by Thomas Maier
With typical energy, Fitzgerald gained control of a rundown newspaper called the Republic, which he aimed at Irish immigrants and sold on Sundays outside churches, quickly turning it into a moneymaker. “You know, sixty percent of the shoppers in Boston are Catholic and my newspapers are the only effective medium to reach them,” he reportedly told George J. Raymond, one of Boston’s largest advertisers. “Besides, if you want anything in the Massachusetts legislature or at City Hall, I can get it for you.” After all, Honey Fitz had arranged a state senate seat for his brother, Henry, and helped get state-approved liquor licenses with no problem. Another newspaper, the Sacred Heart Review, complained that Fitzgerald improperly intimidated potential advertisers by claiming undue influence with priests and being the “authorized representative” of the Catholic Church. “Fitzgerald makes a business of trading on the Catholic name,” the competing newspaper charged.“He has the hardihood to pretend that he represents Catholic interests, and speaks for the Catholic clergy.” The Republic not only made Fitzgerald financially successful but revived and provided a new platform for his political ambitions. When asked by Mayor Collins about the newspaper’s billboards featuring a photo of its owner, Fitzgerald smiled. “I’m just trying to promote The Republic,” he told Collins. “I want to make it a newspaper for the Irish.”
When Collins, who had never appreciated the need for patronage among the ward bosses, died suddenly in 1905 during his second term, Fitzgerald seized upon this opening to City Hall. With barely a straight face, he fashioned a campaign for the Democratic nomination by attacking the city’s ward bosses—even though he remained the power broker of Ward Six— and later won in the general election against a Back Bay Republican. On victory night, Fitzgerald paid emotional tribute to his dearly departed Irish immigrant parents and how they might relish their son’s place in Boston history. “It would have been a great delight to them, for they were natives of a country where democracy could not be exercised freely due to English domination,” he told supporters, many of them “Dearos,” the shortened name for what Fitzgerald often called the “dear old North End” of his youth. “I am the first son of foreign parents to become Mayor of Boston, thus my parents were the first persons of immigrant stock to have a son as Mayor.”
Rather than deny the stubborn bigotry in Boston, Fitzgerald confronted it head-on in his campaigns and transformed any whiff into a rallying cry for his troops. Indeed, his organization spread false rumors of bias against the Irish by his opponents so that he could express outrage and defend his people publicly. Fitzgerald later lost a two-year term to a Republican challenger but, after chronicling his trip to Ireland and other European countries for the Boston papers and planning a new strategy, he was reelected in 1910 to a four-year term as mayor. When his opponent in the 1910 campaign, James Jackson Storrow III, a wealthy reformer, held a well-attended rally, one of the featured speakers, former Governor Curtis Guild Jr., made a fatal blunder. “By what right does any candidate for high public office in this fair city dare to introduce the issue of religion into a political campaign,” Guild bellowed, his finger pointing to high heaven. Even though Fitzgerald’s newspaper had declared three years earlier that Storrow didn’t possess “any motive that can be fairly viewed as hostile to those of Celtic blood,” candidate Fitzgerald seized on the gaffe so that he could defend the honor of the city’s Catholics, who also made up the majority of the electorate. Police were forced to stop the fistfights and near-riots that erupted during the rest of the campaign. At Honey Fitz’s last rally in that race, the “Star-Spangled Banner” was interspersed with Irish songs, including the romping beat from “The Wearin’ of the Green.”
The theme of bigotry against the Irish remained a constant war cry for Honey Fitz, even after he left City Hall. He later ran for Congress, but was forced from his seat in 1919 because of voter fraud—including a ballot cast in the name of a dead soldier. Confronted with the evidence, Fitzgerald saw green instead of red. He wrapped himself in the Irish flag rather than deal successfully with charges for which he had no good answers. His accusers were guilty of “injecting the Irish issue to stir up the prejudice of the bigoted natures in the House,” he countercharged. “I would sink into the ground before I would prostitute a cause that has struggled for centuries and is struggling now, and to which men and women of Irish blood have given their all.”
