Author Archives: Laura Smith

About Laura Smith

Archivist

“The Case Against Franklin D. Roosevelt”…and a pamphlet that does quite the opposite: a source for classroom instruction

Posted on by
1

The election of 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ran against Alf Landon, may not have been as contentious as some — Roosevelt swept the election by winning 46 of the then 48 states and 98.48% of the electoral votes — but like all elections had its share of accusations and claims hurled against the incumbent.  By 1936 Roosevelt had served for almost one full term and his political opponents now had ammunition to use to discredit him and his record. Among other things, he was accused of not being a good steward of the people’s money, of disregarding the Constitution, of being a dictator, and of breaking his promises.

Shown here is a page from a pamphlet titled “The Case Against Franklin D. Roosevelt.”  You may first think that this writing would try to prove Roosevelt’s incompetence, but look again.  The case the pamphlet makes is that FDR “Wastes the Public Money,” but upon closer reading we see that the pamphlet is really comparing similar claims made to other presidents of the past, such beloved ones as Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, with the inference that if such claims were made against presidents who we now revere then surely Roosevelt’s policies will also stand the test of time.  Also, in the back of the pamphlet we see that it was published by the National Democratic Committee, and such rhetorical language now makes sense.

Here are some questions to ask as you study this page:

How does comparing the record of previous presidents disprove Roosevelt’s opponents’ claims that he wastes public money?

Does this kind of rhetoric work well in making an argument?  Do you think the writer’s argument is stronger, in showcasing words used against other presidents, then if he or she just answered the claims in a plainer way?

Also in the pamphlet was a political cartoon from 1861 lampooning Abraham Lincoln for printing “greenbacks”, with a worker saying “These are the greediest fellows I ever saw. With all my exertions I cant satisfy their pocket, though I keep the Mill going day and night.”

Here are some questions:

How does this political cartoon strengthen the National Democratic Committee’s contention that Roosevelt is a good steward of the public’s money, and makes good fiscal policies?

What was the situation that caused Lincoln to print greenbacks?  Are the circumstances of Lincoln the same, or worse, for Roosevelt?

This pamphlet comes from the personal papers of Herman Wolf, a Connecticut political consultant who in his youth worked for the Roosevelt campaign.

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

The “Voice with a Smile” returns to her telephone switchboard

Posted on by
Reply

Mary Cullen Yuhas Anger and her niece Kay Cullen, visiting the reading room at Archives & Special Collections on Monday, February 13, 2012

In 1952 Mary Cullen, a 25-year-old telephone operator with the Southern New England Telephone Company, received the “Voice With a Smile” award, given to operators for superior public service and demeanor.  The award came with a distinctive white headset — Mary said allowed her to stand out and made her feel very special.

Mary Cullen, SNET operator and the “Voice with a Smile,” 1952

On Monday, February 13, 2012, the “Voice With a Smile,” now Mrs. Mary Cullen Yuhas Anger, visited Archives & Special Collections with her niece Kay Cullen to view photographs, documents and employee magazines in the Southern New England Telephone Company (SNET) Records in the archives.  Mrs. Anger reminisced about her happy days as an employee of SNET, from 1944 to 1956, and then off and on, on night shifts, when her children were young.

Mrs. Anger topped off her visit with the gracious gift of a dial pencil, a mechanical pencil with a metal ball at the end, which operators used to work the rotary dials (for efficiency as well as to preserve their manicures, she told us).

The Lyman Viaduct, a technological marvel

Posted on by
Reply

The Lyman Viaduct under construction, July 4, 1871

It’s hard to gauge just how high the Lyman Viaduct is until you click on the photograph to get a larger view and look closely at the bottom.  See the man and the horse (or maybe it’s a mule, it’s hard to tell)?  Then compare them to the enormity of the trestle, then under construction.  Amazing, isn’t it?
At 1100 feet long and 137 feet high, the Lyman Viaduct iron railroad trestle was built 1872-1873 to span the valley of Dickinson Creek near Colchester, Connecticut. Named after David Lyman, the man who built the New Haven, Middletown & Willimantic section of the Air Line Railroad, the trestle was a major link in a railroad line that was billed as the fastest route between Boston and New York City.
In 1912, as trains became heavier and the railroad became concerned about the stability of the trestle, the Lyman Viaduct was filled in with sand and gravel. It is now part of the Air Line State Park Trail, on the Rails-to-Trails network.  It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in August 1986.
The Lyman Viaduct is a technological marvel, showing the great lengths Americans went to to take advantage of the most powerful mode of transportation of the time.  By the early 1900s almost every town in Connecticut had a railroad line easily accessible, enabling travel among the towns and cities as well as across the nation.

