What I Am Reading: "Boston Mahatma" by Leslie G. Ainley

This isn’t quite turn-of-the-century-Europe prep work. With just a few days to go in Massachusetts, I still had this book lying around; and it was one of the rarer books in the pile so I figured I’d read it while I still had a chance.

As I noted in my survey of Massachusetts political history books: everyone loves Martin Lomasney. Nobody loves him more than his biographer, Leslie G. Ainley; who as best I can tell worked in Massachusetts politics in some capacity, including as an aide to Governor Volpe. This biography is just bursting with praise for Lomasney, the political boss of the West End from, roughly speaking, the 1890s to the early 1930s. I eventually dispensed with writing laudatory quotes because there were just too many, so I’ll just note the early fact that,  “His career, in retrospect, offers few opportunities for sincere condemnation of his actions or motives, because in the main both were directed toward the betterment of the government and the benefit of the people. He was a strong exponent of the ends justifying the means – with of course, the means being “kept legal.” (p. 3)

In Ainley’s telling, Lomasney was a benevolent, high-minded political boss, who always looked out for the needs of his constituents and the civic life of the city as a whole. Though he made his income from, as others have put it, “honest graft,” such as owning real estate that was to improve in value as a result of political decisions, he attains such high praise from Ainley and others because he was not proactively corrupt as was Curley and other politicians of his day. Lomasney never ran for Mayor or for statewide office, seemingly content with running his organization, the Hendricks Club, that politically dominated his ward. In the age before the modern welfare state, such a machine was the first and last recourse for the poor and immigrant ward to receive a job or an otherwise helping hand when they had need; and Lomasney’s efficiency and honesty in providing these services were the bedrock of his power and reputation.

Ainley goes out of his way to play up various causes that Lomasney supported during his career. He was a proponent of civil service reform to prevent removal of appointees for political reasons; and it was understood that those he placed on the city payroll must be qualified for the job, and work hard at it. As a legislator, he was always interested in improved efficiency in the various Boston city charter reform proposals and state constitutional conventions; he also pushed efforts for more fiscal accountability and formal accounting, including a proposal for an elected comptroller who would be the second-place finisher in the Mayoral race, to hold the Mayor to account. He later supported efforts to allow for the impeachment and removal of a mayor. He opposed attacks on the judiciary for partisan reasons, and opposed crooked public works projects that would waste municipal funds. That being said, he was also a YIMBY who supported the city’s growth and economic development, and opposed the onerous real estate taxes that Jack Beatty talks about as having crippled the city under Curley’s rule.

A biography of Lomasney is an interesting proposition because, once ensconced in power, he mostly just did the same thing year after year. As I said in my earlier overview, once the book has covered Lomasney’s rise, it pretty much just presents chapters on topics that Lomasney where focused his legislative and political efforts. Sometimes these topics are tackled non-chronologically; someone will be mentioned in connection to a topic, and the book will provide a brief precis of that person’s subsequent relationship with Lomasney down the decades before returning to the topic and the time at hand.

Lomasney was born shortly before the Civil War, and had some of its events as his earliest memories. His parents died young, and he lived with his aunts subsequently. There are some formative childhood events displayed, such as how his exclusion from a paid outing as a youth drove home the importance of fiscal planning and hard work; and how a brush with a truant officer followed by a second chance from a judge drove home the need for leniency for young violators, who might have their lives ruined by youthful indiscretions.

Lomasney’s entrance into politics, like that of Curley at a somewhat later date, was banal. Politics was there, he talked to people he knew and worked for about it, and eventually when an election rolled around, he decided to help out. He was good enough at it that people wanted him to help next time as well. Lomasney was impressive enough getting votes for Tilden in 1876 that he got work through political connections as a laborer in the expanding city, then moved into the quaint Gilded Age job of a lamplighter. This job left most of his day free, and he chose to spend it at the State House or at Boston City Hall, listening to the formal floor debates and informal sidewalk arguments that gave him a good education in political rhetoric and wheeling-and-dealing; soon he was known as a “walking encyclopedia” on any political topic. This time also saw the formation of his abiding interest in protecting workers from political purges, as he successfully embarrassed a city councilor who cooked up a dereliction of duty in an unsuccessful effort to get him fired.

He stuck with the organization of a State Representative, Michael A. Wells, for a few years; then when Wells died, Lomasney made the next essentially banal political move: he gathered a few of his cronies and went into business for himself. He ran a small Independent Democrat operation to displace the extant West End bosses, of what was at the time Ward 8 of Boston. After a couple of cycles of wins and losses, he decided to start his own organization in 1885. It was called the Hendricks Club, named after Grover Cleveland’s Vice President who was known as a friend of the Irish at the time.

