One might have expected the Irish and Italians and other immigrants to unite against the Yankees, and to some extent they did. But coalition was not easy because of economic and social tensions between national groupings. They fought for jobs and for political recognition. The anti-Semitism of the Boston Irish stemmed from economic as well as from religious and cultural sources. Joseph Kennedy himself often made remarks that sounded anti-Semitic; they were the result of the fierce economic tensions of groups trying to work their way upward. The origin of this prejudice was suggested by the fact that the next generation of Kennedys—John’s and Bob’s generation—was free of such bias.
No group was more determined to maintain a wall between the Irish and itself than the Yankees. Apprehensive, soon to be outnumbered by the immigrants, the old stock withdrew increasingly into its own world and turned to the Protestant Brahmins for leadership.
On Noddle’s Island, Pat Kennedy probably had little time to worry about such remote matters; he was busy making his way in this tight little community of longshoremen, laborers, and servants. Irishmen dominated the cooper’s trade, doubtless because so many barrels of liquor ended up in Irishmen’s saloons. Pat prospered a bit, married an Irish girl, and sired four children. The last, born in January 1862, was named Patrick J. Kennedy, and he was to become John Kennedy’s grandfather. Soon after his birth, the father died, perhaps in one of the epidemics that still swept Boston.
Behind the Lace Curtain
How does a man break his way out of the world of the shanty Irish? One way was to sell things to his fellow Irishmen, build up a little capital, and perhaps open a shop or a saloon. Another way was to capture their votes and thus store up influence to trade in the political arena. Young Patrick J. Kennedy did both.
Things were hard at first. His mother had to go to work in a shop, leaving him at home with his three older sisters. For a time, Patrick attended a nearby school taught by the Sisters of Notre Dame and helped his mother at the store. But he soon turned to the Boston liquor trade, perhaps because his father had made contacts there. He started a saloon, and later branched out into the retail liquor business. Located across from an East Boston shipyard, the saloon attracted thirsty laborers on their way home from work. At night, Irishmen fled their dingy tenements and crowded into Pat Kennedy’s bar, singing, joking, carousing, sometimes going out for a short bout of the fists.
Pat was a popular saloonkeeper, and he looked the part, with his stocky build and black handlebar mustaches. Standing behind the bar, he listened patiently to the latest gossip and complaints. Everyone knew Pat and he knew everyone. Loyal and generous to his kind, he helped many a fellow Irishman who was down on his luck. Increasingly he won the respect of the community. He was a soft-spoken man who never swore; the worst he had ever been heard to say about a man was, “He’s a no-good loafer.” He was a bit austere, too; he rarely lifted a glass himself, and he kept his blue eyes cocked on the bar to see that no one got noisily drunk in his establishment. Although he had never finished grammar school, he loved to read, and friends would often find him after hours, his glasses pushed up on his forehead, a book—usually an American history book—in his hands.
It was only natural that an Irish saloonkeeper like Pat would go into politics, just as “Big Tim” Sullivan did so successfully in the Bowery of New York and “Hinky Dink” Kenna in Chicago. For the main thing a man needed to rise in Boston politics was a big, devoted personal following. East Boston politics was a network of family, neighborhood, and religious ties, all bound together in loyalty to the party and the party leader. Pat’s saloon became a rallying place, a caucus room, and a campaign headquarters.
Slowly during the early 1880’s, Pat Kennedy built his influence throughout his ward. Like most city bosses, he stayed in the background and worked with his lieutenants in the back room. Even while campaigning for office, he rarely made speeches. He did not need to. Five years in a row in the late 1880’s, he ran for state representative and won every time; then he moved up to the state senate. After that, he held various city jobs: fire commissioner, street commissioner, election commissioner. But Pat’s chief concern was not holding office, but wielding power and the patronage that went with it. He wanted to run his ward—and he did. As the years passed, he became a member of the unofficial “Board of Strategy,” a coalition of bosses who picked Democratic candidates and ran city affairs from the old Quincy House on Brattle Street. The most noted member of the Board of Strategy was Martin Lomasney, boss of famed Ward Eight, and a brilliant political organizer.
