Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  The more famous Louise became, the less explicit she needed to be. She was a mistress of indirection. Her mayoral campaign was stunningly simple: few billboards, fewer television spots, almost no press relations, just the candidate herself strolling the streets, wearing a big button which read: “I am Louise Day Hicks,” shaking hands, saying, “Hi, how are ya,” with maybe an aide trailing behind handing out emery sticks (“Stick with Hicks, she’s always stuck with you”). She was instantly recognizable, of course, with that dumpling of a face set on a bulky Helen Hokinson body, draped in royal-blue, kelly-green, or shocking-pink dresses, a strand of pearls draped around her neck, a corsage blooming on her lapel. It was always a surprise when, from that huge physical presence, issued that tiny, little girl’s voice, often on the verge of tears, as she bemoaned the fate of “the little children.”

  To some listeners, “You know where I stand” was merely a bigot’s code, a way of communicating racial hostility which the conventions of Massachusetts politics would not let her express openly. Whatever Louise’s private feelings on race, that was certainly an aspect of her political stance. Her campaign speeches were loaded with sly allusions to the black threat: “I am alarmed that I, as a woman, can no longer walk the streets in safety…. I am alarmed to see lifelong Bostonians moving out of Boston in disgust…. I am alarmed to see rioters causing damage to property, injuring our policemen and firemen, and escaping any form of punishment…. I can reduce welfare costs by putting able-bodied welfare recipients to work…. Under my administration the parks, streets, and subways of Boston will no longer be a jungle of lawlessness.” Only rarely did she lapse into explicit assaults on “a justice which means special privileges for the black man and the criminal” and on “black militants who tyrannize our schools, creating chaos and disruption, who sabotage, undermine, and frustrate every effort of our educators to create a learning atmosphere.” When Martin Luther King said her election as mayor would be a “tragedy,” she shot back: “Dr. Martin Luther King is the real tragedy of our times.”

  But she stood athwart other ramparts too. For Louise had tapped a much broader sense of grievance, rooted less in race than in class: the feeling of many working-class whites that they had been abandoned by the very institutions—City Hall, the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church, the popular press—that until recently had been their patrons and allies. After eight years of Mayor John Collins, white neighborhoods were seething at the priority given to downtown development. Airport expansion, highway construction, and urban renewal had encroached on blue-collar communities across the city. Democrats in the age of Robert and Ted Kennedy no longer found the plight of the white workingman as compelling as it had been in the New Deal and Fair Deal eras. The Church and the press rallied to the new, fashionable causes. Friends, relatives, and neighbors had escaped to the suburbs and, preoccupied with their own zoning and tax problems, no longer gave a damn about the old neighborhood. If the rioting in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and Roxbury had persuaded government, business, and white liberals to give fresh attention to black needs, that was only the latest in a succession of snubs to neighborhoods like South Boston, Charlestown, and East Boston.

  Louise had never really belonged to this dispossessed class of city dweller. Her father was part of South Boston’s Irish aristocracy and her own shrewd real estate investments had kept her family’s living standards well above most of her neighbors’. In addition to the eighteen-room house she and John Hicks shared with her brother Paul, they had a summer house at Weymouth on the South Shore, often called “the Irish Riviera.” The Days had helped found, the Boston Harbor Yacht Club, whose clubhouse on the Point was the bastion of South Boston’s Irish elite. Louise’s brothers had both served as the club’s commodore, her husband as fleet captain and trustee, and the Hickses kept two boats at the club—a sloop called Scotty and a powerboat dubbed Lojobi, from the first letters of “Louise,” “John,” and “Bill.”

