Common Ground (72 page)

Not everyone was convinced by Miss Taylor’s argument: twenty-five of Associated’s members were quite content to leave the busing question to the public sector. But eventually seven of Boston’s most socially committed philanthropies allocated $198,000 in 1974–75 and $242,500 the next year to
fourteen separate programs designed to reduce racial tensions and violence during the desegregation process. Determined to avoid a partisan stand on so divisive an issue, Hyams trustees made no grant the first year. Later, at Joan’s urging, they concluded that they couldn’t turn their back on the crisis. Yet finding an appropriate grantee was difficult. Joan conducted prolonged talks with a coalition of black social agencies, but the negotiations fell through when the group failed to submit adequate data. Ultimately, Hyams provided $45,000 to three organizations—the Citywide Educational Coalition, School Volunteers for Boston, and Freedom House—which sought peaceful compliance with the court order and “quality education” in the city’s schools. Meanwhile, the United Way—in the middle of its 1974 campaign—committed $200,000 to several “special projects” intended to “reduce tensions and help guarantee the safety of our children in all neighborhoods.” They included an effort by the South Boston Committee of Community Agencies to get students back into school, a counseling service by the People’s Task Force of Hyde Park, and “sensitivity training” by the Greater Boston YWGA.

The action by Associated’s members had attracted little public notice, but the United Way’s special grants prompted an outcry in Boston’s white neighborhoods. ROAR and its ally, the Home and School Association, called for a boycott of the United Way. A ROAR representative toured comfortable suburban communities urging residents not to contribute to the fund drive, but instead to give directly to their favorite charities. Hundreds of pledge cards were returned defaced with anti-busing slogans. The United Way was compelled to extend its campaign by several weeks in a vain effort to meet its target.

This protest crested on April 13, 1975, when three hundred cars streamed from the city to the Wellesley home of William C. Mercer, president of the New England Telephone Company and chairman of the United Way campaign. More than a thousand demonstrators pressed against the green privet hedge around Mercer’s colonial house, located not far from Arthur Garrity’s. Barred from the driveway and lawns by a platoon of helmeted Wellesley police, the protesters chanted anti-busing slogans, sang patriotic songs, and waved miniature American flags. A ROAR speaker, Adam Kasprzak of Brighton, said the United Way had “clearly misused the money given to it by the people.” And Kasprzak added a warning which struck at the heart of Boston’s philanthropic tradition: “If those who control our city’s charities think they can also control our lives, they are very much mistaken.”

A
lice McGoff stood at the hedge, gazing up the sweep of lawn toward the handsome house on the hill. Thickets of ash and silver birch partially screened it from Falmouth Road, but she could make out the broad façade of red brick, punctuated by a graceful white doorway and two rows of windows with bright green shutters. It was a grand house, all right, just where you’d expect to find the president of the New England Telephone Company, her boss, the illustrious William Chauncy Mercer.

Suddenly there was a movement at one of the narrow windows flanking the door. The gauzy curtain was pulled aside and a tall, silver-haired man appeared for a moment behind the glass. My God, Alice thought, it’s Mercer! In the eight months she’d worked for the telephone company, she’d met the president only once—when he came through the operators’ room at Christmas, shaking hands and expressing appreciation for all the overtime they’d put in during the holidays. He’d smiled at her then, that toothy smile she’d come to expect from Yankees of a certain class, and Alice had nodded back respectfully. But now, as he peered through his window, Alice wondered, “What if he recognizes me, one of his own operators, demonstrating in front of his house?” Oh no, she thought, that’s silly—the company had hundreds of operators, thousands of repairmen and clerks. Why would Mercer remember
her
face? If he noticed her there at all, she would look like just another overweight Irishwoman out from the city to trample his bushes and scuff his lawn.

Well, she thought, that’s what I am. She had nothing personal against Mercer—he was probably a decent man—but he was the United Way chairman, and $200,000 of the money he had raised was going to support forced busing, much of that money collected from people like herself, the very ones who were bearing the brunt of such social engineering. Indeed, the telephone company had put pressure on its own employees to support the fund drive, but Alice had flatly refused to contribute and she had urged her co-workers to
boycott as well, spreading the word through a letter to the Charlestown
Patriot
. “I will not give any of my hard-earned monies to an organization that is so dramatically opposed to my beliefs. I would like to suggest to my fellow Townies that they make their contributions directly to the organizations of their choice.” She had sent her ten dollars to the Charlestown Girls’ Club, whose funding had been cut off by the United Way after its parent organization was accused of “financial irregularities.”

