by David Nasaw
Columbia Trust had been founded in 1895 and controlled since then by a small group of East Boston stockholders, P. J. Kennedy among them. When in late 1913 the largest of the stockholders died, the founders were faced with the choice of either raising the money to purchase his stock or becoming minority owners of their own bank. Joe volunteered to help raise the funds. He successfully borrowed from family members, including his relatively well-off uncles on his mother’s side, and Eugene Thayer, who was president of the Merchants Bank of Boston, and used these loans to purchase bank stock, much of it in his own name. With control of more bank shares than anyone else, he had himself elected bank president and promoted family friend and mentor Alfred Wellington to the position of treasurer and vice president. He then brought in two new directors whom he could count on to support him.13
Joseph P. Kennedy was on the move. He had, he wrote Arthur Goldsmith in New York, been “one of the busiest little ‘cups of tea’ in the world . . . running a real estate office, getting ready to assume my bank duties, running a campaign for mayor and last but not least looking after the dearest girl in the world.” He expected to get to New York in the next month or so. In the meantime, he asked Goldsmith for help in buying “stick [tie] pins,” and “rather good” ones, for Mr. Thayer, Wellington, and a number of others “who were so kind to me on my bank proposition.”14
Six days after becoming a bank president, Joseph P. Kennedy was appointed by his future father-in-law, the lame duck mayor of Boston, to the board of the Collateral Loan Company, founded decades earlier as the Pawners’ Bank to provide loans to the poor. The position was unpaid, but it put Joe’s name in the headlines again and added an important line to his résumé.
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On February 2, James Michael Curley was inaugurated and almost immediately set out to distinguish himself from the free-spending Honey Fitz by vowing to cut back on public expenditures and instead raise money privately for what he called his “Boom Boston” fund. To curry favor with the new mayor, Joe Kennedy donated $200 to the fund. He knew full well where his $200 was going—into a glorified James Michael Curley slush fund—but he didn’t much care. The same day that Kennedy’s contribution was announced, his fellow bank president Allan Forbes, of the State Street Trust, foolishly announced that he had decided not to donate the $1,000 he had pledged the day before. Mayor Curley responded by withdrawing all city deposits from the State Street Trust. He could not in good conscience, he declared, deposit city funds in an institution “whose officers are so devoid of public spirit” that they declined to contribute to his economic development fund.15
Kennedy proved himself a more than able bank president. Almost immediately upon taking office, he injected new life into a trust company that in the last twelve months had lost 1 percent of its assets, while Boston’s other trust companies had increased theirs by 3 percent. Commuting on the Boston, Revere Beach, and Lynn Railroad to the bank on 20 Meridian Street from his parents’ house in Winthrop, he arrived early and stayed late, making full use of every family connection the Kennedys had acquired since the first Patrick Kennedy had arrived in East Boston. By June 1914, after six months on the job, he had increased Columbia Trust’s holdings by some 27 percent to $920,204.16
Now a bank president and a successful one, even if his bank was among the smallest in the city, Kennedy was finally in a position to marry Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald.
On June 20, 1914, the now ex-mayor and his wife announced the engagement of their daughter to Joseph P. Kennedy.
Joe and Rose, if we are to believe her account, spent a heavenly summer together, going to the Boston Pops, eating ice cream (Joe was a sweets addict), attending small soirees at friends’ homes, and, whenever they could, attending tea dances with an orchestra “at one of the clubs or good hotels . . . we always had good times at these little soirees, partly because I loved dancing and Joe was such a good dancer. He always knew all the current steps,” including the turkey trot and tango, which her father, the mayor, had declared to be morally injurious and banned from the city’s public dance halls in October 1913.17
Just one week after the announcement of the Kennedy-Fitzgerald engagement, Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Serbia.
On July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia.
On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia.
On August 3, Germany declared war on France and on Belgium.
On August 4, Great Britain declared war on Germany.
