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Bridgeport Unmasked
Bridgeport Public Librarian Adam Cleri hosts talks & interviews on all things about Bridgeport, CT, the Park City!
Bridgeport Unmasked
Revolutionary Connecticut
Andy Piascik & Steve Thornton co-authored a collection of articles about the people's history of Connecticut, gathered in their book, Revolutionary Connecticut. Andy comes to the podcast studio to explore articles about Bridgeport; we talk about strikes, plays, HUAC hearings, Housatonic Community College, & more!
Get Radical Connecticut at: hardballpress.com, bookshop.org, amazon.com
Articles on Bridgeport: bportlibrary.org/hc/grassroots-historians/
Thanks for listening to Bridgeport Unmasked. Want to make your own podcast? Beardsley Branch Library in Bridgeport has a podcast studio, open to anyone with a library card from a Connecticut city. For more information, see https://bportlibrary.org/podcast-studios/
Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Bridgeport Unmasked, the Bridgeport Public Library podcast concerning all things about Bridgeport, connecticut. Today, I have with me Andy Piasik, historian and co-author of Radical Connecticut, a collection of essays about the Constitution State and has plenty about Park City, which is, of course, bridgeport, connecticut. We'll be talking about those articles today. So, andy, thank you for braving the sweltering heat outside to come here in this nice air-conditioned Beardsley Branch library Looking forward to talking to you. How you doing, andy, I'm very well, thanks for having me. Awesome, awesome. Before we get into anything that's related to anything, I do have to ask and I'll tell you why I have to ask in a moment Are you a Little League guy, a little league world series baseball guy?
Speaker 2:um, a little bit, yeah, going back many years to when I played little league oh, that's awesome, was it?
Speaker 1:was it for bridgeport, or? Was it original little league, nice, nice, okay. Well, that's actually incredibly appropriate. The only reason I brought it up is because I read your article about Bridgeport getting to Williamsport getting to the finals in 49 and 50, I believe and so I wondered if you had a personal connection there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, unfortunately, the little league that I played in doesn't exist anymore. We used to play in Seaside Village. It was a diamond, very nice setup that lasted probably 25 years into the 70s. I'm not sure exactly when it ended, but yeah, that was a big part of my youth.
Speaker 1:Oh, certainly On to Radical Connecticut, which is a book that you teamed up with Steve Thornton, another historian and writer from I want to say from the area Is he from? He's from Hartford.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I might just ask, because Steve Thornton also writes articles for the Bridgeport History Center as you do. Radical Connecticut, which we'll be talking about in just a moment, is hardly your first foray into writing history stuff. Do you want to just tell the folks out there you know what you've been doing as a historian and where they can find your books, your works if they want to read you?
Speaker 2:get your book or what have you? Sure, local history is only one part of the history that I write. I've written a book that was about the integration of pro football. It was a series of interviews with black players who came into the NFL in the 1940s, called Gridiron Gauntlet. That book came out, I'm going to say, 15 years ago or more, and I write about history basically around the country, even international. I had a long article published some years ago about Latin America. So yeah, bridgeport and Connecticut are just two pieces of some of the history that I write and those two actually do, you know, integrate with each other.
Speaker 1:Someone is writing about Mexicans moving to Bridgeport, and so that's kind of an international and local thing going on. I'm not sure, absolutely, yeah, I'm not sure if your Latin America article, you know was, was both, you know, foreign and local, or if it was just about those countries.
Speaker 2:No, it was just about developments in Bolivia, venezuela and various countries that have been trying to transform their societies toward more justice.
Speaker 1:So cool. You've mentioned some other things you've written. You mentioned some other things you've written. Where can people get Radical Connecticut if they so desire to get themselves a copy?
Speaker 2:It's available pretty much on any online bookseller. They can order it directly from the publisher, hardballpresscom. It's a little publishing outlet in Brooklyn, new York, and I would think Amazon and pretty much all the other ones have it. I know it's probably more profitable for Hardball Press if you buy it directly from them, but any way that people can get their hands on it. You know, I think it's well worth reading and I hope people do support the book.
