What I Am Reading: "The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874-1958)” by Jack Beatty

I tried. I tried to ignore Boston politics for as long as I could. It’s not my scene, and I have plenty of it forced upon me already. But my dabbling in New England politics of the interwar era led me here, and I couldn’t ignore the call anymore. Not after the Coakley book.

James M. Curley is one of the most famous figures in Massachusetts political history, especially internally. 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. He was the boss of a famously corrupt machine, and a major booster (some might say demagogue) of Irish interests. 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.

This biography has plenty of those. However, the book, published in ‘92 and written by a former Atlantic editor, is very self-aware about the Curley legend. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Curley was Irish. That was his main thing. 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. 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). 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. 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. This period ended with the death of Mayor Patrick Collins in 1905, an Irish beneficiary of the alliance between “Harvard and the slums.”

James Michael Curley had worked his way into Boston politics by then. 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. He worked assorted blue-collar jobs that took him around the city to meet people, good practice for his eventual political career. 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.

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. Working with the local Ward 17 organization of one Timothy E. McCarthy, Curley was elected to the Common Council, then the lower chamber of Boston’s bicameral municipal legislature, in 1899 after two tries that made it no further than the party caucuses. Turning quickly on McCarthy, a fellow youthful up-and-comer, Curley soon formed his own political organization, the Tammany Club, earning a following through celebrations, dispensation of patronage and financial assistance (in that pre-welfare state age), and his own skillful oratory.

Curley went on to the state House of Representatives in 1901, but soon encountered his first big political scandal when he was arrested for fraudulently taking a civil service examination on behalf of a constituent. Despite doing jail time, he was able to turn this into a political talking point, how far he would go to help his people (though it also remained a longtime source of embarrassment). He parleyed this into victory in an election for Alderman, the upper house of Boston’s legislature, then a switch to the unicameral City Council when the city charter changed in 1909. This end of “deference Democracy” saw Curley as one of the leading practitioner of ethnic politics, and the Tammany Club rallied their Irish base through counter-attacks on the persecution from the WASP elite that ran the city and state. This use of grievance politics was a big change to the city’s political culture. The Brahmins had gotten theirs, and Curley was telling the Irish that it was time to get ours.

In 1910, Curley built his resume with a campaign for congress, running against an incumbent on the wedge issue of that incumbent having failed to vote against the dictatorial Speaker Joseph G. Cannon. Curley’s two terms in Washington mostly focused on foreign policy, a way to gain chits with different ethnic voting blocs. The Irish in Boston in the 1910s were under the sway of their new Cardinal, William O’Connell, who preached the dual messages that Irish Catholics had arrived and should maximize their power, and also that they should know their place and refrain from toppling the Protestant establishment. O’Connell was a very conservative leader who imparted his provincial values to his Boston congregation, and through them to their leaders (though Curley was always a faithful and observant Catholic anyway). Curley’s time in Washington was fairly impressive in light of some aspects of his later career: he crusaded successfully against immigration restriction measures and other nativist policies pushed by Henry Cabot Lodge and his cohort, and convinced his unlikely friend President Taft to veto one such bill. He was a loyalist to new Democratic speaker Champ Clark, and backed his unsuccessful campaign for President in 1912.

Curley himself was re-elected to Congress in 1912, and ran for Mayor of Boston for the first time in 1914. Incumbent mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald had planned to run for another term, but Curley threatened to campaign against him on the basis of his affair with Elizabeth “Toodles” Ryan, the local employee of an illegal gambling establishment (see my previous post on the Coakley bio; I am still unclear on how public this scandal was at the time). Curley was the strongest candidate in the resulting open race, and defeated City Council President Thomas Kenny. Kenny had been a reform candidate, and despite Curley’s leadership of his own Tammany Club machine (not to be confused with the leadership of any kind of pre-existing machine: Curley’s operation was always a dedicated cult of personality), he unexpectedly co-opted the reform agenda upon taking office. He did not square the circle well, however. He went too far in budget cuts to maintain the loyalty of city employees and contractors, but the budget ballooned anyway, costing him the support of business and good-government groups. When he pivoted in the other direction in his second year, he was undercut by too heavy-handed of an effort to turn city employees into his own personal campaign arm. Nobody was happy.

