Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas Read Free Book Online

turned northward, Alice had grown skeptical. When King held his big rally on the Boston Common, Alice had asked, “What the hell is he doing up here?” As far as she could see, Boston wasn’t prejudiced against blacks—nobody rode the back of the bus, nobody was kept out of restaurants; Boston wasn’t Birmingham or Selma. King was getting a bitabove himself. So while his assassination was a terrible thing, she couldn’t bring herself to grieve for him.
    When dinner at the Officers Club was over and the kitchen had been scoured clean, Alice walked up Decatur Street to her apartment in the Bunker Hill housing project. Her husband, Danny, was still tending bar at the Point Tavern, but their seven children were home, huddled around the television set, watching the riots that had broken out in dozens of American cities. For more than an hour, Alice and her kids watched young blacks racing through the nation’s streets—burning, looting, battling the police. Her daughters, Lisa and Robin, seemed terrified by the violent images flickering across the screen, but her sons, Danny Jr., Billy, Kevin, Tommy, and Bobby, sat openmouthed, absorbing the action as avidly as they did their weekly police dramas. Well past midnight, Billy took her outside and pointed toward the horizon, where the fires of Blue Hill Avenue cast a dull red glow.
    What did the blacks think they were doing? Alice wondered. They acted as though they were the only people who’d ever had it tough in this world. Poor was poor, hungry was hungry. The housing project where the McGoffs lived wasn’t any better than those across town in the ghetto. The widow upstairs who had to get by on social security and food stamps didn’t have any more than those black welfare mothers the newspapers were always writing about. The discrimination which blacks had confronted over the years was no worse than the arrogance and indifference which the Irish had faced when they came to this country.
    The difference between the blacks and the Irish, she thought, was that the blacks had tried to advance through the civil rights movement—sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, ultimately riots—while the Irish had used politics. Alice believed in politics—it was the American way of getting ahead. And for a long while it had paid off. No district in the country had produced a more potent roster of pols than the storied “Old Eleventh,” of which Charlestown was part.
    As early as 1894, in a race marked by bogus “mattress” voters, street brawls, and bully-boy raids on polling places, a tough little mick named John Francis Fitzgerald had won election to Congress from the Eleventh. “Honey Fitz” promptly repaid Charlestown’s support by getting the Navy Yard reopened, bringing hundreds of jobs back to town. But his stock in trade was an appeal to Irish rage against the “blue-nosed Yankee bigots.” In 1905, he rode that anger into the Mayor’s office.
    Eventually, Fitzgerald’s old congressional seat passed to an even more aggressive young Irishman, James Michael Curley, who also exploited Irish resentments against the Yankee nabobs. The very term “codfish aristocracy,” he once said, was “an insult to the fish.” His style was flamboyant, even demagogic, but both as congressman and later as Boston’s mayor he appealed less to narrow Irish ethnocentrism than to the poor of all races. Nowhere was he more popular than in Charlestown and no neighborhood received more of hislargesse. One of the most consistently Democratic wards in the nation—Democrats routinely defeated Republicans there by margins of five or six to one—Charlestown did well under the New Deal, receiving one of the country’s first public housing projects (the very one where the McGoffs now lived), relief assistance for 1,200 of its 30,000 residents, and a staggering 400 federal jobs.
    As late as 1942, at age sixty-eight, Jim Curley was returned to Congress from the Eleventh District. Even his subsequent