Book summary “Killing the poormaster”: summary

Introduction

You live in a city where corrupt political bosses control every job, relief check, and municipal service. When economic disaster strikes, you face an archaic relief system designed to punish you for your poverty rather than help you survive.

A fatal confrontation between a desperate unemployed mason and a stingy municipal poormaster in 1938 Hoboken exposes the ruthless cruelty of local political machines and archaic poor laws during the Great Depression.

Holly Metz investigates the social and political mechanics of this tragedy through the lens of Hoboken, New Jersey. The book traces how autocratic Mayor Bernard McFeely maintained power while citizens starved, leading up to the fateful clash at City Hall.

The following questions guide this exploration:

• How did political machines control immigrant communities during the Great Depression?
• Why did municipal relief systems treat the unemployed as criminals?
• What drove a quiet mason to commit a desperate act of violence?
• How did defense attorneys turn a murder trial into an indictment of the welfare system?

1. A City Divided and Ruled by the Boss

Geography of Inequality

Hoboken was sharply divided geographically and socioeconomically between an affluent uptown and a struggling working-class downtown. The upland strip east of Willow Avenue was settled by educated German professionals and the wealthy Stevens family. The marshy lowlands to the west housed poor immigrant workers in dense tenements. Over time, the German population was displaced by Irish and Italian Americans who endured grueling conditions in local factories and shipyards.

Uptown residents enjoyed beer gardens and cultural societies, whereas downtown families lived in four-story walkups, kept chickens or goats for milk, and sewed buttons on cards for four cents a gross.

The city hall was built in the 1881 year. When the city reached peak density, the population of Hoboken was 70,000. Only 9 percent of housing was owner-occupied in Hoboken. Locals referred to the upland settlement as Little Bremen, the lowlands as downtown, and the marshy edges as the Meadows.

The McFeely Machine

Mayor Bernard McFeely maintained absolute autocratic control over Hoboken through political patronage, police intimidation, and the suppression of dissent.

Modeled after other urban bosses of the era, Boss McFeely used city jobs, coal distributions, and relief permits to reward loyalty while ruthlessly punishing anyone who challenged his administration. Constitutional rights to free speech and assembly were routinely ignored, and dissenters faced jail time or physical violence.

Anthony Bezich distributed leaflets calling for a march on Washington and was sentenced to three months in prison, where he contracted pneumonia and died; his wife died of heart failure days later.

An investigative series by the New York Post exposed how McFeely bypassed civil service requirements to install over six dozen family members in high-paying city positions. He funded political campaign accounts through mandatory employee kickbacks and perpetually awarded the city garbage collection contract to his family's company at exorbitant rates. Bernard McFeely was photographed as commissioner of public safety in the 1921 year.

Reporter Vilas J. Boyle revealed that fifteen of the mayor's nearest kin cost taxpayers $39,000 annually, while the family garbage cartage company pulled down nearly $1.5 million for a service that should have cost far less. Other municipal expenditures included $750 paid by the city for a new rug in Mayor McFeely's office. This contrast appeared while $500 dollars or less stood as the average annual income in New Jersey. The city's destitute thousands survived on a total 1937 budget of $16,000 dollars. Observers estimated that the boss accumulated a total stash of $3 million dollars through these methods, relying on trusted bagmen to operate the McFeely Plum Tree.

2. Waiting for Nothing and the Relief Crisis

You watch local overseers use harsh and stingy practices to deter claims on public funds. These officials punish the jobless because they believe poverty stems from personal moral deficiency. You find that poor laws blame laziness or drinking rather than the nationwide economic collapse.

Poormasters enforced medieval poor laws by slashing relief rolls and distributing starvation-level aid while blaming the jobless for their own destitution.

Harry Barck served for 42 years as Hoboken's gatekeeper of poor relief. He severely restricted relief distributions and forced desperate applicants to beg for minimal grocery orders. Officials branded applicants as chiselers while offering stale bread tickets.

A New York Times report from May 24, 1936, documented how Hoboken slashed its relief cases from two thousand to ninety in a few weeks. That total of two thousand cases represented over seven people each. You see how families received meager grocery orders that failed to keep them alive.

The Poormaster's Gate

You witness families struggling under rules that provided absurdly small rations. A family of nine received weekly food orders of just $1.90.

In 1933, 12 to 18 million Americans remained unemployed and dependent on federal or municipal aid. By winter 1934, 20 million people lived on the dole. Hoboken kept per-capita relief expenditures well below subsistence levels while cutting rolls to a fraction.

Tragic Scarcity

Inadequate municipal relief provided by Harry Barck led directly to the starvation death of a local toddler in Hoboken. Three-year-old Donald Hastie died of starvation at St. Mary's Hospital after his unemployed father was given only $5.40 in a biweekly check for five people. That amount amounted to 38 cents a day.