He did expand his support, however. He centralized the awarding of patronage and jobs in his own person, weakening the remaining old-school ward bosses like aging West End boss Martin Lomasney. Then, having softened them up, he brought them into the fold as well. He continued to engage in culture wars against the Brahmin elite, causing ethnic kerfuffles by proposing policies or changes that targeted them, then using the resulting criticism as evidence of bigotry against himself and his constituents (with some level of accuracy, of course). Curley also pandered to his conservative base through aggressive bans on publications and films, contributing heavily to the “banned in Boston” tagline used to sell targeted films and books while making the city a famous site of censorship. He conspicuously failed, however, to ban The Birth of a Nation, angering the city’s African-American voters.

The second half of his term was consumed by revelations about his use of city funds and kickbacks to build his own mansion on the outskirts of the city, which he and his large family would spend most of the rest of their lives in. This transparent sleaze did proved too much to overcome in the pursuit of a second term in 1917. Despite backing from most of his own patronage machinery and the (sometimes crass) publicity received as a result of World War One home-front efforts, he attracted fire from all sides. Curley lost to a split in the vote, defeated by upscale child molester Andrew J. Peters.

In interregnums like these, Beatty provides some character notes. Curley was a grind, working hard on the hustings and at improving things like his oratory, seeing a vocal coach. Some saw him as a warm figure, some found him cooler than Coolidge. He was a spellbinding and patrician speaker, with long and sometimes baroque sentences that would be unfamiliar to political oratory today. Bill Weld seems to have had this speechmaking right in his Quabbin Reservoir book, though he was still off by a year in dating it if I am not mistaken. Though often dramatic, the speeches sometimes veered toward bathos, as Curley could never resist the chance to undercut himself with a good quip.

It is also interesting, while the book takes a breather, to have a look at the might-have-beens of alternate history. Champ Clark, prior to his presidential bid, said that Curley was the sort of person he would have wanted in his cabinet. Curley could have similarly been elevated if, having been re-elected in 1917, he had been in a position to preside over the police strike that launched Calvin Coolidge to stardom; though Beatty thinks that unlikely in such a Republican year as 1920, and he might have supported the strikers anyway. Finally, there is the background figure of Honey Fitz: JFK’s grandfather, later a somewhat pathetic figure described as increasingly befuddled in the histories (though not in the newspaper accounts of the day that I have read), ran for the Senate in 1916. He lost by only about 30,000 votes to Henry Cabot Lodge in the latter’s first popular election. Cribbing from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book with the plagiarism issues, Beatty notes that, perhaps, if Fitzgerald had managed to stick it out through the Toodles scandal and get re-elected, the power and patronage of the incumbent mayoralty could have made up 30K votes’ difference (buttressed by the absence of Curley’s efforts to publicly trash his predecessor’s incompetence and corruption, which he spent much of his first term doing). Could a defeat of Henry Cabot Lodge have swung the League of Nations fight the other way, leading to greater American internationalism in the interwar period? It’s a tantalizing possibility, though Beatty notes that Wilson’s Senate control was compromised by eight Democratic senatorial deaths anyway, so history was already pretty well taken hostage by fate as things stand.

In 1918, Curley failed to unseat one of the Congressmen who had jumped into his mayoral race and split his base vote. Instead, he became a bank president for a time, a no-show job that failed to bring the bank any hoped-for business. He ran again for mayor in 1921, eventually bullying District Attorney Joseph Pelletier out of the race and earning powerful local lawyer Daniel Coakley’s enmity. The 1921 race was a mean one; the legislature had even passed a single-term limit in an effort to blunt his power should he achieve office again. Even with this and with most of the remaining local machines, such as Lomasney’s, against him, Curley won. He had built up a dedicated base of voters; they appreciated this conspicuous crusader for their interests (or at least their spite) against the WASP establishment, and they appreciated that he brought them jobs and some benefits that they did not have to pay for through higher taxes, as his taxes were levied on commercial properties downtown. The Robin Hood system was working for the time being, and his constituents felt heard by the establishment for the first time in their lives.

His second term went well, as he presided over (and profited from) a massive building boom. This was another draw toward Curley: he was effective, and got things done (never mind that he had his hand in the till in the process, they all did). Reform mayors presided over retrenchment and stagnation, Curley presided over boom and prosperity. Boston’s economy suffered in the long term, in Beatty’s telling, as its commercial life stagnated under high assessments (and, to be fair, family trusts that did not provide for risk-taking endeavors). He also pushed a Greater Boston plan of incorporating many suburbs into the city; though obviously doomed to failure, this would have, in Beatty’s analysis, solved many of the city’s later bussing and tax base problems, altering forever the character of Massachusetts politics. The suburbanites would not have wanted to be governed by Curley, you say? Well, their votes outnumber his base’s. This could have been a visionary proposal.

