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An Advertisement Placed in the "Boston Daily Globe" on December 12, 1905

As he took the oath of office in the shadow of a snowy United States Capitol, John F. Kennedy stood for far more than the ascendance of one man to the office of the Presidency. Rather, his inauguration laid a capstone in the story of a family steeped in American political life for more than a half-century; a story that begins with John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.

55 years earlier, a car carrying John Fitzgerald’s brother James and a representative from the Boston Daily Globe arrived at the Fitzgerald residence on Welles Avenue in Dorchester. As later recounted in a Globe story, James Fitzgerald and his reporting companion were greeted at the door by overwhelming elation: John would be elected Mayor of Boston.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tallies Fitzgerald as having won 44,174 votes out of more than 92,000 cast; because his nearest opponents – a Republican and independent identified by Kearns Goodwin as having split the same demographics of voters – drew 35,028 and 11,628 votes respective, “Honey Fitz” had won a plurality victory in Boston. The Boston Daily Globe described the rousing cheers in Dorchester’s Codman Square as Fitzgerald made his way towards Democratic Party headquarters in downtown Boston, marking his first public appearance as Mayor-elect. As described in another Globe piece, a Fitzgerald supporter called out in the gallery of City Hall (which had never recorded a larger election night crowd), “what’s wrong with the old North End?”

The victory was likely quite gratifying for Fitzgerald. Kearns

Photographs from an article in the "Globe."

Goodwin asserts that the Mayorship was a position that intrigued him for some time, but it had not seemed to be the right opportunity until 1905. It was a race in which he had worked incredibly hard, up to and including election day. The Boston Daily Globe reported that Fitzgerald began December 12th with a “whirlwind” campaign through each of Boston’s 25 wards, followed by meetings with his campaign staff that lasted a significant part of the day. As the day waned, Fitzgerald focused on a ground campaign in his tougher wards, even having an encounter with a hostile ward boss, described in the same Globe article:

“Cheer up Martin. Don’t be discouraged,” said Mr. Fitzgerald, his remarks evidently being designed to carry with them the impression that the battle was all over but the shouting, but Martin failed to see the humor of the situation and scowlingly looked defiance as the democratic standard bearer was whisked away in his automobile.

As much as it was victory for Honey Fitz, it was equally sweet relief for other members of the Fitzgerald family, some of whom had trouble concealing their nervousness on election day. “Miss Rose,” as the eldest daughter of Honey Fitz and future mother of John Kennedy is described in the Globe, was so nervous that she “visited her church and offered up a fervent prayer for the success of her father” on election day. More than a century later, it is clear from Boston’s political and ethnic landscape that she did not have cause for great concern.

The late-19th and early-20th centuries were as transformative for Boston as for the United States as a whole.

A photograph of Copley Square in downtown Boston, circa 1912. The building on the right is the Boston Public Library, which still stands.

The 1900 Census shows that between 1850 and 1900, the number of people living in Massachusetts’ capital city more than quadrupled from just over 130,000 to over half a million, a number propelled upward by an influx of Irish immigrants. The Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups, compiling several decades of Census data, reports that Boston saw 45,000 Irish-born residents in 1860 and 71,000 by 1890, or 12 percent of the entire city’s population.

The transition from a bastion of Brahmins to a center of immigration was not easy for Boston. Kearns Goodwin shows that with the swell of Irish Bostonians came the blight of slums and poverty, a trend that slowly edged the wealthier families out of the North and South Ends and into the Back Bay and Beacon Hill. While this separation likely served to propogate discrimination, it also helped to generate a formidable and cohesive political machine. Combined with voting regulations that were comparatively equitable (as Virginia Harper-Ho reports in Law and Inequality), Irish Bostonians were able to assume major influence on their city’s political process.  In 1885, just 30 years after Irish immigration reached its peak, Boston had elected its first Irish mayor. A few months after John Fitzgerald walked the streets of Boston’s wards on election day 1905, an official guide to Boston’s mayors had four Irish-Americans within its pages.

44 years later, John Fitzgerald passed away. An Alderman, Congressman, and Mayor, his obituary in the New York Times hailed “one of the most colorful figures in the history of Boston politics.” A product of an oft-painful chapter in the history of Irish-Americans, he never lost sight of that sense of attention to people that was honed so carefully across decades of election days. His grandson, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, would recall in his autobiography that, as late as 1947, Honey Fitz would tip a hotel bellman to ring the bell once for a guest from Massachusetts and twice for a guest from Boston. Every time the bell rang twice, any guest at the hotel could hear, in a great booming Irish brogue, “you’re from Boston, aren’t you!”

