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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
Jasper McLevy: Bridgeport's Socialist Mayor (1933-1957)
You can't tell the history of Bridgeport without Jasper McLevy. Bridgeport's longest serving & only socialist mayor is well known for an incident of not plowing Bridgeport's streets, but his story is one of a lifetime of honest service to the city, in which he takes on and replaced corrupt administrations and political machines.
Author & Fairfield University Professor of Labor & Working-Class History Cecelia Bucki, Librarian & Archivist Jaime Pettit, & Librarian Adam Cleri explore Jasper McLevy, and socialism in Bridgeport & Connecticut.
For more on this topic, listen to Episode 5 of Bridgeport Unmasked (Revolutionary Connecticut by Andy Piascik)
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 Bridgeport Unmasked, the Bridgeport Public Library's podcast about all things Bridgeport. We are here today to talk about Bridgeport Mayor Jasper McLeavy and the New Deal socialists who led Bridgeport from the 1930s through the 1950s. I'm Librarian Adam Cleary and today I'm joined by Fairfield University professor Cecilia Buckey and by my co-worker in the Bridgeport History Center, librarian and archivist Jamie Pettit. Today's topic is a must-know for knowing Bridgeport history, so I hope you all stick around. So thank you both of you very much for coming along. We're going to have a fun time, I think, because for all the folks up here today, we have two Jasper McLeavy aficionados in this room and, spoiler alert, I'm not one of them. So they're really going to run with this and take it away.
Speaker 1:Cecilia Buckey recently retired after 34 years of teaching at Fairfield University as professor of history, where her courses included American labor history and immigration history. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh under the mentorship of David Montgomery, a key architect of the new labor history in the United States, and with an emphasis on history from the bottom up. As a Bridgeport native, dr Buckey has always been intrigued by the stories of the socialist mayor of Bridgeport from 1933 to 1957. But there was no solid history written about this, nor was there any awareness of the great World War I strikes that rocked Bridgeport and captured national attention. She learned about these strikes in Dr Montgomery's seminars and where he was the first to write about those strikes. This led Buckey to her dissertation topic and later the award-winning book Bridgeport's Socialist New Deal 1915 to 1936, where she traced the history of labor and radical thought from those World War I strikes through to the New Deal victories of the Depression years Along the way. She has worked in Connecticut on a variety of labor history projects establishing the Connecticut Labor Archives at the University of Connecticut Library in 1980s, researching and writing the industrial history of the waterberry brass industry for the Matic Museum and creating the award-winning traveling exhibit Women at Work Connecticut 1900 to 1980 for the Connecticut Humanities Council. She has also been editor-in-chief of the academic journal Connecticut History Review from 2011 to 2017. She continues in her retirement to work on various labor history-related projects around the state.
Speaker 1:So in other words, we have somebody in here who's done a thing or two about the history of labor in Connecticut and that's going to be fantastic in talking about one of the most worker-friendly mayors in the history of Bridgeport, certainly the 1900s, when you know especially Buckingham the jerk before him wasn't great. Sorry, I have a thing against Buckingham ever since we did that bit about the death of James Beardsley and how he just didn't handle that well as police chief. But anyways, cecilia, it is so great to have you on board. I appreciate it, Thank you. Thank you, so normally I ask you know our guests to tell us what they're all about, but I think that covered it pretty awesomely. Is there anything else you wanted to throw in there about who you are, why you're here today?
Speaker 2:No, I think that'll come out when you know, in the course of the discussion about McLeavy.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Fantastic, and my only other question is you are the author of the Bridgeport Socialist New Deal, which is a book about the rise of socialism in Bridgeport and, as the title would suggest, the effect of the Depression and their reaction to it. Would you please tell the folks out there where they could get their hands on a copy of your book?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's available in paperback from the University of Illinois Press and if you Google Illinois Press or you know, just go online to. I don't want to, I don't want to be ill for Amazon, but there too.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely, I mean.
