Immigration to Connecticut

By John F. Sutherland, Manchester Community College

See Also: Maria Sanchez: Godmother of the Puerto Rican Community

THE "OLD" IMMIGRATION

Connecticut's population history is by no means unique; nevertheless it is startling to note the changes which have occurred in the make-up of the state's citizenry in a century and a half. In the early nineteenth century, most of the state's residents were of English birth or descent and were overwhelmingly Protestant. By 1910, nearly thirty percent of the population was foreign-born, and of that group, roughly fifty-five percent were from Southern and Eastern Europe. Seventeen percent alone were born in Italy. In 1980, 1,259,873 of Connecticut's residents claimed ancestry from one of fifteen European nationalities. Persons of English and Scotch descent combined accounted for only 17.9 percent of the group. Nearly 1,700,000 more inhabitants claim descent from one of six mixed-European nationality groups. In addition, over 124,000 persons of Spanish origin and almost 19,000 residents of Asian and Pacific Island background live in Connecticut. Such a profound demographic transformation is of crucial significance for Connecticut's teachers. Their students are the descendants of this diverse population growth.

The homogeneity and stability of Connecticut's population in the Colonial and Early National Periods can be exaggerated. Connecticut's population constantly received new immigrant infusions from England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And ethnic homogeneity did not preclude religious diversity. By 1770, the state's Protestant churches included Congregational. Episcopal, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran congregations. Most Protestant dissenting sects were excused from attendance at Congregational services. But the dominance of the legendary Yankee of English stock is no myth. It has been estimated that at the time of the American Revolution over ninety-six percent of Connecticut's population was either English-born or of English descent.

In the early nineteenth century there seemed no reason to believe that the situation would change. Indeed, outmigration characterized the century's first three decades, as residents moved westward seeking relief from impoverished soil and declining commerce. Connecticut's population increased by only approximately five percent per decade between 1790 and 1840. Nevertheless, significant alterations in the state's economic outlook were already heralding new social developments.

Geographer David R. Meyer of Brown University, author of Urban Change in Central Connecticut: From Farm to Factory to Urban Pastoralism (Cambridge, 1976), has identified four factors which favorably disposed Connecticut toward industrialization in the early nineteenth century: (1) the legendary technological innovativeness of Connecticut's craftsmen; (2) the advanced literacy of its population; (3) a social and political climate which looked with favor upon such traits as shrewdness and acquisitiveness; and (4) the availability of merchant capital and the willingness to divert it to manufacturing. Moreover, in the nineteenth century the state's factories produced manufactures such as machinery, rolled iron, tools, brass and tin products, buttons, clocks, transportation equipment, arms, and textile goods which met the needs of an emerging national market. By 1850, Connecticut ranked fourth among the nation's industrialized states. For the first time more workers were employed in industry than in agriculture. The industrialization was highly localized within the river valleys or commercial centers. As communities such as Waterbury, New Britain, Middletown, Danbury, Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven evolved into important manufacturing cities, they required more workers. Natural population growth and agricultural displacement could meet part of the need, but immigrants would increasingly be required. In 1850 the state's population reached 370,000, an increase of 60,000 since 1840. Thirty-eight thousand of these residents were immigrants who had arrived since 1845.

Immigrants from England and Scotland continued to populate Connecticut's cities in the mid-nineteenth century. Often called the "invisible immigrants," they shared cultural and linguistic similarities with native-born Americans. Their migration was related to the facts that the British population quadrupled between 1800 and 1910 while at the same time improvements in scientific farming reduced the need for agricultural laborers. Since British industry could not absorb the surplus, many natives of England and Scotland moved to the United States with thousands coming to labor-hungry Connecticut.

