Politics with an Irish accent

BOSTON —  Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman Philip Johnston, the grandson of Irish immigrants, recalls when he first got to know a young Vietnam vet, John Kerry, who was trying to build support for his 1972 run for Congress.

Kerry had a powerful Irish American ally, Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, at his fundraisers and rallies, and Kerry courted the district’s ethnic political bases, shooting pool at Mike Malloy’s Pub, and buying a round of drinks for the Irish Catholic crowd. “I think they thought he was Irish,” Johnston said. “John F. Kerry. What could be a better name for a politician in Massachusetts, except John F. Kennedy?”

In fact, John Forbes Kerry, though Catholic and a Democrat, had a patrician pedigree, and no Irish inheritance. But in an era when an entire generation of Democratic politicians drew their inspiration from John F. Kennedy, it is understandable that an Irish-sounding last name could be an asset.

Kerry lost that election but returned a decade later, winning campaigns as Massachusetts lieutenant governor, then U.S. senator. Thursday night he became the official Democratic party presidential nominee. At the moment, “Erin Go Bragh” translates into “Vote for John Kerry.”

This week, as Massachusetts politicians prepared to head to the convention floor, they engaged in the ritual ethnic bonding that has lubricated a weeklong commemoration of Kennedy nostalgia. There have been papal blessings and a sing-along of “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” led by Ted Kennedy.

Wednesday night, the Irish revelry was in full swing at a state party fundraiser. Kennedys hugged O’Neills, an Irish band, Solas, sang plaintively of strife and lust, and one politician after another began a speech by conjuring up the woes of Irish immigrant forebears.

“It’s very tribal,” said Johnston, his red face fleshy and kind. “It’s an Irish city. It’s an Irish state. The Massachusetts Democratic Party is more diverse now. But it’s still dominated by the Irish.”

There was a touch of malarkey at the state fundraiser. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland’s first female lieutenant governor and daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, introduced her daughter as “Maeve, the queen of the fairies in Irish legend.” Johnston introduced Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Edward J. Markey as “a great member of an illustrious Irish family, so Irish he’s a triple Eagle.”

Tales were told of trials endured together by these intertwined families. Maureen Foley, the director of a new film, “American Wake,” about the Irish immigrant experience, told the crowd how Teddy Kennedy came to her mother’s bedside and consoled her after she lost her entire first family of young children in a car crash. Kennedy helped her mother and father find the strength to start a new family -- herself and two other children, Foley said.

“That personal connection made me a Democrat while I was a gleam in my parents’ eye,” Foley said, repeating a local adage: “If you are Irish in Boston, you are born Democrat and baptized Catholic five days later.”

There is an amnesiac tendency at such gatherings to ignore things that do not flatter the romance of the Irish as champions of social justice, such as the ugly and sometimes violent role played by South Boston Irish as they opposed busing to desegregate the schools 30 years ago. Or the way Irish-dominated unions excluded African Americans from good jobs.

Instead, speakers recalled family triumphs, martyred heroes, the struggles of their Irish grandparents to prevail in the face of the discrimination of the Boston Brahmin establishment. Former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Tom O’Neill, the son of the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, traced the Irish gravitation to politics to an identification with social issues, such as health and education, that came with their underdog status. The immigrants’ cultural bent toward oral and literary culture made them adept at the calculated informalities of politics, he said.

The Irish, who came to America following the mid-1840s potato famine, also brought with them a host of survival skills from living under British domination, said Greg Delanty, the Irish immigrant poet who authored a collection of poetry, “American Wake,” named for the gathering Irish families would have on the eve of their loved ones’ departures for America, figuring they might never see them again. Delanty and his poems helped inspire the film.

“They had a particular feeling of trying to beat the system in Ireland,” Delanty said. “Here they had a chance to do it.”

State Democratic Rep. Harold Naughton, who is running for a sixth term of the 12th Worcester District, said politics was one of the few avenues to power in Boston because influential positions in banks, insurance companies and other high-level jobs were closed to the Irish.

“We [Irish] still remember days when copies of the Boston Globe had help-wanted ads in the 1920s and 1930s for domestic servant and other low-paying jobs, but it also said ‘No Irish need apply,’ ” Naughton said.

Thus began a system of political patronage, in which Irish ward bosses were the gatekeepers to jobs in police, fire departments and government, state party chief Johnston said.

“If you wanted a job in government, you got involved in politics,” said Johnston, whose grandfather is from County Sligo. “Yankees controlled the money and the Irish controlled the government.”

Kennedy’s colorful grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, rose up in this patronage system and eventually became mayor of Boston, earning his nickname with his singing voice. His daughter, Rose Fitzgerald, married the Harvard-educated son of a Boston saloon owner, Joseph Kennedy, who made millions of dollars on alcohol he was allowed to import for “medicinal purposes” from Great Britain during Prohibition.

It was JFK who cemented social acceptance for the Irish.

“Jack Kennedy was Harvard Irish,” Johnston said. “He represented the ascending Irish --economically, socially and politically. Jack Kennedy made it acceptable to be Irish beyond the borders of Massachusetts.”

At the dedication Monday of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, a seafront park, the children and grandchildren of these Harvard Irish filled the Kennedy section. These Kennedys have attended some of the best Eastern prep schools, romanced movie stars and moved into the American elite.

They listened attentively as a priest delivered “warm greetings to the Kennedy family” from Pope John Paul II, who invoked “Almighty God’s blessings of grace and peace.” They got to their feet and sang along to “Rosie O’Grady.” When Sen. Kennedy wisecracked that “it’s a rare moment when I have the opportunity to introduce a Republican governor I have such good things to say about,” people chuckled and looked over at his niece Maria Shriver, who is married to California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Many Boston Irish no longer vote along party or ethnic lines, Johnston said.

Some Irish Americans, particularly people conservative on social issues like abortion, transferred their support to a Republican president, Ronald Reagan. Later, some switched back to a Democrat with the “common touch,” Bill Clinton.

Today, it is President Bush who speaks the language of populism to Irish Catholic Joe Lemont, 38, a U.S. Infantry squad leader who just came back from a tour of guarding suspected Al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Lemont’s maternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland. His dad became a missile designer for Raytheon, the defense contractor, and his parents moved to the Boston suburbs, where Lemont came of age during the Reagan administration.

“I became a Republican because I grew up in Massachusetts, and the Democrats came across to me as being very elitist and very snobby,” Lemont said, as he had a Guinness at the Irish Rose, a pub where sepia photographs of Irish patriot Michael Collins gaze down from the bar, and the songs of U2 mingle with “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

Lemont has not warmed to Kerry, though Kerry was a fellow soldier and decorated war veteran, and Lemont even mistook him for some time as another Ivy League Irish American Democrat. “For a long time, people kind of thought he had some Irish in him. He wasn’t afraid to play it up at St. Patrick’s Day dinners,” he said.

Lemont voted for President Bush, who like Kerry comes from a privileged background, and graduated from Yale. But now, he faces potentially dangerous duty in Iraq. “If I’m called up, I’ll have to go,” he said. “I won’t have any choice.”

Lemont thinks he’ll still vote for Bush again. But the plain-spoken simplicity that drew him to Bush worries him now.

“This Iraq thing, he didn’t explain it as well as he should,” Lemont said. “He better start explaining. If he doesn’t, he’s going to lose.”