The Bostonian

Life in an Irish-American Political Family

Larry Donnelly

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780717190430
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

American Or Irish, Republican or Democrat: many people are one or the other, but Larry Donnelly has been all of them.

Born into an Irish-American political dynasty, Larry was destined for a successful career in politics from the start. Having completed law school, he entered the 'family business' and involved himself in political life, experiencing everything from town hall meetings to the highest offices.

Years later, his career brought him to Galway, his ancestral home county, and love kept him in Ireland. Now a highly respected commentator, Larry's unique insight into the influence of Ireland on American politics, his reflections on growing up in Boston, his views from both sides of the house, as well as his take on the current state of his homeland, make for a fascinating read.

At a time when American politics has never been more divided, Donnelly offers a unique Irish-American perspective in his memoir of a life in a political family.

Part One – The Boston Family Business

CHAPTER 1

The Kelly Brothers

The Boston neighbourhood of Dorchester was founded as its own separate town in the early to mid 17th century by Puritans who had emigrated from Dorchester, Dorset, England. Dorchester was annexed by the city in 1870 and is, by a long stretch, the largest neighbourhood in Boston, which happens to be among the smallest of America’s urban centres in geographic terms. Not unusually, it was originally inhabited by a Native American tribe from the Massachusett nation, the Neponset, and the river dividing Dorchester from suburban Milton is named for them.

It was well served by rail from downtown and had thus become a very popular countryside getaway for the Boston elite in the 19th century. Notwithstanding its distinctly English roots, however, Dorchester became a place where many European immigrants, those from Ireland in particular, settled in the early 20th century. They were joined in increasing numbers by black Americans fleeing hostile territory in the southern US, as well as by immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Today, that ethnic mix – together with an influx of people from around the country who have come to Boston for higher education or for work or for both – renders Dorchester a uniquely diverse and vibrant place to live.

Near the turn of the 20th century, my own family from the west of Ireland – from north County Galway on my paternal grandmother’s side and from Kiltoom, near Athlone, in County Roscommon on my paternal grandfather’s – arrived in Dorchester and found tens of thousands of fellow Irish emigrants already in full pursuit of their American dreams. They, and those from other European countries, carried with them a strong Catholic faith. As such, Dorchester had a number of thronged churches.

Indeed, Dorchester people, both those who remain and those who have left but revere their roots in the old neighbourhood, identify themselves to this very day by which Catholic parish their family hails from. My family settled first in St. Peter’s Parish, in the northern part of the neighbourhood near Meetinghouse Hill, the highest point in Dorchester.

One native, the painter Childe Hassam, lyrically summed up the reasons why the area was so attractive to newcomers:

Dorchester was a most beautiful and pleasant place for a boy to grow up and go to school – from Meetinghouse Hill and Milton Hill looking out on Dorchester Bay and Boston Harbour with the white sails and the blue water of our clear and radiant North American weather … if you like as fair as the isles of Greece … and white houses often of very simple and good architecture juxtaposed to it all. Some of the white churches were actual masterpieces of architecture, and the white church on Meetinghouse Hill as I look back on it was no exception.

Boston then was dominated by prosperous families who collectively ran the city and controlled its financial, cultural and other key institutions. They were largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who, in some cases, were downright hostile or condescending toward the mainly Catholic immigrants suddenly in their midst. In that context, the new Bostonians made their way as best they could in the public and private sectors. In light of their rapidly growing numbers, politics was one route that ethnic Catholic immigrants saw toward a better life for themselves and for those from their respective tribes. And it was there that my great-uncles, Frank and John Kelly, directed their energies and ambitions.

In countless and endless chats in the vicinity of the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill, Frank Kelly was remembered by a good friend of mine, the late, consummate political animal and public servant, Don Falvey, as ‘one of the all-time characters in Boston politics’. Frank was a relatively newly qualified attorney when first elected to the Boston City Council in 1929 at age 26. While on the council, the young upstart jousted frequently with one of the most legendary Irish-American politicians in history, James Michael Curley.

What more can be said about Curley, the son of Galway-born parents who served as a state legislator, a US Congressman, for four terms as Mayor of Boston and for one term as Governor of Massachusetts over half a century in public life, that hasn’t already been chronicled in the history books or biographies? Curley was convicted twice of serious offences – the first of which was taking a civil service exam for an Irish immigrant who could not read or write. He parlayed that into a subsequent successful election slogan: ‘he did it for a friend’.

Later on, in 1932, he was denied a slot as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention by a political foe. Undaunted, he assumed an alias, Jaime Miguel Curleo, and was selected as a delegate from Puerto Rico! At some stage prior to or during Curley’s governorship in the 1930s, a tenure described as ‘ludicrous part of the time, shocking most of the time, and tawdry all the time’, he offered to nominate his erstwhile foe on the city council, Frank Kelly, to take up a coveted position on the quintessential bastion of the Boston legal establishment, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, if and when a vacancy arose. Although my Uncle Frank may have been tempted by the chance to horrify the genteel, Ivy League scholars on the oldest appellate court in America, elective office was where his heart lay. Accordingly, ‘Stick it where the sun doesn’t shine’ was his curt response to Governor Curley’s entreaty.

