by Thomas Maier
Later in his life, P. J. Kennedy visited Ireland, talking for hours with his Irish cousins about what their lives had been like and what they might look forward to. Mary Ann Ryan, a Kennedy cousin who today lives at the Kennedy Homestead, says that her mother, Mary Kennedy Ryan, remembered being introduced as a little girl to the visitor from Massachusetts. “My mother would say P. J. came here for about a week,” she recalled. During his visit, P. J. made sure to pay homage at Vinegar Hill, the battle site where his Kennedy relatives fought with the Boys of Wexford in ’98. He carried back to America a greater sense of the injustices to the Irish, which he shared with his son, Joseph, as he grew up. When he returned to Boston, P. J. Kennedy wrote letters to Irish cousins in Dunganstown and sent a photograph of himself, which faded over time. In one correspondence, he thanked his Irish cousins for giving him the “copy book” his immigrant father, Patrick, used when he attended school. “My children were particularly interested in it,” he wrote, “and you know how pleased I was . . . the fact that I had never seen my father to remember him.” Years later in an interview, Mary Kennedy Ryan recalled how her own father took delight in reading her “the Boston letters coming from Patrick, the Senator.”
One Sunday afternoon, long after P. J. Kennedy’s death in 1929, Mary Kennedy Ryan and her husband sat in the living room of the main house on the Kennedy farm and pulled down the old box containing P. J.’s letters. By then, the Kennedys owned their farm and no longer feared losing it to the British landlords. Mary’s marriage was a union of second cousins in the Kennedy family. Her grandfather, James Kennedy, was the younger brother of Patrick Kennedy, who emigrated to America. Mary’s husband, James Ryan, was the grandson of John Kennedy, the oldest brother of immigrant Patrick Kennedy.
On that afternoon, Mary remembered the visits by P. J. Kennedy, Patrick’s son, and the way he helped save their family farm. As was true of other Irish families who saw their loved ones drift away to America, the Kennedys of Dunganstown fell out of contact over time with P. J.’s son. As Mary shuffled through the correspondence, perhaps she thought she’d never see her American cousins again. She decided to dispose of these old papers left in the house.
“We sat in front of the fire and read them,” Mary Kennedy Ryan recalled,“and then we burned them, one at time.”
Chapter Six
The Long Climb to Acceptance
AFTER NEARLY A HALF CENTURY in Boston, the Irish, unwashed and unwelcome, had not melded into the broader society. “The Irishman fails to fit into the complex of our civilization, apparently for the reason that his talents are too little interwoven with the capacities which go to make up the modern successful man,” the Atlantic expressed with utter contempt in 1896. Elsewhere, the view of immigrants wasn’t much better. In his Harper’s Weekly cartoons, illustrator Thomas Nast portrayed the Irish as crass semi-illiterate drunkards, shiftless in action and violent by nature, given to all forms of graft and chicanery when elevated to power. Even those who once supported America’s open-ended immigration policy, who believed they could forge the Irish and so many other “poor wretches of the old world” into a new nation, creating, in Emerson’s words, “a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature,” were no longer optimistic. What ailed the Irish-American, wrote Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell, a one-time enthusiast of immigration, was “something too deep for railways or transplantation to cure.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, the dream of assimilation in America gave way to resentment among even the most successful Irish Catholics in Boston. Fading away were their more accommodating leaders, Patrick Collins and Archbishop John Williams, two men who had acted as temperate voices of reason with the Brahmins. (Archbishop Williams declined a cardinal’s hat because he feared it would stir up too much bigotry.) In their place were such men as Mayor John Francis Fitzgerald, the boisterous dynamo from the North Side who rallied the Irish to City Hall and extended his message to include an array of Italian, German, Polish and Jewish immigrants. Fitzgerald embraced a career in politics—turning it into a vehicle for Irish ascendancy as well as his family’s own ambitions—because, as he once claimed,“In business, I was held back by prejudice.”
