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<p>Just a few days ago Wilkes-Barre acquired a new mayor. Congratulations to George Brown, and here&#8217;s hoping that his administration will be a great one.</p><p>Exactly a century ago, Wilkes-Barre had just sworn in another mayor &#8211; Daniel L. Hart. Was his administration a great one? Let&#8217;s take a look.</p><p>Hart&#8217;s background suggested he would be a different kind of mayor when he ran for office in 1919. He was not a man from politics or business &#8212; the chief sources of politicians &#8212; but from entertainment. He is the only one of the city&#8217;s many mayors since the 1800s with a page on IMDB, the International Movie Data Base.</p><p>Born in 1866, five years before Wilkes-Barre formally became a city, Hart graduated from Wyoming Seminary. By the early years of the 20th century, he had worked locally as a theatrical manager and was carving out a career as a playwright. His plays were popular in the theaters of Wyoming Valley, and some were being mounted in the big cities of the Northeast. At one point, he had four shows playing in New York City.</p><p>Hart&#8217;s most famous play was &#8220;The Parish Priest,&#8221; made into a silent movie in 1920. With Hart himself doing the screenplay, it portrays a kindly clergyman who carries out his mother&#8217;s last wish to promote a marriage and bring a family together.</p><p>Before long, though, Hart tired of theater and began to focus on politics. He ran for Wilkes-Barre city treasurer, winning and holding the position for three terms. Though he wrote more theater for a few years, eventually he decided to pursue a bigger prize &#8212; the mayorship of his home town.</p><p>Running as a Democrat in a strongly Republican community, the highly visible Hart won the election of 1919. He would win again in 1923, 1927 and 1931, becoming the only Wilkes-Barre mayor to capture four terms.</p><p>Wilkes-Barre was a community on the move in the 1920s. Population would reach its all-time high of more than 86,000 by the end of the decade. Railroads sped thousands of people into and out of the city daily and carried the products of the city&#8217;s industry &#8212; everything from anthracite coal to peanuts to silk &#8212; far and wide.</p><p>There were political and cultural strains, though, and Hart was in the middle of them, siding with &#8220;the little guy.&#8221; Two areas stood out.</p><p>Pennsylvania&#8217;s &#8220;blue laws&#8221; of the time banned sports and other &#8220;worldly&#8221; pursuits on Sundays. Hart raised hackles when he championed Sunday amateur baseball, saying that the working man needed some fun on his day off.</p><p>In the middle of 1920s prohibition, he brazenly flouted the law by building a private speakeasy on the top floor of his palatial Hazle Avenue home. Dubbing it the &#8220;Club de Attic,&#8221; he poured the beer and entertained local dignitaries and visiting actors he knew from his days on Broadway, signaling to the working people that he saw nothing wrong with a brew or two.</p><p>How did the voters respond? Hart defeated Republican Charles Loveland twice, and then had no more opposition for a while.</p><p>Soon after the start of his fourth term, though, it was obvious that Hart was ill. He died early in 1933. The streets were packed along the funeral procession&#8217;s route from his home to St. Patrick&#8217;s Church. The Luzerne County Court named Loveland to succeed him. Unmarried, Hart left no heirs.</p><p>A great administration? Well, maybe. But in Wilkes-Barre&#8217;s own &#8220;Roaring Twenties,&#8221; Hart was certainly the man for the job</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Tom Mooney Mug</div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/web1_TOM_MOONEY-1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Tom Mooney Mug</caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Tom Mooney</p><p>For Times Leader</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history columnist. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Remember When: Mayor Hart presided over the 1920s