Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Thomas Edison’s invention may have been more spectacular and showy,” one of his grandchildren says, “with the incandescent bulb. But Grandpa Murray virtually invented everything but the light bulb—the circuits, switches, dynamos, and power systems that got the electricity to the bulb. In my opinion, it was a more important contribution. After all, if there hadn’t been a way to get the power into the bulbs, how would the bulbs light up?”

  Meanwhile, Mr. Murray’s children were steadily making their way into New York society. Mr. Murray rather liked and encouraged this, and enjoyed clipping items from society columns about his children’s appearances at this or that “swell” party in Manhattan. In this preoccupation he was, again, very Irish-American. American Jews kept to themselves, and tended to shun “society” and actively to avoid seeing their names in the papers. But America’s emergent Irish families were proving themselves a socially ambitious lot, bringing with them a strong sense of pride in their Irish heritage—as, whenever an Irish or Irish-sounding name was mentioned to one Boston dowager, she would always comment, “Well, if they were one of the First Irish Families, I would certainly know them.”

  The Murray children were indeed attractive, and had the three prerequisites that are still needed for acceptance in society in New York: money, good looks, and good humor, which rank in importance in that order. The second-generation Murrays were all at once very social.

  “Yes, I suppose you could say they were accepted,” says one member of New York’s Protestant Old Guard. “But you always knew that they were Catholics. And, socially, the Murrays always remained—well, just a little bit different, a little bit Brooklyn.”

  * No one personified Irish oratory better than Boston’s Mayor “Honey Fitz,” who once told an audience, “Having been wined and dined by all the high potentates of Europe, I return to the old North End, where every cobblestone beneath my feet seems to say, ‘Welcome home, John F. Fitzgerald, welcome home.…’”

  Chapter 4

  “MURRAY BAY”

  The first prominent New York Irishman to buy a summer home in Southampton, on Long Island’s southeastern shore, was a New York lawyer named Morgan J. O’Brien. O’Brien—who was always called Judge O’Brien—was the first lawyer of Irish ancestry in the city to assume a place at the top of his profession comparable to the positions held by Protestants, and it is said that he paved the way for a good many other young Catholic lawyers to advance in the big “old family” firms downtown.

  O’Brien bought a big Southampton place in the early 1920’s, and Southampton was then, as it remains today, a resort for the second-rate rich, or at least for the nouveau riche. It has been said that Southampton was colonized in reaction to old-line Newport, which many younger people in society considered too restrictive and stiffly formal, but this is only partly true. The fact is that Newport’s Old Guard would not accept many of the newer-rich families, who, if they wanted a strip of Atlantic seashore for themselves, simply had to look elsewhere.

  Certainly, the Irish families would not have been accepted in Newport, and they knew it. A New York lady of ancient Sephardic Jewish heritage recalls visiting a gentile friend in Newport and her friend saying at one point, “I do think our two peoples are getting closer together, don’t you?” The Jewish lady replied that she indeed hoped so. With that, the non-Jewish Newporter said, “Of course we’ll never accept the Catholics.”

  Newport is, after all, in New England, and in New England—particularly in nearby Boston—the Irish experience had been quite different from what it had been in New York. The Irish immigration had disturbed big, bustling, competitive New York in only a relatively minor way, but its impact on prim old Boston had been shattering.

  To begin with, Boston was a smaller city than New York, and geographically much less suited to immigrants. The suburbs could only be approached across bridges which required the payment of a twenty-cent toll in each direction, and so the hordes of arriving Irish who entered Boston Harbor during the famine years—or who struggled down from Grosse Île in Canada, both legally and illegally—were crowded into Ward Eight and the North End, districts that had formerly contained the homes of prosperous merchants. Neighborhoods were literally ruined as wealthy home-owners fled the invasion and fine old Federal houses were surrounded by jerrybuilt shanties and lean-tos. At one point, Paul Revere’s splendid house in Ann Street was so completely encased by tenements that the house within became invisible. In the nine years prior to 1845, some 33,346 immigrants had landed in Boston, a figure which must be increased by 50 percent for those who made their way in by unrecorded or illegal means—or an average of 5,500 a year. These the city had been more or less able to absorb. In the single famine year of 1847, however, more than 37,000 immigrants arrived in Boston, “three-quarters Irish labourers,” adding their poverty and weight to a city which, two years earlier, had contained a population of 114,366, and the Boston Transcript noted with alarm that “Groups of poor wretches were to be seen in every part of the city, resting their weary and emaciated limbs at the corners of the streets and in the doorways of both private and public houses.”

