Jersey City Times: Museum Hosts Lecture on Three Infamous Jersey City Mayors

Left to right: Mayors Thomas J. Whelan, John V. Kenny and Frank Hague (CC BY-SA)

Museum Hosts Lecture on Three Infamous Jersey City Mayors By Ron Leir Jersey City Times May 14, 2024

https://jcitytimes.com/museum-hosts-lecture-three-infamous-jersey-city-mayors/

Visitors to the Museum of Jersey City History shared a recent perspective on three of the city’s probably most legendary power brokers – Frank Hague, John V. Kenny and Tom Whelan.

Insights on how their unique brand of political leadership impacted the city – for good and for ill – were offered May 4 by former resident Peter Begans.

When the MJCH opened at the Apple Tree House this past November, part of its mission – as stated in its website – was to offer regular classes and lecture series illuminating the city’s past.

Bearing that in mind, the MJCH brought in Begans, a St Peter’s Preparatory School alum who wrote for the old Hudson Dispatch and New Jersey Monthly before moving on to ABC News as an elections researcher and, later, speechwriter for former Gov. Tom Kean.

“I’d love to see the museum succeed and, for that to happen, it needs programming,” Begans said, and it was a lifetime fascination with his native city’s practice of politics that brought him to MJCH.

“I’d shot a film about the Jersey City mayoral election in 1981 (won by Gerald McCann),” Begans recalled, “and, actually, I wanted to do this presentation for the museum so I’d become more knowledgeble about the pre-1981 political period here.”

Peter Begans with portrait of Frank Hague in background, displayed at the Museum of Jersey City History

It was actually during a teaching stint at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Richmond, Va. in 2022 that Begans shaped a draft of his research as a lecture which he presented as a trial run at an Osher branch at Rutgers University’s Division of Continuing Studies.

He begins his look back with Hague, who, as mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947, traced his roots to riding the wave of Irish emigration to national prominence as a preeminent Democrat of his time.

Initially, Begans said, “Hague was an old school clubhouse politician, but he understood that people wanted progressive government and that’s how he became popular as a reformer.”

As a would-be progressive, Hague “wanted open meetings, got rid of feather-bedding and made members of the city Police and Fire Departments paid professionals,” Begans said.

“He also fought very hard to get professional training for the city’s teachers,” Begans noted, and, ultimately, in 1927 persuaded the state to issue a charter for what was to become New Jersey’s only teacher-training college.

Jersey City State Normal School, as it was then known, opened two years later at its present site, enrolling its first class of 330 women and one man.

In the latter stages of his administration, in return for consistently delivering Democratic votes, FDR rewarded Hague by earmarking millions in federal relief funds for a new hospital, baseball stadium, development of the Holland Tunnel and Journal Square – all during the Depression era.

Because organized labor was a bitter enemy of Hague, there was no big push for using union workers on the new construction fostered by the federal largesse.

“But you had (contractors) with their hand out for business development,” Begans said.

Hague’s successors – Kenny and Whelan — looked to build their personal coffers with heavier payouts and, according to Begans, “the going rate was 10% percent for city or a county contract” awarded during Kenny’s regime.

But Kenny (known as “JVK” and “The Little Guy”), who served as mayor from 1949 to 1953, and Whelan, who was elected to consecutive terms as mayor starting in 1965, were convicted in 1971 on federal charges of racketeering and tax evasion. JVK died soon after and Whelan died in 1980 after having served seven years in federal prison.  

Whelan, a U.S. Army Air Force pilot who flew 66 combat missions in WW2 and a security officer with N.J. Bell as a civilian, applied his business acumen, Begans noted, in cutting 500 municipal and school jobs. He was credited for putting down a disturbance in the city’s Lafayette Gardens neighborhood in the summer of 1967 when Newark was beset with rioters.