General Assembly. The English colonists who settled New Jersey brought with them faith in a government of laws. They believed that people had a right to participate in the lawmaking process through elected representatives who could assemble and deliberate as a distinct body. While a proprietary colony (1664-1702) and a royal province (1703-1776), New Jersey had such assemblies. When the colony was controlled by the Crown, its governor and council were royal appointees. The elected assembly often struggled with the governor, typically over finances and land ownership. Its institutional development, however, was hampered by an irregular pattern of elections and meetings. The governor could convene and dissolve the assembly at his pleasure.
In 1776 the new state’s constitution provided for a popularly elected "General Assembly,” consisting initially of three delegates per county, serving one-year terms. The assembly dominated financial policy, initiating all tax and spending bills. The council (now composed of one person elected annually from each county) could not alter these, voting only to approve or disapprove. The governor had no veto. This "republican” constitution made the legislature in general, and the assembly in particular, quite powerful. Joint meetings with the council, where the assembly had numerical superiority, selected the governor and all judges.
In 1844 the constitution was revised along separation-of-power lines. The assembly’s size was reduced in favor of the governor and senate (successor to the council), the latter with the power to amend finance bills. The General Assembly now had sixty members, apportioned among the counties according to population. The one-year term continued. (The senate kept its predecessor’s representation by county, but the term was increased to three years, as was that of the now popularly elected governor.) Assembly elections usually were at large by counties; this maximized the power of county political parties.
With constitutionally weak governors, the legislature normally dominated state government. Senate and assembly became "upper house” and "lower house” in the public’s eye, to the status disadvantage of the assembly. New Jersey became a two-party state: rural Republicans generally controlled the senate; the assembly’s yearly elections meant that it was more quickly affected by shifting political currents. Each party handled legislative decision-making through secret caucuses; formal legislative sessions confirmed caucus votes. Potentially powerful, the legislature preferred to delegate governing responsibility to counties and municipalities.
Constitutional revision in 1947 brought no change to the mode of representation. Assembly terms were increased to two years, the senate’s to four years. Legislative influence was reduced in favor of the governor, who became budget initiator and received strong veto powers. Aggressive supreme courts also altered the political game, with the system evidencing more checks, balances, and complexity than before. As state government became more active, however, the assembly’s workload increased markedly. Party caucuses remained, but standing committees and professional staff acquired significant roles in its decision making.
General Assembly chamber.
The system of representation, voided by the courts in 1964, was revamped by a special constitutional convention in 1966. Forty legislative districts were authorized, based on whole counties or groups of counties. Two assembly members and one senator were to be elected from each district. The state supreme court later mandated that legislative districts be substantially equal in population, effectively ending the long tradition of formal county representation. County political parties, however, remain major factors in the nomination and election of state legislators.
General Assembly et al. v. Byrne.In General Assembly v. Byrne, the New Jersey Supreme Court considered whether the 1981 Legislative Oversight Act violated the state constitution. The act conferred upon the legislature the power to invalidate all rules proposed by state executive agencies. By creating such a "broad and absolute legislative veto,” the court held that the act interfered with the governor’s power to enforce law. In so doing, the law violated the separation-of-powers principle encompassed in Article 3 of the state constitution. According to the court, the veto concentrated power in the legislature by enabling it both to make and to execute laws. The court also found that the veto violated the presentment clause by significantly interfering with the executive’s power to veto laws passed by the legislature. This case underscored the court’s intention to enforce vigorously the expanded executive veto created under the 1947 constitution, and thereby enabled the executive to safeguard its independence from the legislature. Prior to the ratification of this constitution, the state legislature had been the clearly dominant branch in New Jersey government. The Byrne decision echoed the findings of the U.S. Supreme Court and a number of other state high courts that struck down legislative vetoes as violations of separation-of-powers guarantees.
General Electric Corporation. For much of the twentieth century, the East Coast manufacturing and distribution operations of General Electric’s light bulb division were based in Newark, in a sprawling plant at 40 Seventeenth Avenue, near Irving Turner Boulevard in the city’s Central Ward. Built as a series of eight connected buildings between 1908 and 1958, the factory employed as many as 2,500 people, working three shifts, during its heyday. By 1975, the workforce had been cut to 150. The closing of the plant in 1985 added to the economic problems that beset Newark after the city’s race riots in 1967.