Like newly engaged couples everywhere, Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Fitzpatrick tried their best to hold the world at bay, but that was not easy. “The summer of 1914 was, of course a time of high drama and the crisis in Europe. . . . Nevertheless, we were young and in love and the Atlantic lay between us and that tragedy. President Wilson declared America’s neutrality. We could assume that the war would be settled by somebody, and somehow fairly soon . . . with peace restored, before it could possibly affect our own life together in any direct way.”18
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Though Columbia Trust was very much a local bank, not even Joe Kennedy could protect it from the financial panic set in motion by the declaration of war, the British announcement that they would no longer exchange pounds sterling for gold, and the decision of European banking houses to cash in their American stocks and bonds for gold. To prevent wholesale disaster, the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors on July 31, 1914, and did not resume bond trading until late November or equity trading until mid-December. The nation’s financial problems were compounded by a virtual cessation of international trade. For port cities such as Boston, the economic hardship was considerable. Citizens and businesses alike hoarded their capital and put off taking out new loans or mortgages. In the six weeks between September 12 and October 31, 1914, Columbia Trust’s assets fell more than 5 percent.
Rose and Joe were married on October 7, 1914, in the middle of the financial downturn. The ceremony took place in Cardinal William O’Connell’s private chapel. Honey Fitz gave the bride away; Joe Donovan, Joe’s oldest friend and his partner in the sightseeing bus, was the best man. Rose’s sister Agnes was her maid of honor. Though it was a wedding for family only, the groom wore a top hat, stiffly starched white shirt and collar, and tails; the bride was dressed in a full-length elaborately embroidered white dress. Following the ceremony, the wedding party gathered for a breakfast for fifty or sixty family and close friends at the Fitzgeralds’ home. “I had a great many parties, receptions, and festivities while my father was mayor,” Rose recalled. “So I preferred to have a small wedding, when it was time to be married.” It was also possible, of course, that the Fitzgerald family, following Honey Fitz’s still puzzling withdrawal from the mayoral campaign, felt it best to keep a low profile.19
The wedding might have been a simple affair; the honeymoon was not. The first stop was New York City, where the honeymooners stayed at the Hotel Belmont, had luncheon at Claridge’s, went for a ride in Arthur Goldsmith’s new automobile, then dined with him and watched the latest Douglas Fairbanks play, He Comes Up Smiling. The next morning, Honey Fitz and Rose’s brother John showed up in New York City and took the train with the honeymooners to Shibe Park in Philadelphia for the first game of the 1914 World Series between the Boston Braves and the Philadelphia Athletics. After two days and two games in Philadelphia, both of which the Braves won, Rose and Joe left Honey Fitz behind and traveled south to The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where they spent the next ten days riding, playing tennis and golf, and meeting and dining with some very “distinguished people.” Then it was back on the train to Atlantic City for a promenade on the boardwalk, “bathing” in the ocean, a formal photograph, and a night at the theater, where the celebrated actress Alla Nazimova was appearing in a new play.
The honeymoon ended where it had begun, in New York City. Rose and Joe saw another play on Friday and on Saturday man
aged to get tickets for Chin Chin, a musical comedy extravaganza starring Fred Stone and David Montgomery that the New York Times had five days earlier declared “far and away the biggest show of its kind . . . that has ever come to Broadway.” They spent their final honeymoon evening dining at the Biltmore, then returned to Boston and moved into their new house on Beals Street in Brookline.20
Joe had spent everything he had on the purchase of the outstanding stock in Columbia Trust the year before and was left with only $500. Unfortunately, the house he and Rose had picked out cost $6,500; fortunately, he had no problem borrowing $2,000 from his family and getting a $4,000 mortgage from his own bank.
