Between Joe and Honey Fitz
As teenagers in the first decade of the twentieth century, Rose Fitzgerald and Joe Kennedy fell deeply in love. Rose’s father responded by sending her to a convent in Holland.
The protective father in question was career politician John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Born in 1863 in Boston to Irish immigrants, Honey Fitz would come to cover the waterfront of Massachusetts politics; he served on the Boston Common Council, in the state senate, then for two terms in the US House of Representatives, then for two (noncontinuous) terms as the mayor of Boston. A short, powerfully built man with intense blue eyes, he was a born politician who loved to work a crowd. He crooned “Sweet Adeline” at nearly every campaign stop, “was loud, brash, unrestrained on the stump, an indefatigable backslapper and handshaker.” He married the lovely but much more retiring Josie Hannon in 1889 and Rose, the eldest of their six children, was born on July 22 of the following year. Josie was a deeply devout Catholic, and she inculcated strict adherence to the religion in the children, as would Rose a generation later with her nine children.
If daily mass and praying the rosary were habits Rose inherited from her mother, her father transmitted his love of campaigning. Shy Josie mostly abdicated her role as political wife in favor of raising her children. “Mother had a limited capacity for the official social swirl,” Rose would later write, and from an early age, the energetic, outgoing, articulate Rose served as her proxy. “I’ve been in the limelight since I was practically five years old,” she was fond of saying. As a teenager, she was covered by the local newspapers as she joined her father on many public appearances.
When not appearing at campaign stops with her flamboyant father, she was attending a series of Catholic schools, where the nuns further instilled in her the importance of personal, daily devotion to the faith.
Rose’s upbringing was Victorian, an era and ethos that from our vantage seem archaic, restrictive, and conservative. Women actualized themselves, according to Victorian mores, in motherhood. The one progressive impulse in the Victorian era was the new insistence that girls should be well educated—that they be so in order to better raise educated sons was taken for granted. It seems that Rose never seriously questioned any of this. “As motherhood is the greatest and most natural God-given gift for women for posterity,” she would write in the 1960s, “it would seem that the birth and rearing of children in the way which to us seems most ideal, would be the most satisfying and the most rewarding career for a woman.” In motherhood, she believed, was real power: the power to mold a child. “Her words will influence him, not for a day or a month or a year, but for time and eternity and perhaps for future generations.”
As a girl Rose’s intellectual verve was undeniable. Graduating from Dorchester High, south of Boston, at only age fifteen, she set her sights on Wellesley College, an elite, all-women’s liberal arts college outside of Boston. Her father vetoed the idea: Even after two years of additional convent schooling, he claimed she was too young. Wellesley was also a secular school, and it would not do for an Irish Catholic political figure to send his daughter to a non-Catholic institution. Instead, she took classes at the Sacred Heart Convent in Boston and improved her piano skills at the New England Conservatory of Music.
It was around this time that Rose began dating the son of Patrick J. Kennedy, a banker, liquor importer, and a force in Boston’s ward politics. P. J., as he was known, was often at odds with, and occasionally a wary ally of, Honey Fitz. Fitzgerald didn’t like him, and he didn’t like the Kennedy boy either.
The boy, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, was a couple of years older than Rose, a tall, athletic, handsome student at Boston Latin, a prestigious boys’ high school that was a feeder school to Harvard University. While not a star in the classroom, he excelled in athletics: a year-round athlete, he played football, basketball, and baseball and captained the tennis team. He was gregarious, charming, and well-liked, already popular with young ladies by the time he started dating Rose. Excluded from many Protestant economic and social institutions, Irish Catholic Boston was, at the time, a tight and interconnected population. The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds had been vacationing in the same spot—Old Orchard Beach, Maine, a popular resort for Boston’s Irish Catholics—since Rose was eight. In 1906, Joe invited her to a high school dance. “He was a very good baseball player,” Rose later remembered. “He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke . . . and then he was a very good polite Catholic.” Rose was sold. Her father, emphatically not. He refused to let her go.
And so Rose invited Joe to a dance at Dorchester High. What followed was a furtive courtship, enabled by many friends and even Honey Fitz’s chauffeur. “It took teamwork and conspiracy, because we needed reliable allies,” she would remember. “During that last year at Dorchester High, and the following year, when I was commuting to Sacred Heart, Joe and I managed to see each other rather often. Less often than we would have liked, but more often than my father was aware of.” Though she risked incurring her father’s wrath, her early relationship with Joe was remarkably innocent, in keeping with the time for a respectable, Catholic girl. They attended lectures together, met each other at friends’ gatherings, and took walks, which were almost always chaperoned.