Genovese case. Apolitical storm hit Rutgers University in 1965 in wake of remarks made by a junior professor at a Vietnam War teach-in. One of several speakers at the New Brunswick campus’s Scott Hall on April 23, history professor Eugene Genovese denounced U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. "Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a socialist,” he observed. "Therefore, unlike some of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.” Press reports of Genovese’s remarks were initially spotty, and no major controversy seemed in prospect until the state’s Young Republican organization assailed Genovese at its May convention and demanded a legislative investigation. Mounting public criticism provoked a review of Genovese’s remarks, first by a two-person assembly committee, then by the Rutgers Board of Governors. In both reports, and in Gov. Richard Hughes’s response to them, Genovese’s statement was sharply criticized, but no sanctions against him were deemed appropriate. Genovese had exercised his First Amendment rights, the reports concluded; he had not tried to indoctrinate students in his classroom. The issue might have gradually faded but for its injection into that year’s gubernatorial campaign. Seeking to exploit patriotic sentiment in New Jersey at a time when the Vietnam War was escalating, Republican nominee Wayne Dumont made the dismissal of Genovese a central theme in his platform. At a Rotary Club luncheon in Paterson on July 29, Dumont said that he supported academic freedom, but he did not believe it should "give to a teacher in a state university, supported by taxpayers’money, the right to advocate victory of an enemy at war in which some of his own students may very well lay down their lives in the cause of freedom.” Dumont pressed the Genovese case on the campaign trail and in a debate with Governor Hughes. New Jersey voters, however, did not believe that the fate of a history professor trumped other issues. In the November elections Hughes, who consistently defended Gen-ovese’s right to free speech, trounced Dumont. The Genovese case was not entirely a triumph for academic freedom. The Rutgers administration’s treatment of Genovese—denying him standard academic rewards—suggested that the university remained uncomfortable about the controversy he generated. Genovese grew increasingly dissatisfied with his status at Rutgers and in 1967 he accepted a position at Sir George Williams College in Montreal. His subsequent career earned him a reputation not merely as a sharp-tongued controversialist, but also as a leading scholar of slavery.
Geography. New Jersey ranks forty-sixth in land area among the states, accounting for only 0.2 percent of the nation’s territory. Despite its relatively small size, New Jersey has a fairly varied physical geography, a complex economic geography, and a remarkably varied mosaic of racial, ethnic, and cultural geographies.
Although New Jersey is home to only 3 percent of Americans, on average they are among the richest citizens: New Jersey’s median household income was the nation’s highest in 2000. New Jersey is first among the states in density of population: at over a thousand people per square mile, the state has a higher density than China or India. New Jersey’s population of almost eight million is larger than that of one hundred independent countries.
Not particularly blessed with natural resources, the state’s comparative wealth results more from its relative location than from any particular natural resource. Relative location, or situation, is the geographic key to understanding the state’s economic and cultural distribution patterns. From the colonial era forward, New Jersey has benefited from its position between New York and Philadelphia, astride the main transport axis of the northeastern megalopolis.
New Jersey can be seen as a large peninsula with the Delaware River and Bay to the west and the Hudson River and Atlantic Ocean to the east. The only land boundary, shared with New York State, forms but 12 percent of the total border. About 40 percent of the state lies within the Appalachian Mountain Province, with the remaining 60 percent in the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The boundaries of these two great landform regions and their subdivisions run essentially northeast to southwest, roughly parallel to one another. The Appalachian Mountains and Piedmont contain some of the oldest rocks on the continent, while the Coastal Plain is composed of relatively young sediments that are poorly consolidated. The northwestern portion of the state lies in the Ridge and Valley Province of the Appalachians—an area of strongly paralleling mountain ridges and valleys. Kittatinny Mountain is the highest of these ridges; it includes High Point (the state’s highest elevation) at 1,803 feet above sea level. The famed Delaware Water Gap is one of the few breaks in this long, rugged ridge, channeling transport routes to the west. Highlands Province, flanking the Ridge and Valley to the southeast, is an extension of the rugged crystalline rocks of the New England Uplands. This part of New Jersey has a "New England” appearance, with forested ridges, hillside pastures, and picturesque lakes. The Piedmont ("foot of the mountains”) Province lies south and east of the Highlands. The bulk of New Jersey’s Piedmont consists of the Newark Basin, characterized by ridges of once-molten magma intruded into relatively less resistant sandstones and shales that now form the lowlands. During the Pleistocene glaciation, great sheets of ice moved down from Canada, scraping off soil and loose rock, pockmarking the surface and finally depositing a ridge of debris at their southernmost, melting edge. This debris ridge, or terminal moraine, runs across New Jersey from Perth Amboy north to Morristown, and west to about Belvidere on the Delaware.
