The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
DeLauro pens book on ‘social safety net’
NEW HAVEN » U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro has built her career on fighting for those who, without government help, are in danger of losing the chance at a decent life.
In her new book, “The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable,” she tells the stories of those fights, which she has undertaken over 26 years as U.S. representative from Connecticut’s 3rd District and in previous positions as chief of staff for fellow Democrats Mayor Frank Logue and U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd and the first executive director of EMILY’s List, which supports prochoice Democratic women in their election campaigns.
DeLauro, 74, continually refers to the “social safety net” that she sees as the undergirding of the American dream: “Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and nutrition programs, unemployment insurance, child tax credits and the Earned Income Tax Credit … these are all areas that I talk about in the book,” she said recently in her Church Street campaign office.
Her story begins in Wooster Square, the ItalianAmerican neighborhood where her late father, Ted, an immigrant, and mother, Luisa, a first-generation American, heard the hardluck stories of their neighbors and did whatever they could to help them.
“It’s really what I learned from my parents,” DeLauro said. “Our kitchen, our kitchen table was a place where people could come and get help.” Both her parents served as New Haven aldermen. “That’s the lesson that I learned: Government is supposed to help people, particularly in a time of need,” she said.
The other event that helped form DeLauro’s drive to lift up the vulnerable was a 1957 fire in a Franklin Street dress shop. A locked fire escape and blocked exits trapped people inside, killing 15 women, including a friend’s mother, who was later identified by her shoes. “She ran back to get her pocketbook and couldn’t get out of the building,” DeLauro said.
“It was a disaster, and it happened down the street from my house,” DeLauro writes. “It is impossible to be an eyewitness to events like that and not be touched by the gravity of our responsibility to one another.”
Another formative experience for DeLauro was meeting her mother, now 103, every day after school at a garment factory on State Street.
“She did it because she wanted me to see what these working conditions were and she wanted me to get an education, to take advantage of an education, so I wouldn’t have to do this work,” she said.
“It’s piece work. … You get the needle in your finger, you didn’t get a tetanus shot. … If you got blood on a garment, you didn’t get paid. It’s not the 26 years I’ve spent in the House of Representatives but it’s about the values that I was taught growing up in an Italian Catholic family” that have formed her governing philosophy, she said.
DeLauro’s father, who worked as a court interpreter for Italian immigrants — and advocated for teaching Italian in the public schools — and her mother “were consumed with my getting an education,” said DeLauro, who attended Lauralton Hall, Marymount College, including a junior year at the London School of Economics, and Columbia University.