For his part, Layhe loved the camaraderie he shared with his buddies in the department, men like William Connor and Paddy Driscoll. There were always spirited discussions or a game of billiards or cards during the noon hour. George had been assigned to Engine 31, the fireboat headquarters, since he began working for the department on March 15, 1911, and he considered these men his brothers. He was proud to be part of their family. He was especially close to Connor, who was George’s age and had started his service on the same day. Today, after the shift was over, they would celebrate their anniversaries by dropping in to one of the dockside taverns for a beer.
A handsome man with soft, intelligent eyes and an angular face, Layhe had other reasons to be grateful today. He and his wife, Elizabeth, owned their home on Saratoga Street in East Boston, and with the addition of their infant daughter, Helen, who arrived just two months ago, they now had three beautiful children. The boys, Francis, eleven, and George, eight, were growing fast, and the tight-knit Irish community in East Boston seemed the ideal place for them to make friends and remain safe. It reminded him of the neighborhood in which he had grown up in Fort Plain, New York, where his parents, Daniel and Elizabeth, had settled after emigrating from Ireland.
The difference, of course, was that George Layhe was a widely respected man outside of his neighborhood and he had the opportunity to work at something he loved. His father, like so many Irish immigrants arriving in America in the aftermath of the Great Famine, had been the victim of intense discrimination and had little opportunity to do anything but to perform unskilled labor as he struggled to support his family. George had discussed this topic often with Bill Connor. The worst of the treatment against the Irish was mostly over now, but it had taken place not so long ago. Their good friend, John Barry, a stonecutter for the city who was twenty years older than Connor and Layhe, recalled firsthand how he had been denied work, insulted, and spat upon because of his heritage.
But times had changed rapidly. Now, Boston had elected two Irish mayors in the last six years, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald in 1910 and James Michael Curley in 1914, the latter of whom proclaimed himself the “mayor of the people” and enjoyed widespread support within the fire department. Curley had tweaked the Yankee Brahmins immediately after taking office when he proposed that the city sell the famous Public Garden for $10 million. Half the money would go into the general fund and the other half, Curley suggested, would be used to purchase new public gardens in various neighborhoods of the city where they would be more accessible to the public.
George thought the idea made sense and hoped that Curley’s idea would become a reality—East Boston could use a public garden. But it quickly became clear that Curley’s proposal was a mischievous attempt to draw the battle lines between the old “downtown” bluebloods and the new Irish leadership that focused more on the ethnic neighborhoods. He sharpened those lines to a point shortly thereafter when he boasted publicly: “The day of the Puritan has passed, the Anglo-Saxon is a joke, a new and better America is here. (The Brahmins) must learn that the New England of the Puritans and the Boston of rum, codfish, and slaves are as dead as Julius Caesar.”
George and the other firefighters felt as though someone at City Hall was fighting for them and looking out for their welfare. This was reinforced when Curley, with a flourish, ordered long-handled mops for all the scrubwomen at City Hall and announced that the only time a woman would go down on her knees in his administration would be when “she was praying to Almighty God.” The firefighters had cheered, and the Curley legend was born. An Irishman was mayor of Boston, George Layhe was a respected firefighter and a new father, and just about all was good with the world.
As George walked along the pier to the firehouse, he took in the early morning scene around him and marveled at the increase in activity since he began work five years ago. Commercial Street now was one of the main arteries in Boston. It linked North and South stations and supplied the piers and wharves on the north side of the city. From these wharves departed practically all of the coastal shipping out of Boston, as well as the passenger ferries to Charlestown and East Boston, the latter of which Layhe took to and from work each day. From the big freight sheds on the dock everything from leather goods to livestock to beer would be loaded on ships and transported to destinations along the East Coast or to Europe. It was barely 7:30 A.M., and already George saw teamsters, stevedores, railroad messengers, freight handlers, and delivery boys beginning their day in the crowded, noisy wharf area. Adjacent to the firehouse, at the North End Paving Yard, he exchanged quick greetings with John Barry, the stonecutter for the City of Boston Street Department. Barry worked in one of several contiguous wooden buildings that included an office, a blacksmith shop, a stable with more than twenty horses, a wagon house, and a carpenter shop.
Dominating this scene, since the beginning of the year, was the giant molasses tank. The tank towered over everything in the area, including the wharf itself, the tenements across Commercial Street, even the elevated tracks that ran above the busy thoroughfare. It sat just three feet from Commercial Street and fifty feet from the firehouse, which gave George a clear view of the tank every workday. It was painted a depressing charcoal gray color, but depending on how the sun slanted over the harbor, there were hours and moments when the huge receptacle gleamed and seemed to be almost inspiring in its size and power.
It would be hard for anything to ruin George Layhe’s day today, but he became a little queasy when he stared up at the tank and witnessed a sight that had become all too familiar in the two months that it had been standing.
Thick lines of molasses oozed down its walls and painted rust brown stains across its charcoal gray steel face.
Boston, That Same Day, 8 p.m.
