The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [23]
Joe knew that to save Jack, and perhaps to save all his children, he had to find a hospital bed for his son. The Brookline Hospital had no contagion ward, and his son was not eligible to enter the special children’s ward at Boston Hospital. There were 125 beds in the ward, and more than 600 Boston children sick with scarlet fever. The illness fell equally on the poor and the rich, the children of the North End and the children of Back Bay. There was a terrible triage at work in the choice between those who would enter the hospital, and probably live, and those who would not and might well die or pass on the disease to their siblings.
Power and influence could mean life and death, and Joe saw that he had not enough of either to save his son. His father-in-law, though, still had the power to see to it that little Jack got a bed that should have gone to a child living in Boston.
Joe was a man who thought he could solve any problem, but he felt now a parent’s helplessness in the face of illness. Watching little Jack in his sterile white room at Boston Hospital touched Joe in places in the heart that he had not known he had. Jack was a likable lad, with his good humor and gentle warmth, and a son who did not cry at having been taken out of his home and placed among strangers. Joe went to church and prayed to God promising that if his son lived he would give half his wealth to the church. And when Jack lived, his father wrote out a check for $3,700 to the Guild of St. Apollonia. It was a noble gesture, but given Joe’s earnings, it would seem that he was a calculating negotiator even when he was dealing with God.
Joe believed in the saving grace of money, but he now had two more reasons to seek great wealth and power. His wife had returned to him after having been told that her marital salvation lay in more servants and a bigger house. And his son had lived only because of his father-in-law’s power.
Joe was already making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but now, with the enactment of Prohibition in January 1920, he saw an opportunity to make even more. His own father had made his way in life largely through the liquor business—first with his own tavern, later with a wholesale liquor business—and the political clout of the industry. An Irishman’s pub was his Somerset Club, and for every worker who tumbled out drunk, ten others had a drink or two and went home to their families.
When the good ladies of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union campaigned for the Eighteenth Amendment to enact Prohibition, men like Joe’s father saw it as a malicious attack on them and their ways. With Prohibition, it was the Italian winemakers of northern California who saw their vineyards turn to weed, the German beermakers of St. Louis whose breweries were shut down, and the Irish tavern keepers whose doors were shut forever.
An observer might even have viewed the Volstead Act instituting Prohibition as a regressive piece of legislation, targeted at the poor and the foreign. Since the law allowed citizens to stock up beforehand, the forward-looking men of New York’s Yale Club put away enough for nearly a decade and a half of good drinking. For the well-to-do, there was always a supply at their clubs and homes. But the saloons of the poor were shut and dry.
The promise of bootlegging beckoned to the quick and the daring, but not to Harvard men. Crime was often a poor man’s capital, the quickest and surest way out of the ghetto. Joe, however lived far from the cusp of poverty