Vol. 4, No. 1, January 2007
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The Dandy Mayor
Franklin P. Stoy begins tradition of scandal-plagued mayors
The position of Atlantic City mayor has, in past generations, been more often than not a stepping-stone to scandal, with several of the most recent holders of the office ending up in jail or under indictment. But this isn’t just a recent development—some early mayors had brushes with the law as well. One of them, Franklin Pierce Stoy, better known as “the Dandy Mayor,” was as interesting as any modern office-holder.
Stoy, a Republican, was first elected as a councilman at large in 1891, and then served as mayor from 1894-97 and 1900-1911 (Joseph Thompson held the office from 1898-99).
His tenure was marked by controversy. Some of his campaigns for “decency” strike the modern reader as ridiculous. For example, in the summer of 1905, he issued an edict prohibiting women from appearing on the beach in cream-colored bathing suits. Since these were “practically transparent,” particularly when wet, Mayor Stoy decreed that all women must wear dark-colored swimming gear. He was also an emphatic opponent of “bathing bloomers,” insisting instead that women wear full skirts while bathing.
A week later, Stoy was back on the beach, this time chasing after a traveling group of Filipino performers known as the Igorrotes. Tipped by the lifeguards that the underdressed (by Stoy’s standards) were cavorting in the surf, the mayor ordered the visitors to be ejected from the beach, and only allowed to return in “proper” beach attire.
In the following summer, Stoy announced a campaign against “untimely roistering,” by which he meant people driving too fast after dark. After he was kept awake nearly an entire night by honking horns and speeding automobiles, he alerted the police to be on the lookout for anyone disturbing the peace after bedtime.
Stoy also championed a hard line against “spooning” (no less than three young visitors were arrested in August 1904 for flirting on the Boardwalk) and, in 1908, took a courageous stand against horse play on the beach. After a young woman was seriously injured when a rubber ball drove one of her hat pins into her head, the mayor confined all ball-playing and rough sporting to a small section of the beach.
Though his anti-horseplay and roistering policies might tag him as a humorless martinet, the mayor actually had a wry sense of humor. He took a liking to snakes, and allowed a five-foot rattlesnake he’d adopted on a hunting trip full run of his office. He supposedly trained it to respond to his commands (something hard to believe, given snakes’ rudimentary hearing) and usually kept it on his desk while he attended to his official duties. Once, while touring the Boardwalk, he stopped at a snake-charmer’s booth to admire her reptiles.
He even played the hero on occasion—once, while dictating a letter inside his office, he noticed a 5-year-old girl standing between the trolley tracks at Atlantic and Tennessee Avenues. He jumped out of his chair, bounded out of the building, and bundled the child off to safety before returning to work. He also happily performed weddings, and welcomed dozens of convention groups to Atlantic City.
The mayor’s biggest controversy revolved around the issue of Sunday closing. During his first term as mayor, Stoy actively enforced an interpretation of the common law that required all bars and saloons to close on Sunday. In retaliation, the bar owners demanded—successfully—that Stoy himself be arrested because of his part-ownership of the Union Transfer Company, a transportation company that operated on Sunday.
Perhaps because of this brush with the law, Stoy was decidedly more favorable to “Sunday amusements” during his second tenure as mayor. When, in 1907, the New Jersey legislature passed the “Bishops’ law,” which absolutely prohibited liquor sales on Sunday, Stoy joined with the police, media and people of Atlantic City in publicly flouting the ban.
Two years later, Stoy was again arrested, this time for directly disregarding an order from then-Attorney General (and later Governor and President) Woodrow Wilson to enforce the Sunday closing law. He was released on $5,000 bail and continued to serve as mayor, welcoming visiting conventions and representing the city in official functions.
He was still mayor when, in July 1911, he suffered a stroke and, after a month’s illness, died in a sanitarium at the age of 52. Despite his controversial tenure, the city mourned him profoundly—all public buildings were closed after his death was announced, and all business on the island stopped for three hours on July 26 as 35,000 people paid their respects. It was a fitting end to the life of a tireless advocate for the citizens of Atlantic City.