British migrants frequently took up either farming or the skilled trades which they had practiced in England. Approximately three thousand of them had settled in New Haven County alone by 1860. Those that were not farmers worked in New Haven's diversified industrial establishments manufacturing firearms, carriages, hardware, and rubber goods. By 1850, sixty-one cutlers had migrated from Sheffield, England, to Waterbury, where they were employed by the Waterville Manufacturing Company in the manufacture of pocketknives. Other skilled workers found employment in Waterbury's brass and button factories. Samuel Colt (1814-1862) of Hartford hired skilled British workers in his Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company. Carpet weavers from Scotland settled in Thompsonville, where in 1836 the courts upheld their rights to form a union. British immigrants were relatively evenly distributed throughout the state and by 1860 numbered 8,875.

The first major challenge to the dominant migration from England and Scotland came from the Irish and Germans. The Germans began migrating in the early nineteenth century as population increases, land divisions, and an influx of cheap British textiles threatened a reduction in living standards. Political unrest culminating in the Revolution of 1848 and dissent within the Lutheran church also were contributing factors. German immigration is associated with migration to the Midwest, but many Germans settled in such Eastern states as Connecticut.

Connecticut's Germans generally were skilled workers and proprietors of small commercial establishments. In New Haven several German breweries were in operation before the Civil War. Hartford's Germans settled along Front Street, and their numbers included blacksmiths, machinists, and skilled workers at the Colt Firearms Company. Colt also persuaded most of the willow workers from a village near Potsdam to come to Hartford where they manufactured furniture from the willow trees which surrounded his factory. Cheney Brothers, a Manchester silk company, purchased looms from Krefeld, Germany, and many weavers and loom-fixers followed. As the Germans settled, they established their own cultural institutions. New Haven's first German Roman Catholic church was organized in 1858 and Lutheran and Baptist churches followed in 1865 and 1868. A German-language newspaper, the Hartford Zeitung, served as a political mouthpiece for Stephen A. Douglas's 1860 presidential campaign. German-American Turn-Vercin, or social and athletic clubs, appeared in communities with heavy concentrations of German-Americans.

A significant portion of Connecticut's Germans were Jews. As early as 1840 Bavarian Jews founded Congregation Mishkan Israel in New Haven, and Hartford's Beth Israel was organized in 1843. In 1856 Beth Israel occupied the former First Baptist Church on Main Street as its synagogue. In New Haven German Jews became tailors, dry goods merchants, druggists, and restaurateurs. Many of Hartford's Jewish businessmen began their careers as peddlers. By saving their earnings, they later were able to open up small businesses. The 1855 Hartford City Directory listed 13 of 27 clothing stores as owned by Jews, as well as all eight "fancy goods" stores. Perhaps the most famous of these early proprietors was Gerson Fox (1811-1880), founder of G. Fox Department Store. By 1860 over 8,000 German immigrants of all faiths lived in Connecticut.

But the Irish constituted Connecticut's largest pre-Civil War immigrant contingent. The "flight from famine" thesis is responsible for the widespread notion that the 1845 Irish potato famine was the initial spur to cause the Irish to come to the United States. But there had been earlier, less severe, famines in 1800, 1807, 1816, 1822, and 1839. Moreover, English political repression since the seventeenth century had both relegated Irish Catholics to second-class citizenship and severely limited their economic opportunities. Thus the Irish had sufficient motivation to emigrate prior to the famine. For example, over 352,000 Irish immigrated to America between 1830 and 1845. While many were Protestant from Ulster, many also were Irish Catholics from southern Ireland. Connecticut was one of their destinations.

Over four hundred Irish immigrants from Galway and Cork came to Hartford and New Haven to work on the construction of the Enfield and Farmington canals in the 1820s. Irish immigrants also helped build the Hartford and New Haven Railroad. An indication of the Irish Catholic presence in Connecticut prior to 1845 is seen in the founding of Roman Catholic parishes. Hartford's Church of the Most Holy Trinity was consecrated in the former Christ Episcopal Church in 1830. New Haven's first Catholic church was organized in 1832; and one began in Bridgeport in 1843.