With the one-term limit, Curley had to go up or get out, so he ran for Governor for the first time in 1924. This was the heyday of the second Ku Klux Klan, and though Curley did not restrict The Birth of a Nation then, he certainly let his opposition to the racist group be known now, even to the (despicable) extent of secretly putting up their burning crosses himself to rally Irish and other Catholics to his defense. He also reversed himself on a child labor bill after the Cardinal opposed it. He was always going to lose this race in Silent Cal’s home(-ish) state in his landslide year, but Beatty thinks that these two things meant that he lost without his dignity intact.

In 1925, he backed one of his cronies and his fire commissioner, Teddy Glynn, for mayor; but his lack of enthusiasm was a conspicuous effort to sabotage Glynn’s candidacy, so Curley could take things back from the Republicans four years later. Coakley’s campaign is mentioned, but his vengeance agenda (according to Halley) is not; and there was a Democratic reform candidate in the race as well. Glynn lost. Unfortunately for Boston, their new Republican mayor, Malcolm Nichols, was a tawdry crook as well, governing and appointing at the behest of the Republican machine’s bosses this time.

Curley’s next campaign was not his own, but one he attached himself to: the cause célèbre of ‘20s Catholics, urbanites, and immigrants, Al Smith. Smith’s historic campaign united the warring factions of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, and Curley was there to take full advantage of that fact. Smith is described as a less inspiring orator than Curley, but unlike Curley he was non-corrupt, and he was also the product of an existing machine that he rose through the ranks of, rather than being a “political entrepreneur” who had created his own personal following, as Curley did Curley milked the campaign and the publicity for all it was worth, and was in a good position afterword despite Smith’s loss. In 1929, he faced only one reform candidate, “reform” still a dirty word for discriminatory elite rule to the average ethnic Bostonian, and had all of the various ward machines backing him, even Lomasney for the first and last time. Once again, despite his corruption, the building boom and other reasons cast Curley as an effective leader, corruption and culture wars aside (though those, as always, helped). His voters were loyal to him, they remembered his personal touch and small favors and would for many years to come.

Curley’s efforts to deal with the burgeoning Depression in some ways presaged the New Deal, as he attempted to provide make-work programs and (in a manifestation of that era’s conservatism) give people jobs, not “the dole.” Despite his economic anti-elitism, Curley was still a social conservative, in favor of order. Communists and Socialists in the city often did not have their gathering permits approved. Some of his building projects, though, were even far-sighted, such as initiating construction of Boston’s airport. He worked hard to lobby for state, federal, and private relief funds, though of course that money would have been spent in a way expedient to him. Personally, though Curley was not effected economically by the Depression, he was nonetheless having a difficult personal time, as his wife, whom he had long been happy with, died of cancer in 1930.

Also in 1930 was his silliest campaign, as he ran Honey Fitz for the Democratic nomination for Governor in order to keep the seat open for himself in 1932, one way or the other. Honey Fitz lost his nerve and withdrew, but Curley campaigned for him anyway, launching pathetic attacks on Joseph B. Ely, the DA for Western Mass and eventual nominee. This was of course the campaign where, in a scuffle after a radio address, he kneed Dan Coakley’s son Gael in the testicles. Curley’s bullshit backfired this time, as not only did Honey Fitz lose (if he had withdrawn after winning, Curley planned for the state committee to name a candidate), but so did Curley’s other primary candidates. In the depths of the Depression, Ely became Governor, though it took a massive party unity showing for him to just barely scrape by. The bad news kept coming for Curley, as the son who would have been his political heir died in 1931.

In 1932, Curley threw himself into another Presidential race; counterintuitively, the results may have been worse this time despite his candidate’s victory. Curley latched on to Franklin Delano Roosevelt early on. Massachusetts, with its conservative-leaning Catholic Democratic Party (or “Democracy,” as unfortunately no-one calls it anymore) was natural Smith territory, and it is where Smith actually decided to compete for delegates, rather than just accept a draft. Curley’s bullishness pushed Roosevelt into the primary, which soon (after his belligerence also scuttled a compromise and withdrawal) became a struggle between Curley and the rest of the Democratic Party. Curley was in the awkward position of having to tell voters to look beyond the candidate’s Catholicism and identity; despite having attached great support to that in past elections, to put it lightly. Roosevelt suffered a humiliating defeat, and Curley, despite claims of great usefulness, was simply a hanger-on for the rest of the nomination and general election campaign. He did make a successful speaking tour of the west, but was kept away from Massachusetts.