  The cellars of Boston, meanwhile, provided even worse housing than those of New York, and were usually windowless hollows carved out of the earth, completely without ventilation, drainage, or any form of plumbing. Families doubled and tripled up to occupy these holes, and it was not surprising to find as many as forty people living in a single tiny cavity. Drunkenness and crime and violence soared. In 1848 complaints for capital offenses increased 266 percent over the preceding five years, and assaults on police officers rose 400 percent while other forms of assault jumped 465 percent. The outraged Boston authorities declared that Massachusetts was becoming “the moral cesspool of the civilized world.”

  Beggars by the thousands roamed the Boston streets. The sick grew sicker and the starving died. By an ironic quirk of human logic, Boston’s aristocrats had no trouble regarding the starving and dying populace in Ireland as “poor unfortunates,” and the Protestant churches on Beacon Hill were filled with sermons counseling mercy and kindness for those benighted souls. And yet these same Irish, having managed to make their way across the Atlantic, were categorized as the dregs and filth of human society, a scourge and disgrace to Boston, and an intolerable burden on the taxpayer.

  It is also ironic that upper-class Boston, otherwise so culturally and intellectually liberal, simply could not then—and cannot today—accept the Irish as candidates for social equality. In the pre-Civil War South, the enslaved blacks could count on the support of the Boston Brahmin abolitionists. Upper-crust Yankees throughout New England—where religion was so firmly rooted in the Old Testament (Harvard was the first college in America to offer a course in Hebrew)—could also look with kindness on the Jews (such anti-Semitism as there was always had its base in the lower classes). But there were only a very few philo-Celtic Protestants. The rest looked with utter disdain upon the Irish. As Daniel Moynihan has put it in Beyond the Melting Pot, “The Irish were the one oppressed people on earth the American Protestants could never quite bring themselves wholeheartedly to sympathize with. They would consider including insurgent Greece within the protection of the Monroe Doctrine, they would send a warship to bring the rebel Kossuth safe to the shores of liberty, they would fight a war and kill half a million men to free the Negro slaves. But the Irish were different.” And of even such a devout supporter of minority causes as Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph P. Lash has said that “Somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was part of her Protestant heritage.”

  As the fictional George Apley in John P. Marquand’s novel put it in a letter to his son in New York, “We have our Irish and you your Jews, and both of them are crosses to bear.” In Boston the luckiest Irish, perhaps, were the healthy young women who were able to find jobs as serving girls in the homes of Boston’s rich. In those more spacious days, over a century ago, the top floor of every rich man’s house was the servants’
floor, divided into cubicles where the housemaids slept, and a strong Irish maid would work seven days a week, with time off for six o’clock Sunday Mass, for room and board and as little as four dollars a month. Household service might seem to go against the Irish grain, but it was something these girls could do with a small amount of pride. Their mothers had taught them to cook and wash and sew; they loved children, and made excellent nannies; their Church had taught them orderliness, neatness, honesty, personal cleanliness, and above all virtue. An “Irish virgin” was certain to remain that way, and it was not long’ before every proper Boston home had its “Bridget” in the nursery, the laundry, or the scullery.

  To be sure, the servants’ floor was dark, lighted only with tiny windows, and a maid’s room was barely big enough to hold a single bed and perhaps a dresser, with splintery flooring and, sometimes, a single electric lamp. Plumbing and heating seldom ascended to this level of the house, and each room was provided with a chamber pot. But these girls had other advantages that they were quick to see. They were able to spend their daily lives among gentle, cultivated people, and they were able to observe at first hand the ways not only of the wealthy but of the polite and well-bred. They learned the touch of fine silver and porcelain and furniture, the feel of good linen and real lace. They also learned, from their mistresses, good manners. These were advantages that these girls would do their best to see that their children would have in the next generation.

