February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
And because it required very little work, it would allow her plenty of time for writing. But the local chapter of the anti-Catholic American Protective Association saw the matter differently and promptly launched a boycott against her.
Louise Imogen Guiney was born Jan. 7, 1861 in Roxbury, Mass., to Patrick Guiney and Janet Doyle Guiney, descendants of Irish immigrants. Her father soon headed off to fight in the Civil War as a colonel in a unit of Massachusetts soldiers. Over the next four years he participated in more than 30 battles and rose to the rank of general. The citizens of Massachusetts welcomed him back as a hero. Guiney’s experience symbolized how Irish participation in the Civil War helped improve the reputation of the Irish in America.
Louise Guiney thus grew up in a famous household. She was educated at Elmhurst, a convent school in Providence, R.I., and for a time considered entering religious life. But she was drawn to literature and in her teens began to submit poems and essays to various newspapers and magazines. By her early 20s she was becoming well-known as a poet in the popular sentimental style of the day. Guiney published her first collection of poems, “Songs at the Start” (1884), when she was 23. A collection of essays, “Goose Quill Papers” (1885), appeared a year later. But it was her 1887 collection of poems, “The White Sail and Other Poems,” which gained the attention of Boston’s literary establishment and brought her into friendship with notables such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Thomas W. Higginson.
Guiney never married and by the 1890s she was famous but far from rich. She also cared for her aged mother and was constantly dogged by financial worries. Fortunately, the many friendships that accrued to her from literary success eventually presented a lucrative opportunity. In those days one of the great patronage positions offered by the federal government was that of local postmaster. The job required no experience and light work, essentially overseeing the running of a small post office. Best of all, one’s income was based on the number of stamps sold. A popular and well-connected postmaster could earn a handsome income. So when the position of postmaster in Auburndale, a small town next to Boston, opened in 1893, Guiney’s friends successfully lobbied the Cleveland administration to appoint her. The fact that her father and President Cleveland had served together in the Union Army doubtless helped her cause and in January 1894 Guiney began her duties.
Trouble began on Feb. 1, 1894 when a local chapter of the American Protective Association announced a boycott against the Auburndale post office, declaring the appointment of a Catholic to the position of postmaster an outrage and threat to the Republic. The goal was to drive Guiney from the job by getting the public to buy their stamps elsewhere and thereby reduce her income.
The APA had been founded only a few years earlier in 1887 in response to a sharp rise in immigration and anti-immigrant hostility. Often derided by Catholics as the American Protestant Association, the APA reflected a revival of the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s. Its members argued that Catholicism was incompatible with American institutions and government and spread rumors of papal plots and murderous conspiracies. The organization grew to 500,000 members by the end of 1893. Its main base of strength lay in among middle-class Protestants in the Midwest, but chapters sprang up in most cities in the East, including Boston.
When the Irish began arriving in America in great numbers in the 1830s and ’40s, they found Boston one of the most hostile cities in America. A proud and powerful “Brahmin” elite was unified in its abhorrence for the poverty, drinking, illiteracy, and, most especially, Catholicism of the Irish. Nowhere did the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s enjoy greater support.
Given this legacy, one might assume the APA boycott would enjoy widespread community support. But the status of Irish Americans had begun to change dramatically by the 1890s, mainly for the better. In contrast to their lowly status in the mid-19th Century, Irish Catholics by the 1890s had achieved an astonishing degree of upward mobility. By some measures, they had drawn equal to native-born Americans in terms of occupational distribution. An Irish-American middle class had emerged — the so-called “lace curtain” Irish — and more and more Irish could be found in the ranks of business, politics, and the professions. Non-Irish Americans might still view the Irish with a measure of disdain and suspicion, but by the 1890s they directed their nativism toward the new immigrants coming from places like Italy and Russia.
And so, to the astonishment and embarrassment of the APA, the boycott against Louise Guiney ended in a monumental flop only a few months after it began. Guiney, a prolific letter writer with many influential friends, did her best top get the word out about the boycott. So too did Boston’s Irish Catholic newspaper, The Pilot. “We can hardly utter our contempt,” thundered a typical editorial, “for the criminal bigotry of those who form an association just for the purpose of keeping people of one religion out of public or private office.” Many non-Irish citizens of Massachusetts expressed deep embarrassment at the boycott and condemned it as un-American. A professor at MIT commented: “There has never before come to my personal knowledge any instance of persecution so intolerant, so outrageous, so utterly without a shadow of justification. . . . A lady of highest character . . . the daughter of a brave and patriotic officer in the Union Army, is being hounded out of her means of livelihood by a company of narrow-minded and violent fanatics, simply on account of her faith.”
Soon orders for stamps poured in from all over Massachusetts and eventually across the nation. Instead of causing Guiney’s income to disappear, the APA boycott brought her a small fortune. Clearly, a lot had changed in Boston (and the nation) since the 1850s. Anti-Catholicism, at least the overt and organized Know Nothing kind, was no longer acceptable.
Guiney stayed on as postmaster for three years and then resigned in 1897. She worked at the Boston Public Library until 1899 and then moved to England, where she remained for the rest of her life. She continued to write poetry, but focused increasingly on literary scholarship, writing critical studies of mid-17th Century English poets. She died Gloucestershire, England, on Nov. 2, 1920 at the age of 59.
HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK
Jan. 12, 1971: “All In the Family” debuts on CBS-TV, starring Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker.
Jan. 14, 1914: Henry Ford unveils the assembly line, which reduced time required for assembling a car 12 1/2 hours to 93 minutes.
Jan. 18, 1915: The ship of Irish-born explorer Ernest Shackleton becomes icebound in Antarctica.
HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES
Jan. 12, 1884: Silent film star and famed New York speakeasy owner Texas Guinan is born in Waco, Texas.
Jan. 14, 1919: “60-Minutes” essayist Andy Rooney is born in Albany, N.Y.
Jan. 17, 1880: Mack Sennett, slapstick comedy innovator and creator of the Keystone Kops, is born in Richmond, Quebec.