USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 15
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
But citizens sensed a difference: it was company interests first, Naugatuck's second. Company executives here were bound by decisions of non-resident heads in whose view the plant in Naugatuck, original rubber town of America, was but one of many.
So Naugatuck discovered that it could expect no more special consideration than any other of the more than twenty cities where the United States Rubber Company operated great plants. Contribution to a public project in Naugatuck might involve similar support in other communities. In- dividual employees of course might give to the Y.M.C.A. or the Day Nursery or the Recreation Association or the Centennial Celebration fund, but a gift from the corporation was out of the question. The corporation could point to its generous pension plan for its own over-age employees and could reasonably contend that care for its own workers, past and present, constituted its only obligation to the town; the rest was a matter for individual citizens. But because the Eastern Malleable Iron Company, the Risdon Manufac- turing Company, Peter Paul, all the smaller companies, even the Bristol Company located in southern Waterbury not in Naugatuck at all, invariably gave company support to any undertaking calculated to make Naugatuck a more whole- some place in which to live, citizens were annoyed at the refusal of the rubber company to do the same.
Doubtless few people engaged in raising money for civic projects considered the alternative. As a concern in which the DuPont interest was large, the United States Rubber Company was peculiarly vulnerable to any charge of dictating local affairs in towns where it was the largest employer. Wilmington had often been labelled a "Company town" and all the state of Delaware a pocket borough of the DuPont family. It was certainly a defendable policy, therefore, for the United States Rubber Company carefully to avoid the whisper of a suspicion that it was using its position in Nau- gatuck to convert it into a company town. Non-participation
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in community affairs was the logical consequence. But this fact notwithstanding, during the 1930's many citizens of the borough felt chilled by the shadow of absentee ownership. Not until war broke out and the necessity of community solidarity became evident did the company alter its policy.
Long-time residents were still happy to live in Nauga- tuck and most people maintained an ultimate faith in its future. But in spite of the borough's employment record dur- ing the depression, the one-time optimistic self-confidence that had given the community vigor had somewhat ebbed before World War II dawned. That as a result of this ap- palling world tragedy new vitality was to be infused into Naugatuck and many other American manufacturing cities is one of the grim paradoxes of history.
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CHAPTER X
Industrial Expansion, 1893-1921
T HE changes in mode of life and social attitudes that took place in Naugatuck after 1893 in large part grew out of the expansion and changes in the bor- ough's industrial life. As in any manufacturing city the tempo of developments quickened or slowed as business pros- perity rose or fell. The year 1893 marked the beginning of a business depression in America from which most manufac- turing communities did not recover until after the defeat of Bryan, champion of the Silver Standard, in 1896. But in spite of a shut-down in the rubber shops for a period of weeks in the winter of 1893-94, and in spite of some reduction of force in other Naugatuck plants, there is little evidence that Naugatuck suffered sharply from any general contraction of business.
The small shops along the brooks had been closing down one after the other for a decade and more, and those that remained in 1893 largely disappeared in the course of the next few years. Obsolescence of equipment and change in demand made it economically unsound to continue manu- facture there. Soon after 1900 only the Smith button factory remained in operation on the upper stretches of Fulling Mill brook, while at its mouth, where Homer Twitchell had run his factory, the Naugatuck Manufacturing Company, moved from Millville, was turning out copper floats for an America already beginning to pride itself on the universality of the plumbing in its growing cities. On Beacon Hill brook a sawmill alone remained; the Ward brothers' curtain-ring shop was closed out when Lauren Ward died in 1897; on Hop brook none of the smaller enterprises continued. In the flats the foundry had engulfed every other activity. Only
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in Millville on Long Meadow brook did a succession of small shops carry on. These changes were, however, not the result of business depression but the culmination of the process of elimination which had been evident in the 1880's.