Speaker 2:B-U-C-K-I.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you very much and awesome, great. So also with me today, I am my coworker, jamie Pettit. She is, in her own right, a Jasper McLeavy person. In fact, I would say that my personal favorite of your exhibits that you have created just really struck home was the Jasper McLeavy exhibit that you made. So, jamie, you want to tell me a little bit about the History Center and what's going on there and all that jazz.
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course. So the Bridgeport History Center is located on the third floor of the Burroughs Library. We are a special collections and archives. We are a special collections and archives, basically treasure trove of stuff about a treasure trove of everything Bridgeport, a lot of stuff relating to Jasper and the labor history of the city, and we're very. We're open three days a week for walk-ins, for walk-in researchers. Jasper is, of course, a favorite subject and, uh, we just had an exhibit on him.
Speaker 1:Jasper mclevey, the people's mayor yeah, no, it's probably one of my favorite exhibits that the history center has done has his pickaxe, which was pretty awesome. Um, was that mostly ceremonial, because a roofer wouldn't necessarily need a pickaxe? Well, you know what's the story behind that pickaxe yeah, that was yeah.
Speaker 3:What? Yeah, that was, um, it was labeled as one of his tools. We're not exactly sure about the details around that, it's just it was one of our archive archival materials attributed to him, a bunch of stuff that's, I'm a librarian and I have a pickaxe, so I don't even know where that question was going.
Speaker 1:So I really like the exhibit. My favorite part was this one cartoon where it was like Bridgeport was on a gurney. It had like a human being that was supposed to be Bridgeport and they said call in, dr McLeavy, we have an emergency. Would you tell us why you included that cartoon in the exhibit?
Speaker 3:I mean, I find that particular cartoon was actually I found that by accident while we were going through our archives that was one of the pro-McLeavy cartoons from his I think his 1937 governor race 38. 38. Yeah, so that was basically depicting the state of Connecticut beaten up, backstabbed multiple times. There was a lot of corruption and scandals going on at that time. I think, oh boy, uh, that was um a scandal involving the merit parkway. There was like, yeah, severe, severe mismanagement of that.
Speaker 2:Uh, severe a little bit of skullduggery involved Corruption.
Speaker 1:My personal favorite is. So I think it was one or two years before Mick Levy unseated Buckingham. As I said, I have my personal stance. And so Lenny Grimaldi, by the way, for the folks out there great Bridgeport historian, and I read Lenny Grimaldi on Jasper McLeavy, and so basically, mayor Buckingham said a bridge project was going to cost $30,000, and the tab was running up to $150,000. And he was like, of course, there's no graft involved, they just underbid. And I think the ultimate cost of that bridge was like $280,000. But anywho, that's just the little bits and pieces I know. Again, I'm kind of a fan, but not nearly as much as the two folks in here. So I'm going to hand it over to them. I might throw in a wit or two in there as it comes along, but otherwise I'll leave it up to you too. So let's have a great podcast. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Actually, there's a really good entree into your first question about why the socialists, with McLeavy at the head of the ticket, win the mayor's race in 1933. Win the mayor's race in 1933. It's because of the last few years of serious economic scandals having to do with the budget, and bridges are always involved, and that was very true in the mid-1920s and all the way up to Buckingham. So he was kind of in the tradition of traditional Bridgeport politics. The reason that McLeavy and his socialists were able to win in 33 is kind of a long-term project. They did not pop up overnight. Mcleavy, in fact, had been running for mayor for the last decade, always with the notion of corruption. Let's beat back the machine, let's undo the machine, the machine politics, and have a real honest government. And so this latest Buckingham thing with the bridge that I don't know the details of, but that was one one, the main reason he almost won in 31, but it wasn't enough of a. The scandals weren't obvious enough. And you throw in two more years of depression and um and and the city hall was not handling the depression well and federal government was of no use at all. The Hoopla Corporation was not doing very much to support cities or individuals. And so McLeavy ran both on corruption and the need for honesty in government and secondly about making government deal with the crisis, the Great Depression. It wasn't great yet, it was only 1932, 1933. And one of the things that helped was that Franco Roosevelt was elected in 1932, ending a decade of Republican rule on the national level, and that, you know, my sense is that gave a lot of incentive for people to change their minds about their traditional relationship with the two major parties.
