III

It says something about the experience of Irish-born men in Boston at this time that so many of them died young, leaving large numbers of children to be raised by their mothers. According to one estimate, the average Irishman of Patrick’s generation survived only fourteen years in the New World.16 The congested and unsanitary conditions in which many of them lived was a factor—often they made do in cellar apartments in the North End or Fort Hill that offered little light or air and were prone to flooding; it was not unheard of for a hundred people to share one sink and privy—since they made the community a prime target for every scourge and disease. Cholera hit the Irish sections of the city hard in 1849, and there were regular outbreaks of smallpox and tuberculosis. Add to that the extremely long hours in physically taxing jobs in the quarries or on the docks and it becomes easy to see why so many met their end prematurely. Three Irish Americans who in due course would reach the pinnacle of the political scene in Boston—Martin Lomasney, James Michael Curley, and one of John F. Kennedy’s grandfathers, P. J. Kennedy—all lost their fathers in childhood. Kennedy’s other grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, had barely reached adulthood before his father passed on. (His mother had already died.)17

The constant stream of new arrivals strained Boston’s resources well past the limit. In 1847 the city built two hospitals on Deer Island, in the harbor, to treat “Foreign Diseased Paupers”; both were soon swamped with patients, almost all of them Irish. Acute needs remained. A health inspection committee visiting a teeming Irish area near the harbor in 1849 found horrible conditions (perhaps colored by prejudice on the part of its members):

In Broad Street and all the surrounding neighborhood…the situation of the Irish is particularly wretched….This whole district is a perfect hive of human beings, without comforts and mostly without common necessaries; in many cases, huddled together like brutes, without regard to sex, or age, or sense of decency; grown men and women sleeping together in the same apartment, and sometimes wife and husband, brothers and sisters, in the same bed. Under such circumstances, self-respect, forethought, all high and noble virtues soon die out, and sullen indifference and despair, or disorder, intemperance and utter degradation reign supreme.18

The description speaks to one overriding characteristic of the Boston Irish: their ballooning numbers. In 1800, the city counted little more than a thousand Irish. By 1830 the figure had risen to eight thousand. But in 1847 alone, 37,000 came ashore. (This in a city that, according to an 1845 census, had a total of 114,366 residents.) Many others traveled overland to the city from Canadian ports. On just one spring day that year—April 10—one thousand Irish overwhelmed the port of Boston. By the early 1850s Irish-born Catholics made up a quarter of Boston’s population, and Reverend Theodore Parker remarked that in a single decade Suffolk County had become a “New England County Cork,” and the city of Boston “the Dublin of America.” Catholic churches soon dotted the landscape in Irish Boston, each becoming the unifying center for its neighborhood, around which community life revolved. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the city’s Irish-born population stood at 45,991.19

If there was strength in numbers, young Bridget Kennedy could be forgiven for not seeing it as she contemplated her new life as a single mother. The Boston in which she and her compatriots had arrived was already more than two centuries old, and it possessed a reputation and civic identity that could terrify the newcomer.20 Everywhere she turned, she saw evidence of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice. Anglo-Saxon Bostonians, steeped in anti-papist rhetoric that coursed deep into their colonial past, saw the immigrants as crude and clannish and uncivilized, prone to crime and public drunkenness. These residents regularly posted “No Irish Wanted” notices when making hires, and excluded even the small band of well-educated, professional Irish Catholics from the city’s rigidly defined and tightly restrictive financial hierarchy. Being Irish and Catholic was an occupational handicap at midcentury that few could overcome.21

Even women who worked as maids, as Bridget Kennedy had done, found themselves under suspicion. “Though Bostonians could not do without the Irish servant girl, distrust of her mounted steadily,” historian Oscar Handlin wrote. “Natives began to regard her as a spy of the Pope who revealed their secrets regularly to priests in confession.” Soon there were newspaper ads like the one for “a good, reliable woman” to care for a two-year-old in Brookline, then a Yankee enclave. The person hired would not have any washing or ironing duty, but the post had one ironclad requirement: “Positively no Irish need apply.”22

Politically, too, the Irish found themselves frozen out. In the early 1850s, the reactionary Know Nothing movement (so named because its adherents would feign ignorance when asked about the organization) swept the immigrant-heavy Eastern Seaboard and became, for a time, an unstoppable force in Massachusetts. With an ideology rooted in anti-Catholicism and opposition to immigrants, the party sought to extend the period for naturalization and the right to vote from the then-current five years to twenty-one years, and ran candidates under the motto “Americans must rule America.” In the state election in 1854, two out of three Massachusetts voters backed Know Nothing candidates, with the result that the party took all but a handful of legislative seats as well as the governor’s office and the Boston mayor’s seat. In short order, the state legislature put forth a program of “Temperance, Liberty, and Protestantism,” which mandated among other things that Protestant hymns and the King James Bible be used in public schools, and which deprived Catholics of the right to hold public office because of their supposed allegiance to Rome.23

The bigotry of the Know Nothings prompted Abraham Lincoln, an up-and-coming Illinois politician, to despair to a friend in 1855, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ ”24

The Know Nothing surge in American politics proved short-lived, thanks to Lincoln’s rapidly growing Republican Party, but Know Nothing sentiments continued to hold sway in Massachusetts state politics for many years to come, and kept the Irish population away from elected office. The nativist press duly chronicled the alleged lawlessness and chronic alcoholism and disease in Boston’s immigrant neighborhoods, and state voters approved laws mandating literacy tests that were designed to keep Irish from the polls. Catholics were discriminated against in hospitals and were prohibited from burying their dead in public cemeteries. Hundreds of impoverished Irish in poorhouses and asylums were deported back to Liverpool on the grounds that they were a drain on the public purse.25