Although, with most of the small shops gone, Naugatuck's manufacturing for the next twenty years was centered on rubber and malleable iron, in this period one new industry emerged connected with neither, namely, the making of scientific recording instruments. This venture, begun in 1892 when the Bristol Company opened its plant in Platts Mills, was good for Naugatuck because any new factory meant more jobs, more money, more prestige. But the im- portance of the Bristol Company went much further: it foreshadowed a whole new era in American industry, the day of manufacture based upon scientific research. People in Naugatuck did not at once realize that here was a tremen- dous innovation. It was not peculiar to Naugatuck; else- where in America similar undertakings were taking shape about this time. But the Bristol Company's introduction of its line here placed Naugatuck among the communities where recognition of the role of science applied to manufac- ture came early. And this was to affect the future develop- ment of the borough.
In the nineteenth century Naugatuck's factories had turned out reputable goods, superior sometimes because of the training and skill of the workmen, sometimes because of ingenious machinery, sometimes because of special processes. The buttons and small hardware made along Fulling Mill and Beacon Hill brooks depended for quality upon the people employed in the shops; the Twitchell safety-pins and the Ward curtain rings were the product of special machines; the malleable castings and the vulcanized rubber of the larger plants had a country-wide reputation because the men in charge of manufacture in the critical stages had "secret" formulae to guide them. At the shoe shop the foreman of the vulcanizing room is said to have summoned the plant
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superintendent every morning when it was time to prepare a special mixture to add to the rubber. The superintendent's book in which the "magic" formula was written down was locked up in the company safe every night, and the mixing of the compound was a one-man ritual. The superintendent's witch-doctoring over the compounds by 1890 was of course partly a ceremonial joke within the plant, but some belief lingered that only the processes worked out amid secrecy and sifted by experience could continue to guarantee the best quality to Goodyear's Metallic Rubber shoes. Discovering by laboratory research what elements had specific chemical effects was of course not unheard of, but the immediate ap- plication of scientific research to manufacturing was still new.
So the launching of the Bristol Company was in fact a milestone. It represented the kind of enterprise that in the twentieth century was to give Naugatuck its basic occupa- tional diversification-production of highly specialized articles developed from scientific formulae. Like the Nauga- tuck Manufacturing Company, the Risdon Company, and the Lewis Engineering Company of a later time, even more markedly the Bristol Company was rooted in detailed knowl- edge of modern physics and chemistry. Science focussed upon industry gave birth to each of these newer companies.
The originator of the basic idea behind the Bristol Com- pany, William H. Bristol, was a professor of mathematics at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey, when he hit upon a new way of lacing together strips of leather belting. Immediately seeking out his father and brothers in Nauga- tuck, he presented his ideas; the family organized the Bristol Company, and, employing one man, began operations in Frank Bristol's barn in Naugatuck. The belt-lacing sold quickly and enabled the family three years later to set up a factory in Platts Mills, just over the Naugatuck line in South Waterbury. Meanwhile Professor Bristol had turned his at- tention to a truly scientific problem, devising a continu-
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ously-recording pressure gage, and next a temperature re- corder. By the time of the World's Fair in 1893 the company had successfully manufactured both of these and had also ready for exhibit in Chicago instruments to measure and record fluctuations of electric voltages, amperes, and watts. Since electrification of American industry and American homes was just beginning, the demand for the recording de- vices was immediate and grew with every year.
Death of one of the Bristol brothers in 1904 brought about a splitting of the company when family controversy arose about division of financial controls, but later the breach was healed. In 1908 Professor Bristol brought out a line of low- resistance millivoltmeter pyrometers which were to be of the utmost importance to American industry. Use of a base- metal thermocouple instead of platinum laid the founda- tion for a complete line of indicating and recording instru- ments at once accurate, dependable, and relatively inexpen- sive. Utility companies as well as manufacturers of a wide variety of commercial products, ranging from automobiles to household wares, needed the Bristol instruments. To these scientific items the company added in 1913 manufacture of hollow safety set screws of unique design, and in World War I a series of airplane instruments-air speed indicators, pilot tubes, recording thermometers, and gages for dirigibles. So employment for Naugatuck people in the Platts Mills factory mounted steadily. Though the inventive William Bristol after 1920 dedicated prolonged research to a scheme for synchronizing sound recordings with movie film, his fail- ure to design a mechanism saleable to the movie industry did not affect the company's prosperity.
