The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  But many league members were weary of good-government attempts to meld poor and uneducated Irish immigrants into their own society. Francis A.Walker, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an early league member, said that even second-generation Irish immigrants were no more than “homemade foreigners,” separated by religion, race, “clannishness” and “the jealousy of their spiritual teachers toward our popular institutions.” Other league members, influenced by the rise of eugenics, argued against immigration on the grounds of mixing “inferior” bloodlines with the Anglo-Saxon. Overt or subtle, bigotry at Harvard—regardless of its patronizing assurances—continued for years against immigrants and their children. In reporting about the Brahmin concerns at Harvard in 1922, the Boston Telegram noted: “The Irish, not the Jews, present the real problem at Harvard. The new plan of class selection will cut down the number of Irish as well as Jews.”

  Although the league enlisted many influential people in its cause, none was more prominent than Henry Cabot Lodge, a Harvard man who revived a flagging political career with his anti-immigration message. Despite his words of support for the American democratic ideal, Lodge held a strong belief in the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.“English to the last fibre of his thought,” said his Harvard professor, Henry Adams, in admiration. Lodge feared the Brahmins would be doomed if they didn’t step forward and close the door on immigration—a dagger, he said, aimed at the very heart of America. Lodge warned of “changing the quality of our race and citizenship through the wholesale infusion of races whose traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and whose beliefs are wholly alien to ours and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated with in the past.” Elected to the U.S. Senate, Lodge shepherded through the Capitol the literacy-test immigration bill, which Congressman John F. Fitzgerald helped convince President Cleveland to reject in 1897. But Lodge continued his campaign against the flow of “undesirable” immigrants into America—the very same people filling Fitzgerald’s ward and Cardinal O’Connell’s parishes. Neither man would stand for it.

  Though controversial and outspoken, O’Connell built up a strong parochial school system in with Boston, with the number of church-run elementary schools more than doubling, and Catholic high school enrollment soaring. When James Michael Curley, perhaps the most outlandish Irish pol in Boston, thought of challenging incumbent Mayor Fitzgerald, he asked the cardinal to support his bid for City Hall. O’Connell refused because he would not abide a challenge to the incumbent Mayor Fitzgerald. It would be bad for the Irish, he told Curley in so many words. By going it alone, Catholics in Boston saw their power increase to form an insurmountable voting bloc in the city’s electoral process and turn Boston into what many called the most Catholic city in America. After having seen his flock so long denied, O’Connell was determined not to see the Irish fail. As he often implored: “It is time for Catholic manhood to stand erect, square in the shoulders, look the world in the eye and say, ‘I am a Roman Catholic citizen;What about it?’”

  Fitzgerald benefited greatly from the rise in Irish fortunes, though the divisions in Boston were still painfully obvious. With his showmanship and blarney, Honey Fitz became the personification of the Boston Irish during his tenure in City Hall, his much caricatured persona sometimes glossing over genuine achievement. Worse, greed and corruption in Fitzgerald’s administration perpetuated the Brahmin belief that the Irish couldn’t be trusted to run government in a fair and honest way. In favoring Lodge in the 1916 Senate race, the New York Times complained the election was “turned into a joke” with the Democrats’ selection of Fitzgerald as their candidate. “To this amiable kisser of the Blarney Stone, warbler of ‘Sweet Adeline,’ rider of Florida sharks, a butterfly flitting unconcerned around the solid men of Boston, famed in song, is given the uncontested honor of nomination for Senate,” the newspaper sneered.

