Middle State
My forthcoming book looks at quintessential American lives at a crossroads
Between the summers of 2023 and 2024, I worked on a series of small projects, including a couple of small books, one of which has now entered the production pipeline. It’s called New Jersey Vanguard, and it’s a series of biographical sketches of Americans—some natives of the Garden State, some not—who had key moments of their careers take place there. I got the cover over the weekend, and thought I would share it with you.
New Jersey began its life as part of an English empire sandwiched between two more powerful ones: France and Spain. Even within the English (later British) empire, it occupied a middle zone between relatively homogenous, mercantile New England colonies above and the agrarian, racially segmented South below. New Jersey’s middle status goes one step further: it was right smack in the middle of the so-called Middle Colonies, wedged between the much larger New York and Pennsylvania, jostling between the other small middle ones of Delaware and Maryland.
Indeed, New Jersey’s significance can seem to rest on its relative insignificance. The state is smaller than 45 of the 50 in the Union; its population falls somewhere in the middle of the pack. It occupies a mere sliver of Atlantic coastline. And yet while the state is certainly right smack in the middle of that seaboard, one could hardly call it the heartland of a continental nation that stretches 3,000 miles to a different coastline, part of a Pacific rim that is now emerging as the focal point on the globe.
But one can turn also such characterizations of New Jersey inside out and say that the state sits at the very heart of the nation and its history. The mixed economy and demographic diversity that have defined the United States been also been hallmarks of New Jersey from its very origins to this very instant. It also sits at the crossroads of the most important structural shifts in American history: from farm to factory; from country to city; from city to suburb. Slavery to freedom, agriculture to industry, manufacturing to services, services to information—it all happened there. New Jersey is literally a crossroads as well, a node of transportation in terms of shipping, rail, interstates, and fiber optic cable. It’s not necessarily unique in these regards—but its very typicality, its utter ordinariness, is why it matters. To paraphrase Walt Whitman (the subject of of my chapters, as he spent the last years of his life there), New Jersey is large, it contains multitudes. It is a synecdoche for America.
So it is that I survey a series of lives beginning with Peter Stuyvesant, a founding father of New Amsterdam—we think of him as a key figure in the making of what became New York City—who also played an important role in seizing what we now know as South Jersey from Sweden. Other figures include George Washington, who spent more time with the Continental Army in New Jersey than any other state and won key battles there. Still others include Clara Barton, whose storied career in nursing was the result of her frustrations in founding the first public school in New Jersey; Meryl Streep, who had an idyllic suburban childhood there that empowered her to imagine a world of women; and Whitney Houston, whose youth was also a suburban one—and whose talent was a distillation of the Great Migration that so decisively shaped African-American history. And, of course, there’s a chapter on that Jersey shore beach bum, Bruce Springsteen.
If all goes well—I’m awaiting a copy-edited manuscript before it’s to be typset and I proof it—New Jersey Vanguard is slated for publication in March of 2025.