December 2011 Item of the Month: The switchboard that launched the first public telephone company in the world

Posted on by
Reply

Blueprint for George Coy’s switchboard, 1878

On April 27, 1877, George Willard Coy attended a demonstration at Skiff’s Opera House in New Haven, Connecticut, of an exciting new invention — the telephone — given by inventor Alexander Graham Bell.   Coy, a Civil War veteran and manager of the New Haven office of the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company, was fascinated by the possibilities of this invention.  In November 1877 he was awarded a Bell telephone franchise for New Haven and Middlesex counties and spent the next two months getting partners and financial backing.  On January 28, 1878, the New Haven District Telephone Company, in a rented storefront office in the Boardman Building at the corner of Chapel and State Streets, opened for business with 21 subscribers, each of whom paid $1.50 per month for the service.  It was the first telephone exchange in the world.

Prior to this time the first telephones were used privately on lines that allowed allow two people on each end to communicate over very short distances.  George Coy invented the first switchboard, which, according to a writing done by the Southern New England Telephone Company (the successor to the New Haven District Telephone Company) “consisted of a wooden panel about three feet wide and two feet high, with a little shelf at its base on which the operator’s telephone rested when not in use.  Across the top were four circles of contacts which resembled clock dials, each contact connected to a subscriber’s wire.  In the center of each circle was a metal arm like the pointer of a clock, which could be connected with any one of the eight contact points…”  Apparently Coy had to improvise in constructing the switchboard by using wires from ladies’ bustles.

This blueprint is one of several Coy made after the initial installation of the switchboard, in an effort to patent the design.  More information about George W. Coy and his switchboard can be found in the records of the Southern New England Telephone Company, a collection that was donated to Archives & Special Collections in 2003, the 125th anniversary of the founding of the company and the creation of the switchboard.

E. Ingraham Company and war work, part 2 — a source for classroom instruction

Posted on by
Reply

The blog post on November 14 showed a photograph and document from the E. Ingraham Company Records.  Here are two more documents and some more questions.

Telegram from the War Department, Hartford Ordinance District, to E. Ingraham Company of Bristol, Connecticut, December 13, 1944

Letter from E. Ingraham Company president to employees, December 15, 1944

What work is the company doing that is so important to the war effort? How has the E. Ingraham Company responded to the command from the government to step up production?  Do you think Edward and Dudley Ingraham were fair to not allow Christmas parties at the company during work time?

These primary sources conform to the Connecticut Social Studies Curriculum Framework for High School students, particularly Strand 1.2 — significant events in local and Connecticut history and their connections to United States history, grade level expectation 15 – describe how major events in U.S. history affected Connecticut citizens.

Child labor laws and war work — a source for classroom instruction

Posted on by
1

Army/Navy E award presented to the E. Ingraham Company, June 16, 1944

The E. Ingraham Company of Bristol, Connecticut, was a maker of clocks and watches from its founding in 1831 by Elias Ingraham, to its demise in 1967.  It was run by descendents of Elias Ingraham for all but the last 15 years of its existence.

Letter to E. Ingraham Company from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1944

Use this photograph and the letter to create a narrative of what was happening at the E. Ingraham Company, and in the United States, at the time.  Some questions to ask include:

What was happening in the country in 1944?  What conditions would have necessitated the need for hiring girls at the company?  What kind of work were the workers doing that was so important to the government? 

More information and some more documents will come in a couple of days.  For now, use the documents, and your own knowledge of the circumstances of the time, to describe what is happening.  Let us know what you think by leaving us a comment!

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

Tariffville Dam on the Farmington River

Posted on by
Reply
Tariffville Dam on the Farmington River, ca. 1915

The last two posts of this week showed some photographs of Walter Atkin, an employee at the Tariffville Dam, who went fishing from an open window at the hydroelectric station.  Those photographs were just three of many interesting images of the dam that we find in the Hartford Electric Light Company Records, one of which includes this beautiful wide angled shot of the dam, taken circa 1915.