  Fitzgerald remained true to his immigrant family’s origins. Though he paid his dues to the cultural conservatism of Cardinal O’Connell, Fitzgerald’s politics reflected a far more liberal view than heard in Sunday sermons. They were closer to the real views of his immigrant constituency. In City Hall, Fitzgerald pushed Boston to become more diverse, more willing to embrace the newest immigrant arrivals. His “Old Home Week” festival, ostensibly for the Brahmins, who refused to attend, turned into a celebration of Boston’s immigrants.“A great public holiday of the foreign people of the city,” as one journalist at the time described it. The mayor gave fifty speeches, often mixed with a line or two of poetry. “If my car were as big as my heart,” he bellowed from his large, open touring automobile,“I’d give you all a ride!” The mayor’s commitment to the famine Irish was never forgotten.“He was always involved in the Irish question,” remembered his granddaughter, Jean Kennedy Smith. “My grandpa Fitzgerald was a very loyal Irishman. I think all of that was about immigration too.” He managed to translate the experience of his Irish immigrant family—and of so many other minorities—into the national debate. He fought against Know- Nothings and the restrictive leagues; and twice he challenged Henry Cabot Lodge on immigration, once in the Congress and again when he lost a bid in 1916 for Cabot’s Senate seat.

  In a story he fondly told, and probably embroidered, Fitzgerald recalled encountering Lodge, the senator from Massachusetts and a prime sponsor of the literacy-test immigration bill who blamed Fitzgerald as the culprit for President Cleveland’s veto.

  “You are an impudent young man,” said the senior senator. “Do you think the Jews or Italians have any right in this country?”

  “As much right as your father or mine,” replied Fitzgerald. “It was only a difference of a few ships.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Family Enterprise

  THEY FELL IN LOVE during a family outing. In the sand and saltwater of the Atlantic, they frolicked and shared laughs as their unsuspecting parents looked on. Rose Fitzgerald, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Boston’s mayor, realized she cared for Joseph Patrick Kennedy at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, in August 1907. Joe was a tall, handsome young man, a year older than she, with light reddish hair, engaging eyes and a quick lively wit. They were brought together by their families’ common passion—politics.

  As a way of ingratiating himself to a potential rival, Mayor John F. Fitzgerald invited Joe’s father, P. J. Kennedy, the East Boston ward boss, to share the same summer holiday with him and some other power brokers. “Not surprisingly, practically all of them were Irish Catholics from Boston,” Rose later recalled. These two men were very different in temperament, and at times Kennedy opposed Fitzgerald’s political plans. Still, Fitzgerald figured the relaxing summer days at the Maine resort, playing a friendly game of baseball, or just taking a dip along the oceanfront, would deepen bonds between the two elected officials and their families. If he hoped this trip might pay off politically, he certainly had no idea to what extent.

  A photograph taken during that holiday shows the two families in bathing suits stretched out on the sand as if on a picnic blanket. Honey Fitz, his jaw jutting and his bantam-like physique on display, is seated beside his beautiful daughter, Rose, her raven black hair tied behind her head. P. J. Kennedy, his thick hair curled by the surf, reclines in the sand behind them. Off to the side, Joe Kennedy, with his long legs and broad shoulders, gives a discreet smile. “I shall always remember Old Orchard as a place of magic,” Rose sighed long afterward.“For it was the place where Joe and I fell in love.”

  In that idyllic setting, the teenagers began a summer romance that would eventually turn into marriage and a large extended family, becoming the lasting foundation for one of the most unique dynasties in U.S. history. Over the next several decades, this family would achieve an extraordinary political and economic success never seen before by Irish Catholics in America. In their words and actions, the Kennedys defined their lives not in historic milestones but around the concept of family and their sense of belonging to an entity greater than themselves;
it was cultivated by more than two thousand years of Irish history and prized by the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that viewed the family as the prime expression of hope and love in a dark and dangerous world. “Long before it ever became a slogan,” Joe Kennedy explained simply,“my family and I had togetherness.”

