Vocational Education, Work Culture, and the Children of Immigrants in 1930s Bridgeport

By Greenberg, Ivan

In 1917, the United States Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act mandating federal aid for vocational education. The law became an important catalyst for the expansion of vocational schooling throughout industrial America. While in 1918 approximately 122,000 students enrolled in vocational courses nationwide, within a decade student enrollment increased almost five-fold.1 The literature on vocational schooling generally stresses national developments and the ideological perspective of reformers, business, and organized labor. Early writers viewed vocational schooling as democratic reform designed to expand the educational system and to provide opportunities for the working class.2 Revisionist historians of a later period emphasized the function of these schools in aiding business to secure a trained, disciplined, and passive workforce.3 However, very little still is known about the local history of vocational education, especially the impact of vocational schooling on the student population and working-class culture. As Daniel T. Rodgers and David B. Tyack have asked, “Who enrolled in the new vocational education courses? From what backgrounds did they come? What kinds of vocational courses did they seek out in greatest number? How much of that demand was voluntary, and how much of it coerced?”4

This paper addresses some of these questions by focusing on vocational schooling in Bridgeport, Ct., during the 1930s. Bridgeport, a medium-sized city with a population of about 147,000 in 1930, was known as the “Industrial Capital of Connecticut.” The industrial sector included both large and small firms, employing about half the local workforce. While Bridgeport sometimes assumed the reputation of being a single industry city geared to munitions and arms production, especially during the two world wars, its industrial base was quite diverse as manufacturers produced some 5,000 different items. Overall, about 500 manufacturing establishments operated at mid-decade and the vast majority of these (89 percent) employed less than 100 workers. Only nineteen firms employed at least 500 workers. As the local city directory boasted, “There is probably no city in the United States that has a more diversified line of industries.”5 Vocational education in Bridgeport took place at what was named the State Trade School, a state- funded, free vocational high school. As we will see, the history of the school, the largest of eleven trade schools in Connecticut, provides insight into changes in craft work and craft culture, the role of business, the aspirations of working-class students, and the changing ethnic composition of the industrial workforce. Additionally, Bridgeport is an interesting setting because the Socialist Party, led by Jasper McLevy, dominated elected city government after 1933. The prominence of skilled workers in urban politics raised expectations that the working class could have a leading voice in local life as Socialists. I highlight the experience of the native-born children of the “New Immigrants,” a generation that came of age during the 1930s and dominated school attendance. In New England, this group totaled 38 percent of the population and exceeded 40 percent in such states as Connecticut and Rhode Island. Bridgeport’s second generation made up an impressive 45 percent of the city’s residents, and much of this group was under twentyfive.6 This “rising generation” faced changing industrial demands, which often led them to forsake immigrant family advice and spurn the artisan world of their parents in favor of organized school instruction.

The Bridgeport school was founded in 1910, a year after the Connecticut legislature became the nation’s first to subsidize free vocational high schools. Initially the school offered training in seven trades, but by the 1930s expanded its instruction to fifteen: auto-repair, auto-screw, carpentry, architectural drafting, dressmaking, electrical work, foundry work, machine trades, masonry, painting, paperhanging, wood pattern making, plumbing, composition and presswork printing, and welding.7 The expanding curriculum reflected national trends and was in keeping with vocational high school’s growing popularity. Whereas 5 percent of high school age students attended trade schools nationwide in 1930, some 16 percent attended at the end of the decade.8

Student interest in Bridgeport created long waiting lists to attend throughout the 1930s. For example, in 1938 more than 450 young people were wait-listed and hundreds of others attended part- time evening classes, while about 730 students enrolled full-time for two-to-four years of study.9 According to the Federal Writers’ Project in Connecticut, approximately two-thirds of the students at the State Trade School were the children of a wide range of eastern or southern European immigrants. The diversity of European backgrounds is striking, in many respects mirroring Bridgeport’s ethnic population as a whole. In 1938, the student body was 16 percent Italian-American, 13 percent Polish-American, 11 percent Slovak-American, 8 percent Russian/Ukrainian-American, 7 percent Hungarian-American, and 2 percent Lithuanian-American.10