  Yet although Louise was never one of the “little people,” she was closely attuned to their fears and anxieties. Some critics called her a “conservative,” even a “reactionary,” but if she had any ideology at all it was an amorphous kind of urban populism. Proud of her identification with the Democratic Party, she resisted entreaties from George Wallace to be his running mate on a third-party ticket in 1968 and appeals from Richard Nixon for her support of the Republican slate. When the Greater Boston Labor Council declined to support her reelection to the School Committee because of her stand on desegregation, she seemed genuinely surprised. “I’m shocked not to be endorsed by labor,” she said. “Why, even as a child I was taught never to cross a picket line just as other children were taught never to cross the street.” Later, when she served in Congress, she drew far higher ratings from Americans for Democratic Action (62 percent) than from the conservative Americans for Constitutional Action (28 percent). A staunch patriot (“There’s only one flag good and true and that is the American flag, Old Great Glory”) and a vigorous supporter of the Vietnam War, she also supported much Great Society social legislation, particularly health care and old-age assistance. Her invective focused on “the special interests,” “the rich people in the suburbs,” “the establishment,” “the outside power structure,” “the forces who attempt to invade us.” Just as telling as “You know where I stand,” was her other slogan, “Boston for the Bostonians,” and by “Bostonians” she meant “the workingman and woman, the rent payer, the home owner, the law-abiding, tax-paying, decent-living, hard-working, forgotten American.”

  Her critics in the press—usually suburban, upper middle class, and well educated—often revealed their class bias. To the Globe, she was anathema. Ridiculed on its news pages, scorned on its editorial pages, she was once depicted by a cartoonist as a bloody Bitch of Buchenwald bestriding the city. But nothing quite matched the lofty condescension of Newsweek’s 1967 cover story: “They looked like characters out of Moon Mullins, and she was their homegrown Mamie-made-good. Sloshing beer at the long tables in the unadorned room of the South Boston Social and Athletic Club sat a comic-strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls…. After Mrs. Hicks had finished reading off her familiar recitation of civic wrongs the other night … the men queued up to give Louise their best, unscrewing cigar butts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a trailer truck.”

  Sensing an opportunity to exploit class resentment against the New York media moguls, she promptly took out full-page ads in Boston newspapers addressed to Newsweek’s editors: “I am not disturbed that you undertook to insult me. As a candidate for mayor of Boston, I have come to consider myself an open target for publications in New York and elsewhere which, for some strange reason, assume the right to try to tell Bostonians for whom to vote and how to run their city. But I deeply resent your insults to Boston and its residents…. I am proud of my heritage. No article of yours can lessen that pride. On Tuesday, November 7, the people of Boston will give you their reply.”

  The response was an impressive outpouring of votes which fell just 12,249 short (out of 192,673 cast) of electing her mayor. The postmortems suggested that she had lost to Kevin White because she had run an amateurish campaign, compounded by a last-minute blunder in which she pledged to raise policemen’s and firemen’s salaries by one-third, without sufficiently explaining where she could get the funds. But Louise had more fundamental problems. She consistently did well in multi-candidate races where her opposition was splintered, but in head-to-head contests she could never muster a citywide majority. Many of Boston’s white voters—less a conventional voting bloc than a movement of true believers—wanted Louise to speak for them in the councils of government. But those who had assiduously sought respectability often found her an unsettling reminder of less refined days and couldn’t envision her as the city’s chief executive. Thus, while she won a three-way race for Congress in 1970, and powerful pluralities swept her into t
he City Council in 1969, 1973, and 1975, she lost her second bid for mayor in 1971 and her congressional campaign the following year.

  Her most bitter disappointments were personal. After her husband died of cancer in 1968, she invested her remaining emotional capital in her two sons, proudly boasting that Bill would be a doctor, John an astrophysicist. But that was not to be. Soon Bill was arrested for a fracas at a South Shore country club, during which he allegedly took a golf cart for a drunken ride along the fairway, assaulted a club employee, then rode the cart onto a public street (the assault charge was later dropped). Her younger son, John, found himself in much graver trouble, convicted of kidnapping a security guard, riding around the city for several hours, during which he threatened the guard with a pistol, fired several shots at billboards and buildings, and finally blasted a hole through the car door a few inches from the guard’s elbow. A few years later, John was arrested again after allegedly storming out of a Weymouth restaurant threatening to “get a machine gun and clean out the place,” hopping in his Cadillac, and leading police on a wild chase down the expressway, during which he bounced off several cars, sides wiped others, and forced still others off the road, until he finally abandoned the car and fled into the woods. Arraigned on twenty-four charges, including assault with intent to murder, he became a fugitive from justice. For a woman who had devoted her public life to a defense of home and family—not to mention law and order—John’s escapades were embarrassing as well as painful. “It hurts a mother to see this sort of thing happen to her family,” Louise told a reporter. “Maybe if I’d spent more time with them. I’m sure it wasn’t easy being the children of Louise Day Hicks.”

