Paterson

Paterson city (1990 pop. 140,891), seat of Passaic co., NE N.J., at the falls of the Passaic River; inc. 1851. Founded in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton and others of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, Paterson was a planned attempt to promote industrial independence in the newly formed United States. In 1792 and 1794 cotton-spinning mills, forerunners of the city's textile industry, were established. In 1835, Samuel Colt began the manufacture of the Colt revolver. Shortly thereafter the silk industry was established, beginning a silk boom which would earn Paterson the appellation "Silk City of the World." The iron industry, which initially supplied Paterson with textile machinery, was producing locomotives in great numbers by 1880. After World War I, the aeronautics industry moved to Paterson.

Although the silk industry is gone, textiles and transportation equipment are still made, and there is a large garment industry. Among the many other manufactures are electronic equipment, paper and food products, fabricated metals, rubber, and plastics. During the first half of the 20th cent., notably in 1912-13, 1933, and 1936, many bitter strikes arose from bad labor conditions in the silk industry. The city has gradually become an ethnic center, with significant black and Hispanic populations. High unemployment rates marked Paterson in the late 20th and early 21st cent.

Of special interest is the historic district that centers around the roaring falls of the river. Designated a national historic site in 1970, it is a unique display of industrial history, with old cobblestone streets and stone bridges; the abandoned houses of workmen and mill owners; and industrial works that include several locomotive factories (one dating back to 1830), the Colt gun factory (1835), and historic spinning mills and waterworks.

Paterson, long poem by William Carlos Williams, divided into five Books published in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958. Fragments of the incomplete Book Six were published posthumously (1963) as an appendix to the collection of the first five parts.

Written in the “variable foot” of Williams's free verse, the work incorporates prose passages from historical documents, newspaper accounts, geological surveys, literary texts, and personal letters ranging from one by an anonymous semi‐literate black man to those by Edward Dahlberg, Alan Ginsberg, and Ezra Pound, all reinforcing the poem's themes.

The Author's Note declares: “a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.”

Using the city of Paterson on the Passaic River near his hometown of Rutherford, N.J., as subject so as to bring forth the universal from a local setting (“there are no ideas but in things”), the poem presents local history and the natural scene (particularly the Falls and Garrett Mountain) as well as the consciousness of a gigantic, mythic man (Paterson) and of the author, poet and doctor. Book One (The Delineaments of the Giants) mythologizes “the elemental character of the place”: the city (a masculine force) the landscape (a feminine principle), and the vital, unifying river. Book Two (Sunday in the Park), concerned with “modern replicas,” meditates on failures in communication through language, religion, economics, and sex, but suggests redemption through art, imagination, and memory. Book Three (The Library) moves from the previous section's “confused uproar” of the Falls to find that “books will give rest sometimes,” a sanctuary for “dead men's dreams,” but the past represents only desolation, destruction, and death, and “I must find my meaning and lay it, white, beside the sliding water.” Book Four (The Run to the Sea) treats the polluted river below the Falls in terms of human corruption by modern civilization, while recognizing innovations in science, economics, and language, but finally the identity of the river is lost in the sea, although the individual man (Paterson) survives and strides inland to begin again. Book Five (untitled but dedicated to Toulouse‐Lautrec) is like a separate work, an oblique commentary on the poem by an aged poet from a point of view more international and universal than local.

Paterson, William (1658–1719). Founder of the Bank of England. Paterson was born in Dumfries but brought up in England. He made a rapid fortune in trade in America and the Low Countries. A supporter of the Glorious Revolution, he was engaged during the Nine Years War in government finance and pressed upon the government the establishment of a national bank to help finance the war. In 1694 when the bank was founded, Paterson became a director. He withdrew the following year and became involved in schemes to improve London's water supply. He was one of the leading protagonists of the Darien venture and worked for the Company of Scotland raising investment. He was lucky to survive the first expedition in 1698, in which his wife and only son perished, but continued to be consulted by the government, urging a union with Scotland. When negotiations began, Paterson advised on the financial and economic aspects of the treaty. A prominent example of the commercial revolution of the period, Paterson was one of the first to advocate the systematic study of economics.

J. A. Cannon