Real Lace by Stephen; Birmingham Page B

houses.”
    The cellars of Boston, meanwhile, provided even worse housing than those of New York, and were usually windowless hollows carved out of the earth, completely without ventilation, drainage, or any form of plumbing. Families doubled and tripled up to occupy these holes, and it was not surprising to find as many as forty people living in a single tiny cavity. Drunkenness and crime and violence soared. In 1848 complaints for capital offenses increased 266 percent over the preceding five years, and assaults on police officers rose 400 percent while other forms of assault jumped 465 percent. The outraged Boston authorities declared that Massachusetts was becoming “the moral cesspool of the civilized world.”
    Beggars by the thousands roamed the Boston streets. The sick grew sicker and the starving died. By an ironic quirk of human logic, Boston’s aristocrats had no trouble regarding the starving and dying populace in Ireland as “poor unfortunates,” and the Protestant churches on Beacon Hill were filled with sermons counseling mercy and kindness for those benighted souls. And yet these same Irish, having managed to make their way across the Atlantic, were categorized as the dregs and filth of human society, a scourge and disgrace to Boston, and an intolerable burden on the taxpayer.
    It is also ironic that upper-class Boston, otherwise so culturally and intellectually liberal, simply could not then—and cannot today—accept the Irish as candidates for social equality. In the pre-Civil War South, the enslaved blacks could count on the supportof the Boston Brahmin abolitionists. Upper-crust Yankees throughout New England—where religion was so firmly rooted in the Old Testament (Harvard was the first college in America to offer a course in Hebrew)—could also look with kindness on the Jews (such anti-Semitism as there was always had its base in the lower classes). But there were only a very few philo-Celtic Protestants. The rest looked with utter disdain upon the Irish. As Daniel Moynihan has put it in Beyond the Melting Pot , “The Irish were the one oppressed people on earth the American Protestants could never quite bring themselves wholeheartedly to sympathize with. They would consider including insurgent Greece within the protection of the Monroe Doctrine, they would send a warship to bring the rebel Kossuth safe to the shores of liberty, they would fight a war and kill half a million men to free the Negro slaves. But the Irish were different.” And of even such a devout supporter of minority causes as Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph P. Lash has said that “Somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was part of her Protestant heritage.”
    As the fictional George Apley in John P. Marquand’s novel put it in a letter to his son in New York, “We have our Irish and you your Jews, and both of them are crosses to bear.” In Boston the luckiest Irish, perhaps, were the healthy young women who were able to find jobs as serving girls in the homes of Boston’s rich. In those more spacious days, over a century ago, the top floor of every rich man’s house was the servants’ floor, divided into cubicles where the housemaids slept, and a strong Irish maid would work seven days a week, with time off for six o’clock Sunday Mass, for room and board and as little as four dollars a month. Household service might seem to go against the Irish grain, but it was something these girls could do with a small amount of pride. Their mothers had taught them to cook and wash and sew; they loved children, and made excellent nannies; their Church had taught them orderliness, neatness, honesty, personal cleanliness, andabove all virtue. An “Irish virgin” was certain to remain that way, and it was not long’ before every proper Boston home had its “Bridget” in the nursery, the laundry, or the scullery.
    To be sure, the