Mary Augusta’s regimen as a mother was to teach her first and only surviving son the merciless rituals of civility. For Joe’s mother, the relentless pursuit of civility was not a trivial matter. In the radical egalitarianism of America, people learned to mimic the manners of those whose company they sought. The most vulgar and ill bred could affect the manners of their betters for a time, but eventually the mask of civility would fall. These ersatz ladies and pseudo-gentlemen often exposed themselves at dinner by choosing the knife as their favored implement for eating rather than the fork. Eating with a fork became such a symbol of civility that its teaching was laid out in Joe’s parochial school curriculum (“shall eat with a fork, rather than a knife; shall take small mouthfuls of food and masticate quietly”).
Young Joe lived largely in a female world, and from that world he took many of his ideas of womanhood. He had his mother as his guide and goad, a constable of civility. He had his two younger sisters, who constantly deferred to him. The Irish servant girls treated the young master as a royal being. He was the center around whom all things revolved, a condition that he took as the natural order of things. Joe saw even the Catholic Church largely through the eyes of women, particularly the nuns who taught him at parochial school.
Joe listened to the moral axioms proffered by the nuns and followed his mother’s detailed course in manners, but he chafed at all the restrictions she put on him. Mary Augusta represented a secret danger to her only son. Her idea of civility, of culture, was a seductive call that risked closeting him away so that he might never become a true man. Her house was a sanctuary of rectitude and security, but it was on the streets below, unprotected by his mother’s sheltering skirts, that Joe had to journey to become a man.
Joe was on two journeys: one toward civility along a pathway led by his mother, the other a struggle toward true manhood. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt feared that an insipid, feminized culture was castrating men, robbing them of their vitality. Roosevelt saw each nation engaged in its own struggle for survival, a fight in which only a nation of true men might survive. “Any nation that cannot fight is not worth its salt, no matter how cultivated and refined it may be, and the very fact that it can fight often obviates the necessity of fighting,” Roosevelt asserted. “It is just so with a boy.”
G. Stanley Hall, the most prominent psychologist of the age, taught that boys replicate the evolutionary process of civilization, from savagery to barbarism to refinement. It is a process, he lectured, that each boy has to go through to become a true man. A teenage boy who was “a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.
“An able-bodied young man, who can not fight physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is generally a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak,” wrote Hall, a Harvard Ph.D. and the president of Clark University. “He lacks virility, his masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the core.” Risk was risk and danger was danger, and Hall did not shrink from the implications: “Better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative.”
Out on the streets of East Boston, the games were sometimes rough. Boys had their noses bitten, ears half torn off, groins kicked, heads stomped on, and lips split. Boys yelped and screamed, exhorted and cursed. A boy asked no quarter and gave none. A boy who whined was a sissy, a dandified, effete mommy’s boy.
Danger was everywhere. Joe often hitched a ride on the back of one of the long coal pungs that moved laboriously from the docks to the ferry. These horse-drawn wagons were so long that the driver rarely could strike his unwanted passenger, as often happened when boys jumped on a carriage. Joe still might have fallen off and had his legs crushed by one of the wheels. There was danger even when he stayed home. Joe had been injured playing with a toy pistol; so had one of his friends, and the boy died of blood poisoning. The dead boy’s brother invited Joe to go sailing with him. It was the first of the month, the day on which young Joe always took confession, so he said no, and the boy upset the boat and drowned. Danger might be omnipresent, but Joe stepped around it like a puddle of water in his path.
Life in the streets, though, was not all danger and risk. Young Joe loved the rituals of patriotism. He always attended the parades to watch the drum corps and the Civil War veterans and the bands marching proudly by. One Memorial Day he got together all his friends in uniforms, and they marched in the parade, falling out long before its end. Back at the house, he orchestrated a flag-raising ceremony with all the neighborhood children present, and his own sister Loretta swathed herself in a flag and wore a glorious “Columbia” crown.
Joe’s father and mother could easily have given their precious son an allowance large enough that he never would have had to bother getting a foul taste of the workaday world of America. They did not do so, however, and were proud that young Joe went out hustling jobs. He ran errands at P. J.’s bank. He hawked newspapers on the street corner. He lit stoves on the Sabbath for Orthodox Jews.
One summer Joe got together with a friend, Ronan Grady, to raise pigeons, which many in East Boston considered a delicacy. Ronan had the coop and the pigeons, but Joe didn’t fancy himself as a pigeon farmer, feeding the birds expensive food, cleaning the coops, and waiting months for them to fatten. Instead, he and Ronan regularly picked out two of the most likely pigeons, secreted them under their shirts, and took them to Boston Common. There they released the birds. By the time the boys got home, their pigeons had already returned, bringing amorous partners with them. The boys sold the birds and split the profits. Joe was beginning to learn that there was nothing worth more than a good idea and a better angle.
The nuns might educate his sisters, but for Mary Augusta’s son, only the finest secular education would do. Joe set out in September 1901 to take the ferry to attend seventh grade at Boston Latin School on the corner of Dartmouth Street and Warren Avenue. He was entering what was probably the finest public school in America. Alumni included Samuel Adams, one of the fathers of the American Revolution; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author; Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard; and George Santayana, one of the university’s most distinguished professors.
