Jim Walsh
When I was 10 years old in 1953, my family moved from the small town of Milford to the larger town of West Haven, Conn. For us it could be seen as a step up. We moved from a neighborhood that was mostly low income to one that was firmly working class.
My father was a factory worker, as were others on our block. Across the street was a railroad engineer living next door to a carpenter, and two retired teachers lived two doors down (the Skelly sisters). Most, but not all, were Irish or Italian.
On our street were one- and two-family houses, with a small apartment building and a rooming house in the middle of the block. One street over was yet another step up: solid middle-class homes, a brick apartment building instead of one with wooden clapboards and faded paint. We never lived on that other street.
In West Haven my mother was always involved in local Democratic politics in various grassroots roles. I found myself thinking of her as I listened to the testimony of Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, at the Jan. 6 committee hearings and, more recently, as Rudy Giuliani was found liable for defaming them.
One of the roles my mother filled was as a registrar of voters. There were six districts in West Haven. In Massachusetts they’re called “wards.” In each district there was one Democratic registrar and one Republican. Periodically, they were required to visit each home in the district that had a voter and verify their status.
It might take them a couple of weeks, going door-to-door together, working all day, establishing the list of voters in that district. And, at least in my mother’s case, it was an opportunity to establish a friendship. That was the kind of person she was. They walked together, talked together, had tea together in each other’s homes, and together, Republican and Democratic ladies, they did their part to make the American system work.
Mom also worked at the polls on election day. She was the stuff of which grassroots democracy is made.
On our street, the front porches of the Democratic and the Republican district leaders were directly across the street from one another, halfway down the block. The Democrat, Bob Deignan, his wife, and their two children walked past our house every Sunday on the way to 10 o’clock Mass at St. Lawrence Church. I don’t know where or if the Republican district leader, Alan Spargo, and his family went to church.
But I do know that I would see the two leaders chatting amiably from time to time — or at least it seemed amiable to a 10-, 12-, or 15-year-old boy. I believe it was.
As a boy a very clear message was conveyed to me in all this. We were Democrats — there was never a question about that — and some of our neighbors were Republicans. I will note that in my mother’s family there were Catholics and Protestants, but, when I was growing up, there were no Republicans. But the Republicans on our street were our neighbors. Not enemies. Not “others.” They were our “neighbors” in the New Testament sense of that word.
Sometimes as one enters old age, the distant past may not be remembered entirely accurately. When the writer Oliver Sacks wrote an autobiographical account of his early years, including the London Blitz, during which he experienced fire, fear, smoke, and the dull thud of bombs landing in his neighborhood, he sent an early draft to his older brother to read.
His brother wrote back, telling his younger sibling how much he enjoyed reading his account but, he pointed out, 7-year-old Oliver had not been there during the Blitz. For his safety he had been sent to live in the countryside when the Blitz started. His account had been a feat of imagination. Well done, but not based on real memories of actual experiences.
As I write this, I keep that other possibility in mind. Yet I know that the Kaplans lived next door on one side and the O’Connors beside them. On the other side were the Walscotts and next to them the Skellys. Across the street were the McCarrolls, the Farrells, the Pelligrinos and Maude Smith — older, white-haired, alone, a little strange, with 10 locks on her back door.
I thought of my mother as I watched Moss and Freeman testify before the Jan. 6 committee. Like my mother, they worked at the polls on election day and I’ll bet they lived in a neighborhood similar to the one I grew up in, even though some of their family roots on this continent probably go back much further than ours. Most of ours — Irish, Italian, Polish, German, Jewish, Scandinavian — only go back to the 19th century. Theirs, I suspect, are more like Alex Haley’s “Roots,” a family history that suffered the cruelties and hardships of enslavement more than a hundred years earlier.
After the 2020 election, Moss and Freeman were threatened with violence, harassment, and harm to themselves and their families.
At the hearing, another election official from Arizona testified that Trumpists showed up at his home at all hours of the day and night, but especially weekends, shouting threats and invective over loudspeakers — people with hate in their hearts making the vilest accusations.
After Giuliani falsely accused her of stuffing ballot boxes, Ms. Moss’ grandmother suffered a home invasion by a mob looking for her, threatening retribution based on false accusations. The mob brought no hangman’s scaffold as it did for Mike Pence on Jan. 6, but nooses were tweeted to more than one election worker after the 2020 elections.
Election violence was not limited to Jan. 6 in Washington. In the months following the 2020 election there was organized violence across our country. Federal and state authorities in each state are tracking down those who threatened to harm poll workers.
The “free speech” our founders envisioned did not include shameless, ugly, violent, and unlawful threats against election workers. My mom did not feel endangered. Neither should Moss and Freeman.
Jim Walsh is a Nahant resident.
