Notes on Selected #MApoli Readings
I discovered in late March that my work-from-home situation would likely allow me to remain at my parents’ house in Massachusetts through the month of April. During that time, I decided to take advantage of the extensive collection of my Central and Western Mass library system to peruse as many books on Massachusetts political history as I could; not to thoroughly examine each one, but rather to gain some background in selected topics in the interest of current or future studies. Notes on these readings, extensive or otherwise, are presented here, roughly but not perfectly in the order that I acquired and read them. My specific topics of research were:
Roland D. Sawyer, a long-time state legislator from Ware (1914-1941), on whom I am writing a paper currently (I didn’t expect to find much on him in these books, but I checked anyway);
Marcus D. Coolidge, a single-term US Senator (1931-1937), on whom I considered writing a paper but wasn’t able to find enough primary or secondary source material to make much of a go of it;
Governor Eugene N. Foss, whom I am still considering a brief paper on; and
Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, to satisfy my idle curiosity about his 1916 Senate campaign, as first brought to my attention by The Rascal King ( I refer to this as the “Honey (Fitz) Hunt”).
I would like to stress that it is possible that some important element or segment of these books eluded me in my incomplete pursuit, so please keep that in mind.
The Gentleman Mr. Shattuck: A Biography of Henry Lee Shattuck, 1879-1971 by John T. Galvin (1996)
Henry Shattuck’s name stirred a distant memory when I came across him while writing my Hiram Bingham paper. Shattuck was a Brahmin Republican who, for my proximate purposes, served on the Loyalty Review Board in the Truman Administration, which Bingham chaired. More extensively, he was a longtime legislator in Massachusetts in the ‘20s through ‘40s, in the state legislature and the Boston City Council; and also a member of the board running Harvard.
I didn’t have a direct use for a Shattuck biography once I learned that it existed, but I was interested enough in him to read through the book’s political chapters. In the process, I learned not to ignore the essential building blocks that biographers build up by discussing their subject’s familial and social background and upbringing, because this insight into character and motivation provides, hopefully, a grounding for understanding their actions. I didn’t quite have this grounding for Shattuck, so I swung back and forth in my opinion on him based on my judgement of whatever political actions were being covered at the time.
From only reading the political chapters, I learned that Henry Lee Shattuck was a nice guy, a liberal Republican, who gave back to the political life of his state out of a sense of noblesse oblige. He first became a well-respected lawyer at an upscale law firm, then parleyed his genteel respectability to a seat in the state legislature when he was in his 40s. Here he was a work horse, not a show horse, and dedicated much of his career to keeping the state’s fiscal house in order in the legislature, then on the Boston City Council, then back in the legislature. I earlier read a paper he had written summarizing his time in Massachusetts politics where he framed himself as a James M. Curley opponent, and the book discusses his involvement in curtailing some of Curley’s financial excesses and corruption. He prevented him from building a boondoggle of a bridge, in one memorable instance.
However, I think that The Rascal King has Shattuck’s number. First of all, it mentioned him only once, indicating his (lack of) importance to the overall Curley narrative. That narrative takes pains to highlight the interests of Curley’s Irish voters who had been blocked from any kind of social advancement or state support of any kind by the Yankee/Brahmin establishment who ran Boston and Massachusetts as a whole after the Civil War. It notes their disdain for “good government” that only paved and lit the streets in the nice part of town, and was essentially a gloss on the status quo. The Shattuck biography, however, at least in the politically-focused segments that I read, doesn’t seem to invest much time in exploring any social narrative or counter-narrative to Shattuck’s prim good government agenda. It comes the closest when first discussing his budding relations with Curley and with another machine boss, Republican Charles Innes:
“As Charles Innes was Shattuck’s main Republican bete noire, so Curley was his chief Democratic one, and both for the same reason: Shattuck despised their lack of ethics and use of political for personal gain. In this he was much like the earlier Mugwumps of his class and station. Like them he wanted both “Swamp Yankees” and Irish Americans to adopt the patrician ideals of selflessness and service in politics. Not blessed with family money or the natural self-assurance of people with Shattucks’s social standing, Innes and Curley lived in a quid pro quo world in which they helped people who, like them, could not break into the Brahmin-dominated legal and financial establishment Harry Shattuck inhabited. In the process they helped themselves… Friendly rivals for power, Curley and Innes understood each other. They would never understand - or be understood by - Henry Lee Shattuck. Yet Shattuck understood and admired Martin Lomasney, the hard-nosed Democratic boss of the West End, a man who shared Shattuck’s pleasure in working through the legal process and loved to joust with Shattuck… As he would show throughout his years in the legislature and later in the Boston.” (p. 180).
