BOSTON 1700-1980 the Evolution of Urban Politics
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BOSTON 1700-1980 The Evolution of Urban Politics edited by Ronald P . Formisano and Constance K . Bums Contributions in American History, Number 106 GreenwoodS Press Westport, Connecticut • London, E n g ird 10 All in the Family: The Dilemmas of Busing and the Conflict of Values J. ANTHONY LUKAS My text for this chapter comes from the best novel I know about Boston politics, Edwin O’Connor’s All in the Family. Overshadowed by his more popular The Last Hurrah, less honored than his Pulitzer Prize- winning The Edge o f Sadness, All in the Family is the story of the Kinsella family, a big, tightly-knit, fiercely competitive clan of Boston Irishmen, led by a millionaire patriarch, one of whose sons goes on to become the dominant political figure in the state and, ultimately, per haps, in the nation. That may sound familiar.1 Towards the end of the novel, Charles Kinsella, now the state’s governor, has a bitter falling out with his brother, Phil, a modem man who has emancipated himself from both the time-honored mores of state politics and the claustrophobic loyalties of the Kinsella clan. When Phil threatens to expose his brother’s shady dealings with political hacks, Charles moves to have Phil committed to a mental hospital. This pro vokes a climactic family conference in which Jimmy Kinsella, the aging patriarch—obsessed as always with the family’s need to stand together against the outside world—rages at his disloyal son: You turned on us, Phil. You tried to blow us sky-high and to smithereens. You tried to do that to your own family! You tried to do it to Charles! And, by God, you tried to do it to me! And now you’ve got the guts to sit here and look at me and ask me if I think you’re crazy. All right. You want an answer, so I'll give you one. You bet your ass you’re crazy. Believe it or not, you’re as bughouse as they come. This, in turn, brings a bitter tirade from Phil’s wife, Flossie. “You’re a horrible old man,’’ she shouts at her father-in-law. 242 J. Anthony Lukas Really horrible. For anyone like you to say what you’ve just said to someone like Phil, you ought to be knocked down and beaten ... you're a dreadful, horrible, insensitive, vulgar, stupid little tyrant ... I don’t pray much, but tonight I’m going to get down on my knees and pray that after tonight neither one of us will ever be bullied by you or even talk to you or even so much as catch sight of you ever again. A moment later, as Phil and Flossie leave the room, the bewildered old man cries after them, “ What the hell has happened? What the hell has happened to my family?” And Phil, from the doorway, responds, “ I don’t know, Pa. I guess we all grew up.”2 I suggest that O’Connor is writing here less about any particular family of politicians than about the whole world of the Boston Irish and, more broadly still, about what has come to be called “ ethnic politics.” When Jimmy Kinsella talks about his family—that tight little grouping which is linked not only by blood but by self-interest, turf, ideology and sentiment—he is talking about something more than mere biological family. He is talking about the whole nexus of neighborhood, church and family which for more than a century made up the traditional world of the urban ethnic.3 And when Phil Kinsella breaks with those old loyalties to point the finger at corruption in his brother’s administration, he is invoking a larger ethos: of political morality, social justice, efficient government, in a word—of reform. In Massachusetts, of course, that is an ethos long associated with the Yankees, the Mugwumps, the “Goo-Goos,” who deserted the city in the late nineteenth century for the more salu brious climate of Dover, Beverley, Winchester and Newton.4 But, by the era O’Connor is describing, it had been inherited by a new generation of middle-class Irish, the Phil Kinsellas of this world. And that, in turn, led to bitter vendettas in which both factions, old and new, felt stabbed in the back. It was O'Connor's special contribution to see that this had all the markings of a family feud—the intensity bred of long, close association; the combustible mixture of pride and envy; the acute sense of betrayal. Our deepest antipathies, of course, are reserved for our own kind, those whom we expect to support us, no matter what. Such acts of disloyalty— between father and son, brother and brother, sister and sister—are the stuff of classical tragedy. All in the Family: The Dilemmas of Busing and the Conflict of Values 243 And 1 would extend O'Connor’s metaphor to argue that this is the kind of tragedy which Boston has been experiencing in the last decade, from which it is still suffering today. It is a special tribute to O’Connor that, writing in 1964, he had an intuition that the city’s next great testing ground would be the issue of race. And, as all Bostonians now know, school desegregation has di vided this city as rarely before. The desegregation fight is usually seen as a battle between the races and, of course, to a large degree it is. When white youths spear a black lawyer on City Hall Plaza with an American flag; when blacks in Roxbury beat a white worker so badly he lives out the rest of his short life in a coma, then certainly the city is experiencing a war of the races. But the struggle has other dimensions too—among them, that of economic and social class. Those Bostonians who can afford to live in suburbia or who have the resources to send their children to private or parochial schools are exempt from the court order. Thus, the burden of desegregation here— as elsewhere—falls on the disadvantaged, an in equity of which they are acutely aware.5 I have been working on a book about the lives of three Boston families during the decade following Martin Luther King’s assassination: an Irish-Catholic widow and her six children who live in the Bunker Hill housing project in Charlestown; a black woman and her six children who live in a subsidized housing project in the South End; and a Harvard- educated Yankee lawyer and his wife, who grew up in Lexington, moved into the South End following King’s death and then out to Newton eight years later, These are three real families whose lives I have followed for much of that period. Although it is not a book about school deseg regation, the busing battle is one of the principal cockpits in which the interests of the three families collide. The eldest daughter of the black family was bused into Charlestown High where she found herself in the same class as the eldest daughter of the Charlestown family. The Charlestown family is very angry about busing. But when 1 talk with them, the principal focus of their anger is not blacks, not Yankees, not Jews— as some of the textbooks would suggest. Their anger is directed principally at other Irishmen, The names that come up most often in our conversations are W. Arthur Garrity, Ted Kennedy, Kevin White, Tip O ’Neill, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (under Car dinal Medeiros), even Bob Healy of the Globe. And that, I think, is an accurate perception. For it was not Yankees 244 J. Anthony Lukas who imposed busing on Boston—except for a few bankers, professors or newspaper editors, Yankees don’t count for much in 1980s Boston. Nor was it the Jews; now that Charlie Wyzanski has largely retired from the bench and Eli Goldston is dead,6 Jews don’t cut much of a swath east of Waltham. Blacks, to be sure, took the initiative in the fight to desegregate Boston’s schools. Ruth Batson and Ellen Jackson, Jim Breeden and Mel King fought the good fight for years and ultimately it was the NAACP’s suit which prevailed in Federal District Court.7 But with barely twenty percent of Boston’s population, and far less than their share of political office holders and business leaders, blacks have little clout in the city. No, it was the Irish who introduced and enforced busing in Boston— if only because it is the Irish who now hold virtually every position of political or governmental leverage in the city.8 First among them, of course, is Judge W. Arthur Garrity.9 There is, to be sure, a debate about Arthur Garrity’s Irishness, a debate which itself tells us something about contemporary Boston. I don’t mean that his ethnic origin is in doubt. We know that his great-grandfather emi grated from County Sligo to Boston in 1850, later settling in Milford, New Hampshire. But Garrity’s critics contend that he has long since lost his Irishness, or at least the stigmata deemed to identify an Irishman in today’s Boston. They point to his longtime residence in Wellesley, his law degree from Harvard, but especially his spare, austere, almost ascetic style—fourteen hour work days, a sandwich and an apple for lunch, Royal Canadian Air Force exercises on his office floor. Some go so far as to label him a “ hoper”—Boston’s language for “a man who goes to bed Irish and hopes to wake up Yankee.” It is an old form of denigration among Boston’s Irish.