Speaker 2:And McLeavy had been running, as I mentioned already, always been running. But in 1928 or 29, the Bridgeport Sunday Herald editor gave him a weekly column. I mean, the Sunday Herald was a great newspaper back then. It was very progressive, capital P in um, his tendencies and what it reported on. And the masthead said no fear, no favor, the people's paper. So it was really. It was really amazing. Unfortunately we don't have digitized versions of it yet so it's not easy to get to. You have to go through the microphone.
Speaker 2:But anyway, the uh by him getting that weekly column, that raised his profile quite immensely.
Speaker 2:That plus the fact that he and the socialist activists were working in every neighborhood so they were having rallies and this is kind of old school, but that's what it was until this era of digital information and the present day era where people they really, first of all the 20s had led to the creation of activist wards, and now you had women voting, and so there were women's clubs, and this is both Democrats and republicans, and the socialists had always had a deep commitment and involvement in the labor movement.
Speaker 2:Now this is the old american federation of labor, um, which is all craft union, um, and mclevey himself was a craft worker, he was the roofer, he was president at one point of the National Roofers Union and very involved in Connecticut's labor politics and the State Labor Council, as well as, of course, the Bridgeport Labor Council and many of his fellow candidates running in the Democratic or Republican Party, and that you had some very forward-looking and outspoken women not candidates, but wives of the male activists and who were activists in their own right. And so, between that, with the, the afl base, which was significant enough in this era, um, and you know, with the building trades, uh, painters, uh, you know ed carpenters well, actually, his nephew, uh, charles mcleavey, became business agent for the, the carpenter's district, for the rest of the 20th century, um, you know.
Speaker 3:So there's a deep base yeah, so like these were people who basically were among the people they were, basically they recognized the need of spring orders and they spoke.
Speaker 2:they spoke common language and everyone knew them because they'd been around for a long time and MacLeavy was always. He was, aside from being an interesting character and he always dressed in the most ungodly, unfashionable way, which actually got mentioned in a couple op-ed pieces and a couple letters to the editor that the Sunday Herald produced and the Bridgeport Times Star, which was a daily paper, used to be the Democratic Party paper but was being much more straightforward in its discussion of the depression, its relationship to ethnic communities and the major papers that this, the um, bridgeport post and telegram did not talk about anything but business my initial impressions was when I was like researching jasper's story, for I believe when I was researching Jasper's story for our Jasper McLeavy- exhibit was how like timely it was.
Speaker 3:You know you had like a group of people in the midst of economic turmoil who were both, who are unsatisfied basically with both the republicans and the democrats, with the. You know that was one of the um campaign slogans, I believe, of both his governor and mayor. Mayoral races are when the old parties win. Bridgeport always loses, but everybody wins with jasper.
Speaker 2:So yeah, they had some very nifty slogans that way, and because he was so easily caricatured in the cartoons, there were some really great ones. I actually haven't seen that particular one, but so he was an everyman. He's also a very rigorous, socially conservative, goddish craftsman, basically, and did not have any. I don't even think he drank, you know. So he was a very upstanding person that you could trust the city budget with.
Speaker 3:Very, very honesty.
Speaker 2:Yep, honest to a fault.
Speaker 3:Honest Jasper, I believe Another one. And so can you tell us a little bit more about the party that he belonged to, like the Bridgeport? Well, the Socialist Party of America.
