Politics
Nine of the ten men who served as mayors of Saint Paul between 1932-1972 were Irish. Domination of the Democratic Party dates back to 1850s. Around the turn of the 20th century, Irish politicians allied themselves with businessmen and controlled city politics. A study in 1957 concluded that being Catholic was "almost essential for political success in Saint Paul". Led by the influential Archbishop John Ireland, the Catholic Church was heavily influenced by the Irish. Other ethnic groups complained of Irish Catholic ways being imposed on their parishes.
The O'Connor System was created by the Chief of Police, John J. O'Connor and his brother Richard. The system allowed known criminals to live in the city as long as they obeyed the law in Saint Paul. As a result, criminals such as Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson lived in Saint Paul. After the O'Connor brothers retired from politics and a series of high-profile kidnappings occurred, the system fell apart.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Irish In Saint Paul
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All is politics in this capital.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)