Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (2 page)

Eager to take an active role in politics, Fitzgerald was elected to Congress in 1895. He split his time between West Concord and Washington, but the idyllic setting, close proximity to her own Hannon family, good schools, and a large home with servants were ample compensation to Josie for her husband’s frequent absence. Honey Fitz, though, never forgot his love for the crowded and vibrant culture of Boston. His decision to run for mayor of Boston in 1905 was reason to move his family back to the city.
The compromise for taking Josie away from her rural home was a beautiful mansion on Welles Avenue in Dorchester, with an easy commute to the heart of the city.

By the time of Honey Fitz’s run, the Boston Irish had become a powerful constituency, having demanded and won, over the course of several decades, a bigger role in the city’s governance as well as in its economic and social institutions. Consolidating political power through the ward-boss system, a particularly effective organizing tool rooted in close-knit neighborhood organizations and committees, the Irish capitalized on their settlement in nearly all districts of the city, building strong and sophisticated political machines. This system enabled Fitzgerald to win a hotly contested mayoral race in December 1905, when Rose was fifteen years old. But he differed markedly from his immigrant Ireland-born predecessors: he was part of a younger, progressive generation of American Irish Catholics, campaigning for the poor, hungry, jobless, and downtrodden. Though Fitzgerald had already served in various city, state, and national offices, his election as the city’s mayor was a milestone for Puritan Boston. He had run against Patrick Kennedy, Joe’s father, and in spite of Kennedy’s loss, the two men remained cordial friends and sometimes political allies.
Their distinct political power bases were both valuable and representative of a diverse Irish community.

The alliance between Honey Fitz and Patrick Kennedy had its basis in political and social interactions over the years; their families had summered in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, since both Rose and Joe were toddlers. But it was not until the summer of 1906, after Rose graduated from Dorchester High School and Joe was looking toward a final year at the prestigious Boston Latin School, that the two teenagers became reacquainted. Their immediate at
traction upon being reintroduced to each other in Old Orchard Beach through mutual friends blossomed into love.

Rose during this heady time was well positioned, as the newly elected mayor’s daughter, to step into Boston Irish society. Not only was she considered beautiful, but also her intellect and outgoing personality rounded out her position as one of the aspiring new women of Irish Boston.
She took courses in foreign languages, perfected piano at the New England Conservatory, volunteered at the Boston Public Library, and participated in German and French cultural associations in the city. She thrived in the spotlight.

Rose had become her father’s companion on the campaign trail, appearing frequently with him, even as a high school senior, in place of her mother at Boston parades, luncheons, dinners, political rallies, and more. When she was born, in 1890, Rose filled a deep void in Fitzgerald’s life. Two sisters and one brother had died in infancy, and his mother had died in 1880. When he married Josie Hannon of Acton and brought her to the North End home where he lived with his nine surviving brothers, she was the first woman to live in the house since their mother had died. He desperately wanted a baby girl, and his prayers were answered in Rose. A close family friend later told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin that “his love for her . . . was greater than any feeling he had ever known.”
Rose thrived as her father’s eldest; beautiful and smart, she was his favorite among his three daughters. She returned his adoration: “To my mind,” she later told Goodwin, “there was no one in the world like my father. Wherever he was, there was magic in the air.”
Outgoing and quick of wit like her father, Rose enjoyed the political and social world of her father as much as he did. She was an ideal stand-in for her mother,
who preferred the privacy and cloistered life of her own home and family.

Fitzgerald had high expectations in suitors for his eldest daughter. “My father,” Rose wrote many years later, “had extravagant notions of my beauty, grace, wit, and charm.” As she grew older, “these delusions deepened. I suppose no father really thinks any man is good enough for his daughter.” He was, she concluded, “a hopeless case.”
Rose complained that her father refused to allow her to attend school dances or to socialize with boys and young men. In her mind, her father was excessively conservative and overly protective.
Once the family returned from Old Orchard Beach that fall of 1906, dating posed considerable challenges for Rose and Joe. Undaunted by Honey Fitz’s rules, the young couple would remain committed to each other, finding ways to see each other without her father’s knowing.