Speaker 2:You know it's interesting. I don't believe that there actually is a good study of the Connecticut party going back to its origins, but nationally. I mean, everybody might have heard of Eugene Debs who becomes the famous orator. He was not the leader of the Socialist Party but he was nationally, but he was one of the major spokesmen for it and he had come out of the Railroad Brotherhoods, famously during the Pullman strike in the 1890s, went to jail for violating the federal injunction against.
Speaker 2:This was the best Knights of Labor. It included some very popular parts of the populist movement etc. Coming together not necessarily with a single manifesto. Like some of the socialist parties of Europe. It's a very American-made one and from that a lot of craft union leaders um defied their afl leadership and joined the, the um, the socialist party of america. Uh, for a while it included the industrial workers of the world leadership. So it was a very big hit, but definitely on the left and so I'm not sure exactly how Jasper got involved in that, but he had been a member at least five years before World War I started.
Speaker 2:He and the rest of the socialists were basically banned from national attention and national newspapers during the war period because Debs and others were forthright in their opposition to the US entering the war in 1917. And the laws that were passed nationally basically shut down the socialist press, jailed any socialist who would give a public speech, and Debs, most famously, made that choice to make a public speech. And so he was in jail for most of the 90, of the through 1919 and after. He was only pardoned in like 1924, just before his death. But so there's very little time in which the socialists were active during the war period and I can't really find I couldn't find details about McLeevy being active in anything during the World War I era, which made sense because they're all underground, basically.
Speaker 2:But they retained their connection to the labor movement. They're all activists within their labor unions. They're all were. You know, there are activists within their labor unions. And as soon as the war was over and things began to open up and there's all of the in the Europe and then in the United States as well, that caused a split in the Socialist Party of America, where a lot of the ethnic federations split away, joined the Communist Party, and you could find that same kind of dynamic going on in Connecticut, which means that there would be socialist federations within the various immigrant groups, but there would also be communist federations in those groups. That's going to lead to some splits in the 1930s.
Speaker 2:A lot of different branches of leftist thought lead to some splits in the 1930s A lot of different branches of leftist thought yeah, but you know, still very much a minority. But the Socialist Party was and McLeavy was respectable enough to always have at least one public voice, given the fact that there were just very progressive newspapers in the Bridgeport area, which actually is also unusual for the state. So Bridgeport really in some ways leads in these kind of new ideas and that was shown during the World War I era, which no one talked about, no one knew about until I went to David Montgomery's seminar and came back. My first chapter of my book is actually about World War I. I actually I didn't know.
Speaker 2:My grandfather was a brass caster in Burns and Bassick during World War I and he saved so much money with his war job, with the overtime that the federal government gave to all workers working on war contracts, that he was able to save enough money to go back to Poland and buy a farm which was everybody's dream from that era. Italians went back in very large numbers. Italians went back in very large numbers. Eastern Europeans went back in very large numbers too. I digress though.
Speaker 3:But anyway. But what caused Ridgeport to be such a progressive hub? Was it really because it was basically the industrial capital of Connecticut at that time? There were so many people coming in, so many labor-related issues coming up.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, good question. First of all, during the war period the population of Bridgeport almost doubled because there were so many war jobs. Was doubled because there were so many war jobs and Connecticut led I'm sorry, bridgeport led by the end of 1915, bridgeport had more small arms and ammunition going to the European theater than any other area in the United States, and it's all you know. The US had not entered the war yet. This was all serving European contracts, the Allied contracts, and so Bridgeport just attracted many more people coming in.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry but Cecilia, you actually do a great job in Bridgeport. Socialist New Deal of capturing it in my head very clearly. So I never knew that a Connecticutkee King Arthur's court came quite so close to home. But you you quote.
Speaker 2:I started off that way, I invented that basically you know, I quoted, your Bridgeport report comes up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Bridgeport comes up. Yeah, no. Basically, you know, Connecticut, Yankee, King Arthur's art court guy goes back in time doesn't know he has, and this guy in knight armor captures him, and the guy who went back in time thought he was a wacko so just wanted to go along with him, right? And so they come across this beautiful, metropolitan, powerful city and he looks at it and he goes is that Bridgeport?
