Connecticut, 1929-Present*

Connecticut and the Great Depression

The Crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression soon made the pros­perity and the optimism of the ‘20s distant memories in Connecticut. Unem­ployment rocketed to astronomical levels. One study in 1932 concluded that fully 26% of the state’s work force stood idle. Over 16,000 were unemployed in Bridgeport; 12,000 in New Haven; 14,000 in Hartford. Many of those still holding jobs saw their workweek drastically curtailed. Unlike earlier economic downturns, where the brunt of the crisis was felt primarily by workers and the poor, the Great Depression cut across Connecticut society like a knife, scarring the lives of rich and poor alike.

Connecticut watched helplessly as the economic crisis deepened in 1930. With a long tradition of limited government, pay-as-you-go financing and a consummate faith in the marketplace’s ability to correct its own deficiencies, Connecticut’s Republican leadership opted to wait the situation out, apparently subscribing to the January 1930 view of Connecticut Industry that “business is sound and will go forward after a short respite for planning for the future.”

By the fall of 1930, however, the severity of the crisis was all too clear, and Connecticut voters opted for new leadership, electing Democrat Wilbur Cross as governor. Cross was no wild-eyed radical, and his election was more a triumph of personality than a signal of the sweeping political and philosophical changes that were soon to come. An engaging former Dean of Yale University graduate school, Cross’s solid Yankee character and wry country wit won over conservative rural audiences while his party affiliation assured the ethnic vote of the cities. Still, the Republican’s continuing domination of the General As­sembly, the weakness of his party and his own inherent conservatism confined Cross’s attack on the state’s steadily escalating unemployment woes in his first term to a series of modest public works projects in Connecticut roads and forests.

By 1933, however, the enormity of the economic catastrophe engulfing the state at last called into question an array of deep-seated and long-held Connecti­cut assumptions. In past economic downturns, the state had relied primarily on voluntary organizations and charities, local institutions and individual generos­ity to aid the needy. But as the depression steadily worsened, these resources soon collapsed under the sheer numbers of the destitute. In Bridgeport alone, the city stood $1,000,000 in debt in 1932; the funds of local charities were exhausted and an array of the unemployed desperately cried out for assistance.

In past crises, too, the state had maintained a belligerent independence from the federal government. But by 1933, it was apparent even to a firm “state’s rights” champion like Cross that the state had no choice but to seek federal assistance, and in massive amounts if it was to survive.

Under Cross’s leadership a torrent of federal dollars soon flowed into Connecticut from New Deal programs. Over 40,000 jobless found work in highway and public works projects. Out of work artists were commissioned to paint imposing murals in Connecticut post offices and town halls. Historians were employed to chronicle Connecticut culture. The Federal Theater pre­sented plays, pageants and radio dramas. Fifteen thousand young people found jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps. An array of federal programs ad­dressed the needs of the old, the sick and the homeless. At the same time, Cross pushed substantial packages of social legislation through the General Assem­bly, the famous “Little New Deal,” much of it aimed at working conditions. Organized labor emerged from the long night of the ‘20s and grew powerful again under the first state administration in decades openly sympathetic to the union movement.

The sweep of New Deal programs across the state swelled the fortunes of Connecticut’s long-dormant Democratic party. In 1930, Cross’s 5,000 vote victory margin was insufficient to carry any other Democrats on the state ticket into office or to affect Republican control of the General Assembly. In 1932, Cross doubled his margin of victory, the Democrats elected two congressmen, a senator and won control of the state Senate. In 1934, Democrats swept all state offices, took four of six congressional seats and elected a second Demo­cratic senator. In 1936, Cross won by 100,000 votes. Democrats elected all six Connecticut congressmen, controlled the state senate by a margin of 26-9 and dramatically improved their position in the House.

Suddenly strangers to office, Connecticut’s Republicans did not sit idly by for long. Stung by the enormity of their defeat in 1936, a group of progressive Republicans, led by Raymond Baldwin of Stratford, moved to modernize their party. In a series of meetings of so-called “Beefsteak Clubs” across the state in 1937 and 38, Baldwin and his allies worked ceaselessly to win support for a party philosophy less hostile to the Federal government and to organized labor, and more receptive to an expanded role for the state government in the regula­tion of the economy and in the resolution of social problems. Profiting from the political vacuum left by Roraback’s suicide in 1937, these “Beefsteak” Re­publicans secured Baldwin’s nomination for governor in 1938. Hamstrung by a series of financial scandals in his own administration and by the surprisingly popular third-party candidacy of Bridgeport’s Socialist mayor Jasper McLevy, “Uncle Toby” Cross fell to the Republicans by a 2,688 vote margin in the fall election.

