Lipman, Wynona Moore (b. 1929; d. May 9, 1999). Politician. Born in LaGrange, Georgia, Wynona Moore Lipman attended Talladega College in Alabama, Atlanta University in Georgia, and Columbia University in New York, where she received a Ph.D. She received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and became fluent in French, later assisting Martin Luther King with his doctoral language requirement. After serving as an Essex County freeholder, in 1971 Lipman became the first African American woman elected to the New Jersey senate. Lipman served nine terms representing the 29th Legislative District. She was the longest-serving member of the senate, and often the only woman. An advocate and leading voice for women and children, Lipman authored tough domestic violence laws, including a bill that increased the penalties for adults who patronized child prostitutes, and legislation that provided safety and support for children of troubled families. She helped create the state commission on sex discrimination, a body she chaired for thirteen years, and she sponsored legislation that expanded state contracts for under-represented business owners. Lipman, a diminutive, articulate woman, was nicknamed "Steel Magnolia.”Montclair University issued her an honorary degree in 1989, and the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University established the Senator Wynona Lipman Chair in 2000.
Lippold, Richard (b. May 3, 1915). Sculptor and teacher. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Richard Lippold has had two distinguished careers, one as a teacher, and the other as a creator of space-age, strung-wire sculptures in public places. He received an industrial design degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937, and taught design and art in Michigan and Vermont before heading Trenton Junior College’s Art Department from 1947 to 1952. His commissioned abstract wire sculptures radiate to define multiple spatial planes as they stretch from floor to ceiling, some with heights of 100 feet. In 1964, New Jersey Meadows, only twelve feet tall, was commissioned for the Newark Museum.
Literature. New Jersey literature, with a singularly long and rich history, has one grave handicap: almost every widely recognized writer who has contributed to it has been identified more quickly with another state or label. Yet James Fenimore Cooper (Leather-Stocking Tales) was born here; Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist) married and was fatally shot here; Jonathan Edwards ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) died here; Washington Irving ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) began his serious literary career in Newark; poet Marianne Moore lived in Chatham; F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) attended Princeton; Herman Melville (Moby-Dick) frequently visited his Metcalf grandchildren in South Orange; Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) called himself "the Bishop of New Jersey”; Thomas Nast (cartoonist) sharpened his humor in the state, while the Gilbreth family (Cheaper by the Dozen) exemplified it; Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass) retired and wrote his last important work here; and Toni Morrison (Beloved) won her Nobel Prize while living here. Every other year, the Dodge Poetry Festival at Waterloo reenergizes and disseminates "American Poetry” here. In fact, a high percentage of American writers in every genre have lived defining episodes of their lives in New Jersey.
The first historically important and uncontested New Jersey writers are a pair of Quakers, Elizabeth Ashbridge and John Woolman. Both wrote autobiographically. Ashbridge, the older of the two, was a rebellious British lass who eloped at age fourteen, was disowned by her father and quickly widowed, and sold herself as an indentured servant to finance passage to the New World. She then bought herself out of such servitude and supported herself in New York as an entertainer. She married a second husband named Sullivan, but then adopted—against the wishes of that husband—the Quaker persuasion. Eventually she settled in Freehold, and subsequently kept school in successive Jersey towns while living as a Quaker "minister.” Tracing her travels by foot through "the Jerseys,” as East and West Jersey were long known, she wrote Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, Written by Her Own Hand Many Years Ago (1755), which was reissued in 1990. This astonishingly forthright record of female spunk, domestic violence, public ridicule, colonial poverty, resilience, and self-empowerment against all odds is also prophetic of the crucial contributions Jersey Quakers would make to the women’s movement; for only egalitarian Quakers encouraged women to speak out in public before the twentieth century, and many groups stigmatized the women who dared.
