Last updated: November 26, 2024
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President John F. Kennedy and the History of Irish Immigration in Boston
Library of Congress
The Irish Arrive
When the first wave of Irish immigrants arrived in New England in the late 1790s, they were fleeing oppressive penal laws and high taxes in Ireland that had kept them poor and subservient to English colonial rule. Centuries of conflict between the English and the Irish had resulted in a mutual animosity and a long history of violence between them. The lack of political freedom in their home country forced small numbers of Irish people to leave in search of a better life. Most early immigrants arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were from Northern Ireland and had skilled professions. Even with the addition of the few immigrants who chose to settle in Boston, the makeup of the city remained almost entirely Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Most existing Bostonians were the descendants of early English Puritan settlers, and many still felt strongly connected to England and held on to deeply ingrained anti-Irish prejudices. The cultural and religious homogeneity of the city had resulted in an atmosphere that was unwelcoming to newcomers, and many early Irish immigrants passed through Boston and continued west in search of better work opportunities and a less hostile environment.
Irish immigration to New England remained low until 1821, when Ireland experienced its first potato crop failure and Boston found itself receiving about 2,000 immigrants from the depleted southern farming counties. These primarily Irish Catholic immigrants arrived in Boston with very little money and were mainly qualified for work as day-laborers, working on the piers and construction sites. Their willingness to work for little pay in undesirable conditions meant that they were seen as competition for “unskilled” jobs by other working-class Bostonians. This created an atmosphere of hostility between the groups that resulted in frequent violent clashes and destruction of Irish Catholic property.
Ballou's Pictorial, October 31, 1857. The Smithsonian. Object number: 1996.63.148
The Great Hunger
The second wave of Irish immigration to the United States came after the potato blight of 1845, when the majority of the potato crop in Ireland was lost to disease. During this period, known as the Great Hunger or the Irish Potato Famine, thousands of Irish people lost their lives to starvation, disease, and exposure. Thousands more were evicted from their homes by English absentee landlords. In desperation, people fled Ireland in droves and spent what little money they had on passage to America on “coffin ships”, on which food and water were scarce and disease ran rampant. Many did not survive the voyage, and those who did were often sick and weak with nothing to their names. Unlike earlier immigrants who opted to leave Boston in search of better opportunities, most of the famine Irish did not have money for passage out of the city, so they settled in groups near the waterfront. Because their main goal was to escape the seemingly hopeless situation in Ireland, the precise destination was not important to many, and their extreme poverty limited their mobility. In 1847, roughly 37,000 Irish immigrants settled in Boston, and by 1855, the Irish population was more than 50,000 people and they were the city’s largest ethnic group.
A Struggle for Survival
The Boston waterfront neighborhoods of the North End and East Boston quickly became home to thousands of Irish immigrants, who wanted to stay as close as possible to family, friends, and limited job opportunities on the wharves. Tenement houses in these Irish slums were extremely crowded, with a very low standard of living and high rents. The communal sinks and bathrooms had insufficient drainage and sanitation and facilitated the spread of disease through the communities. When the cholera epidemic of 1849 reached Boston, the North End Irish neighborhood was hit the hardest, causing the deaths of over 500 Irish immigrants, the majority of whom were children. In his official report on the Boston census, Bostonian Lemuel Shattuck remarked on “children in the Irish district, literally born to die.”
Work opportunities were limited for the famine Irish, and they often earned just enough to afford rent. Because most Irish immigrants were illiterate with few marketable skills, the men worked as day-laborers and the women went to work as domestic servants in wealthy Protestant households. The unsafe work and living conditions and the effects of poverty on their health meant that many Irish men died in middle age, leaving their wives and children with little money and support. This was the case for Patrick Kennedy, the paternal great-grandfather of future president John F. Kennedy, whose untimely death from cholera at the age of thirty-five left his wife Bridget to provide for their four children on her own. To ensure the survival of the family, women took any employment they could find, and from the age of five children peddled newspapers and shined shoes, before leaving school at age twelve to work full time on piers and construction sites. The struggle to survive emphasized the importance of sticking together and making the family the central priority, often at the expense of personal aspirations. Despite the horrific conditions in tenements and the lack of opportunities in the city, even those who could afford to leave would often stay in Boston to remain close to family and familiar surroundings; they were determined not to lose any more than they had already lost after leaving Ireland.
