Real Lace (6 page)

Thomas and Catherine Murray had, over a spate of years, eight children. And, as the number of Thomas E. Murray's patents increased, so did the inventor's fortune. He was also proving himself to be a bold and assertive businessman. Once, when he and his partner, Mr. Edison, needed some power lines strung up in a hurry, Mr. Murray went to the telephone company and asked whether he could use their poles. The telephone company said no. Thomas Murray and his crew went out in the dead of night and put the lines along the telephone poles anyway. When someone suggested that the telephone company might object, and rip the power lines down in the morning, Murray shook his head and said, “No, the telephone company is so scared of power that they'll
never touch us.” He was right, and to this day in certain outlying areas Consolidated Edison and the telephone company still share their poles, in a state of uneasy coexistence.

The great Murray house was built at 783 St. Marks Avenue—he felt comfortable living on a street named after a saint. Although it did not contain its own private chapel, where Mass could be celebrated for the family, Murray was given the privilege, unusual even for rich Catholics, of keeping the Holy Sacrament in his own house and could thus live in the continuous presence of the Host. The children were dutifully enrolled, one by one, in Catholic schools. Thomas E. Murray was made a Knight of St. Gregory and a Knight of Malta, two of the most prestigious Papal orders. During World War I, meanwhile, his invention for welding shells was found to be the only one that could be used in the production of the 240-millimeter mortar shell, which earned him, in addition to another fortune in government contracts, a special commendation from the War Department. For the dozens of safety appliances he had invented, he received in 1913 the gold medal of the American Museum of Safety in New York. He became president of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, the Murray Manufacturing Company and, eventually, headed five different corporations. At night, he kept sheets of copperplate by his bedside. Whenever an idea for a new invention struck him, he would get up and carefully sketch it out on a copper sheet with a metal stylus. He also installed an alarm in his bedroom, and whenever anything went wrong in one of his power plants, the alarm would go off and Grandpa Murray would leap from his bed and head for the trouble.

His father-in-law, Dan Bradley, remained a powerful figure in Brooklyn politics. Once, when two of his Murray grandsons were arrested for throwing a baseball through a neighbor's window, Dan Bradley marched down to the station house, pounded on the sergeant's desk, and said, “Do you realize that if these two boys are
booked on this they'll never be able to hold political office?” The boys were released, and the arresting officer—who happened to be an Irish Protestant—was chastised.

Thomas E. Murray was a stern, strict, and pious parent. Whenever one of his children had a date with a non-Catholic, that young person was required to wait for his escort in a special anteroom, kept just for Protestants, at 783 St. Marks. “Grandpa Murray was sort of the conscience of the family,” one of his grandchildren says. Another says, “The Murray brand of Catholicism was all hellfire and damnation—but we paid attention to him.” He could also be kind and generous. As the family grew, he established the practice of giving each child, on its birthday, a little sack containing five twenty-dollar gold pieces. This money, it turned out, represented honorariums which Grandpa Murray had received for attending directors' meetings of various companies. After the ceremony, to be sure, the money had to be returned to the patriarch to be banked in the child's name. He continued the practice with his grandchildren, and when one grandchild said shyly to him that he had entertained forty little boys at his birthday party, Grandpa Murray said, “Any boy who has had forty little boys at his birthday party should have another twenty dollars,” and handed the child another gold piece. He could also be stubborn. He never served a drink in his house until the advent of Prohibition. Then, however, he began serving cocktails every night because, as he put it, “Nobody is going to tell me what to do.”

He continued to love music and singing, and each Christmas he would pay a special visit to the prisoners at Rikers Island, and sing Christmas carols for them, bringing along his children's piano teacher as his accompanist. Such deeds were, he carefully explained to his children, Corporal Works of Mercy—caring for the hungry and the needy and the orphaned and imprisoned. Whenever a board meeting at one of his companies was ended, he liked to close the proceedings with a song. In return, his board members
sang for him, and children at the local parochial schools always appeared on the doorstep of the Murray mansion on Christmas Eve to serenade Tom Murray.