The  Tariffville Dam hydroelectric station was built in 1899 on the Farmington River in Simsbury, Connecticut, by the Hartford Electric Light Company.  It provided electricity to the Hartford area until at least August 1955, when it was destroyed by flooding caused by back to back hurricanes in August 1955.

The Man With the Fish — Here’s the scoop

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s the deal about the man with the fish. 

This gentleman is identified on the photograph as Walter Atkin who presumably worked at the Tariffville Dam hydroelectric station on the Farmington River in Simsbury, Connecticut.  The date of the photograph is 1948.  This photograph is from the Hartford Electric Light Company Records, a collection of business records of this company that we have here at the Dodd Research Center. 

The collection has these photos of Mr. Atkin fishing directly from a window in the power station, something I personally think is hilarious.  I wonder if his employers were aware that he was spending his time in this manner while on the job.  Hmmm…I wonder if my supervisors would approve my fishing in Mirror Lake during work time. 

Hey, it worked for Walter…

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

What’s With the Man With the Fish?

Posted on by
Reply

Who is this man?  What’s with the fish on a stick?  What’s the story behind this photograph?

You want to know, don’t you?  Well, I’m not going to tell you, not yet.  What I want is YOU to tell ME what you think is going on here. 

Here’s a challenge to our loyal blog readers.  Use the comments to give your best guess.  Where is this man?  What year do you think this photo is from?  And why in the world is he grinning from ear to ear at the fish? 

Make up a story about him if you want. 

I’ll give you more information on Wednesday.  In the meantime, I want to hear from you about what you think is going on with this photo.

Cheers!

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

June 2011 Item of the Month: Railroad Men and their Magnificent Machines

Posted on by
Reply

1881, Housatonic Railroad locomotive and crew

Charles Dickens, in his 1842 book American Notes, wrote about an excursion he took by train from Boston to Lowell, Massachusetts.  He describes his trip in this way: “[The train] whirls headlong…clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road…there – on, on, on – tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire, screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.”

Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Railroads came on the scene in the United States in the early 1830s and immediately took hold of the national psyche, changing concepts of speed and time and providing limitless possibilities of the movement of agricultural products, goods of industry, and people to all points across the country.  The railroad was the means that brought the Industrial Revolution to the United States, ushering in the modern world we know today.  To the people of the 19th century, the railroad was a dream, a miracle, a danger, and the most marvelous thing they had ever seen.

The Railroad History Archive has many thousands of photographs.  Most focus on locomotives and scenes of the New Haven Railroad, the predominant railroad line in southern New England from 1872 to 1968.  We have photographs of railroad stations and other structures, railroad yards, passenger cars and dining cars.  We have photographs of railroad bridges, railroad tunnels, and railroad trestles.

But few photographs are as evocative as the one above, where railroad men pose with the nation’s new obsession.

James Klar Photograph of the Old Saybrook switch tower

Posted on by
2

Old Saybrook, Connecticut, switch tower, on the New Haven Railroad. Photograph taken by James S. Klar, 1975.

James S. Klar spent his working life as a city planner, but his first love was photography. After he retired he indulged in his passion full-time, and received training in photography techniques. In 1975 he received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts to photograph 75 railroad stations in southern New England for an exhibition. This photograph of the Old Saybrook Interlocking, or switch, tower, was taken on June 10, 1975, for the exhibition.

James Klar died in 1985 and in 1990 his wife Marjorie donated the photographs from the exhibition to the Railroad History Archives. The photographs show exquisite details of old railroad stations and structures, many of them dilapidated.

The interlocking tower in Old Saybrook was built in 1912, for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. An interlocking, or switch, tower was an important feature for railroad safety. It allowed the tower operator to communicate with railroad personnel about train movements, and to control junction switches and signals with a bank of levers on the second floor. In the 1920s the mechanical interlocking was replaced by banks of electrical relays, which were replaced by pneumatic assists. By the 1970s changes in dispatching technology rendered the tower obsolete and it was closed. The tower was razed in June 1998.

This photograph of the switching levers on the second floor of the tower was taken in 1997 by Robert Brewster when it was recorded for a Historic American Buildings Survey, which you can find in the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection.