American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Belatedly it was the economic ladder that carried some Boston Irish to the top. Much has been made of the job discrimination the Irish faced—the signs reading “None need apply but Americans,” the white-collar promotions reserved for Protestants, the shunting off of talented young Irishmen into domestic and service jobs. Less has been made of the handicaps that many of the Irish brought to job-seeking and advancement: illiteracy, inability to speak English well, lack of vocational skills and of a feel for the rhythms of the city. Despite all this, sizable numbers of the Boston Irish went into business and finance and thrived. This was partly because they had entrepreneurial skills that could not be denied, partly because the better-assimilated second and third generations suffered fewer handicaps and found a variety of channels in a nationally expanding economy, partly because the most stiff-necked State Street banker would deal even with Irishmen as long as he could make a dollar.

  The social environment was changing too. The “No Irish” notices came down, the Boston Transcript finally stopped running “Protestant only” job ads, and more and more non-Catholics voted for Catholics running for office—but of course not yet for the presidency. The changing image of the Irish was reflected in Puck, a journal of “mirth and fun” published in New York but widely circulated in Boston. In the 1880s Puck caricatured Bridget in the kitchen and Paddy in his shanty swarming with pigs, chickens, and children. “In front of these leaking, tumbledown shacks sits the Hibernian male, clay pipe sticking from a large, baboon-like mouth in an underslung jaw,” in John Appel’s description of the caricature. Paddy was “eternally hostile to Great Britain; prepared to send his and Bridget’s hard-earned dollars to support lazy relatives or harebrained, landlord-murdering, dynamite-happy compatriots in the Emerald Isle or the United States.” Later the cartoonists featured the second generation of financially successful contractors and their upward-striving wives, and still later Puck’s savage thrusts at the Irish and other immigrants died away, as did the journal itself.

  Still, the transition into politics, business, and the professions was never easy. Economically the Irish could follow the path of Social Darwinism or of a Horatio Alger hero, but still be excluded from the Protestant old-boy network of corporate decision-makers. Educationally they could send their children to Protestant schools, knowing that their sons might be accepted on the football field or baseball diamond but not in a fraternity or in a dormitory clique. Socially they could meet members of their own class at Boston events, but not enter the Somerset Club. Politically they operated under the umbrella of the Democratic party, but the Democracy served them as a patronage machine rather than as a political and programmatic movement. Ideologically they shared the welfare liberalism of progressive-minded Protestants, but they recoiled from their social liberalism, feminist (and, earlier, abolitionist) leanings, intellectual eclecticism and tolerance, and Bill of Rights absolutism, which clashed with Catholic moral and social conservatism.

  The Irish could be, in short, wholly “American” in their behavior— ambitious, cosmopolitan, active in the party of their choice, contributors to charity, hostile to radical causes and groups, paying obeisance to the higher American values, sharing in the nation’s love of heroes in the political and sports arenas. But “structurally” they were not integrated into the American system. They stood a bit apart, somewhat quizzical, sardonic, critical of many of the modernist and secular trends in American life.

  Probably no family in Boston embodied the Irish Catholic heritage and ambivalences more fatefully, or seized on the new land’s opportunities more eagerly, than the Kennedys. The generations followed the classic sequence. During the famine Patrick Kennedy, a County Wexford tenant farmer, walked—so it is said—from his cottage to the packet ship that took him to Boston. There he worked as a barrel maker, married Bridget Murphy, fathered four children, and died of the cholera in his early thirties. His son Patrick Joseph attended a parochial and then a public school, worked as a dockhand, saved his money, bought a tavern in Haymarket Square, and then branched out into both politics and finance, building his own Democratic party organization and helping to establish an East Boston bank. He won the hand of Mary Hickey, at the time a bit above his station. Their firstborn, Joseph Patrick, attended parochial school through the lower grades, then Boston Latin, then Harvard. In 1914, when he was in his mid-twenties, he married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald. Rose was the bright and beauteous daughter of Boston mayor John (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, who had been born in a tenement near the Old North Church of parents from County Wexford.

