by David Nasaw
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Mass migrations are made up of individual journeys, and while Patrick Kennedy carried with him many of the same scars as did his compatriots, he differed from them in significant ways. The Kennedys were from County Wexford, on the southeast coast of Ireland, a region “well served,” Irish historian David Doyle has written, “by banks and trade networks . . . and by schools.” Population densities were relatively low, land more fertile, agriculture somewhat diversified, landholdings larger and costlier, and the percentage who emigrated smaller than that from other Irish counties. While in the poorer north and west small farmers divided their land among their sons, in the southeast the family farms were held intact and passed on from father to oldest son.1
As the third son and fourth child in his family, Patrick would have no inheritance—and he knew it. The Kennedy leasehold would be passed on to his older brother; additional resources would go toward a dowry for his older sister and a second leasehold for brother number two. Patrick could, had he chosen, have remained on the family leasehold as a landless laborer. Instead, he left the family farm at Dunganstown and walked the six and a half kilometers north along the River Barrow to New Ross, the nearby, still thriving port town, where he found employment at a cooperage.
There was a decent living to be made as a cooper, or barrel maker. As the commercialization of Irish agriculture proceeded apace in the 1830s and 1840s, more land had been dedicated to the production of wheat and barley for export off the island or to local breweries and distilleries. Whatever form it took, grain or liquor, the barley and wheat were transported in wooden barrels, which were handcrafted by New Ross coopers.
In good times, there had been more than enough work for coopers like Patrick Kennedy, formerly of Dunganstown. But these were not good times. By 1848 or 1849, the effects of blight, famine, and depression had reached into every corner and occupational strata (undertakers excepted). Patrick Kennedy, already one step removed from the family farm, had little to detain him in Ireland.
There are several young Patricks, Pats, and P. Kennedys in the passenger lists of ships arriving in Boston in the late 1840s from Liverpool or New Ross. We cannot be sure which was our Patrick. But we can be certain that whether he left from New Ross or Liverpool, he was six weeks on a “coffin” ship, so called because for so many it would be a final resting place. With little edible food and a minimum of potable water, hundreds of men, women, infants, and the elderly were locked together in darkened, unventilated ships’ holds for weeks on end, hatches battened, with no room to stretch, no decent air to breathe, and no escape from the accumulating human waste, the scourge of seasickness, hunger, and thirst, the stench of decay, disease, and dying, and the endless boredom, broken only by fits of panic when storms rocked or fire threatened. Only the strongest survived the passage with body and soul intact.
Patrick was one of these.
He arrived in East Boston (or Noddle’s Island, as it was still known) and remained there for the remainder of his life.
East Boston was everything that New Ross was not. The population was growing, jobs and housing were available, and no one, not even the poorest of the poor, starved to death. East Boston had been annexed to Boston in the 1630s but remained virtually ignored and uninhabited until 1833, when William Sumner, a large landowner, joined forces with a few partners and, incorporated as the East Boston Company, raised sufficient capital to subdivide the land into a grid of streets and squares, sell off the most promising sites for vacation homes, build wharves, and arrange for regular ferry service across the harbor to Boston. By 1835, the population on the island was up to 604 from 24 just ten years before. Four years later, the partners’ wildest dreams were realized when Samuel Cunard, who had been granted the right to transfer mail from England to North America, chose East Boston as his American terminus. By 1840, Cunard ships from Liverpool were arriving with regularity every fortnight, carrying not just the mail but every variety of English manufacture. East Boston prospered because it provided transatlantic shippers with a deepwater port, newly constructed and well-maintained piers, and easy access to warehouses and rail lines. It was also hundreds of miles closer to English, Irish, and Scottish ports than were Philadelphia or New York.2