The Hendricks Club, as an up-and-coming organization, was always grooming new political talent, which was often then poached by the existing machines. Lomasney owed his competitiveness to his rigorous organizing, with each precinct having an officer, and that officer having lieutenants responsible for turning out the full vote of specific streets. This was all carefully catalogued based on the published census of the city, so that Lomasney knew exactly how many votes were expected where, and could hold his subordinates to account. In addition to the votes earned through the bestowal of favors in the positive feedback loop of political power, Lomasney often met boats of Irish immigrants on the dock, where they found a Gaelic-speaker to welcome them to the city and attempt to see to their needs. It was on the basis of this support that the Hendricks Club was able, by the early 1890s, to wrest control of the Ward away from the other Democratic organizations.

At this point, well-versed in the social work and voter mobilization needed to win elections, Lomasney found himself needing to learn how to wheel-and-deal with leaders in other parts of the city. Sometimes this didn’t go well or had lasting repercussions, such as when he built up John F. Fitzgerald in the 1890s to use him to displace a disagreeable Congressman, only to have Fitzgerald form a city power base that often (though not always) came into conflict with his own operations. Honey Fitz, who was mentioned as still alive at the time of the book’s publication in 1949, had a longstanding relationship with Lomasney; the Toodles affair is not mentioned, and the book says that Honey Fitz left the 1914 Mayoral race for health reasons. I find the historiography of that scandal (or lack of scandal) very interesting.

As noted above, sometimes the book fills in the full history of an issue before returning to its chronological narrative. This was useful at one point when the book says (in some discrepancy from the same summary on Wikipedia, which I may trust more) that he was an Alderman from 1893 to 1895 and again after the turn of the century, a State Senator from 1896 to 97, and in the State House of Representatives in 1899, from 1905 to 1909, from 1911 to 1915, in 1917, from 1921 to 1922, and from 1927 to 1928. There will be more on his House career later, but he apparently first entered it when there was some debate in the Hendricks Club as to who should sit in an open seat, and he sought to avoid any division over the issue.

In the late 1890s, Lomasney also stepped into national politics for the first time. He was a convention delegate in 1896, and wasn’t particularly impressed with William Jennings Bryan, whose nomination caused a Democratic wipeout in New England. Lomasney then turned to city affairs when he was involved in the recruitment, transplanting, and election of Mayor Josiah Quincy in 1895. He subsequently battled with Quincy’s other supporters, who formed themselves in opposition to Lomasney in a “Board of Strategy.” The “guerilla warfare” between the groups was compared to the ongoing imperial conflict in the Philippines, and he was called “Aguinaldo Lomasney” in the press. This nickname, among others (such as “Bare Rib,” from the original Irish phrase that gave his family name) was eventually replaced by that of “The Mahatma,” bestowed by a cartoonist who dug up the then-uncommon word for a sage.

As I said, once Lomasney is in power, things sort of plateau in terms of biographical advancement, as the book is largely a catalogue of issues and campaigns. After the political unrest of the Quincy and subsequent Hart administrations, things settle down for Mayor Patrick Collins, the city’s second Irish mayor (and the last leader, according to Beatty, of the consensus politics era). Suddenly, at that point, Lomasney was at and over age 40.

Lomasney opposed Collins in his first primary in favor of his opponent John R. Murphy; he supported Collins in the general, which he lost to Republican Thomas N. Hart. He supported Collins the second time as part of a united front, when Collins won in 1901 on a second try. Collins died in office, though Lomasney’s enemies had intended to run him again to thwart Lomasney (in Ainley’s telling) . Lomasney had intended to support John F. Fitzgerald, but then his opponents talked Lomasney’s own trusted lieutenant, Edward J. Donovan, into running, and Lomasney switched his support. Fitzgerald won that race, but it was so acrimonious that Lomasney supported the Republican nominee, Louis A. Frothingham, and his loyal club followed him into it.

Lomasney also made people in state politics: one of the chapters most useful to me was on his support for dark horse candidate Eugene N. Foss in the 1910 gubernatorial election, where Lomasney serendipitously corralled a vote (outside a movie theater) that put him over the top in a mail-ballot convention, after the in-person convention was too deadlocked that year to pick a nominee. Foss was an agreeable Governor while Lomasney was in the legislature, tossing out the Civil Service Board picks that Lomasney wanted gone and bringing in a more egalitarian judiciary, in support of Lomasney’s efforts to abet the ambitions of the poor. He vetoed a bill to prevent consideration of criminal offenses before the age of 16 in consideration for a civil service posting; but (as we learn separately in a later chapter) Lomasney had that veto overridden. It was in this period, 1910, that Lomasney was almost elected as Speaker of the state legislature with support from various Progressive Republicans, and was only thwarted when his Republican opponent forced through an open vote rather than the usual secret ballot. Lomasney embarked upon other projects, many of which passed the lower chamber before dying in the Senate. One of these was a statue of his pro-Irish hero Ben Butler, Massachusetts governor and the head of occupying forces in New Orleans during the Civil War (whom I think is overdue for a revisionist makeover now that we have all realized that Reconstruction and the Radical Republicans weren’t bad). He also worked on education issues, preventing religious discrimination in teacher hiring and keeping standards at the State Bar such that, in terms of general knowledge, students could pass at a level of two years of high school or equivalent night school. This long-standing fight was part of his effort to make sure that the doors of opportunity, specifically legal opportunity in this case as Lomasney had at one point wanted to be a lawyer, were always open to the poor, who were less likely to have finished high school. His legislative colleagues, even when opposed to his interests, always respected him.