So Shattuck was at least fond of Lomasney (everyone is fond of Lomasney, people can’t stop singing his praises wherever you go) and of some other Democrats like future House Speaker John W. McCormack, whom he took under his wing when they were in the state legislature together. However, my overall impression of Shattuck, while not inherently negative, is of someone who was not able to transcend his social upbringing. He doesn’t understand Curley voters or their social motivations, and his biography doesn’t attempt to either. When Leverett Saltonstall campaigned to become state Speaker of the House in 1929, he was attacked by his Democratic opponent Martin Hays, who said that Saltonstall “was not born, Mr. Speaker, the way you and I were born: he didn’t have to go through the hardship of life…” and implied that Saltonstall would “subconsciously” or “unconsciously” favor “those who first stuck the diamond-studded spoon into his mouth when he was an infant.” Shattuck rose to respond that “I abhor demagoguery” and defend Saltonstall against “this despicable attack.” (p. 234). Here may have been a good opportunity for the author to explore an alternative viewpoint, if only for a moment. We don’t have to condemn Saltonstall to understand how someone in the political opposition could be wary of giving power to yet another upscale Brahmin.
In another example, Shattuck un-endorsed a Republican Senatorial candidate, Frederick H. Gillette, in 1924, over Gillette’s support for the then-pending (anti-) Child Labor Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “In brief,” he wrote someone, “if the amendment is adopted Congress may assume complete power and control of persons under eighteen years of age…with equal logic amendments to the Federal Constitution may be urged to cure every human ill, real or fancied.” (p. 194). This is the typical conservative fearmongering of the era, unable to confront real social issues, and is observed without being contextualized.
Neither the book nor Shattuck, however, were all bad. For example, when in 1931 Gov. Joseph B. Ely, himself later an anti-New Dealer for context, proposed a public works program to ameliorate unemployment, Shattuck quibbled only with the methods of payment, though he and the Republican legislature did cut down the size of the program (which I recall Beatty described as undersized to begin with). He was a liberal on other issues, such as his opposition to Boston’s censorship laws. There is a funny incident recounted in 1930 when he was pushing a bill to revise and loosen these laws. Lady Chatterly’s Lover was seized in one vice raid, and the bill’s proponents feared that Martin Lomasney was going to read from it on the House floor “as ammunition” against the bill. Instead, Lomasney rose with the book in his hand, and said of Shattuck that “this venerable and respectable bachelor would rather take to his bed a filthy book than an honest wife,” and left it at that. The bill passed (p. 244-245).
Indeed, Shattuck had a lot of good parts, and the book tells us about them at length. He was a competent and well-respected legislator; he was the chair of the Ways and Means Committee for a long time, and his fiscal knowledge was widely respected (in quoted editorials from papers on both sides of the political divide). He also on several occasion is quoted on the nobility and importance of legislative work, statements after my own heart. This biography is a kitchen sink biography, where the writer clearly just put everything from the archives on the page. This means that we are treated to notes on every vacation Shattuck took and member of his family he interacted with (he was Eliot Richardson’s uncle, by the way); but also that we are treated to extensive feedback on Shattuck’s philanthropic efforts. Shattuck served as the Treasurer for the Harvard Corporation, and much of his work went to expanding the school’s program offering, such as into Celtic studies, and endowing funds for youths of underprivileged backgrounds to attend. These are nice little feel-good moments to counteract incidents such as that when Shattuck only gives a nominal sum to a sick, indigent children’s charity because he resents the extortion of an elected official. Anyway, the thoroughness is also appreciated when the book has at least a paragraph, it seems, on ever state election during Shattuck’s active period, which I appreciated. On the other hand, there wasn’t much on the Loyalty Review Commission that wasn’t directly from Shattuck’s own paper on the subject, which I had already read.
Anyway, now I am just checking things off the list. This wasn’t a bad read, and I am all for deep dives on state legislators from days of yore. It’s just funny to get a Republican perspective on things and have it be exactly what you expected.
