What I Am Reading: "Let George Do It!" by Foster Furcolo

This novel was published by Foster Furcolo (under the pen name “John Foster”) during his first term as Governor of Massachusetts. Who was Foster Furcolo? Well, Edgar Litt will tell you that:

“In 1956, the Democrats regained the governorship with Foster Furcolo. Although Furcolo’s Italo-American ancestry had voting-bloc appeal, the primary significance of his candidacy in 1956 and 1958 lay in the fact that he was the first governor from the managerial and white-collar strata of the new-stock suburbs. He came from a wealthy suburb in the Springfield metropolitan area; he had attended Yale University; he had served in the cosmopolitan setting of national politics as a member of the House of Representatives; he had won the plaudits of the cultural and economic liberals, including the Americans for Democratic Action.

Furcolo did owe part of his political ascent to party regulars such as Paul Dever - who was instrumental in advancing his gubernatorial ambitions. He held the position of state treasurer in 1952, the year of Dever’s defeat, and his inclusion was intended to soothe Italian Democrats chafing at an all-Irish ticket.

Furcolo entered the governorship with a strong policy orientation, and disdained the petty strivings for patronage and personal favor that surrounded him. Nor did he work closely with many of his party’s leaders. Mallan and Blackwood wrote of him:

‘His background separated him from many of the Democratic legislators; he was urbane and well educated, with a broad interest in national and international issues, while many of them were self-made men - small businessmen or insurance salesmen - wbose education had ended with high school or perhaps with night law school. But more essential was the fundamental interest Furcolo had in broad and sweeping programs, combined with a determined if not stubborn willingness to push for an idea he believed in against the political judgement of his own advisors. (Mallan and Blackwood p. 289).’”

-Edgar Litt, The Political Cultures of Massachusetts, p. 45-46

So there you have it.

The novel has a simple premise: it is about a clueless nobody (Peter Martin) and his huckster friend (George Clancey). One day, based on winning a serendipitous bet on a horse called Candidate, George convinces Pete to run for State Representative in their district, against the eight candidates already running. The district is the Third District, and the city or county are never named; but their part of the state is juxtaposed with the eastern part, and the district includes a small outlying town called Gardner (only 500 people, much smaller than the real Chair City, even in the ‘50s), so it must be in Central or Western Mass. Furcolo represented the Second District in Congress when it was (as now) a Central/Western Mass district, and was based in Springfield. We don’t get much more set-up, characterization, or political context than that, and we don’t need it.

George, fueled by his own inscrutable motives, is determined to put the utterly hapless Pete (a first-person narrator) in office by any means necessary, and runs all kinds of cons on other candidates, politicians, or ethnic bloc influencers in order to win the September 15th primary. He manages to turn Pete’s involvement in a barroom brawl into a story about how he was trying to help a drunk get sober; and turns another campaign’s dirty trick back on them when they try to frame Pete as having impregnated a young lady. He runs alongside the Italian candidates downballot in the Italian wards, and the Polish candidates in the Polish wards. He never says that the woman speaking in Polish on the radio is the candidate’s mother, but it is implied. Such bloc votes are a very important consideration, as they must have been for Furcolo in his career. As Litt says, he was more of a candidate of the managerial and meritocratic cohort, and would have probably relied heavily on ward heelers like George to bring him old guard bloc votes the urban areas of the Massachusetts of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

This was a fun little novel. Most of the campaigns I’ve been involved in were in rural settings, but I was involved in one race for a dense urban district. I’m not saying that tricks like these happened, but I will say that the types of hucksters are identifiable: those who can swing a certain constituency or number of voters for you if you just listen to (and pay) them. It is fun to root for George as he gets the better of these people. The book closes with an epilogue not to allow a manager to create the candidate from whole cloth (“Don’t Let George Do It”), but it is tough to argue with the man’s results.