He enjoyed taking his children for outings at the theater or to the opera in New York, and the minute the group was settled in the back seat of the big chauffeur-driven car, and it was ready to pull away from the house, Mr. Murray would remove his beads from his vest pocket and, in a solemn and stentorian voice, would begin to recite the rosary, intoning, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible … and in Jesus Christ, His only son …” announcing all the Mysteries as he came to them, delivering a full ten Hail Marys at the appropriate intervals, pausing to cross himself whenever the car passed a church or a cemetery. The recital continued all the way into Manhattan. The children's Protestant friends were always somewhat baffled by these performances. And yet he considered this a vital ritual, and before any of the family started on a trip, or went into the water, there were prayers and blessings, and everyone was expected to cross himself. He had made, he liked to explain, only two trips to Europe in his life, and both times they had been pilgrimages to Catholic shrines. He also gave his children practical advice—particularly in the field he knew best, electricity. He lectured on how crucial electricity was to the life of New York City, how the city depended on it, and he was one of the first in the field to warn of the dangers—on city streets, where electricity controlled traffic and provided illumination, in apartment houses with electrically run elevators, in hospitals where electrical equipment kept patients alive—of massive blackouts that could occur if systems became overloaded. Long after his death, New Yorkers began to have firsthand experience of what Tom Murray had been talking about.

“Thomas Edison's invention may have been more spectacular and
showy,”
one of his grandchildren says, “with the incandescent
bulb. But Grandpa Murray virtually invented everything
but
the light bulb—the circuits, switches, dynamos, and power systems that got the electricity to the bulb. In my opinion, it was a more important contribution. After all, if there hadn't been a way to get the power into the bulbs, how would the bulbs light up?”

Meanwhile, Mr. Murray's children were steadily making their way into New York society. Mr. Murray rather liked and encouraged this, and enjoyed clipping items from society columns about his children's appearances at this or that “swell” party in Manhattan. In this preoccupation he was, again, very Irish-American. American Jews kept to themselves, and tended to shun “society” and actively to avoid seeing their names in the papers. But America's emergent Irish families were proving themselves a socially ambitious lot, bringing with them a strong sense of pride in their Irish heritage—as, whenever an Irish or Irish-sounding name was mentioned to one Boston dowager, she would always comment, “Well, if they were one of the First Irish Families, I would certainly know them.”

The Murray children were indeed attractive, and had the three prerequisites that are still needed for acceptance in society in New York: money, good looks, and good humor, which rank in importance in that order. The second-generation Murrays were all at once
very
social.

“Yes, I suppose you could say they were accepted,” says one member of New York's Protestant Old Guard. “But you always knew that they were Catholics. And, socially, the Murrays always remained—well, just a little bit different, a little bit
Brooklyn.”

*
No one personified Irish oratory better than Boston's Mayor “Honey Fitz,” who once told an audience, “Having been wined and dined by all the high potentates of Europe, I return to the old North End, where every cobblestone beneath my feet seems to say, ‘Welcome home, John F. Fitzgerald, welcome home.…'”

Chapter 4

“MURRAY BAY”

The first prominent New York Irishman to buy a summer home in Southampton, on Long Island's southeastern shore, was a New York lawyer named Morgan J. O'Brien. O'Brien—who was always called Judge O'Brien—was the first lawyer of Irish ancestry in the city to assume a place at the top of his profession comparable to the positions held by Protestants, and it is said that he paved the way for a good many other young Catholic lawyers to advance in the big “old family” firms downtown.

O'Brien bought a big Southampton place in the early 1920's, and Southampton was then, as it remains today, a resort for the second-rate rich, or at least for the
nouveau riche
. It has been said that Southampton was colonized in reaction to old-line Newport, which many younger people in society considered too restrictive and stiffly formal, but this is only partly true. The fact is that Newport's Old Guard would not accept many of the newer-rich
families, who, if they wanted a strip of Atlantic seashore for themselves, simply had to look elsewhere.

