Meanwhile, Staten Island had become a wealthy summer resort for rich New Yorkers, and a number of fine Greek Revival mansions lined its shores. Staten Islanders were soon complaining about the hordes of “diseased Irish” in their midst, and one property owner, Robert Hazard, claimed that the stench from the hospital was so unbearable that he had to close the windows of his house, Nautilus Hall, whenever the wind was blowing from that direction. Local indignation finally came to a head in 1858 when a group of Staten Islanders rioted, stormed the hospital, and burned it to the ground. Many patients perished in the blaze.
Manhattan for the Irish had, in the meantime, become a city of cave- and cellar-dwellers, with families crowded into downtown basements and dug-out hollows beneath the floors of buildings. One cellar, beneath 50 Pike Street, measured ten feet square and eleven feet high with a single tiny window. In this room lived two Irish families, ten persons in all. In another cellar below 78 James Street an investigator found, lying on some straw, the corpse of a woman who had died of exposure and starvation. The single room contained no furniture, the floor was wet, and the woman’s husband and five children sat “moaning” in a corner. All were Irish immigrants who had landed in New York three weeks earlier. In the 1840’s the problem of Irish beggars in the streets—including old women and small children—had reached such proportions that the Tribune demanded sternly, “Cannot this be stopped?”
For many of the Irish poor, drink—“the curse of the Irish”—became the quickest path to forgetfulness of suffering and poverty. It wasn’t long before “Irish” became synonymous with drunkenness, rowdyism, bar fights, destruction, and crime. Because so many Irishmen bore the name of Paddy—for Padraic, the Gaelic form of Patrick, the patron saint—the term “Paddy” became generic for all Irishmen. Phrases such as “poor as Paddy Murphy’s pig” entered the language. And the paddy wagon became the name of the vehicle that carried the drunken Irishman, shouting and cursing, off to jail.
For the Irishman who escaped fever and starvation, the greatest peril awaiting him in the New World was the professional bondsman. New York law required that shipowners guarantee that each immigrant passenger would not, upon arrival, become a candidate for public welfare. Shipowners would not or could not provide such guarantees for the Irish, and so the job fell to the bondsman, or passenger broker. The bondsman met the new arrival at the pier, and sold him a guaranteeing bond at anywhere from ten cents to a dollar, or as much as he could extract. If the immigrant did indeed become destitute, as thousands did, and turn to the state for aid, he was referred back to the man, or firm, that had bonded him. As a rule, the bondsman offered no help at all or, if he did, gave it in the cheapest possible way. The bondsmen had deals with cheap rooming houses, and in some cases operated “private workhouses” of their own. They also served as recruiting agents for American companies looking for cheap Irish labor, and had emissaries abroad who scouted Irish villages lining up young men willing to come to America and work at hard labor for little money. These men arrived in New York wearing identifying colored tags on their caps to indicate which railroad or construction firm had contracted to ship them off to work gangs across the country.
Bonding was extremely profitable. There were commissions to be collected at every angle—from railroad and steamship lines, from boardinghouses, from employers, and from the immigrants themselves. One firm collected eighty thousand dollars in a single year, and paid out only thirty dollars in “benefits.” The bondsmen were considered “irresponsible from every point of view,” and carried on their trade with the connivance of city and state officials, who took their cut of the profits. One Emigration Commissioner wrote: “The entire business became a private traffic between a set of low and subordinate city officials, on the one hand, and a band of greedy unscrupulous brokers on the other.” And yet some of the luckiest Irish immigrants of all were those clever enough to get employment in this line of work.
Peter McDonnell of Drumlish, County Longford, was described in an early Manhattan business directory of the period as a “Railroad and Steamship agent.” But he was, in actuality, a bondsman.
Not much else is known about Peter McDonnell except that he prospered, and that he prospered sufficiently to send his son, James Francis McDonnell, to Fordham University, from which the young man graduated in the class of 1900. James Francis McDonnell was a short, compact, somewhat strait-laced man—hardworking, ambitious, with a deep longing for respectability and social acceptability. Within five years of his graduation from college he was able to ally himself with a partner named Byrne, and the firm of Byrne & McDonnell set itself up as stockbrokers in a small booth on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The future father-in-law of Henry Ford II used to like to remind his grown children, as they sat around one or another of their heated swimming pools in the family compound at Southampton, that, in his youth, he had had to swim in the East River—neglecting to add that in those days the East River was clean and sparkling, delightful for swimming. He also liked to say that, as a young man, he had determined to make a million dollars before marrying and that, after that, his goal had been to make another million for each of his fourteen children. Whether he actually made the full million before choosing his bride is uncertain, yet when he chose her ten years after opening his brokerage firm, he chose not only an Irish beauty, but the daughter of a multimillionaire—Miss Anna Murray of Brooklyn.
