USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I > Part 26
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Once started, the business grew apace. It was not long before the scope of the company was enlarged beyond the New Haven district, Ilartford, Bridge- port, Middletown, Meriden and New Britain being included in the eireuit. About that time it became necessary for the concern to have more adequate quarters, which it secured in the Ford Building across the street. As early as 1880 a union was made with the Western Union Telegraph Company, and the name was changed to the Connecticut Telephone Company. In 1888 the company secured land on Court Street and commenced the erection of the building which for nearly thirty years served as its central exchange and general offices. In 1890, with a service list of 3,000 subscribers, the Southern New England Tele- phone Company was incorporated. In the course of time this became a con- stituent part of the Bell system, but it has largely retained its New Haven directorate, and almost entirely its New Haven management.
A few figures of contrast may best show at once the growth of forty years and the size of the communication service which gives New Haven peculiar distinction in the telephone history of America. That single exchange of 1878 has grown to sixty-nine, from which are served the people of 695 cities, towns or villages in and near this state. The forty-seven subscribers, with their fifty stations, have grown to exceed 130,000, who use 146,164 telephones, and make as high as 705,564 calls a day. In place of the single sheet, containing on one side all the patrons, is a closely printed volume of 420 pages, each of them larger than that sheet. There is not a town in this state, and there is hardly a hamlet, that is not reached by the universal wires. In New Haven itself, the forty-seven subscribers have grown to exceed 15,500.
Of the thirteen towns historically considered here, ten have their independent
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telephone exchanges. From the New llaven central district are served West Ilaven, Woodbridge, Hamden, Mount Carmel and North Haven. Orange has its central for that part of the town that is out of West Haven. Wallingford and Meriden each serve their towns. The Branford division takes care of Bran- ford and North Branford, which includes a part of Northford, the other part going direct to New Haven. East Haven is mainly limited to the town. Cheshire has its own central. So have Guilford and Madison.
The $5,000 capital which seems to have sufficed the company in 1878 has grown to $12,000,000, and 1917 saw an increase of $1,000,000. The wire mileage of the company at the end of 1917 was 439,919, and 41,705 had been added in that year. The net income for that year was $810,733.21, of which $770,000 went to the stockholders in dividends, leaving $40,733.21 to be added to the company's surplus. That now amounts to $610,996.33.
These outside towns are well supplied with telephones, for it has been the poliey of the company to give service at a price which should make it possible. to have a telephone in almost every home. In the city of Meriden there are 2,820 subscribers. Wallingford has 1,050. That part of Orange which is strictly rural has 117. the greater number of the telephones of the town being, of course, in West Haven, which is a division of the New Haven system. The Branford exchange has 827 subscribers, taking in Stony Creek and the shore resorts, to- gether with North Branford. Cheshire has 279 telephones. East Haven lists 234. Guilford was 386 subscribers, scattered all the way from Guilford Point to the Durham line on the north, and Madison, with an even longer stretch from shore to north end, has 317. It should be said here that nothing that has come to these towns in the last two decades, with the possible exception of the rural free delivery, has so bridged their isolation and changed their character as has the telephone.
Several years ago it became apparent to the management that the company would soon outgrow even the commodious quarters built for it on Court Street in 1889. Late in 1916 work was begun on a new building adjoining the old one, and that, now completed, towers seven stories above the old building. The removal to these new quarters was effected in the early part of 1918.
Many changes have come to the management of the company since those pioneer days of 1878. Outside capital has come in to some extent, and telephone experts have come from other points to handle the phenomenally growing busi- ness and meet its problems, but the management has continued to be essentially New Haven. In 1916 John W. Alling, who had been its president for many years, retired, and James T. Moran, its able general manager, was moved up to the presideney. At the same time Harry C. Knight, one of the ablest of the younger members of the institution, and a citizen in whom New Haven de- lights, was made vice president and general manager. The other officers at present are :
Secretary and treasurer, Charles B. Doolittle ; assistant secretary and assist- ant treasurer, Clinton J. Benjamin ; general auditor, Ellis B. Baker, Jr .; chief
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engineer, Edward Il. Everit; general commercial superintendent, Johnstone D. Veitch; general superintendent of plant, Ernest L. Simonds; general super- intendent of traffic, Frank L. Moore; general agent, Frederick P. Lewis; general claim agent, John W. Ladd.