Certainly, the Irish families would not have been accepted in Newport, and they knew it. A New York lady of ancient Sephardic Jewish heritage recalls visiting a gentile friend in Newport and her friend saying at one point, “I do think our two peoples are getting closer together, don't you?” The Jewish lady replied that she indeed hoped so. With that, the non-Jewish Newporter said, “Of course we'll never accept the Catholics.”

Newport is, after all, in New England, and in New England—particularly in nearby Boston—the Irish experience had been quite different from what it had been in New York. The Irish immigration had disturbed big, bustling, competitive New York in only a relatively minor way, but its impact on prim old Boston had been shattering.

To begin with, Boston was a smaller city than New York, and geographically much less suited to immigrants. The suburbs could only be approached across bridges which required the payment of a twenty-cent toll in each direction, and so the hordes of arriving Irish who entered Boston Harbor during the famine years—or who struggled down from Grosse Île in Canada, both legally and illegally—were crowded into Ward Eight and the North End, districts that had formerly contained the homes of prosperous merchants. Neighborhoods were literally ruined as wealthy home-owners fled the invasion and fine old Federal houses were surrounded by jerrybuilt shanties and lean-tos. At one point, Paul Revere's splendid house in Ann Street was so completely encased by tenements that the house within became invisible. In the nine years prior to 1845, some 33,346 immigrants had landed in Boston, a figure which must be increased by 50 percent for those who made their way in by unrecorded or illegal means—or an average of 5,500 a year. These the city had been more or less able to absorb. In the single famine year of 1847, however, more than 37,000 immigrants
arrived in Boston, “three-quarters Irish labourers,” adding their poverty and weight to a city which, two years earlier, had contained a population of 114,366, and the Boston
Transcript
noted with alarm that “Groups of poor wretches were to be seen in every part of the city, resting their weary and emaciated limbs at the corners of the streets and in the doorways of both private and public houses.”

The cellars of Boston, meanwhile, provided even worse housing than those of New York, and were usually windowless hollows carved out of the earth, completely without ventilation, drainage, or any form of plumbing. Families doubled and tripled up to occupy these holes, and it was not surprising to find as many as forty people living in a single tiny cavity. Drunkenness and crime and violence soared. In 1848 complaints for capital offenses increased 266 percent over the preceding five years, and assaults on police officers rose 400 percent while other forms of assault jumped 465 percent. The outraged Boston authorities declared that Massachusetts was becoming “the moral cesspool of the civilized world.”

Beggars by the thousands roamed the Boston streets. The sick grew sicker and the starving died. By an ironic quirk of human logic, Boston's aristocrats had no trouble regarding the starving and dying populace in Ireland as “poor unfortunates,” and the Protestant churches on Beacon Hill were filled with sermons counseling mercy and kindness for those benighted souls. And yet these same Irish, having managed to make their way across the Atlantic, were categorized as the dregs and filth of human society, a scourge and disgrace to Boston, and an intolerable burden on the taxpayer.

It is also ironic that upper-class Boston, otherwise so culturally and intellectually liberal, simply could not then—and cannot today—accept the Irish as candidates for social equality. In the pre-Civil War South, the enslaved blacks could count on the support
of the Boston Brahmin abolitionists. Upper-crust Yankees throughout New England—where religion was so firmly rooted in the Old Testament (Harvard was the first college in America to offer a course in Hebrew)—could also look with kindness on the Jews (such anti-Semitism as there was always had its base in the lower classes). But there were only a very few philo-Celtic Protestants. The rest looked with utter disdain upon the Irish. As Daniel Moynihan has put it in
Beyond the Melting Pot
, “The Irish were the one oppressed people on earth the American Protestants could never quite bring themselves wholeheartedly to sympathize with. They would consider including insurgent Greece within the protection of the Monroe Doctrine, they would send a warship to bring the rebel Kossuth safe to the shores of liberty, they would fight a war and kill half a million men to free the Negro slaves. But the Irish were different.” And of even such a devout supporter of minority causes as Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph P. Lash has said that “Somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was part of her Protestant heritage.”