  The Kennedy-Fitzgerald clans, packed with Murphys and Hickeys and Connellys as well, were claimed by an admiring Bostonian to be “Irish as Paddy’s pig.” Yet the second generation of that clan—PJ’s and Honey Fitz’s generation—had begun to veer from the shanty Irish stereotype. With his jokes about the auld sod, all too frequent warbling of “Sweet Adeline,” fondness for jigs and wakes, Honey Fitz was the very caricature of the merry little Irishman, but he penetrated Protestant society through his athletic feats at Boston Latin and after, and he even enrolled in Harvard Medical School, dropping out after his father’s early death. Not only did PJ see his son into Harvard but this “typical Irish boss” ended up an affluent banker and liquor wholesaler living in a fine colonial mansion.

  Honey Fitz and PJ moved toward success without apparent trauma, in part because they accepted the rules of the social game—equal, but separate. This was precisely what Joe Kennedy would not accept. He must be not separate but included, not equal but at the top. And this he never fully achieved. With strong initial boosts from his father and father-in-law he went on to a highly remunerative career in Boston banking, in films, liquor, stock speculation, and real estate. But riches never brought him acceptance from men whom he often despised anyway. While Groucho Marx remarked that he would not join the kind of club that would let him in, Kennedy would join it—but the club would not let him in. Still, despite his own womanizing, he could take enormous solace in his loyal wife and rapidly growing family of nine children—especially in his firstborn and namesake, Joe Jr. And he could send his four sons to Harvard.

  John Kennedy grew up half Irish, half Harvard, conventionally Catholic in religious matters, secular and skeptical in intellectual. He dealt with such dualities by compartmentalizing his life and perhaps even his thoughts. He dutifully followed his mother’s admonitions about attending mass, but he ignored theology and spurned religiosity. He was properly pious and decorous when occasion demanded it, but at Choate school he headed a “mucker’s club” that rebelled against the headmaster and his rules. He became a bread-and-butter Democrat who shunned the orthodox liberalism of Americans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union. His detachment from traditional American Catholicism, wrote his friend Arthur Schlesinger, was part of his detachment from middle-class parochialism, the business ethos, ritualistic liberalism.

  Rather early in his life there began to develop a public John Kennedy and a private Jack. The fierce competitor in football, sailing, swimming, and roughhousing concealed the youth who was racked and often immobilized by a series of illnesses. The son of Boston actually grew up mainly in New York, Cape Cod, and Palm Beach. The image of the clean-cut all-American youth was shrouded in obsessive womanizing that started remarkably early in his life and lasted until the end of it. He wrote grandly of courage and leadership in politics but usually practiced caution and shrewdness. He took the orthodox anticommunist posture in public while in private he more and more favored flexibility toward the Soviet Union. He demonstrated independence in his behavior and his career choices, even while he was closely dependent at critical junctures on his father’s money, connections, and advice.

  He was not even committed to a political career until his brother Joe was killed piloting a bomber over the English Channel in 1944. A constituency opened up too, when James Michael Curley, who represented everything the Kennedys now detested in Boston politics—pugnacious dem
agoguery, silver-tongued blarney, flamboyant appeals to the shanty Irish, corruption—relinquished his 11th Congressional District seat in 1946 to run for mayor. Since the 11th was as heavily Democratic as it was Catholic, the big fight would come in the party primary. Almost a dozen hopefuls, including one woman, jumped into the race.

  Soon this old working-class district was treated to the spectacle of a gaunt, hollow-eyed twenty-nine-year-old, still yellow from South Pacific Atabrine, handshaking his way through Maverick Square, the Italian North End, tenements, and factories. The young Kennedy did not take to this glad-handing easily; shy and slow with the sweet talk, he developed his own style of direct, informal, pithy speech. More decisive in such a free-for-all, however, was father Joe’s quiet mobilization of media attention, subway and billboard advertising, and tens of thousands of reprints of a Reader’s Digest abridgment of an account by John Hersey of Kennedy’s steady leadership after the loss of his PT boat in the South Pacific. The primary outcome—a clear lead by Kennedy over his nearest rival—was sobering as well as gratifying: after all the months of hoopla and beating of the bushes by all the candidates, fewer than a third of the registered voters bothered to vote.