Conservatism in a Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics 1900-1912 by Richard M. Abrams (1964)
This book was a godsend for my research into the Governorship of Eugene N. Foss, to the point where it might well provide the backbone of a paper I am considering. Foss was Governor from 1911 to 1914, and his three winning Gubernatorial elections (1910, 1911, and 1912) fall right within the scope of this book. I ended up copying long sections of the book into a document for later use, since that paper is on the backburner right now. I expect to make extensive use of it.
Foss is the n-th Trump stand-in that one might come across. He was a “megalomaniac” businessman who jumped around between political parties, buying/bullying his way into a Democratic gubernatorial nomination; all in service of his idiosyncratic views on trade. Foss was in favor of trade reciprocity with Canada (a “reciprocitarian” as it is put at one point), whereby Massachusetts industries would be able to buy Canadian raw materials without any tariff issues, but still have protectionism for the resulting manufactured goods. It was a sweetheart deal for us but a non-starter for anyone else. Foss managed to enrage partisans of both parties in his (occasionally successful) quest for popular appeal, making him arguably more successful at PR than Trump.
I was interested, as you’ll learn extensively below, in Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1916 re-election campaign; but this book actually also informed me that Lodge had a close call in 1910 as well. That was prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment, and the Republican lead in the legislature was narrow that year. The Democrats may have been able to unseat Lodge with a few Progressive Republican defections, but Foss, in another apt Trump parallel, managed to screw it all up by going after Lodge like a bull in a china shop, giving his target an outside force to organize against.
It’s interesting stuff. I might just buy the book, honestly. Again, I didn’t fully read it or even do a thorough skim, but from my impressions, the title is accurate: Massachusetts lagged behind in at least reforming fervor in the Progressive era, but made up for it at least in part because the uninspiring establishment Republicans who ran the place made enough reforms that they didn’t get burned on any major issues.
David I. Walsh, Citizen-Patriot by Dorothy G. Wayman (1952)
I just did a quick drive-by of this book for my own purposes. David Ignatius Walsh is an underrated Massachusetts character - he served four-and-a-third terms in the Senate, and two terms as Governor. He was a pioneering Irish Democrat in a time period when the state was run by Brahmins. He is also completely confounding in the New Deal era in the way that old-style Progressive politicians often were - he was opposed to much of the New Deal “bigness,” and went on to be a leading isolationist in the lead-up to World War 2 (though not after Pearl Harbor).
He was also, famously, the possible-subject of a gay sex scandal in 1942, whereby he was rumored to be the client of a male brothel in New York. Gore Vidal thinks it was him, and that FDR set him up as part of an effort to get rid of his isolationist enemies. The author of this biography, Dorothy G. Wayman, blames other unspecified enemies, and does not think that there is any evidence to implicate him in this “disgusting smear,” which she won’t even name.
David I. Walsh is an interesting character with a long career and a lot of interesting elections, including his eventual demise at the hands of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. in 1946. However, I specifically came to this book to see if there were any information on the elusive Marcus A. Coolidge, Massachusetts’ Senator from 1931 to 1937. Coolidge, an industrialist from Fitchburg, left little historical record. He was apparently friends and Central Mass neighbors with Walsh, however, who abetted his political rise. I had hoped to be able to write something about Coolidge, or possibly the relationship between the two men; however, Coolidge receives only a cursory mention in this book, and my archival requests at Holy Cross, which holds Walsh’s papers, apparently didn’t turn up any correspondence between the two men (or much of anything between the two men). Thus, this is one paper idea that did not pan out; I might try to write a brief article with the Marcus A. Coolidge material I got from Fitchburg State, but even that is all just secondary sources from a few old newspapers.
Anyway, I may return to this book in the future, but for now it was just a quick hit. It seems thorough and useful, though also heavily deferential and laudatory. I did my best to absorb things like the author’s opinion on the sex scandal, or the 1926 Senate special election that sent Walsh back to the Senate after his lost to Frederick H. Gillette in 1924 - this turned out to be useful for another of my writing projects.
The Knave of Boston & Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters by Francis Russell (1987)
I should have listened to my instincts on this book. In The Rascal King, it was the main source for Beatty’s background on the Starr Faithfull case, whereby Andrew J. Peters, upscale dilettante Mayor of Boston from 1918-1922, groomed and sexually abused a young girl who went on to commit suicide. However, it was clear from the title that it was a book of entertaining vignettes and character studies, and my first reaction was to prefer to find something more in-depth on the topic I was interested in rather than find it sandwiched among other Wacky Boston Stories ™.