While old-stock American boys often dominated trade schools during the Progressive era, their representation declined during the interwar years. Between 1910 and 1920, students of Anglo-Saxon descent made up a significant 41 percent of Bridgeport graduates, even though this ethnic group comprised less than 15 percent of the city population. Their representation at the school fell dramatically thereafter. Between 1920 and 1930, it dropped to 20 percent of school graduates, but rose modestly to 24 percent for 1930 to 1937. Meanwhile, the Italian group in Bridgeport made the greatest attendance gains. Their proportion of graduates rose from 12 percent between 1910 and 1920, to 24 percent between 1920 and 1930, and leveled off at 18 percent between 1930 and 1937.

Not surprisingly the ethnic inclusiveness of the student body did not cross gender or race lines. The school perpetuated characteristics of white male dominance culturally and physically. Women were allowed to study only traditional women’s trades, such as dressmaking and millinery. Their classes were held in a separate building. This pattern of job restriction and sex segregation was common in vocational education in this period. The city’s black population was small-about 2 percent in 1930-and very few African- Americans graduated between 1910 and 1937.11 Did any women or blacks protest this underrepresentation? There is no evidence of such protest in existing local sources. What we do find is that male white ethnics often held anti-black views and believed that white women deserved only a secondary place in the paid labor force. In this sense, the school’s policy reflected contemporary biases. It is notable that for European immigrants at the bottom of the economy, anti-black attitudes often served to deflect the criticism they faced from the middle and upper classes.12

Scholars often note that vocational education has little bearing on one’s ability to secure employment in a skilled occupation. The argument goes that many trade school graduates are forced to find work outside the field of their training.13 Of course, the restricted labor market during the Depression heightened competition for jobs. But how to explain the influx of the second generation into the trade school? While large manufacturing firms in Bridgeport and throughout New England required new hires to secure a secondary education, examination of local evidence reveals the degree to which firms favored those with trade school experience.14 School officials and local government leaders adopted the position that vocational schooling provided a critical way for young workers to find skilled work. Certainly there appears to be truth to these claims, at least according to the surprisingly high placement statistics provided by several Connecticut schools. The Bridgeport school claimed that their placement of graduates in skilled work never fell below 85 percent during the 1930s. The Hartford Trade School boasted a 96 percent placement rate between 1930 and 1935. In nearby New Britain, trade school officials said that 95 percent of their graduates found skilled employment at mid-decade, and approximately 87 percent of all Connecticut high school trade graduates in 1938 reportedly secured skilled work.15

The second generation also turned to trade schools because, contrary to what is typically assumed, their own narratives suggest that immigrant parents played a diminishing role in their skills training and in the choice of an occupation. While much scholarship depicts the work lives of first and second-generation immigrants as interdependent as families relied on kin to learn skills and to pool wages,16 I find that both generations during the 1930s readily acknowledged that their work worlds were different and that the second generation needed to learn new trades independently from their parents. Immigrant parents granted their children such autonomy even though this weakened the strength of immigrant family culture. Interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project in Connecticut reveal that the immigrant generation offered less resistance than we might suppose toward the second generation’s craft choices, and conversely, that the second generation did not expect to depend on their parents in learning craft work. Overall, the Connecticut Writers’ Project collected about 200 “life histories” based on extensive oral interviews. Known as the Ethnic Group Survey, it detailed immigrant life in four cities (Bridgeport, New Brtain, Hartford and New Haven). The life histories are an extraordinary source: significantly, both the interviewers and interviewees were drawn from the local community and record the views and beliefs of ordinary people which otherwise would be lost. As historian Laura Anker notes, ” . . . fieldworkers walked the streets of Connecticut neighborhoods, their own communities, knocking on doors and talking to people. Since most of the interviewers were from the working or low middle classes, their contacts and networks were to immigrant working-class families.”17 A substantial portion of the interviews concerned working lives: the impact of machinery in industry; unions; networks used to secure employment; and the changing nature of craft work, including the role of vocational schools.

