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Last Updated June 22, 2005
The beginnings of Connecticut's defense industry came more than two centuries ago, in 1798, when Eli Whitney, a young Yale graduate, won an order from the federal government to produce 10,000 muskets at $13.40 each. Six years before, Whitney had invented the cotton gin, which revolutionized the South but for years only embroiled him in a patent suit. On the musket contract, he was determined to make a profit right off, so he set up a system of interchangeable parts and invented a milling machine and gauges: The beginning of standardized American manufacturing. It was also the beginning of New Haven as a manufacturing center, for Whitney set up his factory along a small, rapidly flowing river just north of this town, established more than 150 years before as a religious haven for strict Puritans. For the next 150 years or so, the town mass-produced rifles, clocks, locks, hardware and toys--anything its tinkerers and entrepreneurs could fashion. Today there are few factories left in New Haven, and Connecticut's defense contracts have been cut way back; the Sikorsky plant in Stratford, west of New Haven, lost the contract to produce the new Marine One helicopter in January 2005. Southern Connecticut around New Haven is mostly prosperous, with scores of mostly small technology and biomedical firms. But the city itself, with significant crime rates and many neighborhoods scarred by abandoned homes, has been abandoned to a considerable extent: it had 164,000 people in 1950 and 125,000 in 2003. Yale, with its Gothic spires and redbrick halls, has always been the visual focus of the city, and now is New Haven's largest employer. Although there has been some revival in recent years, sparked by Yale's homebuyers' program of incentives to faculty and staff and by $1 billion in local investments by biotech firms, the economic vitality of the region is centered outside the city limits. New Haven, however, has a new historic claim. It was the birthplace of George W. Bush in 1946, and he lived his first two years on Hillhouse Avenue in a building that now houses the economics department. The 3d Congressional District of Connecticut covers the New Haven metropolitan area, which has long since spread beyond the narrow city limits over the hills of what were once Yankee villages and countryside; New Haven cast only 12% of its votes in 2004. For many years the 3d was a marginal district, changing partisan hands in the 1980s as well as the 1940s and 1950s. But it has moved to the Democratic side and is now a strongly Democratic district. The congresswoman from the 3d District is Rosa DeLauro, first elected in 1990. She is well connected in New Haven and Washington. She grew up in New Haven's Wooster Square. Both her parents were elected as New Haven aldermen; her mother, Luisa DeLauro, retired in 1999 after 35 years as New Haven's longest-serving alderman. Rosa DeLauro's husband, Stanley Greenberg, was Bill Clinton's chief pollster from 1991-94 and worked for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Rosa DeLauro has been in politics nearly all of her life. She was a development administrator in New Haven in the 1970s, chief of staff to Senator Christopher Dodd from 1980-87, then spent a year working to stop U.S. military aid to Nicaraguan contras before going on to become director of EMILY's List, the feminist campaign fundraising group. In 1990, when 3d District incumbent Bruce Morrison ran for governor, DeLauro ran for Congress and won 52%-48% over anti-tax and anti-abortion legislator Tom Scott, after spending an impressive $957,000. DeLauro has had the most liberal voting record in the Connecticut delegation, and became one of the Democratic leadership's loudest champions on the floor. Like most House Democratic leaders, she voted against NAFTA and normal trade relations with China. She has been an active and enthusiastic supporter of feminist issues. A cancer survivor, she sponsored the law to require 48-hour hospital stays for mastectomies and argued for insurance coverage of early-detection tests of cervical cancer. She has sought unsuccessfully to remove abortion restrictions on federal employees' health benefits. As a member of the committee that drafted in 2002 the bill creating the Homeland Security Department, she embarrassed House Republican leaders by winning a vote to prevent the department from contracting with corporations that move overseas for tax purposes; the House-Senate conference committee later watered down that provision. When she added similar language in committee to an appropriation bill in 2004, she lost a floor vote on procedural grounds. DeLauro organized the House's food safety caucus, and she has sought to increase its relevance in the era of security fears by demanding increased steps to prevent bioterrorism. She wants fast food and chain restaurants to display nutrition information on their menus. She remains an active and intense political strategist, "a live wire whose words rush out like sparks," wrote the New York Times. She has run twice for chairman of the Democratic Caucus and suffered two painfully close losses. In 1998, she lost 108-97 to Martin Frost, but Dick Gephardt then named her an assistant to the leader to work on the party message. In 2002 she lost by 104-103 to Bob Menendez after an intense yearlong contest. The deciding vote was cast for Menendez by Mike Feeley of Colorado, whose election was in question at the time; it later turned out that he lost his race and so was never actually a member of Congress. DeLauro was an active and early supporter of Nancy Pelosi in her races for minority whip and minority leader, and she was probably hurt in her own race by the reluctance of some Democrats to put so many liberal women in the party leadership. But she has found other opportunities for leadership. Pelosi named her as co-chair of the Democratic Steering Committee, which assigns members to House committees. In 2004, working in close coordination with the Kerry campaign, DeLauro led the drafting panel of the Democratic Platform Committee. DeLauro's last serious competition in the 3d District came in 1992, when she won a rematch against Scott 66%-34%. She has been reelected easily since then. She has expressed her interest in running for the Senate when there was talk that Joseph Lieberman's or Christopher Dodd's seats might become open. In 2002 and 2004 she defeated Richter Elser, an openly gay restaurateur who became a bread truck driver, by 66%-30% and 72%-25%.
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