The Connecticut River--William M. Citron's Contribution

CONNECTICUT RIVER: A natural resource of immense significance to the region, subject to spring flooding, the Connecticut River held an abiding fascination for William Citron. He grew up on its banks in Middletown and formed an early attachment to the river and an interest in its regulation for the public good. The Connecticut River flows from the Canadian border in New Hampshire 410 miles through Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut to Long Island Sound, dropping 2200 feet from its upper reaches to the ocean. The development of water power led to the industrialization of such cities as Holyoke and Springfield, Massachusetts. The Connecticut's navigability to Hartford made that city and Middletown important seaports from colonial times, with the quarries in Portland, across from Middletown, producing the brownstone for the famous apartment buildings of New York's post-Civil War years. [See Evan Hill, , with photographs by William F. Stekl, introduction by Roger Tory Peterson, and foreword by Abraham Ribicoff. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972.)]

SOURCES OF POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY: Private development of power on the Connecticut River was the rule. Federal action in the movement for the regulation of utilities or the direct development of public power was resisted under the cloak of states rights. The issue of flood control was also important in the political life of these states, especially Connecticut, and individual political figures like Citron were drawn into unending disputes about numerous imponderables. One careful student of the subject concluded that the disputes, as they took shape, reflected the political configurations and moral attitudes of the major contesting interest groups in the era of Franklin Roosevelt. The question of federal-state conflict in the Connecticut Valley is a microcosm of the political struggles of the period. [Leuchtenburg, , p. 1]

NATURAL DISASTERS IN THE CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY. Politics may not explain the time of acts of God but natural disasters do have political consequences. Three such devastations visited the Connecticut Valley between 1927 and 1938, years coinciding with Citron's emerging prominence, as follows:

(1) The New England flood of November 1927 resulted from a collision of a cold, western stormbank with moist southern winds. Torrential rain fell over all of Vermont, and western Massachusetts and Connecticut, November 2-4, followed by near-zero temperatures the following week. The resulting flood left thousands homeless, took hundreds of lives, destroyed numerous bridges, and aroused great citizen interest in flood control needs. In much of the Connecticut Valley, the floodwaters reached their greatest height in three centuries. The November 1927 flood was incomparably more destructive than any previous flood in the history of New England. [Leuchtenburg, p. 29.] The chief response to the 1927 disaster was to ignore interstate action and to urge that private power companies develop a system of storage reservoirs for peaks on the river. The years passed with insufficient action to achieve a bare minimum of flood protection. But as Leuchtenburg points out, a flood of the magnitude of 1927 was not to be expected for another century.

(2) The Connecticut River Valley was flooded even more severely than 1927 between March 12 and 26, 1936. Industrial life came to a stand-still. By March 22 Hartford was in a virtual state of siege. [Leuchtenburg, p. 47] There was devastation from northern Vermont to Long Island Sound. The flood was a major disaster for the Connecticut Valley, by far the worst in memory . . . It cost at least sixty million dollars at a time when the valley was only slowly recovering from the great depression. The New England floods took twenty-four lives and left 77,000 homeless. [Leuchtenburg, p. 48.] Previously buried, Citron's August 1935 proposal, H.J. Res. 377, to enable the drafting of interstate compacts, was revived in April 1936.

(3) On September 21, 1938, following four days of rain, a tropical hurricane of major dimensions struck New England and left devastation that clearly surpassed that wrought by the great floods of 1927 and 1936. The storm's center hit just west of New Haven and passed up the Connecticut River Valley to Canada, and yet counter-cyclonical winds of 110 miles an hour were felt in Providence and Boston. The hurricane struck when the tides were higher than normal. The wind blew down and damaged 250 million trees, including some 20 percent of the maple sugar trees of Vermont. Hundreds of trees on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown were felled. Damage to crops of all kinds was extreme, 488 lives were lost and property damage was incalculable throughout New England. One assessment, possibly excessive but worth bearing in mind was this: The property damage was the greatest in any disaster in American History, worse than the San Francisco earthquake or the Chicago fire. [Leuchtenburg, p. 113.]

CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY FLOOD CONTROL COMPACT

Among the means explored to govern problems created by the untamed Connecticut River was the interstate compact idea suggested in the United States Constitution, Article I, section 10, providing: No State shall, without the consent of Congress . . . enter into any agreement or compact with another State. After much study, Mr. Citron on August 13, 1935, introduced a Joint Resolution to enable the six New England States and New York, or any two or more of them, to negotiate and enter into agreements or compacts for conserving and regulating the flow, lessening flood damage, making other public improvements on any rivers or streams whose drainage basins lie within any two or more of the said States. (H. J. Res. 377, 74th Cong., 1st sess.) The bill was referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it lay until April 1936. At that time debate on the so-called Copeland bill, designed to require local contributions for federal flood control efforts, led Congressmen to look at other alternatives, including Citron's bill. Hearings were held in April at which Citron stated that he thought New Englanders preferred the home rule flood control option to the federal intervention as in the TVA. [Leuchtenburg, p. 50.] The bill was favorably reported by the Committee, passed, and was signed into law on June 8, 1936. Shortly thereafter, President Roosevelt signed into law the Omnibus Flood Control Act of 1936 (the Copeland Act) [Leuchtenburg, p. 51], which provided some funds for flood control projects on the Connecticut and also authorized creation of interstate compacts in New England for the purpose of determining and distributing costs of land purchases, rights of way, and construction of dams among the states involved.

When the New England Joint Commission on Interstate Compacts for Flood Control met in Boston that year, delegates from Vermont and New Hampshire made it clear that they were not about to flood good land for the benefit of those downstream, namely Connecticut and Massachusetts. Nevertheless, upon urging from a representative of President Roosevelt, the states came up with a completed draft for a flood control compact. It called for creation of a Flood Control Commission to distribute the costs of acquiring land according to the following ratios: Massachusetts, 50 per cent; Connecticut, 40 per cent; Vermont, 5 per cent; and New Hampshire, 5 per cent.

One provision of the proposed compact caused considerable opposition by the Roosevelt Administration in Washington. Article 8 provided that the states in which the dams were constructed would have exclusive rights of water conservation, power storage, or power development provided by each reservoir site. The Federal Power Commission objected to this provision, claiming it violated the Flood Control Act of 1936 and the Federal Water Power Act of 1920. Roosevelt himself opposed Congressional approval of the New England compact, which forced the issue back in Connecticut.

Those who opposed the Administration's rejection of the power provision included the and Governor Wilbur Cross in Connecticut, as well as Governor George Aiken of Vermont, Governor Francis Murphy of New Hampshire, and the . Those who supported Roosevelt included Congressmen Citron, Alfred Phillips, and Herman Koppelman of Connecticut; Joseph Casey of Massachusetts; and Senator Fred Brown of New Hampshire. This support proved disastrous in the 1938 election, only a month and a half after the hurricane of September 21. Only Congressman Casey was reelected. [Leuchtenburg, p. 119.]

TVA ON THE CONNECTICUT

The controversy over the TVA arose from Citron's bill, HR 4979, introduced on January 29, 1935. Reaction to the idea was mixed. Roosevelt thought that the TVA should be studied thoroughly before attempting nationwide implementation. Private utilities in New England opposed a Connecticut Valley Authority, and no substantial support for the bill ever became evident. As a result, the bill died in committee.

On February 16, 1937, Citron reintroduced a modified version of the CVA bill (HR 4811) which would include an advisory commission of representatives from the New England states to be recommended by the Governors of those states. This concession to home rule, however, did nothing to get the bill past the committee on Flood Control.

FINAL ACTION

A quick review of action in Congress after the New England compact was submitted for approval follows. While the committee hearings were in progress. HR 10618, the omnibus flood control bill for 1938, was reported out on May 19. In the course of floor debate, Alben Barkley's amendment giving the Federal Government title to dams and reservoirs in all Federal flood control programs won Senate approval. Roosevelt concurred with this amendment, and the bill passed both houses in June 1938, and was signed into law by the President. It was now the Federal Government's turn to attempt to solve the massive political and economic flood control problems in New England. [For a detailed account, see Leuchtenburg, pp. 110-120.]

CITRON'S ROLE

Congressman Citron lost the election of 1938, but had done his part to see that Congress had a number of alternatives to direct Federal control of the Connecticut River flood program. As a New Deal Democrat, William M. Citron tried to bring the successes of the Federal Government in other programs into New England through the TVA idea. New England sentiment, however, was in favor of local authority for solving the problems of the Connecticut River Valley. His first bill enabling the New England states to form a compact stood as the foundation for the eventual agreement among those states that they must act independently of the Federal Government to get action. While approval of their compact agreement was held up in Congress, Roosevelt's program was passed. Meanwhile, the hurricane of 1938 struck. It is interesting to note that the New England Flood Control Commission was finally formed and approved by all the participating states by the summer of 1951. [Leuchtenburg, p. 211.] After sixteen years in the works, a system was operational. Political change may not come in time to prevent acts of God, but natural disasters do have significant political consequences.