In one case, a Polish-American worker explained that his mother deferred to his judgment in choosing a trade. The parent had selected the trade for her first son, but realized that her own judgment was inadequate when he later decided to work in a different occupation. As Frank Chop said,

When we were growing older, we used to talk to my mother about what was best to learn. She said she didn’t know much about what the modern kids wanted to learn, so in other words she was willing to listen to what we had to say. We gave our ideas and she agreed with us that the best line is the mechanic line. She knows now that she made a mistake with my brother Stanley when she had him learn the carpenter trade, because now he’s working in the mechanic line and he likes it better.18

Henry Oleski, a twenty-four year old Polish-American welder, said his friends picked out their own trades and “their families had nothing to say about it.” He emphasized the considerable autonomy of his generation. “In my experience of being with Polish people I find that the young are choosing their own trades. At one time the parents did the choosing for them. I think the reason is that the young people know what trades are better for a good future.”19 The experience of Slovak-American John D. further underscores changes in craft work and craft culture. He grew up in the mid-1920s and secured his first job in a textile factory. “The first thing I did when I got out of [grammar] school was to get a job, any old job,” he said. “I work from the bottom up.” Schooling was not valued in his family because of the struggle for subsistence. “The only thing on the minds of the kids was to get out of school and go to work. The reason for that was that the parents figured the main thing was for the family to earn money and they didn’t waste time in having kids learn a trade.” His parents had a say in his work choices, which he said was the exception among his younger second-generation peers. “Once the Slovaks were trying to teach their children to learn on the Old Country style. That was the same with the trades and habits. But now the old people are taking a back seat and they’re letting the kids judge for themselves. I don’t think that the old people have much to say, and all my friends say the same thing.”20

A Polish resident, identified only as H.S., scorned his father’s bakery business to go to the trade school. “I didn’t like the bakery business, so my father let me go to the trade school and I took up machinist work. The only thing which bothers my father is that there will be no one to take over the bakery when he retires or dies. He wanted one of us [four children] to be a baker, but none of us liked the business. He used to tell us that in the old country it was an honor to be a baker.” The conflict between father and son was commented on by an Italian mason, who emigrated from Italy in 1915 and saw few of the younger generation learning his trade. The use of concrete in place of stone rendered his trade less useful, C. Guerra told an interviewer. “Stone is cheaper like concrete, but they build from concrete just the same. That’s why people don’t care to learn trade like this no more. If they learn something, they don’t learn mason because there’s no chance for the mason.” New machinery also undercut his skill. “Before, mason make foundations by hands-now machine makes with one man what takes before 15 men.” As for the younger generation, “Kids now, in this country, be too fresh and don’t learn nothing. When they want to learn something, they go to the trade school and they don’t learn nothing from the masters.”21

Immigrant artisans often worked as cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, iron makers, barbers, tailors, stonecutters, and weavers- crafts they often practiced in the Old World. By contrast, their sons learned such new trades as plumbing, auto-repair, and electrical work. These were the most popular non-factory trades at the Bridgeport school.22 And the young did not identify these new trades as ethnic enclaves. Instead, as John D. said, “The kids have learned to follow things along the American style. . . . It’s no use for the Italians to learn the shoemaker business and jobs like that because there’s no use in those trades anymore . . . You find that Italian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainians and even the Irish take up the same trade.”23