Speaker 2:And it ends up being camelot. But no, it is a camelot. Is this camelot?
Speaker 1:and the knight says no, it's bridgeport oh, so I completely got your quote wrong. Right, I'm keeping that in because I want I I I still, I still want mark twain.
Speaker 2:Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.
Speaker 1:Uh, I don't have a clue what I'm talking about, but at day's end, I love that picture so much of how big Bridgeport must have been and this is the 1880s that he wrote this particular book.
Speaker 2:Okay, industrial capital of Connecticut, ICC, WICC, is named after the first radio station. Bridgeport is named after that title. That was given to Bridgeport in the late 19th century Because it was oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was. Because it was such an industrial hub and by the late 19th century into the early 20th, where it starts to boom, you know so many patents for machine tools and all sorts of other kinds of metal products were. Who you know made these inventions and the companies they work for took them over. That's just a plug for the ingenuity of Bridgeport machinists.
Speaker 3:A hub of progress. Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so yeah, and so in the fact that my my god grandfather was involved in I don't know that he was involved because he died of industrial disease in the early 1920s, which is the downside of working in various machine shops and brass boundaries, the you know there was a whole lot of ingenuity and invention going on in Connecticut, which is why it's the industrial capital, and so entrepreneurs are also coming into Bridgeport and starting companies, and so it's all gone now yeah, but when I was in my time, Bridgeport was still very, very booming.
Speaker 2:It's sad to see what's happened really is.
Speaker 3:Um, we're gonna divert a little bit because Bridgeport was obviously leading the charge. But on the subject of the socialists, were they active in other parts of Connecticut? I mean, I think we had a previous conversation where they actually had a little meeting place, and actually where I live, in walnut beach in milford that's the, that's the um, that's the iww hangout during world war one really um and and um sam lavitt, who was the leader of the machinists during world war one, and he was a bit of a an industrial unionist.
Speaker 2:So before you know, 20 years before his time the CIO of the 1930s hadn't come into existence but he had certain IWW tendencies and that one big union where there were not craft divisions seemed to be the best choice for the union movement at the time. Of course they were kind of crazy radicals in some other ways, the IWW and they were suppressed during World War. I completely smashed. I could go on about that. The socialists recovered from that. It included a lot of people had these industrial and industrialist tendency. Um mclevey was not one of them and most of most of the socialists that I followed then into the 1920s were also very much afl affiliated um the. That's not to say that they didn't have large followings and they were very successful in getting their membership to come along with the Socialist Party. But it was bigger than that. They spoke to what people really needed during the Depression and they were honest, and so it's a combination of that that led the socialists in Bridgeport, precisely because they were so long-term and deeply embedded in the neighborhoods, whereas I know well.
Speaker 2:Norwalk for a while did have a very active socialist party, but not during the World War I period. They wound up getting one or two council seats in the 30s and 40s. I think there also was a in New Haven. There was a socialist party that has some significance for a time, but they tended to be. I don't want to over generalize but the? Uh, there was a pacifist wing that they followed. Norman thomas who took over for jen for, took over for gene devs. After he died, norman thomas becomes the main. Who was a protestant minister, uh, the, a labor gospel um follower who was then the leader of the socialist party of america through the 1940s and into the 50s. So it was another. There was. There was a split in the socialist party in the ways in which the various constituents chose to explain themselves. Mcleavy and his gang were not part of that particular religious wing. The, you know the social gospel was a very important structural foundation for just a lot of the kinds of rhetoric that was being used by socialists, but it wasn't overly religious. So that in itself gave some credence to the sense that, oh, these were honest, down-to-earth men who would lead us out of the depression.