After his service on the Boston City Council, Uncle Frank (as he was known in our house) sought to be elected lieutenant governor of his state in 1936. Triumphant in the Democratic primary, he faced off against the then-Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Leverett Saltonstall. ‘Salty’ was an aristocrat who could trace his family genealogy back to the Mayflower, the ship that carried the first Pilgrims from England to Plymouth Plantation in 1620. A graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School, he was a veteran of World War I. He was equally a political figure straight from central casting for that era and the ideal foil for Frank Kelly.

From the off, Uncle Frank painted him as a rich Yankee, totally out of touch with the various challenges faced by ordinary people, especially the working-class Irish in Boston and across smaller cities and towns in Massachusetts. He also had a typically Brahmin name, Leverett being borne by several in his family before him and likely the converted surname of another ancestor. In short, ‘Leverett Saltonstall’ said everything: the name itself was an emblem of his exalted socio-economic status. To it, at a campaign debate, Frank Kelly added the middle initial ‘P’ to devastating effect. He intoned, in a broad Boston accent, ‘my opponent, Leverett Percival Saltonstall’ at the outset.

Contriving an even more esoteric and noble middle name for his Republican opponent was a stroke of political genius insofar as it drew the class distinction between the two men into sharp contrast: Leverett Percival Saltonstall vs Frank Kelly. Uncle Frank won that race by a mere 7,000 votes from well over a million that were cast. It was the only time Saltonstall, who went on to be Governor and US Senator from Massachusetts, was ever defeated in a state-wide election. He never forgot it. My father recalls being present for an unexpected meeting of the two by-then elderly men, who maintained a lifelong friendly relationship, in the mid 1970s on State Street in downtown Boston. On recognising his old rival, Saltonstall exclaimed, ‘Goddamn you, Francis, they are still calling me Leverett P!’

Returning to the 1930s, Frank’s brother John won election to the Boston City Council in his own right representing Ward 15 and St. Peter’s Parish in 1937. In 1946, with the assistance of Mayor Curley, John Kelly became President of the Boston City Council. The plot then thickened. John was indicted on a charge of soliciting bribes in April of 1947, but was fully acquitted that June. Almost immediately after his acquittal, however, Mayor Curley was sentenced to prison for mail fraud. The city charter provided that John Kelly would serve as acting mayor for as long as Curley was away. But this was a bridge way too far for Boston’s WASPish establishment.

In Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950–1970, the Boston College historian Thomas O’Connor writes: ‘The acting council president at that moment was John B. Kelly, brother of Francis E. Kelly … the prospect of the Kelly brothers running the city of Boston did not at all appeal to the downtown Republicans, and at that point Governor Robert F. Bradford moved into the vacuum and arranged for the state legislature to appoint the Boston city clerk as acting mayor.’³ Naturally, John was bitterly disappointed. And to add insult to injury, following a campaign in which he adopted a slogan that alluded directly to his legal travails – ‘Re-Elect John B. Kelly: Proven Honest’ – he was defeated in his bid for re-election to the city council. That marked the end of his career in politics.

His brother Frank, on the other hand, furthered his career in law and in elective office. He successfully ran for Attorney General of Massachusetts in 1948 and won a second, two-year term in 1950. 1952, though, was a good year for the Republican Party and Frank lost his bid for a third term.

It is worth noting that one Massachusetts Democrat who bucked the trend that November was John F. Kennedy. The Republican presidential nominee, Dwight Eisenhower, won the state by more than 200,000 votes. Yet Kennedy managed to beat his GOP foe for a US senate seat, Henry Cabot Lodge, by some 70,000. Frank Kelly was not the only Democrat sharing the state-wide ticket with the future president who wondered if he was already looking past the rough and tumble of Massachusetts politics to the White House.

And speaking of rough and tumble, the former Boston City Councillor, historian and author, Larry DiCara, recounts a ‘dispute’ between Frank Kelly and a local reporter on the campaign trail in 1952. After a debate with the Republican nominee, George Fingold, Frank was asked by a reporter about rumours that he held substantial amounts of money of unknown, dodgy origin in accounts in banks throughout Boston. Frank’s reaction was to slug the reporter in the face; unfortunately for him, the incident was captured by a press photographer. Even more unfortunately for him, DiCara was told a quarter of a century on by a Republican operative that he had witnessed the punch first hand and purchased the photo for $100, a handsome sum in those days, and Fingold used it to devastating effect in the campaign’s closing days.

As well as serving in and pursuing public office, Frank Kelly built a hugely successful law practice. He specialised in representing plaintiffs who had suffered personal injuries and was involved in the early days of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys. A cynic might term him an ambulance chaser, but by all accounts he was a very capable advocate for people with little experience of the court system and who would have otherwise been denied access to justice had he not intervened. My own mother, who worked as a legal secretary in a prominent insurance defence firm, used to describe the way her bosses would react when they were to do battle against Frank Kelly closer to the end of his legal career, and wonders what they might have said if they didn’t know she was dating his nephew. One technique he employed frequently when up against WASPish, ‘white shoe’ law firms defending Boston’s entrenched financial interests was to flick a set of rosary beads from his pocket while purportedly reaching for his handkerchief. Juries in eastern Massachusetts, predominantly Irish and Catholic in those days, lapped it up. ‘You could almost hear the cash register opening, cha-ching, cha-ching,’ an old-timer once told me.