Giuseppe Iantosca trudged into the kitchen of his home at 115 Charter Street in Boston’s North End, dirt caked around the knees of his heavy work pants and etched into the lines that ran from the corners of his eyes. He would be forty-one years old in three months, but he felt much older after working for ten hours laying and repairing track for the Boston & Maine Railroad. Lifting and maneuvering the heavy steel rails and swinging a pick and sledgehammer most of the day left his shoulder muscles aching and sharp pain shooting across his lower back. After his shift today, Giuseppe took the train back from Cambridge, then had to stop at the market to pick up some vegetables for dinner. The B&M paid Giuseppe forty cents an hour, and the $4 he earned for today’s long labor seemed especially meager. Worse, the railroad had already announced it would be cutting back the shifts to eight hours, meaning Giuseppe’s pay would drop to $3.20 per day, less than $20 a week even when he worked six days. Giuseppe barely spoke English, but he could add and subtract, and he knew that the new pay schedule would bring him and his family less than $1,000 per year. He and his wife, Maria, had six children—the youngest, Josephine, born just two days before—meaning the dollars he earned would be stretched further than ever. Meat and fresh milk, virtually nonexistent during the week, would now be a rarity even at Sunday dinner, and Maria’s pasta dishes and lentil soup would be the family’s food staples. His children would forgo new shoes this year; each of them knew how to jam wads of newspaper into the holes in the soles.
Maria sat at the kitchen table now, the infant unmoving in her arms. The child was so still that he was alarmed at first.
“Josie?” he said, unsure.
“Asleep,” Maria smiled and nodded to the child. Giuseppe stepped over to them, reached down, stroked his wife’s cheek, and then the baby’s, with palms rough as sandpaper, hewn from years of pick-and-shovel labor. Maria’s face was pale and drawn; she was exhausted from the rigors of childbirth on Monday. She had delivered Josephine with the help of Carmela Distasio, who lived upstairs, but since then Carmela had been able to provide Maria with only limited help. Carmela had four children of her own that needed care. The two Iantosca boys, Pasquale, seven—whom they called Pasqualeno or “Little Pasquale”—and Vincenzo, fiv
e, often played together with Maria Distasio, eight, and her six-year-old brother, Antonio.
Giuseppe bent, pain clawing his back, and kissed his wife softly so the baby would not awaken.
“The other children?”
“Asleep,” she answered. “Pasqualeno had a busy day.” She thrust her chin toward the ceiling to refer to the upstairs apartment. “With Maria.” Giuseppe stood silent, waiting for more of the story. “Look over there,” his wife said, nodding to the kitchen counter.
Giuseppe saw three large cans standing uncovered on the dingy countertop. He shuffled over and peered inside. All three were filled with thick, brown molasses.
“They went over to the tank after school,” Maria Iantosca said. “Pasqualeno, and Maria and Antonio. They bring the cans. The molasses leaks from that tank all day long and they go there and scoop it up. We can use it. Otherwise it goes to waste.”
“Can the kids get in trouble?” Giuseppe asked. “Can they get hurt?”
“If the railroad men see them they just chase the kids away, so there’s no trouble,” Maria said. “I don’t see how they can get hurt.”
“No, I guess not,” Giuseppe said. He dipped his finger in one of the cans, tasted the molasses, turned to his wife and smiled.
In her mother’s arms, Josephine stirred, scrunched her face, yawned, and continued to sleep.
Giuseppe was ready to do the same.
The North End in which Martin Clougherty, George Layhe, and Giuseppe Iantosca lived and worked was one of America’s oldest, most historic, colorful, and crowded neighborhoods.
In the early years of the country, the North End had been Boston’s most fashionable address, home to colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson and the city’s most famous midnight-rider, Paul Revere. It was a springboard for the settlement of Boston in Puritan and colonial years, it was the nexus of activity during the American Revolution, and later it became a center of shipping and commerce in a growing city.
By the mid-1800s, however, the economic condition of the North End had deteriorated, as successive waves of German and then Irish poor had settled there. The Irish potato famine of the mid-1840s provided the impetus for this flood of poor immigrants, and by 1850, the North End had become Boston’s first slum neighborhood. John F. Fitzgerald, “Honey Fitz,” a future mayor of Boston and grandfather of a president of the United States, was born in 1863 in a small wooden North End tenement, the son of a grocery store owner. (John’s daughter, Rose, who would one day become the mother of President John F. Kennedy, was born twenty-seven years later on Garden Court Street in the North End.) In 1880, there were about twenty-six thousand people in the neighborhood, and the Irish still made up the vast majority of the population—about sixteen thousand. The combined Jewish, Portuguese, and Italian populations numbered only about four thousand.
Those numbers changed dramatically over the next forty years. More than 4 million Italians came to America between 1880 and 1920, 80 percent of them from southern Italy and Sicily, a great influx that altered the ethnic makeup of American cities in general, and the North End population in particular.