Meanwhile the Naugatuck Malleable Iron Company also grew in importance. After 1898 Beardsley brackets, the galvanized or japanned metal fixtures used to connect the glass insulators to telephone poles or buildings, expanded operations considerably. By 1903 the foundry was running six furnaces. In 1912 the incorporation of the Eastern Mal-
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
leable Iron Company which combined the interests of the Naugatuck foundry with its offshoots in Troy, Bridgeport, New Britain, and Wilmington, resulted in bringing to Nau- gatuck a centralized purchasing department for all the five foundries of the corporation, and in 1916 a Research Depart- ment. The chemical and physical tests carried on in the laboratory, tests of mechanical equipment, of coal, sands, refractories, and other raw materials, and design of melting and annealing furnaces gave Naugatuck new stature. For now not only was the borough the seat of a successful foundry, it was a center of metallurgical research. Hereafter, like the Bristol Company, the foundry built for its future upon scientific knowledge. During the first World War govern- ment contracts, primarily for cast metal envelopes for hand and rifle grenades, pre-empted much of the company's output and later necessitated a considerable readjustment to peace- time production.
An accompaniment of the war fervor that pervaded the foundry was the growth of new company-sponsored, social activities. In 1918 the company erected a recreation hall for employees. A foundry Drum Corps, supplied by the company with uniforms and instruments, organized in October 1918 and played enthusiastically at rallies and parades all through that winter. At the great welcome-home celebration for Nau- gatuck's servicemen in July 1919 the foundry band won special applause. Before the end of the war foundry bowling teams also were formed and in the spring of 1919 a baseball nine that played teams from other factories in the neighbor- hood. To perpetuate the new esprit de corps the company started Smiles, a shop newspaper, later renamed Malleable News. But a good many people came to feel that such things smacked too strongly of company paternalism, and later much of this so-called "welfare work" was dropped. The Recreation building was leased for other purposes and was eventually sold.
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Heads of the foundry, as time wore on, showed increasing sensitiveness to public opinion. Before the war the contract system of labor was abandoned and all men became company, not contractors', employees. Moreover, the fact that all the officers of the Eastern Malleable Iron Company made their homes in Naugatuck assured the community that its welfare would be a consideration in corporation policy. Men in charge were mostly the second generation of the founders, younger Tuttles, Whittemores, Hopkins, and Warners, men brought up by their fathers with a sense of their responsibil- ity in the community, and, perhaps more vital, an under- standing of what Naugatuck working people had contrib- uted to the success of their forebears. A number of younger men from outside the valley were also brought in, among them of course the laboratory staff, but the newcomers came quickly to realize that company officers regarded the pros- perity of the town and of the foundry inextricably linked.
Of even more far-reaching consequences than develop- ments at the foundry were the changes after 1893 in Nauga- tuck's rubber industry. Ultimately and fundamentally the greatest change came with the merging of The Goodyear's Metallic Rubber Shoe Company with other rubber compa- nies to form the United States Rubber Company in 1892. But, as noted in Chapter VIII, Naugatuck felt no immediate effects from having its largest single manufacturing corpora- tion become a unit of a new holding company. The merger was the natural outcome of competition among rubber man- ufacturers in the latter part of the nineteenth century and was intended to induce competitors to pool their resources instead of cutting each other's throats. Two years after the shoe company the glove company entered the combine. Only one new concern, located just over the Naugatuck line in Beacon Falls, the Beacon Falls Shoe Company, organized by George A. Lewis and others in 1898, maintained some in- dependence for a number of years. But this too was absorbed
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
in 1930. Otherwise all Naugatuck's rubber shops were tied in with the United States Rubber Company, although the reclaiming unit was not formally included until 1913.
