by Thomas Maier
P. J. KENNEDY, known as “Pat’s boy” in their East Boston neighborhood, grew up in a world of newcomers who spoke with thick Irish brogues, had dirty hands pounded by hard daily labor and entertained ambitions of getting ahead. He never finished school as his mother intended, but in the family store, he learned the important life lessons of being an attentive listener and pleasing customers. As a lad, P.J. worked as a stevedore along the wharf and developed a lean, muscular physique to complement his fair skin, blue eyes and wavy brown hair. In later adulthood, his girth widened and he grew a large curled handlebar mustache that demanded respect. He heard of a failing saloon for sale in East Boston’s Haymarket Square, bought it for a pittance and by the 1880s had turned the tavern into a thriving business that specialized in sales of lager beer. Kennedy became known for a friendly manner that went down easy with the hard-drinking laborers and neighborhood residents who tottered up to his bar. Soon, P. J. Kennedy bought interests in two other saloons and expanded his business into a retail and wholesale whiskey distributorship. He hired Tom Barron, the son of Bridget’s cousin, to help him after Barron’s own tavern failed.
In his establishment, P. J. Kennedy not only listened to stories about Ireland from his customers but also convinced them he was looking out for their interests by trading information about job openings or lending cash when they were in need. In its early stages, the Kennedy family’s fortunes were fueled by profits from the business of drinking—the traditional bane of Irish existence—even though P. J. Kennedy and, later, his son, would remain tea-totalers, wary of the dangers of drink. As a successful tavern owner in East Boston, Kennedy possessed a position in the Irish Catholic immigrant community that “lent him power and prestige second only to the parish priest,” as one of his son’s biographers explained. Increasingly, P. J. became active in the politics of Boston’s Ward Two, and brought his own chieftain-like qualities to his loyal and ever-larger group of supporters. By a landslide margin in 1886, P. J. Kennedy, at the age of twenty-eight, won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
His political climb was accompanied by an elevation in social status. A year after being elected, P. J. married Mary Augusta Hickey, the daughter of an Irish immigrant from County Cork who listed on his entry papers the profession of laborer and rose to become a successful contractor in Boston. Because of their financial success, the Hickeys were more Americanized than the Kennedys. Mary Augusta, educated by the nuns at the Notre Dame Academy, projected a refined and genteel image that appealed to her unpolished husband. Mary Augusta was “lace curtain” Irish, the emerging elite within the East Boston community. Her own quick wit, deep religious faith and optimistic enthusiasm were a constant source of moral support for her husband in his endeavors. In September 1888, little more than a year after their wedding, the couple celebrated the birth of their first child, a boy, whom they named Joseph Patrick Kennedy.
If his private life was simple and content, the world of politics that P. J. Kennedy ruled from his Boston ward was byzantine and cutthroat—a constant clearinghouse for favors, job offers and other forms of patronage. The Irish now constituted nearly half of Boston’s population, just as the Brahmins feared, and they were determined to seize their share of power. A man as realistic and sober-minded as Kennedy knew just how hard that could be. Writing a job recommendation to a friend for a young man who was Catholic,Kennedy confided:“It is particularly hard on one of our kind (I mean by this the Catholic boy) because there are very few cities in the Commonwealth that I know of that will give one of our boys a position if they know he is Catholic.”
Though he was not quite as ambitious as his wife might have liked, P. J. Kennedy managed to get elected later into the Massachusetts State Senate, and he became very influential in his own community. He plowed profits from his taverns and whiskey business into neighborhood banks, such as the Columbia Trust Company, and into buying vacant land. As a Democratic leader, Kennedy became part of the Board of Strategy, an aptly named group headed by the city’s ward bosses, who divvied up perks and wielded power during their luncheon sessions together. These bosses included Martin Lomasney, the powerful Ward Eight boss dubbed “the Mahatma” both by his admirers and his detractors.“The great mass of people are interested in only three things—food, clothing and shelter,” Lomasney said, encapsulating much of his political strategy with a distinctly practical Irish immigrant’s view. Seated at this same table was John F. Fitzgerald, the ward boss of the North End, who would become an adversary for Kennedy and ultimately a family in-law. More reserved than most Irish pols and content to stay in the background,Kennedy managed to thrive in this world of ballot stuffers and money grabbers without taint. His oldest son later laughed in recalling the Boston election when two ward healers came to the door excitedly to tell his father, then an election commissioner, “Pat, we voted one hundred and twenty-eight times today.”
