The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The city sits beside a gentle curve in the Connecticut River with an air of complacency, ignoring its reflection in the water. The river means less to Hartford than it once did—much less than when the city’s founders, led by Thomas Hooker, came down from what is now Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1635 and settled on this western bank. Since then, the river has seen many changes. Steamers no longer ply between Hartford and New York. The river no longer freezes solidly from shore to shore, allowing skaters to waltz to Glastonbury and back again, as they did fifty years ago. Its waters, sullied by towns that have sprung up along its length from Long Island Sound to its headwaters in Canada, no longer lure great races of salmon as they once did. From the western slope of the city, there was once a Currier & Ives eye view of a New England river port. On these slopes, in the late eighteenth century, a group of intellectual artists known as “the Hartford wits” gathered in drawing rooms of Federalist houses. Here, in the nineteenth century, Charles Sigourney built a mansion where his wife, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the most prolific lady author of her day (over two thousand articles, more than fifty books) held literary salons.

  Today, the view of the river from these rises is blocked by banks of buildings, and the atmosphere in Hartford is somewhat less cerebral, somewhat more statistical. Hartford, since Mrs. Sigourney’s day, has been largely based upon the law of averages which the fifty-odd insurance companies with home offices in the city have used to build businesses with total assets close to twenty billion dollars. For over a hundred years, the insurance business, and nothing else, has set Hartford’s social tone.

  Residentially, Hartford—as is the case in most cities—has always taken to the hills, and Hartford’s hills range to the west and northwest. In Lydia Sigourney’s day, the best people built their houses on the first rise of hills, an area which is now virtually a part of the city proper. Soon the fashionable residences moved westward to the next rise in the terrain, along Forest and Woodland streets, which were the city’s finest streets until shortly after the First World War. As the city surged westward—the only way it had to go—so did fine houses, and mansions are hard to spot on Forest or Woodland now. The best people pushed higher, to the highest spot they could find and, in an ecstasy of extravagance, Prospect Avenue came to be.

  For many years, Prospect Avenue was Hartford’s ultimate street, climbing from south to north to a high hilltop studded with turrets. Beyond its shaded sidewalks, its manicured lawns, rhododendron-shrouded drives, and porte cocheres, Hartford’s noblest and best secured themselves. Society stratified itself along the streets leading up to Prospect Avenue. In great houses on Prospect and nearby streets lived Battersons (insurance), Beaches (insurance), Cooleys (banking, but many insurance-company directorships), Bulkeleys (insurance), Brainards (insurance, but often considered newcomers, since the Brainards married into the older Bulkeley family as recently as the 1870’s),* Goodwins (real estate, with numerous insurance connections via marriage to Beaches and Battersons, leading to the local observation that “the sons of Beaches always marry Battersons”), and other families who for years formed Hartford’s Old Guard.

  The view from Prospect Avenue was supremely satisfying as, from their tall, east-facing windows, the insurance families contemplated the city that had nourished them to greatness and, perhaps, considered greater days and statelier mansions to come. But today there is a strong body of opinion that Prospect Avenue may have been a mistake. In a way, it was a public statement that—despite the generous payments to widows and orphans, despite the care of the ailing and disabled—insurance was a very profitable business to those at the top. Viewed from below the hill, Prospect Avenue houses looked not only massive but aloof and disdainful as they poked their heads from among the trees. Prospect Avenue was not only the goal of the upstart, but a hated symbol of wealth and power to the left-behind. When Henry S. Beers was elected president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company in 1956, breaking the Bulkeley-Brainard family chain of leadership in that company, he was overheard to remark, “I guess this proves you don’t have to come from Prospect Avenue to be president of an insurance company.” Mr. Beers did not even come from Hartford, but from New Haven.

  Prospect Avenue added to the insurance industry’s public relations problems, for Hartford faces a sad fact: in most other cities, the insurance business lies somewhere near the bottom of the status ladder; the only person less welcome than an insurance salesman at a social gathering is an undertaker.

