Patrick Collins This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. Dorchester Reporter, Dorchester MA USA

   www.dotnews.com/collins.html - [Cached]

   Published on: 1/3/2002   Last Visited: 1/4/2002

   On January 4, 1902, Patrick Collins was a proverbial man on a mission. The Dorchester resident was sworn in that day as Boston's first Irish mayor of the 20th Century.
   
   He had come a long way.
   
   ...
   Born on March 12, 1844, in County Cork, Ireland, Patrick Collins was little more than two when the Great Famine ravaged Ireland. His father, weakened by "The Hunger," succumbed to pneumonia before his son ever knew him, and the boy and his widowed mother boarded a "coffin ship" for Boston shortly afterward.
   
   Mother and son settled for several years in Chelsea's ramshackle, disease-riddled tenements. As did most Irish boys his age, Collins learned to scrap against Yankee bullies and those of his own heritage as well. He also learned to read and write in a public school, displaying a quick, facile intelligence.
   
   With college out of the question for a poor immigrant boy, Collins ended up working as a farmhand and a coal miner in Ohio for two years, but, in his teens, returned with his mother to Boston. They took a flat in South Boston. He continued his education on his own, one account asserting that he spent all day learning the upholsterer's trade and all night studying at the Boston Public Library.
   
   By 1864, he had grown into a sturdy young man, "a capable and highly paid [for an Irish tradesman of the day] workman."
   
   His bosses and his friends admired his "loyalty to his fellows" and his manner of speech, a winning combination of the proverbial "gift of gab" and a polish obtained through his countless hours of memorizing classic literature and oratory. Many of Collins's fellow immigrants would have been satisfied with the secure, unremarkable life his trade promised. Collins, however, had his eye on far more than that.
   
   Still seething with memories of "the Archangel Gabriel" and other indignities that his people endured daily from prejudiced Yankees, Collins intended to get even. His anger also stretched across the Atlantic, back to Ireland. Although he could not recall much of County Cork, "his knowledge of it, gained from his elders, must have been colored by the catastrophe of the famine in the midst of which his father died." In Collins's view, Yankee prejudice ranked with "English tyranny."
   
   Collins was a perfect recruit for the local immigrants plotting an uprising against the British once the Civil War ended and the Irish wearing Union blue could apply their bloody battlefield lessons against the British. Sometime in 1864, Collins strode into a meeting of the South Boston Fenian Circle and soon established himself as "a man to watch" in the movement. Enflamed with the would-be rebels' anti-British rhetoric, he took a job as a recruiting agent for the Brotherhood, lining up "soldiers" from Boston to New York. But in the wake of the Fenians' tragi-comic forays against British-held Canada after the Civil War, disillusionment, as well as a waning interest in revolutionary violence, gripped Collins. He came to the belief that the only way to seize equality was not through bullets, but through the ballot box.
   
   Collins walked in the fall of 1867 into a different sort of meeting &emdash; South Boston's Irish Democratic caucus. Already known as a highly intelligent man and gifted speaker, he was welcomed into the bruising world of Boston politics.He had found his element.
   
   Collins started small by winning a slot as a delegate to the Democratic convention, and, in 1868, he rode a wave of Boston Irish votes to the state's House of Representatives, where he quickly riled some Brahmins as a mouthpiece for "the ragged Irish." Collins won re-election and also crashed through a Yankee bastion by earning a Harvard law degree in 1871. Along with Thomas Gargan and fellow immigrant movers and shakers, Collins began crafting a blueprint for Irish political muscle from the wards to the voting booth.
   ...
   So popular was Collins among the local Irish and even Yankees who grudgingly admired his "up by the bootstraps" work ethic that he was elected to Congress; he loathed Washington, however, always believing he could better serve Boston's Irish in Boston. Finally, in the 1890s, he came back home for good.
   
   Collins's neatly combed and parted hair, bristling mustache, and intense eyes were a welcome sight back in the wards. His rhetoric, once blazing with Fenian fury, now delivered a more pragmatic message to immigrants: "There are Irish-born citizens like myself, and there will be many more of us. But the moment the seal of the government was impressed upon our papers, we ceased to be foreigners and became Americans. Americans we are, and Americans we will remain."
   
   In an 1884 speech, he defined what, for many Irish-Americans, would serve as a political credo, reminding listeners that they must never forget their Irish roots, but that they must be assimilated to American life: "Those of us born in Ireland or who sprang from the Irish race are here to stay. We and our children and our children's children are here merged in this great, free, composite nationality, true and loyal citizens of the state and federal systems, sharing in the burdens and the blessings of the freest people on the earth."
   
   ...
   Still, Collins knew that much work lay ahead before "native-born" Americans accepted the Irish and that such acceptance would never completely arrive in his lifetime. He was determined, however, to push for that breakthrough.
   
   In 1899, the city's ward leaders convinced Collins to run for the office that many supporters felt was his destiny all along &emdash; mayor of Boston. After a clash with Ward 8 titan Martin Lomasney, Collins lost narrowly to Republican Thomas N. Hart, but vowed to run and win two years down the road.
   ...
   Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, swore in Patrick Collins as Boston's second Irish-born mayor (Hugh O'Brien, in the 1880s, was the first) on January 4, 1902.
   ...
   Collins stood up time and time again to the Common Council and the Board of Aldermen's "incompetents and nobodies" who had plagued Boston politics by allying "with a mixture of convicts and notorious grafters." When it came to political hardball, Collins proved a master, the local press lauding him as "a strong man and the city's defender against some of the most corrupt schemes that ever menaced it." In 1903, Collins swept back into office on the strength of his honesty and his pledge to usher in an "Era of Good Feeling" for immigrants and bluebloods alike.
   
   Patrick Collins's dream of peaceful co-existence between Boston's Irish Democrats and Yankee Republicans was short-lived. The news that he had died suddenly at the Hot Springs Resort, in Virginia, stunned the city on September 14, 1905.
   
   For one of the few times in Boston's history to that date, eulogies to the Irishman who had survived the Famine, worked tirelessly to improve himself and the lives of fellow immigrants, and had dominated the Boston political scene for years poured in from Yankees as well as the Irish. The Boston Globe praised him as "a manly man among manly men, [who]...filled the public offices to which he was called with high honor." Another writer called him "the recognized leader of his race."
   
   At Holy Cross Cathedral, Collins's constituents gave him a hero's send-off. Far from the soil of Cork, he was laid to rest near his mother, in Holyhood Cemetery, in Brookline.