By Peter F. Stevens
Reporter Staff

"The Parade." In Boston, the phrase means one thing &emdash;South Boston's annual St. Patrick's Day extravaganza. This year's incarnation marks the march's 104th anniversary, but the event that so many enjoy today did

not arrive easily for the Boston Irish, who long had to battle prejudice

before they could have their celebration. All of that notwithstanding, have their parade Boston's Irish would, and proudly so.

As Irish-Catholic immigrants landed in Boston in ever-increasing numbers in the 1840s and the years after and staked their claim to a new life in America, they soon thumbed their collective nose at Yankee antipathy to commemorations of St. Patrick's Day. One of the early manifestations of the local Irish love for the Ould Sod's patron saint was the Shamrock Society, a social club that gathered on March 17 to defiantly toast the saint and "sing the old songs," the revelers' voices pealing from Dooley's, the Mansion House, and Jameson's.

No one building, however, would long serve to hold the growing numbers of

local Irish longing to celebrate the day in a bigger way. One historian

noted: "No banquet room was broad enough to comprehend all the Sons of

Eire, even had they the price of dinner."

There was only one way, Irish Boston's leaders decided, to include not just Irishmen but also women and children in a celebration of St. Patrick.

Their solution was a parade.

As early as 1841, without official sanction by Boston's government, more than 2,000 local Irish marched through the North End, their bands booming and the crowds singing. Earlier that day they had honored their patron saint at a traditional Mass. The scenes enraged many Yankees who still retained their ancestors' loathing of anything Catholic, especially Irish Catholic.

Somewhat ironically, Boston's first celebrations of St. Patrick's Day had

materialized not with the unofficial parades of the 1840s, but with an

organization founded over a century earlier. Boston's Irish Charitable

Society, launched on St. Patrick's Day of 1724, was composed of "men of the Irish nation" to honor "the Feast Day of Ireland's National Apostle." These men, however, shared little in common with the Boston Irish of 1841.

Acceptance by the Irish Charitable Society hinged on three qualifications: members had to be "natives of Ireland, inhabitants of Boston, and

Protestants."

To the "ragged immigrants" who marched along Ann and Water Streets in the 1840s, the Charitable Society's genteel repasts at the Parker House seemed hardly a celebration of the patron saint at all. Religion and festivity were the order of the day for the impoverished immigrants, reflecting a wistful yet often raucous longing for a bit of Ireland in their new home.

The cant of Brahmins who reviled the St. Patrick's Day Masses and revelry notwithstanding, the Boston Irish prayed and paraded on March 17. So much a part of Irish life in the city did St. Patrick's Day commemorations become, that on March 17, 1863, the 28th Massachusetts Regiment, composed of Boston Irishmen who fought and bled for the Union in the Army of the Potomac, celebrated the saint's day with their fellow regiments in the

vaunted Irish Brigade.

An Irish infantryman from Charlestown recalled that the unit's songs, toasts, horse races, speeches, and an impromptu "stage show" that day all celebrated Ireland and its religious symbol. As Dennis P. Ryan concludes in Beyond the Ballot Box, the Boston Irish, "having dispelled the popular suspicion surrounding their allegiance to the Union by fighting in the Civil War, they asserted their new sense of belonging by turning their patron saint's feast day from a religious to a more secular event. Some chose to observe the day by attending temperance banquets, where toasts to Ireland were made with sparkling water, while others celebrated at parish socials, music concerts, saloons, and theaters, which featured Irish plays for the entire month."

Still, the unofficial St. Patrick's Day parades that wound through every Irish ward from the 1870s to 1890s proved the highlight of the festivities, with bands and marchers tramping proudly through the heart of Boston, South Boston, Charlestown, and Dorchester alike. All along the route, hordes of spectators lined the pavement, and Irish homes and businesses were emblazoned with colorful images of St. Patrick and draped with sheets or banners that were adorned with such traditional slogans as Erin Go Bragh and Cead Mile Failte. Hugh O'Brien, Boston's first Irish-born mayor, infuriated Yankee nabobs on Beacon Hill one year with his decision to close the Boston Public Library on March 17 in honor of the revered saint and the celebrations in his name.