The McDonnell-Murray wedding, on May 24, 1916, was given nearly an entire page of society-section coverage in the Brooklyn Eagle. The Bishop of Brooklyn officiated at the ceremony, at the Church of Our Lady of Victory, and over forty priests were in the chancel. The bride wore white with touches of pink, and the church was “gorgeous with flowers,” as the Eagle noted, and “distinguished by the large number of Manhattanites who attended.” There were more than nine hundred people at the wedding and the reception and breakfast that followed, at the Murray mansion at 783 St. Marks Avenue, described as “the most spacious residence in Brooklyn.” With this union, the McDonnell name entered the ranks of those who had already begun to call themselves the First Irish Families of America, or, for short, “the F.I.F.’s.”
The same issue of the Eagle carried the announcement of the forthcoming marriage, in June, of the bride’s brother, Joseph Bradley Murray, to Miss Mary Theresa Farrell, daughter of the “Steel King,” James A. Farrell, who headed both the United States Steel Company and the Farrell Steamship Line, another member of the F.I.F. The newspaper carefully traced the lineage of Anna Murray and her brother. They were children of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Murray, the former Catherine A. Bradley; they were the grandchildren of John and Anastatia McGrath Murray, and of Daniel and Julia Duane Bradley.
None of the bridegroom’s antecedents was mentioned.
Chapter 3
“EVERYTHING BUT THE LIGHT BULB”
The success story of Thomas E. Murray in America is, in slight contradiction to Mrs. Woodham-Smith’s thesis, a genuinely romantic one. A second-generation Irishman, Grandpa Murray—as he is still known in the family—was born in Albany, New York, on October 21, 1860, a carpenter’s son and one of twelve children. He was in the fourth grade at public school when his father died, and, at the age of nine, he was forced to leave school and go to work to help support his mother and her brood. He went to work as a lamplighter for the city of Albany, lighting the gas lamps that lit the city’s streets. With this little money, he put himself through two more years of night school, attending classes after his evening chores were done. He then worked for a while in the drafting rooms of local architects and engineers, and, for four more years, worked as an apprentice machinist for various shops in Albany. In 1881, at the age of twenty-one, he was made operating engineer of the pumping plant of the Albany Waterworks.
It was in this capacity that he came to the attention of Mr. Anthony N. Brady, an Irish-American who had made a fortune in railroads and electric light companies in and around Albany, and in Brooklyn. As a youth, walkin
g the streets of Albany, Tom Murray had passed the window of a pastry shop and had become fascinated by the electrical mixing apparatus he saw inside, mixing cake dough. Through the glass, he studied the machine, made sketches of it, and, in his spare time—for his own amusement as much as for anything else—constructed a similar mixer with an electric motor. It operated perfectly, and Murray even added a few improvements and innovations of his own. Anthony Brady was impressed that a man so young could create a machine from simply looking at another machine through a window, and, in 1887, Brady hired Murray to take charge of the power station of the Albany Municipal Gas Company. From there on, under the wing of Mr. Brady, Thomas E. Murray’s rise was rapid.
He was soon placed in complete charge of the gas company’s entire operations, and was made a consultant on other Brady companies, including the Troy City Railway, the Troy Electric Light Company, the Kings County Electric Light & Power Company, and the Albany Railway Company. He was also called in to help consolidate the Brady electric companies in Brooklyn, and helped form the Edison Illuminating Company, later known as the Brooklyn Edison Company, and now a part of Consolidated Edison. During these years, he traveled busily back and forth between Brooklyn and Albany, and also managed to launch himself as an inventor. Most of his inventions were in the electrical field—condensers, switches, electrical protection devices—but they also included copper radiators, pulverized-fuel equipment, water-wall furnaces for steam boilers, and automatic welding. The list of Murray patents lengthened. Once, in a railroad car, a cinder landed in his eye. He noticed the way his own tears were able to wash the cinder out, and this immediately gave him the idea of a water-screen filter to reduce the amount of smoke and soot that belched into the air from the Edison Company’s big smokestacks. With this invention, he became one of America’s earliest environmentalists. His copper-radiator system still heats the occupants of New York’s Chrysler Building.
He loved music, and he loved to sing and, at an operetta in Albany, he met a young Irish girl named Catherine Bradley. For the hierarchy of First Irish Families in America, it was an auspicious encounter.
Catherine Bradley was one of four children of Daniel Bradley, another Irishman who had risen from relative poverty to considerable prominence. Born in Londonderry on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1833, Dan Bradley had made the stormy two months’ crossing of the Atlantic with his parents in the famine year of 1849. He was sixteen years old, and was fortunate enough, when he landed at Castle Garden, to be met by family friends and escorted to Brooklyn, which in those days was a separate, independent city with its own mayor and its own municipal government, physically and emotionally far removed from Manhattan across the river. His first mail from the old country was addressed to:
Daniel Bradley
Fornenst the Catholic Church
Brooklyn, U.S.A.
“Fornenst” means “opposite,” a clear indication that his relatives in Ireland knew that wherever the young man settled a Catholic church would not be far away.
For a while, Dan Bradley worked in a small tobacconist’s shop, not far from where the massive footings of the Brooklyn Bridge now stand. But it was not long before he was making his way inexorably into local politics.
Why did so many immigrant Irish—even those from the tiniest villages and hamlets—find themselves so readily adaptable to the politics of large American cities and, in particular, to the activities of the Democratic Party? There are several good reasons. To begin with, there is the traditional Irish feisty, scrappy nature—a nature that loves a good fight, particularly when the Irishman believes without a shadow of a doubt that right is on his side. Freedom and justice have for centuries been the goals of the Irishman’s fighting nature. Sean O’Faolain has written, “I do not myself believe that anything will ever completely kill that ancient, almost wild passion for personal freedom that is the very marrow of the Irishman’s nature.” “No people,” William Butler Yeats wrote, “have undergone greater persecution.… No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive; there are moments when hatred poisons my life and I accuse myself of effeminacy because I have not given it adequate expression.… This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity.” Of this curiously Irish passion, Yeats also wrote, “The Irish mind has still, in County Rapscallion or in Bernard Shaw, an ancient cold, explosive, detonating impartiality.… The English mind … has turned into a bed-hot harlot.” In a poem, Yeats wrote, “I carry from my mother’s womb/A fanatic heart.”
Jews arriving in the New World from reactionary Germany at about the same time had also, for generations, endured the same sort of persecution, and had been politically repressed. But the Jews, though proud and independent—refusing, among other things, to take the menial jobs the Irish took in America, as ditch-diggers and housemaids, and preferring instead to take off with packs of dry goods on their backs and roam the countryside as foot peddlers—simply lacked this inner Irish fire. It was a fire, of course, that for centuries had been fed and nourished by the Church in Ireland. In Europe, rabbis had counseled moderation in the Jews’ relations with the outside world, a more subtle way of dealing, perhaps, with the pressures of persecution. “Live as best you can within the strictures of the system,” had been the rabbis’ advice; “don’t be too conspicuous in your demands; stay out of fights, which only call attention to your presence; be ready to pack up and go when the enemy threatens; don’t rock the boat, for you might rock yourself right out of it.”
Then, too, there was the Irish gift for talk, for poetry and oratory—all useful tools for the clever politician.* Just as nineteenth-century New York had few Jewish maids and gardeners and footmen, there were even fewer Jewish orators and firebrands. The Jews were not great talkers. A European visitor in the 1870’s, calling on both Jewish and Christian banking firms in New York, commented that all Wall Street firms did business in much the same way, “But the Jews appear to do it quicker because they do it with less talk.” In all this, of course, the Irish were assisted by an enormously important single fact: they spoke the language. It did not take, as it did with other Europeans, a full generation before an immigrant family became fully English-speaking. While a German Jew could make money peddling—displaying the wares from his cart or pack before a rural housewife, using gestures and symbols when he did not know the words—he shied away from politics and other forms of endeavor that required direct and precise communication with an English-speaking people. The Irish, on the other hand, leaped into politics with gusto.
There is also the fact that the Irish have always been a highly social people—again unlike the Jews, who have been traditionally timid and reluctant to mix with “outsiders.” The Irish love company and, in Ireland, have become famous for the relish and charm with which they invite passing strangers into their houses. Cecil Woodham-Smith has pointed out that the Irish “depend to an exaggerated extent on human intercourse,” and when, in County Donegal, Lord George Hill in the nineteenth century tried to move some of his tenants into better houses, he found the farmers unwilling to move because it meant separation from their neighbors. In America, Irish pride and ferocity and what Yeats labeled “fanaticism” caused the Irish to maintain, and even exaggerate, their national characteristics. Through all this, of course, they were supported by their priests, who constantly reassured them that, because they were truer to the letter of their faith than other Catholics—the German, the French, the Italian, the Spanish—the Irish Catholics were the noblest and best Catholics in the world.
In nineteenth-century American politics, the Irish also had the strength of sheer numbers. In 1850 the Irish constituted 42.8 percent of the entire foreign-born population of the United States, which represented a goodly share of voters. The Catholic Irish loyalty to the Democratic Party, meanwhile, extended back to prefamine days into the earliest years of the Republic, and to the famous s
chism between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had advocated that only the propertied classes be allowed to vote, and his sympathies lay with England. Jefferson despised the monarchy and the whole social system of Britain, Ireland’s ancient enemy. The trickle of Irish immigrants which had arrived before the famine sided with Jefferson’s Republican Party (as the present Democratic Party was then called), and later arrivals followed the example of their countrymen. Allegiance to the Democrats was buoyed in the 1850’s when the Know-Nothing Party came very close to overthrowing the Democrats on a platform dedicated to “checking the stride of the foreigner and alien, of thwarting the machinations and subverting the deadly plans of the Jesuit and the Papist,” and which stated publicly that “Americans must rule America; and to this end native-born citizens should be selected for all state, federal, and municipal offices of government employment, in preference to all others.” At the time, only five years’ residence was required for an immigrant to become a United States citizen—and there was not even, then, a literacy-test requirement. The Know-Nothings, however, wanted to deny citizenship, and therefore political franchise, to anyone who had not lived in America for a full twenty-one years—nearly a whole generation’s worth of voters—and to exclude “all paupers and persons convicted of crime from landing on our shores,” which would have been another heavy blow to the incoming Irish. There were celebrations in every American Irish household when Buchanan won the election, and the Know-Nothings ran a very poor third—and eventually collapsed into extinction.
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