John Woolman, born on Rancocas Creek and living all his life in Burlington County, produced the Journal, first published in Philadelphia two years after his death. Wool-man, who saw his antislavery and pacifism tracts reprinted throughout England and the colonies, is the first American writer to exert a personal influence on both sides of the Atlantic. The Journal was lauded by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier, and illustrates Quaker "plain style’—undecorated and therefore unarguable. In his Journal Wool-man recorded his everyday "leadings” about such issues as slavery and materialism, as his "Inner Light” illuminated his concerns. Wool-man’s life models a "right way” to treat those with whom one disagrees: with patience, loving tolerance, and firmness. His opposition to slavery derives from his sense of the equalizing presence of God in every person, whether slave or free. He established the theoretical framework from which abolitionists and more recently civil rights workers argued their radical reforms. Pacifist Woolman’s refusal to pay taxes levied to finance the French and Indian War (1755) anticipated Henry David Thoreau’s "Civil Disobedience” by more than ninety years. The human right Thoreau claimed for a conscience to consider itself "a majority of one” is clearly set by Woolman’s example. Further, Woolman’s A Plea for the Poor (1793) created goals for American social reforms for the next two hundred years.
New Jersey produced her share of radical writing. Indeed, Thomas Paine wrote the most famous lines of the Revolution while trying desperately to rally troops for Gen. George Washington as they retreated through Jersey from Fort Lee: "These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Further along in that first number of The American Crisis, Paine hopes for "some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen,” like Joan of Arc. Concomitantly, Philip Freneau, first a student at the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and later a farmer at Mount Pleasant, served the Patriot cause by putting Paine’s revolutionary feeling into poems, and his venom into satires on the Tories. He is the prototype for the state’s spirited public poets.
In the nineteenth century, distinctive New Jersey literature swirls around "the woman question.” Indeed, New Jersey writers range from antisuffragist Rebecca Harding Davis (Life in the Iron Mills), who summered forty-five years on the Jersey Shore at Point Pleasant, to writer of landmark suffragist tracts, Lucy Stone (Why the Women of New Jersey Should Vote) of Orange and Newark, right up to the Founding Mother herself, Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Tenafly, who with Susan B. Anthony wrote three volumes of the History of Woman’s Suffrage (1885) here.
Important women writers include the regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (A Humble Romance and Other Stories), who lived, after her marriage, in Metuchen, to the world-famous Mary Mapes Dodge, who wrote Hans Brinker;or, The Silver Skates (1865) before she served for thirty-two years as the editor of Saint Nicholas Magazine, with which she transformed children’s literature. In fact, Jersey can even claim the awe-inspiring Grimke sisters, who were born in South Carolina but were living in Shrewsbury when Angelina wrote Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States (1836), concerning the abolition of slavery; Sarah, her older sister, who anticipated Margaret Fuller, wrote Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (1837). Sarah achieved the distinction of being publicly silenced in Yearly Meeting by the Philadelphia Quakers in 1836, when she extended antislavery arguments to whole social systems that enslave human beings.
The most famous Jersey writers to discuss women in America, however, were Walt Whitman of Camden and Stephen Crane of Newark and Asbury Park. Whitman, to the scandal of all, sang as "the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,” and held that "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man.” He moved to New Jersey after a physical breakdown in 1873 left him disabled and depressed. From Jersey he wrote his great prose Specimen Days and Collect (1882), in which the confident sunshine of his 1855 poems gives way to the gray clouds of old age. His optimism eroded under pressures of overwork, anxiety, and Civil War shocks, never better described than in this topic. Those shocks are memorably dramatized in Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895); but beyond war scenes, the entrapments awaiting poor and unskilled women are searingly depicted in Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893).
Crane influenced poetry, however, as well as war fiction. His Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1900) anticipate the experimental verse with which New Jersey would soon be identified. Together with Whitman, Jersey poets William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg changed English-language poetry. Jersey’s Amiri Baraka cracked the facade of respectable verse.
Perhaps the best twentieth-century New Jersey literature seems designed to transgress boundaries and vivify outsiderness. After all, the state literally lies between, as well as outside of, the powerful commercial centers of New York and Philadelphia. But whatever the reason, the best Jersey writers of the past century are consistently proficient in more than one literary genre or artistic mode, and refuse to be contained, as Whitman boasted, by one measure or label. William Carlos Williams, for example, was reared in Rutherford and practiced medicine there all of his life. He also wrote Paterson, the book-length poetic epic describing a place, a figure, and a symbol of a state. Further, he wrote plays, novels, short stories, historical essays, and literary criticism. Spring and All (1923), his best-known book, is itself an experimental mix of poetry and prose.
