The last New Jersey Democrat to lose a U.S. Senate race in New Jersey was Paul Krebs (1912-1996), labor leader and one-term congressman from Livingston. His story involves one of the great New Jersey labor union feuds.
The account starts in Essex County in the late 1950’s. Essex had three of New Jersey’s fifteen congressional districts: Newark Democrats Peter Rodino and Hugh Addonizio and Livingston Republican Robert Kean. Kean gave up his seat in 1958 to run for the U.S. Senate, and was replaced by George Wallhauser, a businessman who ran what was then a small Republican machine in Maplewood.
In 1954, New Jersey Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) president Carl Holderman became Gov. Robert Meyner’s new Commissioner of Labor. Krebs, then 41, had been political director of the United Auto Workers of America (UAW) for four years.
To get that job, Krebs outmaneuvered Joel Jacobson, 34, who led the Essex-West Hudson CIO Council. The two men hated each other: Krebs was quiet and old-school; Jacobson was brainy and thought unions should be a little militant in their advocacy of social causes. The bad blood between the two got worse when Meyner gave the seat Krebs wanted on the Rutgers Board of Governors to Jacobson.
The merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) with the CIO created considerable dissension among labor groups in New Jersey – think how a merger of the Essex and Hudson Democratic organizations today might go. The AFL had about 300,000 members in New Jersey, and the CIO had about 200,000. As part of the merger debate, the AFL wanted three of the four seats on the state executive council; the CIO wanted two seats.
The newly-formed New Jersey AFL-CIO would have a CIO man as the vice president. Krebs and Jacobson both wanted the job. The AFL president, Louis Marciante, would head the new labor group; former Newark Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Vincent Murphy who was even more powerful than Marciante, would be the secretary-treasurer – a job he’d held for nearly thirty years.
Complicating matters was that the CIO was split between the UAW and the rest of the CIO. The fight got so heated that national AFL-CIO leader George Meany threatened to seize control of the New Jersey union and name the officers himself. Krebs and the UAW wound up walking out of the state convention and floated forming their own independent union. Jacobson became state CIO president after the merger was postponed.
Addonizio gave up his House seat in 1962 to run for mayor of Newark – he famously said at the time that a guy could “make a million dollars in that job.” He was replaced by Joe Minish, the executive director of the Essex-West Hudson Industrial Union Council, AFL-CIO. Minish had been a CIO man allied with Jacobson.
Wallhauser was never able to replicate Kean’s popularity. He won the seat with 53% against former Irvington Municipal Court Judge Thomas Holleran, and faced Democrat Bob Peacock, a 32-year-old Livingston resident and deputy state Commissioner of Banking in 1960. Peacock campaigned in Newark with John F. Kennedy, raised in what was in those days big money from labor, and came within 3,826 votes of winning a seat in Congress – 40%-48%.
Peacock ran again in 1962 and Wallhauser won again, this time by a slightly bigger margin: 6,386, 53%-47%. In 1964, the 64-year-old Wallhauser had no appetite for another tough campaign and called it quits.
Krebs leveraged his friendship with Essex County Democratic Chairman Dennis Carey and got the Democratic nomination for Congress in the old 12th district, which the Republicans held since 1938. The Republican candidate – and the early favorite — was Essex County Surrogate David Wiener. Wiener, a former state tax appeals commissioner and counsel to the State Assembly, had won his countywide race by 18,000 votes in 1959.
With Lyndon Johnson winning 70% of the vote in Essex – in an era…
Read More: Labor Leader: Paul J. Krebs, last president of NJ CIO served one-term in Congress