With the Hartford City Plan of 1910, city planning began in Connecticut. Hartford Commission on the City Plan
There was, however, immediate concern that restricting the use of privately owned land through zoning might be unconstitutional. For example, were not the creation of building and street lines the equivalent of land taking, and should not a land owner be compensated by the town for that portion of his property that he could no longer build on? The Connecticut Supreme Court tackled the issue early on in Town of Windsor v. Henry D. Whitney, et al. In that case, the court determined that such zoning actions were “a legitimate exercise of the police power of the State, as distinguished from the power of eminent domain,” under which an owner must be compensated for land taken for public use. In what became a landmark decision on the matter, the court concluded that “the State may regulate any business, or the use of any property, in the interest of public health, safety or welfare, and without making compensation, provided this is done reasonably.”57 The constitutionality of zoning was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company in 1925, which made zoning a legal expression of a community’s policing powers as long as it was applied without prejudice to the entire community and not only to certain property owners.
The Connecticut legislature endorsed zoning for specific Connecticut cities beginning in 1921, and four years later passed general legislation that empowered all Connecticut cities, towns, and boroughs to create zoning agencies to control the bulk and use of structures in their communities, as well as the density of their population. The concept of zoning as an adjunct to progressive city planning proved particularly popular in Connecticut. By 1946, more than half the towns in Connecticut had zoning commissions, many of which were combined into a local planning and zoning commission. As one report noted, “There is no state in which zoning has proved more acceptable.”58
While planning and zoning allowed cities and towns to organize the landscape according to progressive principles, neither resolved the most egregious problem of city life: unfair and undemocratic representation in state politics. According to the state constitution, Connecticut towns had either one or two representatives in the General Assembly, regardless of population. As a result of the urbanization of large cities after the Civil War, Connecticut’s system of representative government, a holdover from colonial times, abrogated the political rights of the majority of the state’s residents. For example, by 1889, the demographic changes that occurred during the nineteenth century allowed 11,851 voters living among sixty small towns to elect a total of seventy-six representatives to the state’s General Assembly, while the 17,827 voters then living in New Haven could elected only two. And the discrepancy became more disparate as urbanization progressed. In 1900, the town of Union with a population of 400 persons had two representatives in the state assembly, the same number as the city of New Haven with a population of 108,000. It is no wonder that Connecticut’s unbalanced system of representation became known in progressive circles as the “rotten borough” system.59
In 1901, progressive reformers took up the cause of “rotten borough” politics by calling for a state constitutional convention to address the issue. However, when the convention was organized the following year, its composition reflected the very problem it was called upon to resolve: regardless of its size, each town could send only one delegate to the convention! To no one’s surprise, the convention achieved little. One delegate commented boldly on the heart of the problem, if not its legal ramifications: while it is agreed, he said, “that town representation is illogical … [and with] no legal justification … it is a sentiment which should be cherished and perpetuated.”60 In the end, the convention penned a new draft constitution that increased urban representation slightly, but in a subsequent referendum the voters turned down even this modest improvement.
While Connecticut cities were quick to adopt progressive ideas such as town planning and zoning, the state had failed to redress what after centuries of abuse had become the most egregious problem of life in the city: the unfair representation of city dwellers in the assembly halls of the state capitol. The disparity of the “rotten borough” system of representation would continue well into the 1960s before Connecticut was forced to rectify the situation by a decree of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, the unearned political control exerted by rural towns under the “rotten borough” system would continue to cast a strong Republican influence over state politics, and in the 1930s would give rise to one of the most flagrant scandals in all of the state’s history: the Merritt Parkway land fraud.
MASS TRANSPORTATION CONFRONTS AUTOMOBILITY
The construction of an improved highway network in Connecticut, and the increase in car, truck, and motor bus travel that it made feasible, had a significant impact on the state’s existing system of railroad, steamboat, and trolley services operated by the New Haven Railroad. To begin with, there was the direct competition between the fixed route, fixed schedule mass transportation provided by the New Haven, and the more flexible door-to-door service associated with the automobile. The local nature of much of the New Haven’s passenger and freight traffic made its rail, steamboat, and trolley operations especially vulnerable to competition from the automobile and the truck. But what railroad managers complained about even more was the unfair nature of that competition. As one news cartoon put it, how was a privately owned railroad responsible for its own infrastructure—tracks, stations, bridges, signals, and switching yards—expected to compete with cars, trucks, and buses whose infrastructure, from local streets to secondary collector roads to trunk line highways, was provided for them by the government and paid for with public tax dollars? Yet that was exactly the situation created by the “highways only” policy of the state and federal megagovernment that supported highway construction to the detriment of private transportation corporations such as the New Haven.
Unfair competition. How was a private railroad, responsible for its own infrastructure, supposed to compete with a publicly built highway network?
Courtesy of the Hartford Courant
As a result of decisions made in 1903 by J. P. Morgan (banker to the New Haven) and Charles S. Mellen (president of the New Haven) to expand the company’s operations to other modes of transportation in an effort to create a monopoly over transportation services throughout New England, the debt burden of the New Haven increased dramatically. In the years from 1903 to 1913, Morgan and Mellen increased the capitalization of the New Haven from $93 million to $417 million. Of this increase, only $120 million was spent on rail-related properties and improvements; the remaining $204 million was invested in the acquisition of steamboat and trolley properties, often at prices well above their industry values. To make matters worse, many of the purchases were made in a financially questionable manner, using dozens of subsidiary companies to manipulate New Haven assets and create paper profits designed to deceive stock- and bondholders on the true financial condition of the company.
An investigation of the New Haven’s shady dealings by the Interstate Commerce Commission led to a federal court decree in 1914 intended to divest the transportation monopoly created under Morgan and Mellen of its more controversial assets, including its controlling interest in the Boston & Maine Railroad, as well as its steamboat and trolley properties. These assets were placed into the hands of court-appointed trustees and marked for sale. However, before divestiture could be accomplished, the federal government in 1920 reversed its long-held position against the consolidation of railroads as an instrument of monopoly. Instead, in the Transportation Act of 1920, Congress directed the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to devise a plan to deliberately consolidate the nation’s major railroads into a number of more efficient, more profitable regional systems. It was hoped that by judiciously combining stronger roads with weaker ones and eliminating duplicate services, financially troubled railroads such as the New Haven could be reorganized into a national network of sustainable, but still privately owned railroads. As a result of this change in policy, the New Haven succeeded in having the court decree of 1914 modified to regain control of most of its divested assets. As the