Frank Kelly’s lucrative law practice – coupled to a lesser extent with, as Larry DiCara describes, then-extremely loose campaign finance laws which did not forbid serial candidates for political office like Frank from raising money and having a substantial income, yet no salary – made him a wealthy man. It was entirely permissible to run for office often, collect funds and live on them. No doubt reflecting the mores of that period, my father would often tell the story of his elderly Uncle Frank lamenting the practices of the next generation of Massachusetts politicians on a commuter boat from his second home in the town of Hull, situated across Boston Harbour from the city.

‘These kids today, Larry,’ he muttered while looking disdainfully into the distance.

‘What is it, Uncle Frank?’

‘They take cheques,’ was his disgusted response.

Those who react to the story in horror would do well to consider that typically ethnic Catholic Boston Democrats had almost no connections to the corridors of real money and power. Their Republican opponents were invariably either from extremely wealthy families or were ‘sponsored’ by an establishment that clung steadfastly to their standing at the top and resented new immigrants and others who challenged them.

Frank had settled with his family in a large house on Morton Street in St. Gregory’s Parish in Dorchester. St. Gregory’s, as compared to his native St. Peter’s, was a lace curtain, even well-to-do area. And Larry DiCara calls this fairly affluent section of Dorchester a political powerhouse during his childhood. ‘You had Mayor John Hynes, Attorney General Edward McCormack, State Treasurer John Driscoll, Frank Kelly and a host of other local politicians within a few streets of one another – it was the political capital of Massachusetts.’ And indeed, St. Gregory’s bred future politicians, DiCara and Brian Donnelly among them. Mayor Hynes, the son of a Galway immigrant, was one of Boston’s modernising mayors. McCormack is most famous for his unsuccessful campaign for US Senate in 1962 against a young Edward Kennedy. During a debate, McCormack memorably roared at his privileged opponent, ‘If your name was Edward Moore and not Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke.’

Frank Kelly’s political last hurrah came that same year. He decided to run again for Attorney General. Leading Massachusetts Democrats had other ideas and endorsed a much younger state legislator, James Lawton, for the position at the party convention. The Kennedy–McCormack match-up was box office stuff, attracted extraordinary media attention and drove turnout way up. Uncle Frank, having been a well-known state-wide official and political figure for decades, benefitted hugely from his name being far better recognised by casual voters and pulled off a major upset in the primary. The Republican nominee, Edward Brooke, who later became a US Senator, was an African-American.

Frank Kelly was a master of running against Boston’s Protestant ruling class; he had no idea how to run against a black man. In his previous tenure as Attorney General, he was a strident advocate for civil rights and for equality. But pressure mounted from some of his long-time contributors and backers to exploit the issue of race. There were elements, acting on their own and without the approval of the campaign, who engaged in despicable behaviour. In From Edward Brooke to Barack Obama: African American Political Success, 1966–2008, Dennis Nordin outlines the use by ‘forces supportive of Kelly’ of the n-word and other outrageous tactics to scare white people into voting for their man.⁴ And in an undeniable misstep, Frank also referred directly to Brooke’s race in the middle of a debate. While some historians have drawn negative inferences about Frank Kelly as a consequence, those who knew the man never thought he was a racist and he is broadly looked back upon with fondness. Nonetheless, it was a regrettable end. Perhaps Uncle Frank’s most lasting legacy was the creation of the Massachusetts State Lottery, a crucial vehicle for funding local government expenditure, an initiative he championed relentlessly.

The controversial Tory MP Enoch Powell said that all political careers end in failure. If the low point of Frank Kelly’s political career was playing the race card in 1962, it highlighted just how potent race was, and remains, in American life.

____________

3 Thomas O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950–1970 (Northeastern University Press, 1995).

4 Dennis S. Nordin, From Edward Brooke to Barack Obama: African American Political Success, 1966–2008 (University of Missouri Press, 2012).

CHAPTER 2

A Changing Boston

A little over a decade after Frank Kelly’s political career reached its denouement, in September of 1974, parents of school-aged children in Boston were gripped by fear as to what might lie ahead.

The civil rights movement and the resistance to it in the American South that boiled over in the 1960s was, of course, watched with a mixture of curiosity and shame in the northeast. Most Bostonians, however, felt that the activism and bigotry simultaneously on display was other-worldly. That said, it all came to their city in 1974. Parents’ annual late summer routines had been rendered infinitely more complicated and fraught by a ruling from federal judge W. Arthur Garrity that the city’s public schools were racially imbala...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• An Introduction to Politics on the Ground Floor
• Part One – The Boston Family Business
• Part Two – Finding My Place
• Part Three – The View from The Centre
• Afterword: Parting Thoughts from a Unique Vantage Point
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill Books