From Famine Ships to the White House: The Boston Irish and John F. Kennedy

When John F. Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic president of the United States, his victory capped more than a century of struggle and rise by Irish immigrants and their descendants in Boston. His family's own story — from a great-grandfather who died of cholera at 35 to a father held back by prejudice in the city's banks — follows that history closely.

Family members bid farewell to emigrants leaving Ireland, in an 1868 illustration by Henry Doyle (Library of Congress).

The first arrivals

The first wave of Irish immigrants reached New England in the late 1790s, escaping penal laws and heavy taxes that had kept them poor and subject to English colonial rule. They came in small numbers, mostly skilled workers from Northern Ireland, to a city almost entirely Anglo-Saxon Protestant and deeply prejudiced against the Irish; many moved on west.

Numbers stayed low until Ireland's first potato crop failure in 1821 sent about 2,000 mostly Catholic immigrants from the impoverished southern farming counties to Boston. They worked as day laborers on the piers and building sites for low pay, other working-class Bostonians saw them as rivals, and frequent violent clashes and attacks on Irish Catholic property followed.

An Irish family comes ashore at Charlestown, Massachusetts, in Ballou's Pictorial, October 31, 1857 (Smithsonian).

The Great Hunger

The second wave followed the potato blight of 1845, which destroyed most of Ireland's potato crop. During the Great Hunger (the Irish Potato Famine), thousands died of starvation, disease and exposure, and thousands more were evicted by English absentee landlords. Many who fled on crowded "coffin ships" died on the way.

Those who reached Boston were often sick, weak and penniless. Unlike earlier arrivals, most could not afford to travel on, and escape rather than destination had been the point, so they settled together near the waterfront. Roughly 37,000 Irish immigrants settled in Boston in 1847 alone, and by 1855 the Irish numbered more than 50,000 — the city's largest ethnic group.

Surviving in the city

The North End and East Boston filled with Irish families living near relatives and the few jobs on the wharves, in packed, expensive tenements whose shared sinks and toilets spread disease. When cholera struck Boston in 1849, the Irish North End was hit hardest: more than 500 Irish immigrants died, most of them children. Boston's census report by Lemuel Shattuck described "children in the Irish district, literally born to die."

Most famine immigrants could not read and had few marketable skills. Men worked as day laborers; women became domestic servants in wealthy Protestant homes. Dangerous work, bad housing and poverty meant many men died in middle age. One was Patrick Kennedy, the future president's paternal great-grandfather, who died of cholera at 35 and left his wife, Bridget, to raise their four children alone. Women took any work they could find; children sold newspapers and shined shoes from age five and left school at twelve for full-time work on the piers and building sites.

"No Irish Need Apply"

The Puritans had declared Boston a "city upon a hill," a beacon of morality to the world. Though they had left England seeking religious freedom, they had little tolerance for other faiths, and especially for Catholicism. Their wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestant descendants, the Boston "Brahmins," led the state's politics and business and saw the Irish as a threat: working-class Bostonians feared for their jobs, while the Brahmins distrusted Irish Catholicism and feared the political power of a fast-growing Irish electorate.

The backlash produced nativist parties such as the "Know-Nothings" (the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner), which sought to restrict immigration, slow naturalization, and bar immigrants from voting or holding office.

Irish Catholics met discrimination almost everywhere. Signs and advertisements told them "No Irish Need Apply." They were treated unequally in city hospitals, barred from burying their dead in public cemeteries, and saw their faith undermined by Protestant teachers in public schools. The Protestant-run School Committee opposed Catholic parochial schools, even as Brahmin families moved their own children to private ones.

A New York Times advertisement stating "No Irish Need Apply," March 25, 1854.

Native sons of Boston

For years the Irish remained apart. The Civil War, which began in 1861, changed that: many Irish immigrants opposed President Abraham Lincoln but believed in loyalty to the Constitution, and many joined the Union army. Fighting alongside men of every background turned attitudes: after the war, Massachusetts eased restrictions on the Irish, letting them hold municipal jobs and pledging equal treatment for all faiths in city hospitals and public schools.

By 1870, an estimated two-thirds of Boston's laborers were of Irish descent, but the second generation was moving into semi-skilled work, new transportation let families leave the waterfront for nearby towns and suburbs, and their growing numbers made the Irish a political force. By the end of the 1880s, they could call themselves native sons of Boston.

John Francis Fitzgerald in 1906; photograph by Theodore C. Marceau (Library of Congress).

From ward bosses to City Hall

In the mid-1880s, ward bosses — popular immigrants or sons of immigrants — emerged in Boston's Irish neighborhoods, lending money, extending credit and doing favors in return for political support.

• John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the future president's maternal grandfather, was born in the North End to Irish Catholic immigrant parents and became the North End's boss at 29. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1894, became the first American-born Irish mayor of Boston from 1906 to 1908, and was elected mayor again in 1910 for another four years.
• Patrick J. Kennedy, the president's paternal grandfather, was boss across the harbor in East Boston. Elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1884, he served five years before becoming a state senator in 1889, and afterward stayed active in Boston politics behind the scenes.

Hugh O'Brien's election in 1884 as Boston's first Irish Catholic mayor opened the way to city, state and national office. By 1887, Irish Catholics chaired the School Committee and the Board of Aldermen, and by the early 1900s they largely controlled city government — though Brahmins still ran the city's businesses and banks.

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., Patrick J. Kennedy's eldest son, was born in 1888. Unlike his father, who had left school young, he attended the mostly Protestant Boston Latin School, graduating in 1908, and then Harvard, earning a degree in economics. Yet in banking, prejudice kept him from starting at the same level as his Brahmin classmates.

He overcame it, made a fortune and became one of the most influential men in the country. In 1914 he married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of Honey Fitz. In 1927, when John was around ten, Joseph moved the family from suburban Brookline to New York. Rose did not want to leave, but Joseph had not forgotten the prejudice of his youth; he later told a reporter he considered Boston no place to raise Irish Catholic children and did not want them to endure what he had.

An Irish Catholic president

By the time John F. Kennedy was born in 1917, most anti-Irish feeling in Boston had faded. Surrounded by politics from childhood, he followed his grandfather to the U.S. House of Representatives for three terms and then won election to the Senate. But when he ran for president, his religion was one of the biggest obstacles. Catholic politicians were still accused of divided loyalty between the Vatican and the United States — the old suspicion that had followed Irish immigrants since their arrival — and in 1928 Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party, had lost amid widespread anti-Catholic feeling.

Kennedy won in 1960, in a very close race. In just over a hundred years, the descendant of immigrants who had reached Boston with nothing had risen to the highest office in the land. Having no childhood memories of anti-Irish discrimination, he embraced his heritage. On his state visit to Ireland in June 1963 he went to his family's ancestral home in County Wexford, and at New Ross he told the crowd:

"When my great grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheritance."
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— President John F. Kennedy, remarks on the quay at New Ross, Ireland, June 27, 1963

President Kennedy with his sisters Jean Kennedy Smith and Eunice Kennedy Shriver and relatives outside the Kennedy Homestead in Dunganstown, County Wexford, June 27, 1963. Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum).

Sources

• National Park Service, John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site: "President John F. Kennedy and the History of Irish Immigration in Boston."