Morgan Gardner Bulkeley

Born: East Haddam; December 26, 1837
Died: Hartford; November 6, 1922

Morgan G. Bulkeley, descendant of the Reverend Gershom Bulkeley (1636-1713), was one of the most influential business, civic, and political figures in Connecticut life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Bulkeley's father, Judge Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley (1803-1872), was president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company, a judge of the Hartford Police Court, a commissioner of the Connecticut School Fund, and one of the founders of the Republican party in Connecticut.

Morgan Bulkeley left high school in Hartford at age fifteen to take a job as an errand boy in an uncle's store in Brooklyn, New York. Thereafter he became a confidential clerk and subsequently a partner. Bulkeley's quite obvious preparation for a business career was interrupted by his service in the Civil War, during which he participated in the Peninsular Campaign. After the war Bulkeley went back to Brooklyn but returned to Hartford in 1872.

In Hartford Bulkeley very quickly became a dominant figure. He helped to found the United States Bank, and in 1879 be became the third president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company. During the next forty-three years Bulkeley presided over the evolution of Aetna into one of the nation's soundest and most successful financial institutions. Aetna's assets rose from $25 million to over $200 million, and the number of its employees increased from twenty-nine to 1,500. He also founded the subsidiary companies, the Aetna Casualty and Surety Company and the Automobile Insurance Company of Hartford.

The expansion of Aetna did not prevent Bulkeley from becoming a legendary leader in Hartford civic affairs. He was the driving force behind the building of Hartford's new YMCA in 1892 (a building subsequently replaced in 1972).  Bulkeley was also prominent in preserving historic buildings important in Connecticut's past. Following the building of Connecticut's single State Capitol in Hartford in the late 1870s, the Old State House became Hartford's City Hall. In 1915, when Hartford's present Municipal Building was opened, there were some who concluded that the Old State House could justifiably be demolished. Such would have taken place had not a drive led by Bulkeley raised the funds  necessary to preserve the Old State House, currently one of Connecticut's most important historic landmarks.

Finally, Bulkeley became one of Connecticut's leading Republicans, serving as mayor of Hartford (1879-1887), Connecticut's governor (1889-1893), and United States senator (1905-1911). A complex, fiercely independent man, Bulkeley marched to his own drummer and constructed a political record not easy to characterize. Bulkeley became known as Connecticut's "Crowbar Governor" when he refused to acknowledge the victory of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who had won a plurality of the votes in the election of 1890. Bulkeley used a crowbar to pry a lock off of his office door and remained governor for two more years, financing state operations from his own and Aetna funds. He concerned himself with child labor, the treatment of orphans, and the fate of a battalion of black troops of the Twenty-fourth Infantry summarily dishonorably discharged by President Theodore Roosevelt. Some 167 privates and noncommissioned officers were dismissed by President Roosevelt in 1906 for having "shot up" the town of Brownsville, Texas. Bulkeley was one of the few United States senators to challenge President Roosevelt's judgment in the episode. It might be noted that in 1972 the United States Army cleared the soldiers of guilt and changed the discharges to honorable ones.

At the same time that Bulkeley was defending some of American society's more vulnerable citizens, he was a vigorous foe of political reform in Connecticut. One of Connecticut's most obvious needs for reform at the turn of the century was the outmoded system of representation in the General Assembly, especially in the House of Representatives. Each Connecticut town, regardless of size, sent two representatives to the House. Consequently, in 1900 the town of Union with a population of 428 had two members in the House as did New Haven with a population of over 100,000.

This outrageous situation sparked endless calls for proportional representation, especially by Connecticut's urban Democrats thwarted by the dominance in the House of Representatives of Connecticut's small towns, generally Republican. Morgan G. Bulkeley was one of the Republican leaders who resisted bitterly any reform of the state's outmoded system of representation. Bulkeley fought attempts at remedial legislation in the General Assembly and vigorously opposed a call for a constitutional convention. When calls for reform did finally result in a convention, the Constitutional Convention of 1902, Bulkeley was one of those Republicans who engineered a revised system of representation which had no chance of ultimate approval by the voters. The result was that Connecticut's outmoded system of representation was retained—to Republican delight—until the U. S. Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" decision in the l960s. Thus, Morgan G. Bulkeley in this matter, as in so many others, utilized his unique will and influence to achieve what he sought. It is hardly surprising that when called "Caesar" by a business and political competitor, Bulkeley was said to have been flattered.

For Further Reading

Betts, Frederick. "The Origin and Development of Connecticut Insurance." Connecticut Magazine. 8 (March-April 1901), 1:3-44.

Welch, Archibald Ashley. A History of Insurance in Connecticut. New Haven, 1935. Tercentenary Pamphlet XLIII.

Entry by David M. Roth.

*  Under revision.