As much a part of the local landscape as the St. Patrick's Day parades and other celebrations had become from 1841 to the turn of the century, the hard-won traditions were about to evolve into something far more, something that truly proclaimed the growing clout of the Boston Irish. In South Boston, the biggest and best of March 17th celebrations would materialize.

St. Patrick's Day parades organized by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which numbered over 8,000 members in Boston alone by 1900, had become the norm. Bands, organizations, refreshments - all were handled by the

Hibernians' Entertainment Committee. In the hands of Ward 17 boss "Pea Jacket" Maguire and other Boston Irish leaders, fun, festivities, and pride in Irish roots ruled the city on March 17.

In March of 1901, the blare of bands and the vibrations of marching feet pealed through South Boston's streets. Banners awash with glittering

shamrocks, harps, and images of the patron saint himself nodded in the

gusts racing in from the Atlantic. But the date was March 18, and with good

reason. The city's leaders had sanctioned South Boston's first official St.

Patrick/Evacuation Day Parade for the 18th because the 17th had fallen on Sunday and thus fell under the prohibition of the Blue Laws. So on that Monday morning, bands and colorfully uniformed militia, sailors, and Marines formed neat ranks along Q Street (Farragut Road), shivering

with each spray-laden blast from the Atlantic that whistled across Marine Park and City Point. However, the chill did not keep away the crowds that jammed South Boston. Marchers needing a dose of warmth dashed into the haven of the Head House.

The procession commenced with a rattle of drums, the cries of pipes, and the pounding notes of brass bands. Wave after wave of marchers poured onto Southie's streets, wound across the bridge, and surged into downtown Boston to the ear-throbbing cheers and applause of thousands massed along the parade route. In their biggest outpouring of pride to date, Boston's Irish reveled in their heritage, a legacy with one foot planted firmly in America, the other in their ancestral counties. The words of a reporter observing the parade ring true still: "Let us think of the procession and the pageant, of the harp and the sunburst, of the cheerful lads and blushing lasses and of the rich brogue full of heart and soul, all compact of significance and enthusiasm &emdash; an out-pouring of genuine rejoicing, a boiling over, in a word, of jovial patriotism and effervescent vitality."

That patriotism and Irish pride reached a throaty crescendo at Faneuil Hall as the parade's rousing climax erupted amid music and seemingly ceaseless applause. The first official South Boston Parade was over, but the post-march celebrations were merely beginning. Dignitaries in natty over-coats and top hats, figures such as Mayor Thomas Hart, stepped from

the open, horse-drawn carriages in which the city's high and mighty had ridden in the parade, and dashed into the venerable hall for an

official St. Patrick's Day banquet.

It was hardly the politicos alone whose party continued after the parade. Hordes of marchers and spectators streamed back to South Boston. At parish halls, in private homes, and watering holes throughout the ward, the celebration of all things Irish continued. A throng of citizenry jammed every inch of Gray's Hall, nestled at the junction of I and Emerson Streets, for the South Boston Citizens Association banquet. In an address that left the crowd misty-eyed, Congressman Henry Naphen waxed eloquently about the meaning of St. Patrick's Day and of the growing role of the Irish in America. Inside that crowded, alternately boisterous and hushed room, the future of South Boston's annual St. Patrick's Day Paraded truly materialized.

A newspaper column captured the essence of Southie's St. Patrick's Day Parades past, present, and future: "A sign that, although scattered far and

wide, Irishmen still hold to their love of country and countrymen, and

never forget the verdant home they fondly call the gem of the sea."

In Boston, those sentiments and the legacy of the Hibernians, the

Charitable Irish, the marchers from the 1840s to 1901, and every other

local expression of Irish lineage bloom especially on St. Patrick's Day.

But the "Irish holiday" has become something far more from Southie to San Francisco. As Edward Wakin notes in Enter the Irish-American, "the Irish

not only won acceptance for their day, but persuaded everyone else to join in, an achievement matched by no other immigrant group."

The Irish World, in the late 19th century, posed the following question:

"How Long Will St. Patrick's Day Live Among Irish-Americans?" An editor answered: "While in veins of Irish manhood flows one drop of Irish blood; While in hearts of Ireland's daughters beats true Irish womanhood; While God sends to Irish mothers babes to suckle, boys to rear; While God sends to Irish fathers one man child thy name to bear."

In Southie on St. Patrick's Day 2005, those sentiments and traditions will continue to swell the parade route.