CO-HOST JAMIE RICHARDSON: The JFK 35 podcast is made possible through generous support from the Blanch and Irving Laurie foundation.
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NEAL THOMPSON: It says a lot about how far she came in her first decades in America and the impact that she had and the legacy that she left behind. I think it's remarkable.
CO-HOST MATT PORTER: More than 100 years before President John F. Kennedy would take up residence at the White House, his great grandmother, Bridget Murphy, arrived on the shores of America. There, she met Patrick Kennedy, another Irish immigrant, and they started a life together that would lead to one of America's most famous political families. We'll sit down with author Neil Thompson and learn more about how it all began next on JFK 35.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. [CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
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MATT PORTER: Hello, I'm Matt Porter. Welcome to JFK 35. President John F. Kennedy and many of his siblings share a common trait. That they've played a role somehow in public service. Many historians have looked at the influence of parents, Joseph Kennedy senior and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, when it comes to why politics and public service was such a common thread between their children.
In a new book, however, author and journalist Neil Thompson takes us further back to President Kennedy's paternal great grandparents, Bridget and Patrick Kennedy. Both emigrated from Ireland to the United States during the potato famine plague in the small country. They found themselves having to start from scratch in the unfamiliar city of Boston.
Neal Thompson joins me now. Neal, welcome to the podcast.
NEAL THOMPSON: Matt, great to be here. Thank you.
MATT PORTER: So Neal, the spotlight has been on the Kennedys for a long time. The family born under Rose and Joe Kennedy has been immensely successful, not just with President Kennedy, but there are other children and grandchildren have served posts in the US Senate, Congress, governorships, state legislators, ambassadors, CEOs, nonprofit directors, and that list goes on and on. But there has been less written about the family's history before the patriarch and matriarch of Rose and Joe.
What did you think was important for people to learn from the stories of Bridget and Patrick who are two generations before Rose and Joe even met and started the Kennedy family that we normally think of today?
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, I mean, what drove me, Matt, was this mission to really explore where did all this begin? As you said, we know a lot about the 20th century Kennedys and their success and what they mean to us as a country and what they represent. I think many Americans are familiar with the family as being our royal family as they've been described and others are familiar with the concept of Camelot and what they represent to different Americans.
But what I wanted to do was figure out who were the first? Where did this family actually begin in America? Who came here first, what was life like for them in those early decades, and what did their experience as Irish immigrants, how did that inform later generations of the family?
What characteristics and traits were passed down from the earlier generations, and basically, I just wanted to tell a story about who they who. Were the people who came here and created this family that became one of the most famous and influential families in American politics and in culture. So yeah, that's what drove the book. Where did it all begin and who were the first.
MATT PORTER: And so Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy, the original first generation immigrants to the country, let's first start talking about that decision by both of them to leave Ireland and travel to the United States, which wasn't without risk and the travel wouldn't be easy. I believe Bridget traveled and what some referred to as coffin ships. Can you describe what the two were risking and the difficulties they would face trying to set up a new life in the new land here in the United States?
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, you use the word risk, and that's exactly what they were up against in making this big, big decision to leave their respective family farms. Both Patrick Kennedy and Bridget Murphy grew up in what I describe in the book as this peasant culture. It was very poor modest farm life for both of them, and when the potato famine hit, which was the impetus for their decision to leave Ireland in the mid to late 1840s, that potato famine devastated the country, particularly in rural parts of the country and on farms like Patrick Kennedy's and Bridget Murphy's.
So it was the initial risk of just making this decision to leave the comfort of home, to leave family and friends, to leave everything they had known. Neither one of them had ever really traveled more than a couple of miles from their family farm as far as we know. So to make this decision to first cross from Ireland over to Liverpool where many of these immigrant ships left from and then to cross from there across the Atlantic, there were newspaper stories that I came across in Irish and British newspapers at that time, which were carrying descriptions of the dangers that were awaiting these Irish immigrants as they tried to make their way to America.
Ships that sank, ships that burned. Disease that swept through these ships like a tidal wave, and so many people lost their lives trying to make it to America. And so as you point out, that's why they were rightly called coffin ships. But the book also describes how even though Bridget was you know this strong character who decided to leave home. She was the first in her family to leave her home, as was Patrick Kennedy.
