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South Boston, My Home Town The History of an Ethnic Neighborhood Thomas H. O’Connor New foreword by Lawrence W. Kennedy SOUTH BOSTON: MY HOME TOWN Senator John E. Powers, president of the Massachusetts Senate, and Richard Cardinal Cushing, Catholic archbishop of Boston, were both born and raised in South Boston. Their lifelong friendship reflected the close relationship between church and state that characterized the history of the Commonwealth. SOUTH BOSTON: MY HOME TOWN The History of an Ethnic Neighborhood THOMAS H. O'CONNOR Northeastern University Press BOSTON Originally published in 1988 by Quinlan Press Reprinted in 1994 by Northeastern University Press Copyright 1988 by Thomas H. O'Connor New foreword copyright 2019 by Lawrence W. Kennedy Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ISBN 978-1-55553-880-4 Cover design for the Humanities Open Book edition by THINK Book Works. To my South Boston Family: the Meanys and the O'Connors, the Pages, the Turpins, and the Schmidts. FOREWORD TO THE HUMANITIES OPEN BOOK EDITION T HIRTY YEARS AGO, THOMAS H. O’CONNOR PENNED THIS book about his beloved South Boston. It is still a book well worth reading. Tom was born and raised in the peninsular district famously known as “Southie” and infamously recalled as the cen- ter of opposition to school integration in the 1970s. A graduate of Boston Latin School and Boston College who earned a doctorate in history at Boston University, Tom O’Connor served as an excellent source of information and insights about the people of South Boston and the local development of ethnic and religious communities. He had a long and distinguished career at Boston College (ending only with his death in 2012) teaching and inspiring generations of students (including me), writing a dozen books about Boston, and serving as University Historian. Dubbed “the dean of Boston historians,” he be- came the go-to source for local journalists seeking insight into and a quote about life in Boston. For well over a half-century he was es- teemed as an active and enthusiastic leader in the academic and civic life of the greater Boston area. Tom O’Connor was truly a scholar and a gentleman who never forgot his roots in South Boston. viii SOUTH BOSTON: MY HOME TOWN In his introduction to South Boston, O’Connor likens his account to the “spirit of historical nostalgia” seen in Edwin O’Connor’s fic- tional The Last Hurrah, but there is more to his book than that. There is, in fact, a good argument for reading in tandem the work of these two (unrelated) writers of the same generation (Edwin was born in 1918 and Tom in 1922). They serve as guides who offer affectionate insights into the nature of Irish Catholic politics, religion and identity, religion, and politics in the midst of the twentieth century. Both books deal with South Boston as well as Boston and its Irish-American pol- iticians more broadly. Tom O’Connor’s portrait of South Boston is a rewarding read for those interested in the district or the city of Boston, but also worth a read for any student of immigrant life in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The history in this book reaches back to George Washington driv- ing the British out of Boston in 1776 with cannons placed on Dor- chester Heights, in what would later become known as South Boston. It continues with the industrial development of a portion of the district, and the placement of asylums, workhouses, and poor houses in other sections. Many readers may be surprised by the wide variety of religious denominations and ethnic groups that established themselves in South Boston in the nineteenth century. Just about any reader will be rewarded by O’Connor’s narrative sweep, which includes the im- pact of the Civil War and the importance of the Catholic Church, as South Boston in the nineteenth century came to be more residential and, like Boston, more Irish Catholic. O’Connor felt that the first decades of the twentieth century were “the most colorful and nostalgic period of South Boston’s history as a distinctive Irish-Catholic neighborhood.” Change came to South Boston and the world with the Great Depression and World War II. While that old world of South Boston didn’t quite die, the post-war era was clearly separate. Enough of the old Southie remained for it to epitomize, above any other neighborhood, the Boston Irish “at their open-hearted best or their brooding belligerent worst.” Economic de- cline and a population drop created a new, less cohesive South Boston. It was also the era when housing projects were transformed from bul- warks of the working-class to places where governments dumped the poor. It was in this context that South Boston came to the forefront in opposition to court-ordered school desegregation in the 1970s. The anti-busing story is told at greater length by Ron Formisano, Anthony