Speaker 1:Oh, I agree with that. I got my copy from bookshoporg. It is out there in a number of places.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is on Amazon and Barnes Noble online, and also smaller things like bookshoporg Well, cool. Well, let's get into why. You know we're saying this book is worth reading today by talking about what's in it. Now, before we delve into the topics, which we're going to do very soon, I just want to tell everybody that Bridgeport Public Library takes no positions on any of the subjects we're going to talk about today. Any opinions stated or implied are only held by the person talking about them.
Speaker 1:That said, you know, it's not all fairy tale stories in this book. I'll put it. That being said, not much in the way of trigger warnings. Unless you're a fan of Senator McCarthy and HUAC, then you might have a problem with this book. They do get brought up on occasion throughout the book and if you really are a diehard fan of theirs, I'd like to recommend any of the other podcasts we have on this channel. Feel free to check those out, and if you have no idea who Joe McCarthy and HUAC are, we will be talking about them later, because at least one of the articles about Bridgeport specifically, you need to know who they are to make sense of it. Cool.
Speaker 1:So the things that we're going to be focusing on today are the articles that Andy wrote, specifically because, again, andy and Steve Thornton teamed up to write this book, and those that are about Bridgeport, and there's a lot of other great articles in here. This is just a Bridgeport podcast, so we're focusing on those and I figure we would start with the strikes. We got some strikes in Bridgeport that are particularly unique and interesting, as we will see in just a moment. Andy, what are you thinking about us starting with the teacher strike of 78?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, that was a momentous event in Bridgeport history, and recent enough so that a lot of people who are still around remember it well, it happened in September of 1978, right at the beginning of school.
Speaker 2:It had come a couple years, I'm going to say three years after. Teachers felt like they got stuck with a substandard contract by the city of Bridgeport, and so for that reason, I think some resentment and anger had been developing. So when negotiations hit a loggerhead leading up to September of 1978, the teachers voted to strike, and when students showed up for the first day of school that's when people really discovered that schools were closed the teachers were out on the picket line, and it really soon escalated into a very bitter kind of showdown with the law and order judge I guess you could call him, who felt like the need to lay down the line and start sending both union officials and teachers to jail in very large numbers. Within a matter of days of the strike starting, dozens of teachers were arrested and shipped off to prisons that were actually very far away from Bridgeport 50 miles, 60 miles.
Speaker 1:By the end of the total 60 miles by the year. Yeah, because, as it still is today, connecticut teachers are by law not allowed to strike.
Speaker 2:That's right, it's illegal, yeah, yeah. So teachers went into it knowing they were breaking the law, figuring, as has happened many times in history we'll talk about other instances whereas if you're united enough and you have enough support from the community which the teachers did read correctly that they did have that they would be able to withstand the fact that it was illegal for them to be on strike.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, no, parents were involved. Students were involved. The PTA was involved. Students were involved. The PTA was involved, which is my favorite bit, because my experience is that PTA and teachers typically are at each other's throats, but when the chips were down, they were together school administrations.
Speaker 2:I'm not so much sure that it's against teachers, because parents understand as well as anybody what kind of conditions that teachers operate in. It's not such a big issue now at least I hope not but oversized classrooms were a big issue in the 1970s and one of the main issues that the teachers were trying to get the Board of Ed to address at the time issues that the teachers were trying to get the Board of Ed to address at the time. So, yes, that's a very important point that you raised, that the parent-teachers associations rallied to the support of the teachers during the strike and prevented, I guess you could say, any of the students from going to school by keeping their children home. And eventually, within just a couple of matter of days, all the schools were closed because the number of teachers who crossed the picket line originally was very small and then it dwindled basically to zero. The total number, as I remember, of teachers who were jailed was 274.
Speaker 2:And the last batch that were arrested were sent by bus to a National Guard armory 70 miles I don't remember the name of the town, but it was like 70 or 75 miles away from Bridgeport, but it was like 70 or 75 miles away from Bridgeport. So these were really grueling kind of conditions that this judge was putting the teachers through. It wasn't like just going over to the prison in North Avenue and registering and being released. These teachers stayed in these prisons in this case a National Guards barrack for days and days, some for as long as a week or two, and they were outraged. I think outrage was becoming directed more and more at the city. I note in the article that there was a series of teacher strikes in the country at the same time. All of them were settled, but while the Bridgeport strike was still going on and so more and more national attention was being focused on Bridgeport and the fact that this judge was insisting that hundreds, almost 300 teachers had to be arrested and put behind bars, yeah, and that's how it.