By the time Patrick Kennedy walked down the gangplank after his six weeks at sea, East Boston was well on its way to becoming, as William Sumner declared in a letter to a business associate, so prosperous and populous that it could be accounted “a second Brooklyn.” There were jobs aplenty for unskilled laborers and skilled artisans and mechanics unloading, repacking, and reshipping goods arrived from across the Atlantic and, after midcentury, supplying California’s ballooning mining population, which, until the transcontinental railroads reached the West Coast, had to be fed, clothed, housed, informed, and entertained by eastern goods carried in clipper ships built in and sailing out of East Boston. “Ploughs and printing-presses, picks and shovels, absinthe and rum, house-frames and grindstones, clocks and dictionaries, melodeons and cabinet organs, fancy biscuits and canned salmon, oysters and lobsters; in fact everything one can imagine went through Boston on its way to the miners and ranchers of the white man’s new empires.”3
All of this and more—grain, rum, sugar, and salted fish—was shipped in wooden barrels, crates, and casks, fashioned by coopers such as Patrick Kennedy. Because he brought with him a marketable skill for which there was growing demand, Patrick Kennedy was one of the more fortunate Irish immigrants. The coopers were not the best-paid artisans, but they were offered higher daily wages and steadier employment than unskilled day laborers. We don’t have statistics for Boston, but we know that coopers in New York in 1855 earned an average of $1.42 a day, almost 50 percent more than teamsters, cartmen, ditch diggers, and day laborers, the positions in which unskilled Irish immigrants predominated.4
With steady work on the horizon, Patrick Kennedy was able to marry Bridget Murphy, another recent emigrant from County Wexford, in September 1849 and buy a house. East Boston, though pockmarked with cheaply built shacks and permeated by the stench and smoke of shipyards and workshops, was not a bad place for first-generation Irish American parents to start a family. The population density was lower than in Boston; there was space to start a garden; rents and house prices were more affordable. Those who wished to attend Mass could do so in the meetinghouse of the Maverick Congregational Church, which in 1844 had been purchased and converted into a Catholic church dedicated to the patronage of St. Nicholas.5
Bridget and Patrick’s first child, Mary, was born in 1851, followed by a second daughter, Joanna, in 1852; a son, John, in 1854 (he died at twenty months of cholera); a third daughter, Margaret, in 1855, and Patrick Joseph Kennedy in January 1858, nicknamed “P.J.” so as not to be confused with his father. The family prospered as long as Patrick was able to bring home his paycheck. Regrettably, one of the disastrous by-products of steady work as a cooper was exhaustion. While most unskilled laborers—and the majority of skilled artisans—worked about sixty hours a week, coopers were expected to put in twelve hours a day, six days a week. Few could survive such a grueling pace for long. Patrick Kennedy did not. He died in November 1858, ten months after the birth of his son. The direct cause of death was cholera, but eight or nine years of seventy-two-hour weeks in the cooperage had no doubt weakened him to the point where he could neither resist nor survive the infection.6
Irish-born males of Patrick Kennedy’s generation had a particularly high death rate in Boston, leaving unimaginably large numbers of second-generation Irish Americans like P.J. to be raised by their mothers. The four Irish Americans who in the years to come would dominate Boston politics—Martin Lomasney, John Francis Fitzgerald, James Michael Curley, and P. J. Kennedy—all lost their fathers in childhood.7
Patrick Kennedy, dead at thirty-five, with four young children, could not have picked a worse time to leave his family without its chief breadwinner. The financial panic o
f 1857, which directly affected both shipbuilding and international trade, swept through East Boston like the plague. The Kennedys were among the fortunate few who had the minimal resources necessary to keep the family intact, perhaps because Patrick had earned better wages as a skilled artisan than the mass of unskilled Irish laborers. On June 25, 1860, a little more than one and a half years after Patrick’s death, Assistant Marshal Cyrus Washburn, the census taker for Boston’s second ward, reported that Bridget Kennedy had personal effects worth $75, not an insignificant amount compared with those listed for her neighbors. Identified on the census records as members of her household were her four surviving children and two boarders, Mary Roach, eighteen, and six-year-old Michael O’Brien. In return for room and board, Mary Roach may have looked after the three Kennedy daughters and two-year-old P.J., while Bridget left the house looking for employment.8