The youths who surrounded Joe in the Boston Latin classrooms did not bear the great names of the old city. The upper-class Protestants thought of Boston Latin as their school, but they had largely given it up rather than have their sons’ sweet souls soured by sitting next to the likes of a Joseph P. Kennedy. They had made their hegira to the undefiled premises of a group of new private prep schools scattered across New England, where their sons would sit only among their own kind. That left only a few of the poorer Brahmin brethren to sit in classrooms full of immigrant sons and grandsons.
The boys who dominated the academic life of the school were almost all Jews. Joe was not one of those thrusting his hand up, waving it for attention. He was not a good student. His grades were pathetic, including Cs in elementary and advanced Greek and his second year of elementary French; Ds in English, elementary history, elementary Latin, elementary algebra, and geometry; and Fs in his first year of elementary French, elementary physics, and advanced Latin.
These grades did not temper Joe’s ego. He looked disdainfully at the humorless, relentless, merciless struggles of grade grubbers. For him, the glory of these years lay elsewhere, especially on the athletic field. On the baseball diamond all of his natural aggressiveness played out. He slid with spikes up, argued with umpires whose casual ineptness appalled him, and batted each time as if the game depended on him stroking the ball over the fence. For Joe, there was purity in this world that he found nowhere else. Years later he would lovingly remember the details of each school game, reliving the glory of those long past days.
Joe befriended one of the best athlete
s at Boston Latin, Walter Elcock. Not only was Elcock captain of the football team, but he was sure to be chosen captain of the baseball team as well. Joe took his friend to steak dinners that he would not have been served at home and talked him into stepping aside so that Joe would be named captain. Thus two years in a row, Joe was captain in name and deed.
Joe learned of the profound dangers of sex, not of its pleasure. There was no purity in the world of sex, especially not in the Ireland from which Joe’s ancestors had emigrated. In the name of God, the peasant priests drove the sexes apart, patrolling the Irish countryside in search of couples so foolish as to seek out a dalliance. Men married late and reluctantly, seeking another farmworker as much as a wife. Then, and only then, did they partake in the short, brutish business that was sex and prove their manhood nightly by continuing to lift a few with friends at the village tavern.
In the Boston of Joe’s childhood, a gentleman did not talk about sex. As for children, when they talked of “the dirty place” or “the dirty parts,” it was clear of what and where they spoke. They might disguise the words, but they could not disguise the acts. Hall recalled that, growing up in the small town of Worthington, Massachusetts, youths experimented with “homosexuality, exhibitionism, fellatio, onanism, relations with animals, and almost every form of perversion.”
The list of sexual experiments in East Boston may have been smaller, but life for an adolescent was presumably not radically different. No one of any honor and decency spoke of such matters, and Joe most likely stayed clear of such behavior in word and deed. Joe’s own family displayed attitudes suggesting that they considered sex a matter largely peripheral to the serious business of life. As a young man, his father was too busy succeeding to squander his time in momentary flirtations. He had not married until he was nearly thirty, only then starting his family of four children. Joe’s own uncle, John Hickey, a doctor, and his aunt Catherine had never married, and indeed, they lived together—another fine example of how the bothersome business of sex could be exorcised.
Joe was six feet tall, far above the average height for his generation, and his height advertised his virtue and manhood. He was a hardy, athletic, outgoing youth. He had an interest in the opposite sex, but it appeared to be confined to the narrow parameters of civilized life. In the summer of 1907, Joe met a petite young woman in Orchard Beach, Maine, where his family spent part of each summer. He had met the vivacious sixteen-year-old a decade before on the same beach, but he did not remember her. Her name was Rose Fitzgerald, and she had all of the virtues that his mother had taught him to hold dear in a woman. She was a deeply religious Catholic. She was a cultivated woman who could play the piano. She was a far better student than Joe. And not least among her merits, she was the beloved favorite daughter of the mayor of Boston, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.
Honey Fitz was everything Joe’s mother had taught her son to deplore: a professional Irish-American full of self-conscious blarney. This man sang “Sweet Adeline” at the hint of an invitation and cried Irish green tears on cue. He was the kind of Irish-American politician the Brahmins hated, a mountebank who, on a congressman’s salary, had built a mansion in Dorchester and jig-danced away from anyone who tried to investigate him. He was an embarrassment to those Irish-Americans who were attempting to brush the straw of Ireland off their clothes. He was nonetheless a man of such immense native sagacity that he had served three terms in Congress from Boston’s North End while living in Concord, a full sixteen miles from his district and the constituents whom he vowed he loved so much. Honey Fitz was deeply possessive about power, publicity, and his beloved daughter Rose. He would choose her suitors, and he was not about to see her wooed by Joseph P. Kennedy.
