The city’s cost of living increased 54 percent, but wages had grown by 80 percent. The factories began to expand their walls and hours, and more employers reverted to the Albert Pope/Samuel Colt way of doing things by offering after-work activities and events. Popular baseball teams grew into an obsession with factory leagues competing through the week.
If the war brought work for the factories, residents of Frog Hollow found themselves cutting back. A coal shortage, and an attendant rise in prices, meant that fuel was too expensive for most families. Frog Hollow residents had long been accustomed to cold furnaces, at least until November 1, the traditional date for beginning to heat homes for the winter, but in 1917 a mid-October snow tested that resolve, as “New England weather is very indifferent to the alleged shortage of fuel,” according to a Courant article.85 The shortage was reported at fifty million tons, and first priority was given to the defense industry. Though there were some instances of gouging and hoarding coal, most residents heeded a November 1917 Courant headline, “Every Coal User Must Co-operate.”86
After World War I, Hartford wasn’t precisely a sleepy town, but it had the feel of most other midsized New England cities. Downtowns were robust, though after the stores closed, all but the streetlights went dark. The latter part of the era was spent in the Depression, and though New England struggled, the northern economy remained healthier than in other parts of the country. Smaller farmers in New England, in particular, did not suffer on the same scale as their mid-western colleagues.87 The Park (Hog) River flooded frequently, and city planners decided that miles of sandbags were not enough. In 1940 the Army Corps of Engineers began burying the river, which had come to serve as an aboveground conduit for industrial waste.The project included nine miles of pipe, and Frog Hollow shuddered in preparation for another shift in fortunes.
After every war since the civil one, defense plants had moved to peacetime products, only to rev up again with munitions for the next war. During World War II, once again the city shifted back. This was not necessarily as seamless as adjusting a wrench or recalibrating a machine. In factories, shifting production of items between war- and peacetime could take a month or a year.88 But when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hartford was just two turns of a screw from being a war machine. Already the capital city had in place an infrastructure that would contribute greatly to the war effort, in both human and material capital. Already Connecticut was an industry center for aircraft manufacturing, employing 13.5 percent of the workers nationally in the field.89
In fact, even before the country declared war, Hartford was operating as if the country was at war already. In September 1941—three months before the attack at Pearl Harbor—the city boasted fifty-two defense-related industries.90 On the day that will live in infamy, the New York Times reported that Hartford was “having growing pains. Defense work is the reason. Factories once used to turn out things like typewriters, percolators and toasters are now manufacturing war materials. Defense workers have flooded into the Nutmeg State’s sedate old capital on the muddy Connecticut River.”91 By the time the war ended, Connecticut manufacturers had fulfilled more than eight billion dollars in contracts.92
But with peacetime the suburbs were calling, and those Frog Hollow residents who could do so began to move away from the center of the city. Ironically, the budding insurance industry would step in and make Hartford, for a while, the Insurance Capital of the World.
The idea of insuring one’s self or property started in Philadelphia as an antidote to fires that periodically swept through the closely built wood structures of that town. Word spread in Hartford that James G. Batterson, the son of a stonecutter and owner of a granite works, was preparing to offer insurance to travelers on railroads, a notoriously dangerous form of passage. One day in 1864, when Batterson ran into James Bolter, a banker, at the Hartford post office, Bolter jokingly asked him how much it would cost to insure him on his walk home to Asylum Hill (a distance of about four blocks). Batterson said, perhaps facetiously, “Two cents,” which Bolter paid, and thus was born the nation’s first accident policy. (Bolter was supposed to have made it home safely.)93
Insurance would change the face of industry as well. Frank W. Cheney of the Cheney Brothers silk manufacturing company bought the first major accident policy in May 1864.94 A 1909 book extolled the work of the hypothetical “Mr. Engineer” and said that “wood-working machines, with the saws and knives revolving thousands of times a minute, seek in vain to mangle the hands and fingers of the workman, while cunningly devised guards permit the workman’s hands to push the work along or to glide harmlessly over knives or cutters; at the same time, there being no interference with the speed or limitation of the output.” All hail “safety elevators, emergency brakes, rail joints, automatic gate crossings and signals, life buoys and collapsible lifeboats, safety hatches, life guns, safety clothes lines; and methods for safeguarding the milk and food supply.”95 For a while the offices of Travelers Insurance included what they called a “Chamber of Industrial Horrors” for visitors to study photographs of explosions, open elevator shafts, and machinery before protective devices had been installed. Defective chains, broken cogs, snapped tubes and rivets—it was all on display.96
For all the exhibit’s trumpeting of a safer work environment, workers were still routinely injured and sent home to Frog Hollow to exist on the kindness of neighbors or local churches. By some estimates, industrial accidents occurred two million times a year, and that number was far and away higher than any other statistic in any part of the world, according to a 1911 Courant article.97 In 1910 the Aetna Life Insurance Company published Safeguards for the Prevention of Industrial Accidents, because according to that book’s first chapter, “The toll of human life and limb being exacted by modern industry has reached such startling proportions as to be a serious menace to our national welfare.”98
This was evident both in the number of deaths and dismemberments, and in the laws that were being passed to prevent such events. The machinery heated up, and in February 1912 E. Sidney Berry, counsel of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection & Insurance Company, spoke to a gathering of insurance agents: “This is a great country for liberty, but we lay more emphasis on liberty of property than we do on liberty of life.”99 Owners had not taken proper steps because, according to Berry, accidents didn’t cost them enough. After all, when railroads found it expensive to pay recompense to injured passengers, they began to observe stricter safety measures.100
Boiled down, prevention was the responsibility of the employee.101 If an injury occurred on the job, the company rarely if ever took steps to make things right. If one worker was injured to the point of incapacity, there was always someone else to step in. But that began to change as labor unions grew in Frog Hollow’s factories and legislators passed worker-friendly protections, since “the workingman is the one least able to bear the burden of liability.”102
For decades Travelers owned the market on accident insurance, and by 1885 the company announced it had sold one million policies, an astonishingly high number, considering the fairly restrictive rules that dictated who could be covered. Only men between the ages of eighteen and seventy (who were considered employable) could be insured. Women were uninsurable, as were people without jobs, because their time was considered statistically worthless.103 Policies were written to provide compensation in the event of the death of the policyholder, or the loss of two limbs, the loss of eyesight, or the loss of one limb and one eye, or any combination thereof.104
The rules changed as more women entered the factories. By 1900 as many as 50 percent of all U.S. workers—male and female—were covered by some kind of policy that protected against financial ruin in the case of illness.105 But this industry wasn’t based in Frog Hollow. Much of the insurance business was downtown or just to the north of the neighborhood, in graceful Asylum Hill. The insurance industry would carry Hartford through financially lean times, but by the 1960s all that remained of Frog Hollow’s manufacturing powerhouse was shells of factories surrounded by sturdy Perfect Six apartments. In those dwellings the doors shut tight, the walls were thick, and the stairwells held the smell of garlic, potatoes, and meat from two generations of families. If the factories were gone, the housing remained.