Another man who embodied this new assertiveness by Irish Catholics was Cardinal William O’Connell, a zealous defender of the faith unafraid to attack strongholds of Brahmin society. He voiced a separatist call for Catholics to attend their own schools and follow their own ways rather than bow to the New England culture in which they were perpetually second-class citizens. Ablaze with his own personal sense of injustice, O’Connell recalled the sting of bigotry he endured while attending public schools in Lowell, Massachusetts, and how he “sensed the bitter antipathy, scarcely concealed” of Yankee “schoolmarms” toward Irish Catholics like himself. “For any slight pretext we were severely punished,” O’Connell remembered bitterly. “We were made to feel the slur against our faith and race, which hurt us to our very hearts’ core.”
Fitzgerald and O’Connell, both sons of Irish Catholic immigrants, understood their parents’ struggle to survive in the New World, but they, as proud second-generation Americans,were determined not to remain docile or subservient to any of their countrymen. Though they could barely tolerate each other personally, the two men were bound by their common resentments and their great ambitions for the Irish. Each understood how important religion could be to politics, especially in Boston.
In his early years, John F. Fitzgerald seemed to personify that Brahmin ideal of “Americanizing” the children of Irish immigrants, certainly as much as Emerson or any other Yankee visionary might imagine. Fitzgerald graduated from the Boston Latin School—the renowned public institution attended by many sons of Yankee aristocrats—and he performed so well that he was accepted to Harvard Medical School. It was a remarkable climb for the son of immigrant parents, Thomas Fitzgerald and Rose Mary Murray, both of whom emigrated from County Wexford during the famine years of the 1840s and settled in Boston’s bustling North End. Thomas was the last to leave his family’s farm in Ireland, and he wound up working for six dollars a month as a farm laborer in South Acton, Massachusetts, before saving enough to buy a grocery store in their North End neighborhood. In his close-knit community of Irish immigrants and their children, John Fitzgerald became known as a smart, amiable young man. He gained notice as a good athlete and for helping the parish priests at St. Stephen’s Church run sunlight dances, picnics and charity events. “My playgrounds were the streets and wharves busy with ships from every port of the world,” this young man of boundless energy recalled years later.
When both his parents died at a young age, John felt compelled to drop his plans for medical school and went to work, hoping to keep his family of eight siblings together rather than, as a neighborhood priest suggested, seeing the younger ones sent off to an orphanage. The turmoil in Fitzgerald’s early life resembled that of many other Irish politicians of his time—Patrick Collins, Martin Lomasney and P. J. Kennedy among them— all of whom were forced into the workplace as youngsters when their parents died at an early age. Blocked by “prejudice” in Boston’s world of commerce, Fitzgerald explained, “I chose politics, the only field where I could get influence and opportunity.”
His fortunes were helped along by Matthew Keany, then boss of the North End’s Ward Six district, who appreciated the young man’s organizing abilities and arranged for him a clerk’s job at the Customs House. Keany supported Fitzgerald’s first bid into politics, for the city’s Common Council in 1892 and then the state senate the following year. Young Fitzie, as his friends called him, became “the social leader of a great section of the most sociable of folk—the Irish—surrounded on all sides by a socially hostile population,” Collier’s magazine later observed. Though unexceptional in stature, Fitzgerald possessed an outsized personality, piercing blue eyes, a large head with slick dark hair parted down the middle, a pointed nose and a droll mouth that always seemed ready to speak. At the slighte
st urging, he could sing “Sweet Adeline” to crowds of supporters with the gusto of an old vaudevillian. If P. J. Kennedy in Ward Two gained a reputation for quiet, almost stolid behind-the-scenes effectiveness, Fitzgerald practiced an affable, flamboyant political flimflammery mixed with genuine concern and a desire for programs of substance for his immigrant constituency. In a ward filled with Irish immigrants, some of whom still spoke Gaelic, Fitzgerald understood their desperate need for work. He used municipal government as a supply house for jobs that kept many families from the poorhouse. Eager to please, Fitzgerald claimed that his parents hailed from various parts of Ireland—Tipperary and Limerick, rather than, in truth, County Wexford—depending on whom he was talking to and in what county their Irish immigrant parents were born. “New England is more Irish today than any other part of the world except Ireland,” Fitzgerald said, pointing out that Boston’s population was made up of more than 60 percent Irish. As more Italian and Jewish immigrants filled Ward Six, Fitzgerald made sure they got their fair share of patronage and political perks.
