The Irish Road to the White House

The story of how the Irish rose to the top of American politics.

The machines shouldn’t be romanticized. There’s no doubt they were riddled with corruption (and the corruption often grew worse at moments when the entire country was off on one of its financial benders or when a strange interlude like Prohibition made illegality easy and lucrative). There’s also no doubt that, as well as serving up some extraordinary political figures like Charles Murphy and Al Smith, the machines added a degree of practicality and democratic realism to American politics. In the long run they served their primary purpose, giving the Irish and other immigrants space to reorganize apart from the control of Anglo-Saxon ruling classes and assisting their passage into America. The machines eventually went away not because they were corrupt or intrinsically evil but because they’d served their purpose and weren’t needed anymore.

The magic moment came with J.F.K.’s inauguration as president. Irish Americans, once despised as immiscible outsiders whose presence threatened the very future of the American republic, were now quintessential insiders. “After Jack Kennedy, anything was possible,” writes William Kennedy. “Goddammit, we’ve been president, and you can’t hold us back anymore.”

In a wider sense, the long-standing notion that America’s highest elective office was forever reserved for one group of Americans to the exclusion of all others had been dispelled. In traveling the road they did, Irish Americans had opened that road for others to travel. Courtesy: Kennedy LIbrary

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