Still the local companies continued to be run in fashion that seems curious today to anyone bred in the concept that, wherever possible, co-operation should replace competition: the shoe shop continued to compete with the glove shop within Naugatuck, and both competed with other United States Rubber plants. The superintendent of each ran his own shop, adhering to his own particular principles of man- agement, just as he had in 1890. Fortunately William T. Rodenbach, Adna Warner, and Frederick F. Schaffer, who were responsible for the company's performance down to the time of World War I, were all men of vigor and intelli- gence and all interested citizens of Naugatuck. Under their direction the rubber shops here were Naugatuck shops first and United States Rubber Company units second, an enor- mously significant situation.
Under the presidency of Colonel Samuel Colt, nephew of Colt of fire-arms fame, plant rivalry within the corpora- tion was somewhat reduced, and in 1917 the two Nauga- tuck companies were combined into one as the Naugatuck Footwear Division of the United States Rubber Company. But the new general manager, Charles T. McCarthy, ap- pointed in 1919, like his predecessors was a long-time resi- dent of Naugatuck. A tall, even-tempered man, easy of ap- proach, both respected and beloved by his fellow towns- people, he gave close consideration to whatever might affect the community. Tight consolidation of the United States Rubber Company had to await the coming of new financial controls in 1929.
Every decade brought expansion of physical plant, im- provements in methods, and new articles of manufacture. Four new buildings for the shoe company and nine for the glove company were erected between 1893 and 1921 until the rubber shops had crept out over all the southern part
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of the town's center. Along the west bank of the river stretch- ing southward for a half mile rose tiers of old tires and other junked rubber dumped in the yards of the regenerating plant. Rubber workers' houses and tenements lined Rubber Avenue and the hillsides sloping down to Long Meadow brook. The most casual visitor could scarcely fail to detect the dominance of rubber. In 1920 the company acquired a paper box factory east of the river to make complete its local line. Within the factory buildings new machines gradually replaced some of the old benches where men had worked by hand. First, in 1894, came Wellman sole cutting machines, and some years later six-roll outside calendars. Introduction of metal lasts and then pressure heaters for vulcanizing made even more important changes in production processes. In 1915 the shoe company brought in its first research chemist and set up a laboratory to provide more specialized formulae than could come out of the superintendent's secret book of years gone by. So scientific manufacture entered also into the shoe shops. During the war the shops made gas masks for the Government, but of more permanent benefit to the company was a new line of footwear, Keds. This trade- marked, specially sturdy, rubber-soled shoe for children even- tually practically ran out of the market the older type of sneakers, but, unfortunately for Naugatuck, manufacture of Keds was centered in Bristol, Rhode Island, after 1921 and so profited the local plant little.
While shortage of workers in the shops did not reach so acute a stage as it was to attain in the second World War, still the lack of manpower in 1917-18 was pronounced. Ap- peals to women who had married and withdrawn from jobs with the rubber company began to appear in the Daily News and anyone who could recruit a new worker was offered a bonus. Then, to stabilize its working force, the company re- sorted to two other measures, one ultimately disastrous, the other of enduring benefit to Naugatuck. Believing that a financial interest in the company would hold valuable per-
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
sonnel, the directors made available a block of stock which salaried employees could purchase below market prices, if need be by borrowing from the company. Other big corpora- tions at this time were trying out similar plans of employee participation, and the universal enthusiasm for stock owner- ship, already riding high in America, made such seemingly easy roads to wealth immensely popular. The opportunity was seized upon by a good many Naugatuck people. But later when in the post-war depression the market value of the stock dropped precipitously and dividends shrank, purchasers who had borrowed from the company to finance their transactions found themselves saddled with a debt greater than the partly paid for stock was worth. The whole scheme of employee- stock-ownership was halted and never resumed. Some years later the company cancelled the outstanding notes and wiped out the balance of the borrowers' liability.