In years past, Alice—like many of her neighbors—had usually given the United Way a few dollars. But Charlestown had never thought very highly of philanthropy controlled from downtown by Yankee bankers and businessmen. It was too remote from the Town, too lofty and condescending, too dedicated to its own social agenda (John Boyle O’Reilly, the poet who lived in Charlestown for many years, called it “Organized charity, scrimped and iced / In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ”). Besides, Charlestown had long prided itself on its self-sufficiency, and it resented charity as a badge of dependency. When the United Citizens’ League, a Protestant reform organization, opened an unemployment relief station there during the Depression, a letter to the Charlestown
News
complained that “this intrusion of soup-eating benefactors” was needed in the Town “like we need smallpox.” The writer, an old Townie, asserted: “The needs of the poor in Charlestown have always been looked after in first-class shape by our St. Vincent de Paul Society.”

In short, Catholics would take care of their own, without meddling from Protestant do-gooders. For traditional Catholic philanthropy had never shared the Yankee predilection for social reform. To the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the Catholic Charitable Bureau, charity wasn’t a lever for change, but a balm to make the Catholic worker more content with his meager lot on earth. “It is through alms-giving on the part of the wealthy and gratitude on the part of the poor that we are saved the dry rot of communism or a war of the classes,” the Reverend William G. Byrne, a Boston priest, wrote in 1880. And three years later, Pope Leo XIII put his imprimatur on that doctrine when he declared: “Christian charity … unites the rich and poor by sweet bonds of holy affection.”

For generations, Charlestown’s Catholics had lived comfortably with such passivity. Whatever they might expect from City Hall, the State House, or the White House, the parishioners of St. Mary’s, St. Catherine’s, and St. Francis de Sales’ looked to their churches not for reform but for solace. As one Townie put it: “When I saw Christ bleeding on his cross, I knew he was there suffering for my sins. That was good enough for me. I didn’t expect him to climb down and start lobbying for a minimum wage, urban renewal, and peace in Vietnam.” When the Church began reinterpreting its position in regard to social issues in the 1960s, that created a new source of conflict for many Townies.

Alice had been raised a devout Catholic, but the Kirks differed widely in their attitudes toward the Church. Resentful of ecclesiastical power, her father, Bernie, rarely attended Mass. Bernie Kirk respected priests so long as they stuck to theological issues, but he wasn’t about to let the Church instruct him
in his temporal duties. This ambivalence was evident at the dinner table, where, in one breath, he would inveigh against Cardinal Cushing, “that red-hatted old politician,” and, in the next, would command his children to obey the good pastor of St. Mary’s, Monsignor Frederic Allchin.

Alice’s mother was more conventionally religious, perhaps to eradicate the Wolfberg in her. It hadn’t been easy growing up half Jewish in a relentlessly Irish Catholic town, and Gertie Wolfberg soon recognized that the quickest route to acceptance was full immersion in the Church. By the time Alice was born, her mother had adopted all the rituals of Charlestown Catholicism. The Kirks always ate fish on Fridays, fasted on Ash Wednesday, and occasionally even joined the Cardinal in his nightly recitation of the rosary, kneeling side by side on the hard parlor floor as Cushing intoned the familiar phrases over the radio. On hot summer nights, Alice could hear that harsh voice droning from back porches and parlor windows up and down Breed’s Hill, uniting the Town for a few moments of obeisance to “God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.”

But even Gertie Kirk performed these rituals more by rote than by feeling. The religious center of the family was Alice’s aunt Mary, whom the priests at St. Mary’s liked to call “the most devout woman in the parish.” Mary attended Mass daily—on weekdays, walking from her job at City Hall to a church in the North End, and on weekends, joining her family and neighbors at St. Mary’s. From her modest salary, she contributed regularly to both parishes, but her favorite charity was missionary work among the American Indians. Bernie Kirk liked to say that his sister had “built half the tepees between here and the Rio Grande.”