A year before Kennedy’s own election to the state legislature, Boston voted for Hugh O’Brien, its first Irish Catholic mayor, an event marking the most serious threat yet to Brahmin political dominance. Fearful of what the Irish might do, the Yankee-controlled legislature passed a measure to wrest control of the Boston police from city officials. The Irish politician that P. J. Kennedy most admired—as he later told his oldest son—was Patrick Collins, a naturalized Bostonian born in Ireland. In the 1880s, President Grover Cleveland appointed Collins as American consul general to Great Britain. For Kennedy, the idea of an Irish-American going off to England as America’s representative seemed almost incomprehensible, a remarkable feat for a people so afflicted by the British. Collins, who later became Boston’s mayor,was different from other Irish politicians. He didn’t inflame the anti-Brahmin and anti-British resentments of his constituents for political gain. A thoughtful, courtly man who graduated from Harvard, Collins seemed to straddle successfully the divide between being Irish and being American. He didn’t want to battle the Brahmins as much as cooperate and live with them. “I denounce any man or any body of men who seek to perpetuate divisions of races or religion in our midst,” Collins once said, in endorsing a Brahmin candidate for governor.“Let me say now that there are no Irish voters among us. There are Irish-born citizens like myself and there will be many more of us, but the moment the seal of the court was impressed upon our papers, we ceased to be foreigners and became Americans. Americans we are and Americans we will remain.”
Collins’s words and actions resonated with P. J. Kennedy. He, too, considered himself fully American. And yet for Kennedy, like so many Irish- Americans, the familial ties to Ireland, the loyalties to an impoverished land his parents left behind, still beckoned. In fact, the Kennedys’ connection to Ireland was never broken. Over the years, both Patrick and Bridget Kennedy kept in contact with relatives in Wexford County, writing long letters telling of births, deaths and important details of their life in America. Undoubtedly, like many famine Irish, the Kennedys felt remorse about leaving behind loved ones, and these correspondences were a way of assuaging their guilt and sad memories. For P. J. Kennedy, Ireland was more of a romantic notion, a lost emerald homeland that he heard his widowed mother and other Irish immigrants speak of wistfully, but where he’d never set foot. With his success in business and politics in Boston, P. J. possessed more money than any Kennedys in Ireland had ever owned. The future for his growing family in New England appeared bright, and there was no cause to look back. Still, P. J. and his sisters remained in touch with relatives in Ireland, and heeded their call when the Kennedys who stayed behind were in trouble in 1888. Before this new crisis resolved itself, P. J. Kennedy would help save his Irish cousins from ruin.
BACK IN DUNGANSTOWN, the Kennedys faced jail and lost nearly everything because of their strong opposition to the British rule in Ireland.
The family’s history of defiance reached back more than a century, to the Kennedys who shed their blood at the battle of Vinegar Hill in 1798.As the famine years subsided, farmers in Ireland who s
urvived became convinced that they could no longer tolerate the English system of land ownership, which they believed choked the lifeblood out of their country. Tenant farmers such as the Kennedys could sweat and toil all their lives and have no chance of ever owning their farms. Certainly, Patrick Kennedy’s oldest brother, John, who ran the homestead, felt that way until his death in 1864, and so did John’s two sons, Patrick and James, who continued the family’s tenancy of the farm into the 1880s. Those Kennedys who stayed in Ireland became resolute in the republican cause, fervent believers that Ireland must be free of the British before its people could prosper. In the 1880s, the two Kennedy brothers, Patrick and James, became strong political supporters of Charles Stewart Parnell, his drive for Irish independence and his Home Rule campaign against the British-run system of land ownership in Ireland.
