WOR. Pioneer radio station WOR signed on the air February 22, 1922, from a tiny studio on the sixth floor of Louis Bamberger’s department store at 131 Market Street in Newark. While radio was still a minor electronic curiosity, its promise of free in-home entertainment was intriguing, and Bamberger had ordered a shipment of units to sell. WOR, the call letters he accepted when he found WLB had already been assigned, was conceived as a promotional device to familiarize customers with the concept of voices and music magically appearing out of thin air. Within a year, WOR was so successful that Bamberger almost shut it down, fearing it would hurt sales of his other entertainment products. He was persuaded radio had a future outside promotion, however, so he kept it alive and commissioned a Manhattan studio. By 1925 WOR was developing the prototype talk-and-information morning program under John B. Gambling, whose son and grandson would continue the dynasty on WOR for seventy-five years. In 1934 WOR cofounded Mutual Broadcasting, whose newscasts and entertainment programs like The Shadow were influential far beyond their modest budgets. WOR maintained dual studios in Newark and Manhattan until February 1,1941, when the Newark facility was closed.
Works Progress Administration. The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA) by Executive Order Number 7034, dated May 6, 1935, under the authority of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, approved April 8, 1935. In 1939 the Federal Works Agency incorporated the WPA and renamed it the Works Project Administration. The WPA was originally intended to provide employment for needy workers on small projects and to coordinate the "Works Program,” which supervised the efforts of forty federal agencies to create emergency public employment. In practice, the WPA was a cooperative federal, state, and local enterprise. State and local entities determined eligibility for employment and proposed projects for funding. The WPA officially terminated its activities on June 30,1943.
From 1935 until early 1942, WPA projects never employed fewer than 1 million people nationwide. During late 1938 and early 1939, the agency employed in excess of 3 million people a month. It reached its peak in November 1938 with 3,335,000. About 8.5 million individuals worked on WPA projects during the life of the program. From 1935 to 1940, three-quarters of all WPA employment was for construction projects. Total WPA expenditures were $10,750,500,969. Of this total, 37.9 percent paid for highway, road, and street construction. Ten percent went to buildings, and another 10 percent was invested in water and sewer systems. WPA projects constructed 651,000 miles of roads, 77,965 bridges and viaducts, and 35,064 public buildings.
In New Jersey, the WPA supervised a high of 108,170 employees in September 1938. From late 1935 to early 1941 it employed no fewer than 54,000 persons annually. New Jersey ranked among the top ten states in numbers of WPA jobs. From 1936 to 1943, the WPA expended $404,826,420 in New Jersey; only seven states received more. The highest expenditures, $83,548,544, occurred in 1939. In New Jersey, the preponderance of WPA funds went to the construction of highways (34.7 percent), buildings (11.4 percent), recreational facilities (10.9 percent), and water and sewer systems (11.2 percent). The WPA constructed 6,018 miles of roads in the Garden State, 661 bridges and viaducts, 37 schools, and 1,071 new buildings or additions. It funded 388 new or improved parks, 600 new or improved playgrounds and athletic fields, 76 swimming pools, 1,019 school improvement projects, and 2,793 renovations of existing public buildings.
The WPA was not just bricks and mortar, however. Its Federal Theater Project gave jobs to actors, directors, and backstage craftspeople, who put on plays, shows, circuses, and other events. The Federal Writers’ Project produced about a thousand publications, including The WPA Guide to 1930s New Jersey, a volume in the American Guide Series. The Federal Art Project gave work to unemployed artists. This agency revived mural painting, inspired by the great Mexican muralists of the time, especially Diego Rivera. The WPA was also involved in adult education, nursery schools, library services, social and economic surveys, research projects, public records administration, and many other services.
World Trade Center attack. On September 11, 2001, followers of Islamic fundamentalist Osama Bin Laden took control of four transcontinental jetliners, two of which they flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The impact and resulting fires ultimately leveled the towers and other buildings in the plaza while causing major structural damage to a number of others. A third plane caused widespread damage on the fourth, fifth, and sixth corridors of the Pentagon in northern Virginia, the impact tearing a gaping hole in one side of the building. The combative resistance of passengers on the fourth plane, which departed from Newark International Airport, led to the crashing of the plane into a field in western Pennsylvania before it could be used as a weapon.