At the same time, the Irish experienced tensions with other immigrant blocs—the Germans, the Scots, the English, the Canadians—who saw their wages diminish on account of the throngs of unskilled newcomers. As John F. Kennedy would later remark about the era of immigration lasting into the early 1900s, “Each wave disliked and distrusted the next. The English said the Irish ‘kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on.’ The English and the Irish distrusted the Germans who ‘worked too hard.’ The English and the Irish and the Germans disliked the Italians; and the Italians joined their predecessors in disparaging the Slavs.” From time to time in later years, after the influx of Italian immigrants to Boston in the 1890s, noises were made about the Irish and Italians banding together against the Yankees, but unity proved elusive—the economic and social tensions were simply too deep.26

Under different circumstances, the newcomers might have responded to these restrictions by striking out for greener pastures elsewhere in the United States. But few Irish had the training or the skills to feel confident they could make it out there in the great unknown. Some could not read; others lacked the skills needed to settle on the rural frontier. There was also the simple matter of Boston’s geography, different from that of almost every other major American city in that it was substantially water-locked. To venture out from areas where most immigrants lived required the payment of tolls or fares, which, however modest, were prohibitive for a people struggling to eke out an existence. (As late as 1858, bridges leaving the city charged tolls even for pedestrians.) Most of all, perhaps, this was a place to which they could relate, with an established Irish community—with recognizable faces, a neighborhood parish, an Irish-run saloon.27

Moving was in any event out of the question for a young widow with a brood to raise. So Bridget Kennedy hunkered down and set about doing what needed to be done. In June 1860, a year and a half after Pat’s passing, a Boston census taker reported that she had personal effects worth $75, a respectable sum in the neighborhood at that time. To help make ends meet, she took in boarders occasionally, including Mary Roach, eighteen, who looked after the Kennedy children. Details regarding Bridget’s employment are sketchy, but it seems she worked as a hairdresser and housecleaner before becoming the proprietor of a notions shop near the waterfront in East Boston that in due course started also carrying groceries and baked goods, even some liquor.28

Bridget loved her daughters, but P. J., as the lone son, was the measure of all things. She and the girls coddled him and worked to keep him on the straight and narrow. Determined to give him the opportunity for a better life, Bridget saved every penny she could in order to send him to Sacred Heart, a school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame. Quiet and reserved, with fair skin, blue eyes, and wavy brownish-red hair to go with a sturdy build, the boy was ambitious and blessed with a quick and agile mind, but book learning left him antsy; he lasted in school only until his early or mid teens. He then went to work as a dockhand on East Boston’s busy waterfront, but although he had the strength for physical labor, he lacked the temperament. The hard-drinking, brawling ways of his co-workers left him cold, and, with his mother’s constant encouragement, he aspired to bigger things. Each month he put away part of his earnings and kept on the lookout for an opportunity.

One day it came: a saloon in Haymarket Square was losing money and had been put up for sale. P. J. pounced and acquired it for next to nothing. Before long the enterprising and self-possessed young man, now in his early twenties, turned the tavern into a profitable business, specializing in offerings of lager beer. He carefully plowed the profits back in, becoming part owner of two additional taverns and expanding into whiskey importation and distribution. A teetotaler like his son after him (he did not wish to be associated with the stereotype of the blustering and bellicose Irish drunkard), Kennedy was a popular saloonkeeper, and he looked the part, with his stocky physique and swooping handlebar mustache. His patrons appreciated his friendly and unassuming manner and his willingness to help new arrivals find lodging and work, to straighten out misunderstandings with the police, to find legal assistance and arrange bail. Most of all, he had the great saloonkeeper’s ability to listen, to absorb the constant babbling without complaint, to laugh with the jokesters and commiserate with the down-and-out.29

Owning the taverns also gave Kennedy something else: political influence. As a neighborhood social center, a refuge in the cold and impersonal urban environment, the corner saloon was where the Irishman could stop on his way home from work and rest his tired body, forget his troubles, and tell a tall tale or two while delaying the return to his often dingy tenement apartment, teeming with children and boarders. Invariably, the chatter touched on social issues, and the tavern became a key center of political activity, its owner often a notable figure in the community, second only to the parish priest in power and prestige. Soon Kennedy knew who was running for office, knew the campaign strategies and shenanigans, knew who had dirt on whom. Small wonder, then, that he and many other saloon owners became ward bosses who built their political power through jobs and favors.

With each passing year, the political discussions in the taverns shifted more and more away from the remembered grievances of Ireland and toward local concerns. No longer did England’s serial transgressions against their beloved Emerald Isle generate the most fervor among the men who hunched over the bar; now it mattered more whether fares could be reduced on ferries linking East Boston to the mainland, and whether Boston’s new sewage system would fully encompass Irish neighborhoods. The attachment to Eire and its beauty remained, but America was home now to these men, many of them naturalized citizens who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. They saw meaning in politics and found a home in the Democratic Party, and they flocked to its banner. Kennedy, his influence rising, became a leader of Boston’s Ward Two and, in 1884, at age twenty-six, was appointed precinct officer. Two years later, just shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, he won a seat in the state House of Representatives.30