  Now Prospect Avenue is feeling the relentless push of the city westward. One by one the great houses are going, or are being put to other uses. Shingles on Prospect Avenue announce beauty salons and apartment houses. The great brick fortress where, not so many years ago, Mrs. John C. Wilson, widow of the president of Colt’s (firearms), liked to entertain visiting royalty, became the Seventh-day Adventist Church. A few Prospect Avenue houses still stand as they were, but the social goal of Hartford now lies in the next range of hills, in the suburb of West Hartford. The insurance executive may work in the city, buy his suits in Asylum Street, lunch at the sedate Hartford Club, but at day’s end he more than likely heads homeward out Farmington Avenue to West Hartford. On weekends he plays golf at the Hartford Golf Club, also in West Hartford.

  The suburb looks as if it had been built all at once. There is a shiny newness—new houses, new cars, new trees, new shrubbery—everywhere. Insurance men, no matter how successful, no longer believe in building massive houses, and modest, anonymous two-and-a-half-story frame Colonials are considered better for business. As a result, there is a considerable sameness to the landscape. Even on what are considered West Hartford’s best streets, such as those which sprout from Mountain Road, the houses are surprisingly small. Few contain more than ten rooms, and most only eight. They sit primly and prettily at the end of walks lighted with coach lamps, beside 20 by 40 foot flagstone terraces, with shutters painted green, gray, or chocolate brown, looking like so many New England tollhouse cookies with raisin-eyes for windows.

  Inside, the pattern of sameness continues—the cobbler’s-bench coffee table, the wing chair with the ruffled skirt, the iron trivets on the wall, the copper planter-lamp with the chintz shade, the ship in the bottle on the mantel. West Hartford automobiles are generally models of the lower-priced three. Station wagons are favored. The atmosphere of simplicity does not mean, however, that money is lacking. West Hartford likes to say that it is one of the richest communities of its size in America. The wife of an insurance executive said, “Goodness, when anyone dies around here, they print the size of his estate in the newspaper. I said to my husband the other day, “Don’t you dare die with less than a million dollars—I’d be so embarrassed!”

  West Hartford, being to a large extent a one-industry town, subjects its residents to some curious social restrictions. If one is in the insurance business, it is less important who one is “on the outside” than how far up one is in his respective company. A mere office manager, in other words—even though independently wealthy—would be ill-advised to buy a house on a street where insurance company vice presidents live. A man whose position indicates that he drive a Chevrolet would be most unwise to buy an Olds-mobile. The social—to say nothing of the professional—consequences of such an act would be extreme. A New York girl who married a young insurance man and moved to West Hartford was given, by her adoring parents, a sumptuous mink coat. Sadly, her husband explained to her the facts of insuranceland: she would never be able to wear that coat in West Hartford—not, at least, until he had advanced considerably in his job. The same strictures apply to the wearing of jewels though, as one young woman explains, “They tend to forgive a large diamond if it’s your engagement ring.” A West Hartford junior executive who is a sports car buff secretly bought himself an Aston-Martin DB6—he is not yet even in the category of Jaguar ownership. He is careful to drive his car only on lonely country roads, and at night. And when a West Hartford pair were entertaining out-of-town friends not long ago, they
ushered their friends into a secret rumpus room created in a corner of the basement. “But don’t tell any of our neighbors,” the couple cautioned. “We’re not supposed to have rumpus rooms yet.” Needless to say, there is a great deal of “duty” entertaining; certain invitations must be accepted without question; and one climbs socially as one is promoted.

  There is another attitude recognizable in West Hartford—and of which West Hartford is proud. That is Connecticut Yankeeism. A Connecticut Yankee, or so a Connecticut Yankee believes, is a special kind of Yankee. A Connecticut Yankee considers himself a little more successful than citizens of the other five New England states, a bit more socially conscious, a bit more sophisticated. His closest counterpart lives in Boston, but Connecticut Yankees believe that Bostonians have slipped a little, become a little lazy, while the Connecticut Yankee remains enterprising. A good example of the breed was Mr. Morgan Bulkeley Brainard. His son, Morgan, Jr., of the Aetna, recalls how vehemently his father insisted that he was “a Connecticut Yankee, a cut above the others.” In his business, it was often necessary for the elder Mr. Brainard to travel to New York and other cities outside New England. He was usually driven, and he liked to doze in the back seat. But he inevitably woke up with a start whenever his car crossed the Connecticut state line. “There was something foreign in the air.”