Six hundred seventy-nine New Jerseyans perished in the attacks. Many New Jersey municipalities suffered multiple casualties. Among the heroes of that day was Todd Beamer of Plainsboro, who died aboard the fourth plane. Talking to an operator from an on-board telephone, he was heard to say, "Are you guys ready ? Let’s roll,”before he and fellow passengers charged the hijackers.
The event and its aftermath shocked the economy of the entire New York-New Jersey region. The consequences—social, political, and economic—continue to challenge the state’s citizens and officials.
World War I. When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, sympathies in America divided along ethnic lines. New Jersey’s German Americans, reluctant to fight former compatriots, were joined by many Irish Americans, who expressed their opposition to everything British by siding with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The allegiance of Americans of English and Scots descent would prevail when the United States entered the war on the side of the United Kingdom and its allies, France and Russia, on August 6, 1917. During the war, German Americans in New Jersey suffered considerable hostility. The teaching of the German language was banned in schools, German publications were prohibited in many places, and, in Hunterdon County, German Valley was renamed Long Valley.
The early years of the war presented economic opportunities for American businesses and particularly for New Jersey’s chemical industries. To fill British orders in 1915, Hercules Powder produced 150,000 pounds of cordite per day at the company’s Kenvil plant, and it acquired another plant in Gillespie. Du Pont’s munitions plant at Carney’s Point had expanded to sixty-seven times its prewar capacity by 1917, employing 25,000 workers, and Du Pont also opened a supplementary plant at Deepwater Point. By 1918, with the added production of other companies, New Jersey was the largest supplier of munitions in America.
Before the war, 90 percent of the dyes used in the United States were imported, and during 1914 Germany continued to exchange dyes and pharmaceuticals for American textiles. The termination of German exports in 1915 by a British blockade was met with the Emergency Dye Tariff Act of 1916, which encouraged Du Pont to acquire indigo dye technology and build a dye works at Deepwater. By the 1920s, Du Pont would become the most important dye manufacturer in America.
In other areas, New Jersey pharmaceutical companies began to pursue research; before the war, this work was done in Germany. New Jersey’s shipyards increased their output in the war effort. The New York Shipbuilding Corporation, located at Camden, received orders for thirty destroyers between July 11 and December 29, 1917, as well as orders for major components for transport ships under construction elsewhere. This corporation added the Destroyer Yard and the Middle Yard to accommodate wartime production at Camden.
Suspicions and harassment of German Americans increased, especially after captured documents indicating plans for German sabotage were published in a New York City newspaper in August 1915. On July 30, 1916, railroad cars packed with ammunition blew up at the Black Tom depot in Jersey City, rocking New York Harbor, killing seven people, and spewing shrapnel that tore holes in the Statue of Liberty. The blast caused $20 million damage in New Jersey and lower Manhattan. An equally devastating blast struck Morgan on October 4,1918, when a munitions storage facility exploded. Both incidents were blamed on residents and citizens of foreign birth. In 1917 pharmaceutical supplier George Merck, who had become a U.S. citizen in 1902, severed ties with his family in Germany and forfeited German-owned Merck stock to the Alien Property Custodian of the United States. The U.S. government allowed Merck to purchase the stock in 1919, maintaining Merck and Company of Rahway as a publicly owned U.S. company.
Company H, 347th Infantry, American Expeditionary Force, Camp Dix, January 1919.
Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917 on May 17. New Jersey would contribute 72,946 conscripts and 46,960 volunteers. Counting those already in the service, an estimated 130,000 New Jerseyans served by the war’s end in November 1918. Women made up the deficit in the workforce, often in fields previously closed to them. When the New Jersey ferry stations of the Lackawanna Railroad first employed women in the ticket booths, the New York Times reported the surprising news. More than one hundred thousand American women found work with the railways, and an equal number were employed by munitions plants.
The federal government created or enhanced thirty-eight military installations in New Jersey, including Camp Dix, the training facility near Wrightstown that later became Fort Dix. Camp Dix opened on July 18,1917, and the Seventy-eighth "Lightning” Division was activated there on August 29, 1917. With men from New Jersey, New York, and Delaware, the Seventy-eighth sometimes trained with picks and shovels in preparation for trench warfare. They arrived in France in June 1918 to join the final offensive against German forces.
