The Boston Irish
From CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS
BOSTON
BRITAIN is a small mixed-in country. In general there is in Britain a similarity of trends and opinions between one part of the country and another. If one has learnt what is happening in one constituency, one can be pretty certain that similar tendencies will to some extent be showing themselves elsewhere. Of course, this is not so in the least in the gigantic United States.
I believe that President Johnson will win this election, but that is for the moment merely be- cause I have read as much in the newspapers —and I could have read them just as well if I had stayed behind in England. All that I have seen as yet in my first week in the United States is Boston and Harvard plus a couple of trips down the coast to North Andover and to Bridgeport in Connecticut. There is no reason why Boston's opinions should coincide with those of the rest of the United States, and, indeed, if they do, it is largely through accident. But certainly in Boston it is hard to find any sug- gestion that such a being as a supporter of Senator Goldwater exists.
Boston, as everybody knows, was a town Puritan and Protestant in its origins which has subsequently been invaded by the Irish. The Irish are now the politically dominant power there. Massachusetts gave its support to Al Smith when the rest of the country was turning against him and, although—to be frank—the Kennedy family were not universally beloved in Boston, yet there was certainly sufficient 'local pride always to carry a Kennedy to victory in that State. The old Protestant families, however, though a minority, remained in protest. I am at the moment the guest of a lady of an old Boston family of Unitarian beliefs which has lived in the Common- wealth since the seventeenth century. She chanced, I remember, to be staying with us in England shortly before Kennedy's election, and she then explained to us with some disgust that the Ken- nedys were not only Irish—which was bad enough—but 'shanty Irish from the wrong side of the rails, not even lace-curtain Irish.'
In the eyes of intellectual Boston, John Ken- nedy had a little redeemed himself by going to Harvard, though the unsatisfiable critics who would have complained of hirti as a narrow bigot had he gone to Boston College or some other Catholic institution, were, of course, equally
ready to complain that he had gone to Harvard and tried to mix with Protestants only be- cause he was an ambitious man on the make. It is a commonplace in such circles that the Irish are incapable of culture, and the fact that there was a far more vigorous cultural life in Ken- nedy's White House than in that of either of his immediate predecessors is explained as all due to Mrs. Kennedy. Protestant Boston was not reconciled to the Kennedy dynasty and it is cer- tain that under other circumstances they would have put up a fight—even though it would prob- ably have been unsuccessful—to wrest Massa- chusetts from the Democrats, whether the Demo- cratic leader was Kennedy or Johnson. Johnson from Texas means little to Massachusetts and, other things being equal, the Republicans in Massachusetts would probably have polled better against Johnson than against Kennedy.
But, of course, Republicanism to the old Boston families means old-established, East Coast Republicanism. If somebody like Cabot Lodge had been the candidate, plenty of people in Boston—even though they were the minority— would have gone out and fought for him. As things have turned out, the Republicans have put up a candidate as unattractive to Massachusetts Republicanism as can be imagined. My Unitarian friend, who has never voted other than Republi- can in her life and has no liking for Johnson, yet thinks that she must vote for him. I have never been able to discover whether Senator Goldwater ever really did say that it would be a good thing if the East Coast could be towed out into the Atlantic and sunk there, but certainly I was told that he had said it in Alabama last Octo- ber and before he was a candidate, and in modern conditions you cannot hope to have little anec- dotes about you circulated in one part of the country without their being repeated in another. So, whatever it was exactly that he may have said, East Coast Republicans rightly think that a vic- tory for Goldwater would be a victory for the West over the East. Without enthusiasm, they tend to prefer Johnson.
As for the young, I do not want to attach too much importance to my generalisations from a very limited experience. I have read in news- paper stories of starry-eyed young football cham- pions who have rallied to the standard of Goldwater and who breathe their defiance at any foreigner who dares utter a word of criticism of their hero. I have no doubt that there are such. Indeed, I have seldom heard of anything more foolish than Bertrand Russell's effort to get a posse of non-Americans to sign a letter express- ing their opposition to Goldwater's election. I am told that the rumour of that move has won a certain amount of sympathy for Goldwater among college students and I can well imagine it. But my impression of Harvard undergraduates —and they assure me that it is much the same elsewhere—is that they are as a rule singularly apolitical. They are very unwilling to enlist them- selves in any political party. They are fairly in- different about their votes. But they are fond of adventure, and adventure means, to an extent that it never meant in their parents' day, going abroad to see the world. Of those foreign travellers a number, of course, go on pedestrian and conven- tional tourist trips. But many follow after stranger adventures. I met last night a young man who had travelled on foot and without money from Calcutta to Delhi, and very strange things he had seen. Others had had equally remarkable adventures.
Now Kennedy's plan to harness this spirit of adventure in youth for the service of the underdeveloped countries was wise and astute. There could not, it seems to me, be an ambition less attractive to American youth today than Goldwater's ambition to produce an America that has turned its back on the world and shut itself up in a North American ghetto. Fifty years ago, the West was the frontier and the place of adventure. Today, the West is as full of com- puters and cash-registers as the rest of the coun- try and adventure is now to be found abroad. The young want to go places, to see the world, to get mixed up in it. Or so at least it is in the East. The old America certainly wants to be new. Whether the new America wants to become old, I shall be able to see in a week or two.
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