Rose at this time was determined to participate in the burgeoning freedoms available in the modernizing new century. Women were moving into the public sphere in droves; they were working in business, retail, health care, law, social work, education, the arts, and more. Educational opportunities for women were expanding, social mores were relaxing, and women’s political power was growing. Though lacking the vote, women organized—often through women’s clubs, unions, and progressive reform groups—to lobby for legislation affecting wages, working conditions, urban politics, education, and public health.

Rose’s aspirations included college, and living in Boston made the pursuit of higher education a possibility. Home to several secular universities and colleges, Boston offered middle-class and some working-class women educational and professional training not available in many other parts of the country. At sixteen, however, Rose was a little young to enter college immediately after
her graduation, so she decided to take a postgraduate year in preparatory classes at Dorchester High School to further groom her for the rigors of college.

By the time Rose was contemplating college, Catholic institutions of higher learning for women were still few. Convent schools had long been the standard, though most did not confer college degrees. The Catholic Church in the United States had just begun its commitment to establishing private Catholic colleges and universities, but they were for men exclusively. Secular, Protestant, and Methodist colleges in the Boston area, including Simmons, Harvard, Wellesley, and Boston University, all accepted women either directly or in annexed institutions, like Radcliffe at Harvard, educating women in mostly segregated classrooms.

Even a separate Catholic primary and secondary school system was slow in coming. Frustrated by the discrimination and bullying that Catholic students were facing every day in Boston’s public schools, the local Catholic archbishop, John Williams, began establishing Catholic parochial schools throughout the region starting in the 1880s.
Such bold maneuvers by the Catholic Church, Boston’s Brahmins imagined, threatened the very foundations of civil society and undermined cherished Puritan values. Protestant denominations had long dominated private schools, but New England’s Yankee and Protestant elite had also defined public-school education through well-delineated curriculum standards for more than two centuries. How could this elite control the Irish population if it could not control who was teaching Irish children?

Once the process started, however, mostly through small schools attached to local churches, the number of Catholic schools for children in Boston grew rapidly. The quality of these schools varied. Even so, dedicated nuns and a few lay teachers brought
more than a few programs up to the high standards of other New England public and private schools. By 1900, Catholic schools in the large urban centers, where immigrants settled nearly exclusively, were considered a “safety valve for the public system” that was groaning under the weight of immigration and grossly overcrowded classrooms.
Some diocesan schools offered the latest in manual and vocational training in addition to the usual academic subjects, providing a path to jobs and a way out of poverty.

Mayor Fitzgerald, even as a Catholic public figure, believed strongly in public education. The mayor’s brother Henry recalled that Fitzgerald sent Rose and her brothers and sisters to Concord public schools because he believed that “public schools were training grounds for success in the world.”
This, although his choice conflicted with the wishes of the Archdiocese of Boston. Under the leadership of Archbishop William O’Connell, the archdiocese pressured Catholic families to send their children to Catholic schools, even if they were inferior, while influential Catholic theologians directed Catholics to invest in parochial schools.
O’Connell’s colleague Archbishop Ireland of Minnesota claimed, in 1906, that “the peril of the age, the peril of America is secularism in schools and colleges.” Parents “should bend their energies to give their children a thoroughly Catholic education. There is no room for argument,” he expounded. “Nothing but the daily drill in the teachings of the faith . . . will sink so deeply into the soul of the child that it must remain there through life unaltered and unwavering.” Otherwise, he warned, the “losses to the faith will be immense.”
By 1910 nearly fifteen percent of all students in Massachusetts attended parochial schools.