Speaker 2:What what jasper was doing in in this 1933 bid is, of course, after the democratic party wins nationally. Um, and democrats in connecticut were coming up. Wilbur Cross had been elected as the first Democratic mayor and governor In some time. He of course gave lip service to the New Deal but did not really implement it. And McGleavy and his band of socialists in Bridgeport were saying why aren't we getting federal funds? Why aren't we getting the state to do this? We should be able to do this ourselves, when in fact you had to go through the state government in order to get federal funds. So it got very complicated that way, but they did a good job of saying the Democrats aren't doing the right thing in Connecticut. We need a socialist perspective. And that led to 1934, the off year for municipal elections that a number of socialists from Bridgeport were elected to the state General Assembly.
Speaker 3:Wow, so they got, they got pretty far, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And they in fact were. Because the state was so divided the General Assembly was really lit evenly between Democrats and Republicans were the deciding vote, and they decided to vote with the Republicans. And this is part of the problem with how limited municipal government was at the time, in particular Bridgeport, because it had such a history of corruption in the state that the city's business leaders had gotten the General Assembly of Connecticut to create a governor-appointed board to govern Bridgeport budgets. It was called the Ripper Act because it took power away from City Hall and the mayor and gave it to this appointed group of businessmen who, of course, want to keep taxes down and do not want to have, you know, the city services that people wanted. This had been a real problem. Democrats were not in the city, the city were not very who were implicated in all these fiscal improprieties could not create a new platform that would convince the people that they would do any better, and so the socialists had an edge with that, but they were still stuck with the Ripper Bill. The Ripper Act meant that they had no control over the city budget, so they could do nothing to alleviate the suffering.
Speaker 2:City and Detroit, where the cities took over charity, took over unemployment compensation, basically tried to help the third of the city that was unemployed, and those big cities half the workforce was unemployed. It was almost the same in Bridgeport. We don't have statistics for that, but it's very clear that Bridgeport was also hurting, and so the state candidates who won the General Assembly seats had to decide do we go with the Connecticut governor, who's not actually all that helpful, or do we go with the majority? The Senate was controlled by the GOP, so let us side with the Republicans and maybe we'll get lucky and we'll get some benefit out of that. Governor Cross forgave them in, and in his autobiography he essentially says they were honest men who were trying to help their city.
Speaker 1:So Cross forgave the double cross. Sorry, there was no way I was going to let that go. My apologies.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, what very quickly turned into an attempt to try, and Cross did in fact, after the successful socialist campaigns in Bridgeport that led to some representation in the General Assembly, activate his own New Deal by mostly by going to the federal government for funds which had not been done before and siphoned then a lot of those.
Speaker 2:You're supposed to go through the state governments and then the state government would decide what cities and towns would get those benefits. And you know there's some state, the state-funded Civilian Conservation Corps and a couple of those other work, study work, projects that were funded through federal taxes, did alleviate some of the hardship that cities and towns were feeling. And so one might say that Bridgeport Socialists did push the Democratic Party to follow the lead of Roosevelt in Washington to advance the New Deal. So the Bridgeport Socialists were New Dealers, but they were going beyond it, but they thought that let's go with what is and what's happening on the national level. And you know there was a real tension between so who do we support, the mainstream Democratic Party or the Socialists or the socialists?
Speaker 2:So on the national level, a third party never does very well because our two-party system is so entrenched, and so the fact that the socialists in Bridgeport were able to overcome that and become the majority party for the next couple decades was a real significant thing. That really didn't have much of a chance of being reproduced, certainly not nationally. There were pockets where third parties were in fact able to succeed, but given the way our party political structure is set up, often the third parties would play spoilers. In Connecticut, which continued to have what's called fusion politics, many other states were actually banned this after the populist upsurge of the 1890s. Connecticut did not, and that meant you could be cross-endorsed across party lines, and you still can, and that's how third parties would have some say. So I mean it didn't work in the favor of the Bridgeport, but and this democratic party remained fairly strong, um and so that by 1957 they were able to topple mcleavy.
Speaker 2:But you know he had been in power for so long and he was an old man at that point um he insists he was robbed because he was only a handful of votes that the democrats won by I did.