There were even more risks and dangers awaiting them when they got to America.
MATT PORTER: It's just an amazing idea that some would pack up and get on one of these ships and go into an unknown place, and that begs the question because you said in your book Bridget's family actually managed to evade what was the worst of the pandemic for many other Irish in the country, whether it was begging, starvation, eviction, workhouses. You said in your book that Bridget's family evaded most of that.
So why then did she continued to risk all of those uncertainties to try to cross the Atlantic and establish herself in the new land?
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, that's a great question. You're right. In her case, her family was able to keep their family farm. They weren't evicted. No one in the family starved. They were a little bit better off than other farm families and particularly in the west of Ireland. So I try and explore this idea in the book of how Bridget was part of this wave of female dominated Irish immigrants leaving the country at that time.
The Irish immigrant women of the 1800s outnumbered the male immigrants coming to America, and they were the only group-- only ethnic group where that occurred where the women were coming in greater numbers than the men. And so I think it says a lot about these women who were making this decision to get on these dangerous ships where bodies were being tossed overboard before they even got too far from Ireland, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that life in Ireland wouldn't have been great if Bridget stayed anyway.
With or without the potato famine, she would have been a farm wife and maybe that would have been fine. But I think Bridget, I think of her as someone who decided I'd like something more for myself and my family. And so she, like many other Irish women, looked at the famine as almost an opportunity. An opportunity to get out and create a new life in a new land, and I think that's what she did.
That's what drove her was-- I think she had a sense of adventure and she was a risk taker and I think some of these sensibilities you see in future generations of Kennedys but I think some of that traces back to Bridget who took a chance and took a chance on herself.
MATT PORTER: It's really interesting. So even though the famine may not have been as harsh on Bridget and her family, it just-- Ireland was a small place and there wasn't a lot of room for growth for her and she wanted to test new waters.
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, I mean, the country was very male dominated. It was dominated by the church, and then there was and explore this tension then there was the dynamic of the Irish the islands basically landlord, England. That England essentially owned Ireland. It was a colony of England and not an independent country and so there were very strict limits on what Irish citizens were capable of.
For the most part couldn't run for public office. Couldn't own their own land in most cases. They had to rent their farms from absentee English landlords. So it was a very oppressive time and place and in particular for women, and so I think that's why Bridget and others said, you know what? I'm out of here.
MATT PORTER: Yeah. But Boston was not the land that we know Boston today, right? 19th century Boston did not have the Irish roots that it has today. It was actually a pretty foreign and hostile place for the new immigrants coming in arriving by ship. Can you describe what it was like for the Irish trying to make it in Boston at that time, and I think you-- and you're welcome to do this, I think you drew out drew some parallels to the situation today on the Southern border of the United States to how it was for new arriving Irish immigrants in Boston in the 19th century.
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, it's remarkable to think of Boston ever being a place where the Irish weren't wanted or welcomed. It's such an Irish city now as we know it, and I was pretty shocked to learn what Bridget and Patrick and other Irish immigrants were up against when they arrived there late 1840s and then on throughout the 1800s. They were not welcomed. They were, in fact, at that time the despised and feared and hated immigrant coming here bringing-- as the nativists and others put it at the time, bringing their disease, bringing their strange religion, bringing their strange dialect and language.
So I describe how and patch were part of this very large wave at the very front end of a large wave of Irish immigrants coming to America, many of them landing in Boston. And it was the first time America had been swarmed by refugees trying to escape their troubled land. It was a lot. It was a lot to absorb.
Tens of thousands of Irish pouring into these ports every year. I think 1848 Boston saw 25,000 Irish immigrants that year alone. There was one day in April of that year where I think 1,000 people showed up on a number of ships, so it was it was a lot for the country to absorb, and in Boston, it was a lot for this old school, very proper, Brahmin Protestant population to-- it was hard for them to welcome these Irish who were very poor, mostly rural, in many cases not very urbane or sophisticated, obviously, and I think there was an initial period of support and sympathy for the Irish during the potato famine.
But once they started showing up and trying to live and work in Boston, Bostonians, their reaction was, wait, we don't want you here. We don't want you as our neighbors. We felt bad for you, but why are you coming here? And some of the language that I came across from in fact well-respected people, preachers, civic leaders, newspaper editors, it was very much the same language we have heard in recent years, like send them back, build a wall, keep them out.
