Rob Bentlyewski
While doing research for a class project, Rob Bentlyewski (MPA ‘19) stumbled upon a shocking story about the origins of Victory Gardens, NJ - a story omitted from the history books. With support from the MPA Changemaker Scholarship and the Colin Powell Graduate Fellowship, Bentlyewski unearthed the true history of this factory town that played a crucial role in the US World War II effort. His research is the first known effort at historical rectification since Victory Gardens was founded seven decades ago. It tells the story of a political battle between wealthy landowners and factory workers over town boundaries that would determine the distribution of resources and political power. In this interview, Bentlyewski discusses the origins of the project, its relevance to the present, and his advice for MPA students aspiring to do similar work.
Tell me about how this project started.
I grew up right next to this small town, Victory Gardens, NJ, but like everyone else, I did not know how it was created. One day I was researching municipal government structures for our American Governance class, and I thought, “who’s idea was it to create such a tiny town?” And when I looked into it, at first I couldn’t find anything; the history available was very limited. I had to go searching and piece together paragraphs and footnotes for various sources. Something just wasn’t adding up. Then I looked at the original newspapers from the time – the 1940s – and I saw a story that was different than what was publicly understood to be Victory Gardens’s history. I couldn’t believe what I was finding, so I set out to get to the bottom of the town’s true history.
What started as a class project became my proposal for the MPA Changemaker Scholarship, which funded my research for one semester, and that became my proposal for the Colin Powell Graduate Fellowship. I told the fellowship committee that I think I’m onto something: give me a year, and I will see if I can turn it into something big.
You are a proud New Jerseyite. Did that motivate you to do this project?
The project showed that there are grand stories – high drama, in fact – in seemingly insignificant small-town life, but you have to look closely and look past the things you commonly identify as important in order to see it. My family’s sort of ordinary, small-town history – you know, ‘they came here, they got jobs, they had kids, and they lived their lives’ – doesn’t look like something you would write a story about, but this project showed otherwise. The project brought out the Bruce Springstein fan in me, because people like Bruce Springstein found value in these stories and wrote songs about them. Victory Gardens is as small-time as you can get, but it was high drama rife with abuse of power – and it had been completely omitted from the history books! I felt like it was right to tell that story. I felt like I was in a position to do it, and not many people are.
How did you approach the research? What steps did you take?
It involved digging up a lot of documents, including newspapers and municipal documents from more than 70 years ago. There was a day when I took a train from NYC an hour west to Morristown and then walked two miles through the snow to a library and found an unmarked glass case that I believe contained the document that I wanted. I had to track down two librarians to find someone who could open it. And then I carefully looked through it for an unlabeled, fifteen-page, three-ring bound notebook that contained the document I needed.
Based on those documents, I developed an alternative story about what actually took place in the town, but I was very careful to not accept that story as true. I continued looking for resources, not to confirm my suspicions but rather to find evidence against them. That’s what we are taught to do in statistics. You don’t confirm a hypothesis; you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis. So I had a hypothesis, and then I spent a year working to disprove it. And although I did find small pieces that I thought to be true that weren’t, it turned out that my suspicions were confirmed.
What is the alternative history that you discovered? How was Victory Gardens founded?
Victory Gardens was originally a housing project built within the township of Randolph during WWII to house the workers of a local explosives factory. The people who moved in were all union factory workers, all Democrats, and Randolph was a wealthy, almost all-Republican town. The influx of Democrats threatened the political stability of the local Republicans, who referred to the project pejoratively as a ‘slum’ that was threatening the town’s growth after the war.
The leaders of Randolph asked the state government to separate this tiny tenth of a square mile from them, and they held a referendum to get public approval. To ensure they would win the referendum, they carried out a misinformation campaign where town government workers gave speeches all around the area making claims that simply weren’t true about the town’s finances. They claimed that Randolph was having to pay for education, police, and streets in Victory Gardens, but that was untrue: the federal government was subsidizing those expenses and actually published the records to prove it. Also, they promised that taxes would go down 40% if Victory Gardens were removed, which was simply a bald-faced lie, and taxes actually stayed the same the next year.
