Connecticut, 1865-1929

An Industrial Society

In early 1911, a one-time New Haven resident, absent from Connecticut since the 1880s, encountered by chance a native of the city and nostalgically asked about “the ancient elms, the quiet beauty of the streets, the ivy-covered buildings, [and] the circle of cultivated and conservative people dominating the little college city.” “The little college city” was no more, sadly replied the New Havenite. “The factory whistles have drowned out the college chimes, and many tongues of many lands have made the quiet streets noisy. ... Do you realize,” she asked:

that while much of the old remains there has grown up in these years a new New Haven, a city where more brass is manufactured than anywhere else in the United States ... where thousands of men and girls work in the largest gun factories, the largest rubber shops, the largest clock shops in the United States? Do you know that one fourth of our population is Italian and one third of the births this year were of Italian babies; that some thousands of Russians, Austrians, Hungarians, Rou­manians and Lithuanians surround our city in colonies like a Roman wall?

No, replied the former New Haven native, she had no idea the city had changed so much. It seemed, she thought, “almost a desecration of sacred soil.”

Whether the final decades of the nineteenth century marked the desecra­tion of the state is a matter of some question. Without question, the period saw an extraordinary transformation of Connecticut life. Primarily rural, agricultural and relatively ethnically homogeneous in 1865, by 1900 Connecticut had become a highly urban, densely populated, heavily industrial and ethnically diverse society.

The factory, with its emphasis on routinized labor and standardized tasks, rather than the farm now shaped the work life of Connecticut’s laboring populations, while the family-owned business, once the mainstay of Connecticut economy, was increasingly replaced by large industrial combinations, many of them owned and controlled by out-of-state interests. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of manufacturers in Connecticut jumped from 5,128 to over 9,000. The gross product of Connecticut industries more than doubled, from $161 million in 1870 to over $350 million in 1900. Huge cotton mills in Norwich, Thompson, Putnam and Plainfield, woolen mills in Rockville and Stafford Springs, the Cheney Silk Mills in Manchester and the American Thread Com­pany in Willimantic made textiles the state’s largest industry and Connecticut the sixth largest textile producer in the nation, with an annual output of over $50 million. The hardware industry, centered in New Britain, produced over $25 million of tools and supplies a year. The machine tool industry grossed over $20 million annually, while Danbury’s famous hatters produced $7 mil­lion a year in goods. Connecticut’s bell makers produced over two thirds of the bells made in the nation: its growing typewriter industry, centered in Hartford, cornered a substantial portion of the national market, while the state’s several major firearms and ammunitions makers dominated that industry nationwide.

The rise of manufacturing in the state, of course, reflected the emergence of industrialization nationwide in the decades following the Civil War. But Connecticut’s extraordinary inventiveness and expertise, evident long before the war between the states, provided a special advantage. So, too, did the growth of an effective rail network, dominated by the New York, New Haven and Hartford rail line and the existence of huge capital resources in the state, largely provided by the state’s insurance industry, which virtually doubled in size from 1875-1900.

The most significant resource for Connecticut’s late 18th century eco­nomic expansion, however, was a massive pool of unskilled labor provided by a dramatic influx of immigrants into the state in the waning years of the cen­tury. In 1870, native-born Americans composed 75% of Connecticut’s popula­tion: by World War I that figured held fallen to 35%.

Connecticut’s first experience with sudden population shifts came in the 1850s when substantial numbers of Irish arrived in the state to escape the great potato famine. But the Irish migration of the mid-1800s paled in comparison to the massive movement of southern and eastern Europeans to the state between 1890 and 1910. In 1870 there were 100 Italians in Connecticut: in 1920 there were over 80,000. The number of Poles in Connecticut in 1920 stood at 46,623, up 50% from 1900. Similarly, thousands of immigrants from Russia and Lithuania poured into the state at the close of the century, fleeing the political and economic instability of Europe in search of a better and more stable life in America. In 1920, 376,513 Connecticut residents had been born abroad and an additional 421,133 were first-generation Americans.

Immigration and industrialization transformed Connecticut from a rural to an urban society. By 1910 the rural population of the state (those living in towns under 2,500) had declined to 114,000, while city-dwellers numbered well over 600,000. Bridgeport grew from a town of 30,000 in 1880 to a metropolis of over 100,000 in thirty years. Waterbury shot upwards from a population of 20,000 to 90,000 in the same period.