New Jersey’s Atlantic Coastal Plain is subdivided into an Inner (in from the ocean) and Outer Coastal Plain. The Inner Plain, about one-fifteenth of the state’s area, has older, somewhat better consolidated sediments exposed at the surface. The Outer Plain soils have less clay and more sands. The relative lack of water retention near the surface meant that Outer Plain soils were considered largely unusable for crop production. The Outer Plain, with its pine and oak forest, is often termed the "Pine Barrens,” reflecting a general scarcity of farms. Generally, the state’s best agricultural soils are those of the Piedmont and Inner Coastal Plain, together with some limestone-floored valleys to the northwest and some specialty-crop producers (cranberry bogs and blueberry fields) on the Outer Plain.
Between Sandy Hook and Cape May, the ocean shoreline has some of the finest sand beaches in the world. From Bay Head south to Wildwood Crest, the shoreline is characterized by offshore sandbars or barrier beaches, with extensive salt marshes and bays between the barrier islands and the mainland.
New Jersey lies in the midlatitudes, slightly closer to the equator than to the North Pole. To the west lies the bulk of the continent, while to the east is the Atlantic Ocean. A broad, undulating belt of eastward-moving air, the westerly airstream, seasonally shifts northward or southward, pulsating along in wavelike motions. Great cyclonic storms, low-pressure cells, move eastward along the broad, shifting freeway of the westerly airstream, especially during the colder months. The results are a highly changeable climate. Despite its coastal location, New Jersey’s climate is continental, reflecting the seasonal extremes in temperature typical of a midlatitude landmass via the westerlies’ influences. Increasing altitudes to the northwest result in cooler temperatures there than in lowlands, and coastal locations tend to be cooler in summer and milder in winter due to oceanic influences. New Jersey is wetter than the average for the United States, with most of the state averaging between forty and forty-eight inches of precipitation.
New Jersey is not an important mining state, although copper and zinc were once produced, and iron miningin both the Outer Plain and Highlands was important in the colonial era. Iron is still mined in the Highlands, and there are known but so far unexploited deposits of oil and gas offshore. Glass sands are important, and gravel, sand, and crushed rock are produced for road construction and concrete.
No economic activities can exist in isolation from the larger economy. New Jersey’s supreme economic advantage—its relative location—has been, and must be, exploited via a well-developed transport network. New Jersey lies at the center of the northeastern seaboard megalopolis, featuring an interconnected string of big cities. Suburban growth is concentrated in the "corridor” of highways and railroads linking the cities. The prototype megalopolis was identified from Boston’s New Hampshire suburbs to Washington, D.C.’s suburbs. New Jersey’s intermediate position within a megalopolis, its location astride the northeast-southwest axis of transport development, provides the state with access to a huge, rich market and to a large, varied labor pool.
The New Jersey Turnpike exemplifies the busy corridor between New York and Philadelphia, where Piedmont and Inner Coastal Plain meet. Carrying more than 200 million vehicles a year, the turnpike is probably the world’s busiest road. Underlining the importance of megalopolis’s interconnection of big cities, vehicular traffic between New Jersey and Pennsylvania is the highest interstate volume in America. The volume across the New Jersey-New York border ranks second. The George Washington Bridge, linking Manhattan with Fort Lee, New Jersey, carries more vehicles than any other bridge in the world.
The corridor was the site of one of New Jersey’s early canals, the Delaware and Raritan. This was soon paralleled by the Camden and Amboy Railroad, the nation’s first railroad to be designed specifically as an interconnector of cities rather than simply a short link between navigable waterways. This early railway’s route is now part of the high-volume Metroliner service. Peak railroad route mileage was reached around 1920 at 2,352 miles; current route mileage is below 1,300.
The Port of New York-New Jersey, now the third-ranked container port in the United States, includes the world’s first (1962) container port, Elizabeth Marine Terminal. New Jersey accounts for 86 percent of all cargo handled in the port of New York-New Jersey, but is only a minority partner in the Delaware River port complex shared with Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Newark Liberty Airport is second to John F. Kennedy Airport in both air freight and passenger volume in the New York metropolitan area. Other important New Jersey airports include Mercer County (Trenton) and Atlantic City-Pomona.
In the Garden State today, 18 percent of the land is used for agriculture, less than half the national average. Only Rhode Island has a smaller average size for farms than New Jersey’s 93 acres (the national average is 491 acres).