In the pantheon of modern Irish heroes, Parnell holds an exalted place. “He is dead / Our Uncrowned King is dead / O, Erin mourn with grief and woe,” wailed James Joyce, who imbued almost Christ-like qualities on Parnell, the political hero of his youth. A Protestant Irishman whose mother was American, Parnell came from a family of wealthy landowners, but he championed the cause of the tenant farmers. After the scare of a potato crop failure in 1878, Parnell rallied the farmers into a new political movement called the Irish National Land League, with himself as president. More than anyone since O’Connell, Parnell effectively pushed the British government to reform, not through violence but through negotiation with Prime Minister William E. Gladstone and the moral weight of his words. Because of the nature of his message, Parnell’s movement was embraced by the Catholic priests, who hadn’t always supported confrontation. Sympathetic Irish-Americans from Boston, New York and other U.S. cities sent more than $1 million to aid the Land League’s activities.“The money that has kept the Land League together,” reported the New York Times in 1881, “has come mostly from the day laborers and the servant maids of America.” Some of these Irish-Americans also were connected by heart and wallet to the Irish Fenian movement, which was devoted to the violent overthrow of the British from Ireland. The church condemned the secret Fenian society’s call for assassination and murder, and viewed Parnell as a welcomed alternative.
At a rally in New Ross in 1880, Parnell stirred the crowd, estimated at nearly twenty thousand, by underlining the evils of the British land system. “They know their only hope of maintaining their right to commit wrong lies in the maintenance of English power in Ireland,” he proclaimed to cheers from the crowd of tenant farmers. He urged them to join him in the campaign “to destroy the system of landlordism which was planted here by England in order that she might divide Ireland’s sons.” On the carriage carrying Parnell into New Ross were garland and banners that read: “Let it ring out over hill and dale, God bless our noble chief Parnell!”
James and Patrick Kennedy enlisted in Parnell’s cause. The Kennedy brothers became Land League organizers in Dunganstown and nearby Ballykelly, working with a well-known patriot priest, Thomas Canon Doyle, whose public exhortations pleaded for an end to the government’s squeeze on tenant farmers. Both Kennedy brothers were assigned the task of collecting money, organizing and recruiting new members and representing their local branch in the larger organization. It is not clear whether the two acted with splinter groups of this reform movement responsible for some 2,500 acts of violence throughout Ireland, including their local Wexford area. This violence was usually intended to stop “land grabbers” who exploited the situation when their neighbors were evicted from their farms under the British laws. Much of the Land League’s strategy called for Irish tenant farmers to withhold their rents to British landlords, resist their eviction when they defaulted and threaten or intimidate “grabbers or landlords” who would try to claim the farms being run by the tenant farmers. Although Parnell didn’t publicly condone violence, it was not uncommon for local organizers to enforce their resistance to the “rack rent” system with terrifying acts of force. Eight “agrarian homicides” to landlords or their agents were recorded in Ireland in one year alone, as well as numerous mutilations, stabbings and other threats of violence and intimidation.
The most dramatic local confrontation occurred in October 1887 at the house of a tenant farmer named David Foley, who ran a farm at Ballykerogue, about four miles from the Kennedys’ place. The landlord insisted Foley pay his rent or face eviction. When ordered to leave, Foley refused. James Kennedy—a later photo shows him to be a burly man with a wide flattened nose and round jaw—also wasn’t one to be pushed around lightly, nor his brother, Patrick. The Kennedys also withheld the rents on their homestead farm in protest. The two brothers rounded up nineteen other supporters of the Land League and jammed into Foley’s house with him, fortifying the doors and windows. When the sheriff and police came to Foley’s house for the eviction, the Kennedy brothers and the others resisted until more police were called, and the men were arrested. They were released on bail, the money put up by two other Land League supporters, and went to trial in January 1888. Each of the protestors, including James Kennedy, received a sentence of three months of hard labor at the Wexford jail for breaking the British laws at that time.