Nevertheless, the major Irish presence in Connecticut dates from the potato famine which began in 1845. From 1847 to 1854 Irish immigration to the United States never fell below one hundred thousand annually. Connecticut was a popular destination for several reasons. Some Irish immigrants farmed, particularly in Windham County, but more worked in the state's cities. Irish immigrants helped build Samuel Colt's armory. A few began factories themselves. Matthew O'Connell (n.d.-c. 1849), formerly of Dublin, established a linen damask factory in New Raven. Wives and daughters began entering the homes of the well-to-do as domestic servants. But the Irish penetrated the state's labor force with difficulty. They were usually without skills; and native-born workers viewed them as competitors who lowered wages and working conditions. Nevertheless, by 1860, almost 55,500 Irish-born persons were living in Connecticut. They were the single largest foreign-born group in the state, leading the Germans by over forty-seven thousand.

Thus, by 1860, one quarter of Connecticut's residents were either immigrants or their children. New Haven's population of thirty-nine thousand included seven thousand Irish and two thousand Germans. Almost one third of Hartford's twenty-nine thousand residents had emigrated from Europe since 1845. Clearly the age of homogeneity had passed. And the state would become even more heterogeneous in the decades to come.

THE "NEW" IMMIGRATION

A marked geographic shift in the national origins of America's immigrants occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As migration from Northern and Western Europe stabilized and declined, it was supplemented by immigration of enormous proportions from Southern and Eastern Europe. These "new" immigrants usually departed from agricultural or preindustrial societies, often with the intent of earning their fortunes and returning. Once in America, most of them remained. They found homes in the cities and unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in the nation's factories. The migration was particularly heavy from Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Russia. The change was reflected in Connecticut's newcomers. A ranking of immigrants to Connecticut in order of their numbers for the decade 1840-49 places the Irish first, followed by the Germans, English, French, and Canadians. But for 1900-09, the ranking places Austria-Hungary in the lead, followed by Italy, Russia, England, and Ireland. By 1910, first- and second-generation immigrants constituted approximately seventy percent of the state's population, and about fifty-five percent of the immigrants had come from Southern and Eastern Europe.

While all of the "new" immigrant groups cannot be highlighted in this brief essay, three, Italians, Russian Jews, and Poles, will be discussed.

The Italians who came to Connecticut prior to 1890 usually came from the more industrialized, urban, northern portions of the country. But many of the 4.5 million Italians who immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1924 were from southern Italy or the Mezzogiorno. These contadini, or peasants, frequently had lived in economically depressed rural cities of several thousand where they went out each day to work the land for absentee owners. Their marginal existence was jolted when the successful American citrus fruit industry severely reduced Italian exports of lemons and oranges. The constant threat of cholera and earthquakes combined with these economic hardships to cause mass emigration.

The Italian immigration to both the nation and Connecticut was conducted on a regional format. Although the legend of transplanted Italian villages has been vastly overdrawn, it is true that natives of Calabria, Salerno, Abruzzi, and especially Potenza, came to Hartford. Most of Middletown's Italian-Americans departed from the Sicilian village of Melilli. Natives of Pontelandolfo and Avigliano were among the settlers in Waterbury. Thus the Italian newcomers were not imbued with Italian nationalism. Rather, they identified with their province or village. And while most were Catholics, their Catholicism was laced with heavy doses of local mythology and anti-clericalism. For many natives of southern Italy, the church hierarchy had been identified with the oppressive upper classes.

New Haven and Waterbury received proportionately more Italians than other cities. Waterbury's increasingly mechanized brass industry offered employment for semi-skilled and unskilled laborers, and by 1920, 9,232 Italian-born residents made up over ten percent of the city's population, especially in the central city district. The first Italian Catholic church, Our Lady of Lourdes, was built on South Main Street in 1909. New Haven's Italians settled around Wooster Square, and they worked at the Candee Rubber Company and Sargent's Hardware Factory. The first church, St. Michael's, was founded by the Scalabrini Order in 1888. New Haven's Italian-born population increased from a mere ten in 1870 to 13,159 in 1910, making them the city's single largest foreign-born group. Hartford's Italian-born population rose from 23 in 1870 to 4,521 in 1910. They settled along ten or twelve blocks of the city's east side, where they maintained a community of homes, markets, shops, and restaurants. By 1910, Connecticut's Italian immigrant community numbered 56,954 and was exceeded only by the Irish.

