The age of the Irish: What Ted Kennedy and John Sweeney built on

It requires no great leap backward in the Kennedy or Sweeney family histories to uncover their roots in Irish machines, both political and labor. Senator Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald (“Honey Fitz”), was the first native-born Irish American mayor of Boston. Sweeney’s father was a New York City bus driver active in his union. Kennedy could claim the intense allegiance of the Massachusetts Irish in his initial Senate races, though he strained some of that allegiance when he backed efforts to integrate Boston schools in the early 1970s. Sweeney first worked for the distinctly non-Irish International Ladies Garment Workers Union, but he soon became a leader of New York's building service union, whose janitors and doormen, once preponderantly Irish, had largely ceased to be so by the time Sweeney arrived.

No great mystery attends the diminution of the Irish presence in the leadership roles of the Democratic Party. By the mid-20th century, the Irish had begun moving to the suburbs and into a far wider range of occupations than their parents and grandparents ever could. Many intermarried. Many became Republicans. The old-line urban machines largely collapsed. Unions grew more diverse and, in time, weaker. But even as the Irish presence in Democratic institutions waned, Irish leadership remained wired into the DNA of many of these groups, so that some building trades unions with small Irish memberships still have Irish presidents, and Richie Daley still presides over a very polyglot Chicago. (This time lag is by no means peculiar to the Irish. America’s garment and apparel union, now the Workers United affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, is still led by Jews, as it has always been, though there probably aren’t half a dozen Jewish garment workers in the United States today.)

Irish American leaders of Democratic and labor institutions will continue to bubble up – but not necessarily in institutions that have been historically Irish American. Last month one Michael Mulgrew of Staten Island succeeded Randi Weingarten as head of the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union. Weingarten had been the third in a 50-year succession of Jewish UFT presidents – not surprisingly, since in its formative years the union was heavily Jewish. With Mulgrew now running the teachers union, the question becomes: When will a Jewish woman run one of New York’s building-trades locals?

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