Despite a swing back to Republican control, an enormous revolution in political values had occurred in the Depression decade. Connecticut’s days of belligerent independence, resolute self-reliance, limited government and one-party rule were gone forever.

The Munitions State, Again

As Connecticut struggled with the domestic consequences of the Depression in the late thirties, ominous events in Europe and Asia signaled new dangers abroad. In 1939-40, the state saw fiery debates between isolationists, led by Senator John Dannaher, urging noninvolvement in the growing world crisis, and “internationalists,” horrified by the march of the Axis powers, who argued forcibly for international cooperation. The fall of France in 1940 effectively shifted Connecticut sentiment toward the Allies. As attitudes changed, the state’s long-dormant economy began to pick up. European orders soon reinvigorated the aviation and munitions industries in a mad expansion of the work force and plant capacity reminiscent of the boom years of 1914-17. In East Hartford, United Aircraft Corporation’s Pratt and Whitney division grew from 3,000 employees to over 20,000 in thirty months. Other defense-related industries such as Hamilton Propellers and Electric Boat similarly prospered. Long years of unemployment were at an end at last.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 brought Connecticut from the sidelines into four long years of war. Unlike the Home Front of World War I, which was largely controlled by Connecticut organizations, life in wartime Connecticut from 1941-45 was shaped largely by such federal agencies as the Office of Price Administration, the War Production Board and the War Labor Board. In a distinct departure from past conflicts, too, Governor Baldwin showed no enthusiasm for the role of “war governor” so sternly etched by his predecessors, Connecticut had no less important a wartime role, but Baldwin sought cooperation in the war effort more through fervid appeals to patriotism than grim threats of retaliation. Reflecting his restraint and the widespread assimilation of Connecticut’s ethnics—most now second and third generation Americans—the war saw little repetition of the ugly cultural con­frontations of 1917-18.

Connecticut’s specialized manufacturing facilities again proved a vital cog in the defense effort. The total volume of war contracts placed in the state through May 1945 was over eight billion dollars. Aircraft contracts accounted for almost half that figure; ordinance over a third. Industries across the state poured millions into new equipment and new facilities to meet the flood of war contracts. Thousands left the home front for the front lines. Almost 210,000 Connecticut men and women entered the armed services during the war: over 5,700 never returned.

Connecticut’s super-heated wartime economy brought with it ample em­ployment and fat paychecks. Many women, in particular, found their lives transformed by the opportunities of the assembly line. A door-to-door “Womanpower Drive” in New Britain, for example, produced over 2,000 recruits in three months.

But prosperity came with considerable costs as well. The defense industry’s insatiable demand for labor brought over 130,000 new workers into the state, severely overtaxing available housing, schools and hospitals and sending many to temporary houses in federally-financed housing projects. Sharp increases in juvenile delinquency and venereal disease, profiteering and rationing abuses as the war wore on documented the severe strains the conflict put on traditional values and institutions.

Mindful of the severe economic dislocation of 1918-19, Connecticut officials increasingly sought assurances of long-range economic planning from federal authorities as the war wound down. Little was done, however, and scarcely had the cheering of V-J Day stopped in 1945 when the state was plunged into economic crisis again. Within a week, 56,000 workers—a third of them women—lost their jobs as defense contracts were abruptly terminated. The rapid lifting of wartime wage and price controls shot prices upward. Food shortages and strikes multiplied as 1946 progressed. The return of thousands of servicemen as the year ended further taxed the state’s already inadequate housing stock and glutted the labor markets. For many in Connecticut, 1946 and 1932 were virtually indistinguishable.


Post-War Connecticut

By 1947, many of these problems had eased. A successful shift back to the production of consumer goods by Connecticut’s chief industries opened fac­tory gates and eased unemployment. The G.I. Bill removed many veterans from the job market by offering educational benefits, and Connecticut colleges and universities swelled with students. Most notable was the University of Connecticut, which rapidly grew in the post-war years from a tiny agricultural school to a major university with a national reputation.

Politics in the “land of steady habits” in the post-war decades attempted to blend the social responsibility of the ‘30s with the state’s long tradition of fiscal conservatism. The failure of liberal activist Chester Bowles to win reelection to a second gubernatorial term in 1950 demonstrated beyond question that the political philosophy of the state had not changed radically despite the party transformations of the ‘30s. A successful businessman who had made millions in the advertising business in the ‘30s and a superb wartime administrator, Bowles was offered up as a sacrificial lamb by the Democrats in the gubernato­rial election of 1948. To the horror of both old-line Republicans and new-stock Democrats, Bowles eked out a narrow victory and plunged ahead on a quixotic two-year campaign “to make Connecticut a proving ground for competent liberalism.” Connecticut’s “Fair Deal” blizzarded the General Assembly with bills improving housing, schools, mental hospitals, reorganizing state government, raising welfare payments and addressing a host of other prob­lems. Most were defeated. Despite the state’s evident social difficulties, Bowles was simply too liberal, too much an activist, too impatient to develop the broad constituency of support necessary for his programs in Connecticut. “He tried to do too much too soon,” growled one Democratic party leader in succinct political epitaph. Future governors would not repeat Bowles’ mistake.