The Hastie family received meager relief checks that forced the child to eat dried paint chips from the apartment walls to satisfy his unyielding hunger. A disputed death certificate ultimately attributed the cause to lead poisoning rather than starvation. The Hudson Dispatch reported Donald Hastie's death on July 15, 1936, just ahead of his funeral on the morning of July 16, which ended with a burial in the potter's field.

3. The Killing at City Hall

The Morning of February 25

Joseph Scutellaro was born in 1902 and worked as a mason during prosperous times. During the post-WWI construction boom, Frank Scutellaro ran a successful contracting business and trained his son Joe. However, after Frank supported a mayoral opponent against Boss McFeely, municipal assignments were withdrawn, plunging the family into joblessness during the Great Depression.

A desperate plea for relief by Joseph Scutellaro culminated in a fatal altercation when Poormaster Harry Barck offered a deeply insulting remark.

Joe Scutellaro went to City Hall on February 25, 1938, with nine cents in his pocket, leaving behind a wife and two young children who had been surviving on weak coffee and dry bread. He was 36 years old that year. He hoped to secure an urgent grocery check to feed his starving family.

Fatal Confrontation

When Scutellaro asked Barck for a relief check and explained his children were starving, Barck responded with a deeply insulting suggestion about Scutellaro's wife. Enraged by the slur and physical threats from the larger official, Scutellaro punched Barck, who stumbled forward onto a metal desk spindle that punctured his aorta.

The violent event unfolded around 10:15 AM on February 25, 1938. Poormaster Harry Barck was 74 years old at the time. After being struck in the face, Poormaster Barck lunged at Scutellaro, threatening to break his neck, before falling forward onto a desk spike that penetrated his chest cavity. Harry Barck was pronounced dead at 10:25 AM.

While Joe was confronting Poormaster Barck, a postal envelope arrived containing bread coupons and an eight-dollar grocery check, prompting news reporters to note the tragic timing. Anna Scutellaro received the eight-dollar grocery check made out to grocer William Schmidt around 10:15 AM on February 25, 1938. Grocer William Schmidt operated at 941 Garden Street. The envelope also contained thirty salmon-colored coupons for bread.

4. Resistance and Repression in Immigrant Hoboken

Italian American workers and activists organized fierce resistance against machine rule, prompting violent police suppression and targeted raids on cultural traditions.

Italian Community Solidarity

Hoboken's Italian American community organized powerful political resistance against machine boss Bernard McFeely. The mayor used the pretext of Prohibition enforcement to deploy axe-wielding police squads into homes to smash homemade wine barrels. This heavy-handed suppression aimed to break their defiance and punish their challenge to the machine.

In 1928, over two thousand Italian Americans marched in a Columbus Day parade that pointedly ignored McFeely's reviewing stand, leading the boss to order police raids on the homes of association leaders like Joseph Finizio. The United Italian-American Societies and Clubs of Hoboken, Inc. possessed a combined membership of 5,000, while the Frank J. Bartletta Association held 400 members. You can see how these regional societies united into a formidable voting block that terrified local authorities.

Activism and Mimeograph Propaganda

The Workers Defense League provided critical legal aid, street campaign support, and solidarity to workers fighting civil liberties abuses and corrupt political bosses. Formed by labor and Socialist party leaders in 1936 to challenge anti-worker abuses and leafleting bans, the WDL allied with organizations like the Workers Alliance of America to fight for free speech and relief. Herman Matson joined the WDL, became chairman of the Hoboken chapter, and used its network to defend his rights and challenge the McFeely machine.

Simple, low-cost duplication tools allowed activists to bypass media silence and censorship to inform and mobilize the public directly. Using a hand-cranked mimeograph machine that required no electricity and operated via stencils, a single person could rapidly produce one thousand or more leaflets every night to expose municipal corruption and call for public meetings. Herman Matson set up a large mimeograph machine in his living room to print handbills announcing WDL rallies and denouncing Hoboken relief conditions.

To produce these handbills, you must follow specific steps:

• Compose text on waxed paper stencils using a ribbonless typewriter
• Ink up the hand-cranked mimeograph machine and wrap the stencil to the cylinder
• Turn the hand crank to print sheet after sheet of leaflets
• Gather sheaves of handbills and distribute them in the streets

Political machines utilized orchestrated mob violence and police complicity to break up public meetings held by reform activists. When activists attempted to hold open-air rallies, political operatives deployed mobs to disrupt speeches, destroy equipment, and inflict severe physical violence while police officers stood back or aided the perpetrators.

At a September 15 WDL meeting in Hudson Square Park scheduled for 8:30 PM, a gang led by dock bosses toppled the speaker's stand, trampled an American flag, and brutally beat Herman Matson while police officers watched and later arrested the victim. Among the 1,500 people gathered in the park for the rally, a crowd of 300 men in the gang approached the park edge. Following the melee, authorities set a high bail amount of 5,000 dollars for Herman Matson after his arrest.

