Common Ground (46 page)

Thomas Garrity settled initially in Charlestown, where he was among the first Irishmen to find a foothold on the inhospitable slope of Breed’s Hill. But, uncomfortable there, he worked his way north into New Hampshire, laying track on the Boston & Maine Railroad. In late 1850, he reached the little village of Milford, where he decided to follow his ancestral craft of stonecutting in the local granite quarry. Other Irishmen were attracted to Milford by the Souhegan Cotton Mill, and gradually an Irish quarter grew up around the mill. There Thomas and his wife, Ellen Fallon, raised eight children.

Though it had only 1,500 inhabitants, Milford at midcentury was a remarkable place, a hotbed of temperance and abolitionist agitation. The village’s most fervent abolitionists were a family of musicians called the Singing Hutchinsons, whose Sunday prayer meetings drew people from miles around to hear their songs and a rousing call to action by William Lloyd Garrison or Wendell
Phillips up from Boston. Although most Irish at that time were hostile to the antislavery movement, resenting the Yankees’ preferential treatment of Negroes, there is some evidence that the Garritys became abolitionists.

Charles Garrity—one of Thomas’s eight children—was a cooper, but he hankered to buy a farm. One day, according to family legend, he went to a probate court auction and won a prime parcel, only to be refused title because a county custom prohibited the sale of probate court land to “Indians, Negroes and Papists.” (New Hampshire had a long history of anti-Catholic feeling, rooted in its fear of French Quebec.) It was that experience, so the story goes, which persuaded Charles Garrity to pull up stakes in 1883 and move his family to Worcester, Massachusetts.

Charles’s wife, Margaret, had come to Milford as an infant and evidently absorbed its social conscience. Passionately devoted to politics, an avid supporter of William Jennings Bryan, and an early suffragette, she named one son Clarence, after Clarence Darrow, another Wendell, after Wendell Phillips. Why Phillips? Perhaps because the Garritys remembered him from his appearance at the Hutchinsons’ camp meetings. Perhaps because they admired his antislavery stance. Perhaps because Margaret appreciated his support for women’s rights. And perhaps because, in the years after the Civil War, Phillips openly identified with the plight of the Irish immigrant, particularly with the reformers in the Irish-American Land League. In December 1879—six years before Wendell Arthur Garrity was christened—the patrician Phillips told a mass meeting in Boston, “I said in the great rebellion, ‘Give the Negro a vote and forty acres of land.’ Give every Irish a vote and forty acres of land to stand on.”

Whatever the reason for the Garritys’ admiration of Phillips, it reflected a partial truce in the cultural war which had long pitted the Irish immigrant against the Yankee reform tradition. By the 1880s, many Irish-Americans had begun to emerge from the big-city shanty towns, becoming regular wage earners, respected craftsmen, even middle-class burghers. Having gained some stake in the larger society, they came to identify with broader national concerns. This was particularly true of those who settled in semi-rural towns like Milford or in medium-sized industrial communities like Albany or Worcester. They were beginning to feel American.

Certainly Charles Garrity made his way in the Yankee world of Worcester. A skilled cooper and minor inventor, he turned from barrels to houses. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Worcester’s population exploded and Charles built many of the grim three-deckers which still scar its gritty hills. For his own growing family, he built a large house on Vernon Hill, the city’s Irish stronghold. Charles made houses and money, but Margaret made the deepest impression on her children. It was she who persuaded two of her sons to enter the practice of law—Charles, who ultimately became a member of the state legislature, and Wendell Arthur Garrity.

Wendell—more often known as W. Arthur, or simply as Arthur—went to Holy Cross, just across town, and then on to Harvard Law School, among the
first of the Worcester Irish to attend that august institution. Graduating in 1909, he came home and went into partnership with a lawyer named John Sheehan. Among the most prominent Irish lawyers in town, Sheehan and Garrity prided themselves on the breadth of their clientele. Garrity used to boast that, unlike most Irish lawyers, he didn’t get his clientele through the priests. The firm supervised the division of assets between two branches of the once virulently anti-Catholic Masons, and represented the Methodist Church. Arthur kept up with his old college mates at the Holy Cross Club and still hoisted a few with the Irish lads down at the Knights of Columbus, but he had begun to transcend the fierce ethnic loyalties which preoccupied so many of his contemporaries. Asked once to list his favorite authors, he included John P. Marquand, recorder of Boston’s Yankee aristocracy.