That the trade school taught such new trades as plumbing, auto- repair and electrical work reflected the interwar expansion of the consumer and home markets. The widespread use of cars after 1920 among the upper and middle classes generated a demand for auto mechanics. The use of electricity and electrical devices necessitated more skilled workers trained as electricians. The need for plumbers reflects the increase in private bathrooms in American homes.24 Moreover, while many immigrant artisans were self- employed, the trade school encouraged the second generation to work on a wage-basis. This emphasis reflected changes in the labor market. The number of workers employed in “independent hand trades” declined by more than 50 percent between 1910 and 1930. Nationally, a mere 356,888 jobs still existed in 1930, and more than one-half were being done by women in the semiskilled dressmaking and millinery trades. The independent handicraft worker was graying: their median age in 1930 was a high forty-five years. The Depression did not make the life of an independent artisan any easier, and few young workers tried to establish their own artisan business during the hard times.25

Did students seek training in order to stay out of the factory? No such pattern occurred. Instead, they chose to study occupations that offered the best employment prospects in the local economy. Between 1930 and 1935 an equal number learned the non-factory trades (plumbing, auto-repair and electrical work) as learned skilled factory trades. After 1935 students responded to the need for skilled workers in the factories. A shortage of machinists especially was acute. “With factories everywhere expressing a demand for skilled workman,” the Bridgeport Post reported, “the machine shop at the school now boasts more students than any other department, and there still are 181 applicants on the waiting list . . . Apparently, the prestige of the white collar is wilted and worn.”26

The case of the plumber reveals the shaping of a trade school craft elite. First, their wages were relatively high. The average Bridgeport plumber earned an hourly wage of $1.30 to $1.40 in 1938, more than three times the wage of the semiskilled factory operative and twice the wage of the skilled factory worker. The plumber’s training lasted from three to five years and the knowledge requirements increased as housing and sanitary codes became stricter. By the late 1930s only the very well-qualified were able to do the work. Codes and state standards became more demanding and new materials were used. “Sanitation and sewerage have grown to complex proportions and demand a technical knowledge which is very extensive.”27

Did the children of both skilled and nonskilled workers have access? Overall, the backgrounds of students and their choice of work training suggests that in important ways the working class reproduced itself: Many children of immigrant workers also became workers, although the types of jobs changed. My analysis of the family backgrounds of Bridgeport trade school graduates indicates that 73 percent of the fathers’ were skilled or low white-collar. Little difference is found in the background of students who studied factory instead of non-factory trades. Skilled family backgrounds exceeded 85 percent among students in autorepair and tool and die making. However, the children of nonskilled parents were evenly distributed with others in plumbing and machinist training.28

The emphasis of revisionist scholarship concerning business support for vocational schooling during the Progressive era cannot be discounted. When we turn to the 1930s, we also find that Bridgeport firms had close ties to the trade school and helped design the school curriculum. This relationship was widely acknowledged in the community. According to the Bridgeport Post, “State trade school graduates are acceptable to business and industry for many reasons, none the least of which is that the trade school courses have the approval of local businessmen and industrialists, and which, in many cases, have been specifically requested by them.” Alfred V. Bodine, a leading Bridgeport industrialist and former head of the Chamber of Commerce, advocated trade school expansion in 1939, explaining, “I have employed many high school graduates. On the whole they are not suited for industrial work and they find it hard to orientate themselves.” However, trade school graduates “proved highly satisfactory” because they were better adjusted to industrial life.30 Even school hours and lessons were structured to resemble the regular work experience, with 90 percent of school time devoted to hands on, practiced trade instruction. Daytime instruction was for fifty weeks each year, and lasted eight hours on the weekdays and four hours on Saturday. The students were required to “punch the clock” daily to record attendance, accustoming them to factory procedures.31 The school also taught business values by encouraging second-generation students to view craft work as an individual “career” and to pursue goals of individual “success.” John D. noticed that “kids are trained in the schools to pick out ahead of time what trades are best to follow and they read how this guy made a success or how that guy made a success.” In this, the schools used professional counselors who replaced parents as a source of vocational guidance. “Now they give you tests to find out what kind of work is best to take up . . . Nowadays kids have their own ideas and they don’t mind what the parents say because they know that any advice that they need they could get from somebody in school.”32