In the fall of 1856, Horatio Collins King was a junior at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  As such, for King and the rest of the Dickinson community, it was an exciting time, for one of their own was running for president.  James Buchanan, a native Pennsylvanian and Dickinsonian of the class of 1809, was running on the Democratic ticket against the Know-Nothing incumbent Millard Fillmore, and John Charles Frémont, the representative of the fledgling Republican party.  Because of the polarizing views of the opponents on the grave issue of slavery, the presidential election of 1856 held great potential to decide which direction the nation was headed.

“Free soilers, Fremonters, Free niggers and Free booters,” a well-known derision of Republican John C. Frémont’s slogan of “Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont for Victory”may have been one of the slogans that King or his buddies in the Democratic Club in Carlisle may have shouted as they strolled down High Street.   These young men were ecstatic over their practice victory in an impromptu poll that had taken place on the evening of Saturday, September 20th, 1856, as King describes in his journal:

“Held an election, viva voce, at 5 P.M….  The Poles remained open about 2 ½ hours. There was tremendous excitement: each party running for their men. At 7. Pm. the Poles closed, and shortly after, it was announced. 60 for Buchanan, 60 for Fillmore, and 13 for Fremont. Several Fremont men voted for Fillmore, in order to defeat Buchananists.”

As November crept ever closer, Horatio Collins King and his friends looked forward to the official national election that would take place on November 4th.  Far more so than the musings of disenfranchised school boys playing politics, this election would help decide the fate of the nation.  Indeed, that disenfranchisement must have bit harder than the nippy air on that November morning, when King yearned to participate in an election that was so dear to him, especially as a Dickinsonian:

“Arose at 6. College exercises are suspended in consideration of the importance of the day. On this day, we Democrats hope to make Buchanan Presd’t of the U.S, and I think we will succeed in doing so. Went down to Polls, and loafed around for awhile. Borous— because I have no vote.”

Although King and his fellow classmates could not participate in this election, the country’s election results followed suit to Dickinson College’s mock vote and James Buchanan won the bid for the Presidency, which resulted in delaying the American Civil War for at least four more years.  The election of 1856 was a crucial one in American history, and if Frémont had won, and put the Republicans in power, the American Civil War may have started earlier, with possibly much different results in store for the nation.  However, the following presidential election in which King did participate would have a profound and lasting impact upon himself, as well as the entire nation.

 http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b23344/, this photo is a public domain image from the Library of Congress. 

“Wherever one went, it was impossible not to notice the predominance of women voters during the forenoon,” the Boston Daily Globe reported on November 3, 1920.  The previous day, the first Presidential election was held since the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women over the age of 21 the right to vote earlier that year (“Women by Thousands Pour Into Polling Places in the Bay State.” Boston Daily Globe. 3 November, 1920, 20.).

The 1920 Presidential Election, the first since the conclusion of World War One, pitted Ohio Republican Senator Warren G. Harding and his running mate, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge against Ohio Democratic Governor James M. Cox and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and future President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Harding and Cox vied to succeed two term Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (“The Presidential Election of 1920.” United States Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/nfhtml/nfexpe.html).  According to historians William Binning, Larry Esterly, and Paul Sracic, the election was “a referendum on the Wilson administration,” especially in terms of the outgoing President’s ardent support for the nation’s entry into the new League of Nations, the unpopularity of which led many voters to favor Harding’s calls for a return to normalcy (Binning, William, and Larry Esterly and Paul Sracic. Encyclopedia of American Parties, Campaigns and Elections. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999, 66).  Unlike his Democratic opponent, Harding took a firm stand on the other major issue of the campaign when he “pledged to enforce” the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which the previous year prohibited alcohol, according to historian David Kyvig (Kyvig, David. Repealing National Prohibition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 29). 