Lomasney also served as a delegate to the state’s Constitutional Convention in 1917, where he pushed a more moderate version of the state’s proposed measures to provide supplies in an emergency (such as the shortages from World War One); as the originally-proposed version was too broad, in his view, and would have led to economic panic and the destruction of small businesses. He also pushed a tax on intangibles (i.e. investments) and income, not real estate. These two topics definitely reveal a type of petit bourgeoise conservatism, against the “socialistic” measures that would cause business panic and in favor of the small property owners who inhabited his district. A reminder of the difference between liberals and radicals. In any case, Lomasney received great plaudits for his skill as a legislative drafter, despite his lack of formal legal training (and in contrast to those who had it).

Lomasney always fell out with the Congressmen who represented his district, perhaps because of the “rarified air” in Washington that made them think they could evade his influence. It took him three tries to remove Congressman Peter F. Tague, whom he had put in in 1914 to replace another Congressman who had taken a different job. One of these tries was the campaign between Tague and John F. Fitzgerald in 1918, which was decided by a very narrow margin that was eventually thrown out by the House of Representatives itself, which seated Tague instead of Fitzgerald. The book doesn’t provide any context for the dismissal of Fitzgerald’s win, in keeping with it’s nothing-but-good-news track for Lomasney; though his combativeness and showiness at the hearings in Boston are front and center. Tague was eventually beaten in 1922.

Also in that year, Lomasney received a lot of favorable attention for opposing District Attorney Pelletier, when the latter attempted to make a comeback after his dismissal from the shakedown scheme he ran with Daniel Coakley, who goes unmentioned (though his advice for Pelletier to avoid defending himself does not bear fruit, in the critical letters Lomasney receives). This is one of many vignettes that receives a chapter, along with Lincoln Steffans’ positive opinion of Lomasney when the municipal reformer visited Boston, and Lomasney’s strong support for Al Smith in 1924, 1928, and 1932.

At last, there is also a chapter on the Teapot Dome and Pearl Harbor, which is teased in the introduction as a previously-unknown instance of Lomasney’s swashbuckling national-level influence. This ends up being a bit anti-climactic. Lomasney attended several Democratic National Conventions, and always pushed (unsuccessfully) for a plank committing the party to support for Irish freedom. One of his allies in such an effort was oilman Edward L. Doheny, who was later a central figure in the Teapot Dome scandal. Part of Doheny’s defense in this scandal was that he had made a secret arrangement (with a date not specified) to build oil tanks at Pearl Harbor; these were for defensive purposes but the government wanted the plausible deniability that they were built for commercial reasons without government money. Thus, Doheny was paid in oil rights to Elk Hills in California, one of the sweetheart deals that came under investigation. Lomasney’s role, which was so dramatic that “a proposal was made to keep a one-car train, with steam up twenty-four hours a day, to rush in to Washington on a moment’s notice,” was just that he knew of this arrangement and was prepared to testify on it in Doheny’s defense, though he was not called upon to do so.

Lomasney died in 1933, stressing himself through his usual campaign involvement though his doctors told him to relax more. The book contains many notes of praise and remorse, as well as the humble crowd that gathered for his funeral. He did not live to see some of the more exciting events of the next decade of Massachusetts and national politics, which is something of a shame.

I like Lomasney too, it’s hard not to. This biography was a lot of fun, if occasionally frustrating for its exuberance, its skipping around, and its dedication to short, single- or double-sentence paragraphs. It makes clear references to Lomasney’s archives of some kind, mentioning letters he received and notes he made, but I can’t figure out where these are or if they still exist. They’d be useful to me for my own research! However, they’d also be useful to someone who wanted to write a new, more even-handed biography; one without some of the random errors such as a date of 1882 instead of 1892 for part of Lomasney’s rise, placing the Cole for Governor campaign in 1924 instead of 1928 (Curley wouldn’t have spoken for Cole in 1924, he would have spoken for himself!), or having William Gibbs McAdoo as the Presidential nominee in 1924 instead of John W. Davis. A more even-handed look could also include greater context on the Boston and state political scenes and policy developments, such as the context missing here when discussing Fitzgerald’s unsuccessful election contest in 1918. A Lomasney biography is an excellent vehicle to look at an entire era of Boston and Massachusetts political history. This biography has a lot of good information, but it is from 1949. It is high time for an update.