Speaker 1:I mean they also went through. I don't know what the technical term is, but showers to get rid of lice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:You know, just to give you an idea of what these teachers were put through. And yeah, no, but it was an almost universal thing, I think. The first day of school, 3% of teachers punched in and then it got less than 3%. So, yeah, no, this really is a near-unanimous situation.
Speaker 2:Well, and that may have partly been because it was very last minute, I mean, people were preparing for the start of school. Yeah, it sounds like maybe the decision to strike was made very late, just before, within a day or less of the opening of school. So, yeah, I mean, it's typical sometimes that you have some workers or teachers in this case go to work, but as soon as I think the word spread, like you said, pretty much everybody was refusing to go to work after that right, uh, and the.
Speaker 1:The lines did not stop after the. You know the, the, the 270 odd um arrests. I think it was three weeks in something like that that that the board and the union finally came to an agreement.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right, it was a kind of victory, if I remember Like the teachers did get a lot of the things they wanted. Then, though, interestingly enough, bridgeport teachers are still the least paid teachers in Fairfield County. And um, and if I I pardon me if I didn't get this exactly correct If the union and the board of education have a problem with a uh with with the contract that they sign, the management can, can like appeal, but the union can't, or something to that degree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. This happened in a series of legislative actions that were taken in the wake of the strike, where, if the union and the management are stalemated the way they were in the prelude to this strike, the municipality in question has the right to reject whatever the arbitrator is putting forward, but the teachers do not. That's very similar to the way it was 46 years ago when this strike took place, where if teachers feel like they're getting a bad proposal that they don't like, they would be risking their jobs and imprisonment if they were to go on strike again. So in that sense, I think there were victories in terms of the contract that was won in 1978, but in terms of the ability for teachers anywhere in Connecticut or in Bridgeport, they would be running the same risk that they ran in 1978.
Speaker 2:And I mentioned in passing that there were other municipalities in the last 10 or 15 years, specifically Chicago I've mentioned, that were up against the same obstacles but who elected a union leadership that was fairly aggressive and determined to push back against cuts and all the other problems that the city of Chicago was facing, which I would say, on a smaller scale, are similar. In Bridgeport, you mentioned salaries being lower. There's constant turnover in Bridgeport because salaries are higher elsewhere and teachers are constantly leaving to take higher paying positions in other towns. But I think Chicago example can be one if there's ever such a situation again, because they've prevailed in getting improved conditions and wages by violating the law and going on strike and enduring, because if you build up enough of a solidarity network and support system, you can prevail, regardless of whether the thing that you're doing may be against the law.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think the takeaway idea is that it depends upon having the support of the community of the professionals striking, and that's actually a theme repeated in your other strike-based article in this book about the 1979 Handy and Harmon precious metal factory strike. Again, the strike would have been unremarkable except for Willie Matos, the Spanish-American coalition and the community getting involved. Andy, do you want to take that and run with it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, that one I recall very well because I was directly involved in it. It was a factory just over the town line in Fairfield, about where Whole Foods and Home Depot now are. Interestingly, this factory started in Bridgeport and eventually moved to that location in Fairfield. It had a long history for reasons I've never even been able to pin down of having large numbers of Portuguese-American workers from the hollow section of Bridgeport employed there, and that continued after the relocation to Fairfield. Many of the workers continued to live in and come from Bridgeport.
Speaker 2:When the workers went on strike in September of 1979, now this is just a year after the teacher strike we were just talking about the company actively tried to recruit replacement workers, which historically have been known as scabs workers which historically have been known as scabs and they targeted low-income sections of Bridgeport where there were high unemployment, one of which was the area of State Street on the west side, which happened to be just basically around the corner of the Spanish-American Coalition's offices on Colorado Avenue.
Speaker 2:So several youths from the neighborhood who got these flyers that the company was handing out to recruit workers went into the SAC office and showed the flyers to Willie Matos and the others who were in the office working there I'm not sure if they had full-time staff or not, but the response was immediate.
