There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

21 Stephen Crane Gets into Trouble

Stephen Crane Gets into Trouble 105 money from her rich employer. Who was telling the truth and who lying? The members of the jury could not decide and the judge dismissed the case as a result of the hung jury. “shocking accident” Trenton Times, 1900 Let us close with this account of the unfortunate Thomas Allen of Trenton , who was answering the call of nature in the outhouse behind his home when he had the misfortune of falling through the floor. Allen “would have smothered in the pit below into which he sank up to his arm pits had he not had the presence of mind to grab on the joists and shout for help.” An alert neighbor came to his rescue and hauled him out from his “perilous and undesirable” situation. One might observe that Allen had been, quite literally, in deep doo doo. 21 Stephen Crane Gets into Trouble On August 17, 1892, the New Jersey chapters of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, a workingman’s organization , held their annual parade in Asbury Park. Among the spectators was Stephen Crane. We remember Crane, who was born in Newark, as the author of a classic American novel, The Red Badge of Courage. But on that day in Asbury Park he was a skinny twenty-year-old kid, trying to break into the newspaper business. That summer, as he had in the past, Stephen had come down to the Jersey Shore from New York to work as a cub reporter for a news service run by his older brother, Townley Crane, which supplied articles to the New York Tribune and other out-of-town papers. Under his brother’s direction, young Crane wrote about piano recitals, church meetings, society doings, and boardwalk entertainment which appeared under headlines like “Joys 106 There’s More to New Jersey . . . of Seaside Life” and “Well Known People Who Are Registered at the Various Hotels.” This was the sort of filler that big-city journalists lampooned as “The Flunkey-Smiths of Squedunk Are at the Gilded Pazaza Hotel for the Season.” A typical piece by Stephen ran: “A highly attractive feature of social entertainment at the Lake Avenue Hotel during the past week has been the informal piano recitals given by Miss Ella L. Flock of Hackettstown, N.J.” But there was something deeper in the young reporter: a rebellion against smug respectability. Perhaps in reaction to his quiet, safe religious upbringing, he deliberately lived the type of life his parents would have objected to and that strained his fragile health: drinking beer, playing poker, shooting pool, and smoking cigars. He was fascinated with the dark side of humanity, and when in New York he would disappear into the Bowery to observe the life of prostitutes, drunkards, petty thieves, and other flotsam of urban life. Crane managed to keep his rebellious spirit out of his newspaper articles, except for an occasional jab, such as his description of a boardwalk attraction as“a gigantic upright wheel of wood and steel, which goes around carrying little cars filled with maniacs, up and down, over and over.” But then came the parade, and the renegade Stephen Crane burst forth. It was in late August, just at the end of the tourist season. Crane was coming out of a billiard parlor where he had gone for a cigar, when he witnessed hundreds of New Jersey members of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics marching down the street. Something about that homely parade touched Stephen Crane, and when the last marcher passed by he went back to the office to dash off an article for the Tribune. The story he wrote was far different from the sort of pieces he had been writing that summer. He described the parade as probably “the most awkward, ungainly, uncut and uncarved procession that ever raised clouds of dust on sun-beaten streets.” He spoke of the bent and dirty marchers in their shabby clothes, plodding along without quite understanding what their lives were all about. But to Crane, these men at least had a certain dignity and honesty, in contrast to the rich, bored vacationers who watched the parade go by. The Stephen Crane Gets into Trouble 107 onlookers, he wrote, were dressed in “summer gowns, lace parasols, tennis trousers, straw hats, and indifferent smiles.” Crane took a slap at the local merchants as well: “The bona...