The Socialist Mayor
Near Bridgeport Stamford, Connecticut
By the early nineteen thirties, Bridgeport was exhausted. The Great Depression had gutted the factory economy that had made the city. The city government was broke, partly because of the Depression and partly because of years of political corruption that had drained the treasury. Into this situation, in the fall of nineteen thirty-three, walked a roofer named Jasper McLevy.
McLevy had been running for office under the Socialist banner since nineteen oh two, thirty-one years of campaigns and defeats, including nine tries at the mayor's office alone. He was the son of Scottish immigrants, born in Bridgeport in eighteen seventy-eight. He had become a socialist after reading Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward, and he never stopped believing that municipal government could be run honestly and in the interest of ordinary working people. The national press, when he finally won in nineteen thirty-three, was stunned that a New England industrial city had elected a Socialist mayor.
What they found was not a revolutionary. McLevy balanced the city's books. He instituted competitive bidding for city contracts, which ended the practice of handing lucrative work to political allies. He took over the trash collection from private contractors who had been cheating on their rent and taxes for years and ran it as a municipal service, saving the city hundreds of thousands of dollars. He opened all board and commission meetings to the press and the public, calling it Operation Goldfish Bowl. He sold the expensive limousine his predecessor had used. When a snowstorm hit the city and reporters asked when plowing would begin, McLevy allegedly replied that God put the snow there and God could take it away.
He was reelected eleven times. He served as mayor of Bridgeport until nineteen fifty-seven. He died in nineteen sixty-two. In an era when the word socialist was used as an accusation and a slur, Jasper McLevy governed a Connecticut city for twenty-four years on the Socialist ticket, and the primary thing that distinguished his administration was its stubborn, unglamorous fiscal honesty.