I was right. The book has a decent ten-page rundown of the Starr Faithfull case, but it isn’t anything that I couldn’t have found somewhere else. The Wikipedia page is probably longer. The book also has stories (compiled articles in fact) on Honey Fitz, James Curley, Daniel M. Coakley, and other now-familiar items. I will say, first of all, that the book shed a glimmer of useful light when it described the Honey Fitz – Toodles scandal’s publicity by noting that “A blur of talk followed the mayor and the over-bosomed blonde, their names becoming more permanently linked in a jungle repeated sotto voice by local politicians: ‘A whiskey glass / And Toodles’ ass / Made a horse’s ass / Out of Honey Fitz.’” (p. 39). I probably would have found that out from the man’s biography, though, if it had arrived from the library first (edit: turns out, not so much). Also regarding Honey Fitz, the author says that he could never have won the Senate race in 1916 that I am most interested in, and diagnoses that the nomination should have gone to a Yankee Democrat instead.
I don’t trust the book’s opinions, though. I had a grave foreboding when the intro was written by William F. Buckley, passed the chapter on Chappaquiddick with dread, and had my worst fears confirmed when one of the book’s articles turned out to be about how the author is horrified and saddened by Black people moving into his childhood neighborhood. “On casual trips to Boston in the sixties I would sometimes drive up Blue Hill Avenue to watch the progress of the black tide. It was easy to spot. For some reason lower class Jewish families never had window curtains but merely shades or Venetian blinds. Where on lower Blue Hill Avenue the windows in the drab brick apartment buildings had been neat though bare, they suddenly became smeared, the blinds twisted askew, the shades town and stained. Blacks had arrived. One could trade the tide by the condition of the windows.” Vile stuff, which gets worse when he starts talking about a murdered white woman.
This book is eminently skippable, between its just-the-highlights summaries of subjects that have voluminous and in-depth coverage elsewhere, its shallow notes of rumors and hearsay (Starr Faithful was definitely a suicide, the author thinks, but then Curley’s kids were, too?), and its blatant racism. Even if this guy found Warren G. Harding’s smutty letters back in the day, somebody else covered these Massachusetts better. Hard pass.
“Honey Fitz” Three Steps to the White House: The Life and Times of John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald by John Henry Cutler (1962)
I became more interested in Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald after reading The Rascal King. Previously, he had occupied place in my mind just as John F. Kennedy’s grandfather and as the subject of a titillating sex scandal. However, The Rascal King, in discussing his frenemy, Mayor Curley, spent the opening of a chapter on how history would have been changed if a few ten-thousands of flipped votes had put Fitzgerald in the Senate over Henry Cabot Lodge in 1916.
The first stop on my trek, as seen above, was the vignette in The Knave of Boston, which dismissed the idea of Fitzgerald’s candidacy entirely (and concisely). I had hoped that this biography might shed some light on that specific question. It did indeed have a couple of pages of general info on the Senate race (p. 207-212, if you are searching), as it did on Fitzgerald’s other campaigns. However, this segment was not the peek behind the curtain, or the analysis, I had been searching for, so the Honey (Fitz) Hunt must proceed into deeper and thornier territory.
I skimmed a few other parts of this book itself. It seems decent, but it seems to lean heavily on the two other individuals of import in Fitzgerald’s life: John F. Kennedy, and James M. Curley. I found a review of it that noted, among other things, that the author didn’t source many of the anecdotes he peppered the book with, which was a bit dismaying. The book offers a few defenses against common criticisms; late in his last term, there was a big fire at a flophouse that his crooked inspector had cleared earlier: the book notes that he had pressed Beacon Hill for better fire safety laws (p. 194). That kind of thing. On the other hand, there is no mention of Toodles; or if there is one, it was well-hidden. It is also, as all of these biographies have been, warm-tinted and laudatory. Honey Fitz only had an honorary doctorate, stop calling him a Doctor!