On Election Day, November 2, 1920, many women rushed to exercise their newfound right to vote.  The Boston Daily Globe reported the following day that when the polls opened in the morning in many towns outside the city “women, old and young, married and single, most of them under no compulsion to vote at that daylight hour, had come forward with pride and eagerness to be among the first.”  The Boston Daily Globe also reported that a number of women voters initially failed to grasp the concept of the anonymous secret ballot, as evidenced by a woman asking the warden at a polling place “Do I sign my name on the back of the ballot?” (“Women by Thousands Pour Into Polling Places in the Bay State.” Boston Daily Globe. 3 November, 1920, 20.).   The New York Times reported that “Women showed intense interest in the election.  In many districts, more women than men went to the polling places in the morning.  In the first hour, it was not uncommon to see when on their way either from or to the grocery” (“Thousands Carry Lunches to the Polls.” New York Times. 3 November, 1920, 11). 

This influx of motivated women voters, which was seen throughout the nation, likely contributed to Harding’s landslide victory, the largest since “the Republican landslide of 1904,” in which Theodore Roosevelt won his second term.  (“Cox and League Buried Under Huge Majority.” Chicago Daily Tribune. 3 November, 1920, 1). 

This conclusion is supported by statisticians Malcolm Wiley and Stuart Rice, who studied voting records in the state of Illinois, where male and female ballots “were separately recorded,” in addition to simultaneous local elections where social issues played prominent roles.  Rice and Wiley determined that women voters, “especially in the northern states” trended more Republican than their male counterparts because women tended to be on the “’moral’ and conservative sides in local elections,” and “Harding of the two candidates was widely believed to be the more conservative,” on social issues such as prohibition.  (“Rice, Stuart, and Willey, Malcolm. “A Sex Cleavage in the Presidential Election of 1920.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 19, no. 148, (1924): 519-520.)

“If the Democrats desire even a sporting chance at the next election their policy must be, “any one but Wilson” These words, spoken by Robert Ford, editor of New York Irish World, an influential periodical, pertained to the purported imminent defeat of Wilson at the hand of Irish Democrats.

The source of Irish dismay was the bloody Dublin “massacre,” in which 16 leaders of the Irish revolt against England were massacred on April 29 1916. The reason for the massacre was a revolt led by Irish dissidents in reaction to the passing of the third Home Rule Bill, which gave British Parliament the right to rule every aspect of Irish life.

The source of disdain for Woodrow Wilson branched from his support of Great Britain during World War 1. Roman Catholic Irish also disliked Wilson for his Mexican policies and alleged mistreatment of Mexican Catholics. Robert Ford Was later quoted, “The election of the next president will, in all probability, depend on our vote. There is not a congressional district in which we are without influence.”

the Irish press followed with a “lesser of two evils” approach to the election and chose to endorse GOP cantidate Charles Evan Hughes, claiming, “He surely cannot be as bad as Wilson, For he is at least a man of honor.” In addition, Wilson had been implored, at the mercy of the Irish community to help save the life of an Irish traitor, but the White House failed to act quickly and he was executed.

In late August, the Irish situation had gotten so bad that it had become apparent that the Democratic party had given up on the Irish entirely. When the climate seemed the darkest for the Democrats, one particular slip-up occured that led to the “unraveling” of the Irish anti-Democrat sentiment. Jeremiah O’Leary, president of the American Truth Society sent a cutting telegram to Wilson, claiming Wilson had been “truckling with the British Empire,” and that he had a “dictatorship over Congress.” Wilson’s response simply read, “Your telegram received. I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message for me.”

This correspondence was a blessing in disguise, as many Irish publications proudly published it with intent on harming Wilson. Instead, as Wilson’s closest advisor Edward House explained, “At what time will Charles E. Hughes send such a message to the disloyal Americans who cheer him when he utters his careful platitudes.” By publishing the Leary-Wilson correspondence, the Irish media effectively made voting for Hughes un-American.

As the months dragged on towards the election, Hughes began to lose steam in the race, as lackluster editorial pieces done by the Irish media could not prove him to be a good leader at all, just better than Wilson. On November 7th the popular votes had come in; Wilson, 9,129,606, Hughes, 8,538,221. Wilson had won in a popular vote so close, not another would be seen until the 2004 election. Wilson took the election with 277 electoral votes beating out Hughes 254.

While evidence does show that Hughes carried 6 of the 8 states with the highest concentrations of Irish Americans in the country, it does little to explain states the Wilson had won with large populations of Irishmen. Many cite that anti-Democrat Irishmen failed to account for the third and fourth generation Irish-Americans who were pro-American and defended Wilson.

Regardless of the facts surrounding Irish-American voter turnout (as they were not measured at the time) the 1916 election provides ample evidence of what a minority group, when properly organized, can do to swing an election away from a cantidate running from their own party.