Connecticut's Jewish population clearly illustrates the shift from the "old" to the "new" immigration. The Jewish immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries originated overwhelmingly in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia, Russian Poland, Lithuania, and Austria-Hungary. Some of the Ashkenazim, or Central and Eastern European Jews, had arrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries along with Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese Jews. But Jews suffered large-scale persecution in the years following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The subsequent May Laws in 1882 imposed quotas on admission of Jews to universities, prohibitions on Jewish land purchases, and restrictions on residency and travel. One of the repercussions was that approximately 2,750,000 Eastern European Jews arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1924. Exactly how many came to Connecticut is uncertain, but the state's Russian population offers some indication. Only sixty-five Russians lived in Connecticut in 1880; by 1910 the number had risen to 54,121. Most of these were Jews.

The newcomers differed from their German coreligionists. Many German Jews were of the Reform tradition, a modernized Judaism which stressed the   separation of spiritual religion from secular life in the United States. The Eastern European Jewish tradition was grounded in centuries of persecution and communal Yiddish culture. Not only was Orthodoxy a spiritual tradition, it was a means of survival in a hostile world. It reinforced the values of family cohesiveness and mutual aid. Class differences existed as well. While the German Jews were often prosperous, the Eastern European Jews were usually poor. German Jews responded to the plight of the newcomers with generous assistance, which, however, was often tinged with condescension. The newcomers responded by forming their own organizational life.

By 1920 Greater Hartford's Jewish population had risen to 18,000, and Eastern Europeans outnumbered the Germans by at least five to one. Like newcomers before them, the Eastern Europeans settled along Front Street, as well as on Main Street and Albany Avenue. Their numbers included carpenters, grocers, peddlers, bakers, furriers, and painters. Before very long the Eastern Europeans had founded thirty charitable and mutual-aid societies. From 1884 to 1919 thirteen new synagogues were established along with Hebrew schools, workingmen's organizations, and Yiddish theater groups. Much the same was true for New Haven, where an Eastern European community developed along Oak Street. The shops of shoemakers, peddlers, tailors, and carpenters appeared. Others found employment in local hardware and clothing factories.

A little-known aspect of Connecticut's Jewish history is the extent to which Jews became farmers. Philanthropic agencies, particularly the Baron de Hirsch Fund,¹  had made extensive efforts to settle Eastern European Jews in self-supporting, agricultural communities. Few of these ventures succeeded, unless they were located near urban markets and alternative sources of employment, such as in New Jersey and Connecticut. Colchester, Connecticut, is one such example. Jews began settling there in the 1890s, and by 1915 they accounted for half of the town's two thousand residents. They operated chicken and dairy farms and supplemented their income by working in clothing factories and in the tourist trade, as Jews from New York and New Haven turned the town into a summer resort. Other farming communities appeared in abandoned farm areas in such eastern Connecticut towns as Chesterfield, Norwich, and Uncasville.

Connecticut's Poles came from a non-country. In 1795 Poland had been divided by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary. In the ensuing century, these nations attempted to suppress Polish nationalism and the Polish language. Moreover, economic hardships buffeted the Poles. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the Polish population doubled to twenty-five million, placing enormous pressure upon an already unequal system of land distribution. The fear of deteriorating into a landless proletariat tormented the Polish peasant. Between 1877 and 1924 some three million Poles migrated to the United States. Their goal was to save their money, return home, and reestablish their families' landed-peasant status. Many, however, found work in American urban factories and remained.