Industrialization brought enormous benefits to Connecticut. It created a substantial new middle class of managers and professionals whose demand for houses, goods and services in turn generated hundreds of other jobs and whose affluence is still seen in the graceful mansions that line Prospect Street and Whalley Avenue in New Haven and Asylum and Farmington Avenues in Hart­ford. Its assembly lines provided employment for thousands of unskilled work­ers for whom artisanship and agriculture no longer held promise.

Yet its costs, too, were considerable. Paralleling the appearance of fash­ionable neighborhoods and lavish mansions in Connecticut cities were squalid slums devoid of the most rudimentary sanitary facilities. A U.S. Bureau of Labor survey in 1905 found housing conditions in Hartford worse than those of any other city of its size investigated. Packed together in the airless tenements of Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport, hundreds fell victim to small pox, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis and diphtheria. Despite the steady growth of Connecticut industry, job seekers always outnumbered openings, and every bump in the erratic economy of the late 1800s sent still more thousands into the streets in search of work.

The enthusiasm of workers enjoying regular employment was tempered by low wages, long hours and dangerous working conditions. Many laborers or­ganized to fight for better conditions. By the 1880s the Knights of Labor boasted over 60,000 members in Connecticut and elected 37 members of the General Assembly in 1885. Succeeding the Knights were the Connecticut Fed­eration of Labor. Organized in 1887, the CFL represented over 32,000 work­ers in the state by 1902.

Frequent and bitter strikes characterized the period: 25 in 1881; 144 in 1886; 126 in 1901. Workers inevitably lost these confrontations. In perhaps Connecticut’s most famous strike, the “Danbury Hatters” fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful fight from 1902-1915 to uphold labor’s right to boycott the products of employers during labor disputes. Though the hatters lost the battle and were ordered by the Supreme Court to pay $252,000 in damages, labor ultimately won the war with the passage in 1914 of the Clayton Act exempting labor from the anti-trust laws. Some progress was made in legislating better conditions for workers during the period, notably for women and children, but meager appropriations for enforcement often undercut their effectiveness.

Conflict in turn-of-the-century Connecticut was not confined to the work place or centered entirely on job conditions. Connecticut Yankees saw in the high birth rates, the vastly different customs and values, the unpredictable loyalties and, above all, the Catholicism of the new immigrants a profound threat to their traditional way of life. Asked in 1908 to identify “New England’s greatest problem,” one Yankee quickly responded. “Will Old New England, her standard of living, her ideals, her customs, her laws, survive the constantly increasing influx of alien blood?”

Connecticut’s Yankees had responded negatively in the 1840s and 50s as well to the arrival of the Catholic Irish. The “Know-Nothing” party, with a platform of avowed resistance to Catholics, enjoyed considerable popularity and actually elected a governor in the state in 1855-57. But the depth of the antagonism between native born and immigrant was far greater at the turn of the century.

A new anti-Catholic party, the American Protective Association, grew up in the 1890s and gained more than 25,000 members in Connecticut. The next thirty years would he characterized by constant friction and hostility between Yankee and immigrant.

Connecticut’s political system was largely unable to contend with the extraordinary demands put upon it in these years by rapid industrialization, urbanization and immigration. From 1865 to 1896 political power was evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Reflecting the larger style of the age, both parties, whether in power or not, avoided grappling with the major economic or social issues of the day. Elections revolved instead around person­alities or largely emotional issues such as the location of the state capitol in Hartford in 1875. In 1890-91 the system utterly ground to a halt when the General Assembly could not agree on who won the election of 1890. The parties wrangled for an entire year: no bills or appropriations were passed and the incumbent governor, Morgan Bulkley, who was president of the Aetna Insurance Company, paid the entire expenses of the state of his own pocket!

While reluctant to address social issues, the General Assembly maintained a close relationship with the business community, particularly the state’s burgeoning insurance industry, utilities, and the powerful New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. “You could sit in the House gallery,” one cynical contemporary observer recalled, “and see the puppets dance when the strings were pulled by the lobbyists outside the chamber.” Connecticut, in fact, was considerably less corrupt than many states in the “Gilded Age,” but the state’s major industries did indeed enjoy highly favorable treatment throughout the period.

