Grampa Honey Fitz

The three-act play runs a century: sixty years from the Great Famine in Ireland to the election of John Francis Fitzgerald—“Honey Fitz” to Massachusetts—as mayor of Boston; forty more years to see his name-sake-grandson, the twenty-nine-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, elected to Congress from a Boston district as the first planned step to the Presidency. Those three dates, cut so deep in Boston’s history, mark the beginning, middle and end of a phenomenon as old as history itself— the superseding of one class by another. Seventy years earlier the seaport peninsula had seen it all happen before when on a blustery March day in 1775 Lord Howe embarked the Boston garrison, and the provincial aristocracy sailed away with the redcoats into exile. Those proudly armigerous Brattles and Vassalls and Dudleys and Hutchinsons abandoned the town to the non-armigerous class below them.

As Boston resumed its pace after the Revolution the old mansions had new faces in them. “Fellows who would have cleaned my shoes five years ago now ride in chariots,” a disgruntled relative of General Joseph Warren observed. The emergents were the sober, hard-faced merchants, men who would never dream of giving up their new counting houses for moth-eaten loyalties. Inheriting the town by default, they—within the limits of their bourgeois sobriety—came to adopt the behavior pattern of their predecessors. One can mark the two eras by comparing the Palladian sophistication of Governor Shirley’s Roxbury mansion (1745) with the naiveté of Bulfinch’s State House (1795), just as one can mark the next emergence in the contrast of the brick Federalist town houses of Beacon Hill with the Hyannis compound.

The three-act play runs a century: sixty years from the Great Famine in Ireland to the election of John Francis Fitzgerald—“Honey Fitz” to Massachusetts—as mayor of Boston; forty more years to see his name-sake-grandson, the twenty-nine-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, elected to Congress from a Boston district as the first planned step to the Presidency. Those three dates, cut so deep in Boston’s history, mark the beginning, middle and end of a phenomenon as old as history itself— the superseding of one class by another. Seventy years earlier the seaport peninsula had seen it all happen before when on a blustery March day in 1775 Lord Howe embarked the Boston garrison, and the provincial aristocracy sailed away with the redcoats into exile. Those proudly armigerous Brattles and Vassalls and Dudleys and Hutchinsons abandoned the town to the non-armigerous class below them.

As Boston resumed its pace after the Revolution the old mansions had new faces in them. “Fellows who would have cleaned my shoes five years ago now ride in chariots,” a disgruntled relative of General Joseph Warren observed. The emergents were the sober, hard-faced merchants, men who would never dream of giving up their new counting houses for moth-eaten loyalties. Inheriting the town by default, they—within the limits of their bourgeois sobriety—came to adopt the behavior pattern of their predecessors. One can mark the two eras by comparing the Palladian sophistication of Governor Shirley’s Roxbury mansion (1745) with the naiveté of Bulfinch’s State House (1795), just as one can mark the next emergence in the contrast of the brick Federalist town houses of Beacon Hill with the Hyannis compound.