These are efficient means of transportation and communication, but New Haven still has dreams. It has seen, in forty years, the wonder of the telephone grow into a commonplace. It has seen the network of wires which used to be the material symbol of electric communication of telegraph and telephone almost entirely disappear-for New Haven has buried them, to the general safety and welfare. It has seen, in not more than a decade and a half, the universal motor vehiele expand from a faddish experiment to a utility. It has seen the onee mar- velous wireless telegraph reduced to the plaything of a schoolboy, and one time a common thing over many of the houses of the city. What wonder if it looks forward to the time when all present means of communication shall be made flat and stale and prosaie by the airship? That, indeed, would be a much less wonderful fulfillment of promise than the fathers of the generation now young have seen in thirty years.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION
NEW HAVEN AND THIE MELTING POT-RACES REPRESENTED AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION IN THE CITY-THIE PROCESS OF ASSIMILATION, IN NEW HAVEN AND THE ADJOIN- ING TOWNS
I
New Haven was settled by good, straight, English stock. The people on the good ship llector were not from one village, by any means, but they were in a literal sense fellow countrymen if not neighbors, and there was much less of a mixture of origin than on the Mayflower. They did not for many years, even for several generations, think of drawing any race lines. They welcomed to their new community all who were willing to adopt their way of worshipping God and their form of religious government. That was a strieter exelusiveness than any race lines could have made, but they did not stop to think of it. It was pretty well understood so, however, by all who would come here. The experience of the Quakers, and later the followers of some other alien beliefs, in other New England colonies was such as to warn "heretics" not to experiment with New Haven.
So the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century came and went, and even the nineteenth century found New Haven a community of well de- fined English stock. The faet that the 5,085 people of New Haven in 1756 had increased to only 8,327 in 1820 would appear to be fairly conclusive proof that most of the increase had come from home stoek, not from immigration. Few thought of such a thing as immigration. in fact. Newcomers were welcome, for there was much room, and the town needed people. But few of them were strangers. None were aliens, as we have come to use the word.
There did begin, however, in the deeade following 1820, an immigration movement. Our wars for independenee had come to a successful close, and peace seemed ahead. Prosperity blessed the land. New Haven was in some senses the first station beyond the great New York port of entry. The real tide of Irish immigration did not begin, indeed, until after the great potato famine of 1842-44, hnt previous to that time a few of the lovers of liberty had found their way to this famed land of the free. Being here, it was natural that they should seek out such a truly free community as New Haven.
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It would be the delight of the statistician to trace in detail the immigrant development of New Haven. It was at first so gradual that few noticed it until they found themselves erowded by strange newcomers, found the old and onee aristocratie sections of the city altered in unexpected ways. It was late in the nineteenth century, however, that New Haven awoke to the faet that it was a Babel-awoke with more or less alarm. For be it known that there had entered into the New Haven society, in the course of the first two centuries of its life, a spirit of aristocraey. It had developed quite early, if one takes the trouble to trace it. It was, as we have seen, a most exclusive state which Davenport and Eaton hoped to establish and maintain. Its citizens should be only the "elect" by the religions test. The air of the place was to be made unhealthy for others. They did not. indeed. succeed in building up just such an aristocracy as that. The heterodox, as the first purists would have regarded them, did get in. Yet there is a certain pride of birth, an ancestral snobbishness wholly unbecoming the comparative youth of the country, that has become characteristie of New England. And New Haven is, despite the greater distinction in that respect which has been accorded to some other communities, a truly New England town.
