At least it’s ‘systematic’

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.

Misreading 'The Last Hurrah'?

James Michael Curley in 1922, during his second term as mayor.

"The misreading of The Last Hurrah (Edwin O'Connor's novel loosely based on the career of the late Boston Mayor  James Michael Curley  (1874-1958)-- "The Rascal King''} came with certain costs. The book's acceptance as an authentic account of Boston's political culture helped steer attention away from critical aspects of the city's history....{T}he eagerness with which so many Americans embraced The Last Hurrah as a celebration of machine politics helped obscure the range of civic activism that circulated in ethnic America. Working-class  immigrants and the politicians who represented them developed their own reform visions, often in opposition to party bosses...We risk dehumanizing ethnics when we assume that their politics amounted to little more than an exchange of votes for services, however personal the help may have been.''

-- James J. Connolly, in his article "The Last Hurrah and Pluralist Vision of American Politics,'' in the book Boston's Histories: Essays in Honor of {historian} Thomas H. O'Connor.

Editor's Note: Curley, however corrupt, had superb political talents, including a capacious memory. My paternal grandfather, who helped run a shoe company in Brockton, met and chatted with Curley at an event in the late '20s. He next ran into the pol in 1952. Curley greeted him by name (Henry) and asked him how Margaret, my grandmother, was. 

-- Robert Whitcomb

'I'm a tribal chieftain as well'

James Michael Curley in 1922.

“You see,’’ he said, my position is slightly complicated because I’m not just an elected official of the city; I’m a tribal chieftain as well. It’s a necessary kind of dual officeholding, you might say; without the second, I wouldn’t be the first.’’

“The tribe,’’ said Adam, being the Irish?’’

“Exactly.’’

Conversation between fictional Mayor Frank Skeffington, based on the corrupt and charming Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, and his nephew in Edwin O’Connor’s novel The Last Hurrah, which was made into a movie with Spencer Tracy starring as Skeffington.

Mr. Curley was mayor in 1914-1918, 1922–1926, 1930–1934 and 1946–1950, and governor of Massachusetts in 1935-1937.

William E. Colleran: The ups and downs of another felonious mayor

Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr. is not the only twice-convicted felon to “throw his hat in the ring” for mayor of a capital city.  I give you the story of James Michael Curley of Boston.  This comparison is all the more interesting to me as I recalled a family story which follows in due course.

Curley’s career of political machinations and corruption is ably cataloged in Jack Beatty’s Rascal King: the life and times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958.   That book and Mike Stanton’s 2003 exposé on Buddy Cianci,  The Prince of Providence, made my summer reading list!

During his six decades at the public trough, James Michael Curley was a four-term mayor of Boston, a congressman twice, governor, state representative and city alderman.  He was known for his glib tongue, barbed ripostes and ostentatious lifestyle.  Like Cianci, he used the power of the office to settle personal scores and enrich himself.

As to Curley’s felonies, unlike Cianci, they were not committed while serving as mayor. Curley’s long political career was book-ended with criminal convictions and curiously, the Kennedy family.  In 1904, while serving as a Boston alderman, Curley was convicted of mail fraud when he took and passed a postal examination for a friend.  Seemingly harmless, it was indeed a federal crime; and he served two months in the Charles Street jail.

Curley’s political star soared and he was elected to Congress in 1910.  While still in Congress, he ran for mayor of Boston in 1914 against the incumbent John Fitzgerald, ''Honey Fitz, '' the maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy.  It was a formidable task, so Curley resorted to blackmail!   Honey Fitz was having a dalliance with a dancer named Toodles.  Photographs of the two were shown to his family and he withdrew from the election citing health reasons.  Thus began Curley’s first of four mayoral stints.

Curley lived an opulent life well beyond his mayor’s salary.  His mansion on the Jamaica Way with shamrock cutouts on the shutters, was financed by skimming and shady dealings with city contractors.

As to my story, my grandfather was raised in Loughrea, County Galway.  He left for America as a teen in 1887 and was followed by his younger sister Jenny -- my great-aunt.  In 1907 Jenny married a Tom Hynes, also of Loughrea, and settled in Boston, where she ran a boarding house while he was a porter at the Harvard Club. They were childless.

Tom's brother lost his wife and was left with a young child; and therein lies my tale.  Jenny raised young John until his father remarried.  Time passed and John served in World War I, went to night law school and got a job in Boston City Hall.  Jenny and Tom returned to Loughrea in the 1925 .

After a single term as governor of the Bay State,  in 1935-37, Curley spent  some time in the political wilderness. But he ran and was elected to Congress again in 1942.  During his second term in Congress, while running for mayor, he was indicted for federal mail fraud.

In 1947, Curley was sent to the slammer for the second time, City Clerk John B. Hynes, the aforementioned John Hynes, became the acting mayor of Boston.  The City Charter devolved the power of mayor to the City Clerk.

Upon his release ,  after five months, Curley, now a twice-convicted felon, returned to serve out his term.   Hynes had served as a caretaker reserving to the mayor major decisions upon his return.  Curley dismissively said:  “I have accomplished more in one day than has been done in the five months of my absence”.

Hynes returned to his position of city clerk.  Stung by Curley’s public rebuke, he bided his time.  In 1950, backed by a bipartisan group, he took on Curley in the mayoral election and soundly defeated him!

Mayor Hynes would go on to serve four terms and Boston experienced  the start of a renaissance under his calm, steady hand.  The eponymous John B. Hynes Convention Center is testimony to that revival.