We don't want them here. So there was a really intense anti-immigrant frenzy at that time aimed at the Irish and Catholic in a city that we now know of as very Irish and Catholic and Democratic, and it just wasn't the case back then. And so that was you know those were the hurdles that Bridget and Patrick were up against right away from the very start as soon as they set foot on Boston soil after getting off their ships.
MATT PORTER: Yeah, you mentioned it wasn't just like sort of the Know Nothing party or another party that was called the Wide Awakes that were like having this anti-American bent, but it was people that maybe we'd find surprising like Lyman Beecher who was Harriet Beecher Stowe's father who was a minister and Henry David Thoreau. People who supported abolition, but then at the same time looking at the Irish and calling them shiftless or guilty of quote, filth and folly. It was hatred.
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, I know, and people you think of as being respectable and voices of our moral reasoning and leaders in many ways, they hated the Irish. You mentioned Thoreau who had a complicated relationship with the Irish. I describe Samuel Morse, the co-creator of the telegram and Morse code wrote a book about the risk of this foreign influence on America and actually ran for mayor of New York as a member of this so-called Native American Party, which later became collectively known as the Know Nothings.
These people who didn't want Irish in this country. They went out of their way to enact laws to make it harder for them to vote, for them to become citizens, for them to hold elected office. I mean, there was a very large widespread aggressive effort to keep the Irish immigrants down, if not out.
MATT PORTER: Bridget, who's coming over you had a very popular name in Ireland, Bridget being affiliated with St. Brigid, worker of miracles, healer of the sick, patron Saint of the poor. But in the new world in America, women named Bridget, you say they were often called biddies. Became affiliated with servitude, submission, humility. This all comes from the Boston upper class and middle class, putting a down view on all these Irish women coming into the coming into the city?
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, absolutely. For Bridget, Murphy, Kennedy, and others, really the only job they were able to get at the time was working as a maid for these Boston families. And so I find it to be a fascinating period of time where all these women are coming to America, Bostonians don't want them, but they need help. They're wealthy families.
They need you know maids and cooks and washer women and people to take care of their kids. They'd prefer to have and they would say as much in their ads that we prefer good Protestant girl for our home but there weren't enough to go around, and so the biddies, the Bridget's show up and they are hired in large numbers to work in these Boston homes.
And I think the relationship between the wealthy Bostonians and the maids named Bridget like Bridget Murphy is a fascinating one because they distrusted each other, they needed each other, and I describe some of the women like Bridget Murphy being not necessarily afraid of these wealthy families, even though they look down on the Bridgets and the immigrants. The women who were working for these families often stood up to their employers and refused to take on jobs that they thought were beneath them, so it creates this interesting tension between the wealthy Bostonians thinking that these poor submissive Bridgets are going to do whatever they're told and they don't.
They stand up for themselves, and I think Bridget was very much like that.
MATT PORTER: And we talked a lot about the negative aspects of coming into Boston and the situation and while it was very true that a lot of the men from Ireland were seeing a very lower standard of respect living than they had in Ireland, but for the women, it was a little bit different and Bridget took advantage of that.
NEAL THOMPSON: She did, and I think it it's why I like her as a character so much and why I think she's such an important figure in the history of the Kennedy family. Yeah, she came here with nothing, started at the bottom working as a maid, and little by little, found ways to move up, despite all the hardships she faced. She gets married, she and Patrick start a family.
They have their first few kids, lose their first son, John. John F. Kennedy who's the first Kennedy buried on American soil, so that had to be devastating for her. And then in 1858 after she's had her next son PJ, her husband dies, and she's left with four kids alone in a pretty rundown Boston tenement building. But she doesn't give up.
She keeps fighting for sort of the next step up in her life and her career, so she moves from made to becoming a hairdresser at a Boston department store, Jordan Marsh, and then later remarkably, to me, she opens her own grocery store at a time when women didn't often do that in general, in particular widowed Irish immigrant former maids like Bridget. So yeah, she just kept fighting for herself and her family and found ways to move them up an inch at a time. And the story could have been very different if not for the tenacity of someone like Bridget.
The family could have just disappeared in the mid-1800s easily. It did for many other Irish families.