On his first night in jail, James Kennedy, then thirty-one years old who, like his older brother, never married, wrote home expressing concern. The two brothers worried how their widowed seventy-five-year-old mother, Mary, and two sisters—Catherine Kennedy, a widow, and Bridget Kennedy, a “spinster,” as one legal document called her—would manage the family farm while they were in jail for the better part of the spring. Fortunately, their incarceration didn’t last long. After four days in jail, the Land League secured an appeal for the protestors, who were released on bail. Eventually, they were granted probation as first-time offenders, and released with a bond to keep the peace. But their British-sanctioned landlord didn’t drop his own eviction campaign against the Kennedys.
In March 1888, while the brothers were fighting the Foley jail sentence, Colonel Charles George Tottenham, the British owner of vast tracts of Wexford farmland, including the Kennedy-run acreage, obtained a civil court order for payment of rent that the Kennedys had been withholding in protest for more than two years. If they didn’t come up with the money, the court said, the Kennedys would be evicted. As local leaders of the Land League movement, the Kennedy brothers stayed true to the cause and refused payment, forcing the hand of the court. By summer’s end, the Kennedy family was thrown off the homestead farm—the same fields of barley and wheat that Patrick Kennedy had cultivated with his brothers before leaving for America.
For the next several weeks, the Kennedys were forced to depend on the charity of their relatives and neighbors for food and shelter. Under the law, those who helped the Kennedys were criminally liable.“This charity, typical of the time and the neighbourhood, endangered the kind people who gave it, because they left themselves open to charges of collaboration,” local historian John W. Pierce observed. After decades of paying escalating rents on farmland they once owned, the Kennedys were now homeless. The fundamental inequity of the British-run land system—indeed the centuries of oppression and denial of basic liberties in their own land—became a painful reality, the sort that can distill into the deep-seated hatred shared by so many other Irish. During this time, no one moved in to claim the tenancy to the Kennedy Homestead. Apparently, potential land grabbers considered it unwise to seize the property of the local Land League chief. But the Kennedys were still desperately at a loss, without a home or the money to reclaim it.
News of the dire predicament in Dunganstown soon reached Boston, about the same time in late 1888 that P. J. Kennedy’s mother, Bridget, was dying, and his first son, Joseph,was born. Though the details are no longer known, the letters between the two countries once again reunited the Kennedys in trying to save their family homestead. P. J. Kennedy, along with his sisters, all married to successful Irish-American men, sent a sum of money to Ireland large enough to pay off the debts of fifty pounds
and regain the family’s tenancy of the farm. Perhaps the money came from P. J.’s booming businesses or perhaps from the estate of Bridget Kennedy as one last gesture to the land she and her husband left. Under the existing British law, however, the Kennedys still couldn’t buy what they viewed as their own property. For the rest of the century, James and Patrick Kennedy kept pushing for land reforms with their local Land League movement. After Parnell lost his leadership role (because of a sex scandal involving Kitty O’Shea, a follower’s wife), the Kennedys were active with the new replacement organization, the Irish National Land League. In 1903, with the passage of the Irish Land Act, the Kennedys were finally able to buy the ownership of their homestead for £214, financed with credit from the Irish Land Commission, a debt paid off in installments until the 1960s.
The Kennedys of Dunganstown didn’t forget the debt they owed America, just as their American cousin couldn’t seem to get his family’s homeland out of his mind. For many Irish-Americans like Kennedy, the process of assimilation stirred conflicting emotions and mixed loyalties. For all his considerable success in Boston, P. J. Kennedy—counted officially at birth as a “foreigner” in his own native land—still faced a world of bigotry and social barriers. Like so many other Irish Catholics in the United States, P. J. Kennedy claimed a spiritual foothold in both worlds—Ireland and America—aware of the many similarities that bound them together and the vast differences between the two lands.