When Keany died suddenly, young Fitzgerald stepped in as the chieftain in Ward Six and, through a consensus with the other ward bosses, managed to get elected to Congress in 1894—the same seat his grandson would later hold. Fitzgerald managed to push through federal money to revitalize the dormant Charlestown Navy Yard, the first major upgrade of Boston Harbor, and saved the old frigate Constitution, which was rotting at a New Hampshire pier. As one of the few Catholics in Congress, he tried unsuccessfully to secure federal funding for Indian schools run by Catholic missionaries (Protestants wanted the Native Americans taught in nondenominational schools), and pointed with pride to a $5,000 appropriation he did get for a Catholic-run orphanage in Washington,D.C. But perhaps his most significant action occurred one afternoon when Congressman Fitzgerald urged President Grover Cleveland to veto a bill requiring a literacy test for new immigrants. Passed with the political support of nativists who feared the swelling ranks of immigrants, the bill demanded that those entering the United States must show they could read and write, and also understand the U.S. Constitution. Fitzgerald, aware of how many illiterate and non- English-speaking immigrants could never pass such a test, objected to such discriminatory tactics. Immigration always remained a crucial issue for Fitzgerald—as it would for generations of family members to come.
CONGRESSMAN FITZGERALD was keenly aware of the renewed anti-Catholic and anti-immigration fervor sweeping across America. The forces pushing this immigration bill resided in many states, and the old Know-Nothing spirit had found new voice in such groups as the American Protective Association (APA), which claimed anywhere from 100,000 to 2.5 million members nationwide. Formed in the 1880s, the APA made each new recruit swear not to vote for a Catholic, to hire a Protestant when one was available over a Catholic and never to go on strike with a Catholic worker.“ The determination of the Church of Rome to capture our great cities, those centers of life and power, rests on immigration!” declared the Reverend Daniel C. Eddy, also a legislator in Massachusetts. “Our dangers as a free people, dangers against which the wisest men of the world have warned us, spring from immigration.” During this time, the APA built up several chapters in Massachusetts, including Boston, and deliberately provoked the Irish and other newly arrived groups with their anti-immigration message. Books and commentators accused immigrants not only of causing crime in the streets and corruption in government but also of a papal conspiracy to take over the United States and playing an alleged role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. An economic downturn in 1893 made some Americans fear immigrants were stealing their jobs. Three deadly riots linked to the APA broke out around the country. During an Independence Day celebration in 1895, the APA marched through East Boston, the heavily Irish ward run by P.J. Kennedy, with a float carrying a woman dressed in orange—the traditional symbol in Ireland of Protestant pride and unity against Catholics—an incident that incited fighting. On the street where Bridget Kennedy had once kept her store, a Protestant extremist shot into an angry crowd of Catholics, killing two men and injuring many others. Rather than remorse or reconciliation, a Baptist minister told the Boston Post that he prayed for God to “hasten the day when there should not be a Catholic priest on this continent.”
With a growing amount of national concern about Catholics and immigrants, the American Protective Association pushed Congress to enact the literacy-test immigration bill. It was proposed by Republican legislator Samuel McCall of Massachusetts to weed out “undesirable” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—exactly the same people coming to live in Congressman Fitzgerald’s district. A similar 1888 immigration bill severely limiting Chinese immigration to America was signed into law by President Grover Cleveland under great political pressure. It was the first significant act to curb immigration into America and, if up to the nativists, would certainly not be the last. Newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune embraced this new anti-immigration measure, declaring the moral fiber of the nation was “being enfeebled by its absorption of the dregs of the Old World.”The literacy bill passed overwhelmingly in the House, as did a similar bill in the Senate, Fitzgerald being one of the few voices against it.