DURING HIS PUBLIC CAREER, Fitzgerald not only represented the Irish Catholics in Boston but helped to transform their position in the city and their image of themselves. He railed against the “Puritan sons” who, he said, “cannot know the personal memories that hallow this scene of our fathers’ struggles. . . . Our annals tell of villages emptied by famine, of crowded immigrant ships, of laborious lives in the new land, and the scanty reward of the laborers.” In his orations, Honey Fitz complained about a “small knot of wealthy men” who controlled too much of Boston. In particular, he chafed at how the Irish were still largely barred by prejudice from Boston’s banking and financial world. Once, as he told the story, he quizzed a banker why, with so many Irish depositors, there were no Irish on the board of directors:
“Well, a couple of the tellers are Irish Catholic,” the banker replied, a bit defensively.
Indignant, Fitzgerald had proved his point.“Yes,” he answered, his voice dripping with sarcasm,“and I suppose the charwomen are too.”
Unlike other Irish leaders in Boston, Fitzgerald didn’t genuflect to the Brahmin hierarchy and its gentile traditions. Certainly no such deference could be expected from a man whose home contained a stained glass window with his family’s Irish coat of arms and his own self-styled Gaelic crest named Shawn A Boo, “John the Bold.” Brashly, he suggested the great days of the Yankee colonists—the brilliant revolutionaries who carved a republic out of a wilderness, the bold capitalists who built industries and fortunes— had given way to a generation of reclusive coupon-collectors whose bloodlines were weak and instincts reactionary; people who were content to sit on their money.“Old Boston is cold and proud, wrapped in the mantle of Puritanism, not progressive enough,” Fitz proclaimed.“It has been too long deaf to the aspirations of the young Irish, Italians, Jews and Frenchmen in our midst who are eager to make their way in business here.”
By embracing all immigrants, Fitzgerald resisted the Irish tendency toward isolation in their own community, focused only on their own problems. With his remarkable panache, Fitzgerald made sure his campaigns appealed to new waves of immigrants beside the Irish, enabling him at times to overcome defections and rancor within the Democratic Party itself. It was a vision of Boston—indeed of America—not shared by many politicians of his time. When Russian and eastern European Jews moved into his beloved North End, stirring anti-Semitic feelings among some Irish Catholics, Fitzgerald welcomed the new voters into his coalition. He recognized from experience that patronage jobs and important city posts should reflect all the city’s ethnic voting blocs. “Mayor Fitzgerald had a good rapport with Boston’s Jews,” historian Dennis P.Ryan noted.“Despite Yankee charges that he was giving official sanction to a quota system, he persisted in asserting that one of five positions on the School Committee should go to a Jew and helped one win election to the Committee in 1913.” Similarly, Fitzgerald wooed Negro voters away from the ranks of the Republican Party by genuinely understanding the racism they faced in Boston and speaking out publicly about discriminatory practices. When his appointment of a Negro lawyer to head the city’s Weights and Measures Department caused protests among workers, Fitzgerald accused them of bigotry and ordered their resignations. Appreciative of Fitzgerald’s record, the Guardian, the city’s leading African-American newspaper, declared the mayor “free from all color prejudice.”
In his free-associating, audacious style, Fitzgerald traced his own family roots back to the Normans, claiming a little bit of French blood, a little Italian, a little Greek and part of just about any cultural heritage whose hall, church, temple or wake he visited. To his goo
d government detractors, these statements seemed ludicrous. It was another example of Fitzgerald’s over-the-top flimflammery, the kind expected of a big-city ward boss. Yet there was a progressive, inclusive spirit to Fitzgerald’s politics that was heartfelt and authentic, born of his own past, that served as a model for the urban Democratic coalitions of the twentieth century. “When I was growing up in Boston, my grandfather, Honey Fitz, would often regale us with stories about my great-grandparents,” remembered Senator Edward Kennedy.“He would also tell us about the famine and the waves of Irish immigrants who left for the hope of a better future in the United States—about how they made their marks in Boston and all across America—enduring hardships, building railroads, digging the canals, settling the West, manning the factories of a growing America. . . . Our own family history gave us empathy for other immigrants who had to face the same struggle.”
In helping these new immigrants land jobs, obtain vital services and climb Boston’s social ladder, Fitzgerald also never let them forget his name. His nemesis, Curley, who followed Honey Fitz to City Hall, once recalled a conversation with a new immigrant who was taking a naturalization class. Every time he was asked how things were done in America, the man replied: “John F. Fitzgerald.” Astounded, Curley stopped the man when he gave the same name for the president of the United States. As Curley quipped:“I’m sure he would have gone on to tell me that John F. Fitzgerald drove the snakes out of Ireland and discovered America.”