But in 1908, Honey Fitz, wounded by losing reelection to the mayor’s office, separated the couple by sending Rose to the aforementioned Dutch convent. He took Josie, Rose, and her younger sister Agnes to Europe “for what Rose presumed was a brief vacation.” The family toured Europe for more than two months, seeing England, France, Switzerland, and Germany in rapid succession. It’s unclear exactly when Honey Fitz told the girls that they’d be left at Blumenthal, a Sacred Heart convent school near Belgium. In her memoirs, Rose would only write, suggestively in the passive voice, that “toward the end of that summer, it was decided Agnes and I would stay on for a year of school.”
Despite the abruptness with which they found themselves enrolled, Rose and Agnes adjusted to life at the international school. The atmosphere was Spartan and severe, but the education topflight. Rose sharpened her German and French by conversing with the many native speakers of each among her classmates. She stifled her intense feelings of homesickness and hit the books, all the while keeping Joe’s photo on her writing table. Rose was allowed to return to the States in 1909, when her father decided to run again for mayor of Boston.
After more than a year away, her passion for Joe was as intense as ever, as was Honey Fitz’s disapproval. Not yet realizing the hopelessness of his efforts to snuff out the romance, he again sent her to a convent school, this time in New York City, and then on to Manhattanville College. At Manhattanville she studied without ever receiving a degree, as the school wouldn’t have the state certification to award degrees until years later. It was very different from the Wellesley that she had so ardently hoped to attend.
“Rose’s gender clearly fettered her education,” wrote Rose Kennedy biographer Barbara Perry. “She possessed an inquiring intellect, a facility for languages, and a prodigious academic work ethic, but her father confined her to stultifying convents and Catholic finishing schools.” Although Manhattanville was not Wellesley, Rose nevertheless developed an abiding affection for it, and she found it perfectly suitable years later for her own daughters, Jean and Eunice.
Rose also showed her intellectual energy, not to mention her frenetic, find-a-way enthusiasm, in her establishment of the Lenox Avenue Club (later the Ace of Clubs) in 1910. Barred as a Catholic from WASP social clubs like the Junior League, Rose simply started her own, and she insisted on giving it intellectual heft. The meetings usually featured a guest speaker on some political or social issue, and a premium was placed on knowledge of current events, as it would later be at the Kennedy dinner table. Rose was decidedly not a feminist: She would hold, throughout her life, the belief that a woman’s most natural fulfillment was found in the raising of children. But she believed fully in the ability of women to engage their minds with—and form educated opinions on—issues facing the larger world.
The same year, 1910, as Joe Kennedy was toiling at Harvard, Honey Fitz narrowly recaptured the mayor’s office and Rose prepared for her society debut. Since she was the daughter of the mayor, her debut reception, attended by more than five hundred people, was covered by the Boston newspapers. Joe and his parents were in attendance, though Honey Fitz still had not accepted Rose’s choice of a beau. When Joe invited Rose to Harvard’s junior prom in 1911, Honey Fitz forbade her to accept, despite the fact that she was almost twenty-one years old. And he employed his usual strategy for keeping the two apart: He got his daughter out of town. He sent her to Palm Beach, Florida. Then he sent her to Europe for six weeks. He prevailed upon her to accompany him on visits to Chicago, Indiana, New Jersey, and all over Massachusetts. He took her to Central and South America. He did everything in his power to keep Rose separated from Joe Kennedy.
Joe graduated from Harvard in June 1912 and, after a stint as a bank examiner for the state, became, at age twenty-five, the youngest bank president in the United States. He ably took the helm of Columbia Trust, the small East Boston bank his father had founded. In the meantime he continued to see other women. According to Joe Kennedy biographer David Nasaw: “At Harvard and after graduation, Joe remained faithful to Rose in the way that men of his generation and class remained faithful to their best girls. He did not court other marriageable women, but neither did he remain chaste awaiting his wedding day.” He dated chorus girls and was remembered by contemporaries as “a ladies’ man.”
If Rose knew about Joe’s proclivities, she most likely wasn’t overly bothered. Despite the piety of her upbringing, she was raised in a home where a husband’s infidelity was more or less normalized. As a teenager, Rose knew perfectly well what it meant that her father was away so often, and why it angered her mother. In 1914, as Fitzgerald commenced yet another reelection campaign, his rival, James Michael Curley, threatened to release details of mayoral corruption and of Honey Fitz’s affair with a cigarette girl named “Tootles” Ryan, who at twenty-three was the same age as his daughter. Fitz had no choice but to drop out of the race.
It was around this time that Rose decided that she would marry Joe, Honey Fitz be damned. “I had read all these books about [how] your heart should rule your head,” she later wrote. “I was very romantic and no two ways about it.” On October 7, 1914, the two married in the private chapel of Cardinal William Henry O’Connell. The reception, a relatively small affair with only seventy-five guests, took place at the Fitzgerald home in Dorchester.
Their three-week honeymoon, bookended by brief stays in New York, included seeing the 1914 World Series in Philadelphia followed by ten days of horseback riding, golf, and tennis at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and a short trip to Atlantic City. At the end of October, they returned to Boston and moved into their new home at 83 Beals Street, in the suburb of Brookline.