Two major players in this fight were two of the largest landowners in the area: Brundage, who was from Randolph and was pushing hard to kick out Victory Gardens, and Hedden, who was from nearby Dover, which was resisting Victory Gardens being kicked out because they were afraid that the responsibility would fall on them to take care of the community. So it was actually a fight between a wealthy Wall Street investor and an oil and iron industry magnate.
The referendum ended up passing by only a 24-vote margin out of about 1400 votes. The state legislature went along with Randolph’s request to remove Victory Gardens, but I found out that a speaker of the New Jersey Assembly later called it one of the darkest moments in the State Legislature’s history.
The worst part of the story is that the false claims made by Randolph’s public officials ended up becoming the official history of Victory Gardens. It feels so wrong to me that what started as propaganda became history. What we would now call an ‘alternative fact’ with the passage of time became an accepted fact. And this town which was essential to the country’s war effort was branded as a burden. It just strikes me as terribly unfair.
Your project also looks not only at the creation of Victory Gardens but also the heroic mayor, Bill Gratacos, who led the community early on. Could you tell me more about that?
Absolutely. I think it’s the most impressive story of government performance that I have ever come across. Bill Gratacos was the leader during perhaps the most difficult time for municipalities everywhere in the 1970s – rising gas prices, recession. And Victory Gardens had a tiny tax base and no public services or even public buildings for that matter. Gratacos refused to just passively accept these conditions. He insisted that Randolph give Victory Gardens more land that he could do something with. Looking at the map of the town before and after Bill Gratacos, it’s unbelievable: he put every single inch of land to use. In a muddy area on the town’s border, he got a factory built on a diagonal that fit perfectly within the border, and it’s now a thriving industrial space. In another small area, he built apartments. He kept Victory Gardens alive even when everyone said it would fail. It wasn’t supposed to work, it wasn’t built to work, but they made it work.
What qualities made him such a good leader?
He was willing to think big. And he was politically brave. He never accepted ‘no’ as an answer, and he refused to accept small-town status. He picked fights with people who on paper he had no business picking fights with: the governor, the president, people with money, people with land and power. People who most politicians try to make friends with, he confronted for the sake of his town.
Gratacos didn’t do it alone, of course. Even after his success, Victory Gardens’s tax base is still too small to properly fund the government. They have no public library. When they call 911, the police car often comes from the state barrack a half hour away. The town relies heavily on part-time help from working class people, folks who don’t have MPA degrees and or accounting degrees. These are people who work nine-to-five and then after hours show up and work for their neighborhood – it is truly impressive.
What does the story of Victory Gardens teach us about city planning and city politics more broadly?
I think there are some bigger lessons to be learned from Victory Gardens’s story. Some of what happened there is similar to what happens in other cities. We see the way bad actors making decisions for short-term gain can have very long-lasting effects if they’re never corrected. Red lining in New York City, for example, created very sharp divisions that still exist today. We also see the way wealthy landowners can dominate local politics, as in the case of Brundage and Hedden. That is something that remains very relevant today.
Also, it is common for the reverse of Victory Gardens to happen: a wealthy community leaves a larger community. They either do it informally by becoming a gated community, or they formally separate. In New Jersey it happens all the time. You see microscopic towns of just very rich people. And these political lines are used to keep the tax money of the wealthy from going to educating poorer children or to paving the streets in poorer neighborhoods.
What are your next steps with this project?
I am completing two versions of the history of the town. One is more simple, straightforward, and accessible to anyone in the town: something that I will offer to the town government in case they want to put it on their website. I will offer a brief presentation at a council meeting, if they’ll have me.