The name "Garden State” reflects New Jersey farmers’ emphasis on marketing fresh fruits and vegetables. New Jersey ranks second in blueberry and summer potato production, third in cranberries, and fourth in peaches, tomatoes, spinach, and green peppers. This specialization in fresh fruits and vegetables reflects both the very high cost of farmland and a close proximity to markets. As early as the colonial period, New Jersey was known for its fresh produce, which provides higher profits per acre than most other crops. Relatively small acreages, no doubt related to high land values in such a crowded state, helped encourage high-value crops. Access to markets reduces the problem of perishablity.
New Jersey’s top agricultural counties in farm acreage are Hunterdon, Salem, Burlington, Warren, Sussex, and Cumberland. Hudson County has no farms at all, while other highly urbanized counties tend to have few farms of very small average size. In keeping with New Jersey’s high population density
New Jersey’s rate of population growth has exceeded the national rate in three distinct eras: from early colonial times through 1720; from 1850 through 1930 (excepting 1880); and from 1940 to 1970. These three booms reflect, respectively, New Jersey as a farming frontier, New Jersey as an urban-industrial frontier, and New Jersey as a suburban frontier.
Geology. New Jersey is underlain by rocks and sediments that are quite diverse and record most of the geologic events that formed eastern North America. The oldest rocks crop out in the Highlands. They include igneous and sedimentary rocks that were deeply buried during a period of continental collision and mountain building known as the Grenville orogeny, between 1.3 and 1 billion years ago. Similar rocks of Grenville age occur from Alabama to Labrador. High pressure and temperature during burial converted the granites, sandstones, and mudstones to gneiss, a layered, crystalline metamorphic rock, and converted limestone to marble. Gneiss is widespread, but marble occurs only in a few places, notably in the Franklin-Vernon area of Sussex County.
The continent created by the Grenville orogeny began to rift apart between 900 and 700 million years ago, opening an ocean basin along the east edge of what was to become North America. Sediments deposited along the continental margin in this ocean became the rocks that underlie the Ridge and Valley. Between 550 and 470 million years ago, limestone was deposited in a shallow sea that covered much of the continent. These limestones underlie Kittatinny valley and several valleys in the Highlands.
Beginning about 470 million years ago, this ocean basin began to close as the African plate moved westward beneath the North American plate. As mountains rose to the east, rivers washed silt into the closing ocean basin. These silts were laid down on the limestone and became shale. As the continents converged and the ocean basin closed, the shale and underlying limestone were folded and faulted. This period of mountain building and deformation is known as the Taconic orogeny. As the deformation ceased, about 430 million years ago, rivers deposited sand and gravel from the eroding mountain range. The sand and gravel became the quartzite and conglomerate that underlie Kittatinny Mountain and several ridges in the Highlands.
As the mountains eroded, a shallow sea again spread over much of the continent. Limestone and shale were laid down in this sea, above the older quartzite, between about 410 and 380 million years ago. These rocks underlie the area northwest of Kittatinny Mountain and also crop out in a narrow belt in the Highlands. Following deposition of these rocks, there is no preserved record in New Jersey for a period of about 150 million years. Rocks from this period are present in Pennsylvania and may have extended over New Jersey, but they have been completely eroded. Deformation of the older rocks, though, records another period of continental collision and mountain building between 300 and 250 million years ago known as the Alleghany orogeny. This event folded and thrust the rocks of the Ridge and Valley and Highlands by compressing them from the southeast and northwest, forming fold axes and thrust faults trending northeast-southwest. The northeast-southwest trend of ridges and valleys in the Ridge and Valley and Highlands is the result of later erosion by rivers exposing the alternating hard and soft layers along the flanks of the folds.
About 230 million years ago the continent formed by the orogenies began to break apart. This separation created a series of rift valleys from Nova Scotia to Florida, which were similar to the rift valleys in East Africa today. One of the largest of these valleys is the Newark Basin, which extends from the Hudson River to central Virginia. Rocks in the Newark Basin include red and gray shale, sandstone, and conglomerate deposited between 220 and 190 million years ago in floodplains, alluvial fans, and lakes. Interbedded with the sediments are layers of diabase and basalt. Diabase formed when magma was injected between beds of sedimentary rock and cooled slowly, creating a layer known as a sill. The Hudson Palisades, and Rocky Hill and Sourland Mountain between Princeton and Lambertville, are parts of a large diabase sill. Basalt formed when magma flowed as lava onto the surface of the rift valley. Three periods of lava eruption formed the basalt layers that now underlie the three parallel ridges of the Watchung Mountains.