WHILE FITZGERALD’S BLUSTERY politics pushed Boston’s Irish to a more expansive democratic approach, seizing for underdogs what was rightfully theirs in the political arena, the new Catholic prelate,William O’Connell, led his immigrant flock on a decidedly more separatist path, away from the Protestant influence of the Brahmins. Though he shared a past similar to that of the mayor, O’Connell urged all Catholics, particularly the Irish, to create their own culture, to go their own way.“The Puritan has passed, the Catholic remains,”O’Connell proclaimed in 1908, at the diocese’s centennial celebration.“They wrote the history of the last century;we must make the history of the coming one.”
Appointed as bishop the previous year by the Pope, O’Connell wielded enormous power in Boston because of the sheer number of Catholic voters in the city, the influence of so many Catholic parishes, schools and fraternal organizations, and the sheer energy and command of the archbishop himself. Few politicians, certainly not Fitzgerald, dared cross him. But the outlooks and remedies of the two men could be quite different. Whereas Fitzgerald spoke generally about the bigotry of the past and present to work toward a more democratic future of shared power, O’Connell pinpointed the same prejudices as precisely the reasons why a Catholic should avoid anything having to do with Protestants. In his book of slights, O’Connell underlined the deep-seated bias of the Brahmin intelligentsia as well as the cruder nativism of the Know-Nothings, the APA and, later, the emerging Ku Klux Klan. O’Connell’s prescription for Catholics in Boston called for shunning non-Catholics. Though this cultural isolation was a familiar tactic of the church, especially in Ireland, this view pushed back the progressive movement for Catholic immigrants in Boston for at least another generation. And because the prelate, soon to be elevated to cardinal in 1911, held sway with so many followers in Boston—including the Kennedy family— O’Connell’s influence would help define the American Catholic Church for the next half century.
Growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of eleven children born to immigrants from County Cavan,William Henry O’Connell was expected by his family to become a priest—a tremendous honor in Irish Catholic families large enough to dedicate one of their own to the church. Perhaps appropriately for a defender of the faith, O’Connell was born in 1859 on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day in the Roman Catholic Church and singularly different from the rituals of other Christian churches, some of which do not recognize the virgin birth of Jesus or venerate Christ’s mother with the same devotion as Rome. As a public school student in Lowell, O’Connell remembered being ridiculed for his religion by his teachers and Yankee peers. He later graduated from the Jesuit College in Boston and studied for the priesthood in Rome, coming of age when the Vatican asserted a more authoritarian hand over its followers and the American church was beginning to emerge from its backwater status. In 1908, church officials lifted the “missionary status” of the United States, recognizing the growth and importance of American Catholics, even though Pope Leo XIII had earlier condemned “Americanism,” the movement among Catholic lay people for more control of their parishes. The pontiff ’s move against the heresy of modernism—“ultramontane ortho-doxy”— appealed to O’Connell’s own authoritarian instincts:“There can be no true morality unless it is founded on religious principle,” he demanded. His motto, Vigor in Arduis, envisioned life as a “struggle . . . through storm and tempest,” a call perfectly tailored for a people who once arrived on famine ships.
O’CONNELL EXERTED the enormous influence he held in local politics with the subtle timing and punch of an Irish ward boss. He not only fought against a state lottery but also opposed birth control, which the diocesan newspaper condemned as “a practice which God Almighty has forbidden.” He objected to baseball on Sundays, supported prohibition, chastised radio crooners and condemned the public discussion of scientific theories about relativity and the cosmos as a “ghastly apparition of atheism.” As easily dismissed as these views might be in academic circles, O’Connell would have none of it. His gospel to Boston’s Irish demanded that they stand up for themselves and no longer view themselves as victims. “The child of the immigrant is called to fill the place which the Puritan has left,” he said, referring to the declining number of Brahmins in Boston. He cast a withering eye on American melting pot theories of assimilation and instead urged Catholics to establish their own culture in Boston.“There is, as you know, just one point of view, and that is, Catholic people should attend Catholic schools,” he declared. Through his strident calls for autonomy and ethnic pride, O’Connell transformed the Irish self-image away from what biographer James O’Toole called a “preoccupation with discrimination, both real and perceived . . . the whine of self-pity” into “the confidence of self-assertion.” And yet part of that self-assertiveness, as O’Connell defined it, would involve identifying those powerful figures or institutions who would discriminate against Irish Catholics. Most prominent on his list was Harvard University.