Speaker 2:You know, willie was a longtime labor radical activist going back to the 1960s, still in Bridgeport, a great guy, and immediately put out a call to first the community to ignore and not follow up on trying to apply for a job at a place where workers were on strike, and then called together a coalition from the neighborhood of clergy, other union members, workers and eventually the Handy and Harmon folks union and workers themselves got involved and so it became an ongoing project that lasted pretty much the whole autumn that year and was highly successful in preventing anybody from trying to pursue jobs as scabs at the factory, but then also began to mobilize people to go to the picket line and culminated with a fairly large march and rally through Fairfield that ended up getting the attention of the company enough so that they settled the strike.
Speaker 2:That was terms that were favorable to the workers. I would say that based on my direct experience, the way I remember it, I don't think that too much of that would have happened had it not been for the Spanish-American coalition being as aggressive as they were, because the union was kind of you know, sending workers to the picket line hoping for the best, negotiating at the same time that the workers were out on the picket line, and I think the efforts and the work that was done by the support committee really kind of pushed the issue a little bit more, kicked the union in the butt a little and ended up with this march and rally that was at least 1,000 people, might have been a little bit more on a Saturday afternoon in November, a good 10 weeks or so after the strike had been going on, and then within a very short time, I'm going to say the very next week, the company agreed to the demands that the union was putting forward.
Speaker 1:Willie Matto is a very interesting guy. He makes multiple appearances in your articles. He wasn't just a union guy, he also helped other people through the Young Lords Party that's right which is an organization of Puerto Ricans that maybe you could give us a detail or two about yeah, and then for many years after that he worked for the state commission on human rights, um, until he retired.
Speaker 2:The last that I knew I spoke with him about three or four years ago, he was still living on the east side of bridgeport. So, um, he's still around and still probably plugging away doing some kind of good work, I would have to imagine given what I read about him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, he organized free breakfast programs and health clinics and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, the Young Lords Party initially started in Chicago. The Young Lords Party initially started in Chicago, had its biggest and most active chapter in various sections of New York City the Bronx East, harlem, the Lower East Side, brooklyn and 1970, I believe it was a chapter was formed in Bridgeport when people from Bridgeport had identified with the Young Lords and then when the kind of leadership of the national body decided that they were going to set up a chapter in Bridgeport, it was a big step forward because naturally Chicago, philadelphia and New York are among the largest cities in the country. Bridgeport, by comparison, is 150,000, much smaller working class. So that was a big step forward and the young lords recognized it as such. Just parenthetically, I will say that, as small as Bridgeport may be, its Puerto Rican population, both then, 55 years ago, and now, is a higher percentage of the city's population than New York City, which is probably surprising to people because we think of New York City as being kind of the Puerto Rican capital of the United States. But as a percentage Bridgeport is higher and as a percentage Connecticut is the highest in terms of its Puerto Rican population as a percentage of its population in the whole country.
Speaker 2:So yeah, the Young Lords were kind of inspired by, and often worked in coalition with, the Black Panther Party. They also worked with organizations of poor and unemployed whites, asians, chicanos and other nationalities as a kind of poor people's campaign in order to put pressure on government officials at all levels to try to deal with the needs of people, to try to deal with the needs of people. They also, specifically, were organizing against police brutality, which tends to be higher among Puerto Ricans than any other ethnic group in the country, except for African Americans, and was an ongoing problem within Bridgeport itself. The first catalyst, as far as I could determine, was a big rent strike right here on East Main Street, just down the road, a ways going toward I-95.
Speaker 1:What was that strike around the time of the other strikes?
Speaker 2:we were talking about it was 1970, so it was earlier. The Young Lord's life was actually fairly brief. Nationally it started in 1969, and by 1976, the group had disbanded. The Bridgeport chapter was actually one of the last that was still hanging on, going into 1976. The catalyst for the work that Willie and the rest of the young lords in Bridgeport were doing was there was a horrible fire on Easter Sunday in 1969, maybe just about six months before the group was formed, in which I believe it was 11 people were killed on the east side, primarily a Puerto Rican. Puerto Ricans were primary among the casualties.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so housing conditions and rents and putting pressure on landlords, who were rightly often referred to as slumlords, was a big part of the work that they were doing when they were formed in Bridgeport and they eventually branched out into other things. You mentioned the Free Breakfast for Children program. That was something that was set up to provide children with breakfast before school. They began providing those. It ended up being like several hundred students, as I remember the research I was doing. So it was very much a community service oriented organization that was also trying to educate people about the conflicts that they didn't really think were resolvable unless there was popular pressure put on the government and powers that be in order to bring about change.