About twenty-one thousand women served in the Army and Navy Nurse Corps, which had been established in the first decade of the 1900s. New Jersey was the training site for the approximately three hundred women who served in the Army Signal Corps as bilingual (French-English) long-distance operators. These women were sworn into the U.S. Army and left New Jersey in March and June 1918 to serve behind the lines in France, providing communications between troops in the trenches and their commanders.
American forces made their most noteworthy contributions in the field at the Battle of Saint Mihiel, September 12-16, 1918, and during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, from September 26 until the Armistice on November 11, 1918. The Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded to Capt. L. Wardlaw Miles of Princeton; Sgt. John Cridland Latham of Rutherford; Sgt. Alan Louis Eggers and Corp. Thomas E. O’Shea, both of Summit; Pvt. Frank J. Bart of Newark; Sgt. William Sawelson of Harrison; Sgt. Ladiovous Van Iersal of Glen Rock; and Boatswain’s Mate Second Class John Otto Siegel. The poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer of New Brunswick may be America’s most famous World War I enlistee. Kilmer attained the rank of sergeant and was killed at the Battle of Ourcq on July 30,1918.
World War I was known as the Great War and was memorialized as "the war to end all wars.” Gutzon Borglum, who sculpted Mount Rushmore, created the massive bronze statue Wars of America for Newark’s Military Park in 1927. Wars of America symbolizes all wars from the Revolution to World War I and depicts civilians as well as soldiers.
World War II. Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, New Jersey residents remained sharply divided over America’s entrance into the war. Jewish communities across the state viewed the growing strength of Nazi Germany with alarm and organized some of the first protests against the Nazi regime in the 1930s. The pro-Nazi Bund drew a small but significant following among German Americans in the state, and this organization maintained three camps in New Jersey. In the late 1930s, frequent clashes took place between the Bund and Jewish war veterans and other anti-Nazi groups.
The outbreak of the war in Europe in September 1939 led to a sharp rise in defense contracts that served to end the Great Depression in New Jersey. After the fall of France in 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized units of the New Jersey National Guard. His call for aid to Great Britain (and later the Soviet Union) provoked considerable debate in the state, which mirrored sentiments in the rest of the nation. The isolationist America First Committee attracted a significant following in New Jersey, but a number of interventionist groups emerged to support FDR’s policies.
After Pearl Harbor, federal and state governments took a series of measures to protect coastal communities and essential military and industrial facilities in New Jersey. Local governments organized civil defense efforts that included thousands of volunteer air raid wardens and frequent blackout drills in the early years of the war. Although German planes never crossed the Atlantic, scores of American merchant ships fell victim to German submarines along the Jersey coast, especially in 1942. Many Shore communities, heavily dependent upon tourism, resisted efforts to dim their lights in the evening until pressured by federal authorities.
New Jersey contributed 560,500 men and women to the armed forces, and fourteen residents earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. The most prominent, Sgt. John Basilone of Raritan, "The Hero of Guadalcanal,” was featured in several major defense bond drives before his request to be reassigned to a combat unit was granted. He was killed during the battle for Iwo Jima. Close to ten thousand women served in the Woman’s Army Corps (WAC), the Women’s Reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve (WAVES), and other auxiliary branches established during the war. Commander Joy Bright Hancock of Wildwood, the highest-ranking WAVES officer assigned to the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, played an instrumental role in expanding the occupational specialties open to naval servicewomen.
During the Second World War, people began to grow "Victory Gardens” to supplement the shortages brought on by the war.
Wartime needs led to the expansion of existing military and naval bases in New Jersey, including such major facilities as Fort Monmouth, the Naval Air Station in Lake-wood, and Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County. More than 1 million servicemen went through basic training at Fort Dix, and 2 million servicemen passed through Camp Kilmer in Piscataway on their way to overseas service. A number of civilian facilities were taken over by the military for the duration. Hotels in Atlantic City and Asbury Park served as barracks and rest centers for servicemen. Newark Airport came under the jurisdiction of the Overseas Air Technical Command and sent thirteen million tons of cargo overseas, as well as forty thousand aircraft and 125 million gallons of aviation fuel. New Jersey also guarded German and Italian prisoners of war. Service units were assigned to Belle Meade Depot, Camp Kilmer, Fort Dix, Fort Monmouth, Port Johnson Terminal, and Raritan Arsenal.
