Boston: Hugh O’Brien, Boston’s first Irish mayor, appeared on the scene in 1885. O’Brien, businessman and politician, and editor of Shipping and Commercial List, served four terms and was succeeded over the next fourteen years by Yankee Brahmins/politicians and businessmen including Josiah Quincy whose great grandfather can be found in Chapter 2. Boston, in other words, despite a very large Irish population, and a series of ethnic Irish ward-based machines, plus the existence of a city-wide Irish-dominated Democratic party committee was unable to establish a city-wide machine governance of Boston during the nineteenth century (or the twentieth century as well).
Interestingly, a year after O’Brien’s first election (1884), the Republican state legislature transferred control over Boston’s police force to the state itself and approved an independent municipal civil service system for Boston —beginning a micro-management by the state legislature that would continue, some would say, to the present day. The role and power of state government in Boston’s municipal policy-making, especially economic development policy-making, will also be discussed in future chapters. Also, of interest, Yankee Josiah Quincy was elected as a Democrat—with Irish votes—and his administration after the Panic of 1893 was characterized as an example of “municipal socialism” while using patronage in public works and building public baths and parks—a Progressive approach, one might surmise.[1]
Things would change dramatically after the turn of the century and the arrival of “Honey Fitz” John Fitzgerald—but that is a later chapter in our story. Late nineteenth century Boston politics was effectively fragmented: with strong, conventional Irish ward machines (such as Martin Lomasney’s 8th Ward), a city-wide Democratic Irish-led committee in a convoluted partnership with the Yankees who controlled city government and administration—themselves in alliance with the Boston Chamber of Commerce. It appeared that first generation Irish reached accommodation with the Yankees; their sons and daughters not so much.[2] Again, a single ethnic group, the Irish, constituted the almost exclusive core of the ward-based ethnic machines.
[1] Richard Dilworth, (Ed) Cities in American Political History, Washington D.C., Sage, 2011), p. 314.
[2] See especially, Thomas O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1995). O’Connor develops exceedingly well how the Irish formed their American political culture and how that culture strongly impacted their politics and their governance once they were able to capture control of Boston’s city government in the twentieth century. We will pick this up in later chapters and consider how these cultural forces were able to meaningfully shape Boston’s politics for nearly a hundred years, but affect economic development policy-making.
Ron W. Coan 