In 1958, in response to an alarming uptick in xenophobic chatter, the Anti-Defamation League asked then-Senator John F. Kennedy to write about America’s melting-pot strengths...
Boston had been a hub of anti-slavery activism, but otherwise it was hardly a model of integration or tolerance. Take Boston artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who helped create the telegraph and Morse code. Though he later said his invention aspired to make “one neighborhood of the whole country,” Morse’s electromagnetic dots and dashes were originally designed as a secret code that could be used to defeat a rumored plot to make “Popery” the law of the land.
Today, the street corners of the Kennedys’ East Boston neighborhood are anchored by bodegas and Latin markets. Those startup businesses, many run by immigrants from Brazil and Mexico, replaced the Italian delis that in turn had replaced the Irish grocery shops like the one JFK’s great-grandmother Bridget ran for twenty years after the Civil War—and the Irish saloons like those that helped launch the late-1800s political career of Bridget’s son, P.J..
When Lodge ran for the U.S. Senate in 1892, his support for strict immigration limits and a proposed federal literacy test for newcomers helped him defeat Irish Congressman Patrick Collins, whom Lodge decried as “hard-drinking, idle, quarrelsome, and disorderly.” Many of Lodge’s nativist ideas, including the literacy test, were later incorporated into the Immigration Act of 1917.
Decades later, the grandson of P.J. Kennedy and “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald defeated the grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge, and midway through his Senate term JFK penned his hopeful views on the subject of Americanism: “There is no part of America that has not been touched by our immigrant background,” he wrote. Kennedy also lobbied inagainst a quota system that favored the Northern and Western European countries of his ancestors, and discriminated against immigrants from Asia and Africa.
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