  Ironically, as racial animosities sharpened in Boston, the woman who had come to symbolize them began losing control of her movement. Other, less inhibited politicians came along to ride the wave. There was Albert “Dapper” O’Neil, a pistol-packing former chauffeur for Governor Peabody, who first attracted notice in Boston by bellowing accusations of infidelity through a bullhorn outside the window of a newspaper editor who had offended him, then won a seat on the City Council, which he used as a platform for ardent declarations of faith in Governor George Wallace of Alabama and defamations of black leaders such as the Reverend Ralph Abernathy (“a perverted degenerate”) and Bayard Rustin (“a homosexual fag”). There was Elvira “Pixie” Palladino, a tough-talking, street-savvy daughter of an Italian shoemaker from East Boston, accused of punching Ted Kennedy in the stomach at a rally and cursing a Catholic monsignor, who even after her election to the School Committee was heard muttering about “jungle bunnies” and “pickaninnies.” And there was John “Bigga” Kerrigan, a former orderly at the New England Medical Center, who parlayed a friendship with one of his patients, Mayor John Collins, into election to the School Committee and the City Council, where he prided himself on unrestrained invective (“I may be a prick, but at least I’m a consistent prick”), particularly directed at blacks (“savages”) and the liberal media (“motherfucking maggots”), and once, in the Federal Courthouse, found the perfect foil in Lem Tucker, a black correspondent for ABC News, whom Kerrigan described as “one generation away from swinging in the trees,” a remark he illustrated by assuming a simian crouch, curving his hands upward, and scratching his armpits.

  For all the discord she had sponsored, Louise could not and would not compete with this sort of thing. She was still the Judge’s daughter who, more than anything else, wanted to be worthy of the pride and affection her father had lavished on her. Even in her toughest political battles, her most unyielding confrontations, she was always South Boston’s version of a “lady”—demure and genteel as the nuns at Nazareth had taught her to be (“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t tell lies”); her schoolgirl’s voice raised in pitch, but never in volume, her language a bit stilted, laced with her father’s studied legalisms, “as to,” “so as,” “therefore.” Vulgarity, obscenity, name-calling, boorishness—these she had associated in childhood with the rabble of the Lower End. She was from the Point, and although she had stayed on in the old house while other Point families moved to the suburbs, she shared their craving for respectability. Politics required that she cater to the anxieties of the Irish who had been left behind in South Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain, but she could never quite bring herself to play the strident demagogue. As the mood of racial confrontation deepened, Louise looked on with distaste and some measure of private misgiving, while the movement she had nurtured and exploited over the years, but which she could no longer control, swept the city closer and closer to the brink.

  10

  McGoff

  As the bells in St. Mary’s steeple tolled three, Alice Kirk and her schoolmates chanted a perfunctory “Hail Mary,” then filed onto the crooked pitch of Winthrop Street. Nuns, severe in their coal-black habits, marshaled them into two lines, one facing up the slope toward the Bunker Hill Monument, the other downhill toward the shabby jumble of Main Street. Promptly at 3:15, the Sisters led their charges in opposite directions. When the “up-street line” reached the rectory at the top of the hill and the “down-street line” passed the church at the bottom, they broke for home. But they never forgot the catechism of class they learned in those daily processions.

  For the nuns were steeped in Charlestown’s social geography. Once, Breed’s and Bunker hills had been a preserve of the Puritan ascendancy, while the Celtic newcomers huddled by the docks on either side. Now that the Yankees had decamped for the countryside, the heights were held by the lace-curtain Irish, with the lower slopes and valleys occupied by their less fortunate countrymen. Even the least experienced nun realized that donations from the hills were heavier than those from the valleys.