No Irish Need Apply
When English Puritans first arrived in Boston in 1631, they declared the new settlement to be a “city upon a hill”, or a beacon of hope and morality for the rest of the world. Although they themselves had left England in search of religious freedom, they were intolerant of different religious denominations, particularly Catholicism, which they viewed as blasphemous. As Boston grew, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant descendants of the early Puritan settlers became increasingly wealthy and powerful in the community and became known as the Boston “Brahmins”, an elite class of Bostonians. These influential families were leaders in Massachusetts politics and business, and they viewed the influx of Irish immigrants as a threat to the established order that had existed in Boston for many years. While the Irish represented a threat to the availability of job opportunities for working-class Bostonians, the Brahmins disliked the immigrants’ Catholic identity and feared that their own way of life would be destroyed by the political mobilization of the Irish, who represented a growing constituency. In response, Bostonians resorted to defensive nativism and xenophobia and formed nativist, anti-immigrant political parties. One such group was the “Order of the Star-Spangled Banner”, also known as the “Know-Nothing” Party. The “Know-Nothings”, who were named after their members’ response of “I know nothing” when questioned about their involvement in the society, sought political power to pass legislation to restrict further immigration, delay the naturalization process, and bar immigrants from voting or holding political office.
Irish Catholics in particular were subjected to prejudice and discrimination in nearly every facet of daily life. Looked down upon as a lesser people and distrusted due to their Catholic identity, the Irish were rejected from jobs with signs reading “No Irish Need Apply”, discriminated against in city hospitals, prohibited from burying their dead in public cemeteries, and even had their faith undermined by Protestant teachers in public schools. When a Catholic parochial school system was proposed, the Protestant-run Boston School Committee opposed the plan. Even though many of the Brahmin families had begun to remove their children from public schools in favor of private schools reserved for the elite, they still insisted on immigrant children attending Boston public schools, where teachers would work to instill in them obedience to the Puritan Anglo-Saxon heritage.
The New York Times
Native Sons of Boston
For many years following their arrival in the mid-1800s, the Boston Irish remained an isolated group within the city. The prejudice they experienced, as well as their different cultural and religious background, caused the Irish to develop a group consciousness and turn inward. However, the start of the American Civil War in 1861 provided them with an opportunity to display their loyalty to their adoptive country. Although many Irish immigrants were staunchly opposed to President Abraham Lincoln, they believed in loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and the acceptance of lawfully established government, and many willingly joined the Union army after the secession of the Southern states. During the Civil War, men of all backgrounds fought alongside each other for a common cause and were drawn together as Americans. This period marked a turning point in the attitudes towards Irish immigrants, as many believed they had displayed their loyalty to the country by fighting for the Union. After the war, the Massachusetts state government began to relax restrictions on Irish immigrants, allowing them to hold municipal government positions and pledging equal treatment for people of all religious denominations in city hospitals and public schools.
By 1870, it was estimated that two-thirds of the city’s laborers were of Irish descent. However, there was greater mobility for the second generation of Boston Irish, who were coming of age and beginning to move into semi-skilled occupations. During this time, there was a demographic expansion of Boston and the surrounding area, which resulted in an increased number of infrastructure jobs for immigrants and social and economic benefits. New forms of transportation and increasing status allowed the Irish to begin to move out of the waterfront tenements into nearby towns and suburbs, and their steadily increasing population meant that they formed a more influential political constituency. By the end of the 1880s, the new generation of Boston Irish was moving upward in society; they had found a place in the working of the city and could now call themselves native sons of Boston.
Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-96662.
The mid-1880s saw the emergence of ward “bosses” in Boston’s Irish neighborhoods. All immigrants or the sons of immigrants, these bosses were influential and well-liked members of the community who were appointed leaders. In exchange for political support, the boss provided for the inhabitants of his ward by lending money, extending credit, and doing favors. One such local leader was John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, future president John F. Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, who became the boss of the North End ward at the age of 29. Born in the North End neighborhood to two Irish Catholic immigrant parents, he was an active member of the local Democratic Party. After the 1884 election of Hugh O’Brien, the first Irish Catholic mayor of the city of Boston, the Irish began to move up from politics at the ward level to positions in city, state, and national politics. By 1887, Irish Catholics were serving as chairmen of the School Committee and Boston’s Board of Aldermen, and in 1894, Fitzgerald was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He would eventually become the first American-born Irish mayor of Boston from 1906 to 1908 and was elected to the position again in 1910, serving for another four years.