There was a certain irony, then. in the fact that New Haven was destined to be emphatically a "melting pot." The typically New England community. with all its pride of English origin and colonial tradition, with its presumption to a sort of Americanism which exists mainly by aid of the imagination, has come, in the past three decades, to be one of the most striking illustrations in America of the process of making Americans out of the raw material. For though of course New Haven displays nothing like the mass of the larger centers of popn- lation, it does present a clearer example of the process than can be found else- where. The background is sharper and the air is clearer. And let it be said here, to the eredit of New Ilaven and the men and women of vision who consciously guide the making of New Englanders out of those who come here from all lands of the earth, that the process is in a conspicuous degree a snecess.
It should also be noted, withal in justice, that not all of the prideful New Englanders have taken the change gracefully. There was, in the years before the older residents yielded to the inevitable, much scornful talk of "foreigners," much disgruntled shifting of residence in the hope of getting permanently out of their zone. There has been much complaint of the mingling of "classes" in the schools, and some degree of snecess in the effort to establish residence districts where the superior young Americans should not be compelled to asso- ciate with these "foreigners." But those of discernment have observed that the effect of the earnest struggles for education of those who welcome their New World privileges has had a stimulating rather than a baleful effeet on self- sufficient young scions of the "old stoek," and learned the wisdom of holding their peaee.
II
It was not until after the eensus of 1840 that New Haven took what could be ealled a spurt in population. The census figures for both 1830 and 1840
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had shown a healthy increase. It was in 1810, it will be remembered, that New Haven's population figures first made for it the decided claim of first eity of the state. The 6,967 of that year had become 8,327 in 1820, had grown to 10,678 in 1830 and 14,390 in 1840. Then, in 1850, New Haven first showed the effect of immigration. The town's 20,338 of that year included 3,697 of what the census discriminators are pleased to eall foreign born. These were mostly Irish, no doubt.
This proportion of aliens grew gradually, not alarmingly, as we now view immigration increase, in the decade from 1850 to 1860. The census that year revealed 10,645 foreigners in a total of 29,267. It may well have disturbed the exclusive New Englanders not a little to discover over 27 per cent of aliens in their midst. They did lament about it more or less, as we know. But of the 10,645 who had come by that time. 7,391 were Irish. They had come to escape famine, it was understood. Mere human sympathy must repress any protest at such a process of humanity. There were, to be sure, 1,842 Ger- mans and Swedes, and 1,412 of all other races-we do not now know just how many that meant-in the city in 1860.
Ten years more, and the proportion of the foreign born had not only slightly increased, but it had become slightly more variegated in character. There were 14,346 aliens in 1870. Again the Irish markedly led, though their increase was not material. They had, in that census, 9,601. Here for the first time we have the English and Scotch reckoned as "immigrants" or for- eigners-1,087 of them. Of Germans and Swedes there were that year 2,423, while the "all others" had slightly dropped to 1,235. The percentage of the foreign born to the total population was that year 28.2.
The census of 1880 for the first time revealed in New Haven a warning of the Italian invasion which has in the years since disturbed a good many citizens too much. In a total which had by that time grown to 14,346 there were 102 credited to Italy. The influx from Ireland had practically stopped, showing only 29 increase over the figures for 1870. The increase had come mostly from Germany and Sweden, from England and Scotland, which together showed 3,160 more than ten years earlier. The unclassified had grown to 1,776. But New Haven's total population that year was 62,882. The percentage of aliens to natives was thereby lowered to 24.9-a marked deerease.
But the real Italian invasion began in the following decade. The year 1890 found 1,876 of them in New Haven who had not been born there. That in itself, however, was not so startling; the increase of Germans and Swedes had been much greater-from 2,802 to 5,514. The Irish, also, had increased their number almost a thousand, and still led with double the number of any other nationality. The English and Seoteh were still sending along a good number, though their figures had dropped below the Italian. This year revealed for the first time the rapid influx of Russians, which in New Haven's case means the people more specifically designated as Russian Jews. There were 1,160 of them in New Haven then. The total number of foreign born in 1890
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was 10,574 out of an entire population of 81,298, or a percentage of 28.2, the equal of that of two decades later.