As rifting continued, these rocks were tilted to the northwest and faulted into a series of blocks. The faults bounding these blocks include the Ramapo Fault, which defines the northwest border of the Newark Basin, and several faults traversing the western part of the basin.
With further separation, the rifting shifted eastward and created the Atlantic Ocean basin. Sediments of the Coastal Plain were laid down in shoreline and shelf settings in the widening Atlantic Ocean. The Coastal Plain sediments thicken from a feather-edge along their inland limit to about 6,500 feet at Cape May. They include layers of sand and clay that record about twenty-five cycles of rising and falling sea level between 120 and 10 million years ago. During periods of high sea level, beds of a clayey, green mineral known as glau-conite were deposited in shelf settings. During lowered sea level, sand and clay were deposited in bay, beach, estuary, and nearshore settings. Global sea level started a long-term decline about 30 million years ago, when the Antarctic ice sheet began to grow. In New Jersey, this decline caused a shift to nearshore sand deposition. These sand beds cover the outer Coastal Plain southeast of a line between Long Branch and Salem, accounting for the sandy soil and distinctive vegetation of the Pine Barrens.
Continued growth of the Antarctic ice sheet between 15 and 10 million years ago further lowered global sea level. The Coastal Plain emerged, and a long period of river erosion followed that gradually produced the present landscape. By about 2 million years ago, the overall form of the present valleys and uplands had been established. Within the past 2 million years, most landscape change has been due to glacial events. Glaciers advanced into New Jersey three times during this period, most recently 20,000 years ago. With each advance, glacial erosion and deposition modified landscape details and rerouted rivers. As the climate warmed and glaciers melted, sea level rose. Along the present coast, shoreline and estuary deposits from interglacial high stands within the past 800,000 years occur up to fifty feet above modern sea level. Modern estuaries, barrier islands, and bays formed as sea level rose during the past 12,000 years.
George Street Playhouse. George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick is a nationally recognized award-winning theater that presents a heavily subscribed main-stage season while providing an artistic home for established and emerging theater artists. Its educational outreach programs have become models used by other theaters around the nation. Well-known playwrights and actors have been associated with the company since its founding in 1974. The theater has premiered a number of shows that went on to success in New York and elsewhere, including The Spitfire Grill, Down the Garden Paths, and Proof. The theater was first located on the street whose name it bears. As part of New Brunswick’s re-vitalization during the 1980s, it moved to its current location on Livingston Avenue near George Street for the 1984 season.
George Washington Bridge. The George Washington Bridge spans the Hudson River between Fort Lee in Bergen County and 179th Street in Manhattan, providing a key link between the highway systems of New York City and New England, to the east, and the New Jersey Turnpike and the interstate system to the west and south. A suspension bridge at this location was proposed in 1922-1923 by Othmar H. Ammann, an engineer living in Bergen County, as an alternative to a massive railroad-vehicular span (then under study) from Hudson County to 57th Street. His plan was championed by New Jersey governor George Silzer, and in 1925 the Port of New York Authority agreed to build the bridge. Ammann was hired to design the crossing, with the longest single span in the world (3,500 feet); in October 1931 he completed the bridge, months ahead of schedule and below estimated cost. The towers rise 600 feet above the water, and each of the four steel cables (made by the Roebling Company of Trenton) has 107,000 miles of spun wire. Ammann’s initial plan was to follow the precedent of the Brooklyn Bridge, covering the towers with monumental stone, but cost constraints in the Depression led him to leave the steelwork unclothed.
The completed bridge was widely acclaimed; when the civil engineering profession celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 1952, the George Washington Bridge was chosen to represent its achievements. The crossing stimulated extensive development in Bergen County and beyond, turning a rural area into densely developed suburbs. In 1962, a lower deck, also designed by Ammann, was added. The structure now has fourteen vehicular lanes, whose tolls produce gross operating revenues of more than $240 million and net income of more than $140 million a year.
Unfinished suspension cables of the George Washington Bridge stretch across the Hudson River, 1930.
George W. Helme snuff mill.Located in Helmetta, the George W. Helme Snuff Mill dates to about 1880, when Helme, a former Confederate Army major-general, became sole owner, although a snuff mill may have operated on the site as early as about 1820. Primarily known for "dry snuff” (processed tobacco the texture of baking flour), it produced such brands as Railroad Mills, Lorillard, and Navy. The mill stopped packaging snuff in April 1993, consolidating with its sister mill in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1980, the mill district—factories, outbuildings, and worker houses—was named to the state and National Registers of Historic Places.
