Morgan Bulkeley
Morgan Gardner Bulkeley (December 26, 1837 – November 6, 1922) was an American politician of the Republican Party, businessman, and insurance executive. In 1876, he served as the first president of baseball's National League and, because of that, was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937, a choice that remains controversial, since his time as a baseball executive was short.
Morgan Bulkeley
John G. Root
Position established
November 6, 1922 (aged 84)
Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.
Fannie Briggs Houghton Bulkeley (1885–1922, his death)
3
Peter Bulkley (ancestor)
Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley (father)
William H. Bulkeley (brother)
Morgan B. Brainard (nephew)
"The Crowbar Governor"
1862
Private
13th New York State Militia
Centennial Commission
Bulkeley was born in East Haddam, Connecticut. His father was Judge Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley, a prominent local lawyer and businessman, who became the first president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company. The family moved to Hartford, where Morgan Bulkeley was educated, before he took a job in the city of Brooklyn, New York. He served briefly in the American Civil War, where he saw no combat. When his father died in 1872, he moved back to Hartford and became a bank president and a board member of Aetna, becoming its president in 1879, a post he held the rest of his life.
When the Hartford Dark Blues baseball team was asked to join the new National League in 1876, Bulkeley, the team president, was asked to become league president, despite having minimal baseball experience. He served one season, while most of the work was done by Chicago White Stockings owner William Hulbert. Bulkeley also served on the Hartford Common Council and in 1880 was elected to the first of four two-year terms as mayor of Hartford.
Bulkeley was elected Governor of Connecticut, taking office in 1889. He was not renominated by the Republicans, but served a second two-year term because the houses of the state legislature could not agree on the outcome of the 1890 election. Holding over in office after the end of his elected term, he found the entry to the executive offices at the State House was locked against him; he had it opened with a crowbar, thus earning him the nickname "the Crowbar Governor". He left office in 1893, and served one term as U.S. senator from Connecticut from 1905 to 1911. In his final years he remained involved with civic and philanthropic activities. After his death in 1922, several structures in Hartford, including a bridge and a high school, were named for him.
Early life and career[edit]
Morgan Gardner Bulkeley was born on December 26, 1837, in East Haddam, Connecticut, to an old local family; both his parents descended from passengers of the Mayflower more than 200 years prior.[1] One prominent ancestor of the Bulkeleys was Peter Bulkley, founder of Concord, Massachusetts.[2] Morgan was the third of six children and the second son (an older sister and a younger brother died young).[3] Morgan's father, Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley, commonly called "Judge Bulkeley" for his service early in his career on East Haddam's probate court, was a lawyer, businessman, public official and a founder both of the Aetna Life Insurance Company and of the Republican Party in Connecticut. His mother, born Lydia Smith Morgan, was distantly related to J. P. Morgan.[4][5]
The Bulkeley family initially lived in East Haddam, but the judge saw greater opportunities in Hartford, and the family moved there in 1847.[6] Unlike his older brother Charles, who attended three private schools before securing a degree from Yale College in 1856, Morgan was not a gifted student, attending Centre School in Hartford (later known as the Brown School), and Bacon Academy but apparently did not graduate from Bacon. He took a job with Lydia Bulkeley's brother, Henry Morgan, leaving Hartford to work for his uncle's company, H. P. Morgan & Company, in Brooklyn, New York. There, he began by learning the dry goods trade and remained almost twenty years, eventually becoming a partner.[7][8] While in Brooklyn, he served as a member of the Kings County Republican Committee.[9]
During the Civil War, Bulkeley served as a private with the 13th Regiment of the New York Militia. His younger brother, William Bulkeley, who had also come to Brooklyn to work at the Morgan store, went on ninety days' active service in 1861, while Morgan Bulkeley joined the home guard. This arrangement was presumably so that Henry Morgan would not be deprived of the assistance of both of them. William saw no combat; then, in May 1862, Morgan Bulkeley joined for a ninety-day term. The regiment was sent to Suffolk, Virginia, and saw no action, losing one man to friendly fire and one to heart disease. The 13th returned to the city of Brooklyn in September 1862 and Morgan Bulkeley returned to his employment,[10] where he remained another ten years.[11] His older brother Charles rose to the rank of captain of the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery Regiment, but died of disease in camp in February 1864, making Morgan the judge's oldest surviving son, and slated to eventually assume his responsibilities. Despite minimal service in the Civil War, the conflict had a considerable effect on Morgan Bulkeley's life, both because of the change of position in the family, and because after the war, he became deeply involved in such veterans' groups as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR).[12] When Judge Bulkeley died in 1872, Morgan returned to Hartford to look after his father's estate and was made a board member of Aetna.[13]
In Hartford, Bulkeley helped form the United States Bank of Hartford, becoming its president.[14] Through the bank, he became involved in a number of charitable and civic activities, and was elected to the Hartford Common Council in 1874.[15]
Businessman and politician[edit]
Hartford municipal official[edit]
Bulkeley's short career as a baseball executive coincided with the beginning of his political career. From 1875 to 1876, he served on the Hartford Common Council, and in 1876 was elected as an alderman, serving two years in that position.[27] When Thomas O. Enders resigned as president of Aetna due to ill health in 1879, Bulkeley became the company's third president. He would serve in that capacity for forty-three years and as a director for almost half a century.[28] Under Bulkeley, the firm's assets rose from $25 million in 1880 to more than $200 million by the time of his death in 1922, with the amount of insurance in force increasing eighteenfold.[29] The techniques it used under Bulkeley to reach the minimum required return on investment of 4 percent included loaning to farmers on the developing frontier, and, as they repaid and the areas they were in became more stable, investing in the municipal bonds of Western towns.[9] Among the new lines of insurance Aetna developed under Bulkeley were accident, liability, health and automobile insurance.[30]
In 1878, Bulkeley ran as a Republican for mayor of Hartford. He was defeated by George G. Sumner. He worked to increase his popularity, supplying the illuminations for the opening of the Connecticut State Capitol in 1879. When he ran again in 1880, he secured many votes of Irish immigrants in the city wards alongside the Connecticut River, which had given him his margin of defeat in 1878, by buying them. Bulkeley most likely conspired with former alderman Gideon Winslow to purchase votes in exchange for five dollars' worth of provisions at Winslow's grocery store. This was a sum equal to several days' work for a laborer. According to Bulkeley's biographer, Kevin Murphy, "Without chicanery, how could Bulkeley have done so well there [in the river wards] in 1880, 1882, 1884, and 1886? The answer is, of course, he could not have."[31] This corruption, which won him all eight of the wards in 1880, lost him the support of even some Republicans, which he won back by buying fewer votes in his three successful re-election bids. Having won the heavily-Democratic fifth and sixth wards in 1880, he lost both twice and split them once in his re-election bids, but on average won 45 percent of the vote.[32]
During his mayoralty, Bulkeley took over the annual excursion the city ran for poor children, which was having trouble getting contributions, and financed it from his own pocket, hiring a train for several hundred children to go to the summer resort of Fenwick. This was cited as a reason that the poorer wards gave him votes. The excursion did not occur in 1884 as Bulkeley was in Europe, and lapsed after that.[33]
Charles W. Burpee, in his history of Hartford County, deemed Bulkeley's mayoralty "most businesslike and efficient ... instituting and promoting many important municipal projects, while he disbursed more than his salary in providing pleasure or comfort for the city's poor."[34]