In 1884, the Irish-born Hugh O’Brien was elected Mayor of Boston; he was reelected for four consecutive terms. Since he could win only with Yankee votes, he was careful not to identify too strongly with his Irish constituents, although later he made an occasional gesture, such as shutting down the Boston public library on St. Patrick’s Day.
By 1906, when John Fitzgerald was elected mayor, all of the major political bosses of the city were Irish, and many Irish-Americans ran for city and state office. “Honey Fitz,” as he was called, had no reticence in making strong local ethnic appeals and attacking his opponents as tools of the merchants of Boston. If O’Brien had been a conservative and dependable Irishman, someone the Brahmins could use to broker their interests, Fitzgerald was outrageously Irish. Before his election as mayor, he was sent to Congress, one of three Catholics in the national legislative body.47 As mayor he became a champion not of the poor Irish alone, but of an increasing number of Jewish and Italian immigrants for whom, when in Congress, he had opposed immigration restriction. Opposed by the Brahmin Good Government Association, he was turned out of office in 1907, but he won again in 1910, despite denunciations of the “evils of Fitzgeraldism.”48 Fitzgerald’s oldest daughter, Rose, married Joseph Patrick Kennedy, the son of another of Boston’s political bosses, Patrick J. Kennedy of the East End, and the father of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Most Brahmins intensely disliked Fitzgerald’s successor, James Michael Curley. Born of poor immigrant parents, with no formal education beyond grammar school, Curley had followed much the same path as Fitzgerald; he had worked his way up in politics in Roxbury to become a local ward boss, member of the common council, representative in the state legislature, alderman, and then member of the city council. Like Fitzgerald, he was elected to Congress and, like Fitzgerald, after just one term in Washington, he ran for mayor. He appealed to all of the ethnics, whom he used to call the “newer races,” but especially his own, the Irish, when he labeled the Good Government Association as “Goo-Goos” and Boston’s Yankee business leaders as “the State Street Wrecking Crew.”49
While Curley’s basic appeal was to the poor, he was extremely knowledgeable about a large range of subjects and a brilliant orator, who clasped to his bosom all of the icons, symbols, and rituals of the American republic. He was the Andrew Jackson of Boston’s city hall, opening the corridors and staircases to voters looking for jobs and favors of every description. As Jackson had represented the triumph of democracy for the backwoods frontiersman, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from whom he came, so the election of Curley was the triumph of the Irish Catholics and a sign to the Italian, Jewish, Portuguese, Polish, and other immigrants who now flooded the city of the possibilities of power. Curley dominated Boston politics for more than thirty years, serving as mayor for four terms, as congressman twice, and governor once; he built playgrounds, parks, and bathhouses, tore down slums, and paved streets for the benefit of ethnic neighborhoods at a high cost to Boston’s business community, whose downtown financial district was largely neglected. Eventually, he went to prison for five months in 1945 after being convicted of using the mails to defraud. (His sentence was commuted by President Harry Truman and he returned to finish his term.)
By his own admission, Curley was a rogue,50 but he also was an ardent and even eloquent spokesman for the civic culture and civil religion. Like Schurz, who identified with the Yankee heroes of the Revolution in his speech on “true Americanism” at Faneuil Hall, Curley loved to praise the revolutionary heroes of the Brahmins as his own. Preaching the virtues of Americanism in a Faneuil Hall speech, he called Boston the “mother city of liberty.” He welcomed visitors to the city, which he said was “dedicated to … the doctrine of equality expressed in civil, political and religious liberty,” a city where they could visit the Old South Church, “sacred to the memory of John Hancock and Samuel Adams.” Never mind that Hancock and Adams shared the hatred of papism common to Boston in their day, or that leading Brahmins excluded the Irish from the banks and businesses and social clubs they controlled. Curley told visitors that after they had drunk “from freedom’s fountain in Boston” they should “go forth as zealous missionaries determined to teach by individual example the lesson of the [founding] fathers.”51
There was no inconsistency in Curley’s mind between obeying the teachings of the church and its vicar, the Pope, and those of America’s civil religion and its prophets and martyrs. Visiting the Lincoln Memorial in 1923, Mayor Curley preached: “America has ever been the object of divine favor, a factor in the divine scheme of human betterment.” God had sent Washington “in that darkest hour when we were most weak,” and when the “struggle and sacrifice for human rights and the blessings of liberty and quality were about to be lost, He sent us a savior—Lincoln.”52
Jefferson’s concern that large numbers of badly educated immigrants used to tyranny might make poor material for citizens in a self-governing republic had not been entirely without foundation. Curley was a crook, after all, as were some of the Yankee bosses who preceded the Irish in Tammany Hall in New York. But no group took as rapidly to American politics as the Irish; and once in it, the Irish Catholics appropriated its heroes and symbols, articulated and embellished its litanies, and played by its fundamental rules. The Yankees who worried that the Irish could never overcome habits of servile dependence had underestimated the power of the civic culture to shape its citizens.
The Civic Culture and the Irish
At the height of the controversy over whether or not Irish Catholics could make good Americans, the New York Irish-American urged the preservation of an Irish identity in the United States; if they kept in mind “what was good and honorable and virtuous in the old land,” they would best be able to teach their children “to adopt and love what is good and noble in the new.”53 The Boston Pilot, then a secular Irish paper, warned against self-hatred, “a moral deformity of the worst description,” and advocated the preservation of Irish social customs and of the Gaelic language, but no Irish leader advocated changing the First Amendment with its protections for freedom of speech and religion and its guarantee to the Catholic minority, among others, that church and state would be separated.
Irish social organizations continued to grow in the late 1850s and into the 1860s. Irish churches and the Irish press continued to flourish. Irish nationalism intensified, resulting in attacks on cooperation between England and the United States, even in something as obviously constructive as the opening of the Atlantic cable.54 Irish-American nationalism, reflected in the activities of the Fenian Brotherhood and the Irish press, peaked between 1870 and 1890,55 and both cultural and political nationalism waned over time.
So strong was the acceptance by Irish Catholics of principles of American freedom that American bishops at the First Vatican Council in 1869–1870 spoke in opposition to two dogmatic constitutions aimed at protecting their church against the dynamic changes sweeping the Western world. A growing number of priests and bishops felt no conflict between the American emphasis on freedom and Roman Catholicism, despite the Syllabus of Errors and the doctrine of papal infallibility.
The leading Americanizers were Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore, who was elevated to the cardinalate in 1886 and became a consultant to presidents and a friend to Protestant and Jewish causes, and Archbishop John Ireland of Minneapolis and St. Paul, who spoke bluntly and loudly about the universal validity of separation of church and state and of democracy. Ireland became more outspoken as the Americanizers within the American church gained influence, despite an implicit warning issued by Pope Leo XIII in an encyclical in 1888, Libertas praestantissimum, which condemned unconditional freedom of thought, speech, and worship. Catholic Americanists virtually ignored the encyclical. Many probably agreed with Father Isaac Hecker, who pointed out that the Pope was writing mainly for the people of an “eastern” mentality and intended no limitation on American ideas of liberty.56
Catholic Americanists believed not just in the value of freedom for America but in the mission to spread that value to other countries. They were as imbued with the spirit of America’s civic culture as non-Catholics were, and Archbishop Ireland, the loudest apostle of Americanism, had boasted in several lectures in Paris that if Frenchmen would emulate American Catholics they would achieve