Speaker 3:I think that it was rob sullivan. He made the argument, or he said in his book that there was like a rumor going around that that there was like ballot stuffing going on, for tedesco's people were doing that or something that was the rumor, yeah yeah but strong, strong unions.
Speaker 2:for most of the 40s and 50s and into the 60s. Through the 60s, the Connecticut economy, particularly the defense economy, was very strong and Bridgeport was booming. I remember Bridgeport booming in the late 60s. Going downtown after school I went to Cathedral Girls High School and caught the bus downtown to get back home that um yeah, the city was booming even the middle of the week and Jasper's.
Speaker 3:I don't know if rain is a good, but Jasper's mayoral, you know his run was um. It's still fondly remembered by the people of Bridgeport like you know, I remember, like back when we had that exhibit up, there were like a few people who, like, grew up around. You know that period of time, I think 40s, 50s who were like oh, my goodness, Jasper. Oh, my parents loved him. You know he was such a great mayor. You know he's still it's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so like like a golden age to a lot of people. In certain ways, you know, it is interesting because you know bridgeport did flourish during that time, not because necessarily because of mcleavey, right, um, but mcleavey, but, you know, because of the war economy generally. You know, just especially after world war ii, the uh war contracts, federal war contracts, never diminished. There was always a war footing. What McClevey was able to do is he made unions popular. Well, the 30s made unions popular. He was not on a cutting edge, he was a craftsman, a crafts union person. And so the CIO when it started nationally, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which established itself as a split off from the AFL in 1935, they start constructing industrial-style unions where you took in everyone who worked in a certain workplace, regardless of what job they had, whereas craft workers, craft unions, were always dividing people up. That's not how modern factories work, right, right?
Speaker 2:Eugene Debs was actually talking about that in the early 1900s, saying industrial unions are the only way to go, and McLeavy and his group generally did not support that. The communists who supported that most actively in Bridgeport and around the state state um, but you know, a lot of people just flocked to um. The new industrial unions like the unite electrical, radio and machine workers um, the uh steel workers industrial union, um. You know that that they were. Those became the after 19, become the majority unions in Bridgeport and in Connecticut, because there was no wiggle room for them to move, become prominent. At that point mclevey and his afl unions might have had the opportunity to have a kind of strong labor support and a labor front um, and become the truly labor party which a lot of people are asking for now. You know, come to think of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very timely yeah, so there are lessons here.
Speaker 2:So how did labor unions capture City Hall? Well, as I said, because so many of the activists, socialists, were in fact leaders of in their craft unions. Mcleavy, of course, roofers was not a huge union. Slate roofers were even a smaller part of the larger roofer. But Brewster, who became the head of public works, was a business agent for the painters union, and so he essentially brought unionism to the city government, because public works is where city government, and that's what everyone cares about is that the roads get fixed and you know, et cetera.
Speaker 2:That was all in union hands and this is way before unions could officially become part of National Labor Relations, board-organized contracts in the city, in any city, public employees did not have the right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, which is the key labor act in the New deal, and that's 1936, um. But bridgeport really was way ahead of the curve in that respect because afl unions, uh, especially the building trades, were very important in the city government itself. Um, and some of the you know the, the, the city councilmen, had ties to those particular unions, and these are unions where there's no level of corruption to speak of. Rather, these were hardworking men mostly who knew how to get the job done, and McLeavy himself insisted on that. There are plenty of tests in which Schwarzkopf, who was his second in command, would have these public displays of. This is why we bought this particular product, you know, and kind of run it through its paces and say this is the best we could get at the best price.
Speaker 3:And therefore you know, you, that the city was in good hands yeah, mcglavey himself was always like among the people, like he was known for, like going out in the field and inspecting.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly you know and you could always meet him for lunch at Lou's Diner downtown. He was one of the people. But it's a really interesting break with tradition of all the cities that there would be such a strong union representation. New Haven had a mayor who was in the later 30s who actually was a union activist too, but McLeavy is the one who kind of paves the way for others. Other union people get involved cool.