In great measure, the story of Connecticut politics after World War II is the story of John Moran Bailey. A Harvard Law School graduate, Bailey learned his politics from practical experience as a precinct worker in the machine of Hartford’s Democratic boss, Thomas J. Spellacy. Bailey assumed control of the Democratic party in 1946 and soon turned it into a perennial winner. Tightly controlling party affairs for the next thirty years, Bailey skillfully erected a classic coalition of ethnics, labor, intellectuals and the poor that regularly re­turned Democratic candidates to office. In Abraham Ribicoff (1955-61), John Dempsey (1961-71) and Ella Grasso (1975-80), Bailey offered this coalition gubernatorial candidates who were socially progressive but fiscally cautious. Each of these executives devoted considerable attention to social issues: each could claim considerable achievements. Ribicoff’s terms in office saw im­provements in the state civil service, sweeping reforms of the court system, increased employment and workmen’s compensation. The Dempsey years brought the University of Connecticut Medical-Dental School; substantial in­creases in state aid to education; a court reorganization plan; consumer protec­tion legislation, environmental programs and increased aid for local social service programs. Grasso’s two terms saw improved utilities regulations, mass transit initiatives and a tightened administration of state agencies. Quite apart from her legislative successes, her status as Connecticut’s first woman gover­nor symbolized the growing power and political leverage of women in the state.

But at the same time, the “Bailey governors” held to an uncompromising opposition to any radical revision of the state’s taxation policies that would expand the state’s responsibilities. Among the industrial states of the northeast, Connecticut alone refused to enact a state income tax. The same conservatism displayed itself in Connecticut’s approach to national issues. Despite a Demo­cratic party with 200,000 more registered members than its Republican coun­terpart, Connecticut supported Richard Nixon decisively over George McGovern in 1972, Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Ronald Reagan over Carter in 1980 and over Mondale in 1984.

Some conservative structures did succumb to the times, however. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared “one man, one vote,” Connecticut’s totter­ing town-based system of legislative apportionment, in place since 1818, was doomed at last. The General Assembly called a Constitutional Convention in 1965 and gave Connecticut’s electoral system a democratic overhaul. In easing eligibility requirements and organizing House districts on the basis of popula­tion, the Convention finally put Connecticut government on a modern footing.

Demography—the study of population trends and characteristics—provides a basic key to understanding Connecticut society in the 1950s and 60s. The period saw an unprecedented rise in the state’s population, from 2,007,000 in 1950 to almost 3,033,000 in 1970, a surge caused both by the postwar baby boom and a massive influx of job seekers from other regions of the country. Population pressures soon produced a dramatic migration of thousands of young families from Connecticut’s crowded urban centers to adjacent towns in search of better housing. Significantly, in a period of enormous overall popula­tion growth, three of the four largest cities in the state actually lost population while ranch developments and tract housing blossomed in nearby suburbs. Between 1950 and 1960, for example, 56,000 people moved into Hartford but 95,000 left the city, an overall decline of 9%. The population of nearby Bloomfield, on the other hand, exploded in the same period from 5,700 in 1950 to 13,600 ten years later. Fairfield county experienced perhaps the most drastic change as hundreds of firms relocated there in the 1950s, turning declining cities like Norwalk and Stamford into thriving centers and sleepy country towns like Greenwich into bustling bedroom communities.

“Suburbanization” set the political agenda of both city and town in Con­necticut in the postwar years. In the suburbs, the arrival of new families, most of them with young children, necessitated new schools, all of them expensive. Education quickly became the dominant concern of local government as offi­cials all across the state grappled with the enormous economic consequences of unprecedented population growth.

By the sixties, the baby boomers were ready for college, and the state’s university system entered a period of dramatic growth. Buildings multiplied at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut, the state colleges expanded offerings and enrollments, and a new institution, the two-year “community college,” arose to make higher education more accessible to students young and old. Private universities such as the University of Hartford, the University of Bridgeport and Fairfield University grew up to serve the expanding student population. In leaving the presidency of the University of Connecticut in 1972 after a ten-year tenure, Homer Babbidge marveled that his signature appeared on over half the diplomas ever issued by the University!