  The Irish, however, never had the security of feeling that they had a friend in court, at the top level of American society. In Boston, they felt particularly abandoned and left to their own poor resources, with only their faith and their Church for comfort. They could draw on no reservoir of automatic sympathy as, paradoxically, could blacks and Jews. This situation, once established, would continue.

  Woodrow Wilson, who was President while Ireland was fighting for its independence from England, had no sympathy whatever for the Irish cause. On the contrary, Wilson was an “Orangeman,” a Scotch Presbyterian, and was both anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. Wilson, on the other hand, had great admiration for the Jews, and it was he who appointed the first Jew, Louis D. Brandeis, to the Supreme Court. Some thirty years later in the mid-1940’s, when Israel was in similar throes of the fight for independence, both President and Mrs. Roosevelt were hugely sympathetic to Israel’s position, as was Harry Truman, who pushed the motion of independence through the United Nations. But from the beginning of their history in America, the Irish were required to make their way upward aided only by each other.

  Why was this? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the thorny Irish “personality,” the Irish orneriness and stubbornness, and unwillingness to bow, scrape, and court favor. The Irish, it might be said, were not “rewarding” victims as were, by contrast, the Negro and the Jew. The masses of Irish immigrants from the famine were clearly poor, but it was difficult to think of them as “deserving” or worthy beneficiaries of care and charity. The Irish might suffer, but they refused to show it, and even the Irish beggars begged aggressively, not obsequiously. It is difficult, perhaps, to want to rescue a porcupine from a trap, or even from an oven, nor is it easy to pity a caged rattlesnake.

  All these various and subtle social forces conspired to cause new-rich Irishmen like Judge Morgan O’Brien to congregate at a summer resort in Southampton. Judge O’Brien was quickly followed by his friend Thomas E. Murray, who had been summering in various places such as Far Rockaway and Allenhurst, New Jersey, and who bought himself a large piece of property on the ocean front and started to build an appropriately large house which was to have, among other amenities, two swimming pools—a larger one for the adults and a smaller one for the children. Since the pools were to be filled with salt water from the Atlantic, it was necessary to figure out some way to keep sand from the ocean floor from flowing into the pool with the water, and so, with his stylus on a copperplate, Grandpa Murray invented a filtering system that would do just that. Grandpa Murray also installed a huge telescope on his lawn through which to survey his neighbors, and another chapel.

  Not long after Grandpa Murray’s Southampton place was finished, his son-in-law, James Francis McDonnell, who had begun summering with his family in Westchester County, in Rye, New York, waded out into Long Island Sound for a swim and saw something floating in the water that displeased him. He returned to the Rye house and announced—in his imperious fashion—that his family would thereafter also spend their summers in Southampton. The family took over a large section of the resort’s Irving Hotel while the McDonnell house was going up hard by the Murrays’. The McDonnell house had over fifty rooms, and was promptly dubbed “the hotel.” Next came two more of Thomas E. Murray’s children, his sons Tom, Jr. and John F. Murray, and both acquired large houses in what had become the Murray family compound. Meanwhile, another son, Joseph B. Murray, and a daughter, Julia, who had married Herbert Lester Cuddihy, acquired equally substantial places in nearby Water Mill. Eventually, there were eight houses on perhaps thirty acres of shorefront, plus garages, stables, boathouses, pools, and a polo field.