The second move, on the other hand, the inauguration of a pension plan for company employees, was immediately helpful and grew in value to the community as time went on. Over fifteen years before the Social Security Act became pub- lic law the United States Rubber Company was paying out monthly to its over-age retired employees sums large enough to permit them to live out their lives in some comfort. No contribution was required of the employee; it was a free gift. Generous as such an arrangement seems today, in 1917 it was an almost unheard-of liberality. Men and women who would otherwise have had to end their days at the Poor Farm became welcome paying guests in relatives' homes and so maintained a treasured dignity and self respect. The money saved the borough can scarcely be estimated.
Along with the company's expanded operations and new pension system, however, came changes less welcome to employees. They came about so slowly that it is difficult to tell when the older order had ceased to exist and a new taken its place. Yet it was plain by 1919 that human rela- tions within the rubber shops were different from what
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they had been a generation before. How much may be attrib- uted to the absorption of the local companies into a coun- try-wide combine may be a question. As long as the super- intendents who had been in charge in the days of local independence continued to direct the shops here employees were apparently not sharply aware of any differences in regime. While labor relations were not always wholly serene, such controversies as occurred were like a family quarrel and were quickly forgotten. Yet by modern standards condi- tions of work here, like those in other American factories, were not easy. Sixty-six hours a week at about $1.75 a day was the rule for many men down to 1907, and after that date the closing of the shops at 4 o'clock on Saturday afternoons in summer was regarded as a special privilege. Only lack of rigorous enforcement of these long hours, together with absence of high pressure when on the job, made it endurable. Not until 1912 was a Saturday half-holiday established. Still shoe shop employees down to the retirement of Frederick F. Schaffer as General Manager could feel that they were deal- ing with local men who understood their temper and local conditions.
But gradually the situation changed. To the labor force of native Yankees were added during the early years of the twentieth century a number of Russians, Lithuanians, and Poles who neither spoke nor understood any English, and who, therefore, were not regarded quite as fellow citizens. Pressure from non-resident officers of the United States Rubber Company began to mount to bring the Naugatuck shops into line with general policies of the corporation, and home rule began to wane. The old casual methods of pro- duction no longer sufficed to meet competition in the rubber industry. In years gone by boot-makers had been to an ex- traordinary degree a law unto themselves. As long as each man made his "ticket," a specified number of shoes a day, no one required him to keep any special hours. He could take an afternoon out to go to a ball game and return in the
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evening to complete his ticket. Shop discipline, as we know it today, did not exist. The regime was pleasant but highly inefficient. In a fully mechanized industry it could not have endured at all. Greater efficiency, therefore, became im- perative as soon as keen competition for markets developed. By 1917 the lush, easy-going days, enjoyed in rubber shoe- making since the beginning of the century, were at an end. Scarcely realizing what had been happening, local shoe shop employees found themselves no longer workers in self-suf- ficient Naugatuck factories but infinitesimal cogs in a great industrial machine.
The first incident that indicated this shift was not in it- self important. Substitution of so-called "making teams" for the earlier scheme, whereby every worker completed a series of operations to make a pair of shoes, was essentially only a logical development of the principle of subdivision of labor. In 1917 in order to speed up production and lower costs, management instituted teams of workers, two or four, and later six people, each one of whom performed only one oper- ation. Piece-rates now were based on the teams' daily out- put, not the individuals', and any bonus for exceeding a day's quota was paid to the team to be divided among them. This system, unquestionably more efficient, had, however, the usual effect of destroying the individual craftsman's sense of pride in his work. No one man could now earn a name for turning out more shoes or better shoes than his neighbor at the next bench. The new system, the necessary preliminary of assembly line production to be introduced some twelve years later, occasioned no particular friction at the time. War-time wages were high and workers were in' demand. The change was only a straw in the wind.
But two years later, in the summer of 1919, trouble cropped up over wage-rates in the tennis and stitching de- partments of the recently consolidated Footwear Division of the company. The postwar high cost of living, familiar to us also in the 1940's, brought about the first demand
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