American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine

Acknowledgements

In the beginning there was McKean. The Boss: The Hague Machine in Action, published in 1940 while Frank Hague was firmly in control of Hudson County, established a timeline and pulled together all the stray facts about the rise of the Boss. Dayton David McKean has been rightly knocked for the prosecutorial tone of his book, his animus against Hague, and his flashes of anti-Irish prejudice, but no one has ever laid a glove on his research or his reporting. Three decades later, Richard S. Connors filled in the rest of the story with valuable demographic spadework and shrewd analysis in A Cycle of Power. Anyone who writes about Hague stands on the shoulders of those two giants. Similar acknowledgment is due novelist and historian Thomas Fleming, who grew up in Hague’s shadow and heard many stories from relatives who were on the machine’s payroll. Once again I offer my gratitude to the staff at the Archibald S. Alexander Library on the New Brunswick campus of my alma mater, Rutgers University. My research into the life and times of Nucky Johnson was considerably aided by the staff at the Atlantic City Free Public Library, where the Alfred M. Heston Collection provides many an opportunity for time travel into the resort’s A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S vii storied past. Thanks also to Nelson Johnson, author of Boardwalk Empire and The Northside, for a most helpful telephone conversation . Thanks once again to the staff of the New Jersey Room of the Jersey City Free Public Library, which remains a valuable resource. Special thanks to Marlie Wasserman, my editor at Rutgers University Press, for her Olympian patience during what proved to be an unexpectedly long gestation period for this book. And, once again, my gratitude to my literary agent, Michele Rubin of Writers House, for watching my back while thinking about the future. acknowledgments viii 2 American Dictators ...