Two events at the close of the century reaffirmed Connecticut’s commitment to conservatism. The presidential election of 1896, which pitted the Populist and Democrat William Jennings Bryan against the conservative Republican William McKinley, split the Democratic party asunder in Connecticut. Appalled by Bryan’s “radicalism,” Yankees deserted the Democratic standard in droves, and in the process assured a virtually uninterrupted Republican control of the state for the next 30 years.

In 1902, repeated complaints about the state’s archaic town-based representational system, which guaranteed small towns control of the General Assembly despite their steadily dwindling percentage of the population, finally resulted in a constitutional convention. Content with a system where towns having less than 15% of the population could elect a majority of the General Assembly, where Union with a population of 322 could cancel the votes of New Haven with a population of 139,605, rural representatives beat back all proposals for reform. The failure in 1902 to secure proportional representation severely undercut the Democrats, whose strength lay in the teeming cities, and confirmed the power of the Republicans, whose control rested on a union of conservative businessmen and rural farmers.

The collapse of the Constitutional Convention of 1902 insured that “steady habits” would continue to govern the political life of Connecticut in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I, and would blunt the reform currents of Progressivism. While a Progressive party did briefly emerge in Connecticut in 1912, its achievements were extremely modest in comparison with the significant reforms enacted in other states. Connecticut had little en­thusiasm for such popular political reforms of the day as the initiative, referen­dum and recall and still less for an activist governmental attack on social issues.

Despite a half century of vigorous political activity in the state by such women’s rights advocates as Isabella Beecher Hooker, Grace Gallatin Seton and Katherine Houghton Hepburn, Connecticut’s established male order re­lentlessly opposed women’s suffrage, fearing that an infusion of new voters would destabilize traditional political arrangements. With the political deck stacked firmly against them, Connecticut’s suffragettes were less able to focus public attention on issues of social welfare than were their peers in other states. A period of vigorous political and social reform in many sections of the coun­try, Progressivism largely passed by Connecticut.

Even immigration, a source of increasing anxiety for the Yankee elite, was not seen as a proper subject of governmental attention. While every other state in the industrial northeast established an immigration commission in the early years of the twentieth century to consider how best to integrate the new groups, Connecticut alone saw the problem as appropriate for private agencies and vol­untary action. As Governor Woodruff’s executive secretary sniffed in 1907, “the subject of immigration is scarcely even referred to here.”

A similar restraint characterized business organizations in the period. In other states, businessmen became ardent supporters of the era’s growing movement toward centralization, bureaucratization and greater authority for gov­ernment. Many business leaders realized that the increased presence of govern­ment in the economy sought by reformers was actually desirable in that it made both government regulation and the marketplace more predictable. As a conse­quence, manufacturers in other states set up professionally staffed, full-time business organizations in the early years of the century to develop long-range strategies and to help shape the legislative process. In Connecticut, however, manufacturers stubbornly resisted such cooperative, activist notions, preferring instead to confine their joint activity to firefighting during the legislative session.

Connecticut’s cultural life in the decades following the Civil War was as vigorous and electric as her politics were passive and restrained. Certainly the most famous cultural figure of the day was Hartford’s celebrated Mark Twain who lived in Connecticut from 1874 to 1891 and saw many of his most signifi­cant works published in that period, including The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Close by Twain in the “Nook Farm” area lived Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner and Francis Gillette.

A similarly prominent cultural community grew up some years later in Old Lyme. Influenced by extensive study of the major French Impressionists, such gifted artists as Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf and Henry Ward Rayer sought in Lyme the same lush light and gentle countryside that had so inspired them in France. Under the patronage of Florence Griswold, who transformed her attics and spare rooms into bedrooms and her outbuildings into studios for the use of the artists, the “School of Lyme” flourished in the early years of the twentieth century and exerted a major influence on the course of American art.

The development of the theater, too, felt a significant Connecticut influ­ence in this period. Just upriver from the “Connecticut Impressionists” lived the talented and eccentric actor William Gillette. Gillette is perhaps most fa­mous for his long-standing identification with the role of Sherlock Holmes, which he played in hundreds of performances across the nation. But theater historians emphasize his great influence on American acting itself in his develop­ment of a “natural” style.

