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Besides fighting, Saltonstalls and Brookses kept their rank up by good investments and better marriages, marriages which linked them with impeccable Yankee names: Boylston, Everett, Lawrence, Lee, Leverett. Lev Saltonstall can count eight governors of Massachusetts among his forbears. One of them was long-nosed Governor James Sullivan, a political asset which qualified Saltonstall for membership in the Charitable Irish Society two years ago. A Brooks married Charles Francis Adams, Civil War ambassador to Britain. This tied the Saltonstalls to the mighty Adams family, including Presidents John and John Quincy, and Historians Henry and Brooks. Great-Great-Grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks struck it rich in marine insurance and Chicago real estate before the 1820s, and his money is the base of most of the heavy Saltonstall fortune today.
But as wealth and prestige went up, the Saltonstall political fortunes went down. Great-Grandfather Leverett Saltonstall (1783-1845) was president of the Massachusetts Senate, member of Congress, first mayor of Salem in the Golden Age of Emerson and Thoreau. Grandfather Leverett Saltonstall, a member of the then-flourishing species of Yankee Democrats, was a good friend of Democrat Grover Cleveland, and thus became Collector of the Port of Boston. The present governor's father, also a Yankee Democrat, couldn't even get elected to the state legislature in his try for office.
The decline & fall of the Saltonstall political fortune was typical of the political decline & fall of the whole proud line of New England's first families. Leverett Saltonstall did not so much inherit a political tradition as resuscitate it.
Red Hat Y. Red Tie. Republican Lev Saltonstall made his way in a day when the red hat of Boston's Catholic Cardinal O'Connell has had vastly more political power in Massachusetts than the crimson tie of Harvard. Yankees may control the Massachusetts purse strings, but Irish Democrats control the ballot boxes. The Old Stock has long since been flooded under by successive waves of immigrants who rapidly became voters; the Irish (70% of the Boston vote), the Italians, French Canadians, Poles, Russian Jews. Boston's best can and do keep the whip hand over bank directorates, and in the overstuffed gentlemen's clubs on Boston's near-sacred Beacon Hill. But what political power they still possess comes strictly from Yankee trader ingenuity. Thus, by enactment of the conservative state legislature, Boston cannot choose its own police chief—the governor picks him. And bluebloods.cannot elect a mayor in Boston, so they pack behind the Irishman most agreeable to them (like present Mayor Maurice Tobin).
Lev Saltonstall broke up this defeatism.