The ’80’s and ’90’s were the ideal time for Pat to enter politics, for the Irish were capturing almost complete control of the city government. Unlike most immigrant groups, they adapted themselves easily to urban politics. Most of them spoke English; they had learned the mechanics of politics in the old country; the democratic politics in America gave them the one road to power that the Yankees could not block. But beyond this the Irish simply loved city politics—the derbyhatted politicos and their blarney, the fast deals and double deals, the singing and fighting and laughing, the simmering hatreds and glowing friendships. At wakes and weddings, after mass or on the back stoop, the Irish endlessly played the intricate game of politics.
On the Board of Strategy, Pat came to know another young politician, John F. Fitzgerald, whose daughter one day would marry Pat’s son. Fitzgerald had been born in 1863, not far from the Old North Church. He was raised in an eight-family tenement on lower Hanover Street. The third oldest of a brood of nine, he had, like Pat Kennedy, found life hard at first, for he had lost both parents by the time he was sixteen and had to help raise the younger members of the family. He secured a clerkship in the customhouse under the Brahmin blue blood Leverett Saltonstall, grandfather of Senator Saltonstall, and soon thereafter started running for office—for councilman, alderman, state legislator, United States congressman, and, finally, mayor of Boston.
In the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of Boston’s Democratic factions, Kennedy and Fitzgerald were sometimes allies and sometimes foes, but they became good friends. They made a sharply contrasted pair. Pat was quiet, cautious, even a little severe, and not too much in the public eye; Fitzgerald was merry, ebullient, talkative, and usually willing to take a political dare.
Everywhere Fitzgerald went he filled the political life of Boston with fun and gusto. He loved to sing, and Bostonians would never forget “Honey Fitz” standing amid his cronies, his eyes sparkling, his florid face turned heavenward, his full cheeks puffed out, his sandy hair parted down the middle like an old-time vaudeville actor, singing his political theme song, “Sweet Adeline.” He was the only man who could sing that song sober and get away with it, the Republican Boston Herald said. He loved to attend wedding parties, attired in top hat and morning coat, even if he had to crash them. Short, bouncy, quick, he was a master of political showmanship and techniques, adept, for example, at the “Irish switch,” which consisted of pumping one person’s hand while talking volubly to another, but he even improved on it by gazing fondly all the time at yet a third.
Bostonians loved Fitzgerald, whom they usually called “John F.,” or “Fitz” or “Honey Fitz” (this last he professed to dislike). He had many political rivals but few personal enemies. One of the latter, though, was James Michael Curley, a man of harder mien, aggressive, pushing, ruthless, vindictive. Sometimes Fitz outwitted Curley. On one occasion—it was the final game of the 1914 World Series, won by the Boston Braves—Curley, then mayor, was about to address the crowd when Fitz paraded by in a high hat leading the Royal Rooters. As his archenemy rose to speak, Fitz lifted his arms, started up his band, and drowned out the oration.
But Honey Fitz had the defects of his virtues, some Bostonians said. Aside from his implacable opposition to Prohibition, he had few strong convictions on national issues. During the ’90’s, for example, he shilly-shallied on the free-silver issue until political expediency forced him to take a stand in favor of it. His only
intense loyalty was to his own city, which he never tired of promoting as a “Bigger, Better, Busier Boston.” Cheered on by his friends, he would plunge into a political campaign, only to pull out unexpectedly if the going got too rough. He could not act the part of the tough boss; it was hard for him to follow the routine procedure of firing his political foes when he entered city office. He was too affable and easygoing to stand up for long against rough-and-tumble fighters like Curley. And much as he liked to help people, he would never do what Curley did—take a civil-service examination for a friend who could not pass it and sign his friend’s name, for which Curley went to jail and emerged to Boston Irishmen a hero.
