P. J. Kennedy

Young P. J. Kennedy around the mid-to-late 1870s

Kennedy was the youngest of five children born to Irish Catholic immigrants Patrick Kennedy (1823–1858) and Bridget Kennedy (nee Murphy) (1824–1888), who were both from New Ross, County Wexford, and married in Boston on September 26, 1849. The couple's elder son, John, had died of cholera in infancy two years before Kennedy was born. Ten months after Kennedy's birth, his father Patrick also succumbed to the infectious epidemic that infested the family's East Boston neighborhood. As the only surviving male, Kennedy was the first family member to receive a formal education. His mother Bridget had purchased an East Boston stationery and notions store where she had worked. The business took off and expanded into a grocery and liquor store.

At the age of fourteen, young Kennedy left school (just below high school) to work with his mother and three older sisters, Mary, Joanna, and Margaret, as a stevedore on the Boston docks. In the 1880s, with money he had saved from his modest earnings and help from his now prosperous mother Bridget, he launched a business career by buying a saloon in Haymarket Square neighborhood near (not the more famous site of a labor demonstration and bombing in Chicago in the 1880s) downtown. In time, he bought a second establishment by the East Boston docks. Next, to capitalize on the social drinking of upper-class Bostonians, Kennedy purchased a third bar in an upscale East Boston hotel, the Maverick House. Before he was thirty, his growing prosperity allowed him to buy a whiskey-importing business.

On November 23, 1887, Kennedy married Mary Augusta Hickey (December 6, 1857 – May 6, 1923),[1] daughter of James Hickey and Margaret Martha Field.[2] The couple had four children and remained married until Hickey's death in May 1923. His wealth afforded his family of one son and two daughters an attractive home on Jeffries Point in East Boston.[3]

P. J. Kennedy in 1893 as a Massachusetts State Senator

Kennedy was "always ready to help less fortunate fellow Irishmen with a little cash and some sensible advice." He enjoyed the approval and respect of most folks in East Boston, living on the hill of a mixed classes and income Boston neighborhood of upscale Irish and Protestant elite. A sociable man able to mix comfortably with both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant elite, he moved successfully into politics. Beginning in 1884, he converted his popularity into service as a Democrat,a minority in the then Republican dominant power in the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the legislature of the Commonwealth since the Colonial Era days, with five consecutive one-year terms in the lower chamber of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, followed by three two-year terms in the upper chamber in the Senate of Massachusetts in the famous Bullfinch designed Capitol of the Massachusetts State House nearby in central Boston on Beacon Street.[4] Establishing himself as one of Boston's principal Democratic leaders, he gave one of the seconding speeches for 22nd and 24th President Grover Cleveland at the party's 1888 national convention of the party in St. Louis. President Cleveland was the only elected Democratic Party chief executive in the long period of the late 19th and early centuries between the Civil War era of Buchanan and Andrew Johnson in the late 1850s and 1860s, to Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 campaign .[5][6] However, he found campaigning, speech making, and legislative maneuvering, to be less appealing than the behind-the-scenes machinations that characterized so much of Boston politics in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. After leaving the Senate and the General Court after many terms in 1895, Kennedy spent the rest his political career activities as an appointed elections commissioner, an appointed city fire commissioner, as the backroom boss of Boston's Ward Two, and as a member of his party's unofficial Board of Strategy.[3]

By the time of his death in 1929, Kennedy held an interest in a coal company and a substantial amount of stock in a bank, the Columbia Trust Company.[3]

In his later years, Kennedy developed degenerative liver disease. In April 1929, he was admitted to Deaconess Hospital to receive treatment.[7] He died there on May 18 at the age of 71. His funeral was held at St. John the Evangelist Church in Winthrop, Massachusetts, on May 21. The Boston Globe reported that hundreds of mourners lined the streets to watch Kennedy's funeral procession and businesses in East Boston closed to honor him.[8] Kennedy is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden, Massachusetts.[9]

In 1914, P.J. Kennedy's son Joseph married Rose Fitzgerald (1890–1995), the eldest daughter of Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald (1863–1950).[10] Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. went on to become a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair[10] and a U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.[11]

Joseph and Rose Kennedy had nine children, including World War II casualty Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.[12]

Kennedy's great-grandson, Patrick J. Kennedy (born 1967) (son of Ted Kennedy), is named after him.