Speaker 1:Uh well, thank you both for coming on. This has been, uh pretty awesome in fact. Um, preparing for this was was really meaningful to me. Um, I got two things myself out of the Jasper McLeavy story that like strike me personally. One is that this man it took him 30 years from going from his first standing on a soapbox, I think, literally, and going to people and being like, hey, I have something worth saying to becoming mayor. That was 30 years. So I often get discouraged when, like, things don't happen in a few months for me, or like, if my life hasn't been like what I wanted it yet, but like, this is, this is I love, whenever I learn about a person where it took, you know decades.
Speaker 1:Like George Carlin, wasn't George Carlin?
Speaker 3:until like 60s and 70s. You know, like george carlin wasn't george carlin until like 60s and 70s. You know, it takes determination, it takes a horrible economic crash, which you know is coming up, so you have an opportunity uh, that that's a little too close to home.
Speaker 1:But, yes, no, I, I I hear you there very much. Uh, cecilia, is there any? Um other sources? We obviously talked about your book bridgeport. Uh, socialist new deal. Um, are there any other sources? We obviously talked about your book Bridgeport, socialist New Deal. Are there any other labor sources, whether written by you or someone else, that the folks out there might who are like, hey, I want to know more about McLeavy, his party work history in the state and the city that you think would be great for people to go for?
Speaker 2:Well, there are a couple books by um steve thornton in hartford, who he's a little book connecticut, iww, um is a book he has and he's second one with the mike uh andy andy piasek on strikes in yeah, connect.
Speaker 3:Radical Connecticut.
Speaker 2:Radical.
Speaker 3:Connecticut People's history in the Constitution State yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we do have an episode on this channel where I interviewed Andy Piasik about Radical Connecticut. So folks listening out there who want a little bit more. Thank you for inspiring an answer to my own question. You could certainly check out that episode, which is about labor related things in Bridgeport, and also check out episode number one if you want to see why I personally have a bad taste about McLeavy's successor Buckingham. Anyways, Jamie, thank you very much. His predecessor. If I could use words, that would be fantastic. Jamie, anything you wanted to plug Any of your stuff on the History Center website.
Speaker 2:History Center is a great source A lot of primary documents that I haven't even gone through yet. Yeah, that have been captured since I wrote my book. Absolutely. My book is like 20 years old now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and our collection on Jasper Mc mcleavey and um, the bridgeport socialist party is one of our uh biggest collections most extensive so definitely encourage people who are very interested in this subject to have a look. Uh, we definitely have a lot on community activism organization.
Speaker 2:We're actually working now with the dsa hopefully to get some of their materials, so great by the way I meant, you mentioned soap boxes yes one of the key things that certainly separates their time from ours is that people really rallied locally, that people set up soap boxes in um, every little. Every little neighborhood has some kind of point with a little park and a lot of people, not just socialists, would get a soapbox and stand in that spot and they would have little rallies like at every ward.
Speaker 3:I think it was either Sullivan or Grimaldi who described Jasper as a sidewalk politician.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The last of the great sidewalk politicians think is how the line went um okay, anything else either of you uh, please come down and visit the history center.
Speaker 3:We we love to have researchers um. We do have a copy of radical connecticut and cecilia's book bridgeport socialist new deal um available for research, and I think we have circulating copies too, if you want to take it home for a short time.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you very much for the time.
Speaker 1:You're welcome and, on that, thank you everyone for cozying on up for an hour with Bridgeport Unmasked, Bridgeport Public Library's podcast about our city and its storied history. Whether you've listened to us while driving, cleaning, doing other chores or just staring intently at your phone, for whatever reason, I want to thank you very much for joining us Cecilia Buckey, Jamie Pettit and Adam Cleary for our exploration of Jasper McLeavy. Thanks for lending us your ears.