The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [3]
When a servant answered the door, Joe politely stated his business and waited for the lady of the house to come to the door to try on her new hat. The elite ladies believed that they had nostrils of such refinement that they could catch the scent of an Irishman before they even saw him. They had as their guides not only their own servants but also half a century of magazine caricatures by Thomas Nast and others portraying Irish-Americans as quasiapes, as looming, salivating simian wretches.
Joe’s face at first glance showed nothing of what the ladies considered the crude excess of an Irishman’s features. The matrons could try on their hats with the pleasing knowledge that their bonnets had been touched not by a rough Irish hand but by the fine fingers of a young man who could have been their own son.
These ladies were “New England Brahmins,” a term coined by one of their kind, Oliver Wendell Holmes. The hereditary aristocracy of the region fancied itself much like the Hindu religious caste: a natural elite, sanctified by an all-knowing God and a just social order. The Brahmin was, as Holmes wrote, “simply an Americanized Englishman. As the Englishman is the physical bully of the world, so the Bostonian is the aesthetic and intellectual bully of America.” Bullies they were, protecting their sacred precincts from loathsome pretenders who dared to dress themselves in the language and lingo that was not theirs, attempting to pass as one of their betters. The Brahmins had an almost perfect self-confidence. Nothing, no momentary fall in their economic well-being, no peasant races disembarking on their land, could move them off their high ground.
The Boston upper class was largely without irony and had a blessed ability to forget what should best be forgotten. They tended not to focus on a past in which many of their ancestors had made fortunes in a three-sided trade that had slaves as one of its sides, or a present in which their coffers were enriched by the cheap labor of the immigrants they largely despised. They were proud that at their Somerset Club on Beacon Street no member would think of engaging in the disgusting practice of doing business in their social bastion, blissfully forgetting that they were such a close-knit elite that they could easily do their dealing elsewhere.
These were a people of restraint who at times mistook manners for morals. The flowering of a distinctive, dominant New England literature and culture was largely over. The blossoms had fallen, leaving the thorns of reaction and regression in a people who had turned from history to genealogy, from literature to antiquarianism. The Brahmins were facing the melancholy mathematics of democracy: one foul Irish immigrant vote was worth as much as that of the most refined Brahmin gentleman. The Irish politicians would soon have the votes to take over the Brahmins’ city, and there was little the Protestant elite could do to prevent it.
The Protestant upper class, however, did not simply slink into the night, carrying away the burden of their culture and their past. They were astute businessmen. They sat atop vast wealth that they continued to amass, dominating the economic life of New England. In their leisure hours they asserted themselves where a man’s vote did not matter, over the cultural and philanthropic life of the city.
As diminished as this world might soon be, it was still the summit toward which Mary Augusta pointed her son. Joe went from one imposing home to the next, learning the lesson of this exercise: these Brahmins were a royalty to whose company he could dare aspire. There was nothing about him—not his name, not his features, not his manner—that marked him as someone apart from these rich ladies and their elegant homes. Nothing seemed to prevent him from living the life they led.
When Joe arrived back in the house in East Boston, he was in his mother’s universe. Mary Augusta was the monarch with absolute sovereignty over her small kingdom. She was five feet seven inches tall, towering above most of the women of her era, with a posture