Fagan of Hoboken & the Horseshoe: In a gilded, manly age of disorderly industrial Armageddon and progressive urban reform

Declaring that you would rather cut your own throat than meet with the Democratic machine boss to talk out your differences was not the usual way to become Mayor of Hoboken in New Jersey’s Hudson County of the 1890s. But that’s exactly what Lawrence Fagan did, prior to winning the job for the first time in 1893.

A Democrat but independent in actions and views, Fagan served four consecutive terms during the city’s period of peak immigration and population growth. Efforts toward reforming a loosely run police force and officiating the fighting forces of temperance and a swelling saloon industry occupied much of his time in office, a tenure also shaped by an apocalyptic harbor and steamship fire in 1900.

In addition to being a politician, Fagan was an ironmaster. He ran an ironworks in the rugged Horseshoe section of neighboring Jersey City, where he took a very hands-on approach to business. On one occasion, Fagan determined that a labor union representative had called on his foundry for purposes of extortion. Fagan made his view on this matter clear and responded with his fists. When summoned by a court of law to answer for the assault, Fagan’s testimony was frank and explicit. He freely acknowledged punching the plaintiff. “Had I been excessively angry at the time,” explained Fagan, “the punishment would have been more severe.”

Fagan was also an owner of a newspaper, The Observer, which had grown to become New Jersey’s most influential Democratic publication by 1910. The apogee of Fagan’s interest in the newspaper business coincided with the launch of Woodrow Wilson’s career in politics. As Wilson campaigned to be Governor of New Jersey, he encountered a peculiar truth: The road to the governor’s mansion in Trenton went through Hudson County’s “Elysian Fields of politics,” and therefore through Lawrence Fagan.