Tocqueville coined the word “individualism” to define a new form of life he saw emerging in North America in the 1830s. Here as never before in history it became possible for an individual, as long as he was white and male, to separate himself from his family background and decide his own socioeconomic destiny. In the New World, as the narratives of Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger exemplified, a sober, prudent, and industrious young man could shake off inherited social constraints and achieve respectability and wealth, even fame and power, purely by his own efforts.

Then, in the 1840s, “came the savages,” as the aging Boston-Irish political boss Frank Skeffington self-mockingly explains to his nephew in Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. Irish immigrants had been coming to North America since the last decades of the 17th century, but most were Presbyterian “Scotch”-Irish farmers from Ulster County, who blended readily with America’s Anglo-Protestant mainstream. The nearly four million famine-haunted Catholic peasants who flooded Eastern coastal cities between 1845 and 1921 were not such an easy fit. Destitute, profoundly disoriented, disease-ridden, drunken, improvident, alternately obsequious and violent, superstitious, erratic–these Gaelic-speaking “wild Irish” shook Protestant America to the core.

Almost immediately upon their arrival a secret political movement arose, devoted principally to restricting further immigration and to barring Roman Catholics from holding government jobs or political office. In 1854 the “Know Nothings” emerged from secrecy to national political success, especially in Irish-inundated Massachusetts, where they won all 40 state Senate seats, 379 of 381 seats in the state House of Representatives, the governor-ship, and every US Congressional District. Literary Massachusetts was no less hostile. Emerson claimed that one had only to look at Irishmen, “deteriorated in size, the nose sunk, the gum exposed,” to know that they operated with “diminished brain.” In Walden (1855), Thoreau scorns the Irishman John Field and “his poor starveling brat. . .thinking to live by some derivative old-country mode in this primitive new country.” And in a letter to her brother who had been complaining of the difficulty of teaching unruly immigrant youths in a Boston school, Emily Dickinson only half whimsically advocates “killing” the Irish altogether.

The root of the hostility was religion. Hundreds of years of persecution at the hands of the Protestant Ascendancy, as the minority Anglo-Irish who ruled over the island in the name of the British Crown were known, had succeeded in cementing the defiant attachment of the Irish peasant masses to the one institution that virtually all 19th-century Americans agreed in despising: the Roman Catholic Church. And Rome had successfully fostered among these masses precisely the sort of authoritarian, collectivist, and quasi-magical spirituality that Protestantism rejected in its founding impetus. But there was also an important difference in social values that subsequently bore fruit in Irish 20th-century political success. A centuries-long history of rural poverty, Gaelic folkways, and political subjection had joined with Roman Catholic moral teaching to form in the Irish a thoroughgoing communalism precisely and powerfully antithetical to the acquisitive individualist ethos of Anglo-Protestant America. It is a communalism that ran, for good and ill, through the lives and careers of Irish America’s 20th-century political sons, Al Smith, Richard Daley, and Tip O’Neill.

It is evident from Kerby Miller’s great study of the preconditions of Irish emigration, Exiles and Emigrants, that the chances of a Ben Franklin or Horatio Alger emerging from the traditional Irish countryside were virtually nil. England’s mid-18th-century “penal laws” notoriously forbade Irish Catholics from, among other things, purchasing land, entering the professions, voting, holding office, displaying a coat of arms, or owning a gun or horse worth more than five pounds. But bourgeois aspirations had been more subtly inhibited long before by what Miller calls “the dense network of reciprocal obligations” governing rural Irish-Catholic families, villages, and parishes.

In response to a stark, bog-sodden geography that provided little opportunity for excess, the fundamental institutions of Gaelic Ireland were all sternly communal. Before the conquest by the English, the operative unit of land ownership was a multigenerational family grouping called the derbfine; the primary form of postconquest settlement, called a clachan, was a clustered group of related families who farmed the surrounding land in common. Particular households were allotted portions of tillage and pastureland by a system designed to prevent any one member of the community from accumulating land at the expense of any other. Inheritance of property was “partible,” allowing every male descendant an equal share. And labor-intensive seasonal farmwork was performed collectively under an informal system of exchange of work and farm animals. Well into the 19th century, life was ordered, under the church’s forbidding eye, at every level by a communitarian ethic of intimate interdependence in which the good of the whole local social unit took firm priority over the desires of any individual member.

