When People -- and Profits -- Were Welcome

July 9, 2009

There was another Connecticut.

Runaway government, rampant welfare dependency, declining household income, disappearing private-sector jobs, and a dwindling young-adult population have led many Nutmeggers to conclude -- probably accurately -- that the state doesn’t have much of a future.

But within the lifetimes of our oldest citizens, Connecticut was a very different place. Government here once was restrained. As a result, rivers of investment flowed into the state. Maniacal, profit-seeking individualism was the norm, making innovation and wealth-creation widespread. Jobs with good wages were plentiful.

Eric D. Lehman’s Bridgeport: Tales from the Park City, published by The History Press, recounts a portion of the Connecticut that was. Lehman, who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Bridgeport, has penned a revealing, if slim, glimpse backward to an era that bears very little resemblance to ours.

Phineas T. Barnum, born in Bethel, was a retailer and newspaperman before he found his destiny as a promoter of all things -- and animals, and people -- unusual and/or spectacular. The man who made Barnum’s career, Bridgeport native Charles Sherwood Stratton, was born of normal size. But as Lehman writes, when Barnum met Stratton in 1842, “the four-year-old boy was only twenty-five inches high and weighed only fifteen pounds.” The “showman’s dream” suffered from a “faulty pituitary gland [that] caused Charles to keep this very small size but left him without bodily deformities. In fact, the boy … was quite striking, with fair hair and complexion.”

“General Tom Thumb” turned out to be a natural performer, and with his haminess and Barnum’s business sense, the two made fortunes. After conquering America, they went to Europe. The “general” got to meet Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. (Stratton dressed as Napoleon.)

Back in the U.S., a then-unknown Walt Whitman asked if the tour had weakened Barnum’s appreciation of America. The promoter’s response was unambiguous: “No! Not a bit of it! Why, sir, you can’t imagine the difference. There, everything is frozen -- kings and things -- formal, but absolutely frozen, here it is life. Here it is freedom, and here are men.”

The gutsy, hardworking, and philanthropic men who built Bridgeport -- none of whom received subsidies from a “business incubator” or “cluster initiative” -- included sewing-machine makers Nathaniel Wheeler and Allen B. Wilson; Joseph Frisbie, who created “the world’s first pie assembly line”; corset manufacturers Lucien and Ira DeVer Warner; Waldo Calvin Bryant, an electrical-switch magnate; auto visionary Andrew Riker, who worked for the Locomobile Company of America; Dr. Alfred Fones, originator of the concept of “dental hygiene”; and submarine builder Simon Lake.

Igor Sikorsky fled Bolshevism for New York City, but moved his business to Bridgeport during World War II. The Kiev native, whose work had been inspected by Nicholas II, dreamed of building a unique flying machine. But doing so required Sikorsky to surmount three tiny challenges: “First, we had little knowledge of helicopters in general; second, we were building the first helicopter in the world with a single main rotor; and third, we knew practically nothing about how to pilot a helicopter.” Undaunted, and blessed with what an employee called “remarkable resilience in the face of tremendous odds,” the man whose name is now synonymous with helicopters established the first assembly line for the aircraft on South Street in 1943.

Industrialists and their appliances, vehicles, and armaments dominate Lehman’s book. But it’s his vivid portrait of Catherine Moore, who tended Black Rock Harbor’s island lighthouse in the middle of the 19th century, that most sticks in memory. Taking over duties from her crippled father, she survived -- and Robinson Crusoe-like, thrived -- under harsh and lonely conditions. She raised cows, chickens, ducks, sheep, and dogs. Moore grew her own food, and used a shotgun to scare poachers away from her oyster bed. In 1878, the plucky spinster retired from service, and moved to the mainland with $75,000 in the bank. She never whined about her lot: “I had done all this for so many years, and I knew no other life, so I was sort of fitted for it.”

Bridgeport: Tales from the Park City stumbles badly in the final chapter, offering the standard chamber-of-commerce nonsense about the city’s inevitable return to glory. But baseless boosterism notwithstanding, Lehman’s vibrant history of the town that “became a center of creative industry and would one day evolve to be the largest city in Connecticut” brims with factoids, anecdotes, and profiles that recall a Land of Steady Habits devoid of indolence, busybodies, and Big Government.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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