Plenty of anti-Catholicism festered behind the ivy walls at Cambridge, a rarified world of Anglo-Saxon Protestant intellectual life far removed from the hand-to-mouth existence of Boston’s Irish Catholics. In many ways, Harvard’s attitudes were merely an extension of the British view of the Irish, part of a stubborn bias engrained in American intellectual life for many years to come. In the early eighteenth century, the Dudleian lectures were established at Harvard, dedicated in part to the purpose of “detecting, convicting and exposing the idolatry, error and superstitions of the Romish church.” With the turn of the twentieth century, Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, became an outspoken critic of Catholic doctrine and sacraments, the priesthood and the onslaught of Irish Catholic immigrants because of what it meant to the waning power of the Brahmins. Eliot insisted that Boston’s children attend public schools. Although he shunned any suggestion of being a bigot, this Harvard president declared himself “an enemy of all that the Catholic Church inwardly stands for.” He predicted America would change the Roman Catholic Church more than the church would his countrymen. At Harvard, Eliot instituted an entrance system for the law school that many Catholics considered discriminatory, designed to keep them out of the city’s top law firms. Although some students from elite colleges gained entry to Harvard Law School without taking a test, graduates of Catholic colleges had to take a “special test,” a mandate based on Eliot’s view that their education was somehow inferior. He also ordered that these students must maintain higher grades than the rest to keep their
places in class. The Jesuits at Boston College were infuriated by the “second-class status” accorded their graduates.
Harvard’s actions confirmed in O’Connell’s mind that Catholics should go it alone. The drive for money and assimilation at Harvard would only drive the Irish away from their families and church. Harvard lacked “the whole truth, the real truth, the fundamental truth” of religion, the cardinal advised, and its lack of moral underpinnings and its overt discrimination should be avoided—a message heeded by many Catholics, but not all. Some prominent Catholics attended Harvard because they hoped their presence in the Ivy League would bring about greater tolerance. Honey Fitz himself considered allowing his bright oldest daughter, Rose, to attend Wellesley College, one of the Ivy League’s seven sister schools, until he consulted O’Connell, who upbraided him on the choice. Rather than face the cardinal’s wrath, Fitzgerald steered Rose to a Catholic women’s school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart—a fateful decision that Rose later said was the biggest regret of her young life.“I was furious at my parents for years,” Rose told a family member.“I was angry at my church. As much as I loved my father, I never really forgave him for not letting me go.”
O’Connell’s antipathy toward Harvard could be justified by the university’s own actions. Many professors believed the Irish to be unworthy heirs of the American Revolution and incapable of performing in the leadership roles they coveted. “Our whole social system suffers from their weak personal characteristics,” wrote one Harvard sociologist. And a 1911 Harvard Lampoon cartoon depicted a drunken Irishman with the caption: “The Glorious 17th of March.” Alarmed by the tensions between Irish laborers and Anglo-Saxon business owners, scholars at Harvard and other leading universities wrote strongly worded treatises against immigration, or pushed pseudoscientific studies claiming a mental inferiority among the new immigrant groups. During Fitzgerald’s tenure at City Hall, many Brahmins joined the Immigration Restriction League, an anti-immigration group put together by Harvard men, serving as the Back Bay’s answer to the more crude and populous American Protective Association, from which it held its nose. The league aimed to crush the nation’s immigration movement without getting its hands dirty or called any nasty names. “At home, Brahmin restrictionists never stooped to religious discrimination, but to aid restriction, they willingly co-operated with Know-Nothing nativists,” historian Barbara Miller Solomon observed. As late as 1913, the league’s prominent members included bankers, educators, rich philanthropists, New York publisher Henry Holt, and several college presidents, including Harvard’s A. Lawrence Lowell. The duty of Brahmins, as Lowell asserted,was not only to dominate the Irish but to “absorb” them into the existing American culture until their separate Irish identity could no longer be detected.