BOOK REVIEWS 533 Ella Grasso: Connecticut's Pioneering Governor

BOOK REVIEWS 533 Ella Grasso: Connecticut’s Pioneering Governor. By Jon E. Purmont. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Pp. xx, 266. $28.95 cloth; $14.99 e-book.) In 1974, Connecticut’s Ella Tambussi Grasso became the first woman to be elected governor of an American state. Women had been governors of other states—Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming, Miriam Ferguson of Texas, and Lurleen Wallace of Alabama—but they had all succeeded their husbands in office. In this biography, Jon E. Purmont, a former aide to Grasso, portrays the “first lady Governor who was not first a Governor’s First Lady” (p. xvi) as an outsider who worked within the existing order and triumphed against the odds. “Ella Grasso remains an inspiration to many people,” Pur- mont maintains. “Her remarkable career in public service, sustained over nearly three decades, is an outstanding example of a life filled with tenacity, zeal, drive, and ambition” (p. xvii). Grasso’s grit was key to her success. Her father, Giacomo Tam- bussi, pointed the way by stressing “hard work,” “determination,” and “aggressive ambition” (p. 4). And, despite being a working-class Ital- ian immigrant, he sent her to a private school that “catered to the daughters of prominent and wealthy families” (p. 13). The female professors at Mount Holyoke College further inspired Ella, imbuing her with a belief in “service to society” (p. 20). The Great Depression instilled in her a “compassion for the poor and underprivileged,” and she came to think that “in a stressful, bleak, and overwhelmingly harsh economic climate, government must replicate on a larger scale what local communities tried to do for themselves” (p. 43). Yet, according to Purmont, Grasso seldom experienced a sense of community in her early life, as “she frequently felt socially distant from her classmates because of her economic and social background” (p. 30). But Grasso slowly found a niche. She married her “best friend” (p. 40), Thomas A. Grasso, and went to work for the Connecticut state government. She entered politics in 1952, winning election to the Connecticut House of Representatives and becoming a proteg´ eof´ the state’s legendary Democratic Party boss, John Moran Bailey. In 1958 she was elected Connecticut’s Secretary of State, a position she held for twelve years. Grasso then went to the U.S. House of Repre- sentatives before capturing the governorship in 1974. Along the way, she earned a reputation as an adept campaigner, a virtuoso in the art of retail politics, and a skilled organizer. She also served on the Demo- cratic National Committee, attended Connecticut’s constitutional Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021 534 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY convention, and worked as an adviser to state governors Abraham Ribicoff and John Dempsey. Her efforts as a good-government re- former, an opponent of the Vietnam War, and a “gadfly” (p. 111) critic of congressional procedure and seniority revealed her indepen- dent mind. But her headstrong personality as well as her gender— which, Purmont notes, “some party leaders perceived . as being a weakness”—repelled many of her colleagues, and she often found herself excluded from the “power lunches” (p. 180) hosted by Ribi- coff, Bailey, and Dempsey. As governor, however, she proved her critics wrong “by demonstrating her firmness, toughness, and strong ability to deal forthrightly, albeit not tactfully, with the tension that emerged from her interactions with legislative leaders” (p. 180). But Grasso, Purmont suggests, paid a price for breaking barri- ers. Though she tackled a massive budget deficit, encouraged job growth, restructured the state’s government, and oversaw the emer- gency response to a fierce winter nor’easter, she nevertheless faced a primary challenge in her bid for reelection. Although Grasso won the campaign, she remained “a lonely political warrior—successful, enormously popular with the electorate, but bereft of close, personal, social companionship and close friendships with her political peers” (p. 180). Grasso’s end came tragically. Ailing with cancer, she resigned as governor on 31 December 1980 and died only a month later. Pur- mont’s admiration for his subject is crystal clear. “Grasso’s careful and cautious guidance of the Ship of State, especially in troubled times, was suddenly thrown off course” (p. 218), he writes. “Her selfless commitment to serving others always centered on Connecticut and its citizens, first, and her own personal well-being, second” (pp. 219– 20). He is keen to applaud Grasso’s most enduring legacy: advancing “in a political world where women often feared to tread” (p. xvii). Sentimental, insider biographies such as this one have their pitfalls and merits. Purmont exhibits a lack of analysis on crucial issues, hardly addresses Grasso’s connection to twentieth-century liberalism, and presents a muddled view of her place within second-wave feminism. And he credits the Democratic Party’s sweep of Connecticut in the 1958 election to Bailey’s organization without ever mentioning that voters nationwide were unkind to Republicans that year. Yet the virtues of this crisply written volume outweigh its weaknesses. The author has drawn upon his own knowledge as well as Grasso’s papers. His command of Connecticut politics is expert and compelling, as are his portraits of Bailey, Ribicoff, and Dempsey. At the same time, he Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 535 keeps Grasso square in the center of the story, depicting a woman who beat everything—antipathy toward Italians, rampant sexism, a cantankerous legislature, an economic downturn, a winter storm, and a succession of political challengers—everything, that is, save cancer. A more detached, scholarly account of Grasso’s life is likely to be written. But in rescuing this path-breaking politician from obscurity, Purmont has broken new ground. Dean J. Kotlowski is Professor of History at Salisbury University in Maryland and the author of Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy. His forthcoming book is Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR. The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail.ByW.Jeffrey Bolster. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 378.$29.95 cloth; $29.95 e-book.) W. Jeffrey Bolster has written an environmental history of the North Atlantic fisheries that encompasses enormous geographic breadth and chronological scope. He does so by bringing together a rich analysis of secondary-source case studies, fishing logs, newspa- pers, and legislative debates under a singular structure that explains why, despite persistent warnings of resource depletion, the human population encircling the boreal North Atlantic managed to exhaust one of the world’s richest ecosystems. Despite his wide outlook, Bolster presents a singular argument that covers the diversity of fisheries across the North Atlantic. He argues that throughout the seemingly ever-increasing desire to reap more from the Atlantic Ocean, important advocates—most often fishermen but at times scientists and politicians as well—continually called for conservation via local control and/or the limitation of new technologies or techniques, such as fishing during the spawning season, incorporating a new mackerel jig into the fishermen’s arsenal, or using steam-powered trawlers or gasoline engines. Yet these initial warnings of the destructive capacity of new ma- chines or methods were dismissed within a generation or two as those technologies or techniques resulted in such large quantities of fish that most contemporary observers simply forgot or ignored the doomsday warnings of the previous generation(s), even when it was apparent that those improvements in yield came from a disproportionately Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021.

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