Suburban living similarly raised transportation to a new prominence as a public issue. The growing mobility of the population soon underscored the inadequacy of the state’s road system. State-sponsored improvements in the 1950s were followed by massive federally-funded interstate highway construc­tion projects in the 60s. The appearance of major arteries for car travel signaled the end of the railroad as a significant mode of transportation and the demise of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, in particular, as a major force in Connecticut’s economic and political life.

In the cities, the consequences of suburbanization were equally dramatic. The flight in the ‘50s of thousands of working and middle-class whites left Connecticut cities largely populated by minority groups, most both poor and unskilled. Up until World War I, relatively few Blacks lived in Connecticut, but the lure of employment both during the war and after drew increasing numbers of southern Blacks north to Connecticut in search of a better life. Between 1950 and 1960 alone, the nonwhite population of the state increased from 53,000 to 107,000. Expectations were often disappointed. Caught in a vicious squeeze between collapsing tax bases and escalating demands for social services, Connecticut cities entered a critical period of extraordinary deteriora­tion in the 50s. Housing conditions were deplorable; rents often excessive. Unemployment levels for Blacks consistently remained twice that of whites; family income a third less.

An aggressive group of urban planners, government officials and corpo­rate leaders sprang up across the state in the 50s and early 60s to combat “the crisis of the cities.” Convinced that cities were not self-contained but served as crucial pivots of interdependent larger regions, they searched ceaselessly for federal dollars to support massive urban development programs. Leading the charge was Mayor Richard Lee of New Haven, who made that city nationally famous in the sixties as a laboratory of urban experimentation. “When the money is passed out,” he admitted in 1966, “we are there with a bushel bas­ket.” Lee’s goal was nothing less than a “slumless city,” and his vehicle, like other urban planners of the day, was the bulldozer. Dilapidated tenements fell before the blade and in their place rose offices, parking garages and highways. By the early 60s, 25 Connecticut cities and towns were engaged in significant urban renewal projects.

The efforts of Lee and others literally changed the face of Connecticut’s cities. Much was both gained and lost in the process. Slums indeed disap­peared; new highways made the city more accessible; new offices provided jobs and buttressed the tax base; but at the same time, thousands lost their homes and dozens of urban neighborhoods, often closely-knit ethnic communi­ties, simply disappeared. In Hartford, a broad swath of the downtown area was razed to make way for Constitution Plaza, an imposing complex of offices, hotels, retail stores and garages that ultimately brought an “all American” designation to the city in 1962. Erased in the process was the vibrant Italian Front Street neighborhood whose residents scattered to other areas of the city and to nearby towns, their community gone forever.

For many, the crisis of the cities and the plight of the state’s Black popula­tion were inseparable, and Connecticut churches and universities soon joined the urban crusade, making social commitment the watchword of the decade. Education became the key to a reformed society and battles for increased teach­ing resources and integrated classrooms were fought across the state. The impact of these programs and initiatives, however, was insufficient in the late 60s to blunt a growing militancy in the Black community over inferior housing, massive unemployment, income disparities, political powerlessness and per­sistent instances of racism in Connecticut society. A series of fiery riots swept the state in the summers of 1967, 68 and 69. No major city was immune, even the “model” city of New Haven or the “all-American” city of Hartford. “If we are a model city,” concluded a stunned Richard Lee, “God save the rest of the cities.” Student activists in Connecticut colleges and universities organized class boycotts and sit-ins in sympathy, signaling a period of bitter campus unrest.

A parallel source of social strain came from the growing opposition to the Vietnam War. Connecticut students had generally supported the war in the mid-60s. A survey of Trinity College undergraduates in 1965 found 331 of 587 willing “to personally fight against the Viet Cong.” By 1967, the campus mood had radically shifted, and the state’s colleges rapidly became hotbeds of antiwar sentiment. Demonstrations, civil disobedience and acts of political violence by the young escalated rapidly in 1969-70. Paralleling the challenge to political authority in the late sixties posed by the antiwar movement was the dismissal of traditional social and moral values by the “counter culture.” Alienated by the materialism and social indifference of their society, many Connecticut young people turned their back on traditional values and institu­tions to embrace a culture which celebrated sexual liberation and the use of drugs. The radicalism of the young provoked a pronounced swing to the right—particularly among the state’s second and third generation ethnics. Conserva­tive candidates gained strength all across the state. George Wallace had little difficulty in 1968 getting 18,000 signatures on his petition to be on the presi­dential ballot in Connecticut, and the 76,650 votes he received in the fall elec­tion were almost 6% of the total cast. The sixties thus closed with Connecticut deeply and bitterly divided along political, racial, generational and cultural lines.