  His congressional race taught the ambitious young politician a lesson in American politics that was wholly congenial to a Kennedy—it was all against all in a big game of King of the Rock. You gather your friends and family around you, raise money, organize a personal following, ignore the party organization except when you can exploit it, keep flailing about in one big donnybrook—and the devil take the hindmost. Anything goes, almost; when the Kennedy people feared that one Joseph Russo might win a plurality (and hence victory) with just the Italian vote, they dug up another Joseph Russo to split his vote.

  In the House of Representatives, Kennedy did not find that political lesson any less useful. Party leadership and organization were weak; the House Democrats were fragmented into a host of shifting factions; despite advice from his elders that in the House you must “go along to get along,” you really did best by endlessly wheeling and dealing in a system of free political enterprise.

  But life in the House, partly for these reasons, was boring as well; he “felt like a worm there,” Kennedy later complained. Soon he was setting his sights on statewide office, whether senator or governor he did not much care; either could be a stepping-stone to still higher office. It became clear that in 1952 the congressman could have a clear shot—that is, without major opposition in a primary—at Henry Cabot Lodge for Lodge’s seat in the Senate. It was a sobering prospect. Grandson of Woodrow Wilson’s nemesis, Lodge had inherited much of the old senator’s Irish and isolationist support. After roundly defeating Jim Curley for the Senate seat in 1936 he had resigned for combat service, then returned and beaten the “unbeatable” incumbent, David I. Walsh. Having won new prestige from having helped draft Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination, Lodge was now the unbeatable one.

  The contest that followed was one of the most significant of the postwar years—not because of the contestants, notable though they were; not because of the money spent, which was probably no greater than in many other Senate races; but because Kennedy’s campaign epitomized a “new politics,” involving massive use of the media, variety of focus on candidate image and personalismo, extraordinary exploitation of family money and friends, and attacks on the foe from both the right flank and the left with little regard to program or ideology.

  In the fall of 1952 tens of thousands of Massachusetts women, responding to personalized invitations, turned out to meet mother and son, share some refreshment, and enjoy a political gathering with hardly a hint of sordid politics in the air. While John Kennedy’s father financed these affairs, his mother and sisters made them a spectacular success. No other candidates were invited, of course. Jack was running solo. He ran his campaign out of his own city and town headquarters and kept his distance from Democrats competing for other offices who might be a drag on his own campaign; many a party hand working for the whole ticket looked forlornly out of a second-floor cubbyhole to see the glittering Kennedy storefront headquarters across the way. Only Kennedy literature was available there.

  How to attack Lodge, who held the strategic middle ground as the “centrist,” moderate Republican candidate? Kennedy, with a crucial assist from his father, enfiladed that centrism from opposite sides of the political spectrum. He targeted conservative Republicans still angry over Eisenhower’s “theft” of the Republican nomination. Joe Kennedy served as the contact with anti-Eisenhower publishers; his exquisitely well-timed promise of a half-million-dollar loan to the publisher of the noisily right-wing Boston Post greased the way for the publisher’s abrupt switch from Lodge to Kennedy. Over on the liberal side of the spectrum Jack Kennedy played up bread-and-butter issues, his promise to do MORE for Massachusetts, his past and future helpfulness to labor, consumers, and other clients of the Democracy. On Joe McCarthy—a friend of his father’s—and on McCarthyism the candidate remained absolutely mum.

  Courage and caution paid off. Kennedy beat Lodge by a margin of 70,000 in a total vote of over 2.6 million. In January 1953 he took his seat in the upper chamber. The new president of the Senate was Richard M. Nixon. The new Minority Leader of the Senate Democrats was Lyndon B. Johnson.

