o begin understanding the poormaster story, I reviewed coverage in local and national newspapers of Depression-era conditions and policies, the administration of aid in Hoboken, and the events that followed poormaster Harry Barck’s death. For several months I was a regular visitor to the main branch of the Jersey City Public Library, which maintains a comprehensive collection of microfilmed national and area newspapers, and, in its New Jersey Room, a time saving index of Jersey Journal reportage from 1912 through 1954.
That’s how I first learned about one of Hoboken’s forgotten Depression-era activists. Herman Matson, an unemployed former merchant marine, had responded to the Scutellaro tragedy by attempting to organize the unemployed in Hoboken. I initially found a brief mention of him as a relief applicant who had been ill-treated by Poormaster Barck, but when I checked the Journal card files, I found several articles about his activism. According to these reports, Herman Matson had taken great risks to speak out against injustice and to try to gain more aid for the city’s poor.
I had heard from Hoboken old-timers (and later read in Department of Justice files deposited in the National Archives) that under the reign of then-Mayor Bernard McFeely, dissent in Hoboken was viciously quashed. Protestors would be hauled into the police station—the mayor’s brother, Edward, was the chief—and some would leave with broken ribs and swollen faces. The McFeelys did not want anyone to disrupt what one critic called their “nepotistic republic.” More than 60 McFeely kin or in-laws, according to reports I later consulted, pulled down rich salaries in city posts during the Depression years, while Poormaster Barck denied desperate families aid, asserting that the city had insufficient funds for moochers. The McFeelys cultivated support by dispensing small, low-paying jobs on the city payroll; in return, their “friends” became the administration’s eyes and ears on the streets. They reported on the actions of dissenters and threatened them with harm if they spoke out.
Among the Journal articles I found on Matson were several describing “a riot” on September 15, 1938, when the activist had convened an open-air meeting in a public park. He had just spoken a few words—“We are here to talk about McFeely and the starvation in Hoboken”—when a crowd of several hundred McFeely thugs attacked and beat him. They also pummeled his wife, Elizabeth. Newspaper photographers captured the scene and published images of Herman Matson attempting to staunch the bleeding of his battered face. As his attackers left the park, the Hoboken police arrived—and arrested Matson, for “inciting to riot.”
None of the photographs of the attack or any other reports on Matson’s activities showed his face. But I remembered that Robert Foster, director of the Hoboken Historical Museum, had retrieved from a dumpster many old police files when the city jail was demolished. I asked Museum archivist David Webster to search the collection for mug shots from September 15, 1938. He came up with one photograph that had been separated from its corresponding file of information—now lost. It depicted a man with facial bruises.
Now came my efforts to locate the surviving children of Herman and Elizabeth Matson. I knew from the Social Security death database that Herman had died in Connecticut; I conducted a search of obituaries in Connecticut papers and found his next of kin listed. I matched the names to available addresses. Two called and said they were Herman’s children and directed me to a third. When they studied the police photo I sent them, all three identified the arrested man as their father.