The Land of Steady Habits: A Postscript

The end of the Vietnam War in 1973 brought a decade of social unrest to a close in Connecticut and signaled the beginning of a shift from social involve­ment to self-interest on the part of the young. Threatened by a weakening state economy, students flocked to pre-professional and career-oriented studies and largely abandoned the social activism of the sixties. The state’s campuses, for years at the cutting edge of social change, became bastions of conservatism for the rest of the decade.

As campuses quieted, political activism quietly emerged in a most unlikely context—the General Assembly. No longer dominated by small town dele­gates, the legislature became steadily more representative in composition and cosmopolitan in outlook. A series of major internal reorganizations and proce­dural reforms early in the decade dramatically professionalized the operation of the legislature and augmented its capacity to act. The death of John Bailey in 1975 brought to an end an era of strict party discipline and unwavering party loyalty and opened the way for a new generation of legislative leaders inclined, by Connecticut standards at least, to move aggressively both to confront and to anticipate the state’s problems. A corresponding inclination was apparent in the executive branch as well, in a series of increasingly ambitious policy agen­das offered by Governor William O’Neill in the eighties. By mid-decade, “the land of steady habits” was acquiring something of a national reputation for political innovation and governmental efficiency, a development utterly unim­aginable to any but the most idealistic observer twenty years before.

An expanding economy provided a favorable climate in which political reform could flower. The state economy sprang back from a nasty recession in 1975-76, in which unemployment levels approached 10%, to record steady growth in the concluding years of the decade. By 1980, Connecticut had be­come one of the most affluent states in the nation: only Alaska had a higher per capita income. Manufacturing remained the base of the state’s economy, al­though significant increases in service, tourism and “high-tech” jobs signaled a welcome diversification of the economy. Still, the state’s extraordinary de­pendence on the defense industry kept the Connecticut economy particularly vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of foreign policy. A different kind of vulnera­bility was revealed by the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74. Prices of gasoline and heating oil tripled, and for the state’s industries and homeowners, suddenly the captives of capricious sheiks as well as a cruel climate, the impact was incalculable. Long accustomed to an insular view of the world, Connecticut learned a rude lesson about global interdependence.

At the local level, hard decisions about waste disposal and other regional problems made the reality of interdependence equally apparent, but the logic of regional planning remained bitterly opposed by towns long accustomed to controlling their own affairs, no matter how the wind blew in Hartford. The cry, “Not in my town you don’t!” a part of Connecticut’s political rhetoric since colonial times, still regularly opened the debate on regional problems in town meetings across the state.

For the disadvantaged, the late seventies were years of slow but steady progress. The election of Thirman Milner in 1981 as the state’s first Black mayor symbolized the considerable strides made in the 1970s toward full par­ticipation in the economic and political life of the state, but for many in the inner-city neighborhoods of Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury, the politi­cal process remained inaccessible and inefficient. Similarly, the seventies saw significant gains for women in employment and in politics. The increasing presence of women in corporate board rooms, in the professions and in promi­nent business positions narrowed the income gap between men and women, but for many women on the lower rungs of the economy, equal pay for equal work was still a dream. The Democratic nomination of Gloria Schaffer to the U.S. Senate in 1976 and the subsequent election of Barbara Kennelly and Nancy Johnson to the U.S. House of Representatives clearly documented the growing political leverage of women in the state, but while politicians in both parties became increasingly respectful of the “women’s vote” as the decade wore on, the political process itself remained dominated by men. In the cities, the famil­iar drama of cultural assimilation acquired a new cast of characters in the thousands of Hispanics who flooded into the state in the 1960s and 70s. In tenements across Connecticut once occupied by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Hispanics pondered their place in a foreign and often indiffer­ent society, as had their predecessors eighty years before.

Some have argued that the most revealing characteristic of contemporary Connecticut society is the continuing influx of corporations and businesses into the state. Cynics, to be sure, point to the absence of a state income tax to explain these migrations, and measure their significance primarily in increased jobs and augmented grand lists. But this continuing corporate search for greener pastures in the “land of steady habits” really makes a larger and more compel­ling statement about the quality of life in Connecticut, an endorsement of the state’s strong systems of public and private education, the richness of its cul­tural institutions, the solidity of its political traditions, the attractions of its natural environment and the essential civility and integrity of its people. These central characteristics of our state, so clearly attractive to our neighbors if sometimes taken for granted by ourselves, are the products of a long and com­plex past, the true richness of which this introductory narrative can only begin to suggest.

By Bruce Fraser

* Under revision.