Dan O’Reilly and JFK

Photo Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

By John Rossi

Elections, especially Presidential ones, were major events in my politically active family.

My first election memory was the 1948 Presidential campaign. My family were all Republicans and were looking forward to Governor Thomas Dewey recapturing the Presidency after 16 years of what they called Democratic ‘misrule’.

But I pulled for President Truman because the word around Incarnation of Our Lord School, Inky as everybody called it, was that a Dewey victory would mean school on Saturday. That was too horrible to contemplate.

My most vivid election memory, however, dates from the Kennedy-Nixon campaign of 1960 and it revolves around a local character, one of the most fanatically loyal Democrats in our otherwise Republican neighborhood of lower Olney, the 13th District of the 42nd Ward. The district had remained Republican despite the Democratic takeover of the city in 1951 and had voted narrowly for Eisenhower in both 1952 and 1956. John F. Kennedy changed all that.

The 13th District was overwhelming Catholic by 1960, as the Protestant families slowly moved out. The few Jewish families, mostly grocers, butchers or candy store owners had sold out and moved to neighborhoods with exotic names like Temple Stadium and Oxford Circle.

The most stalwart Kennedy supporter that I knew was a neighbor who lived down the street from me. Dan O’Reilly was a raw-boned, ruddy complexioned Irishman, about 65 years old. About 5 feet 11 inches tall, he walked with a hobbledehoy rolling gait and had the powerful wide body of man who had worked hard his entire life.

O’Reilly was born in the coal regions of Pennsylvania and had worked in the mines as a young boy where he learned the hard lesson of anti-Catholic prejudice. His first bosses were Welsh Protestants.

When he moved to Philadelphia he found work in a gear company in Kensington where his employers were WASPs and what is worse, Ulster Irish, Black Protestants as he called them. Dan knew prejudice and his entire life was defined by his Catholicism, his Irishness and his faith in the Democratic Party.

For about a month before the 1960 election my friends and I would see Dan returning from daily Mass. He told us that he was praying for a Kennedy victory. When we teased him saying that “You should be praying that God lets the right man get elected,” his answer was an abrupt, “No. It must be Kennedy.”

Dan’s house was plastered with Kennedy posters in every window and a big picture of Kennedy on his small front lawn. He didn’t wear a Kennedy button he said because his boss at the gear company ordered no politicking at work.

We discovered that not only was Dan attending daily Mass and praying for a Kennedy victory but he also was kneeling before the altar after Mass and saying the rosary with his arms outstretched.

Father McGinley, the pastor, had noticed this and worried that Dan might hurt himself and recommended a less punishing way of praying which Dan rejected. The pastor was shocked when Dan told him the reason for his personal mortification.

We all had fun at Dan’s expense, often relaying to him bad poll numbers for Kennedy, or better yet, rumors that the election would be stolen by Protestant Republicans. He didn’t find that hard to believe. He told us that Al Smith, the first Catholic candidate for President, had actually won the 1928 election only to have it stolen by corrupt Republicans.

As the election approached Dan was a nervous wreck. On his way home from Mass he would stop and ask us the latest political news. Even though the Gallup poll showed Kennedy with a slight lead, we always told him that things looked grim for the Democrats.

Perhaps inspired by our reports of bad political news, he began talking about walking on his knees up the Church center aisle before saying the rosary. Father McGinley absolutely vetoed Dan’s latest foray into self-mortification.

On election day my aunt Mary Rose, the Republican judge of elections, was ill and in the hospital. Although this was my first Presidential election, as an honor to my aunt, I was named judge of elections.

Normally the election officials voted first, but at 7 a.m. as the polls were about to open I spotted Dan outside the window of our polling place, pacing nervously. We let him have the honor of casting the first vote. He was behind the voting machine curtain for about 10 seconds, as long as it took to pull the straight Democratic lever.

As he left one of the election officials said, “Dan, are you sure you voted right? That sounded like the Republican lever to me.” Dan just grunted, “You bet I voted right”.

All day the turnout was steady. The numbers much greater than in past elections. By 6 p.m. our turnout was over 60 percent.

After dinner there was a rush of voters. By closing time, 8 p.m., we had a turnout approaching 90 percent–a remarkable figure by any standards.

It was clear that Kennedy had connected with our voters. Hell, even though I was a registered Republican I voted for Kennedy, as did two of the Republican poll watchers.

Around 7:45 I noticed Dan skulking around the polling place. He was talking to everyone trying to find out how things were going.

After the polls closed the majority and minority representative and I began recording the results from our two election machines. It was a Kennedy landslide. Eisenhower had carried the district by a handful of votes; Kennedy won by a margin of 4-1.

The policeman who came to pick up the official results told me that in the other districts he had visited, including one Jewish district in Logan, the result was the same–a Kennedy landslide. The final results showed that Kennedy had won Philadelphia by 320,000 votes, 170,000 more than Adlai Stevenson’s margin in 1956.

As we wrapped things up Dan poked his head in. “How did Kennedy do?”

We were ready for this and had planned our answer. “Not good Dan. It looks like Nixon is winning everywhere.”

Did you ever see anyone’s jaw literally drop? Well, Dan’s did. His eyes took on such a worried look that we felt sorry for him and couldn’t keep up the ruse.

When we told him the real results, he turned, never said a word and almost danced out of the polling place.

I saw him the next afternoon when the result was clear, a narrow Kennedy victory nationally. He didn’t care that there were rumors of the Democrats stealing the election in Chicago and Texas. There was a Catholic President. All the anti-Catholic abuse that he had taken during his lifetime was wiped away forever.

Dan moved from lower Olney a year later and I heard that he died of cancer early in 1963. Later when Kennedy was assassinated I often thought that it was better that Dan had died first. He didn’t live to see his dream destroyed.

John P. Rossi is Professor Emeritus in the History Department at La Salle University.