  The Southern Poor

  When the “famine Irish” shipped into American ports during the late 1840s they found themselves among the descendants of great waves of earlier immigrants—of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonials, of Huguenot French and a diversity of Germans, and of large numbers of Protestant Scotch-Irish, many of whom had settled in Pennsylvania and Virginia and then fanned out to the borderlands. Like the Irish Catholics, many of these migrants had come in search of free religion and speech, free education and enterprise, freedom from class distinction and compulsory military service. The famine Irish encountered one other type of “immigrant,” however—black men and women who had been kidnapped or traded out of Africa and smuggled into southern ports. A few blacks had made their way to northern cities, where they often fought with the Irish over the economic scraps, but most ended up on the cotton and tobacco and rice plantations of the South.

  At the dawn of the twentieth century large numbers of the northern Irish, but only a small fraction of rural blacks, had won economic and political freedoms. Emancipated slaves had emerged from the Civil War and Reconstruction with somewhat broadened constitutional rights and liberties, only to have their advances virtually nullified later in the century by Jim Crow laws that robbed them of their newly won right to vote and systematically separated them from whites in schools, workplaces, and public facilities. By the 1950s southern rural blacks, ravaged further by the great depression, by pervasive segregation and discrimination, and by the mechanical cotton picker and other technological changes, comprised the poorest of the poor. Macon County, Alabama, an 82 percent black cotton-growing land that included Tuskegee, illustrated the situation at its worst. Of several hundred tenant dwellings surveyed in the 1930s, more than half had open privies, almost that proportion had no sewage disposal whatever, eighty-one had no water on the place.

  There was a cruel poverty of aspiration as well. Whether the nation enjoyed prosperity or depression, conditions for the southern poor hardly improved over the years. FDR called the South “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem” and channeled funds into the area, but the structure of poverty remained unchanged. By 1960 seven out of ten of the nation’s black families earning under $3,000 a year lived in the South, as compared to four out of ten white families. Clearly a multitude of whites also suffered poverty in the South, but like the Boston Irish they could take educational, entrepreneurial, and employment paths to personal freedom. Southern blacks could not—and far worse, their children could not. An 1896 Supreme Court decision that most blacks had not even heard of, Plessy v. Ferguson, had set the precedent for “separate but equal” schools that had remained separate but grossly unequal. Blac
k schoolchildren were still systematically shunted out of the mainstream of opportunity.

  Southern blacks were immobilized in their own caste, in their own class structure. At the bottom of the pyramid were blacks still effectively or even literally in peonage. Growing out of wage agreements following emancipation, serving as a crude path from bondage to “freedom,” enforced by the whip and the chain gang, peonage had served as a means of labor control through keeping blacks constantly in debt. Nonpayment left blacks in the toils of the law and hence, in many cases, of the boss man. Isolated cases of peonage were still being reported in the 1950s. Two Alabama farmers were imprisoned in 1954 for paying blacks’ jail fines by working them in the fields; one of the blacks who was bailed out had later been beaten to death when he tried to flee.

  A step above peonage were the sharecroppers, tenant farmers, wandering job-seekers, a kind of rural proletariat locked into its own mores, illiteracy, and low motivation. A black middle class embraced farm owners, artisans, steady workers, elementary and perhaps high school graduates, churchgoers. At the top were a few hundred thousand established business people, lawyers and ministers and teachers and other professionals, even plantation owners. They had “made it” through sheer pluck and a bit of luck.

  But no black, high or low, peon or professional, could escape shattering blows to self-esteem. Carl Rowan, a Tennessee-born black journalist, returned to the South in 1951 to report on race relations there. Soon his stories in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune and later his book South of Freedom were pricking the conscience of the nation. They were old stories to southern blacks: the little white girl pointing to the well-dressed Rowan and crying, “Momma, Momma, look at the pretty nigger!”—the black Charleston schools operating on double shifts—“colored” waiting to board a bus until all the whites had entered—one black doctor in Georgia for over 7,500 blacks—Harvey’s Bar B-Q Stand in Rowan’s hometown, owned by a black and segregated—the man whose grandson was lynched a few days before the actual culprit was found—blacks who could go anywhere as long as they wore a white coat and black bow tie—blacks who could go anywhere if they were or pretended to be African diplomats, and not Americans—and everywhere (including Washington, D.C.) segregated hotels, restaurants, waiting rooms, schools, laundries, and movie theaters.