MATT PORTER: Do you think the death of Patrick, do you think Bridget would have had the same entrepreneurial lifestyle had she not had to take over the leadership role of her family?
NEAL THOMPSON: That's a great question. I wonder. Patrick seems to have been a decent breadwinner. He made barrels in east Boston, whiskey and beer barrels and barrels that went on the ships that were coming in and out of that port. So he had a skill and seems to be steady employment, and yeah, I mean, it's entirely possible. If he had survived and Bridget stay working as a maid that things could have turned out very differently.
But I find it amazing that after he died, it's almost as if something sparked in her. She found some inner reserve and then continue to take these chances, which is what they were. I mean, for a barely literate-- well, she was known to be able to read and write, so that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but for an Irish immigrant woman to expect that she could move her way up to becoming an entrepreneur and a business owner, that's a stretch.
But I think something clicked into gear for her after Patrick died and she found some mojo and displayed at the rest of her life.
MATT PORTER: It's really, really interesting. I wanted to talk a little bit about PJ, who would be Joe Kennedy's father and the grandfather of John F. Kennedy and the other sons and daughters of Joe and Rose. How did he grow up to find success in a time where so little was available to say Irish children or expected of an Irish boy from Eastie. Did he have some natural skills that helped him get ahead of his peers?
NEAL THOMPSON: I think PJ found his way slowly. It took him time to figure out what his skills were, what he was good at, what he wanted to do. I describe in the book, as you said, educational opportunities weren't great for kids like him. Many of the public schools had a very Protestant bent and there were protests by Irish kids who complained about being forced to recite Protestant prayers and study sort of English centric versions of history that were offensive to these first generation Irish kids.
So he didn't get much of an education and a secondary education wasn't really available to him given their economic straits, so he went to work. Well, he got in trouble first. I describe how he spent a little time at a detention center I think probably for truancy. It doesn't specify in the records what he was being held for, but it sounds like he got into some trouble, roamed around like a lot of these Irish boys did causing trouble in the streets, but in time, he found his groove.
He started working in his late teens on the docks of East Boston as a longshoreman hauling cargo on and off, and then you get into the late 1870s when he was about 20 and he incredibly buys his own business, a saloon in South Boston and runs that for a year or two and then discovers, I'm pretty good at this. Behind the bar, he is described later as someone who was a good listener, someone who is willing to help, a patron who came in looking for advice or a job or where to find a place to live.
He would loan money to people who came to his saloons. So he had a knack, not just for running the business of the saloon, but had a knack for being a trusted voice and advisor behind the bar. That kind of bartender. So he buys another saloon in the retail liquor business and starts expanding his mini empire in Boston and East Boston, and little by little, this leads him to developing relationships with the ward leaders, the political leaders of the Democratic Party in East Boston and elsewhere in Boston, and they see something in this young kid and nurture him and invite him to events and ask him to help out with elections and fundraising events.
So he becomes this community organizer type in his early 20s, which in a few short years leads to him being asked to run for elected office, which he does in 1885. And you know just a few years after what could have been tragedy for that family, you've got PJ Kennedy running for the state legislature of Massachusetts and serving seven terms there. So his ascent is remarkable to me, and it's why I divided the book into two parts, the first half being Bridget's story and then picking up with PJ's story in the second half and his sort of rise to power and wealth.
MATT PORTER: For your book, you were one of the first people to get a look at the collection of PJ's personal documents that are here at the library when they were digitized. And so what did you see as far as did Bridget's own entrepreneurial skills like influence PJ? Did they talk about things at all? Was it clear that his mother led by example a bit or that they at least that they influence each other or spoke to each other?
How much of Bridget influenced PJ?
NEAL THOMPSON: Yeah, I think she did a lot, and I think you can see some of that and in the letters that are contained in the PJ Kennedy collection, which was just a remarkable resource and really allowed me to get deeper into PJ Kennedy's head and his history and made me appreciate him even more than I already did. So those letters had been passed down from the family and had been held by the JFK Library. I became aware of them way back in 2017 and started nagging-- hopefully not too annoyingly so-- the staff at the library and archives, when can I get a look, can I come visit, and I think it was described to me because they were very old, onion skin, delicate, fragile, falling apart papers, there was a special process that they needed to use to digitize them.
