newjerseynewsroom.com

BY TOM HESTER SR.

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

In the midst of attempting to overcome a total state deficit of $13.1 billion for the concluding 2009 and impending 2010 state budgets, the Corzine administration Tuesday had to put another $120 million toward jobless benefits. Over 8 of every 100 New Jerseyans who want to work are jobless.

The governor and his aides describe the state's financial crisis as "historic'' and "the worst ever.''

Peter Mazzei, the chief librarian of the state non-partisan Office of Legislative Services library, who for the past decade has tracked the history of the state government to its founding in 1776, concedes the current fiscal situation is ugly, no doubt about it.

Mazzei said it could be argued that The Depression years of the early- to mid-1930s, the period that sparked the nine-day "Siege of Trenton'' in 1936, one of the great events in the history of the Statehouse, were the worst for state government.

"If you are going to compare the current crisis, you have to appreciate what they must have been going through back then,'' Mazzei said. "The annual appropriation (state budget) in 1931 was $34.5 million. By 1933, it was $19.7 million, at least a 40 percent cut. In his 1935 message, Gov. Harold Hoffman said 400,000 men, women and children were dependent on the state for money, shelter, food and clothing. Scores of municipalities were bankrupt in 1935.''

By 1936, 270,000 people were unemployed and 116,000 children depended on the state for their welfare. As for funding public relief, the state needed $30 million for the year and the Republican Hoffman administration was broke. When there was money for relief, Hoffman, who is considered by historians to be one of the state's four most ethically challenged governors, was dipping in for his personal benefit.

And the Republican-controlled Legislature, faced with re-election in 1936, would not act to solve the crisis. In the spring of 1935, legislators had approved a 2 percent sales tax to finance relief but it was so unpopular with merchants, they repealed it in the autumn and directed cities and towns to handle the problem. Trenton city officials said they needed $350,000 monthly for relief. The city had $13,000. Camden and Neptune talked of closing schools to finance relief. A proposed luxury tax on cigarettes and cosmetics went nowhere.

Then came the Siege of Trenton.

On April 21, the Assembly adjourned for the spring without taking action. As the 60 legislators headed for the door, 20 unemployed men and women who had been jeering the inaction from the gallery, got on to the chamber floor and grabbed vacant seats. They vowed to remain until the Legislature returned to special session and acted. John Spain, an unemployed Trenton resident, declared himself Assembly speaker. Attorney General David Wilentz advised against trying to remove the protesters.

By the night of April 22, 230 people, including wives and children of the unemployed, had joined the original 20. This was not a ragtag bunch. Anybody who could do so was wearing their Sunday best, even the children. Outside the chamber, hundreds of supporters milled in the Statehouse hallways.

For the next seven days, the men conducted mock sessions in which they approved the relief they wanted legislators to act upon. They called for idle factories to be reopened, a 30-hour work and federal pensions for the unemployed. A few provided a good laugh by imitating legislators. They also put their feet up on the desks while enjoying a smoke and a newspaper.

The women provided meager meals. A coffee urn stood beneath a portrait of Lincoln and a buffet table stood below a portrait of Washington. The bored children played hide and seek among the desks. At night, the protesters and the children slept in legislators' seats, the gallery or on the Statehouse marble floors and stairs.
The protesters gave up the Assembly chamber only briefly to allow jobless people to take a civil service test.

Fred Gray, one of the protest leaders, addressed the crowd. "You don't want to prevent any one else from getting jobs, do you?'' he asked. "The people that want this work are taking examinations for jobs. Let's give them the chance we haven't got for ourselves.''

While the test was underway, the protesters took over the Senate chamber.

On April 24, Hoffman met with four protest leaders but only to stress that he had no money for relief.
Finally, at the repeated urging of the governor, the Assembly and Senate agreed to meet on the night of April 29 to consider relief. Outside the Statehouse, an estimated 1,000 jobless and their supporters rallied. Most had arrived in the back of trucks from Newark, Paterson, Passaic and South Jersey farms. Extra police were called to handle the crowd.

The first action the Assembly took was to vote to ban the protesters from any further access to the chamber floor. The sessions ended without a financial solution. Instead, legislators created a panel of five Republicans, including Hoffman, to come up with a solution. The protesters left the Statehouse vowing to get their revenge in the primary election, 20 days away.

In the end, it would take the wealth of a dead man and a court to provide a partial solution to the relief crisis.
In 1930, multi-millionaire John T. Dorrance of Radnor, Pa., a chemist who invented condensed soup that became the mainstay of the Campbell Soup Co., died. His estate was entangled in the court until July 1936, three months after the end of the Siege of Trenton, when a judge ruled the state should receive $16 million in inheritance taxes.

"I really think The Depression and its aftermath really redefined the responsibilities of government in America, including state government,'' Mazzei said. "As a result of that economic crisis, The Depression, Americans expect more from their government.''

Mazzei said the Siege of Trenton was a spark that would lead 11 years later to a Constitutional convention that would amend state law to give more power to the governor and less to the Legislature.
"That's why they invested so much power in the governor,'' he said. "To take care of these sort of things.''