Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002

NO PHRASE or nickname can supply an index to New Jersey, for in physical and sociological composition the State is fundamentally diverse. It is often called the Garden State; with equal reason it might be labeled the Factory State, or the Commuter State.

Geographically, New Jersey offers rugged hills, and a long stretch of ocean shore attracting millions of visitors each summer; fertile soil for orchards and truck gardens, and miles of sandy waste covered by ferns and stunted pines. Industrially, the State produces an amazing variety of goods. It maintains a full quota of reasonably paid mechanics, and at the same time numerous sweatshops paying wages of $4 and $5 a week. For generations Paterson and Passaic have been national battlefields for organized labor. Yet within walking distance of these cities are other communities where picketing is considered a crime.

Politically, New Jersey is noted for one of the strongest Democratic machines of the Nation and a hardly less virile Republican organization. It is also a testing ground for the Labor Party movement. Culturally, the State is enriched by Princeton and Rutgers Universities, Stevens Institute, an excellent school system, the fine Newark Public Library, and several noted museums. Yet within an hour's ride from the most densely populated sections are mountain people who have lived for 150 years in ignorance and poverty akin to that of Southern hill folk.

Since the time when New York and Philadelphia were villages, New Jersey has been the corridor between them. Colonial post roads have evolved into the strikingly designed concrete highways and bridges that signify a motor-minded population. Fittingly, it was New Jersey that pioneered with the cloverleaf intersection to sort unceasing streams of traffic. Roads have been laid so straight and broad that the long-distance autoist speeds across the State, seeing little except a landscape of reinforced concrete and billboards, although many pleasant villages and quiet country lie a little way off the main highways.

New Jersey's characteristic disunity extends back to the years of early settlement, when the separate provinces of East Jersey and West Jersey were created. The civil government and Puritanism of New England were stamped upon the eastern province, which was to become the urban manufacturing area, while the western province (now "South Jersey") concentrated on agriculture and adhered largely to the Quaker faith. Although the two provinces were united under a single government in 1702, fusion has never been completed. Residents of southern New Jersey still look askance at products of the northern half, especially when the product is political oratory. The term "North Jersey" is used as a geographical designation with little sentiment, but "South Jersey" is spoken of by fishermen and farmers almost as a Virginian speaks of the Old Dominion.

In more recent years the State has become the home of tens of thousands of people who work in New York or Philadelphia. The commuter reads newspapers from those cities on his way to work; he rides on railroads that, except for the Jersey Central, bear names taken from other States; and when he has money to spend for a good time at night, his pleasure often falls into the category of interstate commerce. The legitimate theater is practically non-existent within New Jersey. Night life is decentralized by hundreds of neon-signed roadhouses, many of them large enough for a thousand patrons.

But the State does not belong to the commuters. Of more significance are the oystermen and fishing captains of the coast; the truck farmers and dairymen; and the merchants, professional workers, and industrial workers of towns and cities. The greatest share of New Jersey's working life is in the factories, whose output of refined copper, petroleum products, textiles, electrical equipment, machinery and other goods gives the State sixth rank in the Nation for value of manufactures, although it is only ninth in population.

Off the arterial roads are hundreds of small villages where the tempo of life is in keeping with the general stores, white frame churches, and schoolhouses; where a good corn crop is more interesting news than the murder of a Manhattan artist's model, and where the county's chief horse trader is more representative of the community culture than the automobile dealer. People in these villages are independent of cities. They are as firmly rooted to their homesteads as the stone walls and rail fences that mark their lands.

Equal to the rural Jerseyman's apparent contempt for the neighboring metropolises (whose residents buy most of his produce) is the simulated scorn of New Yorkers for that unexplored portion of the United States lying between the Hudson River and Hollywood. New Yorkers in general know little of New Jersey. Although Newark is much closer to New York's City Hall than are many sections of the greater city, it is sometimes assumed to be a remote station on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Relatively few New Yorkers ever have penetrated the miles upon miles of pine barrens on the coastal plain; they have never seen Bordentown, where the early nineteenth century is alive on every street, nor the small villages resting solidly in the pockets of northern mountains.

Like China, New Jersey absorbs the invader. On summer week ends, when city asphalt is soft enough to take heel prints, the State's highways are thronged with the cars of New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians bound for the coast resorts. And it is to "Jersey" that apartment-worn residents of Manhattan and Philadelphia move by thousands when the desire for space, grass, clean air, better schools, and lower rents can no longer be denied. Millionaires have joined the exodus across the Hudson and Delaware. They have crowned the low-lying hills with their mansions and greenhouses, converted the fields into golf courses, decorated the roadsides with spring-blooming forsythia, and imported dogs and horses by the hundreds.

The State inherited a large foreign population from the years of wholesale immigration, and received many additional immigrants who moved from other States between 1920 and 1930. Lying at the back door of Ellis Island, the industries of New Jersey absorbed so many shiploads of Europeans that the foreign-born population in some manufacturing centers is still as high as one-third. Negroes came also to work on farms or in factories, and racial discrimination followed, particularly in southern New Jersey -- a section that lies partly below the Mason-Dixon Line. According to the report of the Interracial Committee of New Jersey Conference of Social Work (1932), "Although civil rights are guaranteed by law to Negroes in New Jersey, their personal privileges are increasingly more lim- ited."

Holding to the older traditions are the members of local historical societies, the Daughters of the American Revolution and similar organizations. Washington fought much of the Revolution on New Jersey soil, and the places associated with his name have been marked and preserved. Tales of Indian raids and Indian-killing are still being told, although the Indian population has decreased to some two hundred. Monuments to vanished industry and commerce are the ruins of bog-iron furnaces throughout southern New Jersey, the weed-grown ditches of the two canals that crossed the State from the Delaware River, and hundreds of small streams that once provided power for mills on almost every pond.

Toryism was rampant in New Jersey at the time of the Republic's birth, and the State is still a seething mixture of liberal and reactionary forces. Today the dominant corporation is Public Service, the vast utility concern that sells electricity, gas, and transportation to most inhabitants of the State. Consumers have won an initial fight for lower rates, and Camden is the scene of what amounts to a civic crusade for public ownership.

But the average resident, particularly in the commuting belts, is perhaps less concerned about the destiny of New Jersey than are the editorial writ- ers of the great New York dailies. The voter looks to Washington or to his borough hall, and scarcely knows when the legislature is sitting at Trenton. The commuter has no time to read the editorials as he sprints alternately from train to ferry and from ferry to train. The industrial worker's chief concern now seems to be the future of national labor or- ganizations. As for the farmer, he finds the soil good and usually votes Republican.

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