FROM POVERTY TO
Kennedy saga began with the Irish potato famine & immigration to U.S. – then came wealth & presidency
The road to Camelot began with two commoners.
When they married in 1849, Patrick and Bridget Kennedy didn’t have anything other than strong backs and dreams of building a new life in America. Yet they overcame poverty and prejudice to found a dynasty that would include millionaires, senators and an American president.
Neal Thompson’s “The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty,” tells the story of a legendary American family, but from a novel viewpoint. John F. Kennedy barely appears. Robert and Ted, not at all. Their parents, Joe and Rose, are only glimpsed.
Instead, Thompson focuses on the origins of the clan. And, in doing so, he gives a rich portrait of the Irish-American experience itself.
However singular the family’s success was, the Kennedys’ origins were typical of the time. Born in Ireland’s County Wexford in 1823, Patrick Kennedy was the youngest of three boys, all working a tiny, 2-acre farm. Most of their profits went to a foreign landlord, their money “scarcely warm in Irish pockets before it was returned to England.”
It was a hard, often brutal existence. Then, life turned worse.
In 1845, a sudden blight struck, leaving potatoes rotting in the ground and robbing the Irish of their mainstay, a cheap food, and a steady cash crop. Yet what others saw as a tragedy — The Great Hunger —Ireland’s British rulers saw as an opportunity: Maybe this would tame those rebellious Celts.
“We regard the potato blight as a blessing,” editorialized The Times of London. “God sent a calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,” announced Sir Charles Trevelyan, the official put in charge of Britain’s deliberately modest relief efforts.
“The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,” Irish historian John Mitchel retorted later. “But the English created the famine.”
Desperate Irish families were often left to forage for food — snails, seaweed, grass. “Stories spread of families sharing one lone meal per day, surviving on a single daily turnip apiece,” Thompson says. “Beggars and evictees filled the streets; the country was descending into madness.”
At least 1 million died, another 2 million emigrated. And one of those exiles, arriving in Boston sometime around 1847, was Patrick Kennedy.
Also fleeing to America that year was 23-year-old Bridget Murphy. Arriving alone and unskilled, she was nonetheless ready for any challenge. Boston workplaces were already posting NINA signs – No Irish Need Apply. Manual labor was all that was open to these new immigrants.
“As Irish men laid rail lines, loaded cargo onto and off ships, built roads, dug sewers and canals, Irish women accepted the domestic versions of those physically demanding jobs,” Thompson writes. “As maids, house cleaners, cooks and laundresses, they scrubbed the floors, washed and mended clothes, fed and otherwise tended Boston’s blue bloods.”
The details of their courtship aren’t here, but Bridget and Patrick married on Sept. 26, 1849. They would have five children over the next nine years, four of whom would survive. Patrick Kennedy died of tuberculosis in 1858, shortly after his last child’s birth. He left behind a widow with an infant boy and three little girls.
Bridget sprang into action. She had cleaned houses for a decade. Now she found a better job as a hotel housekeeper. A year later, she moved on and up to become a hairdresser at posh Jordan Marsh, the nation’s first department store. And by 1865, she had managed to save or borrow enough to open a tiny grocery.
But there were signs of trouble at home. Her son, Patrick Joseph, P.J., to all, had turned into a handful. By 12, he landed in reform school.
There’s no record of his offense or his exact sentence at Boston’s House of Reformation. But the institution’s cruelty was legendary. Children slept on hard metal cots. Transgressions were punished with whippings.
A Dickensian place, it must have scared P.J. straight. After his release, he went back to school and, eventually, to work. He toiled as a longshoreman, then found a better job in a machine shop as a brass finisher. Then, at age 21, he opened a bar.
As in a lot of early Kennedy history, the exact details are vague. Did he borrow the money? Did he have partners? However, what was clear was that the chatty and welcoming P.J. found something he was good at.
Backroom bosses in Boston’s Democratic Party took notice of the amiable barkeep. In 1882, they asked him to run for a position overseeing elections. He won easily. In 1885, his ambition kindled, he ran for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Kennedy won again and would keep winning, serving for five years in the House and six in the state Senate.
“He helped people with loans, gifts and advice,” recalled his future daughter-in-law, Rose Fitzgerald. “Often he passed the word on to somebody that so-and-so needed this or that, and P.J. would appreciate it, asking nothing in return but goodwill.”
Along the way, P.J. married Mary Hickey, another child of the Irish working class. They named their first child Joseph. It was a more American name than Patrick, Mary decided – and less likely to expose him to the anti-immigrant sentiment that still prevailed.
In office, P.J. pushed through pensions for firefighters and a 10-hour-workday for women. He supported public transportation projects and opposed limits on immigration. He took care of his own, and himself, too, quietly heading off the growing prohibition movement.
As he aged, though, P.J. enjoyed politics more than campaigning. He spent the latter part of his career behind the scenes, holding various appointed offices and orchestrating other people’s political careers.
One sometime-ally, sometimerival was colorful Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Still, while they might scheme separately, they often vacationed together. And it was at a favorite summer resort where Joe Kennedy, 7, first met Rose Fitzgerald, 5. Not quite 20 years later, they would marry and begin a new generation of Kennedys. But first, the current crop of Kennedys with handlebar mustaches and sawdust-covered saloons would have to make room. After a last hurrah – including a bittersweet trip to an Ireland that was now an ancestral land, and to the home of the father he never knew – P.J. died in 1929.
He left behind $55,000, a sizable amount, but hardly the $5 million his son was already worth. Joe had gone into high finance and Hollywood. P.J. devoted his life to ensuring a new immigrant landed a secure job at the sanitation department or an old widow was provided for.
“Joe Kennedy inherited his father’s business acumen,” a friend observed, “but not his soul.”
Soon Joe would find a new obsession to feed — electing a Kennedy to the White House. And Joe and Rose’s children would become a kind of American royal family, filling newspapers with stories of scandal and success, triumphs and tragedy.
“Yet none of the Kennedys’ accomplishments, nor the fantasies of Camelot, would have occurred without P.J., and certainly not without the brave ambition of his mother,” Thompson writes. “What’s largely forgotten about the Kennedy saga is that it started with nothing. Just a poor, hardworking widowed grocer named Bridget and her four fatherless children in an East Boston tenement.”