  Mr. Brainard, a Yale man (’00) like most proper Hartfordonians, was proud to have graduated from Hartford Public High School, and not from a New England prep school where, considering his family’s wealth and position, he would most certainly have been admitted. Like many New England businesses, the Hartford insurance business starts early in the morning—at eight o’clock. As an example to all his employees, Mr. Brainard was always at his desk at precisely eight-fifteen and, to show he possessed the common touch, worked in his shirtsleeves. (His son has followed Mr. Brainard’s example, but has been known to arrive as late as eight-twenty-five.) Though Mr. Brainard had a car and chauffeur, his practice was to take the bus to work, and many of the Aetna’s four thousand-plus home-office employees recall riding to work, seated, while their dignified president swung from a strap. For the homeward journey, Mr. Brainard preferred to walk, though the distance from his office to his home on Prospect Avenue was nearly three miles. On these walks, Mr. Brainard chose the left-hand side of the street so that his friends, driving by, would not feel obliged to stop and—even though they knew he did not want one—offer him a lift. Ritual and discipline, he used to insist, were vital ingredients of morality and good business. When Mr. Brainard was made president of Aetna Life, the company’s assets were a scant two hundred million dollars. When he died, the figure was well over the three billion mark.

  A Connecticut Yankee also was the late Mr. Brainard’s uncle, Morgan Gardner Bulkeley, the company’s third president and son of its founder. For eight years of his term as president, Mr. Bulkeley—mustachioed, spunky, and aristocratically outspoken—was also Hartford’s mayor and, for four more years—from 1888 to 1892—he was Governor of Connecticut. At the end of his first two-year term as Governor, he was not a candidate for reelection. Two candidates, Judge Luzon Morris, a Democrat and a political foe of Mr. Bulkeley’s, and General Samuel Merwin, a Republican, figured in a particularly close election. When the popular vote was counted, Judge Morris appeared to have won by exactly twenty-six votes, but the majority had occurred only because moderators in Bridgeport had thrown out one hundred and twenty-six Republican votes for Merwin. The Republicans, needless to say, insisted that those one hundred and twenty-six votes should not have been thrown out and, while controversy over the disputed votes mounted, Bulkeley was held over as Governor of the state. One morning, when the fight was at its fieriest, the state comptroller, a Democrat, ordered the lock changed on a door leading to an anteroom of the Governor’s office. When Governor Bulkeley arrived and found this passage to his office locked and barred against him, his action was swift and decisive. He called for a crowbar and, with it, proceeded personally to batter down the door. There seemed to be little point, after that morning, in arguing about who should be Governor. Both Morris and Merwin withdrew, and Morgan G. Bulkeley held the office for two more years.

  The Aetna’s executive suite is contained in an elegant penthouse surrounded by an improbable roof garden. In 1932, long after Governor Bulkeley’s death, the penthouse was filled with gloomy faces and gloomier predictions. The reason for this was the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the Presidency of the United States. One of the gloomiest faces in the office belonged to Charlie, a venerable Negro who, for years, had served as Governor Bulkeley’s office butler-valet. “I’m glad the Governor never lived to see this day,” Charlie kept repeating. And then suddenly, more emphatically, he said, “Why, if the Governor was alive this wouldn’t have happened. The Governor wouldn’t have allowed that man to get into the White House!”

  Another such Connecticut Yankee was James Goodwin Batterson, a stonecutter, some of whose stone is said to repose in the state capitol building. In the early 1860’s, Mr. Batterson had an idea, and he took it up with a certain James Bolter, a Hartford postman. Batterson’s notion was this: if Bolter would give Batterson two cents for each time he made his mail-carrying rounds, Batterson would guarantee that Bolter would not have an accident. If Bolter did have an accident, Batterson said, he would give Bolter a thousand dollars. Bolter liked the idea, and thus came the idea of accident insurance to America, and thus was born the multibillion-dollar Travelers Insurance Company which has enriched many succeeding generations of Battersons, if not Bolters.

