Nelson Brown helped Connecticut get past corrosive religious rivalry

Fifty-three years have passed since Nelson C.L. Brown II, Republican of Groton, was speaker of Connecticut’s House of Representatives, but the reception line at his wake at the state Capitol the other day would have done honor to any current denizen of the building.

For Brown never really left. He went on to have a long career as a lobbyist, representing, among others, the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information, and retired only a few years ago, already in his 80s.

The geniality and fairness that twice got him picked by both Democrats and Republicans to be the tie-breaking vote on the state’s redistricting commission have been recounted well elsewhere. But maybe there’s still something to be learned from the most dramatic days of Brown’s political career, as he presided over the House in the spring of 1957, the year of what became known as the school bus law.

Immigration had changed Connecticut demographically. Yankee Protestants were facing religious and political competition from first- and second-generation Catholics who were not inclined to consider themselves intruders. Partly in response to prejudice, their church had built schools for their children, and now Catholics wanted government to bus their kids to parochial school just as public school kids were bused.

The constitutional arguments then were the same as they are today about school vouchers: Was the service going to the children, which would be permissible, or to the church, which would not be? Courts had found the benefit to the church to be only indirect.

Many people disagreed and most were Protestant Republicans. Because of the Eisenhower landslide the previous year, Republicans overwhelmingly controlled the 1957 General Assembly, but they were sharply divided on the bus issue.

Republican leaders, including Brown, thought that at least politics argued for busing church school students. As Connecticut was becoming more Catholic, statewide elections would not be won without Catholic votes. But many Republican legislators, especially from smaller towns, the party’s base, where there were few Catholics, were more concerned with religious and ethnic competition.

While the debate in the Legislature was civil, it was not civil in the press and other forums. Perhaps angriest in opposition to the bus bill was a Unitarian minister in Hartford whose main grievance was the undemocratic nature of the Catholic hierarchy. (Catholics call it apostolic.) Apparently Catholic kids were to risk getting hit in traffic on the way to and from school because of the pope’s presumption to be the vicar of Christ.

Connecticut’s Catholic Church newspaper, the Catholic Transcript, denounced the commericial newspapers for giving voice to the opposition to the school bus legislation. Then the commercial papers started suppressing letters to the editor to choke off the controversy.

The bill easily passed the Senate, but after a five-hour debate in the House the vote tied at 133. Back then the speaker, presiding, voted only to break ties. Though he had supported the bill, Brown had not expected to have to take what now was sure to be perceived as primary political responsibility for it. At that moment, Brown recalled years later, “I kept thinking: A child is a child.” He voted aye and declared the bill passed.

Within hours it was signed into law by Gov. Abraham A. Ribicoff, Connecticut’s first Jewish governor. There was never any serious effort to repeal it, and it was construed as legitimizing Catholic political influence in Connecticut.

But a book written by this writer’s father (“The School Bus Law,” by Theodore Powell, Wesleyan University Press, 1960), concluded that the issue was decided as much by ordinary local politics as the overcoming of religious and ethnic feelings. Legislators from towns with Catholic schools tended to support the bill; legislators from towns without them tended to vote against it.

Still, religious and ethnic feelings were strong enough in the Republican Party to end any chance of Speaker Brown’s political advancement. Hence his removal to lobbying.

At least the warnings about papism seem comic now. The Catholic Church has never gotten close to achieving school vouchers in Connecticut, and church schools long have been losing enrollment even with public education in serious decline. These days the church can’t even get a hearing on legislation to require parental consent for abortions for minors. Today the only dogma in Connecticut is political correctness.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.