Connecticut's Poles settled most heavily in New Britain, where by 1930 the city's 16,290 first-and second-generation Polish-Americans constituted nearly a quarter of the population. Other significant Polish communities developed in Hartford, Waterbury, New Haven, and Bridgeport. The Poles were rural in origin, unskilled, and one of the last of the new immigrant groups to arrive in Connecticut. But New Britain's factories required unskilled laborers, and the Poles found employment in machinery, hardware, and metal-parts factories. In Hartford they followed previous immigrants into the Colt Factory and the Underwood Typewriter Company. More than any other immigrant group, the Poles, some of them Jews, entered farming. A study conducted in 1940 found that 10,664 Polish-Americans accounted for nearly twenty-three percent of all foreign-stock farmers.

Persistently rebuffed and ridiculed as "greenhorns," the Polish newcomers quickly set about the task of forming their own communities around parish churches. From the beginning, relationships with the Irish-dominated Roman Catholic church were tense. Disagreements frequently arose over the ownership of church land and the desire on the part of Polish communicants to select their own parish priests. One response was the organization of Polish National Catholic parishes in nine communities. More often, as in New Britain's Sacred Heart parish, Polish priests sought to advance Polish interests through accommodation within the Roman Catholic church.

Twenty-four Polish Roman Catholic parishes were organized in Connecticut, and Polish-American life centered around them. New Britain's Sacred Heart parish sponsored a school, a religious order, a cemetery, an orphanage, a home for the elderly, a newspaper, and several businesses. The community's festivals, athletics, and political life revolved around the church. The parishes served both as entry points and transition zones to the mainstream of American life for the Polish-Americans. By 1920, Connecticut contained 46,623 Polish-born residents. By 1930, first- and second-generation Polish-Americans totaled 133,813, or thirteen percent of the population.

By no means do these groups make up a total representation of the Europeans who migrated to Connecticut. In 1910 the census listed eleven other European ethnic groups residing in Connecticut. The state's Slavic population was concentrated most heavily in Bridgeport. By 1915, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, and Slavonian Roman Catholic or National parishes had been founded there. Scandinavians, especially Swedes, migrated to Connecticut's farms and factories. The area around Woodstock contained a large Swedish-American population. Protestants from Northern Ireland reappeared in the late nineteenth century. An example is the migration of textile workers from the linen mills of Portadown to the silk mills of Manchester. By World War I the transition in Connecticut from homogeneity to heterogeneity was complete. Connecticut was a multi-ethnic state.

RECEPTION AND ADJUSTMENT

How were the state's immigrants received and how did they adapt to life in Connecticut? The two questions are related since a people's adjustment to life in a new land will in part be determined by the reception accorded them.

British immigrants in Connecticut in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries were easily integrated. Both immigrants and native-born shared common linguistic and cultural patterns. Little ethnic community life appears to have evolved among the British. Waterbury's Sheffield cutlers lived in a compact community and continued such Old World activities as cricket. But assimilation appears to have been relatively rapid. Not until the Irish arrived did serious antagonisms appear between the native-born and newcomers.

The arrival of large numbers of Irish immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s stimulated both ethnic and class antipathy. The Irish were disliked with respect to their Catholicism and their poverty. The most prominent evidence of the hostility was the popularity of the Know-Nothing party in the 1850s. For many voters, the party was merely a way-station between the deceased Whigs and the embryonic Republicans. But much of its attraction was its anti-Catholicism. The Know-Nothings elected a governor, William T. Minor, and several local officials, including a mayor of New Haven. Anti-immigrant legislation was enacted by the General Assembly.² The editor of the Hartford Courant denounced "ignorant, degraded and priest-led foreigners," and in 1853 Hartford's Church of the Most Holy Trinity was burned.