Across the harbor from the North End was the Irish neighborhood of East Boston, where Patrick J. Kennedy was ward boss. Elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1884, he served for five years before becoming a Massachusetts State Senator in 1889, after which he remained an active but behind-the-scenes participant in Boston politics. In only a few generations, the Boston Irish had managed to push past extreme prejudice and crippling poverty to elect some of their own to influential political positions. By the beginning of the 1900s, Irish Catholics largely controlled municipal government in Boston, but they remained outsiders to the Brahmin controlled business and banking systems in the city.
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys
When Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the eldest son of Patrick J. Kennedy, was born in 1888, his father’s political success in Massachusetts had elevated his Irish Catholic family to relative prominence in the city of Boston. While his father had been forced to leave school at an early age to support his family, Joseph Sr. was able to attend the predominantly Protestant Boston Latin School, a prestigious preparatory school that also educated many of the children of prominent Brahmin families. After graduating from Boston Latin in 1908, he attended Harvard University alongside classmates from the most powerful families in Massachusetts. He earned his degree in economics with his sights set on a future career in banking. Despite his impressive education, when Joseph Sr. first entered the banking world, he found that prejudice against his Irish Catholic background prevented him from starting out at the same level as his Brahmin classmates. Although Irish Catholics had begun to gain power in the political world, the business and banking in Boston were still largely controlled by Protestants, many of whom still distrusted and discriminated against Irish Catholics.
Despite the difficulty he faced at the start of his career, Joseph Kennedy Sr. would make his fortune and quickly rise to prominence as one of the most influential men in the country. In 1914, Joseph Sr. married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the daughter of another prominent Boston Irish Catholic, the former mayor of Boston John F. Fitzgerald. In 1927, when John F. Kennedy was around ten years old, Joseph Kennedy Sr. moved his family out of the Boston suburb of Brookline to New York. While Rose did not want to leave the city she had grown up in, Joseph Sr. could not forget the prejudice he had faced in his youth. When later asked by a reporter why he had left Boston, Joseph Sr. remarked that he felt “it was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children” and that he “didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up there.”
An Irish Catholic President
By the time John F. Kennedy was born in 1917, most anti-Irish sentiments in Boston had abated and Irish Catholics occupied a variety of positions in American politics. As the son of two parents from prominent Massachusetts families, John F. Kennedy was surrounded by politics from a very young age. Following in his grandfather John F. Fitzgerald's footsteps, John F. Kennedy served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was later elected to the U.S. Senate. Although the 1900s had been a time of greater acceptance for Irish Catholics, when John F. Kennedy finally set his sights on the presidency, he found that one of the largest obstacles during his campaign was the public’s perception of his religious background. Many Catholic politicians were treated with suspicion by Protestants and Evangelicals and accused of having dual loyalties to both the Vatican and the United States, a prejudice that had plagued Irish immigrants ever since they first arrived in America. In 1928, when Al Smith ran for President as the first Catholic candidate nominated by a major party, his campaign was defeated by widespread anti-Catholic sentiment and mistrust from many Americans.
Despite this hurdle, John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 in a very close race and was elected the first Irish-Catholic President of the United States. In just over 100 years, a descendant of Irish immigrants, most of whom had arrived in Boston with nothing, had risen to the highest office in the land. Unlike his father and grandparents, President Kennedy did not have memories of anti-Irish discrimination during his childhood in New England, and therefore he relished opportunities to explore his Irish heritage and felt very connected to his familial roots. On his historic state visit to Ireland in June of 1963, he visited several locations, including his family’s ancestral home in County Wexford, and he remarked to a crowd in New Ross, Ireland:
"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."
~ President John F. Kennedy, Remarks on the Quay at New Ross, Ireland, June 27, 1963
Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. ST-C232-9-63