There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

Postscript: How to Write an Encyclopedia of New Jersey in Nine Easy Years

190 There’s More to New Jersey . . . of our population and the unshakeable devotion to home rule in our municipalities. The first is a valuable aspect of our society, and the second is a political third rail that will be with us for a long time. In closing let me summon up a fantasy. I like to imagine that all of those grifters, embezzlers, shakedown artists, and crooked pols from New Jersey history somehow have a place in the afterlife where they can get together after a hard day in purgatory. I imagine a bar, run by Barney Ford like he did in the State House, with liquor provided by Longie Zwillman. I see at the bar Hughie Addonizio of Newark, and Frank Hague, and Harold Hoffman , Walter Zirpolo, and William Duer, all talking shop. You will notice that the company is all male—not surprising since for most of New Jersey history women have been kept out of the back rooms of political power. But here comes Lord Cornbury, who has put on a nice little cocktail dress for the occasion. The group is waiting to greet David Friedland when he passes on, and who knows how many others will follow him later. The one thing we can be sure of from the history of New Jersey is that there will be others, many others. postscript How to Write an Encyclopedia of New Jersey in Nine Easy Years If reading this book has piqued your interest in the Garden State and you would like to know more, there is another book I would like to recommend—the Encyclopedia of New Jersey, which can be found on the shelves of most libraries in the state. It’s a pretty hefty tome, Postscript: How to Write an Encyclopedia 191 weighing in at six and a half pounds, with 926 pages, nearly 3,000 entries, 585 illustrations, and 130 maps, all about New Jersey. I was part of the group behind that big book, and let me raise the curtain to explain how it came to be. Its origins lie in the widely held attitude on the part of fans of New Jersey that our state lags behind others in appreciating its heritage. A study done in the 1990s showed that among the original thirteen states, New Jersey ranked dead last in the number of history publications written about it, relative to the size of its population. We deserved better. After all, New Jersey was a key player in the American Revolution, as well as in the growth of industry, transportation, science, and technology in the nation created by that Revolution. So how to tell the story of our state to a wider audience? In 1995 Yale University Press published the Encyclopedia of New York City. The work was well reviewed and was a bestseller for the Press. I bought a copy and admired the way it brought together information about the Big Apple from many different perspectives. Browsing the entries that began with “Ch” for example, you would see within the space of a few pages entries on Chinese immigrants, Chock Full O’Nuts coffee, cholera, and choruses—all brought together by the random results of alphabetical order. I approached Rutgers University Press with the idea of doing something along the same lines for New Jersey. The director, Marlie Wasserman , saw this as an opportunity to advance the Press’s contributions to the state and urged me to develop the idea. I naively believed that it would not be very daunting—just identify some topics, get some experts on each of those topics, and have them write. It did not take me long to realize that the project was too enormous for one person to manage. So I approached a friend, Professor Maxine Lurie of Seton Hall University, to join with me as coeditor. She agreed, and ever since, we joke that my asking her was one of the best decisions I ever made, and that accepting was one of the worst she ever made. One of the first things we did was to make an appointment to see Professor Kenneth Jackson at Columbia University, who had edited the Encyclopedia of New York City. Jackson met us with great courtesy in his faculty office and gave thoughtful advice when we asked him what he had 192 There’s More to New Jersey . . . learned from his experience. He warned...