Guidance counselors exemplify the intervention of American “experts” into working-class life. Counselors wielded considerable power, using standardized aptitude tests and subjective character analyses to judge an individual’s liabilities and assets, and to determine what they believed were the proper work choices for the students. If in theory vocational counseling was a democratic process of “self-guidance,” it is hard to imagine that it functioned in this manner in practice. “If there is any question in [the student's] mind as to the career he plans to pursue,” the Bridgeport Post reported, “it is usually dissipated after he has been tested and interviewed by three vocational counselors, who ascertain his interests and ambitions, discuss his future with him and test his aptitude for the trade he has chosen. . . . By the time he is ready for class work, he usually has his future career quite definitely in mind.”33

Management used vocational guidance to help reduce the level of labor turnover. Many feared that working-class job-hopping and drifting would stir social unrest and pose a threat to the social order. In addition, when workers voluntarily quit or were discharged, employers lost whatever costs were incurred in hiring and training. Guidance ideology, with the stress on individual success and careers, echoed capitalist doctrine in an era in which bottom-up social movements had widespread popularity. Arguably, while business used the school to train workers with specific skills and to wage an ideological battle, young workers were not passive recipients of business prerogatives. They attended because they had few other options, realizing that a regular secondary school diploma did not go very far in securing work in an industrial city during the Depression. Free trade schools provided an affordable alternative. There is no reason to assume that attending a trade school meant that workers shared the same values or goals as manufacturers. During the Depression, they used the schools as much as the schools used them. Indeed, the McLevy Administration encouraged vocational schooling by accommodating its expansion in new facilities as the decade closed. Socialist city officials spoke at graduation ceremonies and viewed the school as integral to industrial and civic progress. The school’s motto quoted Benjamin Franklin, “He that hath a trade hath an estate” and was popularly understood to mean, “A fellow with a trade is pretty sure of being able to land a job and hold it,” the Bridgeport Post reported. That Socialist City Clerk Fred Schwarzkopf served as vice-president of the school’s alumni association further nurtured these ideas among the city’s working class.34

Second-generation workers wanted jobs that were “interesting” to them. Mere survival, as a contributor to the family economy, was not satisfactory by itself. Yet, few thought they would become wealthy or work at a professional occupation; it is unusual to find such goals among working-class children in this period. Nor did many associate the idea of success with reaching middle-class status. Instead, being a success meant, for example, becoming a skilled auto mechanic with a thorough knowledge of the car business. A skilled factory job was equally as desirable. A machinist, for example, was valued because of his versatility, with the skill to assemble, install, operate, repair and maintain several types of machinery with the aid of drawings. A good job offered a steady income, a workplace that did not jeopardize one’s health, and provided ample means to save money to buy a home, a primary goal of many white ethnic families. “Why so many ‘white collars’?” the Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service asked in a 1939 pamphlet, What Shall I Be?. They instructed young workers to pursue blue-collar jobs. “The earnings of many ‘white-collar’ workers are less than those wearing overalls and a work-shirt . . . Many who have worked at both claim that of the two divisions of labor, manual labor is often more interesting and less monotonous.”35

The trade school was part of the changing working-class experience in Bridgeport. We have seen that students did not try to avoid factory labor and set themselves apart from the working-class majority. The school did not perpetuate an exclusive skilled stratum. In addition, second-generation culture was a synthesis of many values-ethnic, multiethnic, and American. Even the cultural idea of individual success was a contested construction: American teachers and guidance counselors taught one version; ethnic families taught another version. The broader working-class politics of the 1930s shaped by unions and radicals voiced yet another version. The Socialists in power emphasized collective goals, a coming together of working people. Yet, one could think in individual terms-my individual right to a job; my individual right to make a living wage- and still embrace collectivist social movements. This was possible in the 1930s, indeed it was a defining characteristic of the decade.