5. The Trial of Joseph Scutellaro

Renowned defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz utilized meticulous jury selection and dramatic courtroom demonstrations to frame the killing as an accidental tragedy born of systemic deprivation.

Legal Strategy and Coerced Confession

You watch prominent criminal defense attorney Samuel S. Leibowitz step in to represent Joe Scutellaro. At forty-four years of age, Leibowitz traveled from Brooklyn to Hoboken to prevent a potential death sentence. Known for his work defending the Scottsboro Boys and saving ordinary clients from the electric chair, he challenged local judicial proceedings.

Anna Scutellaro secured Leibowitz's services through her cousin early Saturday morning. A neighborhood defense fund raised $1,000 before the arraignment to bring the prominent lawyer to the drab Hoboken courtroom. Recorder Frank Romano denied his requests for postponements.

Assistant Prosecutor William George applied for a struck jury in the Scutellaro case. Judge Robert Kinkead granted the request, overruling Sam Leibowitz's objections. Struck or blue ribbon juries favored well-to-do professionals. The process restricted selection to pre-culled lists of past jurors, systematically excluding working-class defendants from being tried by their peers. The court culled one hundred names for the struck jury, leaving seventy-six names from which a jury was chosen after strikes.

Sam Leibowitz utilized dramatic courtroom reenactments and direct testimony to illustrate the vast physical disparity between Joe Scutellaro and Harry Barck. Leibowitz had Joe take the witness stand to describe his extreme poverty, his health struggles with encephalitis lethargica, and the argument where Barck made an insulting remark about Joe's wife. Joe testified about a 225-word disputed police statement and explained that he and his family had a total of 15 cents between them and starvation on February 25. He noted that he had received a relief check of $5.70 on January 28, with nothing more for four weeks, while $40 was the weekly budget considered the bottom line for an American worker's family in 1928.

To demonstrate the struggle, Leibowitz used Court Officer John Kuehn as a stand-in for Barck. Joe demonstrated the fight in the courtroom by grabbing Court Officer Kuehn's lapels and showing how Barck fell over the desk and came up with a spindle sticking in his chest.

The Verdict and Sentencing

The trial lasted six-day. After ten hours of deliberation, the jury returned a compromise verdict of manslaughter. Newspapers reported that a single prosperous homeowner and mechanical engineer, Harold Tompkins, held out against eleven other jurors for over ten hours who had favored an outright acquittal. While waiting for the verdict, Scutellaro's children played tag on the marble courthouse floors and slept on improvised beds made of overcoats.

Judge Kinkead sentenced Joseph Scutellaro to two to five years in state prison. Despite Leibowitz's passionate final plea arguing that systemic poverty was on trial, Judge Kinkead rejected the defense motions. He cited a personal appeal from Mayor Bernard McFeely as a mitigating factor before handing down the prison sentence. On the day of sentencing, Herman Matson received news that the U.S. Attorney General's office agreed to meet with a Workers Defense League delegation to investigate civil rights violations in Hudson County.

Conclusion

The tragedy in Hoboken shows how institutional cruelty and corrupt political machines create desperate conditions for ordinary citizens.

You can apply these practical rules to resist systemic oppression and expose municipal corruption:

1. Document every interaction with relief agencies and public officials to create an undeniable record of bureaucratic denial.
2. Build solidarity among affected workers and residents through neighborhood networks rather than relying on municipal benevolence.
3. Utilize low-cost communication tools like handbills, newsletters, and public meetings to expose official malfeasance to the wider community.
4. Demand transparent criteria for public assistance and challenge arbitrary relief cuts through collective protests.
5. Support independent legal defense funds to protect activists and victims of police repression from arbitrary state prosecution.

10 Key Ideas

1. Hoboken was sharply divided geographically and socioeconomically between an affluent uptown and a struggling working-class downtown.
2. Mayor Bernard McFeely maintained absolute autocratic control over Hoboken through political patronage, police intimidation, and the suppression of dissent.
3. Poormasters enforced medieval poor laws by slashing relief rolls and distributing starvation-level aid while blaming the jobless for their own destitution.
4. Inadequate municipal relief provided by Harry Barck led directly to marching starvation conditions and the tragic death of a local toddler in Hoboken.
5. A desperate plea for relief by Joseph Scutellaro culminated in a fatal altercation when Poormaster Harry Barck offered a deeply insulting remark.
6. Italian American workers and activists organized fierce resistance against machine rule, prompting violent police suppression and targeted raids on cultural traditions.
7. Using a hand-cranked mimeograph machine that required no electricity and operated via stencils, activists bypassed media censorship to inform and mobilize the public directly.
8. Political machines utilized orchestrated mob violence and police complicity to break up public meetings held by reform activists.
9. Renowned defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz utilized meticulous jury selection and dramatic courtroom demonstrations to frame the killing as an accidental tragedy born of systemic deprivation.
10. The trial concluded when the jury returned a compromise verdict of manslaughter after ten hours of deliberation, and the judge subsequently handed down a prison sentence.