From these diverse strands, Alice wove her own tapestry of devotion. What stirred her most was the Catholic aesthetic—the ritual, the pageantry, the sensuous feel of faith. Her favorite ritual was the May Procession, in which the children of St. Mary’s School marched through the Town’s streets to honor the Virgin Mary—the boys as Swiss Guards carrying pikes; the girls in long white gowns and flowing headdresses. Religious devotions were as important to her childhood as hopscotch or jumping rope. Every day at St. Mary’s School began and ended with prayer; and every Sunday morning the Kirk children trooped to the church for nine o’clock Mass. Never much of a Latin scholar, Alice couldn’t follow the liturgy, but the sonorous phrases, the sweet smell of incense, the rumble of the organ as it swelled beneath the vaulted ceiling, the morning sunlight shimmering through the stained-glass windows filled her with a sense of peace and harmony.

Those were palmy days for the Church in Charlestown, its authority still largely unchallenged. Priests like Monsignor Allchin, pastor of St. Mary’s from 1937 to 1955, brooked no disobedience from their parishioners. In 1951, when Allchin discovered that youngsters were sneaking out of his Masses to play street hockey, he ordered a curate named George Schlichte to stand guard at the door. Sure enough, as the Mass was only minutes old, a kid named Ryan scuttled down the aisle. “Where are you going, son?” asked Schlichte. “None
of your business, Father,” snapped the boy. When Schlichte recounted the story at lunch, the other curates laughed, but the pastor only nodded. Two months later, the boy came to the rectory looking for Schlichte. “Father,” he implored, “please call my parents and get them off my back.” It seemed that every morning for years, Allchin had walked by the family’s home, invariably greeting them with a “Good morning, Mr. Ryan” or a “Fine day, Mrs. Ryan.” But after the incident with their son, he had marched past without so much as a nod. The Ryans were deeply distressed, and when Mr. Ryan found out what had happened, he gave his son a beating, then told him, “Get up to the rectory and square us with the pastor.”

The Kirks never kowtowed to the Church that way. When Alice was fourteen, she and some friends staged an epic snowball tight on the Training Field. Just then, Father John Fogarty of St. Mary’s walked past. Ordering the children to halt their battle, he took their names, then called their homes to report them. Alice never forgot that incident. Over the years, it came to stand for the Church’s determination to exercise authority outside its realm, and like her father, she bridled at such presumption. Some years later, when she married Danny McGoff, Father Fogarty presided at the ceremony, and remembering that snowy day on the Training Field, Alice took her vows through half-gritted teeth.

If Alice needed further evidence of the Church’s inclination to meddle in temporal matters, she found it in the decision of Charlestown’s priests to immerse themselves in the Town’s urban renewal battles. It was a strategy born a few years earlier on the South Side of Chicago. When Saul Alinsky, the radical community organizer, sought to revive the deteriorating Woodlawn neighborhood, he struck a marriage of convenience with the Archdiocese of Chicago. Albert Cardinal Meyer knew that the Church had a heavy stake in neighborhoods like Woodlawn, whose Irish Catholic residents were departing faster than blacks could replace them. Alinsky and Meyer collaborated to halt the exodus and redevelop Woodlawn as an integrated community. Not only did the Cardinal order the neighborhood’s nine pastors to provide $10,000 per parish toward Alinsky’s efforts, he demanded wholehearted support for the redevelopment program, including endorsements from the pulpit. One pastor heatedly objected, warning that his white parishioners would never stand for it. “There’ll be war, there’ll be blood in the streets,” he said. “Well, Father,” replied the Cardinal, “prepare for war.”

One of Alinsky’s organizers in Woodlawn had been a Lithuanian Catholic named Joe Vilimas. In 1961, Ed Logue hired him away to organize community support for urban renewal in Charlestown. Not surprisingly, Vilimas made Woodlawn his model; once again, his campaign would be founded on an alliance with the Church.

Even before Vilimas arrived, Cardinal Cushing had signaled his support of Boston’s renewal by delegating his most intimate associate, Monsignor Francis J. Lally, to serve as chairman of the new Boston Redevelopment Authority. Lally took up residence at St. Catherine’s in Charlestown, where his very
presence was a visible symbol of the Cardinal’s commitment. Between them, Lally and Vilimas enlisted the three Charlestown pastors—Monsignors Flaherty, Shea, and Quirbach—in the renewal fight. The pastors didn’t need much persuasion. Like Meyer in Chicago, they saw the steady drain of young Catholics to the suburbs as a dire threat to their parishes. Renewal, they believed, would stem that tide.