Speaker 1:Now, ok, so there's a lot of community activism articles in Radical Connecticut. In addition, there's a lot of the arts. You know, andy, you wrote a number of articles about arts related to Bridgeport. We have an article on the authors of Between the Hills and the Sea, which is a novel. That's. I'm not sure if you'd call it a satire, but it's about uh, working conditions in bridgeport. Uh, the comic strip pogo, which I was not familiar with but apparently was the uh comic strip in the 50s, and um the walter kelly, the, the writer and and artist, uh lived in Bridgeport. We had the all-black casting of a version of Macbeth, and Bridgeport papers were a huge part of making sure that another play waiting for Lefty didn't get shut down in New Haven. So yeah, there's a bunch there. Andy, do you want to pick your favorite thread or two and pursue those about arts in Bridgeport?
Speaker 2:Yeah sure, what's become known over the last 80 years or so as Voodoo Macbeth was a monumental theater event started in New York City. But a first stop outside of New York City, when I went on the road, was in Bridgeport. I went on, the road was in Bridgeport. What it was was it was the vision of a very young Orson Wells, whose name, I'm sure, is familiar to many of people listening to this. I believe he was 20 years old at the time. This is 1936. He was working for a government program known as the Federal Theater Project, which is an important element of a number of the chapters in the book. It was designed to create jobs for people working in theater whose livelihoods had been impacted by the Great Depression stagehands, actors, writers, set designers and it was, uh, funded by the government to provide people with work. But a secondary and probably equally important piece of it was it was meant to bring theater to places in the country where there might not normally be theater either, because it wasn't a viable thing to sustain financially in a small town somewhere. So it gave people. And remember this is 1936. It's way before television. Of course, many of these towns had movie theaters, but it might be the first and maybe the last opportunity that someone in a small town might have to see a live theater presentation, and some of them were serious dramas, some of them were comedies, some of them were designed for children, some of them were strictly entertainment for a good fun night out, but they did try to. I mean, many of the people in theater were left-wingers who were trying to comment in one way or another about the problems of the Depression.
Speaker 2:The Macbeth, a story that Orson Welles came up with, was to transport the story from Scotland and instead set it in 19th century Haiti. So it took on an anti-colonial dimension within the story. So he auditioned and eventually hired a large number of African-American actors African-American actors. Obviously, it was a very large cast and crew, because the Macbeth story is many different characters in it and you also needed stagehands and set designers. So it was a rousing success. It opened in Harlem early in 1936 and then set in for a long run at a prominent theater in Brooklyn, and then, when it was decided that it was going to go on the road I think it was to eight or nine different cities, bridgeport was chosen as the first stop, and so they did five performances at what was called the Park Theater, which used to be on Main Street. It's been long demolished. If people know where the Aquarian offices are, across from the main headquarters of the M&T Bank, that's about where the theater was.
Speaker 2:So it was greeted very enthusiastically both by audiences here and by the critics for what were two daily newspapers in Bridgeport at the time and I'd say probably close to 100%, maybe 98% of the tickets were sold and, like I said, letters to the editor in the newspapers as well as the reviews that were written in both newspapers were wildly enthusiastic. People were very happy about having such high-quality theater come through Bridgeport. Limited run though it may have been the whole experience of Voodoo McVeck as it's become known, because it ran for many months in New York before it went on the road and then, like I said, I think it was nine cities. The second stop after Bridgeport was Hartford, but it became really a touchstone moment in American theater in the 1930s and when you read about Orson Welles or you read about the theater of the 1930s, invariably it'll come up because it was such an innovative idea and it was such a successful thing. Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And there's a lot of I have. So I have seen through Bridgeport History Center's database of videos they did have. They do have online the final scene where cover your ears if you don't want me to spoil mcbeth for you mcbeth gets his head cut off and raised, and all that by mcduff and um uh, it's let me, let me put it this way a, a millennial in 2024, watching a grainy video of this from almost 100 years ago. Um was impressed, like that's how impressed. Like you know, you're correct about the size of the cast. It was astounding. The amount of props used were also pretty darn astounding.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure if you had anything else to say about that. Well, yeah, and they went all out. I mean, it was tractor trailers full of props and stagehands and folks went on the road, came to Bridgeport, stayed probably in one of the local hotels and did a five-day staging of this great show.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it was kind of a momentous theater event for the city, right 1936, middle of the Depression, no one has a television and this affordable theater comes and is just an astounding show. It must have been. If it was cool for me, it must have been astounding for the thousand people that were watching that.