The other is a longer, more in-depth and academic text that I plan to distribute to local historical societies, the people who teach history in the area. I hope this will help spread knowledge of the town’s true history. After I finish my fellowship work, I am considering making a larger book or podcast, if that will help. But I am prioritizing local stakeholders first.
What do you hope the impact will be?
I think there is a possibility for righting the past wrongs. There has been discussion in the State Senate about reducing the number of municipalities in New Jersey, and there’s a possibility that Victory Gardens could be reunited with Randolph.
However, I have made a point in this project not to put out any recommendations about what Victory Gardens should do with the information. As a person who doesn’t live there, I just want them to understand the facts, to know their history and then they can choose what to do with it.
What surprised you about your research?
I was surprised that I spent 25 years of my life just down the road from this town, and I never questioned how it was created. And no one else had asked why, either. What I found was so shocking, so egregious, but it went undetected for half a century. I had to stumble upon it.
It also surprised me how clear the wrongdoing was. There was nothing abstract about it, no room for interpretation: a specific set of actions led to a clear outcome. You commonly hear that history is written by the victors. There could not have been a clearer example of this lesson. The town government said one set of facts was true, and the federal government said another set of facts was true. The town government won and got its way, and that is the history that stuck. It was in my power to show what the facts were and to paint a new picture of that history.
One other thing that I thought was special about this story was that it had very clear characters. It felt like a work of fiction about political corruption. There was the factory worker who rose to lead the resistance; the rich guy in Randolph who was pulling all the strings; the owner of a general store who became the town leader; and the political machine controlled by the wealthy people in town. And later on there were these outstanding characters like Bill Gratacos. So I felt like there was, in addition to having clear-cut facts, there was also a narrative that was easy to follow.
How did you grow personally over the course of this project?
It helped me clarify that I want to be a lawyer. It made me sit down with legal documents for substantial periods of time, reading laws and interpreting laws and trying to understand them. And I found that I enjoyed it. It was something that came naturally to me. It was something that I found I had a talent for. I entered the MPA Program unsure whether I wanted to go into law school afterward or not. Digging into the laws of 1951 New Jersey, I found that I enjoy this, and I became sure that studying and working in the law was the right next step.
What advice would you offer future MPA students who want to become a Powell Graduate Fellow?
I encourage them to go for it. The Powell Fellowship is one of the best things offered at City College. They take chances on students with ambitious, bold, non-traditional projects, and they give you latitude, financial support, and other ambitious researchers to work alongside. And it has a public service focus, which is exactly what people who come to our MPA program are looking for. And it’s an opportunity to do something completely original, which I feel like it’s hard to find in a university. As an undergraduate, I applied to write a thesis that was turned down for being less than traditional. The Powell fellowship will support students who show up with a passion and a vision for what needs to get done, whether it’s academically by furthering research in that field, or organizing a program, as my predecessor did by taking youth to West Africa.
Also, use the Changemaker program as a stepping stone to the fellowship. Find an advisor to guide you and a clear vision of where you are going with your project, so you can develop your project and be ready to present it to the fellowship committee.
What were the most important skills for this project?
Definitely research skills: tracking down documents that sometimes didn’t even have labels on them; figuring out the system of where information is kept, where public documents are kept, where less than public documents like histories and things like that are kept; figuring out the way public record keeping works and being able to get help when you need it, whether that’s asking a librarian at CCNY to help you find what you need or asking someone in New Jersey who has the key. You have to be able to understand the dynamics of who can help you and then put yourself in the position to get the help.
Any final thoughts?
I would like to thank both the people from the Colin Powell fellowship and the MPA staff for supporting what was really an out-there project from the start, and even though it worked out, perhaps better than even I had imagined, it’s still pretty out-there. A lot of people had to take a chance on this. It affirms, reaffirms for me that CCNY is a really special place when it comes to encouraging academic exploration and not sticking to a more traditional path as I’ve seen elsewhere.
Thanks so much. It’s really a fascinating story how you created and carried out this project. Thanks for talking to me about it.
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