This wasn’t good enough for an appointment as Secretary of the Navy, where shipbuilding contracts could be awarded. It wasn’t good enough for Ambassador to Italy, to visit his friend Mussolini and gain street cred among Italian-American voters. Instead, he was offered the less-than-plum position of Ambassador to Poland, which he turned down. FDR, in what Beatty thinks was at least partially aristocratic Protestant snobbishness and bigotry, did not care much for Curley.

After the real New Deal came into power, Curley’s proto-New Deal could not be maintained, as he feuded with the federal government over funding and patronage rather than just let it come in without his control. He evinced little interest in being mayor in his last year, and was of course prevented from running again. He was succeeded by the reformist candidate whom he had beat in 1929, Frederick Mansfield.

This bad attitude was carried over into Curley’s next endeavor: a run for Governor in 1934. He beat out the preferred candidate of Senator David I. Walsh (the state’s other premier Irish-Catholic politician in this era, a rural-dweller very different from Curley) in the primary by clinging to his FDR support, and narrowly won the general the same way, plus his old organization tricks. Roosevelt did not actually endorse him, and kept him as far away as possible; but Ely had been an anti-New Dealer, so a pro-Roosevelt Democrat was an easy sell that year. He ran behind the rest of the ticket in the general election.

Curley started out as a “dictator” in the mold of Huey Long: he aggressively purged the Finance Committee appointed by the state that was looking into his dealing as Mayor, and took control of paroles and probation patronage by buying off and replacing part of the Governor’s Council (now in concert with his old enemy, disbarred upscale lawyer Dan Coakley). How many members did the Council have then, eight or nine? If you know, email me, because I can’t figure it out between the two books (I know the LG is a tiebreaker). Anyway, Curley was not at his finest as Governor. Despite his preference for home rule for Boston, he didn’t take any action toward it, instead harassing his successor’s administration through all the state power at his disposal. He took copious amounts of state money for gifts, and caused multiple traffic accidents while ordering his limousine to ignore traffic laws. He banned judges from officiating weddings, meaning church weddings only. He mandated a loyalty oath for teachers. His appointments were largely unqualified crooks he could control. There was no whimsy in this corruption, no charming anecdotes here.

However, his usual vote-buying patronage did pass some pro-labor legislation, and he managed to get some state public works rolling. A bigger failing, though, was a failure to secure federal funding for any state projects, despite repeated grandiose proclamations to the contrary. As noted in the Kennedy Versus Lodge book (likely citing this one, if I had to guess), the Roosevelt Administration did not trust Curley with federal money. The feds did enact projects under their own control, but these were mostly banal and small-scale. This conspicuous failing meant that Curley’s personal style was finally coming back to bite his base constituents, though mostly through omission of benefit for them rather than commission of harm.

Curley had a chance to turn it around. One topic I’ve repeatedly encountered in my pursuit of New Deal New England is the massive Connecticut River flooding in 1936 (then again in 1938). After Curley learned of it, he hurried up from some event in Philadelphia and went on a whirlwind 48-hour tour of the affected western and central Mass areas while the flooding was still going on, ordering deployment of state resources and personnel in a front-line crisis response. He was truly impressive once again, and he could have, in Beatty’s telling, used this incident to galvanize himself out of his venial political lethargy. However, he was soon back to his old self, scuttling rebuilding plans because he could not control the expenditures and use them to steer jobs and contracts. Even a new marriage didn’t change his ways, he was soon back to spending state money and trying to hustle state judges out of office to have another tool to reward supporters with.

He eschewed the hard work of Governor for a second term, deciding instead to run for the Senate in 1936. He hustled out Senator Marcus A. Coolidge, a figure about whom history is largely silent, thus ending the Coolidge-Walsh run of two Democratic Senators from north-central Massachusetts. He defeated Coolidge’s son-in-law, the Mayor of Fitchburg Robert E. Greenwood, in the primary, then faced liberal republican legislator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., grandson of the famed Brahmin leader, in the general. There were no big ideological issues between the two; Curley kept up a heavy offensive while Lodge did not mention his opponent. His campaign skills were failing him by this point, as he kept shooting himself in the foot with minor errors. He tried again to embrace FDR, who campaigned in Massachusetts but did not explicitly endorse Curley. This support did piss off Father Charles Coughlin, however, the Catholic radio demagogue who had turned on the New Deal at this point; his Union Party candidate ended up siphoning off some of Curley’s natural voters. He lost to Lodge fairly decisively.