Such cohesive communities tend to compensate for their obstruction of individual initiative by deflecting aggressive energies onto demonized outsiders. Irish Catholic communitarianism emphatically bore out this pattern. Gaelic poetry everywhere honors Gaeil (speakers of the language) over Gaill (“foreigners”). “To save a relation from punishment, or to punish any one who has injured a relation,” according to one folk saying, “an Irish peasant will swear to anything.” And these loyalties were routinely
expressed in the form of “faction fights,” in which as many as a thousand men would assault and sometimes kill residents of rival communities with fists, stones, and clubs, egged on by curse-hurling female relatives. After passage of the penal laws in the 18th century, “agrarian societies” such as the Molly Maguires directed such tribal hostilities onto members of the Anglo-Protestant Ascendancy in rural campaigns of horrific brutality. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish nationalists transferred reserves of communal feeling against the occupying English. It took little trouble to demonize a colonizing elite that capped six centuries of abuse and exploitation by taking advantage of mass famine to evict millions of tenants from their land.

Irish-Catholic communal culture was thus sporadically revolutionary, but rarely utopian. On the contrary, its characteristic tone was famously astringent and fatalistic. “What is fated for a man is hard to shun,” one Donegal proverb states plainly. Another warns, “There is nothing in the world but mist, and prosperity lasts but a short time.” To accept lifelong ties to an unyielding landscape, a repressive Church, and a set of relations and neighbors one has not chosen is, consciously or unconsciously, to forego many options. It isn’t just the rain and the English that inspire Irish literature’s vast melancholia. Joyce’s Dubliners, for one, shows how a local collectivity feeds upon the silent collapse of a thousand private notions of escape. And, more recently, many of William Trevor’s short stories describe quiet but acutely painful concessions to stark communal limits.

The several contradictory faces of Irish communalism‹intimate, protective, harsh, self-abnegating, generous, xenophobic‹are vividly drawn in three recent biographies of major Irish-American politicians: Robert A. Slayton¹s Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor¹s American Pharaoh: Richard Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, and John A. Farrell¹s Tip O¹Neill and the Democratic Century. Reading these three books in chronological order from Smith to Daley to O¹Neill is to be absorbed in a richly detailed, engagingly anecdotal, and highly illuminating narrative history of the modern Democratic Party. These three careers span much of the 20th century, with the New Deal as the central monument: Al Smith setting the stage for FDR in New York state from 1903 to 1928, Richard Daley¹s ambitious and effective expansion of local government in Chicago from 1955 to 1975, and Tip O¹Neill¹s further extension and heroic defense of the Smith-Roosevelt vision in Congress from 1952 to 1986. To follow this narrative is also to be struck by how much the history of the Democratic Party in 20th-century America is also the history of Old World Irish-Catholic communalism in New World circumstances.

This story, unlike most Irish stories, is by and large a happy one. It is the tale of the successful and mutually advantageous adaptation of a communal Catholic immigrant culture to an individualistic Protestant host. Neither culture capitulates, but both change as a result of their interaction. Paradoxically, Smith, Daley, O’Neill, and lesser-known figures like them (including the many Irish-American leaders of the labor movement) drew upon the archaic and conservative Irish communal tradition to make what amounts to an epochal revision of 19th-century individualism–the erection of a robust governmental counterpoise to the often cruel, exploitative, and socially destructive tendencies of the unchecked free market. In these politicians and labor leaders the Irish talent for local solidarity becomes the basis of nothing less than the political and economic emancipation of America’s white-ethnic working-class.

But the characteristic realism of these leaders also stopped them well and wisely short of any utopian resistance to the liberal-individualist structure they had initially foundered upon. As Irishmen they knew enough about Old World and first-generation New World poverty to be grateful for the economic opportunities provided by free markets even as they took steps to restrain free-market abuses. Having grown up on accounts of English tyranny, they also knew enough about political repression to be respectful of the principle of limited government even as they extended government’s reach in unprecedented ways. And, not least important, Smith, Daley, and O’Neill were all moderates in good part because they were all classically American self-made men. By their own exceptional talents and persistent hard work they had each acquired economic success and social and professional standing far beyond anything their parents or grandparents could have imagined.

Communal Irish politics, ironically, became for each of them a means of social ascent no Old World Irish community would have permitted, and for all their communal instincts Smith, Daley, and O’Neill were also grateful to the individualist system that made their rise possible. In The Last Hurrah, Skeffington speaks for them all: “. . .The main reason I went into politics was because it was the quickest way out of the cellar and up the ladder.” For the Irish in America, he added, politics is “the big salvation. . . . It’s a very serious part of the business of living.”