Curley receives a lot of attention, perhaps too much. I understand how tempting he is to include, as a colorful character. But his color, compared to the hapless Fitzgerald (less hapless here than in other portrayals) and his eventual fuddy-duddy image, tends to smother the narrative. That review also said, and I agree, that the issue about writing about Fitzgerald at all is that Honey Fitz himself is just a peripheral character. Curley is Frank Skeffington, the star of his novel; Fitzgerald usually appears anywhere as JFK’s grandfather, a peripheral character of the past. It makes me cringe a little to see those dynamics repeated here, in the man’s own biography, (in again my incomplete glimpse of the book). A fair number of the old newspaper articles I’ve combed through recently, such as those on the 1916 race or on the 1930 gubernatorial election, show that contemporaries took Honey Fitz seriously enough, both as a candidate and as a political actor. History has not been as kind Cutler takes him more seriously than other histories do, but still shackles him to Curley and his grandson.
Fitzgerald sure loved the song “Sweet Adeline,” though. It was his trademark, and he sang it every chance he could get. Curley was annoyed. I sympathized. Anyway, with all that out of the way, here are my favorite unsourced Curley anecdotes:
He was the one politician of his generation who dared to call a crowd “you swine,” as he did at the Marshfield Fair, and wind up his speech in a burst of applause. He once showed his platform magic by quieting a howling mob:
“Now you pickpockets and crapshooters, I’m going to make myself heard if it takes until six o’clock in the morning when you fellows are out at your occupation of stealing milk. I know these men. They are nothing but a pack of second-story workers, milk bottle robbers, and doormat thieves. Now, you Tammanyites [Curley’s supporters], mix in there with the crapshooters, and the first one that opens his face, plug him.” (p. 182).
This concerning his doomed Senate run in 1936:
Jeered when speaking to Williams College students, he said: “You young gentlemen should be proud of a leader like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Consider all the fine federal prisons he has erected to house your embezzling, bank-president fathers.” (p. 272).
Just as in life, Curley crowds Fitzgerald out. I purchased this book, though, because I want to give Honey Fitz his fair shake. For a little more content, see the next entry.
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga by Doris Kearns Goodwin (1987)
I had hoped to avoid using this book. For some reason, the Doris Kearns Goodwin plagiarism scandal anchored itself in my brain long ago, and meant that I never pursued any of her books. And this is the book that was plagiarized! After I read the segment on John F. Fitzgerald’s 1916 Senate race in The Rascal King that directly cited Goodwin on the topic, I tried everywhere else first. However, Cutler’s book, while somewhat informative on the topic, didn’t get the job done. I had to go back to the source. I am a bold and controversial scholar.
Upon doing so, I realized that, beyond being directly cited, Beatty must have quoted wholesale the paragraph on the Senate race, because I remembered it reading the same. It reads:
“…What might have been can, of course, never be known. But if Fitzgerald had stood his ground and accepted the risk to his reputation, it is possible that he rather than Curley would have emerged the victor; and had he continued his successful career, it is possible that he, rather than Curley, would have been immortalized as the hero of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. Just as conceivably, Fitzgerald’s reelection to City Hall in 1914 might have given him a stronger base from which to launch his next campaign against Henry Cabot Lodge for the Senate in 1916, an election he would come within 33,000 votes of wining. And if Fitzgerald had become the Senator from Massachusetts in 1916 instead of Lodge, the history of the country and indeed of the entire world might have been different, for it was from that very Senate seat that Lodge played his decisive role in the crushing defeat of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the defeat that, in President Woodrow Wilson’s words, “broke the heart of the world.” (p. 252)
So I am in the same intriguing place in which I started. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else here. This lone segment comes at the end of the part of the book that follows the Fitzgerald family; that chronology terminates in 1915, whereupon the book switches to the Kennedys, the other half of the JFK family tree. The endnotes cite, other than the front page of the Herald on Election Day, page 40 of an old, obscure book called The Remarkable Kennedys by Joe McCarthy (no, not that one). My library system has it, so I am off to there next for the Honey (Fitz) Hunt.
I decided, somewhat as a moral question, not to look much closer at this book. However, I did chase down all of the “comeback attempts by” page directions in the John F. Fitzgerald entry of the index, and I must say that Goodwin gives a different impression of some things than does Cutler. My investigations are limited to elections, but I’ll note that, contrary to Goodwin’s optimistic prognosis for Fitzgerald’s unrealized third mayoral term, Cutler said that Fitzgerald had planned to recall himself after two years (p. 193). This does not fill me with optimism that he would have run for the Senate instead, or that had he done so, he would have been a more viable candidate after having been recalled (there were mandatory recalls halfway through a Boston mayor’s term at that point).
