Inside U.S.A. by John Gunther

Author:John Gunther [Gunther, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781565843585
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Is Connecticut changing? Yes—profoundly. Before the war it had 370,000 people in industry, Baldwin told me; today the number is 600,000 or more, of whom from 30 to 40 per cent are women. Year by year more foreign-born pump in; and as far back as 1930, only 34.1 per cent of Connecticutters were of native American stock. Another item—a cardinal point almost everywhere in southern New England—is the growing decentralization of cities. The well-to-do go out into the suburbs; big parking lots disfigure empty blocks in the towns, where buildings have been torn down because the owners cannot pay taxes; and the towns spread out voraciously into the mellow, undulant countryside.

Every once in a while a territorial dispute between states comes up in American politics, and the metropolitan dailies have great fun writing about “plots for territorial revision” and the like. A recent example was a petition by residents of Fisher’s Island, New York, for annexation to Connecticut. The island is a small one near the end of Long Island, three miles off the Connecticut shore; its natural links are across the Sound. Baldwin took the matter up with Dewey. He explained that no defection in loyalty to New York state was intended by the inhabitants of Fisher’s Island, and that New York itself must of course agree to this “less of sovereignty,” before he would consent to take the island in.

Finally Connecticut has other things. It is the state of place names just as dramatic as any in the West (for instance Dark Entry, Jangling Plains, Cow Shanty, Dodgingtown); it is the state of twenty-six daily newspapers including the Hartford Courant, founded in 1765, the oldest American paper of continuous publication; of ten billion dollars worth of insurance in forty-five insurance companies; of the graves of J. P. Morgan, Tom Thumb, and Noah Webster; of a host of New York writers, artists and millionaires who escape New York in the vicinity of West-port; of strong Jewish influence (Hartford has more Jews per capita than any American city except New York) ; and of the only important city in the nation, Bridgeport, with a Socialist mayor, the picturesquely named Jasper McLevy.

Some other Connecticut developments recently have been (a) a successful strike in Norwalk by the schoolteachers, who had been shockingly underpaid; (b) vivid emergence in local elections of war veterans, like Captain Emilio Quincy Daddario (who bears a nice melting pot name), a hero of the Italian campaign who became Democratic mayor of Middlesex in 1946; (c) suppression in both New Haven and Bridgeport of performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as a result of Negro protests, and (d) bitter opposition by lush landowners in the Greenwich-Stamford area to the possibility of the United Nations moving in.

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