Speaker 2:And I'm glad that you used the word affordable, because I left that out. That was another one of the goals of the Federal Theater Project, with all the work they were doing, understanding that the audience that they were trying to reach were not the well-heeled type that go to say the way we think of Broadway today. To say the way we think of Broadway today that the goal was to get working class people and people who otherwise wouldn't go to see a play into the theater. So that was also subsidized. Prices were very low because the government was picking up a good part of the tab.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And speaking of the government, I'm kind of forcing a segue I think it's time we talked about HUAC's trip to Bridgeport. So, for all the folks out there who might not know, huac stands for the House Un-American Activities Committee and that was created in 1938, so not long after the play we were just talking about and became the US government's means of suppressing communist activities and accusations of communism and alleged attempts to overthrow any part of the government. Careers and reputations were wrecked because they were, um, because you know, being accused of breaking the Smith act was just about seen as just about as bad as um as actually breaking it. And the reason it seemed bad is because, uh, from here and especially into the fifties, uh, america was very, very concerned, uh concerned about communism.
Speaker 1:There was a general panic against the spread of communism and that was called the Red Scare and that was provoked largely, most famously, by Senator Joe McCarthy. Andy, I will hand the wheel over to you, but I just want to pull from. I mentioned our cartoon, pogo, a few minutes ago and one of the characters in Pogo, pogo wasn't overly political but it had some political series and one of the characters was a simple Jay Malarkey, who was supposed to be a take on Senator Joseph McCarthy. So yeah, andy, you would please tell us about CUAC. You wrote an article in the book book and there's one online, so yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting how so many of these things kind of connect to each other because, uh, the federal theater project, which I just mentioned, which was the outfit that put together the uh Macbeth performance, was really the first group that came under fire from HUAC. Huac, as you said, started in 1938. And it was pushed back by reactionary and far-right politicians and people who supported them, who objected to the fact that the federal government was underwriting, you could say, these plays and theater projects that were critical of capitalism, critical of the direction that the United States was going, etc. And eventually it built up enough momentum so that the Federal Theater Project was ended just a few years after the Macbeth that we were talking about, parenthetically. If people want to get a little bit of a handle on some of that, there's a terrific movie that was made by Tim Robbins called Cradle Will Rock. That came out about 25 years ago. It has an all-star cast. There's multiple currents to the story that sometimes make it a little bit difficult to follow, but a lot of it is about the Federal Theater Project and the politicians who attacked it, the writers and the administrator who came under attack for some of the work they were doing Susan Sarandon, ruben Blades, john Turturro, john Cusack, vanessa Redgrave and on and on. Just a terrific movie with a terrific cast, anyway. So the HUAC thing also relates to the chapter of the book that you mentioned, between the Hills and the Sea, the novel that was written by the Gildans, bert and Katja Gildan, who were Bridgeport residents, not just writers, but also before they were able to make much money as writers. Also, bert was working in factories and was a union activist. Both were known to be members of the Communist Party. This is right after World War II, I'm going to say around 1945 into the 1950s. So all these things are kind of running together.
Speaker 2:The way that the investigations committees worked was, first and foremost, they held hearings in Washington where they called on the carpet people that they suspected of being communists, people they were pressuring to reveal information about the work that the communists were doing. Primarily, it seems like their main goal was to get people to reveal the names of other people who they were working with. That was always kind of the $64,000 question you know, who else are you working with? We want you to name names. If you don't name names, then you're in contempt of Congress and facing a possible jail sentence. As the Red Scare went on, huac kind of went on the road and began setting up hearings in different parts of the country. And in early 1956 is when they came to Connecticut, they didn't actually hold any hearings in Bridgeport. They held them in New Haven, but Bridgeport was kind of the main area that they were concerned about because of the many factories that were here. And the United Electrical Workers Union, which is known widely as the UE, was one of the unions where the communists were here. And the United Electrical Workers Union, which is known widely as the UE, was one of the unions where the communists were strongest.
