently managed to hold a small Jersey City meeting in an abandoned church with Norman Thomas and Oswald Garrison Villard as speakers, a C. I. O. meeting was an impossibility. One of Mayor Hague's speakers proclaimed at last week's rally: "I have lived here all my life and have never seen the day when I couldn't say anything I had on my mind." But next day a New York Herald Tribune reporter searched the city without avail for a man in the street who would talk for quotation about the state of civil liberties. The usual answer: "You know what might happen to a guy if he talks out of turn in this town."

Though some 40 suits are to be filed against Mayor Hague's officials by C. I. 0. organizers and sympathizers, the C. I. O. places most faith in one filed last week by C. I. O. Counsel Dean Spaulding Frazer of the Newark University Law School in Federal Court on the ground that the plaintiffs --the Civil Liberties Union, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and several C. I. O. unions--were "without adequate remedy in the local court of law." In substance, they asked for a perpetual injunction to restrain Mayor Hague from ignoring the Bill of Rights. At the same time Lawyer Ernst interested the Post Office in the charge that Mayor Hague is tampering with the mails.

After Mayor Hague's great rally, Lawyer Ernst broadcast a rebuttal in which; referring to his Committee for Defense of Civil Liberties in Jersey City, he announced: "I represent those great Communist leaders of the nation, General Hugh Johnson, Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann. . . ."

-A New York Times estimate which included 1,500 who stood in the rain outside listening to loudspeakers. The antiC. I. O. New York Herald Tribune figured "20,000 to 30,000." Pro-Hague, the New York Sun shot the works: 75,000.

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