A generation would pass before the Irish-Americans would be at least tolerated. In the late nineteenth century, the anti-Catholic American Protective Association enjoyed some vogue in Connecticut, but its success was limited to a few public gatherings.  Several members of the Protestant clergy denounced the A.P.A. and established warm relations with some members of the Catholic hierarchy. By the early twentieth century, as the Irish began to achieve both middle-class respectability and political power, overt anti-Irish activity was on the wane.

The "new" immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries initially generated more indifference than hostility. Perhaps the state's power structure felt too secure to be worried. Connecticut's system of representation permitted only one senator from each county and two representatives from each town over five thousand in population. This structure left the legislative power squarely in the hands of the rural, small-town, Protestant lawmakers. Economic power also was controlled by a small, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite. A survey of one hundred ten of the state's most prominent industrialists between 1900 and 1930 revealed that ninety-two of them were of British-American stock.

If the state's power elites did little to oppose the immigrants, neither did they do very much for them. What little social legislation emerged from the legislature was watered down and under-funded. With the onset of World War I, however, attention was directed toward the immigrants. Unfortunately, the attention was not comforting.

Fear of subversion by foreigners led to anti-immigrant rhetoric and action. An interesting sign of the times was the census conducted by the state in 1917. Ostensibly undertaken to determine manpower needs, it became, in the words of one scholar, a "patriotic index"—an attempt to determine loyalties and root out "slackers." The Americanization drives which occurred during and following the war were partially grounded in fear, as was Prohibition. A Yale professor expressed satisfaction with Prohibition, especially in cities "where the American stock has been submergd by a wave of immigration from Italy, the Balkans, Russia, and Poland." During the anti-radical, anti-Bolshevik Red Scare of 1919-1920, three hundred and thirty-six aliens were imprisoned by the Attorney General's Office. A resurgent Ku Klux Klan claimed eighteen thousand members at its peak in the 1920s. With the passage by Congress in 1924 of the Johnson-Reed Bill, which imposed a quota system heavily favoring immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, much of the antiforeign agitation receded. And the classical period of immigration in Connecticut drew to a close.

Immigrant adjustment patterns in twentieth-century Connecticut have varied. Scholars are agreed that the symbolic melting pot in which ethnic differences vanish is a myth, but there is considerable disagreement over the nature of assimilation. Furthermore, the different cultural backgrounds of Connecticut's ethnic groups preclude such generalizations.

The Irish political adaptation in America is widely acclaimed. Their experience as captives in their own country had taught them the importance of organization and loyalty. Early on they entered the Connecticut Democratic party, and by 1920 they controlled it. An Irish immigrant was elected to New Haven's Board of Alderman as early as 1857, and in 1899, Cornelius Driscoll, (n.d. c. 1930), a native of County Cork, was elected mayor. Two years earlier Stamford's William H. ("Billy Bo") Bohannan had captured that city's mayoralty. Four Irish-American councilmen were elected with him. In 1910, Thomas J. Spellacy (1880-1957) of Hartford and Davey Fitzgerald (1874-1942) of New Haven controlled the Democratic machines in their respective cities. By World War I, Irish-Americans comprised fifty-seven percent of Connecticut's Democratic State Central Committee.

Political power and control of the Catholic church cast the Irish in the role of middlemen. It was through the Irish that the new immigrants were introduced to American institutions in the early twentieth century. Irish-American legislators sponsored a variety of social welfare bills designed to assist immigrants. Most of these measures fell victim to the WASP-dominated Republican majority, but child and women labor legislation and a workmen's compensation bill did pass, albeit in truncated form. And new immigrant politicians, such as Hartford's Tony Zazzaro (1896-1945) and Herman Kopplemann (1880-1957), had to negotiate for power with the Irish leadership.