Kennedy lore has it that Bridget Kennedy worked as a housecleaner and hairdresser before becoming the owner of an East Boston notions shop. Because her shop was located near the ferry, she began selling groceries and liquor to workingmen and -women returning to East Boston from jobs across the Inner Harbor. The 1880 census lists her occupation as “bakery,” so we can assume she added baked goods to the wares. Her assets continued to grow through the decade. When she died in 1888, she left an estate valued at $2,200 (the equivalent of almost $54,000 today in purchasing power), with $375 of furniture, $825 in stock and fixtures in her shop, and $1,000 owed her from the mortgage she had financed for a Johanna Mahoney of East Boston.9
P.J., the only male in a household of women, was the privileged prince of the brood. Bridget made sure her boy got a proper education—at the Sacred Heart parochial school in East Boston. We don’t know how long he stayed in school, probably into his early teens. The 1880 census records tell us that he was employed as a brass fitter; family lore tells us that he worked briefly as a stevedore, loading and unloading cargo at the docks. In his middle twenties, with his own earnings and no doubt a loan from his mother, he was able to buy ownership stakes in a few East Boston barrooms, then move into the liquor import business. While the census records list his occupation as “liquor,” he did not spend much time behind the bar. His true vocation was politics, an allied but more respectable calling for a second-generation Irishman in East Boston. A quiet, private man who shied away from conflict, P. J. Kennedy had scant interest in kissing babies or making bombastic speeches. He preferred to remain in the background in the ward offices, where the real power lay, where candidates were chosen, votes gathered, and patronage dispensed. Good-looking, but not spectacularly so, with a broad, well-groomed handlebar mustache and a sturdy physique, he possessed a natural charm combined with quick intelligence, a head for numbers, roots in the community, and talents as a mediator, all of which inspired confidence. From the moment he was old enough to vote—probably earlier—P. J. Kennedy made the business of ward two in East Boston his own. At twenty-two, in 1880, he was named a delegate to the nominating convention for city “councilors.” The next year, he represented ward two at the state senators nominating convention. In 1884, at twenty-six, he was appointed precinct officer, then temporary secretary of his ward.
It was the best of times for Irish politicians. Emigration from Ireland had not ceased with the recovery of the potato crop in the early 1850s but continued through the 1870s and 1880s. Where in the 1840s immigrants and their children had constituted a tiny proportion of Boston’s population and electorate, four decades later the Irish had become “not merely the largest of the foreign nationalities but . . . the largest single element in the city.” By 1895, there were more Bostonians with Irish-born parents than with American-born ones.10
Massachusetts law permitted immigrants to file naturalization papers after five years’ residence, provided they could read and write English, which 90 percent of the Irish could. The Irish became citizens at a higher rate than any other immigrant group and, once naturalized, were more likely to exercise the franchise. Two thirds of Irish immigrants to Boston in 1885 were naturalized, compared with under 55 percent for the English-born and 16 percent for the Italians. Sixty percent of Irish-born citizens of Massachusetts (and no doubt a higher percentage of Bostonians) voted in the 1885 elections, compared with 33 percent of those born in Great Britain and 9 percent of the Italian-born. And almost all of those Irish votes went to Democratic candidates.11
State and city Democratic Party leaders, recognizing their growing dependence on Irish Americans, made sure they were repaid for their loyalty. In 1882, an Irish American, Patrick Collins, was nominated and elected to a congressional seat from Boston. Two years later, in 1884, Boston Democrats nominated and voters elected their first Irish-born mayor, businessman Hugh O’Brien. He would be reelected for three additional one-year terms. In 1885, P. J. Kennedy of ward two in East Boston was elected to the house of representatives of the Massachusetts General Court. He would serve five consecutive one-year terms.
P.J. was only twenty-eight on January 4, 1886, when he ferried across the Inner Harbor to take his seat at the general court. On November 23, 1887, he wed Mary Augusta Hickey, the daughter of a well-to-do Irish-born contractor. Nine months and two weeks later, on September 6, 1888, their first child, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, was born. P.J. moved his family into a solid but undistinguished house at 151 Meridian in East Boston’s commercial district. Francis Kennedy was born in 1891 but died a year later; Mary Loretta arrived in 1892; Margaret Louise was born in 1898.