Allen Ginsberg, the most prominent of Williams’s many literary sons, carried on so successfully the tradition of poet as provocateur and prophet that he was said at the time of his death to be "the most famous living poet.” His poems are considered "essential reading” for those interested in American literature. But provocation, dissent, and cultural castigation have also been provided by Amiri Baraka. Baraka has also contributed memorably to drama, fiction, prose criticism, and the art of public performance. His voice has been angry, impertinent, critical, alternately sophisticated and deliberately dialectal, and widely heard. He has served as an important political, as well as cultural, force in the state.
Political change in the interests of poetry, in fact, has been a particular focus of Long Branch-born Robert Pinsky. Appointed poet laureate of the United States in 1997, Pinsky not only made several recordings of his own, but he also engineered the recording of poems across the country by "ordinary” or non-professional poetry lovers. His National Poetry Project brought poetry to the attention of the American public in a manner befitting his literary leadership. He himself is equally distinguished as a poet and as a translator of the great poet Dante.
Including all the poets who write fiction and the novelists who write poetry, New Jersey writers have made definitive contributions to American fiction. Philip Roth of Newark has been especially associated with New Jersey since his first arresting collection of stories, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Whether for Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), The Counterlife, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987, or American Pastoral (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize, his fiction has captured worldwide attention while it depicted Jersey locations in evermore inventive ways. Indeed, it made him a household word and a subject for late-night television talk. Roth has also excelled in related forms, as in Patrimony:A True Story (1991). This account of his father’s dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. Roth’s accomplishments are major. His titillating fictions are also technically remarkable. And his stories featuring Nathan Zuckerman push self-reflexive fiction about as far as it can go.
Another multitalented creative genius working from his Hoboken home is John Sayles, who began by writing widely hailed fiction and proceeded to write, direct, and produce widely hailed films. Sayles has a remarkably fine eye and ear, which he has utilized in more than one mode of creative work. Such movies as Baby, It’s You (1983) and City of Hope (1991) have dramatized New Jersey moments as memorably as his novel Union Dues (1977) or his collection The Anarchists Convention and Other Stories (1980).
Prolific, versatile, and brilliant are adjectives to describe Princeton’s Joyce Carol Oates. Author of nearly forty novels and hundreds of stories, plus plays, poems, and criticism, Oates has left her admirers gasping. Since she received the National Book Award at age thirty-one for them (1970), she has used a pseudonym, Rosamund Smith, to publish her mysteries. She has received much less academic study than she deserves because so few academic writers can imagine keeping up with her. Among her plentiful honors, she received an O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement in both 1970 and 1986.
Finally, fresh energy has been infused into New Jersey’s literary scene by selfconsciously ethnic writers. Perhaps the best exemplar of this huge talent pool is Judith Ortiz Cofer, who was born in Puerto Rico and reared in Paterson. While Ortiz has also written poems and short stories, her novel The Line of the Sun earned a Pulitzer nomination in 1989; in that book, she successfully fused the life of a Puerto Rican hamlet with that of El Building in Paterson. Her autobiographical narrator brings alive a mythic past as well as a quotidian present lived in assaultive urban barrios. Paterson’s amazing literary phoenix seems to rise again from fire to soar above New Jersey life.
Lithuanians. The majority of Lithuanian emigrants to the United States arrived between 1900 and 1914 to seek economic opportunity and to escape the oppressive policies of tsarist Russia. By 1924, there were 4,000 Lithuanians living in New York and New Jersey. In New Jersey, most found work in industrial areas like Elizabeth and Newark, and in the silk factories of Paterson. They established fraternal and social organizations, as well as their own newspapers; in 1897, Pasaule (World) began publication in Elizabeth.
Most of these Lithuanian Americans subsequently assimilated with other Catholic Slavic groups. A new group of Lithuanians, refugees from the Soviet Union, emigrated to the United States after World War II. Lithuanian American groups in New Jersey include the Liepsna Athletic Club and the New Jersey Lithuanian Catholic Center in Kearney.