Speaker 2:Now I will say this it often becomes difficult to distinguish and HUAC and the investigators really didn't care about this. But you might have someone who was an outspoken union member, who was saying things that were similar to what the communists were saying, who suddenly now became suspicious precisely for that reason. It didn't matter what he was saying or she was saying was reasonable or fair or worth listening to. The fact that it kind of corresponded with what the communists might be saying was grounds enough for people to immediately be cast under suspicion. Now that's not to say that some of the people weren't communists. Some of them were, and usually HUAC knew who they were because the FBI had done yeoman's work in terms of infiltrating communist meetings, events that they were doing in different places, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So I think you say in the article that at the time that HUAC came to Bridgeport there were about 5,000 to 10,000 communists in the country, which, incidentally, is like 100 to 200 per state and that the government knew all their names and who they were. So HUAC wasn't really finding more information, it was other stuff fueled by fear that a lot of people had.
Speaker 2:That's right and the notion I mean. There was a period where the Communist Party was somewhat influential, primarily in the labor movement. I mentioned the UE. There were a series of labor unions in the 1930s and 1940s where the communists were influential, and that would only make sense because some communists were killed, imprisoned and beaten in efforts to bring collective bargaining rights to these different factories, not just in Bridgeport. You know, we're talking about Pittsburgh, detroit, chicago, the auto industry, the steel industry, packing house and, regardless of what anybody might think of the Communist Party or communism in general, the work that members were doing at that level, which had nothing whatsoever to do with espionage or had nothing whatsoever to do with cheerleading for whatever the Soviet Union might be doing at any particular moment, they were helping to advance the livelihoods and the living standards of everyday Americans, who often had tremendous respect for them. Anyway, so the point that I'm trying to make is that 10 or 15 years before HUAC really picked up its momentum, the Communist Party was a bit of a force within the society, particularly, as I said, the labor movement. By the time they got to New Haven and began investigating what was going on at the GE factory with the UE local that had been there and which by this time had actually been thrown out. They were a pitiful force down from maybe close to 100,000 members. At their peak there was 5% of that by the time that these hearings are going on, 5% of that by the time that these hearings are going on. So there was a certain kind of routine that they were following.
Speaker 2:That I think was mainly designed to kind of intimidate dissent and there were different people from Bridgeport who were called to testify. Some were from the labor movement Burt Gilden, who I mentioned, who was the writer, along with his wife, of Between the Hills and the Sea. There was a woman by the name of Josephine Willard who became kind of an institution in Bridgeport Years later. She became a host of a radio show on WPKN for many years about health and well-being, lived a long life. I think she was close to 90 when she died. So it was it was basically to you know intimidate people. I think it would tend to try to suppress dissent. Some of it was directed directly at communism, but I think there was an overall message of this is what can happen to you if you in any way kind of challenge the mainstream of this society.
Speaker 1:Well, very much the whole notion of the Red Scare right there, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And that's why people when they think of the 1950s they often think of it as complacent, superseded to some extent by all the upheaval of the 1960s, but where people were scared, people were afraid and partly it was afraid of the possibility of a nuclear war between the two superpowers. But a lot of it was that people were kind of looking over their shoulders Is my neighbor one of these subversives, that kind of thing? So it definitely had its impact in Connecticut, specifically in Bridgeport, a small kind of piece of that whole story.
Speaker 1:And I wanted to make sure we talked about that that it isn't. It's a tough nut to swallow. That being said, I would like to end on a more positive, uplifting note. So I saved my personal favorite article of yours for the end, and that's the one about Housatonic Community College. So Housatonic Community College is part of the Connecticut College system. It is the Connecticut College that's located in Bridgeport. It's in downtown Bridgeport. They offer 75 degrees and certificates. Most of those are associate degrees and then various certificates for professions, and they actually have a fantastic art exhibit.
Speaker 1:You brought that up and I exhibit that. You brought that up and I'll let you talk about it. I just want all the folks out there to know for what it's worth. Housatonic Community College is near and dear to me. I hold my associate's degree from Housatonic. I did my internship for my master's degree at the library at Housatonic, and the library that I work in, the main Bridgeport Public Library, burroughs-saden is literally next door to Housatonic. So when school's in session and their cafeteria is open, I tend to pop in on lunches when I can, and you know, get myself a sandwich or a wrap. That being said, what do you have to say there, andy, about Hoosie?