  Like many American dynasties engaged in empire building, Joe Kennedy’s family enterprise would employ rapier-like techniques learned on Wall Street while propagating an all-American image burnished in Hollywood. But its core was based on a set of precepts and values that were distinctly foreign, other-than-American. Indeed, the basic underpinnings of the Kennedy family—the large and sprawling brood inspired from those languid summer days in Old Orchard Beach—reached back to the Celtic roots of both their families and the unique experience of Irish Catholic immigrants, people who often relied on the family as the essential vessel into the New World.“The origin of the Kennedy sense of family is the holy land of Ireland, priest-ridden, superstitious and clannish,” adduced Gore Vidal, the novelist (and Jackie Kennedy’s stepbrother) in 1967.“Because the Irish maintained the ancient village sense of the family longer than most places in the West and to the extent that the sons of Joe Kennedy reflect those values and prejudices, they are an anachronism in an urbanized, non-family- minded society.”

  At times, the sense of familial duty and obligations for individual Kennedy members, especially for women such as Rose, could be an emotional straightjacket as well as an abiding source of strength. But in defining their lives around the concept of family, there was no doubt of its origins. Nearly a century later, Rose would insist that her grandchildren read the novel Trinity by Leon Uris so that they’d understand what drove so many out of Ireland and why such sweeping bittersweet emotions accompanied the exodus. At his mother’s funeral in 1995, Senator Edward Kennedy cast the history of Rose Fitzgerald very much in this light:“She was the granddaughter of immigrants who saw her father become the first Irish Catholic congressman from Boston and her son and grandson succeed him. She saw the son who proudly carried her Fitzgerald name become the first Irish Catholic president of the United States,” the senator eulogized. “As we gathered to share memories of Mother, grandchild after grandchild stood to tell anecdotes about Mother—different stories with one common theme. She had instilled in the next generation the bonds of faith and love that tie us together as a family.”

  THE FAMILY SPAWNED BY Rose and Joseph Kennedy almost never happened. After their summer in Maine, Joe asked Rose to accompany him to the first dance that fall at Boston Latin, the same school Honey Fitz had graduated from. But the mayor refused to let his daughter go. For the next few years, as both Rose and Joe attended school, they conspired to meet secretively at other dances, or at friends’ parties or even at the Boston Public Library. The romance was given some naughtiness because it flourished under the nose of the city’s mayor. When Honey Fitz’s favorite daughter, the one who accompanied him on so many political outings, announced that she intended someday to marry Kennedy, her alarmed father shipped her off to a convent school in Europe.

  Honey Fitz simply adored Rose. No one seemed good enough for her. “He seems to have regarded me as a miracle, an impression from which he never really recovered,” she wrote years later in her memoir. Rose graduated at the top of her class from Dorchester High School, a coeducational public school, and was handed her diploma by her father, the mayor, brimming with pride. Young Miss Fitzgerald was considered the most beautiful girl in Boston, at least outside the Brahmin circles where the Irish were trying to carve out their own social world. Rose helped form the Ace of Clubs, the top Catholic social club, created as a mirror image to the Boston society from which the Irish were excluded. Their club aspired to feature distinguished lecturers to stimulate the mind rather than copy the purely frivolous events of the restrictive Junior League. Their aspirations were ridiculed. “The greenbloods,” the Brahmins gibed. Like her father, Rose Fitzgerald remained painfully aware of the crippling stereotypes of the Irish as an inferior race not worthy for inclusion in society’s upper echelons. “I remember my father saying that the typical picture of an Irish politician was a man with a glass of whiskey in his hand and a pipe in his mouth,” Rose recalled.“So my father never took a drink in public, and he never smoked anyway. So I think that particular generation was an effort to counter the image of the Irish who were drunkards and boisterous.”

