![]() ![]() Working with the local Ward 17 organization of one Timothy E. There is no particular epiphany that politics was the career for him, but many urban dwellers participated in political campaigns in that era of parades and brass bands for candidates. ![]() He was a hard-worker and was ambitious, and (as we are told in the scene-setter of his eventual funeral) did seem to genuinely care about bettering the lives of the city’s poor people, even as he viewed himself as their superior as he moved up the class ladder. He worked assorted blue-collar jobs that took him around the city to meet people, good practice for his eventual political career. Born in 1874, his father had died from over-work when he was young, and Curley needed to leave school when he was young to provide for his family. James Michael Curley had worked his way into Boston politics by then. This period ended with the death of Mayor Patrick Collins in 1905, an Irish beneficiary of the alliance between “Harvard and the slums.” Things were quiet, though the numbers show endemic poverty and the social (and physical) ills that went with it in the Irish community, and the history shows a government utterly indifferent to their plight. For the few decades between the Civil War and Curley’s political career’s beginning around the turn of the century, though, ethnic-political relations in Boston were in the period of “deference democracy,” whereby Irish voters supported the Yankee elite in running the city and in return received modest patronage benefits. Immigrants from Ireland always remembered the persecution at the hands of the Know-Nothing government, which forever tainted the label of “reformer” in their political memory (Mulkern’s book is cited here in the notes). Boston acquired a sizeable and eventually massive Irish population starting in the 1850s after the Potato Famine, and the Yankee Protestant elite did not like that. I can take these or leave them, but the author also provides useful asides on previous Curley biographies (ghostwritten or authorized) and other topics that I found interesting and that might not have gotten into a more academic biography.Ĭurley was Irish. The book also pontificates, and Beatty occasionally takes time to deliver his diagnosis of the problems of historic America, and compare them to issues of then-contemporary America. The author has a flair for the dramatic, and explanations of Curley’s appeal are intended less to deconstruct than to get the reader inside the mind of the Curley supporter who may have read of his exploits, or listened to him speak in person. It knows that it is about a larger-than-life figure, and takes pains to show both the moments of glory, in all of their glory, and the less glamorous, ignoble actions that recurred throughout Curley’s career. However, the book, published in ‘92 and written by a former Atlantic editor, is very self-aware about the Curley legend. He was famously mythologized as Frank Skeffington in the political novel The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor and Massachusetts newspapers to this day, over a half-century after his death, still regularly deploy charming and roguish anecdotes about him. He was the boss of a famously corrupt machine, and a major booster (some might say demagogue) of Irish interests. He served four terms as the Mayor of Boston and two terms in prison, as well as a term as Governor, four terms in Congress, and as the nominee for Governor twice unsuccessfully and Senator once unsuccessfully. Curley is one of the most famous figures in Massachusetts political history, especially internally. But my dabbling in New England politics of the interwar era led me here, and I couldn’t ignore the call anymore. It’s not my scene, and I have plenty of it forced upon me already. I tried to ignore Boston politics for as long as I could.
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