John F.’s upbringing had been more genteel than Pat’s, but both men advanced far up into the ranks of middle-class respectability. They were now “lace-curtain” Irish, or, as Curley called them mockingly, “cut-glass” or the “F.I.F.’s” (“First Irish Families”). Both men married socially a notch above themselves—Pat a Hickey and John a Hannon from Lexington. But the acid test of respectability in East Boston was a man’s standing in his church, and both politicians were devout and loyal members of their parishes. The church in turn favored the more upright politicians in its flock. Once, William Cardinal O’Connell asked Curley to withdraw from a race against Fitzgerald, but Curley flatly refused.
In 1910, Fitz staged a lively campaign to become mayor of Boston. He was the first native-born son of Irish parents to win that office. At the same time, Pat’s reign in East Boston was stronger than ever. To be sure, the shanty districts were filling up with a new proletariat of Italians, Poles, and Slavs, but the newcomers needed help from the Irish bosses in getting housing, jobs, and licenses as peddlers or junk dealers. The Irish “organized and disciplined the inrushing immigrant masses,” and the influx boosted them higher up the social ladder. Indeed, even Fitz joined the migration of some of the lace-curtain Irish out to the suburbs, and lived for a time in the pleasant fashionable suburb of Concord, of Yankee “minuteman” fame.
But there always seemed to be a limit, both politically and socially, beyond which a successful Irish politico could not go. Several times Fitz ran for statewide office, including the governorship, but the things that made him so popular in Boston did not go over so well in the suburbs or on the South Shore or in the staid Republican towns like Northampton or Greenfield or in the rural Berkshires. Yankee Protestantism may have lost out in Boston but it still controlled the state. Fitzgerald’s most daring plunge was for United States Senator against the mighty Henry Cabot Lodge in 1916, but to no avail. It was maddening that so many Irish would vote for Lodge simply because he was a Brahmin who would tip his hat in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, throw them a few favors, and tweak the British lion’s tail. To make matters worse, Fitz was not very friendly with the Wilson administration, and the national and state Democratic tickets did little to help each other. And there was always the danger that the shanty Irish, rallying around men like Curley, or the fanatical Sinn Feiners, with their demands of independence for Ireland, could cut him from the other side.
To win statewide office, an Irishman needed the support of liberals and reformers who, like the Democratic bosses, had no use for the standpat Republicans usually in control of state affairs. But support was rarely forthcoming from those quarters. The reason throws light on a vital strand of the state’s political history and makes more understandable the attitude of Pat’s and Fitz’s grandson toward McCarthyism a half-century later. The background is this: Aside from their distaste for the Republican Old Guard, the Democratic bosses and the liberals had no basis for joint political action. The bosses were concerned with immediate economic and social needs—jobs, wages, housing, workmen’s compensation—needs that they could provide directly or through the government. Yankee liberalism was remote from all this; indeed, to some prescient Irishmen, the more remote the problem, the more aroused these reformers seemed to become. For decades, the reformers had been agitating about far-off problems—slavery, suppression of liberal movements in Europe, the rights of minorities, the plight of distant peoples. And the reformers’ more domestic interests seemed just as strange and repugnant to Irish leaders; women’s rights, public-school education, rights for Negroes (who competed for Irish laborers’ jobs), religious liberty, curbs on gambling, temperance, and even Prohibition. The Roman Catholic Church, frowning on many of these reforms, helped cut the Irish off from the Protestant reformers, and from the whole Western liberal heritage of civil liberty, tolerance, intellectual freedom, social equality, and philosophical rationalism and pragmatism.
Socially, too, the Yankees presented closed ranks. Retreating politically and economically in Boston before the rising immigrant pressures, they could still hold out in their clubs and cotillions and to some extent in their college—Harvard, of course—and in certain banks and businesses. They were gracious to Fitz but it was a graciousness tinged with a mutual recognition of Yankee superiority. “What this city needs is a lunch club where the blue bloods will lunch with the rest of us!” Fitzgerald said. On occasion, Yankee snobbishness caused him to lose his good humor.
“You have plenty of Irish depositors—why don’t you have some Irishmen on your board of directors?” he suddenly demanded of a bank president one day.
