Barney McGinniskin is being promoted as a role model for today’s immigrants in Boston
THE ST Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston marches right down the middle of East Broadway, the highlight of festivities honouring the patron saint of America’s most Irish city.
It was in the lobby of an East Broadway bank, of all places, that a crowd gathered this week to honour a great Boston Irishman, Barney McGinniskin. Barney couldn’t make the reception, but he had a reasonable excuse: he’s been dead for 143 years.
McGinniskin was a trailblazer, a historic figure, and yet few in Boston have ever heard of him. He was the living, breathing embodiment of what became an American stereotype: an Irish cop.
Barney was not just the first Irish cop to walk a beat in Boston. He was the first Irish police officer in the United States, which in 1851, when Barney joined the force, consisted of just 31 states.
Barney was from Galway, a place the old Boston Irish still call “the next parish over”. He was part of the Famine exodus that, in just a few years, transformed Boston from a Protestant city with an English ethos to one where Irish Catholics made up a third of the population.
Many Brahmins were appalled by the sudden influx of Irish, seeing them as unhealthy, unwashed, uneducated and, worst of all, Catholic. Because while you could give them medicine, a bath and a free education, they were still a bunch of hard-drinking papists taking their orders from some old Italian guy in Rome.
Like many of the newly arrived Irish, Barney settled into the teeming tenements of the North End. He worked in a grain store, using his formidable strength to lift heavy sacks, and drove a horse-drawn cab.
Eventually someone figured out it would make sense to put an Irish cop on the streets where the Irish were the biggest minority.
By most accounts, Barney did a good job. But Brahmin politicians accused him of being more loyal to those of similar origin, the very poor, who were blamed for much of the city’s troubles.
In 1854, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Know Nothing Party made huge gains in Boston elections. And so, just three years into the job, Barney was fired, not for anything he did, but for who he was. A year later, the Know Nothings won all but two seats in the Massachusetts legislature and their candidate, Henry Gardner, became governor.
McGinniskin was the victim of pure bigotry. He was part of a group judged not as individuals, but as a group, based on the actions of a minority. His national loyalty was challenged, again, not on anything he had done, but on suspicions based on the antisocial behaviour of a minority.
He lost his job in a cacophony of anti-immigrant invective, as virulent as the fungus that had forced him onto an emigrant ship.
A century and a half later, the anti-immigrant rhetoric on American talk radio would sound depressingly familiar to McGinniskin. The most vituperative members of the Tea Party sound like their Know Nothing antecedents.
Disturbing, too, is the number of people with Irish surnames who engage in such open hostility towards immigrants. They are three or four generations removed from Ireland, and a million years removed from the experience of McGinniskin.
If Barney was a victim of an early version of McCarthyism, it is fitting that his rehabilitation as a historic figure is being led by a Boston police officer named McCarthy. Sean McCarthy, president of the Emerald Society, a group of Irish-American police officers, is determined to highlight McGinniskin’s story, not just for the Irish who now control Boston and its environs the way the Brahmins did, but to inspire other immigrant groups.
Kevin Cullen is a columnist for The Boston Globe