All immigration boomed along merrily in the decade from 1890 to 1900. The Irish, to be sure, seemed to have stopped coming, and though they still led the list, had dropped their total to 10,491. The English and Scotch showed a reasonable increase to 1,912. The Germans and Swedes jumped to 6,119. This was the decade of large Italian arrival, for their number had increased to 5.262. The Russian Jews had done well, however, with 3.193. There was an impressive showing of 3.825 "all others." The total population of New Haven then was 108,027, and the percentage of foreign to native had risen to 28.5.
But these figures inadequately represent the population proportions of New Haven by the time the last census was reached. While the melting pot process had been going on since before 1860, there had also been a steady increase of what is commonly regarded as foreign population. For there was a population technically classified by the census takers as "native, but of foreign or mixed parentage," which was larger than the strictly foreign born population found in 1910. It is time, however, to reckon a wider variety of nationalities. The census of 1910 classifies fifteen principal nativities. It groups Indian, Chinese and Japanese, in addition to negro. Its "all others." therefore, must include some thirty other languages and dialects which were known to be represented in New Haven by this time.
Other estimates, more recent than that of the census of 1910, have been made of the number and distribution of the representatives of the races and languages in New Haven. But the census figures are the only ones that present with any satisfying reliability the comparisons desired. The so-called illiteracy restric- tion of Congress. and still more the great war. had the effect of checking immi- gration about the middle of 1914, so that figures as of 1910 are, with the excep- tion of the increase by birth rate, approximately illustrative of conditions at this writing. It will be of interest, then, to notice what the census of 1910 revealed as to the makeup of New Haven's population.
There were 133,605 persons in New Haven at that time. It is known that the population of the city has grown, at least temporarily, very rapidly in some of the years since. The increase has not come from immigration, but from the establishment here of certain great industries, and the enlargement of those already here, for the manufacture of war material. This increase may be assumed to be largely of what we should call "native" population. Various guesses have been made as to its total, but most of them are as inconclusive as - the answers which, short of the census of 1920, will be made to the question whether New Haven still is, in population, the largest city in Connecticut. A conservative estimate is that New Haven had 175,000 inhabitants early in 1918.
However, 32.2 per cent of the people of New Haven in 1910 were foreign born, the largest percentage at any time in its history. The number was 42,884. These came from various lands and tongues as follows: Anstria, 1.109; Canada -French, 461: Canada-other, 855; Denmark, 265; England, 1,867; France.
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160; Germany, 4,114: Ilungary, 473; Ireland, 9,004; Italy, 13,159; Norway, 207; Russia, 7,980: Scotland, 724; Sweden, 1,446; Turkey, 186; China, Japan and India, 100; all other foreign countries, 774.
This total of 42,884 must be taken with the larger number of 49,434 of inhabitants called native, but of foreign or mixed parentage. Either figure stands in somewhat startling contrast to the mere 37,726 reckoned "native white, of native parentage." and the total of the two, 87,160, is an ominous comparison, if one chooses so to regard it, with the considerably less than half of that which still remains as native stock in New Haven. One may observe, with or without emotion, according to his degree of accurate knowledge, that a tenth of the people of New Haven were born in Italy, and that rather more than a fifth of them may be called Italian. Probably one-sixth of them are Irish, but that no longer jars the old resident. Considerably more than one in each ten is a Russian, and of course the number of those of the Hebrew raee and Jewish faith is considerably more than that. Recent events give a new significance to the fact that 1,109 of those found in New Haven in 1910 were born in Austria. Moreover, the number of Germans newly arrived in 1910 suggests that the Teutonie population of New Haven just previous to the out- break of the war was much greater than might have been inferred from the city's slight trouble with enemy aliens. The scattering nations not classified in the above list are, of course, negligible. The problem, if any problem is pre- sented, is with those peoples which have large representation.