You have to keep moving, though. Curley ran for Mayor again in 1937, but lost to a new generation, his sometime-protégée Maurice Tobin. As in the prior year, he stumbled in attacking this newer generation of opponent; and he had not overcome the bad publicity of his heavy-handed gubernatorial reign. He failed again in 1938, when he tried to return to the corner office. Though he defeated his successor, Charles F. Hurley, in the Democratic primary (after the latter failed to triangulate between the New Deal and more conservative Boston Catholic influences), he lost to Republican Leverett Saltonstall in the general. His note, cribbed from elsewhere, that Saltonstall was running on his “South Boston face” despite being a WASP was fodder for Republican counter-attacks; and investigations and indictments produced an endless font of reminders of Curley’s past corruption.

He thought about running against David I. Walsh in 1940, but balked. Instead, in the boom in defense spending leading up to the American entry into World War 2, he got involved in various shady financial schemes. Curley was a prime mark: he needed to perpetuate his money yet had no legal recourse if he lost it, since it was mostly the product of graft. He ended up “running” a company, really run by scam artists, that inflated its ability to be the middleman to procure defense contracts. He had to work with this, and contend with a troubled family situation, an IRS investigation, and with a civil conviction for defrauding the city while he was mayor. This all makes it somewhat surprising that he came close to winning the 1941 Boston mayoral election. Tobin’s reformist administration, as they often did, implemented austerity measures, reducing services, while the clearly impending crisis let Curley talk about his successful stewardship of the city during World War One. Tobin won again, but it was closer than it had been four years earlier.

Curley pivoted to Congress in 1942. If it is not clear by now, occupying office was a financial necessity for him, though he was also clearly a creature of the campaign trail. He unseated Congressman Thomas H. Eliot in his primary - the impressive young liberal Congressman, a legislative drafter (swoon) of the Social Security Act, had beaten an incumbent Republican on his second try two years earlier, but his partially-suburban district was redrawn to include much of Curley’s old Boston base. Curley beat him handily, impressing even Eliot with his oratory and prowess.

Surprising the New Dealers, he voted fairly liberally at first. However, before he had even been in office for a year, he was under federal investigation for his shady business dealings in the defense procurement sector (though the timeline gets a little janky as at least one of the old book’s typos seems to say that the investigation came before Congress, though that is later contradicted). This investigation dragged out for a few years, despite Harry Truman’s assurance, as head of the Truman Commission, that Curley would be fine. Curley’s Congressional career was marked by both demagoguing against the threat of Communism, and a noble speech countering anti-Semitic discrimination that Beatty reads as being directed at his own Boston Irish base, as there was a rising tide of hate crimes against Jews in the isolationist, Coughlinite city.

The last hurrah, not to be confused with The Last Hurrah, came in 1945. He was always going to run for Mayor again, but (in a reversal of the prevailing trend) money would not be an object, because Joseph Kennedy would provide funds as long as his son Jack could correspondingly slip into Curley’s Congressional seat. All of the newspapers were against Curley by this point, but Kennedy’s money paid for a saturation radio campaign, which combined with the untimely death of Curley’s oldest son to provide a decisive victory against another reform candidate. “Reform administrations never succeed themselves,” as someone I forgot to write down said, and Tobin’s shabby austerity meant that returning veterans looked forward to Curley’s activity and competence, and his old voters clung to him in the face of encroaching globalism and suburbanization that made their small world much bigger.

The hammer dropped: shortly after his inauguration, he was finally convicted of mail fraud in connection with his defense procurement work. He had six to eighteen months in prison hanging over his head, but dragged out the appeal process for a year and a half. He ran the city in his usual way, and this is when many of his latter-day roguish anecdotes come from. As he reigned as mayor, his health was starting to fail, through years of rich living. He knifed his old enemy Tobin as the latter ran for another term as Governor, getting Republican Robert Bradford elected through his thinly-veiled opposition to the Democratic incumbent. This paid off when his appeals ran out and, despite his pleading of ill health, he was sent to minimum-security prison in Danbury in 1947. Bradford pushed a bill through the state legislature providing for the City Clerk to take over as temporary mayor, so that Curley could return to his position upon his release (I didn’t quite understand the thrust of this bill - presumably it meant Curley needn’t resign? Provided for an interim mayor only?).

