John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Ethnic Incorporation and Avoidance

Chapter 4: Boston, Chicago, and the Rise of Kennedy and Obama

4 Boston, Chicago, and the Rise of Kennedy and Obama Boston has been described as a “caste-ridden city” where the aristocratically pretentious “Brahmins,” tracing their ancestry to the English founders of the city, “generally regarded the Irish as members of a barbaric, inferior and unmanageable race and who saw themselves as representatives of a superior English culture.”1 Boston’s Brahmins, however, were relatively sympathetic to enslaved Africans and the city became something of a haven for free blacks and a citadel of abolitionism. The Boston Brahmins, the African Americans, and the Irish Catholics By the 1860s, Handlin contends that blacks were better off economically and politically in Boston than any other place—in the United States.2 Better off than the Catholic Irish who were “unquestionably” lowest in the occupational hierarchy.3 In Handlin’s Boston, blacks were more socially incorporated with their 12 percent intermarriage rate vastly exceeding the Catholic Irish.4 In 1866 blacks were elected to the state legislature and thereafter they were frequently elected to office, always from majority white constituencies. Frederick Douglass described Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as the greatest friend the Negro ever had in public life. Nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor for his outspoken championing of the cause of African freedom, Sumner, with the evident support of his constituents, led the fight in Congress after the Civil War for civil rights legislation and passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. With Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Sumner was also responsible for the idea of “Forty Acres and a Mule,” introducing legislation to confiscate the slaveholders’ plantations, divide them up, 33 34 Chapter 4 and give them to the Africans as compensation or reparation, and as a means to punish the slaveholders for treason. In 1850, Sumner filed the first school desegregation suit in the United States. Although Sarah v. Roberts was unsuccessful, in 1853 the Massachusetts legislature abolished segregation in public schools and in 1865 adopted a stature prohibiting racial discrimination in all public places. Blacks in antebellum Boston by no means enjoyed complete incorporation and Handlin does not suggest otherwise, but he writes they were far better off than the Catholic Irish, who were “segregated in their murky slums, in their lowly occupations and their dread of losing religion.”5 The Catholic Irish immigrants to Boston during the antebellum era faced discrimination in employment, housing, schooling, and policing in an atmosphere of pervasive Anglo-Saxon bigotry and chauvinism. Occasional anti-Catholic riots also broke out, giving rise to what House Speaker Tip O’Neill described as a “tremendous hatred of the English in Irish neighborhoods.”6 The worst case of Protestant anti-Catholicism in Boston was the 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent in nearby Charlestown. Described by one historian as “one of the darkest incidents of religious persecution to be recorded in the new world,”7 the convent was burned by a mob after an inflammatory sermon by the Reverend Lyman Beecher.8 An elite boarding school for young, mostly Protestant women, the convent was destroyed by a mob led by John Buzzell, who was acquitted and later became something of a folk hero throughout New England eventually winning election to the New Hampshire legislature. Burned into Catholic Irish consciousness Tip O’Neill recalls that the incident was a “favorite topic” in his neighborhood during his youth; “what those Protestant Yankees did to those poor Irish Catholic nuns” could stir the men into a “frenzy . . . as though it happened the day before yesterday.”9 This kind of overt, blatant oppression of the Catholic Irish, however, began to wither away after the first generation, and the succeeding generations rapidly incorporated leaving the African American in Boston far behind. Indeed, as the Catholic Irish ascended in Boston and the influence of the Brahmins declined, the subordination of African Americans intensified.10 Economically, Thernstrom contends that the lowly occupational status of first-generation Catholic Irish may have been due as much to the culture of the group as Anglo-Saxon discrimination.11 However one understands the causes of the initial Catholic Irish lag, by the second generation it was largely a thing of the past. Thernstrom writes that 35 Boston, Chicago, and the Rise of Kennedy and Obama almost one-fourth “of the American born youths of Irish parentage found their way into middle class jobs; white-collar callings were twice as accessible to the second generation...