Little Egg Harbor. A township in Ocean County consisting of 49 square miles of land plus 24 square miles of water, surrounding the much smaller Tuckerton Borough. Quakers first settled the area in the late seventeenth century and established a Quaker meeting in 1709. Little Egg Harbor was established in 1741 as part of Burlington County and was transferred to Ocean County in 1891.
Little Egg Harbor became an important port of entry during the Revolutionary War, and in October 1778 the British attacked Count Casimer Pulaski’s legion there, killing forty men. Ebenezer Tucker was appointed customs collector of the port of Little Egg Harbor by President George Washington. Early industries included shipbuilding, salt haying, and shellfishing. In 1767 the first sea resort was established. More hotels sprang up and in 1871 the Tuckerton Railroad was completed. In 1901 Tuckerton Borough, named for Ebenezer Tucker, separated from the township. Today, Little Egg Harbor serves as a bedroom community for the Atlantic City casino industry. The 2000 population of 15,945 was 96 percent white. The 2000 median household income was $45,628.
Little Falls was incorporated in 1868 when it split off from Aquackanonk. Despite industrialization, parts of the town remained rural well into the twentieth century. Today, the township is mostly residential. The 2000 population was 10,855, of which 92 percent was white. The median household income according to the 2000 census was $58,857.
Little Ferry. 1.5-square-mile borough in Bergen County. Little Ferry began as a colonial ferry at the foot of Main Street on the Hackensack River. It became part of Lodi Township when it was formed in 1825, incorporated as a borough in 1894, and reached its present size when Teterboro annexed a portion of Little Ferry in 1917.
Although an early explosives factory built by Alfred Nobel in 1866 blew up completely in January 1870, the community began to develop during the 1870s when a more successful brick-making industry arose on the clay beds near the river. Up to the 1920s, the brickyards supplied bricks for nearby cities and attracted immigrant workers to Little Ferry. The community was also known for the many small button shops established by Czech immigrants around 1900. By 1940, Little Ferry had a diverse population composed predominantly of immigrant ancestry, with a third of its 4,531 people of Czech extraction, and the rest of Italian, German, Polish, Dutch, and Slovak roots. In 2000, the population of 10,800 was 69 percent white, 5 percent black, 17 percent Asian, and 15 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The median family income in 2000 was $49,958. For complete census figures, see chart, 133.
Little Hill-Alina Lodge. Little Hill- Alina Lodge in Blairstown is a sixty-bed, long-term, private residential rehabilitation facility for the treatment of adult alcohol and substance abusers. The center, founded in 1957, occupies seventy-seven rural acres. Based on the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step model, the program focuses on chronic and relapsing alcoholics. Clients (designated as students) encounter rigorous structure, close monitoring, multifaceted therapy, and intensive education in a non-permissive atmosphere. Average length of stay is five to eight months. The treatment programs and procedural details reflect the leadership philosophy of founder and long-time executive director, Geraldine Owen Delaney (1907-1998). Delaney became a widely respected alcoholism expert and governmental adviser.
Little Silver. 2.8-square-mile borough in Monmouth County on the Shrewsbury River. Until 1923, the town was part of Shrewsbury Township, part of the Monmouth Patent
Little Falls. 2.75-square-mile township in Passaic County. Located on the Passaic River, Little Falls is named for a falls with a drop less than fifty-one feet, which appeared little compared to Paterson’s Great Falls. Historically the Peckman River also provided power and water for industry. The town’s other significant geological feature is Great Notch, the only natural gap in the trap rockescarpment stretching from First Mountain to Paterson.
Europeans first came from neighboring Aquackanonk around 1711. The earliest use of the Passaic for water power was an iron forge in the 1760s. Others included sawmills and gristmills, a woolen mill, a bleach works, and other manufacturers. Two lasting industries were the Beatty Carpet Mills (1844) and the Little Falls Laundry Company (1912). Both have closed but the former became condominiums in 1665 that distributed parcels of land to twelve proprietors. Joseph and Peter Parker of Rhode Island purchased land from a patentee and settled what is now Little Silver in 1667.
Church Street, Little Silver.
Parkerville and other names denoted various sections, but when the town became a railroad stop in 1875, one name was needed. Little Silver, the name of Parker’s Rhode Island family estate (after his ancestral home in Devonshire, England), was chosen to designate the entire borough. Early residents worked as farmers, fishermen, and merchants. John T. Lovett’s well-known nursery and seed business (in operation from the 1870s until the 1960s) provided jobs and occupied much of the town.
In the late nineteenth century, Little Silver Point with its steamboat dock and nearby boarding houses attracted summer vacationers, but now the area has only year-round private homes. Incorporated as an independent borough on April 28,1923, Little Silver developed rapidly during the twentieth century as a choice residential community, popular with New York commuters. The borough today is known for its fine homes, schools, and small businesses.
In 2000, the population of 6,170 was 97 percent white with a median household income of $94,094. For complete census figures, see chart, 133.
Livingston, William (b. Nov. 23, 1723; d. July 25,1790). Governor. Born in Albany, New York, William Livingston was the son of Philip Livingston, lord of the Livingston Manor, and Catrina Van Brugh. After receiving his baccalaureate degree at Yale, Livingston studied law and began a successful practice in New York. He joined with two other Yale graduates, together known as the "Presbyterian triumvirate,”who fought against Anglican efforts to establish King’s College along Episcopal lines and to create an Anglican bishopric in the colonies. He also challenged parliamentary efforts to tax the colonies, expressing his position vigorously in newspaper and magazine articles. The trio also opposed the DeLancey faction that controlled the assembly. The Livingstons superseded them for a time, but when the DeLanceys regained power, Livingston moved to New Jersey in 1772, building a stately home in Elizabethtown that he called Liberty Hall.
The coming of the Revolution foiled Livingston’s attempt to lead a contemplative life. His known political ability caused him to be elected to the First and Second Continental Congresses and to command the New Jersey militia. When New Jersey adopted a constitution in 1776, Livingston was elected the state’s first governor and was reelected annually for the next fourteen years. Shorn of real power—the governor could not veto laws or make appointments—Livingston nevertheless made the position one of real significance. He persuaded the legislature to create a Council of Safety, which he headed, and it wielded enormous power, administering local justice and apprehending Loyalists. Livingston was particularly zealous in seeking out and punishing British sympathizers and interdicting the illegal trade between Jersey and British-controlled New York City. He enjoined the legislature to support Gen. George Washington and provide him with needed supplies and men. Hard on Loyalists, he showed sensitivity to the neutralist position of New Jersey’s Quakers and to the plight of the state’s slaves, managing to secure legislation that permitted their manumission.
Livingston also turned to his pen to inspirit his fellow citizens, helping to found the New-Jersey Gazette in 1777. Under a variety of pseudonyms, he used its columns to raise flagging spirits and urge support of the war effort. His addresses to the legislature were also used to achieve the same purpose. He became anathema to British commanders, who sought several times to capture or assassinate him.
When the war ended Livingston urged his countrymen to support currency reform, curb their extravagant spending, work for a stronger national government, and exhibit "civic virtue.”As a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention, he did not take an active part in its proceedings, but he urged support for the new government and was instrumental in New Jersey’s prompt and unanimous ratification of the Constitution. Born an aristocrat, Livingston learned to understand the aspirations of the lower classes and to adjust to the new democratic tendencies produced by the Revolution. By his integrity and unselfish dedication to the American cause, he set an example few state governors of his time could match.
Livingston. 14.0-square-mile township in Essex County. Livingston was part of the original Newark purchase, but became a section in Springfield and Caldwell when those towns separated from Newark in 1793 and 1798 respectively. In 1813 Livingston became a separate entity, made up of equal parts of Springfield and Caldwell, with the Passaic River marking its western border. Livingston is crossed by Canoe Brook, which was the original name of the region, but when the new town was created it was named for William Livingston, governor of New Jersey during the American Revolution.
Settlers first came to the area about 1685 to harvest wood for the growing Newark settlement. Hickory, oak, chestnut, and poplar were cut and hauled. At least five sawmills were established. As more settlers came to the region farming developed. Later, settlers began manufacturing brooms and hats. Today, Livingston Township is a residential community with 600 acres of parkland and several large commercial areas. The 2000 census showed a population of 27,391 with a breakdown of 83 percent white and 15 percent Asian. The median household income was $98,869.