  Alice and the five other Kirks who attended St. Mary’s School were assigned to the “down-street line” because they lived nearer the bottom than the top of Breed’s Hill. But soon they worked out a private accommodation with the Sisters that permitted them to cut through a firemen’s alley from Winthrop Street to their back door on Soley Street. Strictly speaking, they were neither “up-street” nor “down-street” kids, but a third, ill-defined category, swimming in social ambiguity.

  The Kirks’ Monument Avenue address was enough to lend them a certain cachet. A graceful thoroughfare which ran straight up the hill toward the granite obelisk from which it took its name, the avenue had once been a Yankee bastion. In the years before World War I, a few Irish moved into the spacious brick town houses—among them Dr. Dan Hurley, the first Irishman to captain Harvard’s football team—but it was decades before they claimed the avenue as their own. During World War II, many of its stately dwellings were converted to rooming houses for sailors and war workers from the Navy Yard. In others, Irish spinsters and their bachelor brothers passed their declining years in a clutter of Victorian geegaws and dusty house plants, but it was still Charlestown’s most prestigious thoroughfare.

  The Kirks, with their six children, were naturally drawn to the few neighbors who had kids about the same age: among them the Galvins, who lived near the top of the hill at No. 49, and the McLaughlins, who lived near the bottom, at No. 25. The Kirks, at No. 31, were bracketed by Charlestown’s most renowned family and what would soon be its most notorious clan.

  Billy Galvin and Bernie Kirk had grown up together on Charlestown’s streets and docks, later disporting themselves in the Indian Club, of which Billy was the longtime president. But the boozy camaraderie of a dozen “Pow-Wows” could hardly disguise their temperamental differences. If Bernie was an industrious plodder, Billy was a gregarious showman. For a time he worked as a candy packer, a jewelry salesman, and a real estate broker, but soon he gravitated to more flamboyant enterprises, which, during Prohibition, apparently involved liquor. At a political rally some years afterwards a rival leveled an accusing finger at him and shouted, “Are you going to vote for that guy? He ran the biggest booze joint in town.”

  “That’s okay,” Billy blithely respo
nded, “you were my best customer.”

  After an unsuccessful run for office in 1935, Galvin made it into the Boston City Council in 1937, remaining four years, the last two as Council President. When Mayor Maurice Tobin was out of town, Billy served as acting mayor, the first time a Townie had occupied that exalted position. But in November 1941, he lost his Council seat to a younger challenger, the defeat attributed in part to his support for a controversial Charlestown housing project, in part to his support for Mayor Tobin in a district loyal to James Michael Curley. Six months later, Tobin rewarded his Charlestown lieutenant by making him city Superintendent of Markets, a political plum he held for twenty-six years.

  On occasion, Billy could still flash his old street style. In June 1942 he came before the Boston School Committee to oppose a plan, devised by Chairman Clement Norton, which would postpone student holidays from summer to winter in order to save fuel. Galvin called Norton “Boston’s No. 1 political faker.” Norton called Galvin “Boston’s No. 1 political gangster.” As the epithets escalated, Galvin heaved a seven-inch plaster ashtray, which narrowly missed Norton and shattered against a wall. The Superintendent of Markets and the committee chairman had to be physically restrained.

  But such exhibitions notwithstanding, Billy Galvin assumed the mantle of Charlestown’s elder statesman, becoming known to one and all as “Mother Gal,” ostensibly because of the favors he’d done for his constituents (though a few malcontents suggested that the name derived from the old days when he could be counted on to supply a bottle or two). Settling on Monument Avenue in 1935, he and his wife, a striking woman of Swedish descent, had seven daughters, one more beautiful than the next. Living just nine doors apart, the seven Galvin sisters and the four Kirk girls spent a lot of time together, sleeping over at one another’s houses, trading clothes, doing each other’s hair. Alice Kirk and Mary Galvin were particular friends, as were Donalda Kirk and Ellen Galvin.