Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley

1. Roots of Powerlessness in the Brass Valley

1. Roots of Powerlessness in the Brass Valley One day in 1982,I received a call from a recent graduate of the Yale School of Organization and Management named Ken Galdston. He told me he wanted to create an organization to save jobs in the Naugatuck Valley. I was skeptical of Galdston’s proposal. I had seen the existing strategies of governments, unions, and other institutions charged with representing the interests of local workers and communities prove futile in the face of corporations prepared simply to shut down and move away. I felt changing that outcome was a hopeless task and that people in the valley were almost as powerless to halt its decline as they seemed to feel. That powerlessness was rooted in three hundred years of the valley’s history and in global economic forces that seemed to be in no one’s control. The Brazen Age Talk about the rise of industrial civilization, and you are talking about places like the Naugatuck Valley. The Naugatuck River originates in the western Connecticut uplands and races due south through rocky hills toward Long Island Sound. Over the course of ten thousand years, Native peoples planted corn on its fertile banks and fished in its plunging falls. In the 1630s, Puritans from Massachusetts established towns along the Connecticut River and nearly exterminated the Pequot Indians, the most powerful tribe in New England, clearing the way for expansion of what became the Connecticut Colony. Settlers thereupon spread rapidly from Hartford into the Connecticut interior, reaching the banks of the Naugatuck River in 1673.1 The Naugatuck Valley’s first colonial settlement, today’s Waterbury, began 2 c h a pt er 1 as a corporation whose land was owned jointly, though in unequal shares, by the town’s “proprietors.” A town meeting (from which women, Indians, blacks, and those not in good standing in the church were excluded) governed the town. A church and a school, not to mention stocks and pillories, soon followed. Settlement gradually spread up and down the valley, with Waterbury remaining by far the largest town. For their first century and a half, the Naugatuck Valley settlements were farm villages. Their basic unit was the household, whose labor was complexly divided among men, women, children, servants, and slaves. The villages produced a wide range of foodstuffs, building materials, and craft products they needed, but they lacked the capital, equipment, and skills to compete with English manufacturing. From the start, they had to be part of an intercontinental trading system. Farm and timber products—a 1679 list includes wheat, rye, barley, Indian corn, pork, beef, wool, hemp, flax, cider, pipe staves, and horses2 —moved from the interior of the colony over the poor roads to Hartford or New Haven, whence merchants shipped them to Boston and the Caribbean islands to join the famous “triangular trade” of New England agricultural products, West Indian rum, and African slaves. Even after the colonies became independent, manufacturing developed slowly due to the difficulty of competing with British-made goods. Nonetheless , in the face of growing population and declining agriculture, some Naugatuck Valley households began turning out buttons, clocks, and other handicraft products on a small scale for local consumption. When the War of 1812cut off British imports, valley craftsmen for the first time could sell such manufactured goods in a wider domestic market,3 but many failed in the face of “foreign competition” when international trade was restored. The expansion of American settlement southward and westward and the improvement of roads and canals gradually expanded the “home market” for products made in the Naugatuck Valley and elsewhere in the Northeast. Waterbury merchants began investing in small manufacturing shops, each employing up to a dozen workers, and financing the famous “Yankee peddlers ,” who “set out with large wagons, loaded with dry-goods, hats and shoes, together with tinware,” heading for the southern and western states.4 This expanding market meant fortunes could be made from expanded production . The result was an American version of the Industrial Revolution.5 In Waterbury, that revolution started with buttons. In 1802, Abel and Levi Porter started producing metal buttons by hand. They formed a partnership that employed nine people; it eventually became Waterbury’s largest employer, the Scovill Manufacturing Company. As the company grew, it subdivided the steps of button making into separate tasks, Roots of Powerlessness 3 then replaced tools held and used by...