They have had a large influence on the social arrangement of New Haven, as has been indicated. Naturally. they have been gregarious. New Haven, like all cities which have felt the surging of the alien tide, has its Ghetto, its "Little Italy." its "New Poland" and its own Lithuania. The Italians, most numerous and needing the most room, are most widely separated. They are strongly rep- resented in seven of the fifteen wards, the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth and Twelfth, which means that they prevail in the southern, the south- eastern and to some extent in one of the northern wards of the eity. Their stronghold is the Fifth Ward, streets like Wooster, lower Chapel. parts of Water Street, Olive, Fair and Brewery being theirs almost exclusively. Mention has been made of their prevalence around Wooster Square. The adjoining seetion of Chapel Street, which forty years ago was one of the most exelusive of New Ilaven, has changed its character entirely. There was a time when many agreed that it had changed for the worse, but it has come about that even some partieu- lar citizens no longer despair of New Haven's Fifth and Sixth wards.
The Russian, or more typically the recently arrived Jewish population, is more condensed. Lower Oak Street and a part of Congress Avenue form a com- munity of their own, in large measure. Time was when sensitive citizens avoided it. Now they find pleasure, and not a little instruction, in studying it. Time was when many regarded it as a plague spot, and there are more savory and cleaner spots today. But the observant notice that these new citizens are as willing to learn and as amenable to common sense as to the laws of health
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when they understand them as are many who have lived in New Haven more years.
Citizens of German origin seem to have formed themselves into two groups, but even these are hardly condensed in any such manner as those of the newer arrivals. This was to be expected, for it is shown that in the ease of every nationality in New Haven the longer the residence the greater the mingling. There is, however, a strong German representation on the western side of the Second Ward, particularly in the district of which Winthrop Avenue and George Street form two boundaries. This laps over into the Third Ward until it meets, somewhere in the vicinity of Congress Avenue or beyond, the stronghold of the Irish in the Fourth Ward. There is a large German element, less marked in area, in the Eighth and Ninth wards. This seems to be an expansion or over- flow. New Haven was never inclined, up to the time of the war, to draw any lines against the Germans. They were regarded as the most welcome of new Americans, supposed to make one of the most valuable of the forming elements of our citizenship. The war produced a condition most trying to these people. Always loyal in spirit to the fatherland, even if they did not wholly approve all the ways of its ruling elass, they sedulously refrained from any expressions eritieising its war. But on the other hand, realizing the worth of the country they had made their own, and their duty and debt of citizenship to it, they were estopped from questioning its course. Their position before we entered the war was an embarrassing one; afterward it was at times extremely critical. If they gave utteranee to any feelings they might have they were blamed : if they kept silenee they were suspected. They had the sympathy of those who knew them best, and in the main the confidence of the discerning. They must-await the just onteome of reconstruction.
New Haven some time since lost the habit of regarding the Irish as immi- grants. The original source of increase of its population from other lands, they had grown into the life of the people through a presence of fifty years, to the extent that their alien origin had almost been forgotten. Yet the faet has to be mentioned that up to 1900 they led the number of foreign born at each census, and that in 1910 for the first time they were passed, their numerical conquerors being the Italians. However, the census of 1910 showed 9,004 persons born in Ireland, almost one for each fifteen of the whole population. The percentage of Irish had not been growing by immigration very rapidly in the previous deeades, but enough is known of the increase of this raee to show that it has a great strength in the New Haven of today. In 1900 the Irish had over 30 per cent of the total foreign born population. It is a reasonable estimate that those of foreign Irish birth, and those born of Irish or mixed parentage, together make at present almost 70 per cent of the whole number of alien origin, and a very substantial minority of the total population of New Haven.
The area occupied by newcomers who are classed as Austrian is about as indefinite as the classification itself. For most of those called Austrian in the census are popularly identified by other names. Prominent among them are
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