The corrupt and highly entertaining James Michael Curley (1874-1958), who in his terms as Boston’s mayor skillfully appealed to the resentments of city’s Irish-American residents about the “Boston Brahmin” WASP elite. He was the basis of Edwin’s O’Connor’s great novel The Last Hurrah.
Editor’s note: My paternal grandfather first met Curley in 1930, when they had a conversation of about 10 minutes. He next encountered him in 1949. Curley asked after my grandmother and her two children by name and other related family stuff. Like most great pols, he had a capacious memory for personal information about current and potential voters.
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility —a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it —so that the. pleasure of hating—oneself if no better victim offered —was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of the contrast was real and made the strongest motive of education. The double exterior nature gave life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat, town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement, school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled with six feet of snow in the middle; frosts that made the snow sing under wheels or runners; thaws when the streets became dangerous to cross; society of uncles, aunts and cousins who expected children to behave themselves, and who were not always gratified; above all else, winter represented the desire to escape and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing, and breathed by boys without knowing it.’’
Henry Adams (1838-1918), in The Education of Henry Adams (1918). He was a member of the famous Boston] area-based Adams political family that started with President John Adams.