And that process was underway when COVID began. And so I was already deep into this book when the processing of those papers got paused by covid, but to their credit, the staff managed to process the bulk of them and then I got this great email one day saying, hey Neal, congratulations, good news, here's the link to the first batch of PJ's papers. So to your question, Matt, what they revealed was just what a good guy PJ was. Many of these are from the early 1900s after he's left elected office.
He's still serving in appointed positions and he's serving on this influential board of strategy. So he's a backroom mover shaker, but many of the letters-- and I think they are a reflection of Bridget's influence, they're focused on helping other people. They are letters to employers or business leaders or political leaders in Boston, PJ asking for that person to help someone who he's learned about who needs a job or a place to live or a loan.
Just some boost to get them started in America. And I think that's how Bridget conducted her business, the grocery store. I think that's how PJ later conducted his business as a saloon keeper and continued to conduct himself in that way as a political leader. Just always on the lookout for how to be helpful to his constituents, to his neighbors, to incoming Irish immigrants.
So I thank you very much see this line from Bridget being a helpful community leader to the extent she was able down to PJ and then you see this continue into Joe and Rose Kennedy's kids moving forward from there as well.
MATT PORTER: It's very true. This message of public service was just so important, and it sounds to me like it started with Bridget, at least on this side of the country, side of the Atlantic Ocean. I have two more quick questions if you have time.
In 1888, when Bridget died, The Boston Globe recorded saying she was a woman of many noble and charitable traits and her loss will be deeply felt by the community. That was in 1888. What is that like to have that written in The Boston Globe about someone like Bridget, for her to have had that written about her, considering how the Irish were looked at when she first arrived.
NEAL THOMPSON: I'm glad you used that quote because I found that to be remarkable, and I was so thrilled to find that obituary. I think it's incredible, and it says so much about her character and what she meant to her community and her neighbors and her family that she was praised as this community figure in The Boston Globe, a newspaper that previously wanted nothing to do with praising Irish immigrants in Boston. So I think it's that those few lines and it's just a short couple of paragraphs in the paper, but that says a lot about how far she came in her you know first decades in America and the impact that she had and the legacy that she left behind. I think it's remarkable.
MATT PORTER: And my final question comes back to JFK, because we always come back to JFK on this podcast. JFK would write The Nation of Immigrants, not first published in 1958, and it would be it would be a call to his own generation to find compassion and embrace the talents of immigrants who are daring to start a new life in the United States. How much do you think the story of Bridget and Patrick played into how President Kennedy viewed immigration almost 100 years later?
NEAL THOMPSON: I think there's a direct connection. There has to be. And I explore in the book how there's this transition from PJ as the head of that family and then Joe taking over, and we think of Joe as the patriarch. I'd argue that Bridget was the matriarch of the whole family in America at least. I think for Joe, his relationship with his past and with immigration and his Irish heritage, he didn't really want to dwell on that.
He wanted to be known as American. He didn't consider himself Irish-American. He said, I was born here, what does it take to be an American? So he didn't have those sensibilities, but I think JFK and his siblings did, and it must have come from hearing stories maybe from Rose more so than Joe about their grandparents.
JFK, all of his great grandparents were Irish immigrants, so he knew that's where he came from. And you see him visiting Ireland a number of times, including in 1963 just months before he's killed. I think he had a great affinity for Ireland and its people and had a great respect for the history of Irish immigrants coming to America, and in turn, that affected his view on immigration as a whole. I think he was a great proponent of it and saw the value that it brought to this country, and I think a lot of that goes back to his understanding that that's where he came from.
We are a nation of immigrants, despite the best efforts of those who are opposed to it.
MATT PORTER: Well, Neal, it's a great book. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your thoughts.
NEAL THOMPSON: Matt, great to be here. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much.
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MATT PORTER: If you are interested in learning more about the first Kennedys, Bridget and Patrick, you can visit our podcast page at jfklibrary.org/jfk35. On that page, we'll include a link to some of those newly digitized letters from PJ Kennedy and other resources from the library. If you have questions or story ideas, email us at jfk35pod@jfklfoundation.org or tweet at us at JFK Library using the hashtag JFK 35.
If you liked what you heard today, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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