Curley’s family said he didn’t have a great time in prison, suffering ill health and minor indignities. He put a brave face on his letters, but it is likely that prison did not agree with this sick, grandiose old man. His sentence was commuted after five months, as President Truman was conscious of how favorable he appeared to urban machine bosses considering his own political origins. He came around to Truman later, though he never forgave FDR his cold-shouldering.

Anecdotally, Curley sealed his own political fate the day he returned to office. The Acting Mayor, career bureaucrat and city clerk John Hynes, had mostly left everything for Curley upon his return, including awards of contracts and personnel changes. Curley took care of these immediately upon his return, and then boasted to waiting journalists that “I have accomplished more in one day than has been done in the five months of my absence.” Haynes was outraged and betrayed, and resolved to run for Mayor in the upcoming 1949 election.

In 1949 Curley first fought off an attempt to change Boston’s charter via referendum to remove the mayor and centralize the City Council, to make the city safer for business interests (a Class E plan, for you Massachusetts readers). The reform passed instead was for a runoff election between the top two finishers in a primary. The mayoral election was the one depicted in The Last Hurrah: despite their previous support when the city needed revitalization, the younger middle-class postwar voters did not need “taking care of” the same way that Curley’s poorer constituents had an entire generation ago, and his base of those who had received favors were dying off. The “Robin Hood” system was failing: rents were going up and services were getting worse. Curley’s administration was too expensive. He received his highest vote count ever, but lost narrowly by 12,000 votes.

There were still ups and downs in Curley’s remaining post-governmental life, just as there had been ups and downs in his political career. In the close of his term, two of his surviving children died on the same day. He was forced to hold yet another funeral, adding to that of several other children and his first wife. He ran for Mayor again in 1951 (Hynes’ term was shortened because of the new charter) but dropped out before the runoff, as his eventual victory was impossible. He teased campaigns for Senator and for Governor, but didn’t seriously pull the trigger on any. His tenth and final run for Mayor of Boston came in 1955, when he finished in third place and did not make the runoff.

Curley cut a pathetic figure for a time, renting himself out to conventions and generally hanging around at loose ends. Things turned around in the last years of his life, though, as he lived to see his own mythologization. The Last Hurrah, published in 1956, was briefly pooh-poohed, but soon Curley got wise to the fact that it made him out as a romantic, roguish, and loveable figure, and solidified his place in history and nostalgia. The book gave him a new lease on life, and gave way to a myriad of lectures and television appearances where he was able to talk about himself and the good old days. He even had his own autobiography ghostwritten to capitalize on the publicity. The book laundered his career, and provides a wholesome final act to someone who may not quite have deserved one. Surviving an increasing number of health problems, he died in 1958, mourned by the whole city.

I think that this biography captures Curley well. It opines on his misdeeds while explaining his appeal. It returns many times to the “scrubwomen” who worked cleaning the State House. Curley’s own mother had done similar work, and he remembered how it wore on her body. When he was Governor, he ordered that the women be granted mops to work with rather than brushes, removing the necessity of working on their knees all day; and he retitled them as “matrons,” providing them with dignity. Curley, for all of his theft, his “honest graft,” and his demagoguery, did accomplish good things, and there was a reason that he was called “the Mayor of the Poor.” His constituents didn’t have much, but he was able to give them jobs in many cases, and through jobs, dignity. He built hospitals to treat them, and recreational facilities for them to use, all funded by the hated Brahmins, whom he never forsook an opportunity to tweak (sometimes playfully, sometimes toxically). All of this is in the book.

Beatty provides the usual insights into the Irish-American character, similar to O’Connor’s in the novel. Beatty agrees with the conclusions of the novel, that The Mayor lost because the welfare state had rendered the urban bosses obsolete. He has plenty of opportunity to talk about Irish affinity for tragedy and humor, and moral ground to note Boston’s provincialism, and Curley’s base’s racism, bigotry, and fundamental conservatism (which Curley both sought to abet and to correct at various different points) alongside the persecution they suffered at the hands of the Protestant establishment. The book covers the highs and lows, Curley as hero and Curley as villain, fitting for a larger-than-life figure out of Boston’s past. On my end, it gave a lot of good info on ‘30s #MApoli.

How deep will my Massachusetts political history rabbit hole go? I already intend to at least skim a biography of one of Curley’s nemeses who gets a short shrift here, Henry Shattuck. Should I read the old Honey Fitz and Martin Lomasney biographies from the ‘60s that are in my library system? I don’t know. Can anyone stop me?