The main instrument of this salvation was the political machine. The term itself evokes the remarkably intricate and efficient mechanism by which Democratic politicians secured votes in exchange for patronage jobs and rudimentary social services. Before New Deal and Great Society social programs rendered such aid superfluous, most urban immigrant ethnic groups depended upon some version of the machine for a political voice and economic survival. But the Irish took to machine politics with special gusto, and, it seems, a special aptitude.

Irish bosses such as William Marcy Tweed, Big Tim Sullivan, and, of course, James Michael Curley became notorious for their mastery of the machine’s distinctive mixture of discipline and license. They demonstrated lavish generosity and extraordinary personal kindness to their supporters, even as many of them skimmed shamelessly from the same community’s tax dollars. And these bosses expected complete loyalty in return. To accept assistance from the machine was to commit oneself to an implicit but clearly understood reciprocal obligation from which few defected. And to accept employment from the machine was to commit oneself to its service. Ironically, “machine,” the foundational artifact of the industrial age, came to describe an essentially preindustrial form of organic communalism adapted by the Irish with extraordinary success to the alienating conditions of modern urban life in North America.

Perhaps the single most successful product of urban Irish machine culture was Al Smith. His immigrant father died when he was 12, and Smith left school for good in eighth grade to earn money to take care of his mother and sister. He helped pay the rent with a bewildering sequence of odd jobs in his Lower East Side neighborhood, including “truck chaser” (a sort of messenger), shipping clerk, fight-results announcer, and, for several years, all-around helper for a Fulton Fish Market wholesale fish dealer. He also took up acting in church basements, where he trained his voice and memory and grew comfortable speaking in front of audiences.

Al Smith: successful product of
urban Irish machine culture

When Smith was still in his early twenties, an influential local political boss by the name of Tom Foley took Al under his wing, giving him his first political job as a process server for the Office of the Commissioner of Jurors. Al liked the job because it gave him an opportunity to travel about the city, and he soon demonstrated an abundance of the virtues required of a good machine man: hard work, loyalty, unpretentiousness, patience, and, most importantly, a readiness to subordinate himself to the system. Foley put him on the ticket for state Assembly in 1903, and Smith’s good looks, contagiously affectionate personality, and what seemed like first-name knowledge of everyone in the ward gained him 75 percent of the vote.

It is a measure of Smith’s provincialism that at first he found Albany overwhelming. He couldn’t keep up with the detail involved in legislating, and he hated being away from his family and the old neighborhood. After his second one-year term in 1905 he asked Foley to remove him from the ticket on the grounds that Albany was “a bit too much” for him. But Foley talked him into trying for another year. Al went back upstate and deflected his loneliness by spending late hours in the library carefully reading every word of every bill, looking up what he didn’t understand, and cross-referencing every amendment. His improved grasp soon showed, and by 1910 he had become a prominent voice, leading the fight for the passage of the nation’s first workmen’s compensation law. Slayton describes this legislation as having “epic importance,” arguing that it “set the stage for later federal insurance programs covering old age, unemployment, and health.” In 1911, Smith was appointed vice chairman of the legislative commission investigating factory conditions after the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which forced 146 women workers to choose between death by burning and death by 11-story leap.

Any morally alert adult would have been appalled by the degrading and dangerous working conditions that prevailed in most American factories in 1911, but for Smith the investigation was life-altering. Having watched his own father’s health slowly crumble from overwork and his mother falter under the subsequent strain, Al Smith was an especially sensitive witness. He traveled to every industrial city in the state, holding public hearings, visiting every variety of factory, and interviewing workers, on one occasion accompanying a woman home after a night shift to observe her home situation.

Between 1911 and 1915 Smith and Robert Wagner, then Democratic leader of the New York Senate, documented the conditions of industrial work and introduced 32 bills to protect the state’s most vulnerable workers. They passed laws requiring factories to have regular fire drills and inspections, outward-opening emergency doors with panic bars rather than knobs, clearly marked exits, and clean sanitary facilities. They also outlawed children under 14 from working in cannery sheds or tenements, regulated the hours of women in canning factories, and required that the chairs provided for women workers have backs. With a combination of moral passion and machine muscle, Al Smith established a new and nationally imitated model of government activism to protect the basic health and dignity of industrial workers.

