Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [105]
If the shark exposed an American impulse to make entertainment out of tragedy—an impulse as fresh as the San Francisco earthquake at Luna Park, a Coney Island production in three parts—in New Jersey the impact of the shark was real.
By the middle of July, thousands of citizens of New Jersey had showered telegrams and letters, editorials and telephone calls, on Trenton and Washington, begging the U.S. government and the state of New Jersey for help. Dozens of letters went directly to the White House, imploring President Wilson to take steps to rid the coast of the monsters. Hundreds of New Jersey citizens cabled Governor Tom Fielder with a collective alarm.
The economy of the Jersey shore was in a crisis. Tourists who had not yet had time to mourn or even understand the deaths of Charles Vansant and Charles Bruder reacted to the reported fatal attacks on yet another young man and a boy in New Jersey waters by packing—for home, or for the mountains. During the second week of July, the grand hotels, cottages, and guest houses from Cape May north to Spring Lake reported an average of 75 percent vacancies on some of the best beach days of the year. The threat of the shark prowling offshore cost Jersey hoteliers a quarter million dollars in lost reservations in a week. Combined with the growing fear of gathering in hotels and beaches and public places during an infantile paralysis epidemic, the economies of a dozen seaside towns were on the verge of ruin.
Twenty-eight trainloads of visitors on company excursions had canceled shore trips in recent days. The Asbury Park Hotel had closed, its full house sent packing, because of one infected child. Without summer tourist dollars, many communities would have trouble surviving the winter. The morning Gertrude Hoffman went for a dip, the governor of New Jersey was besieged by citizens' pleas for state authorities to kill the shark.
Governor James Fairman Fielder, a Wilson Progressive, forty-nine years old, a large, powerfully built man, stood before newspapermen from New York, Trenton, and Asbury Park in the governor's summer mansion in Sea Girt that Friday morning. Governor Fielder was one of the bright voices of the Progressive Era, men who believed man had mastered the animal kingdom and were close to perfecting mankind, and that government could fix anything.
The governor had called a press conference to make an announcement about the shark emergency. Fielder was a solid man in a crisis. Descended from a line of Dutch-English politicians and churchmen, he was widely admired for his unflappable temperament and was, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, his predecessor, “a man of proved character, capacity, fidelity and devotion to the public service.”
Now, he announced to reporters, the state was facing a crisis for which no one had answers. Reflecting on the deaths of three New Jersey men and a boy, the governor gave his opinion that not one but many sea monsters were attacking the state's coastline at continuing peril to human life, yet there was “no possible action that the state could take that would lessen the evil.” The governor had no idea what to do, for veteran fishermen and scientists couldn't settle on what the sea monster or monsters were, let alone offer a plan of action. Fielder had contemplated a massive hunt along the state's lengthy coast, but such an expeditionary force would have to be authorized by the legislature, which was out of session, and “even if the legislature could be called,” he said, the “cost was prohibitive.” The governor urged every coastal town in New