Connecticut At War

The outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 effectively revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of Connecticut society. As war orders poured in from the European belligerents, Connecticut’s ample industrial machinery be­gan to hum. Bridgeport’s Remington Arms, New Haven’s Winchester Repeat­ing Arms and Hartford’s Colt Firearms Company added hundreds of new employees a week and hastily built elaborate facilities to handle the flood of new business. The brass industry of the Naugatuck Valley similarly grew as orders for shell casings and other munitions cascaded in. By the end of the conflict in 1918, Connecticut had produced 54% of the nation’s munitions, a figure that translated into thousands of new jobs and millions of dollars of additional income in the state.

The war, however, brought a new intensity to the question of immigrant loyalty and ethnic assimilation. Fearful of immigrant intentions, the General Assembly established a 15,000-man “Home Guard” force in the spring of 1917, equipped them with riot weapons and trained them for battle in the state’s urban ghettos. With American entrance in the war in April 1917, Yankees seized upon the opportunity provided by wartime mobilization to assert the primacy of old-line values in the state. The homefront became a cultural battle­field, as an elaborate Americanization campaign directed by the Yankee-dominated State Council of Defense sought to convert the state’s substantial ethnic communities to “American” ways through an array of educational cam­paigns aimed at young and old alike.

By 1917 the role of “war governor” had been sharply defined, and Southington’s Marcus Holcomb proved a fit successor to the legacy of Jonathan Trumbull and William Buckingham. An old-line Yankee of simple virtues and unshakable convictions, Holcomb had little sympathy for the awkward position of many of Connecticut’s new immigrants, who often saw their new homeland pitted against the old in the conflict. “The tares have been permitted to grow with the wheat until the harvest!” he cried in a 1917 patriotic rally. “The harvest is now here, and the tares must be separated from the wheat!”

Holcomb proved fiercely true to his word throughout the war. Thinly concealed in the constant calls for sacrifice throughout the war years was the threat of coercion. Although most citizens responded out of patriotism, others did so fearing social ostracism or physical violence. Whatever the motivation, Connecticut fully met the challenge of World War I. Its staggering industrial productivity established its reputation as “the munitions state,” while it led the nation in its response to the various Liberty Loan and war savings drives con­ducted in 1917-18.

With war’s end, however, social tensions intensified. The rapid termina­tion of war contracts throughout the state led to widespread unemployment and increasing unrest among workers newly accustomed to regular labor and ample paychecks. At the same time, the progress of the Russian Revolution of 1917 generated a widespread fear of “Bolshevism” among still unassimilated immi­grants. A wave of strikes in 1919, some seemingly aided by representatives of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, convinced Connecticut leaders that Communism was rampant in the state, and hysterical roundups of sus­pected radicals, renewed Home Guard activity and intensified Americanization efforts followed. Only an upturn in the state’s economy in 1922 finally eased tensions somewhat.

The Roar of the Twenties

As in other sections of the nation, the twenties brought a revolution in morals and lifestyles in Connecticut. The appearance of an array of laborsaving devices in the home freed women to pursue new occupations and incli­nations. The automobile gave the young a new mobility and a new independ­ence from parental control. The Charleston and other daring new dance styles swept the state, while the subjects of bobbed hair and public smoking divided families from Greenwich to Thompson. The movies and radio became increas­ingly popular, providing entertainment at the same time that they steadily inte­grated Connecticut into a national culture.

As did other sections of the nation, too, Connecticut enjoyed widespread prosperity throughout the decade. While its distance from raw materials and national markets and the comparatively high wages demanded by its skilled labor force put the state at a competitive disadvantage, all economic indicators registered well above normal for 1922 to 1929. Most Connecticut industries swiftly and successfully made the difficult transition from the production of war materials to peacetime products. Bridgeport’s experience was typical. A major munitions center in the war years, Bridgeport turned in the early twenties to the emerging automotive and electrical industries. An important new industry—the manufacture of aviation engines and accessories—emerged, and the extraordinarily rapid growth of Pratt and Whitney Company, Hamilton Stan­dard Propellers, Chance Vought Company, Sikorsky Aircraft and United Air­craft soon made Connecticut a leader in the aviation industry. Balancing these gains, however, was the collapse of the state’s once-vital textile industry. At­tracted by low wages, favorable taxes and access to raw materials, Connecti­cut’s cotton textile industry moved south in the 1920s, closing a third of its plants in the decade and putting 5,000 laborers out of work, most of them in the eastern section of the state.

The twenties saw the ascension in Connecticut, as in the rest of the nation, of the businessman as a civic and, indeed, a cultural hero. The classic business virtues of efficiency, rational planning and cost effectiveness provided the basic credo of government at both the state and local levels, while a passion for “scientific management” swept Connecticut schools, churches and voluntary organizations.