In 1919, he married Mary Kennedy, whose father was a coachman to Jonas Clark, a prominent Yankee merchant. Reared in the Clark household, and intensely grateful for their many kindnesses, Mary to her death wouldn’t let anyone speak ill of the Yankees.

From childhood, their son, Wendell Arthur Garrity, Jr., was marked as an achiever: a vigorous athlete whose promising sports career was cut short when he broke the same leg three times in bruising football and hockey matches, a diligent student who skipped three half-grades in grammar school.

Like so many middle-class Irish families of that era, the Garritys worshipped education. The Belmont Street School which they attended was the very model of the American neighborhood school. It was a five-minute walk from the Garritys’ new house, and from houses roundabout came other Irish children, Germans, and particularly Swedes—for the family had completed its ethnic emancipation by moving to predominantly Swedish Green Hill.

From across Belmont Street, site of Worcester’s small black community, came several dozen Negro children, who made up 10 percent of the school’s enrollment. As a child, young Arthur accepted this black presence with little curiosity. Years later, his brother Jim remembered the Negro boys removing straight razors from their pockets and stowing them in their shoes before they joined the Irish and Swedes in barefoot football games at Green Hill Park, but the sight filled him more with wonder than with fear. For Worcester’s black community was too small—and too passive—to intimidate anyone. The Garritys retained a special sympathy for blacks. Their mother sometimes drew a parallel between the Irish and black experience by expanding the old slogan to go: “No Irish,
No Negroes
, Need Apply.” And in the 1940s and 1950s, long before civil rights became a fashionable cause, W. Arthur Garrity, Sr., was one of a tiny handful of Worcester Irish in the NAACP.

After twelve years of public education, all the Garrity boys went across town to the College of the Holy Cross—that much was preordained. It was their father’s alma mater and it exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of Worcester’s Irish. Moreover, the Garritys were devout Catholics, saying the rosary together for forty-eight straight days during Lent, keeping an altar to the Virgin Mary during May. Their mother harbored a secret wish that one of
her sons would grow up to be a priest, but if that was not to be, she was determined that her boys should at least have “an intellectual basis for their faith.”

Holy Cross in those years was a stern place with compulsory daily Mass, a strict dress code, and an intellectual life which was just as rigorous. The Jesuit curriculum included great quantities of Latin, Greek, ethics, philosophy, and theology, but the reigning intellectual influence was that of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomism is a relentlessly logical discipline, its chief analytical tool the syllogism, an argument in which two premises lead to an inevitable conclusion (as in “All crimes against nature are wrong / This is a crime against nature / This is wrong”). Building from major premise to minor premise to thundering conclusion, St. Thomas constructed a self-contained moral system grounded in the immutable nature of the universe. Its principles could be discerned by man in the natural law, which, in turn, was “the rational creature’s participation in [God’s] eternal law.”

This doctrine had obvious appeal to the Catholic Church operating within a secular state, for it held that natural rights sprang not from man-made law but from the divine will of God. Since the state had not made these rights, it could not take them away. As a limitation on secular authority, natural law buttressed the Church’s moral authority. But the theory could likewise serve rebels against a tyrannical regime, helping to kindle the English and American revolutions, later fortifying the abolitionists. Against the Fugitive Slave Act, William Lloyd Garrison would argue: “When rulers have inverted their functions and enacted wickedness into a law which treads down the inalienable rights of man to such a degree as this, then I know no ruler but God, no law but natural justice.” To that extent, Arthur Garrity’s training in Thomistic philosophy may have reinforced the abolitionist inclinations which had persisted in his family for three generations.

For the moment, Garrity had little time for such lofty considerations. At Harvard Law School in the fall of 1941, he plunged into the dreary particulars of evidence, property, and torts. After graduation, he clerked for Federal District Judge Francis J. W Ford, who became almost a second father to the young lawyer. Later he served as an assistant U.S. Attorney, then entered private practice with several colleagues.

