James Michael Curley
Boston, 1874 - 1958, Boston
found: LC data base, Sept. 4, 1996 (hdg.: Curley, James Michael, 1874-1958)
found: WwWA: v. 3, 1951-1960 (Curley, James Michael, 1874-1958; mayor of Boston: 1922-26, 1930-34, 1945-50; gov. Mass., 1935-37; U.S. rep., 78th-79th congresses)
found: Biographical directory of the United States Congress WWW site, Aug. 24, 2005 (Curely, James, Michael; b. Nov. 20, 1874, Boston, Mass.; d. Nov. 12, 1958, Boston, Mass.; mayor of Boston: 1914-19, 1922-26, 1930-34, 1946-1950; gov. of Mass., 1935-37; U.S. rep., 78th-79th congresses)
Curley, James Michael (20 Nov. 1874-12 Nov. 1958), mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts, was born in Boston, the son of Irish immigrants Michael Curley, a laborer, and Sarah Clancy, a washerwoman. The death of his father, when Curley was ten, marked the boy's childhood. Forced to enter the paid workforce in his teens, Curley worked as a store clerk and in a variety of other jobs before becoming active in the ward politics of his Roxbury neighborhood. To advance his political career, he joined a series of Irish fraternal organizations, became active in Catholic lay affairs, and developed his skills as a public speaker. In 1897 he failed on his first attempt to win a seat on the Common Council of Boston, but he prevailed two years later.
In 1901 Curley won election to the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature and worked to gain control of the Democratic organization in the neighborhood of Roxbury. To solidify his base of support, he founded the following year a political club that modeled itself by name and operation after New York City's Tammany Hall. Like its namesake, this Curley-dominated organization sought to gain influence by providing job referrals, direct relief, and other services to constituents, many of whom were recently arrived European immigrants. Later that same year Curley took a federal civil service examination on behalf of a constituent and supporter that led to his indictment on federal fraud charges. Despite a guilty conviction and a jail sentence, Curley managed to turn this issue to his advantage and win election as a city alderman in 1903. Serving as an alderman until 1909, Curley won a seat that year on a restructured Boston City Council.
In 1910 Curley gained election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Appointed to the Foreign Relations Committee, he opposed measures that restricted immigration and favored legislation that abrogated commercial treaties with Russia in order to protest that country's record of pogroms against Jews. He lobbied for increased naval expenditures at the Boston Navy Yard. In 1912 he supported the unsuccessful bid of House Speaker Champ Clark to secure the Democratic party's presidential nomination.
Elected the mayor of Boston in 1914, Curley began his term in office by criticizing the administration of his predecessor, John F. Fitzgerald, for reckless spending as well as political favoritism in the awarding of municipal contracts and jobs. His administration's first measures included a round of budget cuts, removal of a number of senior Fitzgerald appointees, and other economy measures, and political reformers initially greeted Curley's actions as mayor with skepticism, surprise, and even grudging admiration. But after narrowly surviving a recall election in 1915, Curley abandoned efforts to appeal to the upper-class-dominated good-government wing of the electorate and emphasized policies that aided Boston's immigrant communities. He stressed the need to devote greater resources to social welfare institutions, increased the wages for the lowest-paid municipal workers, and supported legislation that improved housing conditions. In the interest of both patronage and charity, as mayor he regularly met with people seeking employment and tried to find appropriate positions for them in government or business.
Other Irish Americans had been elected to the Boston city hall before Curley, but few governed as flamboyantly. A controversial figure throughout his career, Curley appealed to ethnic chauvinism and anxieties as part of his political arsenal. In an era that often placed few ethical or legal barriers to using public office for private gain, few outdid Curley. His conspicuously lavish lifestyle was signaled in 1915 by his building of a mansion in the fashionable Jamaica Plains section of the city. In running Boston, he clashed frequently with efforts by the Massachusetts state legislature to limit his authority. Even before Curley assumed the mayoralty, the growing Irish-Catholic dominance of Boston politics led to increasing efforts by the Protestant-dominated state government to place limits on the city's autonomy, especially with regard to municipal finance and control of the police force. In all four of his terms as mayor, Curley opposed state governmental oversight as well as the limitations placed on the taxing and bonding authority of the city.
Although he lost a bid for another term in 1917, Curley remained an anathema to political reformers of Massachusetts. In a move aimed at frustrating Curley's political ambitions, his successor as mayor, Andrew J. Peters, convinced the state legislature to amend the charter to prohibit Boston mayors from succeeding themselves. But after Peters mishandled the Boston police strike and the economic downturns of 1921, Curley recaptured city hall in 1921. Under his second administration, Curley embarked on a major building program that poured millions into the City Hospital, schools, parks, and other public facilities. In an era of political conservatism on the national level, Curley advocated an activist role for government to help ensure the economic and social well-being of the average citizen.
Prohibited from running for a successive term, Curley turned his attention to statewide office and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1924. His linking his name to Alfred E. Smith's Democratic presidential campaign in 1928, however, helped win Curley a third term as mayor of Boston shortly after the 1929 stock market crash. During the first years of the Great Depression, Mayor Curley advocated massive public works to deal with unemployment both in Boston and in the entire nation. Contrary to the Massachusetts Democratic party establishment, he favored Franklin D. Roosevelt over Alfred E. Smith for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, waging an unsuccessful primary bid in Massachusetts on Roosevelt's behalf. Denied a place in the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic National Convention, Curley attended the convention, in place of an ill delegate, as leader of the Puerto Rican delegation.