It is sometimes argued that Irish political control backfired, at least with New Haven's Italian-Americans, many of whom turned to the Republican party. In 1939, Republican William C. Celentano (1904-1972), the son of a fruit peddler, secured the Republican mayoralty nomination. He lost the election, but he won in 1945 and retained the office until 1953. Since then the city's Italian-Americans have consistently supported their own candidates. In a recent election, both parties nominated Italian-Americans. Is this a sign of retarded assimilation?  Perhaps not. New Haven's Italian-Americans did not give overwhelming support to the Republican party until the late 1930s, when the second generation was voting and a middle class had developed. In short, ethnic voting has sometimes persisted among all classes even when other indexes of assimilation appear to be well advanced.

Political involvement and property ownership are forms of adaptation. On the face of it, the acquisition of property would appear to signal assimilation into the larger culture. But even though Italians, Jews, Poles, and other Eastern or Southern Europeans ranked highest in home ownership in a 1970 study of Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, they also maintained strong ethnic neighborhoods. Italians, Poles, and other Eastern European Catholics responded more positively than other European groups when asked if most of their close friends in the neighborhood were relatives or in-laws. Viewed in this context, home ownership could be a means of keeping the family together and preserving Old World values in an uncertain world.

But sometimes becoming an ethnic in the United States is itself a step toward assimilation. Most Italian immigrants initially directed their loyalties toward their village or province. Only gradually did they and their children accept the status of Italian-Americans. The same can be said of the declining significance of the distinction between German and Eastern European Jews.

Occupation and educational mobility is often cited as an indication of assimilation. In 1975, Harold Abramson of the University of Connecticut examined a representative sample of ethnic groups in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport: Ethnic Diversity in Three Connecticut Cities, Preliminary Findings (Storrs, 1975). With the exception of Jews, he found most of the Eastern European groups still heavily concentrated in blue-collar occupations. Yet at the same time he discovered significant generational differences in college attendance. If late twentieth-century economic prospects were less uncertain, these findings might suggest greater future occupational mobility.

Marital assimilation is the greatest harbinger of a breakdown in ethnic loyalties. Little research has been added to Yale sociologist Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy's 1944 and 1952 studies in which she proposed a "triple melting pot" of Protestants, Catholics and Jews: "Single or Triple Melting Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870-1940," American Journal of Sociology, XLIX (January 1944). In New Haven she found an increasing willingness to marry outside one's ethnic group within those three categories. Recent national studies show some outmarriage among Catholics and a striking increase in the willingness of Jews to marry non-Jews. We can only guess whether or not Connecticut's citizens reflect national trends.

Thus the only certainty is that diversity continues to characterize Connecticut's population. We remain a peoples rather than a people. The recent ethnic revival is of uncertain significance; much of the "new ethnicity" is probably symbolic. Sociologist James Crispino in a careful study of Bridgeport-area Italian-Americans, suggests that ethnicity is a function of class: The Assimilation of Ethnic Groups. The Italian Case (Staten Island, New York, 1980). Later generation, upwardly-mobile, Italian-Americans expressed an increased sense of assimilation, associated more with friends of their class than of their ethnic group, and were less inclined to maintain Italian customs. Whether his findings apply to other areas and ethnic groups remains to be seen. The issue is complicated by the fact that newcomers are still moving into Connecticut.

PRESENT-DAY CONNECTICUT

In the 1980s, the Western Hemisphere and Asia increasingly represent the source of newcomers to both Connecticut and the nation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canada provided most of the state's immigrants from this hemisphere. French-Canadians, largely from Quebec, left their harsh lumbering and farming existence and moved into eastern Connecticut, particularly into the textile communities. Over 125,000 persons of French-Canadian origin live in Connecticut today.

In the late twentieth century, newcomers from this hemisphere tend to come in greatest numbers from Puerto Rico. In 1980, 124,499 persons of Spanish origin were living in the state. The largest group was composed of in-migrants, rather than immigrants—over 88,000 American citizens from Puerto Rico. Large-scale Puerto Rican migration to the mainland is a post-World War II phenomenon. Puerto Rican employment on the sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations is seasonal, and the economy is strained to support the island's three million inhabitants. Cheap airfare and no migration restrictions have enticed many Puerto Ricans to the mainland for seasonal work. The chief form of agricultural labor which the Puerto Ricans found was tobacco farming. Puerto Rican law required that the workers come here under contracts which guaranteed minimum wages and stipulated working and living conditions. The decline in the tobacco industry has resulted in fewer jobs. Most Puerto Ricans live in the cities, especially in Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford.