Taking full advantage of the opportunities that came his way, P.J. accumulated a large fortune in East Boston. His political connections were invaluable in securing state licenses for his two retail liquor stores, Kennedy & Quigley at 81 Border Street and Cotter & Kennedy at 12 Washington, and, later, state charters for the Columbia Trust Company, of which he was a founding incorporator, board member, stockholder, and president, and the Sumner Savings Bank, of which he was a director. He also made money in real estate, profiting again from insider, advanced intelligence gathered in ward offices and legislative halls. By his early thirties, he was a pillar of the local community: ward boss, elected representative, businessman, banker, real estate developer, founder and officer of the Suffolk Coal Company, founding member of the local Knights of Columbus chapter, active in the Elks, the East Boston Yacht Club, the Holy Name Society of Our Lady of the Assumption Church, and the Noddle Island Antique Association, which sponsored the annual July Fourth parade.
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The political success of the Irish in Boston did not, of course, go unnoticed by Yankee Protestants. In 1888, the year of Joseph Kennedy’s birth and the third year of his father’s tenure in the Massachusetts General Court, several anti-Catholic organizations and individuals, including the Committee of One Hundred, composed of wealthy Protestant businessmen, launched a hysterical campaign to remove every Catholic and Democrat from the elected Boston School Committee. Their fear was that the Irish, with political control of the city government and the school committee, would funnel money from public to parochial schools. The Irish and the Democratic Party mobilized their voting population (including women, who were permitted to vote in school committee elections) but were badly outvoted. Protestants won every one of the contested seats for the school committee, the Republican candidate for mayor defeated incumbent Hugh O’Brien in his bid for a fifth term, and Republicans took eight of twelve seats on the board of aldermen. The following year, 1889, the electoral results were every bit as disastrous.12
It was not simply Protestant rabble-rousers or the unlettered or those who worried about a papist conspiracy to destroy the public schools who joined the anti-Irish cause. As early as 1891, proper Bostonians such as Henry Cabot Lodge were already pressing for literacy tests, which they expected (perhaps wrongly) would end in the exclusion of large numbers of immigrants, including the Irish. In 1895, five young Boston “blue bloods,” all with significant pedigrees and Harvard degrees, formed the
Immigration Restriction League to carry the fight forward.13
Boston’s Irish Catholic Democratic Party leaders, recognizing that they would no longer be able to elect Irish Catholic, Irish-born mayors as they had during the 1880s, shifted their support in the 1890s to Yankee candidates, and the Democrats won eight of the next nine mayoral elections. At the same time, they solidified their hold on the city’s immigrant wards. In 1891, the year his son, Joseph, turned three, P.J. was elected chairman of ward two and moved from the state house of representatives to the senate. “An unwritten law of democratic [party] politics,” the Boston Daily Globe would later report in a story about Boston’s ward bosses, was “that to become a recognized leader in the higher councils of the party a man must have proved his political strength. The best way in which this test can be applied is by election to the state senate.”14
P. J. Kennedy served his requisite two two-year terms in the state senate alongside his future in-law, John Francis Fitzgerald. His major assignment was to the “joint standing committee on street railways,” where he did all he could to get East Boston connected by bridge or tunnel to the Boston streetcar grid. After two terms, he willingly stepped aside “in the interest of harmony” to support a Democratic candidate from a neighboring ward. He had never had much interest in being a candidate or officeholder; his forte was as ward boss.15
Ward two was one of the more contentious in Boston, with several factions and clubs competing for patronage and nominations for elective office. P.J.’s skill in handling the ward with minimal acrimony was near legendary among Boston’s Democratic Party operatives. So was his near constant attention to his constituents. P.J.’s youngest daughter, Margaret, remembered the continuous flow through the house of well-wishers, favor seekers, and old pols and friends in need. “We never sat down to supper but what the doorbell would ring and it would be someone down on their luck, coming to Papa for help.”16