Certainly Bridgeport’s vocational schooling did not seem to steer workers away from a class-based identity. The school’s cosmopolitan character similarly encouraged young workers to look beyond their ethnic enclave, developing friendships and solidarity with other white ethnics which later might promote cooperation in unions or in politics. I would argue that in the 1930s, at least, a trade school education did not deter union allegiances despite the business values taught. While one view holds that trade schools may become centers of anti-union sentiment, especially if privately owned,36 in this case union and left-wing politics were strong enough to provide an alternative. The McLevy Administration, dominated by skilled workers and promoting a class-based New Deal,37 offered a democratic representation of success for the working class. Widespread worker participation energized the traditionally disenfranchised. As urban politics became more inclusive and democratic, the second generation clamored for decent jobs, turning to vocational schooling which they learned on their own terms. Of course, there is a difference between trade union education which emphasizes the study of workplace inequities and injustice and the more narrowly focused skill-based training taught at the State Trade School. Nonetheless, we know that several graduates emerged as prominent leaders of the new industrial unions during the early rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). For example, the president of Local 258 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), who served as the head of the CIO Industrial Union Council, graduated from the trade school in 1934.38

In sum, second-generation tradesmen inhabited a new workers’ world and adapted to changing industrial demands by enrolling in the trade school. The school enjoyed increased popularity during the 1930s and white ethnic families recognized, as a Slovak barber said, “Now that the times have changed, the type of trades have changed too.” While family work traditions were disrupted by trade school instruction, it was hoped, at least, that “most of the young fellows are learning some trade that is worth something for the future.”39

In Bridgeport, Ct., a medium-sized city known as the “Industrial Capital of Connecticut,” public vocational education enjoyed increased popularity among young workers during the 1930s. At the State Trade School, the largest of eleven trade schools in the state, the children of the “New Immigrants” dominated attendance. This rising generation of young workers faced changing industrial demands, which often led them to forsake immigrant family advice and spurn the artisan world of their parents in favor of organized school instruction. According to interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project, students did not associate particular trades with an ethnic enclave. While the school taught such business values as individual success and careers, and local firms helped to shape the curriculum, the student’s own working-class culture was a synthesis of many influences. Unions and Left politics played a significant role in local life, with skilled workers running as Socialists dominating elected Bridgeport government after 1933 led by Mayor Jasper McLevy.

ENDNOTES

1. Melvin L. Barlow, History of Industrial Education in the United States (Peoria, 1967), 119, 311.

2. See, for example, Charles Prosser and Charles Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy (New York, 1925) and Charles A. Bennett, A History of Manual and Industrial Education, 1870-1917 (Peoria, 1937). 3. Paul Violas, The Training of an Urban Working Class: A History of Twentieth Century American Education (Chicago, 1978); Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, 1972); David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (New York, 1979); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York, 1976); and David John Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Philadelphia, 1985). See also Harvey Kantor, “Work, Education and Vocational Reform: The Ideological Origins of Vocational Education, 1890-1920,” American Journal of Education 94 (August 1986): 401-426.

4. Daniel T. Rodgers and David B. Tyack, “Work, Youth, and Schooling: Mapping Critical Research Areas,” in Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education, eds. Kantor and David Tyack (Stanford, 1982), 284.

5. Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce, The Book of Bridgeport, 1931, 44; Elsie Nicolas Dannenberg, The Story of Bridgeport (Bridgeport, 1936), 148-149; City Directory 1933, 10.

6. I discuss the second-generation experience at length in “Class Culture and Generational Change: Immigrant Families in Two Connecticut Industrial Cities During the 1930s,” Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1990.

7. Connecticut State Board of Education, Trade Education in Connecticut (New Britain, 1915); Vocational Education in Connecticut, 1932-1937 Report, 28.

8. Alfred Kahler, Education for an Industrial Age (Ithaca, 1946), 66.

9. The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2,1938, March 2, 1937.

10. David Rodnick and Samuel Koenig, “Ethnic Factors in Connecticut Life: A Survey of Social, Economic and Cultural Characteristics of the Connecticut Population” (unpublished manuscript, 1938), chapter 6, after p. 3. Rodnick and Koenig directed the Federal Writers’ Project, Connecticut Ethnic Group Survey.