On the strength of his factory reforms, Smith was elected governor of New York in 1918. Over the next 10 years, he completed a personal transformation from local machine operative to progressive politician, becoming a celebrated national symbol of Irish-Catholic pride, immigrant self-respect, and ethnic inclusiveness. A combination of enormous innate warmth, great native intelligence, absolute honesty, detailed knowledge of the political process, and a knack for recognizing and befriending brilliant associates such as Robert Moses, Belle Moskowitz, Frances Perkins, and Joseph Proskauer made Smith a potent political force. On his watch state spending for education increased tenfold; state hospitals were greatly expanded or built from scratch; Robert Moses’s visionary scheme of enormous state parks for the people was launched; 3,000 miles of roads were built; labor unions were accorded fair treatment; the practice of using police to break strikes was ended; and a corps of 123 factory inspectors, the largest in the nation, was employed.

At every opportunity Smith set a tone of welcome and support for immigrants, minorities, and working people of every type, preaching that “the state should by statute declare that the labor of a human being is not a commodity or an article of commerce.” And at the same time as he was extending the government’s reach, Slayton notes, Smith took great pains to streamline its structure, eliminating inefficient or unnecessary agencies and red tape in the hopes of making the state a more effective instrument of social justice. In 1924 he managed to pass the largest tax cut in state history while still rapidly increasing spending on social services. (Franklin Roosevelt would later say that everything he did in the New Deal was tried first by Al Smith in New York.) That same year, he made his first bid for the White House; four years later, Smith became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, the first Catholic to be accorded this honor.

He lost the presidential race to Herbert Hoover by a landslide and was permanently wounded by the anti-Catholic bigotry he confronted during the campaign. It wasn’t only Smith’s Catholicism that seemed “foreign” to most Americans in 1928; it was his derby hat, his cigar, his “wet” views on Prohibition, his accent, and his urban theme song (“The Sidewalks of New York”). Joseph Proskauer urged Smith to allow Franklin Roosevelt to give his nominating speech in 1924 on the grounds that “He’s a patrician Protestant and you’re a Bowery mick, and he’ll rub some of the curse off you.” Roosevelt gave the speech, which helped him launch his own presidential bid in 1932. But Smith remained “a Bowery mick” in the eyes of most Americans.

The shame of this, as Slayton points out, is that the urban working-class environment Smith grew up in had been an almost ideal blend of provincial communalism and cosmopolitan exposure. The Lower East Side immigrant-Irish neighborhood of Smith’s childhood was close-knit, affectionate, intimate, and morally coherent–a true community in the age-old Irish tradition. But it was also adjacent to a startling array of similarly close-knit communities of very different kinds–“Neapolitans who brought into Little Italy all the colors and passions of the Mediterranean, refugees from the knout in Russia, sturdy Germans of the turnverein saengerfest, pre-Nazi variety,” as Robert Moses put it.

The result in Smith was a rare blend of rootedness and tolerance, village thickness and urban flexibility, moral focus and openness to complexity, communal attachment and individualist ambition. He was able to extend the compassionate values he learned as a child in a strong home community to the larger community he encountered as an adult. As Slayton tells it, “Al Smith was only exposed to a single, increasingly coherent social outlook throughout most of his life. . .[but] he emerged from the Fourth Ward with one of the most comprehensive visions of ethnic and racial tolerance of any politician in the first half of the 20th century.” He never became president, and that broke his heart, but Al Smith emerges from Slayton’s excellent biography as one of the most appealing public figures in our recent history.

The case of Mayor Daley is a good deal more ambiguous. On one hand, like Smith he embodied the communitarian virtues of the Irish urban machines without succumbing to their characteristic vices of graft and venality. Unlike Smith, however, he never managed to rise above the more serious vice also endemic to Irish ethnic politics: racism.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley: A profound grasp
of communal dependencies made him a
powerful machine politician.

Richard Daley was an authentic product of working-class Irish Catholic Chicago. His father was a member of the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union for half a century; he grew up in the shadow of the city’s famous slaughterhouses; he attended parochial Catholic schools and, as an adult, daily Mass; and he lived his entire life and raised five children in the same neighborhood of modest bungalows in which he was born, even through his unprecedented five terms as mayor from 1955 to 1976.

