Don’t judge a book by its cover: Celebrating the Fitzgerald’s Legislative Manual

The Fitzgerald’s Legislative Manual is a deceptively simple looking reference book. Its drab, unassuming cover does not draw a reader in and is frankly, quite easy to overlook.

It is also a perfect example of why we should never judge a book by its cover.

From a librarian’s viewpoint, the value of the Manual is not so much in the individual pieces of information it contains, but in the overall compilation. It has done the hard work for us – culling State and local government information from thousands of webpages (and other sources) and then usefully organizing and indexing it for ready reference.

For example, let’s say you wanted to know the sheriff in each New Jersey county. You could Google and visit each of the 21 county sheriff office websites[i]; you could visit the NJ Sheriff’s Association website and click through each of the 21 counties on their interactive map; or perhaps, find an unofficial, unverified webpage and hope the information is correct.

Or, you could turn to the Manual.

Despite the name, the Manual is not just a manual of legislative practice. In fact, relatively little of the book is about legislative procedure at all. The Manual is more of a directory and resource guide to State and local government. It contains the names of elected and appointed officials, their contact information and biographies. It provides summaries of the work departments and agencies do. It provides election results, census figures, budget information, and other useful data sets.

It can answer questions as different as “How many toll lanes are along the Turnpike?” “Who ran against the governor in 1850 and how many votes did they receive?” “Who are registered lobbyists for the health care industry?” “What is the State bug?” “Is hunting allowed in Wawayanda State Park?” “What local newspapers are being published?” All of these topics are indexed and readily available to the reference librarian and curious researcher alike.

What makes the Manual particularly valuable to the State Library’s reference staff is that it has been published annually since 1872 and, so, our collection can help us answer a wide variety of historical research questions.

Going back to my question about county sheriffs… what if you didn’t want to know the current sheriff, but rather, who the sheriff was in 2005? Or 1990? Or 1892? It is possible you’ll find this information piecemeal or on unverified webpages, but you can save a lot of time, clicks, and effort by just checking the Manual for an authoritative answer.

Curious about the official Republican and Democratic party platforms on prohibition or women’s suffrage? Check the 1920 volume.

Want to know the average school teacher salary in 1936? Doing family genealogy and need to know the country coroner in 1962? Or 1912? The Manual can help you out with these and many more questions.

But what about information prior to 1872?

As I mentioned above, the Manual has been published annually since 1872 and published specifically as Fitzgerald’s Legislative Manual since 1879, when publisher Thomas F. Fitzgerald took over operations. A number of publishers have held the rights over the years, but the title and basic structure have remained fairly constant.

There is no known book that served as a single reference for all of this information prior to 1872, though there are books that offered elements of it.

Charles Sitgreaves compiled his Manual of Legislative Practice and Order of Business in the Legislature of the State of New Jersey in 1836, while serving as a member of the Legislative Council. He had previously served in the General Assembly and felt well versed in the structure of proceedings, writing (p. v.):

The peculiarity of our State Constitution, investing almost unlimited powers in the Legislative Council and General Assembly; the general character of our Legislative rules, and the peculiarity of our Legislative practice, in dispensing almost entirely with committees of the whole, render it difficult for a new member to acquire a knowledge of the practice and order of business in a whole session, and impossible to acquire that knowledge from any book of practice now extant. 

Sitgreave’s Manual was designed to be the most comprehensive overview of New Jersey’s specific rules of procedure and because he wanted the work to serve as a quick reference for lawmakers, it also contained several pages of directory, budgetary, and other useful pieces of information.

It was well received and the 1836 Legislature ordered 200 copies to be printed and distributed to key figures and institutions, including “incorporated libraries in New Jersey.”[ii]

Unfortunately, even though the manual contained then-current information and was clearly intended to be updated regularly, the State Library has no later editions in its collections and we cannot verify if there was ever an update at all. We do have reference to an 1853 Assembly resolution[iii] (referred to as a “House resolution”) to purchase for legislators the “new edition” of Sitgreave’s manual. Yet, an 1855 Trenton State Gazette[iv] article mentions the fact that Sitgreave’s manual had not been updated since 1836 had caused some issues during an intense procedural debate. Perhaps the “new edition” was simply a new printing.

Sitgreave’s manual was considered unique and authoritative, but it drew upon earlier works that had proven useful to legislators. Though he references several works in the manual, two may have been particularly formative.

The first was Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice (1801),[v] which had been used by the Legislature since at least 1804[vi]. The second was Joel Sutherland’s A Manual of Legislative Practice and Order of Business in Deliberative Bodies, which was published in 1830 as the Pennsylvania Legislature’s state-specific companion to Jefferson’s manual. We have no record of Sutherland’s manual being formally adopted by the New Jersey Legislature, but we know it was purchased for use of the Library – and therefore legislators – in 1831. Its melding of Jefferson’s ideas with the specific peculiarities of State legislatures no doubt made it an invaluable work.

For useful New Jersey information, there were a number of compiled guides, such as Alden’s New Jersey Register (1811). This work contained directory information for local government, civic organizations, religious and private societies, libraries, university calendars, and odd bits of information, like that the Morris aqueduct supplied water to the village through a mile and half of wooden pipes. If such works didn’t specifically influence Sitgreaves, they may have at least influenced Fitzgerald.

Regardless of its origins, the Legislative Manual has assisted researchers for 150 years and the State Library’s historic collection will continue to do so well into the future.

I would like to thank Dana Combs, librarian with the Office of Legislative Services, for invaluable research assistance. In particular, I’d like to thank her for discovering the earliest references to Jefferson’s manual, the discrepancy about Sitgreave’s “new edition,” and several articles that showed the early manuals’ significance to the Legislature.

References:

[i] Additional google searches may be necessary if you first need a list of the counties

[ii] See Acts of the Legislature of the State of New Jersey (1835-1836) page 411

[iii] “Seventy-Seventh Legislature,” Trenton State Gazette, Feb 2, 1853

[iv] “Parliamentary Usage,” Trenton State Gazette, March 7, 1855

[v] This link is for the 1812 second edition

[vi] Interestingly, this was much earlier than Jefferson’s manual would be adopted at the federal level, despite having been written for that purpose. For more information, see this article and this article from Senate.gov as well as this article from Monticello