The Knave of Boston
Russell, Francis
Some kind of dialectical irony must be seen in the career of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis—or as my father, an unreconstructed practitioner of Boston's dying art of ethnic calculus,...
...Its charm and curiosities have been fossilized for generations to come, or at least until the next developer comes along with a scheme for still more high-tech offices and the ubiquitous shops and restaurants...
...And when weather permits (ah, yes, Boston weather...
...Russell begins, "John Francis Fitzgerald was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was born with a spoon . . . " With deadpan accuracy he goes on to chronicle Fitzgerald's rise to power and premature retirement from public office amid scandals about corruption and his relationship with one Toodles Ryan...
...For the technocratically cool, squeaky clean Massachusetts governor has emerged from the bowels of a political system so inept and corrupt that its warring chieftains were never able to get beyond their petty feuds and build smooth-running machines such as emerged in Chicago and New York...
...What Russell brings to them is an unusual mix of clear-sightedness and sympathy for all the participants in the fray...
...a race war that continued long after the skirmishes ceased appearing on the evening news...
...Meanwhile, the Republicans, in recent decades the minority party to which Democrats turned for civic-minded leadership not forthcoming from their own kind, have been unable to take advantage of the situation...
...In any event, I suspect Russell's German ancestry (he dropped his original surname, Hamburger, during the 1930s) has much to do with his even-handed perspective on the battles between Boston's Brahmins and Irish...
...Quite unlike Fitzgerald, his life-long foe, Curley was a bitter demagogue...
...One should undoubtedly expect such even-handedness from a man who has written for both National Review and the New York Review...
...But in recent years liberal Democrats—the spiritual descendants of the abolitionists, transcendentalist utopians, and good government reformers ("the googoos," as the ward bosses called them)—have achieved something close to total dominance...
...Time has healed some of these wounds...
...C uch legends abound in Massachusetts politics...
...In the mid-1970s, busing was implemented in the face of expert and common-sense advice to the contrary, and resulted in something just short of Peter Skerry is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...So have white flight and the abandonment of the public schools to blacks and Hispanics...
...More typical is the chapter on JFK's maternal grandfather, Mayor "Honey Fitz...
...Curley served as congressman, mayor, and then as governor, punctuating his arrival on Beacon Hill with a swing at his predecessor just before taking the oath of office...
...Curley was in his seventies before his many misdeeds caught up with him...
...When I return to my native city these days, Boston does seem more and more like an urban theme park with a free-admission policy for anyone under twenty-five...
...I=1 THE KNAVE OF BOSTON & OTHER AMBIGUOUS MASSACHUSETTS CHARACTERS Francis Russell/Quinlan Press/$17.95 Peter Skerry 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988...
...As if to drive home the message that the city is once again safe for liberals, Boston is currently the setting of three network television series, all appealing to those young, upscale viewers who wish to think of the city not as the home of angry racists, but as the East Coast bastion of yuppiedom...
...Even more disappointing is the author's failure to address larger questions about Boston: Why did it never produce a Daley-type machine...
...Congressman John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the only member of the Massachusetts delegation who did not sign the petition for Curley's release...
...A much more interesting figure treated by Russell is James Michael Curley, who was certainly not born with a spoon in his mouth...
...I f these facets of contemporary Bos- 1 ton interest you, then The Knave of Boston: And Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters is not for you...
...And at a time when we are treated to the muddled revisionism of J. Anthony Lukas and Doris Kearns Goodwin's shamelessly unofficially official house biography The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Francis Russell's The Knave of Boston is a fresh breeze off the Atlantic...
...I say this self-critically as a former roommate who taste-tested the concoctions of Steve Herrell, founder of the world famous Steve's Ice Cream...
...Some kind of dialectical irony must be seen in the career of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis—or as my father, an unreconstructed practitioner of Boston's dying art of ethnic calculus, insists on calling him, Mike the Greek...
...With the same balance he brings to his portraits of Honey Fitz, the Kennedys, and Curley, Russell recounts the career of one Andrew James Peters, a lesser member of Boston's social elite who was maneuvered into the mayor's seat by ward bosses out to defeat Curley—and who also happened to have "an uncontrolled and apparently uncontrollable passion for pubescent girls...
...To be sure, the bookstores are a marvel, as much for their well-stocked shelves as for the distemper of their young employees, who in this era of New Thinking have yet to get the hang of the tactical uses of smiling...
...During the Depression Curley extended the regime of patronage and corruption to the State House, where the Brahmins had heretofore been able to hold the line...
...He concludes with the scene of Honey Fitz in his eighties, celebrating his grandson's election to Congress with a jig performed on a hotel table and a rendition of "Sweet Adeline...
...Nevertheless, this volume is not without its flaws...
...Indeed, no Republicans have been elected to statewide office in Massachusetts since the early 1970s...
...Such dichotomies have long been evident in Boston, whose lively politics has for generations been fueled by intense ethnic and class tensions...
...He was the only Massachusetts politician to endorse FDR before the 1932 convention...
...In 1947, in the midst of his fourth term as mayor, he was convicted of mail fraud and served five months at the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury until he was pardoned by President Truman...
...one can always stroll down to the banks of the Charles and watch the leaders of tomorrow zip by on roller skates...
...For this is a rogue's gallery of figures from Boston's past brought together by Francis Russell, a journalist-historian and Boston native perhaps best known for his books on the Boston police strike of 1919 and the Sacco Vanzetti case...
...And so have the efforts of journalist J. Anthony Lukas, whose widely acclaimed book, Common Ground, has given liberals not only the last word in print, but also the illusion of having grappled with all sides of the issue...
...Why does such a literate and cosmopolitan populace tolerate a miserable newspaper like the Boston Globe...
...Yet Curley was a lone wolf, who distrusted the Irish wardbosses as much as the Brahmins...
...And in the last gubernatorial election, the Republican candidate was caught in his office with his pants down—literally...
...How does one explain the vehemence of the opposition to busing...
...Still, Boston's is no ordinary local history...
...He hated the Brahmins, and his policies and demeanor helped alienate the banking and financial establishment from municipal affairs for a generation...
...In a chapter entitled "Calvin Coolidge's Vermont," Russell reveals a cranky nostalgia that lurks beneath the surface of these essays...
...Russell does have a mildly devastating piece on Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick ("Indian Summer in Hyannis Port") written some fifteen years after the event, but even here the most striking image offered is that of the urbane young Jack Kennedy starting his political career with a 1946 congressional race, muscling aside resentful "old-line pols who had come up the ladder rung by rung, often by knocking the feet from under the man just above them...
...Similarly striking is the image of Congressman Barney Frank recently declaring his homosexuality from the safety of Boston's cosmopolitan suburbs, and thereby confirming the suspicions of Irish Catholics who give new meaning to the word "parochial...
...Working and lower middle-class Catholics, the former backbone of the Massachusetts Democracy, are not only not voting for the party, they are, according to MIT political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, scarcely voting at all...
...This book is full of insights indicating Russell is the man to tackle such questions, but as they stand, these essays don't quite transcend the confines of local history...
...Why has the city been such a net exporter of political talent—of all stripes—to the nation...
...Yet a few years ago Massachusetts was not quite so securely in liberal hands...
...Across the river in Cambridge, Harvard Square has undeniably become a great place to buy over-priced "contemporary" furniture and gourmet ice cream...
Vol. 21 • April 1988 • No. 4