In a period that deferred to business leadership and celebrated business values, the Manufacturers Association of Connecticut (MAC) and the Chamber of Commerce emerged, as one historian put it, “as a third branch of the state government.” Under the aggressive leadership of   E. Kent Hubbard, the Manu­facturers Association in particular became a highly organized and extremely effective lobbying force for business interests in the General Assembly.

High on Hubbard’s agenda was an all-out assault on organized labor. MAC campaigns to promote the “open” or non-union shop spread across the state, while the Labor Committee of the General Assembly, firmly controlled by laissez faire conservatives, bottled up almost all bills dealing with hours of labor, working conditions, minimum wage, old-age pensions and health insur­ance. Undercut by such efforts, by its own poor leadership and, ultimately, by the general prosperity of the period, the Connecticut labor movement found the twenties an ongoing nightmare.

The linchpin of business community and state government was J. Henry Roraback, who rose to power in the early 1920s as the undisputed “Boss” of the Republican party. A successful businessman himself with considerable investments in Connecticut’s burgeoning utilities industry, Roraback con­trolled the legislative process with an iron hand, picking candidates, making key committee assignments and dispensing patronage. Astutely balancing the needs of rural farmers and urban businessmen, Roraback engineered an unbro­ken string of Republican victories in the polls throughout the decade.

The Roraback Republicans were passionately committed to strict economy and “pay-as-you-go” financing in state government. State expenditures were slashed. Funds for education, particularly teacher training, transportation of schoolchildren and vocational rehabilitation were cut. The state’s prisons, asy­lums and reformatories went on austerity budgets. State income was similarly restricted: proposals for a state income tax and for various bonding projects were resoundingly defeated. Similarly rejected were federal offers of educa­tional funds, child and maternity benefits and vocational assistance because they required state matching funds. “Connecticut,” boasted Senator Hiram Bingham, “is a state that begs no favors.” The same insistence on state’s rights made prohibition a failure in Connecticut. Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only states in the nation to refuse to ratify the 18th Amendment banning the sale of liquor. Rumrunners operated by ship from Long Island and by truck from New York. Hostility to the law at both the state and local levels made enforcement a farce, and speakeasies and saloons blossomed across the state.

Connecticut responded to the 19th Amendment giving women the vote with equal caution. Fearing that 200,000 new voters would disrupt Republican control, Roraback urged Connecticut’s Congressional delegation not to sup­port the amendment and rejected all calls for a special session of the General Assembly to ratify it. Only after the necessary thirty-six states had already approved the amendment did Connecticut move to consider it.

Possession of the vote did disappointingly little to advance women’s politi­cal interests in Connecticut in the 1920s. Women found the Democrats far more receptive to them than the Republicans, but the party was so weak that the newfound opportunity to run for public office was often little more than an invitation to a landslide rejection by the voters. Both parties restricted access by women to leadership positions. The Republicans outraged suffragettes by often appointing anti-suffragists to important party posts. While many women re­mained convinced that political activity was the best way to achieve their re­form aims, increasing numbers in the 1920s, 30 and 40s turned to voluntary organizations and social action committees to influence their society. In the end, the marketplace rather than the polling booth provided the greatest oppor­tunities for women. Almost a third of Connecticut women were gainfully em­ployed in 1920, as opposed to the national average of 24%. While the vast majority still labored in menial positions, increasing numbers entered service and professional occupations as the decade wore on.

Underneath the surface prosperity of the age, old problems still simmered. The ongoing hostility between Yankees and immigrants manifested itself in a variety of contexts. In 1921 and 1925 bitter struggles over attempts to liberalize the state’s stringent Sunday or  “Blue” laws documented the continued concern of the state’s Yankee element that their old-line values continue to receive the respect of all.

More ominously, the twenties saw a dramatic surge of interest in the Ku Klux Klan in the state. Lamenting the disappearance of an older way of life, fiercely anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and anti-Jew, the Klan staged a series of well-attended rallies across the state in 1922-24. The largest, in South Man­chester in September 1924, drew over 10,000 spectators. At its height the Klan claimed 18,000 members statewide despite opposition to its activities among the clergy, veterans and fraternal groups, and local politicians.

By Bruce Fraser

* Under revision.