Joe began a romance with Rose that was both innocent and clandestine. The couple met in the Boston Public Library after Joe’s baseball games and wherever they could manage a few delicious moments together. For Joe, the risks were penny-ante, a momentary embarrassment. For Rose, however, this mild dalliance was an adventure of high order. The religious guides were full of terrifying warnings of the fate in store for the young woman who did not protect her virginity as life itself (“He is shut out from the Kingdom of God. His portion will be the worm that never dieth, the fire that is never quenched. O Christian maiden, tremble before this awful sin!”).
Rose had wanted to attend secular Wellesley College. Instead, at the insistence of Bishop William O’Connell, Rose’s father enrolled his daughter at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Boston. Then a year later, in the spring of 1908, when his almost eighteen-year-old daughter expressed her intention of marrying Joe, he sent Rose and her younger sister, Agnes, off to Europe to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Blumenthal, Holland. There she would be cloistered away from Joe and his pernicious influence.
The Joe from whom Rose was sailing away had become an ideal specimen of young manhood. At nineteen, he was half a foot taller than most of the men of his father’s generation, and his striking face was perfectly groomed, his reddish hair impeccably brushed, his eyes a brilliant blue. He had a proud military bearing. His manners were military too, given more to abruptness than graciousness, but among his peers at Boston Latin he was a popular student.
The fact that Joe had taken an extra year to graduate from Boston Latin hardly diminished his popularity. He was colonel of the Cadet Corps, president of his class, and a baseball player of legendary repute, just having won the city trophy for the best batter with the awesome average of .667. If there was one disconcerting note, it was the prediction in the 1908 Boston Latin School yearbook that Joe would earn his fortune “in a very roundabout way.”
2
Gentlemen and Cads
It would have taken a keen observer to realize that the arresting young man striding along with such confidence through Harvard Yard in September 1908 had no business being there. Joe’s academic record at Boston Latin School was so abysmal that he had repeated his last year and was a year older than most of the other freshman. On his first day at Harvard, twenty-year-old Joe was as much a child of special privilege as some of the denizens of the Boston elite who had little to recommend them to the Ivy League school but old money and old names.
Even if Joe had had a good academic record, the son of a leading Boston Catholic politician belonged at Boston College, the proud new Jesuit institution that sat on Chestnut Hill, where Bishop O’Connell intended that it would look down upon Harvard and its secular world. But for a young man who aspired to the pinnacle of American life, the most prestigious university in America beckoned irresistibly. No university has ever dominated the intellectual, social, and athletic life of an American city the way Harvard dominated Boston in the early years of the twentieth century. Joe was not walking this day along mere bricks and stone but on a noble path toward everything that he aspired to be: a civilized gentleman fulfilling his mother’s dreams, a celebrated athlete, a brave true man of Harvard.
On the same day that Joe matriculated alongside other public school graduates, the prep school youths arrived from their ghettos of privilege. Most of them set up housekeeping on the celebrated Gold Coast, the row of private dormitories on or near Mount Auburn Street. They brought their carriages, cars, and servants, and they greeted each other with casual familiarity. They fit into their college life as comfortably as they would have checked into a first-class stateroom on a transatlantic crossing. They were now “Gold Coast men,” and so they would be known during their years at Harvard.
As these young men settled in, reminiscing about summers full of European travel, sailing, tennis, or western sojourns, Joe found more meager accommodations on campus. In doing so, he defined himself as a “Yard man.” Yard men were in steerage on a ship they did not know, among passengers they had never met, on a journey they had never taken. The dorms were frequently foul places, with underground toilets and so few showers that many men went unwashed. The filthy windows let in little light, and at night the students studied by flickering gas jets
. “Compared to any respectable house or hotel they are all vile,” wrote one undergraduate critic in the Harvard Advocate.
Joe did not want to be relegated to a tedious life among his dormmates but sought to stand among the privileged men of the Gold Coast. He imitated their dress, manners, and social attitudes. He had a rare gift of social mimicry and a constant wariness among his social betters never to betray his past.
Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery; sometimes it disguises its opposite. Joe was no unctuous wanna-be, but a young man whose pride matched that of the most arrogant of the Brahmins, a pride that he hid at times under a cloak of deference. Joe had a profound desire to be accepted in their world, but he could not openly admit to such a goal. Social ambition is the one human aspiration that dares not speak its name; to be caught at it is to fail.
Joe perfectly mimicked the attitude of the Gold Coast men toward their academic work. To many of them, it was little more than a tedious aside to the real business of college life—election to their private club. A club was the only proper place for a gentleman to eat and socialize. The winnowing process began in the sophomore year when upperclassmen chose members for the Institute of 1770.
“A hundred or so of the class are devoured by the Institute and carefully told that there are two kinds of men at Harvard—‘gentlemen’ and ‘cads,’ “wrote Paul Mariett in the Harvard Illustrated in May 1911. “The Institute contains the gentlemen.” The first seventy or so chosen became members of DKE, or the Dickey. They in turn joined “waiting clubs” out of which the new members of the final ten clubs would be chosen, the most prestigious being Porcellian, followed by AD and Fly.
The Kennedy Men Page 2