“Well, a couple of the tellers are Irish Catholic,” the president said.
“Yes,” snapped Fitzgerald, “and I suppose the charwomen are, too.” And he turned on his heel.
Still, a well-liked Irishman could forget these matters back in the bosom of his family. Both Pat and Fitz had a goodly number of children. And in 1914 the two families were united by marriage.
Upward Bound
Some East Bostonians raised their eyebrows when they heard that Pat’s eldest boy, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, had won the hand of Rose Fitzgerald, the mayor’s daughter, one of the most eligible Catholic girls in town. This was pretty good for the son of a ward boss and saloonkeeper. But those who knew Joe Kennedy were not surprised. He was a go-getter in everything he tried, they said, and he would be a good husband and a good provider.
They were right. Only nine years after his birth in 1888, Joe had sold peanuts and candy on Boston excursion boats, and a few years later had worked as office boy in a bank. He attended parochial school until seventh grade, then shifted to Boston Latin, the famed school where Benjamin Franklin and Henry Adams had been students. This meant getting up early to catch the North Ferry every morning, at a penny a trip, but it was worth it, for at Boston Latin Joe mixed with youths from elite Back Bay and the West End and not just East Boston. He was a popular boy and a fine athlete. His favorite sport was baseball, which he played so well that he won the mayor’s cup, presented by his future father-in-law, the great John F. himself.
His mother, ambitious for her son, wanted Joe to go to Harvard, and he entered with the class of 1912. He made the baseball team his junior year. His popularity and athletic prowess helped him get elected to the undergraduate societies Dicky, Delta Upsilon, and Hasty Pudding, but he never made the so-called best clubs. His grades were only mediocre; once when the baseball captain warned him that he was dangerously low in an economics course, he switched to music. But he revered some of the great teachers at Harvard—men like Bliss Perry and Charles Copeland—and he felt flattered when “Copey” dropped by his room and invited him to his famous readings.
Looking at the American scene through his calm, appraising eyes, Joe could see that sports and politics and literature were fun, but money really talked. During the summer vacations he and a partner earned several thousand dollars by running a sight-seeing bus to historic Lexington. He vowed to make a million by the time he was thirty-five, and he did, probably several times over. After he graduated from Harvard in 1912, he got a job as a bank examiner and learned the practical side of finance. When a small East Boston bank, owned in part by members of his family, was about to be taken over by another bank, Joe rounded up some capital and proxies and, with the help of his f
amily, was elected bank president at the age of twenty-five, reportedly the youngest in the country.
By then he was courting Rose Fitzgerald, and the two were married in the private chapel of Cardinal O’Connell in Boston in October 1914. With her dark hair and rosy cheeks, the bride had her father’s good looks and charm, but she also showed something of her mother’s dignity and serenity. She had gone to parochial and public schools and studied music in Europe; she was popular and a good student. The couple settled down in a $6,500 house in a respectable, lower-middle-class neighborhood in Brookline. The groom, in debt at the time as a result of buying the bank stock, had to borrow money to make the down payment. But he was soon solvent. Children came rapidly: the first, Joe, Jr., within a year of the marriage, followed by another boy, John F., in 1917, then five girls and a son—Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Jean, and Robert F.—during the 1920’s, and finally another son, Edward, in 1932.
With the coming of World War I in 1917, Kennedy resigned from the bank and became assistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel’s huge shipyards in Quincy. After the war he moved swiftly toward his first million. Boston finance was still controlled by conservative Yankees not very sympathetic to aggressive Irishmen, but Kennedy, acting on the old political maxim “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em,” deliberately studied the habits of Boston financiers, even to the point of taking a seat near them on the train. One of these, Galen Stone, was so impressed that he hired him as head of his investment banking house, Hayden, Stone and Company, and in this job Kennedy learned market operations and began to speculate on his own. He took some hard losses, recouped them, and then, with a group of Bostonians, bought control of a chain of thirty-one small movie theaters scattered throughout New England.
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