Another, less ambiguous tonal divergence concerns Honey Fitz’s last campaign, for the Senate nomination in 1942. The assumption by all is that Joe Kennedy put Honey Fitz up to the campaign to screw over Roosevelt and his candidate, Congressman Joe Casey (running against incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who defeated Curley for the seat six years earlier). This campaign is described by Goodwin as a rollicking good time. She quotes attorney Ed Hanify, hired by Kennedy as a campaign worker, as saying that “John F. loved it. Every morning he would come into Joe’s suite at the Ritz and start off like a champ. His unfailing zest was really something to see and he was still a splendid speaker. And Joe would sit back and chuckle at his enthusiasm. They seemed very close.” (p. 625). Similarly, Joe tells a friend that “We’ve had more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” (p. 626). Happily, this last campaign and its respectable second-place showing (over, as unremarked in his own bio, Dapper Dan Coakley, who came in third) “finished his career on a dignified, substantial basis” according to Hanify. (p. 627).
Cutler provides an icier view of Joe Kennedy’s involvement in this campaign. He tells how Joseph Kane, a secretary to former Congressman Peter Tague, was the one who suggested to Joe that he run his father-in-law to screw over the New Dealers.
'“A few days before the primaries, Kane took Kennedy to a Boston advertising agency and showed him a proposed advertising spread. ‘This will give Honey Fitz the nomination,’ Kane said.
‘I agree,’ Kennedy said. ‘But can he lick Lodge?’
Kane shook his head. ‘No, he can’t win.’
‘And the campaign would cost between two and three hundred thousand?’
‘Right.’
Joe Kennedy buttoned up his coat collar. ‘Isn’t that nice,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you’re going, but I’m going back to the Ritz.’” (p. 295).
A minor but noticeable difference in tone.
Leading The Way: A History of the Massachusetts General Court 1629-1980 by Cornelius Dalton, John Wirkkala, and Anne Thomas (1984)
This book, written by two journalists and a historian (Wirkkala) had a lot of good information, some of which I found useful for my immediate purposes. Beyond a few hundred pages of history on the structure and activities of the Massachusetts state legislature, it had a lot of reference data on who had how many seats in what year, and what kind of sideburns the leadership had at the time.
I had hoped to find a bit of information on Roland D. Sawyer here, and I was not disappointed. Sawyer pursued some rare and high-profile impeachment campaigns against several state officers, so that is covered; Sawyer also sat in the legislature for 27 years and was the dean of the body for much of the time, so his fingerprints are on enough stuff to be covered in even a bird’s-eye-view history. I can’t understate my interest in filling in background on the Massachusetts legislature (up to 1980, anyway), so I just went ahead and bought this for when I can make more use of it.
The Remarkable Kennedys by Joe McCarthy (1960)
It does seem that both of the sources for Goodwin’s citation regarding Honey Fitz’s possible victory in the 1916 Senate election make sense. This obscure little book, by a “top reporter and non-fiction writer” who has “contributed more than 100 articles and short fiction stories to Look, Life, Reader’s Digest, Holiday, McCall’s, and other magazines” and “writes a weekly humor column for the American Weekly,” seems to just be a sort of current-affairs politics book published (or at least written) prior to Kennedy’s nomination in 1960. It concerns his career and his family background. I didn’t read much beyond what I was searching for: on page 40, as cited, we find:
Fitzgerald had a curious political career. Just before his fifty-first birthday in 1914, he gave up his position as mayor of Boston (James M. Curley once observed that Fitzgerald was the first mayor in the history of the City of Boston who did not have a beard or a mustache.) After he left City Hall, he continued to be an active figure in politics for almost thirty years, running twice for U.S. senator, twice for governor and once for the House of Representatives, but never again in all that time did he win another elected office. Fitzgerald’s best fight (Boston politicians always refer to an election or primary race as a “fight”; they seldom use the word “campaign”) was for the Senate against the supposedly unbeatable Republican incumbent, the elder Henry Cabot Lodge, in 1916. Honey Fitz shook Yankee Brahmin Boston to its heels by coming within 30,000 votes of upsetting Lodge. Sadly, Fitzgerald did not live quote long enough to enjoy the great day in 1952 when his grandson and namesake, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, defeated Lodge’s grandson and namesake, the second Henry Cabot Lodge, in a similar battle for the same senate seat. John F. did play a noisy and active supporting role, however, in 1946 at the age of eighty-three in launching Jack as a politician, singing “Sweet Adeline” in behalf of his grandson’s candidacy for Congress. (p. 40)
I didn’t get to the front page of the Boston Herald for Election Day (November 8th, 1916), which is Goodwin’s other citation. I did, however, find the election result page (10) of the Boston Post that day. It describes his tally as “extraordinary” and notes that “Mr. Fitzgerald not only received the solid Democratic vote, but that he cut into the independent strength of the state.” Elsewhere on the page is a note from Fitzgerald, saying that “I am convinced that if we had three or four more days we would have beaten our opponents in Massachusetts.”