The disappointment of not receiving a cabinet or major ambassadorial appointment in 1933 strained Curley's relationship with the Roosevelt administration, however. Granted only limited political spoils from Washington, Curley had little influence over New Deal public-works spending in Massachusetts. During the 1930s he offered tacit support to the raucous populist Father Charles E. Coughlin and even lent some organizational support to the priest's quasi-fascist movement. Again unable to serve a successive term as mayor, Curley ran for governor of Massachusetts in 1934, and this time he won. Over the course of his term, Curley's extravagant personal spending and expensive vacations showed, however, that he had lost touch with his constituents. A series of scandals rocked his administration, including the involvement of his state limousine in several traffic accidents, the alleged sale of pardons to state convicts, and the appointment of scores of poorly qualified individuals to public offices.
In the late 1930s Curley's political fortunes began to ebb. Denied Roosevelt's endorsement in the 1936 senatorial election, he lost against a moderate Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. In 1937 and 1940 one of Curley's former political confidants, Maurice J. Tobin, twice defeated him for the Boston mayoralty, and in 1938 Leverett Saltonstall turned back Curley's attempt to recapture the Massachusetts governorship. After leaving the office of governor, he squandered a substantial sum of money in unsuccessful investments in Nevada gold mines; then he lost a civil suit brought by the Suffolk County prosecutor that forced him to forfeit to the city of Boston the amount of money he received from General Equipment Company for "fixing" a damage claim settlement.
In 1942, however, Curley managed to revive his faltering career by returning to Congress. In defeating Thomas H. Eliot, a former New Deal attorney with an exemplary voting record on behalf of the Roosevelt administration, Curley based his campaign on appeals to ethnic and religious pride. Once back in Congress, he compiled a voting record that matched his former opponent's in support of the Roosevelt administration's social agenda.
Curley's popularity within Boston remained high--despite even a felony indictment in 1943 for influence peddling, which stemmed from his involvement with a consulting firm seeking to secure defense contracts. On the slogan "Curley Gets Things Done" he won an unprecedented fourth term as mayor of Boston in 1945. A federal jury then found him guilty of the felony charges, but he remained mayor even after he entered a federal penitentiary in 1947. To prevent his political rival Tobin from emerging against Curley, Republican governor Robert F. Bradford helped pass special legislation that made John B. Hynes, the city clerk, acting mayor of Boston in place of the president of the City Council. After President Harry Truman commuted his sentence, in part out of political expediency and because of pressure from the Massachusetts congressional delegation, Curley returned to Boston and resumed the duties of office.
Changes in Boston's charter had permitted Curley to run for reelection in 1949. Hynes defeated him, however, in an election that heralded the growing ascendancy of the middle-class ethnic voter who wanted political leaders that portrayed an image of personal honesty, professionalism, and efficiency. In 1951 and 1955 Curley made two final unsuccessful bids for the mayoralty. In retirement he personified in the public imagination the last of the ethnic ward politicians, who were giving way to the modern age of television-dominated middle-class politics. Curley's fictional counterpart is the Tammany Hall-style politician Frank Skeffington in Edwin O'Connor's novel of the time, The Last Hurrah (1956). The former mayor's death in Boston led to one of the largest funerals in the city's history.
A devoted family man, Curley was first married in 1906 to Mary Emelda Herlihy, who died in 1930. Seven of their nine children predeceased him, several under tragic circumstances. In 1937 Curley was remarried, this time to a widow, Gertrude Casey Dennis. His public identity was shaped by his devotion to Roman Catholicism, pride in his Irish ancestry, and love of politics and campaigning. In assessing the career of James Curley one can easily fault him for his demagoguery and his personal corruption. A self-styled "Mayor of the Poor," as he wanted to be remembered, Curley symbolized the later stages of an era of ethnic ward politics and augured the growing presence of Irish Americans in the national political arena.
Bibliography
Before his death, Curley destroyed many of his personal papers, but he deposited a large collection of scrapbooks containing newspaper clippings, photographs, and other documents in the Holy Cross College Library, Worcester, Mass. Some of Curley's surviving correspondence can be found in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The year before he died, he published an autobiography, I'd Do It Again: A Record of All My Uproarious Years (1957). Joseph F. Dinneen, The Purple Shamrock: The Hon. James Michael Curley of Boston (1949), offers a contemporary journalistic account. Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 (1992), is the definitive biography. Important aspects of Curley's career are examined in Thomas H. O'Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (1995); Ronald P. Formisano and Constance K. Burns, ed., Boston 1700-1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics (1984); Charles H. Trout, Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (1977); and Herbert Marshall Zolot, "The Issue of Good Government and James Michael Curley: Curley and the Boston Scene from 1897-1918" (Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Stony Brook, 1975). Articles about his death and his career are in the New York Times, 13, 15, 16 Nov. 1958.
G. Kurt Piehler
Citation:
G. Kurt Piehler. "Curley, James Michael";
http://www.anb.org/articles/06/06-00128.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 14:12:34 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
Person TypeIndividual
Last Updated8/7/24
Boston, 1820 - 1894, Boston
Conway, Massachusetts, 1841 - 1904, New York
Manchester, New Hampshire, 1879 - 1968, West Harwich, Massachusetts
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1859 - 1944, Brighton, Massachusetts
Salem, 1826 - 1900, Boston