Speaker 2:I think the whole experiment with Hoosatonic Community College and the community college system that was created in the state of Connecticut it could extend to other states too. In the state of Connecticut it could extend to other states too Connecticut is the one that I really know about is coming together of kind of visionary government with popular demand. Popular need because with the baby boom, more and more young people, a more wealthy society, more needs for technical jobs, people with skills to help keep the society growing. There was a clear need for an expansion of the education system that went beyond the four-year colleges that were often beyond the affordability of many working class students. Of course you had a robust state college system, but schools like Yale and Wesleyan and even more locally, fairfield and Sacred Heart are often very expensive and beyond the reach of a lot of students. So the creation of the community colleges in the 1960s was a huge boost both for industries and public sectors in need of new kind of workers with all kinds of different skills, but also of students who were able to do the work and now were able to afford to go to school and get the kind of education they would need to do these kind of jobs. So Housatonic was one of a number that was created in the state of Connecticut. It started over on Arctic Street in what had been the Singer Sewing Machine Factory. It stayed there for a number of years. I remember going there a number of times. To be honest, it was kind of a bleak setting. So I think the move that was made to downtown, to the campus that Adam just referenced, was a huge plus and probably has resulted in a big increase in enrollment. Beautiful campus right here downtown and what can I say? I think it's been a big plus for the city. It's been a big plus for the city. It's been a big plus for students and it's obviously not just for people from Bridgeport, people from all over, I think, fairfield County come to and go to school there. And it's been a big plus for the economy of the state.
Speaker 2:Not to throw water on what is really a great story with a lot of things in the public sector, on what is really a great story with a lot of things in the public sector, it's come under attack. I mentioned that in passing at the end of the story and obviously we're going to have fights to make in terms of maintaining budgets, in terms of maintaining funding in terms of why not expand? You know, why not have more programs available? Can more money be made, since this is a very successful school that's producing lots of students that are doing productive work when they leave. So that's a question that remains and that we'll have to answer as we go forward.
Speaker 2:50 plus years that Housatonic has existed, I think you know. The story you told about your own experience is one that you could multiply by tens of thousands of young people who have gone. Like I said, maybe other schools might have been out of reach. They would have had to make other choices in terms of careers or whatever, and because of this great community college that we have available to us, you know, people were able to make choices that were more in tune with what they really wanted to do.
Speaker 1:Very much so. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of stories like mine. You know, you start at Hoosatonic with an associate's or what have you and then you run. So awesome, andy, I've had fun. Good things must come to an end, though, but is there anything? I glossed over topics. I didn't hit on details. You wanted to get out in my big mouth over road or something. Anything else you wanted to throw at the wall before we headed out for the day.
Speaker 2:Anything else you wanted to throw at the wall before we headed out for the day. Well, I will say there's lots more. I mean I've kind of lost track of how many chapters there are, but there are a lot of chapters in here. Steve and I have been writers for a long, long time. I will say that Steve Thornton, the co-author, has a website, shoeleatherhistorycom. Some of the material from the book is available at that. I, unfortunately, am still kind of more 20th century, so I don't have a website, but my stuff is all over the Internet.
Speaker 2:If you just Google my name, you'll find any number of articles, some of which are in the book, many of which are not. You'll find any number of articles, some of which are in the book, many of which are not, so you can get a taste for the other things that I write about, as well as what's in Radical Connecticut. But no, I think you know it's an attempt at a contribution to telling history from the point of view of everyday people, from working class people, people who are usually marginalized, and I think that's important because history is under attack People. You know reactionary forces are trying to retell history. They want to take certain things out of history books that make them uncomfortable, and I think that's exactly the wrong direction we need to go, and what we did with this book was an attempt to kind of counter that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and see that in the book by Andy and Steve, radical Connecticut, and also see that in the articles written by both Andy and Steve on the Bridgeport History Center's Grassroots Historian page, which I'll be giving a link to in the description of this podcast and on that notion. I hope you have all enjoyed this episode of Bridgeport Unmasked. I'm Librarian Adam Cleary of Bridgeport Public Library and this is Andy Piasik, regular contributor to the Bridgeport History Center's Grassroots Historians article and co-author of Radical Connecticut. You can get Radical Connecticut in the websites I will link in the description below. See the links and websites in the notes. Until then, stay happy, stay healthy and stay interested in all things Bridgeport.