In 1900, alcoholic chocolates and drunken walking topped list of social concerns

Modern Brewery Age, Jan 10, 2000

Associated Press--While the Hudson County, New Jersey of the Year 2000 will continue its war against drugs and grapple with gun-toting teen-agers, the Hudson County New Jersey of 1900 tackled a problem the public considered to be just as serious: chocolate.

"Intoxicating Candies Sold to School Children" announced a headline in the Jan. 2, 1900 edition of The Evening Journal, which would later become The Jersey Journal.

The candies, sold at stores all around the county, were turning innocent kids into "developing drunkards," according to the report.

"That many school children have been half intoxicated by the consumption of liquor contained in candies is proved by recent incidents in several of the public schools," it reported.

Clearly, it was a different time, a time when a windswept fire along a patch of Newark Avenue in Jersey City not only meant leaving people homeless but meant the death of four horses that also lived on the property.

It was a time when taking a leisurely walk, according to some accounts, meant strolling from downtown Jersey City all the way into Newark without thinking twice. And a time when a typical child's allowance of 2 cents meant enough to go buy some candy (hopefully of the non-alcoholic kind).

And while brandy-spiked candies would probably never make headlines today, Hudson County anticipated the New Year in 1899 much as we did in 1999: with gimmicks, like New Year's Eve weddings, and the occasional suicide; with political upheaval, and immigration issues.

Drunk driving was not a problem, but drunk walking apparently was. "Police Seurgeon (sic) Arlitz was kept busy all yesterday attending to injuries received by New Year callers, who were unable to walk with any degree of certainty after several visits to their friends," the Journal reported. "Cut heads from falls upon the sidewalks were in the majority. Broken limbs swelled a long list of casualties."

But mostly, Hudson County seemed to ring in the new year in the pews of their local churches, which, at the time, was not for want of parishioners.

"In a halo of happiness, Hoboken ushered in the New Year," the Journal reported. "Indoors in private houses and public hall social gatherings (people) did homage to the beginning of the last year of the nineteenth century. In the churches, impressive services were conducted, while outdoors, throngs made merry and made the welken (sic) ring with the aid of fish horns and other tooting instruments."

Perhaps the most strikingly ironic news story, at least in retrospect, is a short item about a new battleship that would someday be built. The Evening Journal's first edition of the 1900 reported: "It will not be long before one of the new battleships will be bearing the name of New Jersey to all parts of the world. The Naval Board of Construction has agreed on the design for the greatest battleships ever projected for the American Navy, and if the latest Washington reports are correct, the new vessels will be named New Jersey, Georgia and Pennsylvania."

The USS New Jersey wouldn't be built until the 1940s and retired in the 1990s to become a floating museum either in Camden or Bayonne, the location of which is still to be decided.

Once the 1900s were launched and the honeymoon of New Year's Eve passed, Hudson County would sail into the next decade with its work cut out for itself, particularly in dealing with an influx of new immigrants and political reform. "There was a lot of suspicion about the new immigrant groups. ... In the new century, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans these were the so-called "new immigrants," said Marc Mappen, associate dean of University College at Rutgers.