  A Connecticut Yankee, by assimilation if not by birth, is Mrs. Henry S. Beers. Mr. and Mrs. Beers live in a small, unshowy Cape Cod house in Glastonbury with a view of the river and Rattlesnake Mountain. Mr. Beers has served on the Town Finance Committee, and Mrs. Beers never misses a town meeting. In her bedroom is a cluttered desk from which she handles her various duties for the Smith Alumnae Association. Also in her bedroom is her sewing machine. The Beers’s only servant is a part-time cleaning woman. For vacations, they usually hike in Maine, camping at night in a tent. When William Paynter, an executive of the Connecticut General Insurance Company, and his wife moved to Glastonbury, the first arrival at their door after the moving vans had left was Mrs. Beers, wife of the president of the competitive Aetna Life, bearing a neighborly cake she had baked herself.

  Hartford has the reputation of giving newcomers a chilly reception. But, says Mrs. Millard Bartels, wife of a Travelers executive and a native of Chicago, “It’s very easy to get ‘in’ in Hartford if you do things.” Mrs. Bartels, an attractive woman who is a meticulous housekeeper and the mother of three, does several. She is on the board of Gray Lodge (a home for teenage girls “who might otherwise go astray”), and also plans garden tours for the benefit of the Hartford Art School. She is on the Women’s Committee of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, on the Committee for the Children’s Museum, is active in Church work, spends an evening a week rolling bandages and, somehow or other, finds time to bowl regularly at the Hartford Golf Club. Other causes for which she and other West Hartford wives toil—and are urged to toil by husbands who feel that community endeavor is good for business and for the insurance “image”—include the Community Chest, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, the P.T.A., the hospitals, convalescent homes, and museums, plus the Hartford Symphony and Opera Association, the Foreign Policy Association, the League of Women Voters and, of course, the Junior League. “With so many things to do,” Mrs. Bartels says, “no new family should ever have any difficulty being taken into Society here.”

  There is, however, one circumstance which Mrs. Bartels and her friends may never have been in the position to notice. Insurance is a man’s business, and Hartford is a man’s town. Hartford men, no matter what their wives say—or how avidly their wives work for the community—make the social rules, one of the most implacable of which is the one which divides insurance company management people from the men who merely sell insurance. The H
artford Golf Club, for instance, is said not to want insurance salesmen as members. An insurance salesman, of course—because he works on commission—may make a great deal more money than a vice president, who gets a salary. This makes no difference. The insurance salesman and his wife will not be invited to the houses of those whose names begin with B. The salesmen have tried many tactics—including calling themselves “agents” and referring to their customers as “clients”—but to no avail. One salesman speaks grimly of “the smiles and handshakes and first names and slaps on the back” that he receives from company officers at sales meetings. “But,” he says, “when I meet these same men on the golf course, they look right through me.” Some insurance salesmen, in order to cross this social barrier, have gone so far as to take office jobs, or transfer to executive training squads—at less money.

  One change in insuranceland in the last twenty years is that fewer and fewer insurance company presidents come from “old Hartford” families. Nepotism, once so common, is rarer. Mr. Beers is not the only president who was born away from Prospect Avenue. Frazar B. Wilde of the Connecticut General is from Boston. J. Doyle DeWitt of the Travelers—a golfing companion of Dwight D. Eisenhower—was born in Sully, Iowa. But the newcomers adopt, with amazing ease, the prevailing Connecticut Yankee attitude. An example is Mrs. Charles Zimmerman, wife of the president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company. Opal Marie Zimmerman, whose husband was born in New York City, hails from Oklahoma herself and, though her tanned, smooth-skinned face and superlative figure make her assertion hard to credit, she insists she remembers “walking in the parade, waving a flag” when Oklahoma was admitted to statehood in 1907. Before coming to Hartford, Opal Marie was a successful dress designer in New York, and she continues to dress with a flair not typical of Hartford women.