New Jersey’s industry grew exponentially to meet Allied and then American war needs. In 1939 New Jersey industry employed 433,000 workers; by 1945, the workforce had grown to nearly a million to fill over $12 billion worth of contracts. A large number of women entered the workforce to replace men who were in the armed services. Among notable contributors to the nation’s war production was New York Shipbuilding in Camden, which built more than a hundred naval vessels. Curtiss Wright in Paterson became one of the nation’s important producers of aircraft engines.
New Jersey institutions of higher learning were also mobilized for the war effort. Princeton and Rutgers received a number of federally sponsored contracts for research and development projects with wartime applications. Both institutions, along with a number of smaller ones in the state, participated in officer training programs for the military.
Demographically, the war encouraged the migration of African Americans to New Jersey’s urban centers in search of jobs. It also intensified the struggle by state civil rights organizations to end segregation in New Jersey schools and to protest continued employment discrimination. In 1945 New Jersey became the second state in the nation to pass legislation barring discrimination in employment. Beginning in 1944, Japanese Americans released from federal internment camps in the West began to settle and work at Seabrook Farms in Cumberland County.
Politically, the war did little to diminish the struggles between Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City and reform Democrats and Republicans to amend the state constitution to strengthen the power of the state government. Neither Democratic governor Charles Edison nor his Republican successor, Walter E. Edge, succeeded in gaining the necessary public support to amend the constitution. Yet wartime conditions granted the governor extraordinary executive powers that provided important precedents for the postwar period. In 1947 Republican governor Alfred Driscoll secured the passage of the new constitution, which strengthened the power of the executive branch and also mandated the integration of the public schools and state militia.
With the war’s end on August 14, 1945, New Jersey experienced dislocations as a result of conversion and demobilization. Demands on the state’s unemployment insurance fund soared as civilian workers lost their jobs to layoffs or to veterans returning to reclaim their old positions. A feared postwar depression did not materialize, but labor proved restive, and there were a number of strikes in 1946. The passage of the GI Bill of Rights by Congress in 1944 brought an influx of veterans to New Jersey’s colleges and universities between 1945 and 1950. The explosion of enrollments at Rutgers and the need for increased funding for facilities and faculty prompted the state to designate Rutgers formally as "The State University” in 1945. The home loan provisions of the GI Bill proved an enormous impetus for the growth of suburban communities throughout the state.
Wortendyke New World Dutch Barn. Wortendyke Barn, along with the red sandstone farmhouse across the street, is all that remains of the Wortendyke Farm, which originally covered more than 460 acres in northeastern Bergen County in the town of Pascack, now Park Ridge. The landmark is representative of the Dutch barns that could be found throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bergen County.
The Wortendykes settled in the area in 1735, when Frederick Wortendyke, Sr., purchased the acreage from Hendrick Vanderlinda. The land was maintained by the Wortendyke family as a working farm from 1735 to 1851, when the farm was sold.
The Wortendyke Barn Museum’s exhibits feature handmade eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farm implements and tools, the history of the Wortendyke family farm (including the impact of the Revolutionary War on the family), and the agricultural history of Bergen County from the first settlers until the present. The main attraction of the museum is the barn building, an outstanding example of the vernacular architecture referred to as a "New World Dutch barn.” Wherever the Dutch settled along the Hackensack, Passaic, Raritan, and Millstone rivers and their tributaries, they constructed three-bayed barns with floors raised off the ground. The barns were made completely of local wood, down to the nails (called trunnels).
Owing to the ravages of time and the advancements in agriculture that have taken place over the last century and a half in this area, only a few examples of this type of barn survive. The Wortendyke New World Dutch Barn is listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places.
Wright, Frank Lloyd (b. June 8,1867; d. Apr. 9, 1959). Architect. Son of William Cary Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright attended the University of Wisconsin, but left his studies to work as a drafting assistant. He established his own practice in 1893. Considered one of the great international architects, Wright’s innovation resulted in approximately one thousand designs, of which approximately four hundred were constructed, including Falling-water (1936) and the Guggenheim Museum (1957). Wright is considered the master of the Prairie style, although his later work is best described as idiosyncratic. Four Wright buildings are located in New Jersey, all of them "Usonian”—a term Wright used to describe his mid-twentieth-century modular designs: Richardson House, Glen Ridge (1940); Christie House, Bernardsville (1940); Sweeton House, Cherry Hill (1950); and Bachman-Wilson House, Millstone (1954).