11. Rodnick and Koenig, “Ethnic Factors,” The Bridgeport Post, Sept. 26, 1930, Oct. 27, 1930; Trade Education in Connecticut; Marvin Lazerson and W. Norton Grubb, eds., American Education and Vocationalism: A Documentary History (New York, 1974), 4041, 114- 115; Geraldine Joncich Clifford, ” ‘Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse”: Educating Women for Work,” in Work, Youth, and Schooling, 240-242. See also Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, 1997).

12. Greenberg, “Class Culture and Generational Change,” 75-78; Bruce M. Stave and John F Sutherland with Aldo Salerno, From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America (Hanover, 1994), 221-232, 250; David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: 1994), 192-193.

13. See, for example, Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (Cambridge, 1973), 138-141; and Grubb and Lazerson, Broken Promises: How Americans Fail Their Children (Chicago, 1986), 166.

14. Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service, Cultural and Educational Opportunities in Bridgeport (Bridgeport, 1939), 35-45; Office of Education, Civilian Conservation Corps, Qualifications for Beginning Workers in New England Industry (Boston, 1936), 82.

15. Connecticut State Employment Service, Youth in Search of Jobs! (Hartford, 1935), 11-12; The Bridgeport Telegram, March 15, 1939; The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2, 1938; and The New Britain Herald, Nov. 11, 1936.

16. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1920 (Ithaca, 1977); John Bodnar, Michael Weber, and Roger Simon, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh 1900-1960 (Urbana, 1982); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985); Ewa Morawska, For Bread With Butter: The Life- Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890- 1940 (Cambridge, 1985). Stephan Lassonde emphasizes second- generation resistance to the family economy in Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870-1940 (New Haven, 2005).

17. Laura Anker, “Immigrant Voices from the Federal Writers Project: The Connecticut Ethnic Survey, 1937-1940,” in James Gilbert, Amy Gilman, Donald M. Scott, and Joan W. Scott, eds., The Mythmoking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture (Belmont, 1993), 272, 277.

18. Frank Chop interview, box 25, Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers’ Project, Connecticut Ethnic Group Survey, at the Historical Manuscripts and Archives, University of Connecticut, Storrs.

19. Henry Oleski interview, box 25, WPA.

20. John D. interview, box 18, WPA.

21. Quoted in Stave and Sutherland, From the Old Country, 62-63, 82-83.

22. From 1932 through 1935,58 students graduated in auto-repair, 52 in electrical work, 36 in plumbing, 30 in carpentry, 7 in painting, and 13 in masonry. Fewer students studied such “old” trades as painting and carpentry because of the high level of unemployment in building construction during the Depression. In 1934, painters and carpenters formed the two largest urban unemployed groups in the nation. Building trades workers in Bridgeport made up 19 percent of those on relief, even though they were only 6.5 percent of the city’s gainful workers. The Bridgeport Post, June 27, 1932, June 30, 1933, Jan. 23, 1934, and June 25, 1935; Works Progress Administration, Urban Workers on Relief (Washington, 1936), 36, 93, 124.

23. John D. interview, op cit. (Emphasis added.)

24. See, for example, James J. Fink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, 1988). By 1929, about 85 percent of non-farm American homes were wired for electricity, up from only 8 percent in 1907, and by 1940 electric motors produced about 90 percent of total industrial horsepower, compared to only 55 percent in 1919. Richard B. DuBoff, “The Introduction of Electric Power in American Manufacturing,” Economic History Review (Dec. 1967): 515; John G. Clark, Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900- 1946 (Urbana, 1987), 86.