In 1953, after defeating Curley again, Mayor Hynes visited Loughrea.  He was greeted by local dignitaries, his uncle Tom, and Jenny’s family.  My wife, Julie,  and I visited Loughrea in 2010 and visited the Carmelite Cemetery where Tom and Jenny are at rest a few yards from the grave of my great-grandparents.

The voters of Boston rejected four decades of corruption and venality and turned instead to the future.  May Providence voters, who have suffered through a similar period, profit from their example.

William Colleran, a retired engineer and longtime good-government activist,  lives in Bristol.

Postscript from Robert Whitcomb: Jim Curley had a brilliant pol's memory for names and faces. My paternal grandfather met Curley once in the '20s. He next met him in the late 40's. Curley's first question to my grandfather was "Henry, how is Margaret? '' -- referring to  his wife, my grandmother.

My grandfather, a Yankee Republican  (the other side of my family were Midwesterners of French and Scottish ancestry) who  generally detested big city machines and the sort of people like Curley who ran them,  was impressed!  He spoke of Curley as something of a genius.)

Many readers will remember Edwin O'Connor's book The Last Hurrah and the movie of the same name,  which starred Spencer Tracy as the Curley figure.  It greatly romanticized the life of a narcissistic crook. Still, it's true that his mayoral regime did help many  of his impoverished supporters during tough economic times for New England, especially when he served as mayor in the early '30s, in the worst of the  Great Depression.

Don Pesci: Cianci, Rowland, et al., and the politics of salvation

VERNON, Conn.

Buddy Cianci – the perhaps yet again Prince of Providence – is, to mix metaphors, the Pete Rose of Rhode Island politics.

We all know what Mr. Cianci did in office as mayor. When he was good, he was very good; when he was bad, he was very bad. A typical view of former jail bird and radio talk show host Cianci may be found, following an announcement by Mr. Cianci about running for mayor again, on LinkedIn.

The author of the piece is anxious not to be misunderstood: His post is not to be taken as an endorsement of Mr. Cianci’s political ambitions. But still…

“This is the man who took a near-literal sewer and transformed it into a center of art and culture. He stole the Providence Bruins from Maine and brought in regional hubs of tourism and commerce: WaterFire, the Providence Place Mall, and the Fleet Skating Center. Cianci would attend the opening of an envelope; he returned pride to a once great city. Buddy Cianci is Providence.” {Editor's note: Giving the endlessly  self-promotional Mr.  Cianci chief credit for all these things is misleading, as a perusal of history will show.}

Here in Connecticut, we have our own Ciancis, more pallid, to be sure, than The Prince of Providence, a very readable and entertaining unauthorized biography of Mr. Cianci by Mike Stanton, a former investigative reporter for The Providence Journal.

Former  Connecticut Gov.  John Rowland once again is chomping on a prosecution bullet. Like Mr. Cianci, Mr. Rowland spent some time cooling his heels in prison, having been pleaded guilty to a fraud charge involving the deprivation of honest services. Mr. Rowland’s plea followed an impeachment proceeding that was hampered by a federal investigation. But when Mr. Rowland was good, he was very good.

In Bridgeport, former State Sen.  Ernie Newton is once again running for the General Assembly, having spent some time in the slammer for bribery in office The FBI recently sent to prison a handful of uncooperative singing canaries, all of them associated with the failed U.S. congressional campaign of former Speaker of the Connecticut House Chris Donovan, who miraculously – and some would say unaccountably -- escaped the noose.

One begins to understand a) that power is a powerful aphrodisiac that, mainlined, may get you a stretch in jail, and b) there have in the past been brilliant second acts in politics. The much loved and notorious James Michael Curley of Boston administered the affairs of Boston from a prison cell.

Why not Newton, the self-proclaimed “Moses of his peeps?” Like Mr. Curley – who kept a campaign promise to “get the washerwomen of Boston off their knees” (by furnishing his faithful voters with long handled mops) – Mr. Newton had been unusually attentive to those in the past who had voted for him.

Mr. Newton’s latest legal scrape finds him facing five counts of illegal practices. Contributors to Mr. Newton’s recent campaign have told prosecutors that they filled out cards attesting that they paid contributions of $100 each to complete a &15,000 fundraising goal that would allow Mr. Newton to tap into public campaign funds when, in fact, they had not done so. To date, no one knows where the mysterious $500 came from.

Bridgeport’s underdogs – those “lynched,” justly or not, by the state of injustice – may well have found a champion in the imperturbable Mr. Newton. At one point during his most recent campaign, Mr. Newton pointed out to an astonished reporter that a good many voters in his old district were no strangers to prison. At the molten core of crime-infested inner cities, one finds an appalling spiritual vacancy: Marriages are non-existent; fathers have fled households; young men are in prison; others go to school in gangs. Mr. Newton himself went to prison for having done poorly what Mr. Curley did well. And now aggressive prosecutors want to deprive his constituents of their democratic rights because someone – no one knows who – paid five petitioners $100 each so that they might contribute their mite to see to it that their “Moses” should be reelected to office, from which he will be able to lead them from their Babylonian captivity to a promised land of milk and honey.

This is the politics of salvation.  One supposes that Mr. Curley and Mr. Barnum are spinning in their graves not because they are offended – but because they are jealous.

Don Pesci is a writer who lives in Vernon.