The Catholic Church had taken a conservative tack at the turn of the century, and its separatist views fueled even more distrust and fear among non-Catholics. Anxiety over Catholic control of
education, in combination with the rising tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who did not speak English and who dressed oddly, practiced different religious customs, and ate strange foods, sparked raging nativism. Anti-Catholicism reached a fever pitch, at levels not seen since the decades prior to the Civil War.

Nevertheless, when his family moved to Dorchester and could easily attend one of Boston’s many elementary and secondary Catholic schools, Fitzgerald enrolled his children in the public schools. He ignored the directive from the church, and as mayor he in fact supported expansion of the public-school system to accommodate the growing influx of immigrant children and their parents.

During Rose’s postgraduate college-preparatory year at Dorchester High, she applied to Wellesley College, located on the shores of Lake Waban, twenty miles outside of Boston. One of the nation’s premier colleges, Wellesley, founded in 1870, offered a rigorous liberal arts education exclusively for women. Its world-renowned faculty taught students who as graduates numbered among the most notable female social, scientific, political, literary, and economic pioneers and leaders of the day. Rose was eager to explore new intellectual pursuits, and when she and three of her friends, Ruth Evans, Vera Legg, and Marguerite O’Callaghan, were all accepted into the fall freshman class, she was ecstatic.

Rose and her friends would be among a very few young American women to graduate from high school and attend college at the time. Fifty-five percent of Boston’s high school graduates were young women, but only 12 percent of all students of high school age graduated.
From 1900 to 1920, the percentage of all women attending college in the United States rose steadily, from 3 percent of high school graduates to 7.6 percent—similar rates
to those for men. Although women constituted nearly 40 percent of total college enrollments and 20 percent of graduates, the great majority attended teachers’ colleges, or “normal schools,” which were overwhelmingly female-centered, offered a relatively short period of study, and did not grant bachelor’s degrees.
Rose’s decision, and financial ability, to attend a four-year women’s college put her among the most elite of American women.

Wellesley was a secular college. In spite of the school’s strong emphasis on church attendance and Christian values and beliefs, Catholic leaders were suspicious of its Protestant foundation. They feared the independence fostered at such institutions, preferring instead a strict, sex-segregated Catholic education featuring instruction in a far less progressive curriculum than that offered by colleges like Wellesley. In the general culture, too, concerns that a college education made a woman unattractive for marriage fueled deeply held fears about spinsterhood, keeping many women from achieving educational goals and self-supporting careers.

However, Rose’s parents allowed her to make her own decision. She had received the blessing of her father to apply to Wellesley as a day student. Her Honey Fitz was a modern man, and his bright daughter would be a new woman of the age. Smart, cultured, sure of herself, Rose would be the perfect “Wellesley girl,” or so she thought.

On the eve of her departure for college, in September 1907, Rose’s parents sat her down and told her she would not, after all, be joining her friends and attending Wellesley. Rose was crushed. She begged her father—she knew the decision was her father’s, not her mother’s—but he was immovable. “There was screaming and yelling, absolute madness,” Rose later told Kerry McCarthy, a close relative.

Though unaware of the details at the time, Rose came to un
derstand that her father had chosen his politics over her future. Fitzgerald had been warned by Boston’s Archbishop O’Connell that his days as mayor could be numbered if he did not embrace O’Connell’s brand of Catholic conservatism. The mayor should, he was told, commit to shaping a new, separatist Catholic power structure within the city. Honey Fitz, well into his reelection campaign for mayor and in the throes of a crippling political-corruption and graft scandal that threatened to derail his administration and his candidacy, could not afford O’Connell’s disfavor. The archbishop could easily throw his support in the upcoming election—and the Catholic vote—behind another candidate. When O’Connell learned that Rose was going to attend Wellesley, he warned Fitzgerald that Boston’s Catholic voters would disapprove. The mayor’s daughter was one of the leading young women in the city, O’Connell argued, whose example other young Catholic women sought to follow. If she went to Wellesley, O’Connell feared, these young women and their families would be “heeding the siren call of secularism,” and the bishop would be forced publicly to condemn Rose.