And Daley didn’t just reside in working-class Irish Chicago, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor explain; he identified with it entirely. Enduring a long series of dry and faceless political jobs, Daley rose to success by mastering the ancient Irish Catholic communal code that requires patient, self-abnegating devotion to the service of family and community. Even when enormous power was finally in reach, at age 53, Daley took every opportunity to pronounce his humble identification with local social, political, and religious institutions. “I am proud to be the candidate of this organization,” he told an assemblage of local precinct captains during his first mayoral campaign in 1955. “No man can walk alone.”

Is this what Thoreau meant when he objected to John Field’s “derivative old-country mode” of living? “No man can walk alone” is a far cry from Emerson’s ideal of self-reliance. Like countless rural Irish ancestors going back countless generations, Daley believed that his own existence was so dependent upon the support of his immediate neighbors as to be inconceivable without it. And these neighbors in turn were dependent upon him. It was his profound grasp of these dependencies, as well as great native shrewdness and sheer plodding persistence, that made Daley the most effective and most nationally powerful machine politician in American history. “Make people obligated to you,” his mentor Jake Arvey advised him, invoking the fundamental principle of communal social organizations of every kind.

And obligated they were. At the height of his power Daley controlled as many as 40,000 patronage jobs. It was generally understood that nothing of importance got done in the city without his involvement. He built major highways and an airport. He fluoridated the water long before it was standard practice, dramatically improved public health facilities for alcoholics, and made Chicago one of the cleanest and smoothest-running cities in the country. He made and broke presidential candidates and, arguably, decided at least one presidential race (1960). And during the decline of America’s cities in the 1960s and ’70s, he is credited with saving Chicago from going the way of Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland by envisioning and executing an ambitious plan for downtown commercial revitalization while managing to keep the vast South Side population of working-class white ethnics from fleeing to the suburbs.

But therein lies the darker side of the Daley story. Daley kept the white ethnics in Chicago, in effect, by keeping the city racially segregated. The many shrewd steps by which he achieved this are too many and too devious to summarize here, but they are scrupulously described by Cohen and Taylor. Suffice it to say that, as mayor of Chicago, Daley confronted an epic migration every bit as momentous as the arrival of the Irish in New York and Boston in the 1840s and ’50s. It was the movement of one million African-Americans from the rural Deep South to Chicago (and other northern cities) in pursuit of relatively well-paying industrial jobs. Daley, in standard Old World Irish communal fashion, responded to the rapidly massing presence of alien outsiders by a hostile assertion of boundaries. As a teenager, Daley was a leading member of a neighborhood athletic club that assumed a tribal obligation to keep the increasing number of black Chicagoans from crossing Wentworth Avenue–the traditional dividing line between the working-class white-ethnic Bungalow Belt of the west and the ever-expanding Black Belt of the east. In 1919, when Daley was 17, the club helped to instigate and lead a bloody five-day race riot in which 23 blacks and 15 whites were killed and an additional 537 people injured, two-thirds of them black. In 1956, less than a year after Daley became mayor, he secured this boundary once and for all by approving plans for the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway, a 14-lane highway running precisely along this traditional racial divide. “It was,” Cohen and Taylor explain, “the most formidable impediment short of an actual wall that the city could have built to separate the white South Side from the Black Belt.”

This was not the worst of it. The Dan Ryan Expressway was merely the buttress for another kind of barrier. The centerpiece of Daley’s plan for accommodating the scores of thousands of black migrants moving into the city was a two-mile corridor of hulking, impersonal tower-blocks extending along State Street, just on the black side of the new expressway. Other housing projects would also be located almost exclusively in already troubled black ghettos. Under the guise of public largesse, Daley arranged to channel the vast majority of Chicago’s disoriented new arrivals into highly concentrated pockets of poverty and racial alienation, with predictably disastrous results.

Defenders sometimes suggest that Daley was unaware of the negative long-term consequences of such warehousing of the poor, and it must be said that he was not the only urban leader who adopted this approach in the ’60s and ’70s. But Cohen and Taylor make a strong case that Daley was both warned of the dangers and apprised of alternatives. As Judge Richard Austin, initially a Daley protégé, ruled in a class-action suit brought against the Chicago Housing Authority by the ACLU, “It is incredible that this dismal prospect of an all-Negro public housing system in all-Negro areas came about without the persistent application of a deliberate policy to confine public housing to all-Negro or immediately adjacent areas.”

