Prejudice, mistrust and misadventures in Lowell – 1940 to 1960

My Grandfather, Pepere, Paul Charbonneau in 1948- “The only mistake Hitler ever made was that he didn’t kill enough Jews.” My grandfather was a hard-working businessman, honest and even charitable to people crushed by the Great Depression. However, his sentiments toward this group was often harsh. Maybe, struggling folks from competing ethnic origins simply hate and distrust one another? Could it be a Darwinian, cold-blooded response to Mother Nature’s many challenges?

“Hey, are you a chink?’

‘The Irish kids would throw rocks at the French-Canadian kids crossing the Bridge Street Bridge as they were walking home in Centralville on their side of the Merrimack.’

‘Claire, the bosses would spit on us factory workers as we walked down the creaky, spiral stairs on our way home.” My Mom never worked in the mills. She was the daughter of a modest and successful milk delivery business where she had worked as a young women.

A window sign advertising a job at a Merrimack St. retail shop located across the street from the main library was said to read: “Opening for a clerk – no Irish need apply.’ A relative told me this referring to an event that happened two decades before my birth.

Irish women are all dirty. They don’t know how to clean house or to cook.

‘The poor always get the shitty end of the stick.’

‘Poles or polocks are blockheads.’ – they are naively dumb.

Often a rich encounter with Harry Levine, the grocer store owner, whose variety store and house was located just across the road from our first floor apartment at Ludlam and Dana. According to my Mom, he was always ‘le juif’, the Jew. The thought that in life, we are all in this together remained a concept quite foreign to the local culture.

Our next-door neighbor, Nick, and his beautiful dark-haired wife were the young couple of Greek origin, who kept their clapboard, Victorian house and surrounding lawns and separate garages in excellent condition. An old three-foot high picket fence separated our living spaces. Religion and financial status kept us firmly apart. My Mom usually referred to this couple and the other Greek couple, who rented an apartment located on the second floor of their house as ‘le grec’ or ‘les grecs’- ‘the Greek or the Greeks.’ Foreigners were suspect, different and not trustworthy. Proceed with caution!

Francis Murphy was her boy friend for years during her post high school years. They had met on the dance floor at the huge ballroom by the water at Lakeview. Pepere and memere, her parents, simply could not accept that he might wish to marry Claire, my mother-to-be. All romantic and domestic plans and hopes that they had built around this Irish-Canuck connection had to be tossed out the window. The discussion was finished. Marriage was out! Over the years, my Mom and Francis were close, but the mores of the times required obedience to the rules.

&&&

puddle-jumper

frog

un crapaud

a Canuck

a Yankee

a Jap

a Kraut

a blockhead

un italien

un irlandais

un grec

un juif

un polonais

un portugais

Irish, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, English, French-Canadians,

and Portuguese.

there was a lot of Jewish people on the street I lived, and Irish. It was

everything really; rich people moved up and up and poor people…and

middle class…. There was a large Jewish community because they have

a synagogue up there. There was a lot of Jewish people in the Highlands,

mostly the upper Highlands. I lived in the lower Highlands.17

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/lowe/ethnicity.pdf

Irish, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, English, French-Canadians,

and Portuguese – these are the people that live in my home town of Lowell, Massachusetts. What are all these strangers doing in my city? Don’t they have a place of their own where they could feel comfortable and be with their own kind? Really! Why are they invading our space and trying to change our ways?

Getting along with, and enjoying people, who speak a foreign language, eat strange foods, drink eye-popping beverages, play and dance to peculiar music, wear unique forms of clothing, seek other kinds of books, movies and television programs, and who truly believe in different versions of heaven and hell, good and evil, from the truth and values that I learned at home among my relatives and neighbors can be challenging for a young, French-Canadian, American lad shuffling on foot through the neighborhoods of his home town. Being a newspaper boy in my teenage years opened my eyes to the business of business in these different quarters of the city.

What is prejudice with its usual racial, cultural and religious overtones? If, as a four-year-old child, I asked the Asian owner of a Chinese restaurant,

“Are you a chink?”

does my interest in facial diversity also betray a certain type of home-grown  prejudice?

What would a well-educated and well-traveled person think today in reading a “Help Wanted” sign posted, many years ago, in a retail shop window near the intersection of Merrimack and Dutton streets, near City Hall? According to my Mom – remember that as a five-year-old, everything was quite new to me – that sign read:

Opening for a clerk – No Irish need apply.