The Kennedy house was located at 83 Beals, the last one on the street. There were three bedrooms on the second floor and two more on the third, suitable for servants. It was a pleasant-looking house with a gabled roof and a very large balustraded porch and deck, which appropriately barricaded would be perfect for toddlers. Next door and across the street were vacant lots. Beals Street had sidewalks and sewers and telephone connections; the houses were large and comfortable, but not ostentatiously so; St. Aidan’s Roman Catholic Church and the Edward Devotion public school were nearby; the trolley into Boston was in a short walk away. It was a solid, though rather lower-middle-class neighborhood, on the way up, the perfect place for a family with ambitions but not much cash. Though there was a Catholic church nearby—as there was almost everywhere in the Boston area—it was not an Irish Catholic community. Located at a reasonable distance outside the Boston city limits, Kennedy had the perfect excuse to stay out of the electoral politics he had come to loathe after his father’s unconscionable defeat seven years earlier.21
Rose, the daughter of a prominent politician who had served as both congressman and mayor, had grown up in large, spacious, overdecorated late-Victorian splendor. Now married to an up-and-coming bank president, she intended to replicate, though in better taste and less ostentatiously, perhaps, the homes she had lived in as a child. There was much to do. She had to choose the color schemes for upstairs and downstairs, buy the furniture and the rugs, and arrange the wedding presents so that they could be seen but would not clash. With a decorator’s help, she placed the marble statue of Napoleon, mahogany candlesticks, bronze ornaments, Venetian vases, banjo clock, pillows, pictures, and Oriental rugs in the parlor; and the silver nut set and bread tray, gold cup and saucer, tea napkins, platters, bon-bon dishes, and cut glass in the dining room. Copies of Turner, Hals, and Rembrandt paintings were hung on the walls of the parlor, which was furnished with the new baby grand the couple had received as a gift from her uncles, a matching sofa and armchair, and her husband’s red lounge chair. The upstairs guest bedroom, boudoir (which would later be converted into a nursery), and master bedroom with its twin beds, bureau, dressing table, and chiffonier were furnished more plainly, as they would not be on display for guests.22
Everything having to do with the furnishing of the house or its management was left to Rose. Joe never asked about or questioned her decisions. And she, in turn, never inquired or was told anything about his business outside the home. She had been “brought up that way” and was convinced it was for the best. “Your husband worked hard and he had a good many difficulties during his business day and when he came home he wanted to have comfort and peace and love and affection,” she later recalled. “He didn’t want to be bothered and he didn’t want a cocky wife or a complaining wife.”23
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By the fall of 1914, Columbia Trust’s assets were beginning to stabilize. This would have been cause for mild celebration in the Kennedy household had Joe not been drawn into the midst of a financial scandal that, though not of his doing, reflected poorly on him. In early December, it was reported that the Collateral Loan Company, of which he was a director, had been robbed by its president of tens of thousands of dollars in a scheme whereby pawned objects and mining stock certificates had been taken from the vaults, then pawned again. One particular diamond ring, it appeared, had been pawned twice a week for twenty consecutive weeks. Questions were raised, and legitimately so, about the quality of oversight by the directors, young Joe Kennedy included. Kennedy cooperated fully with the district attorney, testified before the grand jury, and waited for the incident—and his name—to vanish from the newspapers. It did. But when his term expired, he was not reappointed.24
Fortunately, by late 1914 the economic situation in Boston and the nation had begun to brighten. The Wilson administration had, a bit reluctantly, accepted and adjusted to the inescapable reality that the British were going to retain control of the seas. In concrete terms, this meant that while bowing in the direction of neutrality, Americans would renew trading with the British and the French, protected by the British fleet, while allowing that same fleet to blockade trade with Germany.
American loans and credits flowed freely toward the British Isles, financing purchases of homegrown raw materials and nonmilitary commodities. European gold crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction. As the domestic money supply expanded, so did credit and investment opportunities for American banks and businesses.
Columbia Trust rode high on the new wave of prosperity. Between October 31, 1914, and May 1, 1915, its assets rose by almost $46,000, an increase of more than 5 percent in six months.25 Joseph Kennedy’s personal fortune increased as well. He continued his association with Old Colony Realty, which now billed itself as the “Largest Operator in Boston Suburban Residential Properties.” Did his real estate customers get preferential treatment when applying for mortgages from his bank? Probably. Was he breaking any laws? No.