Though he did rely on black machine support in his first two terms, Cohen and Taylor note, Daley took a different tack after the 1964 election results showed him losing ground among white-ethnic voters. He began sending clear, if coded, signals to white ethnics that he would do whatever he could to impede the racial integration of Chicago’s schools and neighborhoods, and he showed he was in earnest by undermining Martin Luther King’s Chicago Freedom Campaign in 1965 and 1966. In subsequent elections he carried white ethnic wards by landslide margins. Thus if Daley must be given credit for “saving” Chicago in many respects, Cohen and Taylor fairly conclude that he must also be given some of the blame for losing at least two generations of poor African Americans to social demoralization. Irish communalism, it must be said, was instrumental in both.

It is perhaps unfair to ask whether racial issues might have been more compassionately addressed if Al Smith had been mayor of Chicago in the ’60s and ’70s. The Happy Warrior was the product, after all, of a very different time and place. But perhaps it is less unfair to ask the same question about Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, who was born in 1912, only 10 years after Richard Daley. Among the many strengths of John A. Farrell’s high-spirited, richly anecdotal, and vastly well-informed biography of O’Neill is its awareness that politics is a function of personality as much as policy. His friend Jimmy Breslin once described O’Neill as “a fine spring rain of a man,” and everyone who knew him seems to have agreed. The contrast with Daley could not have been greater. Where Daley was cold and remote, Tip was warmhearted and engaged; where Daley was formal and controlling, Tip was relaxed and open; where Daley was defensive and xenophobic, Tip was generous and accepting; where Daley was detail-oriented, Tip was a “broad-brush guy”; where Daley was regimented, Tip was spontaneous; where Daley was abstemious, Tip was indulgent; where Daley was somber, Tip was funny. “Enormously alive and vibrant and full of bullshit,” one longtime Washington reporter said of him.

Tip O’Neill: the warmth without the hostility.

These personal qualities come clearly across in a lifetime of achievement as a legislator, first in the Massachusetts State House, then in the US Congress. Over a career of 40 years he fought consistently for the New Deal legacy, for civil rights, and for the full range of Great Society legislation including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, federal aid to education, Head Start, and college grants and loans to middle America. He opposed the Vietnam War after initially supporting it, and also took a courageous public position against IRA terrorism in Ireland. When the tide finally turned against the New Deal in the Reagan years, he remained stalwart, and Farrell suggests that the finest moment of his career was the deal he cut with the president to protect Social Security.

O’Neill’s career thus spanned most of what Farrell calls “the Democratic Century,” the years between Al Smith’s nomination for president in 1928 and the Republican takeover of the US House in 1994. In addition to the defeats of Nazism and Communism, Farrell tells us, the great American achievement of this period was the construction, with indispensable government help, of a vast and prosperous middle class. O’Neill was a faithful and effective contributor to this goal and, finally, a symbol of its success. For no small number of this newly arrived middle class were the descendants of Irish and other Catholic immigrants, whose parents or grandparents had faced the hostility of an anxious Protestant culture. O’Neill took the opportunity of an honorary degree from Harvard to remind the audience that one of his first jobs had been as a Harvard groundskeeper, and people who knew him well say he always retained an all-too-Irish sense of himself as an underdog. But the larger significance of his enormous ease and affability was the comfort it expressed about his own middle-class American belonging. In contrast to Smith and Daley, O’Neill’s early success and long career were partly due to the fact that his father had already established himself as a moderately successful local businessman and politician in the North Cambridge ward that Tip initially represented in the Massachusetts Legislature. Where Smith and Daley raised themselves far above working-class Irish origins, O’Neill at once benefited from, aided, and gracefully symbolized the larger upwardly mobile movement of the Irish in America.

One of the principal benefits of this somewhat easier social position is that it freed O’Neill from the racial resentments that often accompanied working-class economic anxiety. It is easy to imagine Tip O’Neill pulling strings and stroking egos and making deals to get a highway and some public housing built in his district for no higher reason than providing some good jobs for constituents. But it is impossible to imagine him doing so as part of a calculated strategy of racial division.

O’Neill, like Al Smith, seems somehow to have absorbed the warmth of Irish communalism without its associated grudges and animosity. As the Massachusetts ballots continue to accumulate Irish names–Joyce, Lynch, Meehan, Birmingham, Finneran, Kerry, Kennedy–let’s hope the winners possess a bit of Daley’s toughness and effectiveness and efficiency, but also a bit more of Smith’s and O’Neill’s generosity of spirit.

Neal Dolan is a lecturer in American history and literature at Harvard University.