The Boston Globe, on page 3, similarly said that Fitzgerald ran in front of the ticket in Boston, and that “Those who expected Ex-Mayor Fitzgerald to be “knifed” in Ward 12 - old Ward 17, and the stronghold of Mayor Curley’s Tammany Club, Roxbury - because of the personal feud between the present Mayor and the ex-Mayor, will find no consolation in the returns from that district” and that “Martin M. Lomasney again demonstrated his ability to deliver Democratic votes.” My guess, though I may be wrong, is that the Herald had similar commentary. Thus, analysts at the time at least thought that Fitzgerald made a stronger-than-expected performance.
I’d be willing to say that, after this brief review, Goodwin’s analysis (echoed by Beatty) is at least as accurate as Russel’s naysaying, and is more in-line with commentary at the time. Honey Fitz did indeed come from behind to almost win the election, and was not just a doomed candidate; the extrapolation about the resulting League of Nations outcome is wistful, but has a strong foundation in fact. I’m willing to call a satisfactory end to the Honey (Fitz) Hunt, though I’d be interested in reading (or writing?) more about this election.
Boston Mahatma by Leslie G. Ainley (1949)
Alright alright alright fine. Jesus. I will get a book about Martin Lomasney too if you people will shut up about it.
Everybody, everybody loves Martin Lomasney. He was a ward boss in Boston who had dealings with the likes of James M. Curley, Honey Fitz, and all of those. He is actually of a slightly elder generation, he died in 1933, so he was also a contemporary of machine bosses like Pea Jacket Maguire prior to the age of full-throttle Irish ethnic politics. He ran a tight ship, an effective pre-welfare state machine that served to assimilate thousands of fresh-off-the-boat immigrants into the American economic and political system and service their needs. He made a profit for himself and his cronies in the Hendricks Club (named after one of Cleveland’s VPs), but that is when you read terms like “honest graft,” meaning things like purchasing land in advance of city projects, and juxtaposed with things like Dan Coakley’s prosecutorial shakedown rackets.
I don’t have a direct interest in Lomasney at this moment, but I thought that this book could be a good supplement to other works on some of my topics. I lost the gamble that Roland D. Sawyer would come up in it; but there is a fair amount on Eugene N. Foss, as Lomasney was involved in his ascent to the governorship. I had to hunt these down myself, as the book has no index! Big drawback.
The opening half is biographic, but once Lomasney is ensconced in his power base, the latter part of the book focuses chapters on different topics regardless of chronology, such as his support for education policy, Irish independence, a statue of Gov. Benjamin Butler, that kind of thing. There is also an interesting section on his international relations consultation with Wilson, an odd moment of glory that was heavily teased in the intro, so I was sure to process.
In the course of my Foss and my Honey Fitz readings, I also came across notes on Henry Cabot Lodge’s re-election campaign in 1910, which was a close-run thing (as seen above in Conservative in a Progressive Era). This, in the era before the 17th amendment, was made possible by near-parity in the state legislature. This same parity almost made Lomasney the Speaker of the House in that session; but this was frustrated when Speaker Joseph Walker did away with the secret ballot for the leadership, preventing pending Progressive Republican defections in both races. Lomasney, who did not otherwise serve as a floor leader in the chamber, took his loss in good humor.
So there you have it. My studies are fairly specific at the moment, but I am fortunate enough that the topics I’m interested in have a fair number of books available, if you know where to look.