Nelson Johnson - Boardwalk Empire - The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City

Louis Kuehnle used his power to help transform a sprawling beach village into a modern city. He understood the need for making investments in public facilities to accommodate the growth generated by Atlantic City’s increased popularity. He believed the resort needed a larger, permanent Boardwalk and saw to it that a new Boardwalk with steel pilings and girders was constructed. Resort residents, in particular the hotels and shops, were the victims of a telephone monopoly. Kuehnle broke it up by starting an opposing company, which later was controlled by an independent telephone system with reduced rates. The city’s electric lighting was inadequate and expensive; the Commodore backed a competing utility and prices came down. Natural gas was selling at $1.25 per 1,000 feet and Kuehnle organized a gas company, which resulted in prices going down to $.90 per 1,000. The local trolley system, important to the convenience of both tourists and residents, was a mess. Kuehnle organized the Central Passenger Railway Company, which was eventually sold to the Atlantic City and Shore Company, that gave residents and visitors alike first-rate street and railway service.

Kuehnle was corrupt, but he had a vision for his town’s future and he worked the levers of power to make that vision a reality. Vitally important, the Commodore realized that without a secure source of fresh water, this island community would never become a true city. His foresight was the driving force behind the purchase of several large tracts on the mainland that were used as sites for wells for Atlantic City’s water system. (A portion of this acreage would years later become the site of the Atlantic City International Airport.) It was also his regime that established the city’s first modern sewage treatment facility. Additionally, street paving, or the lack of it, had been a sore point ever since the resort was founded, with visitors and locals having to constantly dodge mud puddles. Kuehnle went into the paving business, and in a short time the resort had safe and clean paved avenues and streets. Under Kuehnle’s reign, all the elements for the infrastructure of a modern city were put into place.

Atlantic City prospered and so did the Commodore. The companies organized by Kuehnle were all sold at handsome profits to buyers who knew they would have no difficulty obtaining franchises and contracts from the city. Kuehnle was one of the owners of the Atlantic City Brewery, and its beer was the most popular in the resort. If a saloonkeeper wanted his liquor license renewed and not be cited for selling brew on Sunday, he bought the right beer. Kuehnle amassed a fortune.

Money was only part of the foundation for the Commodore’s machine. As the County Republican leader, Kuehnle had control over the appointment of the county prosecutor and judges. Only loyal party people got into power. Working closely with the county sheriff’s office, Kuehnle set up a network that insulated his organization from the legal system. It was the sheriff who selected the persons who served on grand juries. The juries, handpicked by Smith Johnson, would never indict any of the Commodore’s people.

During Kuehnle’s years in power there was no Democratic opposition. Atlantic City’s population accounted for more than 60 percent of the population in Atlantic County. The remainder of the county was populated by people either dependent on the Atlantic City tourist trade or small farmers who tended to vote Republican. The strength of the Republican Party in Atlantic County was typical of South Jersey at that time. For more than 30 years after the American Civil War, the politics of the southern New Jersey counties was dominated by United States Senator William J. Sewell of Camden. Sewell, an Irish immigrant, had served as a major general in the Union Army and fought at both Gettysburg and Chancellorsville. After the war, he entered politics and served as state senator for nine years, becoming president of the Senate in 1880. The next year he was elected by the legislature to the United States Senate, where he served two terms. Sewell’s long public service and forceful personality made him a leader of the New Jersey Republican Party and the dominant force of the Republican Party in South Jersey. With Sewell in power, there was no hope for a Democratic Party anywhere in South Jersey. As Jonathan Pitney had learned, Democrats had no chance at real political power.

The Commodore wasn’t content just having control of Atlantic City politics. If he were to catch the attention of the state Republican organization, he would need to dominate things totally. In order to do that, he had to run up election margins in a big way. A key ingredient to his strategy was the manipulation of the resort’s African-American voters. From the time of the Civil War until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, the overwhelming majority of Blacks who voted in this country voted Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln. The presence of such a substantial minority, with a predictable voting pattern, made Atlantic City’s African-American population a pawn in Kuehnle’s rise to power. He exploited them for every vote he could.

The Commodore became enormously popular in the Northside by providing for needy Blacks out of work during the winter months. The off-season could be a harsh struggle for many year-round residents of the Northside, and Kuehnle helped them make it through the winter. Under the Commodore, the Republican Party established its own private welfare system, dispensing free food, clothing, and coal and paying doctor bills. At Kuehnle’s prompting, the hotel and boardinghouse owners required all of their employees to register to vote. Any African-American worker who failed to register was harassed until he did. On Election Day, Kuehnle’s lieutenants went into the Northside and rousted Black voters out of their homes. Groups of about 20 Blacks at a time were taken in wagons from ward to ward voting repeatedly, for which they were paid $2 a ballot. The scheme of election fraud was denounced by a national magazine of the day as “the rawest ever known in the country.”

Republican election-day workers stood outside the polls with their pockets crammed with $2 bills. They each had a list of deceased and fictitious voters whose names appeared on the voter registration rolls. As the African-American voters entered the polls, they were assigned a name and given a sheet of carbon paper, the size of the regular ballot, together with a sample ballot. “There is your name and there is your address. Now, for God’s sake, don’t forget where you live.” The voter then took his carbon and the sample into the booth with him and marked the regular ballot on the carbon over the sample ballot. When he returned outside, if the markings were right, the voter received his $2. Voters who wanted a second try at the same poll would wait for another Black voter and exchange a hat or an overcoat and then receive another name under which to vote.

Atlantic County’s small population kept the Commodore’s machine from being a major influence in a statewide general election; however, it often was a decisive factor in a primary. The ability to crank out lopsided votes in a Republican primary made Kuehnle a power broker on the state level. Politicians respect votes no matter how they’re gotten and Kuehnle was wooed by every Republican seeking statewide office. Within the first decade of the 20th century, the Atlantic City machine was one of the key political organizations in New Jersey, able to influence the selection of candidates for governor, senator, and congressman. Kuehnle’s stature as a statewide leader increased his power at home. But not everyone was a fan of the Commodore.

There was a small but vocal reform movement made up of the owners of family-oriented businesses and the large hotels along the Boardwalk. Some of the large Boardwalk hotel owners, like the White family of the Marlborough-Blenheim, were from Philadelphia with Quaker backgrounds. They opposed Kuehnle’s tactics and wanted Atlantic City to be a middle-class family resort without relying on “booze, broads, and gambling.” Others—a small minority—continued to dream of Atlantic City as a genteel resort for the upper crust as Jonathan Pitney had envisioned. Both the Quakers and the dreamers felt things had gone too far under the Commodore. They wanted the resort cleaned up and, though a tiny minority, were a source of tension in the community. This reform group made itself heard through the Atlantic City Review and its editor, Harvey Thomas. A coldly serious, steely looking, hard-hitting muckraker, cut from the same cloth as Lincoln Steffens, Harvey Thomas had been brought to town by a clique of wealthy Boardwalk hoteliers who resented Kuehnle and wanted him out of power.