He painted the bill as an assault on immigrants: “Thousands of Irish and Jewish girls, owing to the injustices and barbarities that have been heaped upon them by the English and Russian governments and the lack of opportunity offered by these governments in the education of their subjects, are unable to read and write,” he said. If this law had been in place “at the time of the arrival of my own mother from Ireland into this country,” he noted, “she would have been denied admittance.” In early 1897, Fitzgerald placed these words into the Congressional Record, adapted largely from a speech supporting American immigration that he had given at an Independence Day celebration the previous year in Boston. Hardworking, industrious immigrants were to be welcomed and admired, he argued, and not met with scorn. “It is fashionable to-day to cry out against the immigration of the Hungarian, the Italian and the Jew, but I think that the man who comes to this country for the first time, to a strange land, without friends and without employment, is born of the stuff that is bound to make good citizens,” he said.
On a Saturday afternoon soon after the vote, the Boston congressman wandered over to the White House, a far smaller and more informal place than the palatial compound of later years. With the president’s secretary gone for the day, he happened to find Cleveland in his office, answering his mail in longhand. According to his biographer, Fitzgerald argued strenuously against the bill for the next half hour and told Cleveland that his veto would “bring millions of immigrants to these shores who would otherwise have been kept out.” Fitzgerald found a receptive audience. The APA considered the election of Cleveland, a Democrat, as a triumph of “political Romanism.” Cleveland shared the old democratic belief that illiterate immigrants could be assimilated and made into good Americans. In vetoing the literacy-test bill, Cleveland chastised legislators for giving way to prejudice. “If any particular element of our illiterate immigration is to be feared for other causes,” the president decided, “they should be dealt with directly, instead of making illiteracy a pretext for exclusion.”
Congress never mustered enough support to override Cleveland’s veto, issued two days before he left office in March 1897. Although historians later praised Cleveland’s veto as one of the most courageous acts of his presidency, most contemporaries agreed with his rival, Theodore Roosevelt, who said Cleveland’s “last stroke was given to injure his country as much as he possibly could.”Years later, however, Fitzgerald still counted his opposition to the immigration literacy-test bill as one of his finest moments in politics, a story that would be repeated to his grandchildren.
After three terms in the nation’s Capitol, Congressman John F. Fitzgerald came home in 1901.The infighting of the Irish ward bosses in Boston, and his own need to make more money to support his wife, Josephine, and his five chil
dren, mandated his return and put his political career in doubt. Boston remained a deeply divided city: the Brahmins were in one camp, still controlling the economic and cultural institutions, and the Irish were splintered into various political factions, their hands around each other’s necks. “Boston politics of this era was not unlike that in Ireland before the Anglo- Norman conquest,” Fitzgerald’s daughter Rose wrote decades later. “The Irish had their local chieftains, who often warred against one another for fancied glory and advantages for themselves and their followers. They made unstable alliances that could find one year’s ally another year’s foe. Yet they produced especially strong leaders, superchieftains who reigned as kings over large regions, in turn allying and defecting and forming new constellations as the winds blew.”
In their yearning for acceptance, the Boston Irish rallied around the esteemed Patrick Collins for mayor, a drive strongly supported by Collins’s friend and ally, P. J. Kennedy. Fitzgerald found himself one of the few ward bosses outside this coalition. Collins held a personal disdain for the syrupy pol who could weep on demand, and for another rising politician as well, James Michael Curley, considered, with more than ample reason, a crass local demagogue known as “the Purple Shamrock.” “Patrick Collins had lived as nobly as he spoke; no scandal ever tarnished his name,” Curley’s biographer Jack Beatty recounted. Harvard’s president even wanted to erect a statue to honor Collins. Although Fitzgerald was ridiculed in some quarters as a pathological glad-hander, he nevertheless represented the broad, sometimes coarse, but ultimately legitimate interests of Irish- American citizens looking for acceptance. They wanted to become enfranchised in the political process on their own terms, not someone else’s. More often than not, the bigotry of the past and present against the Irish engendered a mix of wounded ethnic and religious pride, rather than the dispassionate high-mindedness of Mayor Collins so applauded by the Brahmins. Fitzgerald understood the effectiveness of this appeal and turned it into a fine art.