  The Catholic Church loomed large in the lives of the Fitzgeralds. The mayor’s wife, Josephine Hannon Fitzgerald, a quiet woman of deep and devoted faith and possessing none of her husband’s gregarious personality, grew up in a Protestant farming community where her family was keenly aware of being in an Irish Catholic minority. A special room in the Fitzgerald house was transformed during Lent into a flowery shrine to the Blessed Virgin, a quiet reflective place where Rose became a believer. “Sometimes I wondered why I should be doing all the kneeling and studying and memorizing and contemplating and praying, but I became understanding and grateful,” Rose wrote. The growing power of the Catholic Church in Boston, personified by Cardinal William O’Connell, also changed the course of Rose’s life when her father sent his cherished daughter to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, the most prestigious Catholic school in Boston for young women. The connection with this Catholic order of nuns would extend through two more generations of Kennedy women. This school, as Louise Callan wrote in her history of the Society of the Sacred Heart, intended to do “for young Catholic women much the same work that Vassar and Wellesley do for non-Catholics.” These institutions were established as a solution “to one of the most pressing problems the Church has to deal with in the New World, that of securing for Catholic young women the benefits of college education without the sacrifice of faith.”To make sure of this task, Callan wrote, Cardinal O’Connell kept a watchful eye at the Sacred Heart school in Boston and “loved to make surprise visits.”

  Rose’s rigorous academic studies were accompanied by lessons in religious doctrine, French culture,“domestic science” and piano lessons, a curriculum designed to teach young women how to be good Catholic wives. Though she attended public school early in life, Rose’s enrollment in Sacred Heart seemed to reflect the mixed feelings of many successful Irish families. At the same time that they pursued acceptance in the secular institutions controlled predominantly by Protestants, many Irish Catholics in Boston believed their cardinal’s remonstrations that they were better off in their own schools. Historian Paula Kane, in her study of Catholic cultural separatism in Boston, suggests the young women from these convent schools often “internalized the Church’s outlook on female subservience and embraced its obsession with bodily disciplines, contenting themselves with self-renunciation in order to achieve some higher, communal goal.”

  Rose absorbed this lesson well. To widen her experience in this parochial world, she attended the Sacred Heart school at Manhattanville in New York and spent a year with her sister Agnes at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Blumenthal, Prussia, where she mixed with daughters of European aristocrats. During her stay in Blumenthal, Rose received her medal as a Child of Mary, the highest honor bestowed on the laity by the Sacred Heart order. “I am an angel,” she wrote home.“I arise at six o’clock (fifteen minutes earlier than the others) and go to meditation nearly every morning. So you see my piety is increasing.”

  Rose took to heart the duties of the Children of Mary, which required that she march forth into the world spreading Christ’s teachings into everyday life. For this vivacious young woman blessed with the same social skills as her father, the ascetic lessons of sacrifice, confession and spiritual reflection were a strong and lasting counterpoint to the more frivolous sides of her personality. Years later, her call for prayer and acceptance of God’s will, no matter how tragic or cruel, seemed to emanate from her time with the Sacred Heart nuns. She promised “in the face of changes of fortune, to hold my soul free.” If she left Boston with any hint of bitterness about her father�
��s actions, she resolved to overcome them and seek out her own path. “I decided to forgive them all—all of them,my father, the bishop, the church, politics, I was not going to rebel against my faith but become its advocate, to become truly a Child of Mary. And I would marry Joe, too, no matter what anyone thought or said.”

  DESPITE THE YOUTHFUL DEVOTION of Joe and Rose to each other, their path to the altar was paved with difficulties. Although he curried favor with P. J. Kennedy, Mayor Fitzgerald didn’t want his lace curtain daughter to marry the ward boss’s son. P. J. Kennedy’s contempt, though masked in his usual reserve, came from his uneasiness with the mayor’s vulgar vaudeville mannerisms. His son’s lack of regard for Honey Fitz was even greater. He felt the mayor was a caricature of an Irish political hack, a relic from an earlier age when the Irish sacrificed their dignity to get the political gains they wanted. Honey Fitz was exactly the kind of blustery character that well-bred Brahmins pointed at to justify their exclusions of the Irish. In particular, Joe resented Fitzgerald’s heavy-handed interference in his relationship with Rose. If anything, Joe Kennedy felt he represented what a modern Irish Catholic young man in America should strive for—acceptance into the finest schools and into the vaunted temples of high finance and power. Money, not votes, would be his key.