  The Tom Murray, Jr.’s had eleven children, the Jack Murrays had seven, and the Joe Murrays had five. The Cuddihys had seven, and the McDonnells topped all of Grandpa Murray’s offspring with fourteen. (The Pope himself, or so went a family joke, had given Anna Murray McDonnell his personal permission to have as many children as she wanted and, because it was the fashion in the 1920’s and ’30’s for pregnant women to pass most of their time lying down, Anna McDonnell spent the better part of fifteen years in bed, while her husband had a “nervous breakdown” with the announcement of each new arrival, as though he had nothing to do with it—and with the prospect of having to make another million dollars in his brokerage business for the new child.) Thomas E. Murray’s daughter, Katherine, who married J. Ennis McQuail, also came to Southampton with her more modest quota of two children, and so did another daughter, Marie, who—to confuse things somewhat—had married James Francis McDonnell’s brother John, making their two McDonnell children double cousins of all the other McDonnell children. When President Theodore Roosevelt publicly decried the increasing number of small families among the “best” American family stocks, warning of the dangers of “race suicide,” Grandpa Murray sent Roosevelt a photograph of his own huge clan, to approve of and to autograph. The President returned the picture with his signature.

  It was no wonder, however, with this onslaught of Murrays, that Southampton was soon—perhaps spitefully—being referred to as “Murray Bay.” In fact, the only one of Grandpa Murray’s eight children who did not join the patriarch in Southampton was brother Daniel Murray, who, after a brief but brilliant career at Georgetown, had fallen from a polo pony, sustained a head injury, and become an incompetent. Whenever Uncle Daniel’s face showed up in an old family photograph, and the children asked who he was, they were told, “He died.” He had, in fact, not died, but had been placed at McLean Institute outside Boston, where Grandpa Murray had provided him with a house of his own on the hospital grounds, servants, and a nurse-companion. His brothers and sisters paid him regular visits, but the children were never told of these.

  It would be pleasant to suppose that all these relations gathered together along these balmy summer miles of beach would have composed One Big Happy Family, but of course this was not the case. There was constant squabbling within and without this vast—and, by now, quite wealthy—family group. Most of the fights were about money, now that there was so much of it, and these usually centered on the fact that Grandpa Murray’s sons, who worked for his companies and other scattered interests, always seemed to have more money than his daughters, who didn’t. Thomas E. Murray, Jr. was the martinet of the next generation, and the strictest Catholic, and he was forever lecturing his brothers, sisters, and their respective wives, husbands, and children on what he considered their religious laxity. The children, who resented this, often gathered on the Southampton streets at night and conducted parod
ies of the Mass.

  The Thomas E., Jr.’s took themselves very seriously and seemed to consider themselves the grandest of the clan. And so the other Murrays enjoyed circulating the frivolous rumor that Uncle Tom had met his wife, who had been a Miss Brady, while she had been doing his laundry. Uncle Jack and Uncle Joe Murray were more outgoing and fun-loving than their more strait-laced brother Tom. Uncle Joe had a particularly jolly nature, and Uncle Jack liked to slip out of church on Sunday morning before the sermon started and head for the golf course. At the same time, some Murrays looked down their noses at Uncle Jack’s wife, who had been a model, and who had also been an orphan, and of unknown parentage.

  Certain Murrays, in the meantime, tended to look down on the McDonnells as parvenus and upstarts, and it was assumed in the family that the two McDonnell brothers who had married the two Murray sisters had done so only for the Murray money. And once a young Murray child watched, in tears, while two of his older McDonnell cousins entered the house and proceeded to beat up his mother. Comforting the child afterward, his mother said, “Those McDonnells are nothing but stupid Micks—don’t worry about it.”

  In fact, life was far from harmonious at Southampton. Each of the families had many automobiles, and letting the air out of the tires of cars belonging to their relatives was a popular sport among the children. The McDonnells alone had three sport coupés, five station wagons, three limousines, plus numerous Fords and Chevrolets for the children. One of the McDonnell cars was an exotic Lancia, which, to the nephews’ and nieces’ great delight, would never work properly, and the children enjoyed chanting over and over “Sell the Lancia” to the tune of “Valencia,” whenever a McDonnell appeared within earshot. Once, for amusement, the Thomas E. Murray children vandalized the John F. Murrays’ boathouse, and Mrs. Murray, who had witnessed the act, complained about it to her brother-in-law. “Nonsense,” said Uncle Tom, “they couldn’t have done that. They both received Communion this morning.”