With about 8 months to go until the presidential election, the raging rhetoric and political pontification threatens to leave potential voters tone-deaf, disgusted, and dubious that their vote matters. That being said, it will do us all good to remember the struggle of one group of Americans desperate to have that right to vote: the ladies of the womenâ€s suffrage movement of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

In the second decade of the 1900s, one Hudson newspaper carried a column titled “Womanâ€s Suffrage Forum,” a  regular feature that included information on local womenâ€s suffrage lectures, events, news and campaigns and also reported national progress as individual states voted for (or against) extending the right to vote to female residents. In 1915, New Jersey suffrage supporters succeeded in getting the question on a statewide referendum to be voted on in October of that year. In August, as the election drew near and a womanâ€s right to vote in New Jersey lay in the hands of the men of our state, the pages of local papers carried news of the upcoming arrival of the “suffrage torch” in Jersey City. The torch, symbolically unlit to represent the enlightenment that would come from granting we Jersey girls the right to vote, was to travel throughout the state to raise awareness and popular support for the upcoming suffrage amendment vote. The torchâ€s travels across the Garden State were to be accompanied by celebrations and ceremonies attended by politicians, prominent citizens and the leaders and members of the Womenâ€s Political Union (WPU). 

The handoff and return of the banner-emblazoned tug with a member of the New Jersey delegation triumphantly holding up the suffrage torch were memorialized in two photographs that speak to the happy occasion and hopes for the upcoming special election. Sadly, despite all their efforts, October did not bring the suffragettes a victory and the right to vote. Over 300,000 New Jersey men voted in the special election and while 42% of them were in favor of giving women the right to vote, the majority voted no and the amendment was defeated. Worse, that defeat meant the amendment could not be brought up for another vote in New Jersey for several years, a stinging blow to supporters of the suffrage movement.

Four years later, in October 1919, Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, representing New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Edward I. Edwards, addressed the executive committee of the New Jersey State Suffrage Association, a gathering that drew women from virtually every county in New Jersey. Hague advised the women to emulate the recruiting methods of menâ€s organizations and labor unions and to partner with the Democrats who had a “Votes for Women” plank in their platform, telling those present that the opportunity they had sought for years had finally come. In the end, the women of New Jersey won the right to vote when the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was approved by three-quarters of the states as of August 1920, one of those states being New Jersey.

Post-Script:  Ten days after the suffrage torch arrived in Hudson County and began its pilgrimage across New Jersey it was stolen from the backseat of an automobile in Atlantic Highlands. The NJ WPU offered a reward of $50 for its safe return. Representatives of a New Jersey anti-suffrage group offered an additional $30 reward, keen to prove that the “anti-suffs” were not involved in the theft. A week later, a Wall Street lawyer named Lynch contacted the WPU saying he found the torch on a Philadelphia streetcar. The recovered torch safely made its way back to Newark and Mr. Lynch graciously refused to accept any reward.

Maureen Wlodarczyk is a fourth-generation-born Jersey City girl and the author of three books about life in Jersey City in the 1800s and early 1900s:  Past-Forward: A Three-Decade and Three-Thousand-Mile Journey Home, Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl and Canary in a Cage: The Smith-Bennett Murder Case.  For info: www.past-forward.com.

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By Maureen Wlodarczyk

Super Bowl Sunday did not disappoint this year as Big Blue did Jersey proud. For Gang Green fans, thereâ€s always next year. Speaking of gangs, I want to tell you the story of a very different gang of men, the criminal kind, that roamed the streets of Jersey City in the 1800s.

While New York had its infamous gangs like those depicted in the memorable film, Gangs of New York, its neighbor was no different.  In the 19th century, Jersey City was home to many gangs who claimed specific streets and neighborhoods as their turf. These hoodlums instilled fear in residents and business owners, committing robbery, burglary, assault, extortion and even murder. Those they victimized were afraid to testify against them, making it difficult for law enforcement to arrest and incarcerate them. One of the worst of these Jersey City gangs was the Lava Beds, also known as the Featherstone gang, which operated in what was then the Sixth Ward, a poor immigrant neighborhood.

The Featherstone boys were the sons of Michael and Catherine Ivers Featherstone, born in Ireland in the 1830s. Survivors of the Irish Famine, they arrived in New Jersey in the 1860s and were parents to six sons and a daughter. The family lived in rented rooms in Jersey City in the 400-block of First Street.

The seven Featherstone children cut their teeth in that tough Sixth Ward neighborhood and nothing good came from the lessons they learned there. The older Featherstone boys were petty thieves before the age of ten and soon graduated to robbery and larceny. In their mid-teens, the four oldest boys became the heart of the Lava Beds gang.

In 1880, when the census-taker made his way down First Street interviewing each family, most of them, including the Featherstone family of nine, were headed by Irish immigrants. Michael Featherstone Sr. was listed as a laborer and his wife as “keeping house.” Sons James, 18, and Michael Jr., 16, were listed as “in Reform School” at Jamesburg.

The Lava Beds and other gangs in Jersey City created a pervasive climate of fear in poor neighborhoods. Mothers were afraid to let their children play outside for fear of violence or their young boys being recruited by gang members. Women were accosted on the street and became victim to lewd remarks and even sexual overtures and assaults by these brazen gang members, making it unsafe to go out alone even in the daytime hours. The Lava Beds, like so many criminal gangs before and after them, operated in their own backyard . . . literally . . . preying on and brutalizing their “own kind,” ethnically and economically. Utterly without a moral compass or conscience, they passed the time and amused themselves by stealing socks one minute and beating a pregnant woman nearly to death the next.

Police raids, repetitive arrests and incarcerations notwithstanding, the Featherstone boys rode the revolving door of justice like a carousel, moving in and out of the judicial and prison systems time and time again. They no sooner were released than were back at it again – thieving, breaking and entering, assaulting, vandalizing, extorting businesses and the like. The New York Herald followed the escapades of the Lava Beds and the Featherstones, describing them as the “most persistent and notorious gang of law breakers that the Jersey City police have to deal with” and saying that although half the gang was then in State Prison for crimes including highway robbery and burglary, “they manage, however, to recruit for their ranks and fill the places made vacant by the retirement of the veterans to prison.” By the late 1880s, the Featherstones had been terrorizing the Sixth Ward for the better part of a decade and reportedly had no “home,” just drifting around the neighborhood, living as squatters in vacant apartments.

In the succeeding decade from 1889 on, the headlines kept coming, even as the four oldest Featherstones passed through their twenties, thirties and early forties. Assault, battery, burglary, larceny, robbery and all manner of mayhem were recounted in newspapers of the day. After that, the trail goes cold and I found no trace of the Featherstone “boys” in local census or other public records. Persistent, pernicious predators, they may have fled the area to avoid arrest or ended up as non-descript dead in the streets and alleys they haunted, falling victim to the excesses of their wasted lives.

Maureen Wlodarczyk is a fourth-generation-born Jersey City girl and the author of three books about life in Jersey City in the 1800s and early 1900s:  Past-Forward: A Three-Decade and Three-Thousand-Mile Journey Home, Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl and Canary in a Cage: The Smith-Bennett Murder Case.  For info: www.past-forward.com.

 

 

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