The Patriarch (3 page)

PART I

East Boston to Cambridge to Brookline

One

D
UNGANSTOWN TO
E
AST
B
OSTON

T
he Kennedy saga, like that of so many American families, begins with an ancestor’s escape from poverty and oppression. Sometime in 1848 or 1849—we are not sure when—Joseph P. Kennedy’s grandfather Patrick emigrated from Dunganstown in County Wexford, in flight from crop failure, famine, and the near genocidal effects of British colonialism.

The potato had been both the salvation and the curse of the Irish. By the 1840s, some million and a half survived on potatoes alone; for another three and a half million (out of a population of eight million), the potato constituted the major source of nourishment. When the harvest was late or the previous year’s crop eaten up—as it often was by late summer—people went hungry. When the harvest failed, people died.

Had the British authorities been more attentive or humane, the potato blight of the 1840s might not have led to such devastation. But Parliament provided insufficient relief for a distant and despised people and then, in June 1847, passed the Irish Poor Law Extension Act, which mandated that already destitute communities raise their own tax moneys for poor relief, not one farthing of which was to go to heads of household renting a quarter acre or more of land. To qualify for relief, starving tenants had to abandon their farms. Those who remained were evicted for failure to pay their taxes. The newly landless who could afford passage off the island emigrated. Large numbers of those who remained behind perished. From 1845 through the early 1850s, more than a million died and two million more, about one quarter of the population, departed for North America.

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M
ass 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 of 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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