Puerto Rican migration has intensified since the 1950s. Hartford's roughly 30,000 Puerto Ricans constitute the state's largest community; Bridgeport, New Haven and Norwalk also have sizeable numbers of citizens from the Commonwealth. Most of the Puerto Ricans are Catholics. Hartford's Sacred Heart parish has approximately 1,500 Puerto Rican members. Connecticut's Puerto Rican Protestants are generally Baptists or Presbyterians, but there are also numerous storefront Pentecostal churches.

Asians have lived in Connecticut throughout the twentieth century. In 1910, 462 Chinese and 71 Japanese resided within the state. But in 1980, 18,970 Asians or Pacific Islanders lived in Connecticut. The 1980 figures reflect recent international crises. For the first time the Census Bureau included the Vietnamese as a group, as 1,825 were counted in Connecticut. But the two largest groups are the 4,995 Asian Indians and the 4,691 Chinese. Some are professionals, others are small businessmen, and many are unskilled laborers. Other Asian groups include Koreans, Japanese, and Filipinos.

The other major in-migrants are, of course, black Americans, dealt with in another essay in this book.

Thus newcomers continue to arrive in Connecticut, but the Puerto Ricans, Asians, and blacks are entering a Connecticut different from that experienced by previous newcomers. Most earlier immigrants came to the state's urban centers seeking entry-level jobs in the growing industrial sector. But all that has changed. Automation has extinguished many unskilled jobs, and many factories are no longer in the cities. Hartford's experience serves as an example. Hartford lost forty-one percent of its manufacturing jobs between 1966 and 1975. On the other hand, non-manufacturing jobs increased in Hartford by over 23,000 between 1965 and 1972. But those jobs—in government, insurance, and the service industries—require skills and levels of education which many of the newcomers do not possess. And the declining urban tax base makes it difficult for the city to provide the necessary educational opportunities. Thus, Connecticut remains a multi-ethnic state with its newest arrivals facing an uncertain future.

CONNECTICUT'S FOREIGN BORN: 1880.1970: RANK ORDER OF TEN LEADING CONTRIBUTING NATIONS

CONNECTICUT'S FOREIGN BORN: 1880-1970: RANK ORDER OF TEN LEADING CONTRIBUTING NATIONS

1.  Figures and rank order calculated from census data by John Sutherland.

2.  Polish immigrants distributed under Austria, Germany and Russia in 1900 and 1910.

3.  Canada listed as "French" and "other" from 1900 through 1950.

4.  Ireland listed as Northern Ireland and Irish Free State since 1930.

5.  Russia listed as USSR since 1940.

6.  Total foreign stock (TES) includes both immigrants and n3hve 1'

CONNECTICUT'S FOREIGN BORN, 1980*

*These figures are estimates based upon a sample.

CONNCTICUT'S ANCESTRY GROUPS, 1980*

MULTIPLE ANCESTRY GROUPS, 1980

*In 1980, the census requested for the first time ancestry data from people regardless of the number of generations removed from their country of origin.

PERSONS BY RACE IN CONNECTICUT, 1980

Note:    That enigmatic group, "other," numbered 67,220, and thus, if counted, would have ranked third.

PERSONS BY SPANISH ORIGIN, 1980

PERSONS OF SPANISH ORIGIN BY RACE, 1980

¹The Baron de Hirsch Fund was named after a German financier and philanthropist who founded it in 1891. The Fund's purpose was to assist the resettlement of Eastern European Jews in the United States, particularly in agricultural colonies. It also sponsored legal and educational programs for immigrants.