Joe Kennedy was learning how to skate along the edges without falling in. As president of Columbia Trust, he had immediate access to capital and credit, which he used not only to finance his mortgage and real estate dealings, but to purchase stocks. As the economy righted and then boomed in early 1915, his fortunes soared. His former Harvard classmate and friend Tom Campbell remembered Joe telling him that every stock he “bought zoomed. It was such an easy way to make money that I wondered why more people did not know about it. I was afraid the market would close before I had all I wanted.”
Then came May 7, 1915, the German torpedoing of the Lusitania and the deaths of more than a hundred American civilians. In the war scare that followed, the spectacular four-month stock market rise was halted, then reversed, “wiping out all [his] profits” and, according to Tom Campbell, knocking his “dreams of easy money . . . into a cocked hat.” Fortunately for the nation and the Kennedys, fears that the Lusitania tragedy would lead to war were unfounded. The Germans pledged that there would be no more attacks on passenger liners, no more American civilian deaths. And with that, the economic boom generated by the Allies’ need for American foodstuffs, commodities, and credit to pay for them shifted into higher gear. The stock market pushed forward again, climbing in almost a straight line from a low of 65 in June 1915 to 110 in November 1916. Joseph P. Kennedy jumped back in, wiser now, a bit more cautious, but convinced that having made a killing once, he could do it again.26
On November 2, 1915, short of capital to invest, he borrowed $55,000 from National Shawmut, where Bob Potter was now an officer. It was a short-term six-month loan, backed by some stock certificates, life insurance policies, and real estate. In the months and years to come, there would be other sizable loans from National Shawmut, Merchants Bank of Boston, and State Street Trust, some of them secured by notes backed by real estate, a few by Columbia Trust stock. He never borrowed more than he thought he could repay, and only at preferential rates; and he never defaulted, though occasionally he was forced to take out a new loan to pay off an older one.
His ability to juggle numbers and accounts was remarkable. So too his capacity to profit from a booming market. Later in life, Kennedy would confess to being a bear in all things, including the market, and take great pride in the money he had made betting on stocks to go down. But that was cer
tainly not the case in his twenties, when he was convinced that no matter how violent the short-term swings, the American economy was strong and would only grow stronger.27
Joseph P. Kennedy, still in his middle twenties, was well on his way to becoming a wealthy man, but only on the way. Rose remembered her thrill “the day my husband drove home in our very own brand-new, gleaming black Model T Ford.” It was not the most expensive automobile on the market and much less grand than the ones her father owned, but it was new and it was theirs. “Immediately after supper, in the summer twilight, off we went heading towards a neighborhood shopping center.” Preoccupied with steering his new automobile, the first he had owned or, perhaps, driven, Joe Kennedy didn’t notice the kerosene lanterns on the road or the excavation they marked. Rose “shouted a warning, [but] it was too late and into the ditch we went. . . . Neither of us was hurt except for a few black-and-blue bruises. And our beautiful car was relatively undamaged. They made tougher springs in those days.” Joe gunned the car out of the ditch, with “no loss of nerve.”28
Four
WAR
Joe Kennedy had to have wondered whether the Harvard Class of ’12 reunion committee was congratulating or ridiculing him when they included in the schedule of events for their third reunion a mock “Bank-Presidents Verein [German for association or society]: Meet in J. P. Kennedy’s room at 7:30. . . . The Federal Reserve Board will sing and the Controller of the Currency will read a paper on ‘Our Boy President, or Risen from the Bank.’”1
Still, whether or not his classmates considered Columbia Trust of East Boston a fitting landing place for a Harvard graduate, he was a bank president and rather proud of it.
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He rose early seven days a week, did calisthenic exercises with his Indian clubs, ate breakfast, and set off for work or, on Sundays, for Mass at St. Aidan’s. On those nights he came home after work, he and Rose had a formal dinner in the dining room (with their fine china and silverware), after which he retired to his big red lounge chair in the parlor to read the Boston Transcript, then his detective novel, and listen to classical music on the Victrola. On those nights he did not come home, Rose did not question where he had been—or why. “Joe’s time was his own,” Rose recalled in her memoirs, “as it had been and always would be.”2
