By CHRIS POWELL
Fifty-six years ago Alfred M. Bingham of Salem, an elderly liberal lawyer and author with a national reputation whose father had been a U.S. senator from Connecticut in the 1920s, sought the Democratic nomination for Congress from eastern Connecticut. Bingham didn’t get the nomination but unlike many candidates he tried to think seriously and say what he thought. The most notable thing he said was that he didn’t think the people of eastern Connecticut were happy that massive instruments of death kept being built in and sailing out of New London harbor.
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Back then liberals in Connecticut sometimes gave a second thought to their state’s economic dependence on the munitions industry. Of course without that industry the world might not have been saved from tyranny during the world wars, the Union might not have won the Civil War, and the American Revolution might have been lost. But maybe back then liberals, including Bingham, still remembered the remarkable lament President Dwight D. Eisenhower offered a few weeks after taking office in 1953. While Eisenhower was the foremost U.S. general of his time, he wouldn’t glorify the military business.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Eisenhower said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Leaving office eight years later Eisenhower warned more famously about the “military-industrial complex,” over which he had helped preside.
No second thoughts were expressed last week as Connecticut celebrated the U.S. Navy’s new $77 billion contract with the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics to build nine attack submarines and five ballistic missile submarines by 2038, largely at EB’s shipyards in Groton and Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Instead there were joy and even delirium, since the contract promises many years of prosperity and growth for southeastern Connecticut and redevelopment for its two impoverished cities, New London and Norwich.
Indeed, if Connecticut is not going to be chastened by such massive preparation for war, it at least should be chastened by what will have to be done, and fast, to get the submarines built here. EB has already hired 4,000 more employees so far this year and plans to hire another 12,000 by the end of next year. Where will they come from and where will they live?
Connecticut is notoriously deficient with housing, and together New London and Groton are reported to have increased their housing by only about 900 units in the last five years, an average of fewer than 200 per year. The new sub contract is being called a “signal” to housing developers about the opportunity awaiting them, but they don’t need a signal. A signal is needed by 20 or so municipal governments in the area, and if their usual zoning procedures are followed, southeastern Connecticut may require five years just to produce another 900 units when thousands more may be needed next year.
So state government should take charge not just of zoning in southeastern Connecticut but also local transportation, with commuter buses and even trains and ferries.
The increasing aggressiveness of China, a ruthless totalitarian power, may justify the expansion and modernization of the U.S. submarine force and may fairly suppress concerns about the diversion of resources from human needs. But second thoughts still may be in order for eastern Connecticut. For the indefinite future life in the region will be based on war materiel and casino gambling.
Better than nothing, perhaps, but the best that could be done? What if peace and good sense ever break out?
In any case, will anyone in authority in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut who is celebrating the submarine contract thank the people who most made this future possible — not just eastern Connecticut’s U.S. representative, Joe Courtney, a Democrat, but also President Trump and congressional Republicans?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 