Like the Iantoscas, who hailed from the town of Montefalcione in the province of Avellino, most Italians settled in urban neighborhoods in tight-knit enclaves with others from their particular region, or paese, in Italy. These became not so much Italian neighborhoods as a collection of individual enclaves of immigrants from Sicily, Abruzzi, Calabria, Avellino, and Genoa. Giuseppe Iantosca and Vincenzo Distasio were paesani, as were their families. They lived in the same building, kept an eye on each other’s children, socialized together, and often shared meals. Like Giuseppe, Vincenzo worked to support his family as a laborer, the most common occupation among Southern Italians, who had high rates of illiteracy and were largely unskilled.
As Irish and Jews assimilated and earned more money, both ethnic groups moved out of the North End to better areas of the city, although small enclaves remained in the neighborhood well into the 1930s. The Cloughertys were among the few Irish families that still lived in the North End by the First World War. Most other Irish had moved to South Boston, across the Charles River to Charlestown, or to East Boston, where George Layhe settled after he moved to Boston from New York. The Italian population in the North End continued to soar—by 1910, after a decade of unprecedented immigration, the neighborhood’s population approached thirty thousand people, of whom more than twenty-eight thousand were Italians.
The North End became the center of Italian life in the Boston area. The narrow streets pulsed with vitality, as hacks, pushcarts, delivery trucks, and people competed for right of way. Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, authors of La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian-American Experience, described the general Italian neighborhood in America: “Above the streets, the fire escapes of tenements were festooned with lines of drying laundry, while housewives exchanged news and gossip with any neighbor within shouting distance. The roofs became the remembered fields of Italy where residents could visit one another on summer Sundays while the young played in the tar-filled air.”
But the colorful culture of the neighborhood belied the mostly miserable housing conditions endured by thousands who lived in the congested sections. Tenements were cold and dark. City investigators found the buildings adjoined so closely together that sufficient air and light could not enter inside rooms, except for those on the top floors. Crowding in the North End had become horrific. The inhabitable portion of the neighborhood is only about a half-mile square—only about eighty acres. In 1910, the neighborhood rivaled Calcutta, India, in population density, according to historian William DeMarco.
Arthur P. Jell’s decision to build one of America’s largest molasses tanks in one of its most congested neighborhoods was not due solely to the North End’s prime geographic location. Yes, the tank’s proximity to the inner harbor and to railroad routes were major factors. But other waterfront locations in the city had rail access, including the nearby Irish strongholds of South Boston and Charlestown, and there is no evidence that USIA discussed or even considered these areas to build an aboveground receptacle capable of holding more than 2 million gallons of molasses.
Instead, Jell and USIA saw an opportunity to travel down the road of least resistance with their selection of the Commercial Street site.
Two overriding realities no doubt played a part in their thought process and ultimate decision—social attitudes toward Italians and a lack of political participation among Italian immigrants to control events in their own North End neighborhood.
One of the lesser known and most unseemly aspects of the Great Immigration period is that Italians, especially those from southern Italy, and including those who settled in Boston and the North End like Giuseppe Iantosca and Vincenzo Distasio, were among the most vilified immigrant groups ever to arrive on America’s shores.
The scope and breadth of discrimination against Italian immigrants was remarkable, ranging from physical mob violence in the early years to less overt, yet extremely damaging anti-Italian pronouncements and writings from politicians and journalists. Italian immigrants were lynched more frequently in America than any other group except African-Americans.
The worst single day of lynchings in American history took place in New Orleans in 1891, when eleven Sicilian immigrants, nine of whom had been acquitted and two of whom were awaiting trial, were killed by a mob in retribution for the murder of nationally prominent police chief David Hennessy. The killing of the Italians produced enormously serious repercussions, leading to the near-impeachment of President Benjamin Harrison and bringing the United States to the brink of war with Italy. It also began a period of more than thirty years—bracketed by the trial, conviction, and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—of systemic discrimination against Italian immigrants and Italian-Americans.
Leading “respectable” voices often led the way. Shortly after the New Orleans incident, Henry Cabot Lodge said: “Southern Italians are apt to be ignorant, laz
y, destitute, and superstitious. In addition, a considerable percentage of those from cities are criminal.” In 1902, the five-volume History of the American People, written by Woodrow Wilson, who would later become president, gave his bias against southern Italians the status of a scholar’s judgment. These immigrants, he wrote, came from the “lowest class of Italy … They have neither the skill, nor energy, nor initiative, nor quick intelligence. The Chinese were more to be desired.”
At the heart of the discrimination against southern Italians and Sicilians, considered inferior to their countrymen from the north, was the widespread view that immigrants from southern Italy belonged to a different race entirely. This perception was prevalent for many reasons: their darker complexions, their tendency not to speak English, and their tendency to be illiterate in their own language. Discrimination against southern Italians during this time was as much racism as xenophobia. The Bureau of Immigration reinforced these entrenched biases, classifying Italian immigrants as two different “races”—northern and southern. One official U.S. immigration report stated: “While industrious, Southern Italians … and Sicilians are less steady and less inclined to stick to a job, day in and day out, than other races.” There were other reasons for discrimination against southern Italians, the ethnic group who made up about 80 percent of the North End’s population by 1915. Most were not citizens, and many traveled seasonally between Italy and the United States, a migratory pattern that earned them the disparaging label “birds of passage” from other Americans, many of whom perceived Italian immigrants as uncommitted to the United States.
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