It seems that in that portion of the Acre, Irish people were not always appreciated. Is this yet another example of prejudice and insensitivity to others? Does fear of the foreigner explain this type of attitude and behavior? But, an even bigger question looms around the corner.

Does an industrial melting-pot like Lowell, which is spiced with seven or eight, conflicting, ethnic groups, all placed near the bottom of the local, economic ladder naturally tend to rise above the daily frets of disappointments? How does a person caught in the maelstrom of subsistance escape entrapment? Is there always great danger lurking in the city’s dark, commercial alleyways with their treasure troves of broken beer bottles, discarded wooden boxes and brambles of entwined, barbed wire?

Perhaps, the great American Industrial Revolution – Lowell was its U.S. center with industrial textile production in the 1830s and 1840s – naturally took the only course humanly possible? To quote Voltaire in his novel Candide, we learn that

“This is (was) the best of all possible worlds.”

Certainly, this scene from the mechanical, steaming bowels of Our Fair City is not the Currier and Ives picture postcard terrain that poor, displaced and frightened Europeans read about after the collapse of their own societal structures in the post-1850 time frame.

Who could blame them? The sick, insecure and wounded need peace and solace. Relatives from the Charbonneau and the Bolduc sides of the family reminded me during my years of tenderness and openness that the poor soil and the failing, small, family farms of Quebec province strongly nudged my ancestors to move south to New England. There, in America, they might find strength, hope and a new beginning..

In Centralville, or Centerville as some call it, everyone – well, almost everyone – speaks our kind of French from Quebec. The others, the Greeks, Irish, Yankees and all, from the other side of the Merrimack River call us Canucks. This is meant to be an insult, I guess, although we, Canucks, just find the expression funny. Personally, I  have even gotten to like it. It wears well.

These outsiders snicker at our many mistakes in speaking the English language. Of course, with so few educational opportunities offered to or even accepted by my parents and relatives, mistakes in English grammar and in pronunciation are quite common. I wonder if the Poles, Liths or Italians do any better? Each group has his ethnic piece of the town for himself or herself – we live separate and apart –  so it is only when shopping downtown, in and around Kearney Square in the business center, that these language issues crop up. In our private affairs, we generally get along with these neighboring strangers by simply having as little to do with them as is possible.

Naturally, the situation can become upsetting with emotions bubbling over to a boil when these different people all work together within very tight confines in the textile mills, where many must earn their daily bread. Many years ago, the shop-floor straw bosses overseeing the gritty, grimy workers plus the gritty, grimy and noisy machinery were usually brought in by the factory owners to blend these factors of production into a profitable business.

Today, with President Eisenhower ably steering the country into new and troubled waters, some of the textile operatives (women factory workers, who are manually involved in meshing the rotating gears and revolving pulleys of clanking metallic parts) sometimes can reach first-line management positions, so there is restrained optimism among the day laborers  However, class conflicts remain, and new title does not make for instant happiness.

All these others, the strangers, who also walk our streets, and who let their children play freely in our public parks can cause friction just because they are different in so many obvious ways. Maybe, people like us fear some of these others just as much as these different people fear us, French-Canadians, the Canucks? It is a fragile mix, apparent peace and internal fear.

My Mom has related to me many frightening stories from her growing up years in the city during the 1920s and 1930s. These tales would easily curl the socks of any decent, well-bred and industrious, Catholic girl or boy leaving the safe and pleasant environment of a parochial school setting. Of course, Protestants were just as scary as the Jews, Portuguese, Irish and Greeks.

My mother has certain terms that neatly refer to these strangers such as: les juifs, les portuguais, les irlandais and les grecs. But, to be fair, these French terms don’t have an insulting tone attached to them. Of course, I also occasionally overhear talk of a blockhead for a Pole, a chink for a Chinese person, a spic for an Italian and a mick for an Irishman. But, these slurs are not vicious. Rather, we can find them entertaining, but a bit insensitive. That is true.

During the war years, Jap and Kraut were favorites of many a dining room conversation, but I don’t recall what the English soldiers were called. Being allies of Britain, we probably just let them be. But, the Russians, they were the Russkies and never the Bolsheviks.

In all these ramblings, there has been no mention of any blacks in my surroundings and in our daily world, which was so often focused on the world of friendly Canucks (usually) in that truly magical neighborhood marked by the intersection of Ludlam and Dana streets in Lower Centralville.