In 1952, Garrity married Barbara Anne Mullins, an elementary school teacher, and moved with her to a garden apartment in suburban Wellesley. A delicate woman known as “Bambi” from the monogram—BAM—embroidered on her blouses, she had graduated in 1945 from Regis, a Catholic women’s college with a certain social status. She kept up with some of her schoolmates in the Ace of Clubs, a group founded by Rose Fitzgerald, later John Kennedy’s mother. Excluded from Yankee sewing circles, Rose had established the Ace of Clubs as an alternative for well-bred Irish Catholic girls, and it grew into an exclusive society, whose activities culminated in a spring dance at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

In their first married years, the Garritys’ social life centered on Barbara’s
Regis and Ace of Clubs friends and their husbands, most of them graduates of Boston College and Holy Cross. These were second- and third-generation Irish-Americans, who after the war had moved out of Boston’s ethnic enclaves, finding homes in the suburbs and making their way in law, medicine, or business. In the elaborate hierarchy of the Boston Irish, they were the “two-toilet Irish,” an emerging professional class no longer comfortable with the claustrophobic world of their fathers.

For such families, the annual rite of spring—St. Patrick’s Day—posed a dilemma. They were too Irish to ignore it altogether, too assimilated to enjoy the raucous, boozy, sometimes violent celebration in South Boston. (Arthur Garrity’s sister Peggy once attended the South Boston parade and came away horrified. “My gosh,” she told a friend, “they’re a very different kind of Irish than we have in Worcester.”) Eve Carey, daughter of the chairman of American Airlines, was a friend of Bambi Garrity’s from Regis. In the mid-fifties, she solved the St. Patrick’s Day dilemma for her friends by founding a group called the Mystery Nighters. Every year, on the Saturday nearest the holiday, a hundred couples would be invited to “a night of intrigue and adventure.” Once they were taken to Logan Airport, where they boarded an American Airlines plane, which then taxied into a hangar, where the real festivities began. Another year they went to a Charlestown funeral home for a cocktail party among the caskets, where a man dressed in a green top hat told Irish jokes. Several Townies wandered in off Bunker Hill Street to gape at the suburban visitors. A number of Mystery Nighters recall Bambi and Arthur Garrity as regulars at these annual revels.

The Mystery Nighters were a classic John Kennedy crowd, the kind of upwardly mobile young Irish who responded most enthusiastically to his wit and modish idealism. So it was hardly surprising that Arthur Garrity should join the Kennedy camp, working hard for Jack in the 1952 senatorial campaign, helping him swamp the incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge.

Six years later, when Kennedy was up for reelection, Garrity got even more deeply involved. His law partner Dick Maguire had long been close to Kennedy—serving as treasurer for his first congressional campaign—and in 1958 Maguire persuaded Garrity to put in several hours a day at the Senator’s head-quarters. Kennedy already had his eye on the presidential nomination two years hence and he set seemingly irreconcilable goals for 1958: a landslide victory in Massachusetts, but plenty of time to campaign elsewhere for candidates who might return the favor in 1960. Between the September primary and the November election, he spent only seventeen days in Massachusetts, and Garrity’s job was to make the best use of every available minute. Kenny O’Donnell called Garrity “a genius” at the scheduler’s game: in what may have been a record for a single day, he got Kennedy through fifteen speaking engagements in fifteen different towns and yet to bed by 11:00 p.m. That split-second timing paid off when the Senator won reelection by 874,608 votes, the biggest majority ever achieved by a candidate for public office in Massachusetts, and a favorable omen for 1960.

Arthur Garrity had earned a place on the Kennedy team—not as one of the publicized stars like Ted Sorensen or Larry O’Brien, but as a solid regular who could be counted on to do his job—and in 1960 he drew a tough one: running the Milwaukee headquarters for the critical Wisconsin primary. The Kennedys hadn’t wanted to enter Wisconsin, where their main rival, Hubert Humphrey, was almost as popular as in his adjacent Minnesota. But once they went in, they threw all their resources into the battle—the entire family, dozens of friends and supporters from back home. Garrity coordinated logistics for the far-flung operation. In seven weeks, he earned the Kennedys’ renewed admiration for his meticulous attention to detail and his capacity for hard work. On April 6, Kennedy won two-thirds of Wisconsin’s delegates. Later that spring, Garrity helped plan a national voter registration drive.