25. Judith Smith finds that in 1915 almost one-fifth of immigrants in the Federal Hill Italian neighborhood in Providence were self-employed artisans but by the 1930s, “No longer were most children assuming occupations arranged for them by their parents.” Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940 (Albany, 1985), 41-42, 66. In 1934, the U. S. Office of Education reported: “So rapid and extensive are the changes in occupations and the corresponding changes in the equipment workers needed, that the procession of demands on them seems to be continually passing by while they stand still … The only agency we know, which can help them keep up to date with the occupational equipment in skill and knowledge they need, is some form of vocational training.” U. S. Department of Interior, Office of Education, Vocational Education and Changing Conditions (Washington, 1934), 8. Statistics on independent trades are found in W. S. Woytinsky, Labor in the United States: Basic Statistics for Social Security (Washington, 1939), 73, 241, 256, 309.

26. The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2, 1938.

27. Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service, The Plumber (Bridgeport, 1939), 2-4.

28. Data cover graduates from 1932 through 1935 in four trades (plumbing, machinist, auto-repair and tool and die making). Fathers’ occupations are determined from listings in the 1937 Bridgeport City Directory. I use the 1940 Census classification of skilled and nonskilled occupations, which places buffers and polishers in the nonskilled category. An additional note is in order about the difficulty of compiling these statistics. About 20 percent of the students (45 of 172) do not appear in the 1937 Directory. The names of an additional 13 percent (28 of 172) are unclear, usually because the Directory lists two individuals with the same name. So 99 students can be identified in the Directory. Of these, the occupations of their fathers is available in 48 percent (48 of 99) of the cases. All in all, then, we have data on about 20 percent (48 of 172) of the students. The Bridgeport Post, June 27, 1932, June 30, 1933, Jan. 23, 1934, and June 25, 1935; Margo Anderson Conk, The United States Census and Labor Force Change: A History of Occupational Statistics (Ann Arbor, 1980), 39-40.

29. Kantor, “Work, Education and Vocational Reform,” 404-408; Hogan, Class and Reform, 163-164; Nasaw, Schooled to Order, 122- 129, 149-154.

30. Alfred V. Bodine, quoted in the The Bridgeport Telegram, March 15, 1939.

31. The trade school schedule was much more demanding than the regular public school, which was typically in session for a twenty- five hour week. The regular public high school did not hold class on Saturday and their vacation allotment of eight weeks was significantly greater than the trade school’s two weeks. Vocational Education in Connecticut, 1932-1937 Report, 39; Kahler, Education for an Industrial Age, 80-83; Connecticut Education Department, Connecticut State Trade Schools, (Hartford, 1941); The Bridgeport Post, July 7, 1935. See also Hogan, Class and Reform, 169.

32. John D. interview, op cit.

33. Job counseling spread in regular public high schools as working-class attendance soared. In 1937, a survey of schools in 905 cities found that a majority (61.5 percent) employed part-time employment personnel, although only 2 percent employed full-time counselors. State employment offices also initiated vocational guidance programs. Connecticut officials “tested” approximately 5,255 young workers in 1939, including about 1,200 from Bridgeport. The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2,1938; Howard M. Bell, Matching Youth With Jobs: A Study of Occupational Adjustment (Washington, 1940), 72; Connecticut Department of Labor and Factory Inspection, 1938- 1940 Report, 121-122. See also Hogan, Class and Reform, 183-184; and Harvey Kantor, Learning to Earn: School, work, and Vocational Reform in California, 1880-1930 (Madison, 1988), 146-166. 34. The Bridgeport Post, June 26, 1935, Jan. 17,1936, June 23,1937, and Oct. 2, 1938.

35. Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service, What Shall I Be? (Bridgeport, 1939),6.

36. See the discussion by Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: 1985), 150-177.

37. Greenberg, “Class Culture and Generational Change”; Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915-1936 (Urbana, 2001).

38. Greenberg, “Class Culture and Generational Change,” 223. The UE leaders included Henry Johnson, Andre Maye, John Doelling and Fred Robertson.

39. Mr. Voytek interview, box 18, WPA. His son attended the trade school.

By Ivan Greenberg Independent Scholar

New York, NY

Copyright Peter N. Stearns Fall 2007

(c) 2007 Journal of Social History. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.