The Rascal King
Beatty, Jack
ack Beatty, senior editor of the Atlantic, has written the best book on African-American history published in recent years. It is The Rascal King, a definitive account of the greatest of...
...In the course of saving his scoundrel from the netherworld of nostalgia, Beatty illuminates the compelling parallels between the histories of the Irish and the African in America's cities...
...I love the land of my birth but in American politics I know neither race, nor color, nor creed...
...A man of compelling contradictions, Curley cared for the Irish poor even as he had contempt for their helplessness...
...Disdainful of the dole, which he saw as dangerous to both discipline and self-respect, he favored a policy.of "work and wages"—he would first succor and then snare the Irish with a local welfare state...
...There are Irish-born citizens...
...First elected to Congress in 1911 and to the mayor's office in 1914, Curley dominated local politics—and the political imagination of the Boston Irish—from before the First World War until after the Second, when, again a congressman, he won a fourth and final mayoral term despite having served time for mail fraud...
...The combination of the depression and their new-found political success unleashed the long-held Irish anger at the Yankees who had first disdained and then deserted them...
...Occasionally Beatty interrupts the history to point to parallels between Curley and, for instance, Washington's former mayor Marion Barry, but the narrative itself commands the comparisons...
...The Irish shattered the communal consensus on values and initiated a century of cultural/political conflict...
...Delivered from their deference to the Boston Protestants, the Irish turned politics into what Henry Adams had feared: "the ,systematic organization of hatreds...
...This mix of political assertiveness and economic resignation was a formula for envy and hostility, which expressed itself through Curley's capacity to conjure up anti-Irish and anti-Catholic conspiracies behind every turn of events...
...Curley, the best accuser of the Yankee, succeeded in playing both the bully and the victim at a time when the worst of Irish suffering was well past...
...But Curley, as Beatty puts it, "was a hero to break your heart...
...Similarly the African-Americans arriving in the cities en masse from the peasant South, after having been driven off the land by mechanized cotton-picking—the modern equivalent of the enclosure movement that sealed the fate of the Irish peasantry—shattered the urban consensus created by the common experiences of the New Deal and World War II...
...His example and ideas influenced national policy...
...But this integrationism collapsed at the turn of the century under the burden of a restructuring and deindustrialization similar to the one we're living through today...
...Curley attempted to outlaw civil marriage and to ban speech or thought that might be offensive to Irish Catholics, and invariably responded to his critics by accusing them of anti-Irish prejudice...
...As the city budget swelled, the economy shrunk, and property-owners weren't the only losers...
...Some of this, like giving the fascist salute, was part of courting the Italian vote, but when Curley roamed the state in his huge touring car, running people off the road, it was clear that the admiration was more than rhetorical...
...For the Boston Irish, writes Beatty, "like peoples emerging from colonialism around the world, Who governed them would be more important to their group pride than How they were governed...
...Instead, playing the "racial" card—"No Irishman worthy of the name can vote for [fill in the opponent]"—the perpetual candidate was elected governor in 1935 and promptly cost Massachusetts substantial sums of federal money by insisting on direct control of the aid...
...The sweet salve of righting past injustice foreclosed the future of a people whose leaders were more interested in spite than success...
...But to take care of the people...
...The Irish, says Beatty, were to be both separate and the best Americans...
...When Boston's shoe and textile industries moved South, the city went into sharp decline and took the Irish with it for half a century...
...In 1876 Patrick Collins, the first Irishman elected to the Massachusetts state senate, denounced any man or body of men who seek to perpetuate divisions of race or religions in our midst...
...Fifty-five thousand Bostonians lived in public housing—one of every fourteen, the highest proportion in any city...
...In the late 1840s, the Boston Yankee Ephraim Peabody called the arrival of the Irish "about the equivalent to a social revolution...
...Likened to Huey Long and called "the Codfish Rihrer" by some of his critics, he was extravagant in his admiration for the Duce, whom he saw as just a New Dealer in a hurry...
...Curley's New Deal avant la lettre razed 2,000 tenements, built twelve parks, and added three subway extensions—while cutting the relief budget...
...Quoting Boston's Cardinal O'Connell, Mayor Curley taunted: "The Puritan is passed...
...Drawing on his own local brain trust and his election in 1930 as president of the National Conference of Mayors, he proposed hydroelectric and flood-control projects, old-age pensions, and public works that anticipated much of the best of the New Deal...
...a newer and better America is here...
...He became the voice of Irish Power...
...Per capita expenditure for police and fire were the highest in the nation, as were Boston's tax rates...
...That's my theory of government...
...Curley rose as Boston fell...
...If the Catholics couldn't compete economically with Protestants, cried Bishop O'Connell, they could win politically through sheer numbers...
...But most striking among their shared experiences—their misery at the hands of Anglo-Saxons aside—is that they almost alone experienced not only upward but also sharp downward mobility in the cities they settled in...
...As such, Beatty concludes, Curley "emerges as a contemporary, a prince of our disorder...
...National reporter Louis Lyons characterized Curley's reign as "frankly racial beyond anything known elsewhere in America...
...4 overnment," claimed Curley, "was not created to save money and to cut debt...
...Twenty years after Curley's death, New York plowed down the same path, with a predictably parallel result...
...But at what price such pride...
...In] Curley's version of historical revisionism there was an Irishman at the bottom of everything American...
...Curley "had a stake in leaving basic problems unsolved, the better to manipulate the frustrations that meant votes to him...
...Politically, it led to a Peronism that reproduced the resentments that Curley used to cadge votes time and again...
...And take care he did, at least in the short run...
...Many Bostonians," Beatty writes, "were worse off in 1950 than they or their families had been in 1914 and Curley was a major reason why...
...He made a career acting out the Irish hatred of the English even as he aped the manners and mores of the British aristocrat...
...n the wake of the failed integration, Curley forged a new order in Boston based on the simultaneous distrust of both Protestant legal authority—outcomes, not integrity, were what counted—and dependence on government...
...O'Connell even drew on Booker T. Washington to suggest the need for accepting one's limitations...
...In a parallel to the left-wing argument that "Communism was twentieth-century Americanism," Curley claimed that "the faith of Columbus, of Washington, of Lincoln and Mussolini is now being exemplified by Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...One generation after another," Beatty writes, "was being forced by present needs to sacrifice future promise...
...Stranded, angry, increasingly violent in the years after the depression of the 1890s, "they seemed like a people without ancestry," wrote sociologist Robert Woods...
...Curley was at his best in the early years of the Great Depression, for he saw even before Roosevelt that the main enemy was "the psychology of fear," and fought the Depression with a public works building boom...
...In the long run, government workfare had—like the dole and other entitlements—produced a people entitled to little but their poverty...
...It's a comparison that was made by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer in Beyond the Melting Pot, but it has never been made more effectively than in the course of Beatty's retelling...
...the Anglo-Saxon is a joke...
...Mussolini," he said, "believes in spending public money for public good, offering advantages and opportunities and thereby providing employment...
...but the moment the seal of the court was impressed on our paper we ceased to be foreigners and became Americans...
...On balance, Beatty concludes that "Curley deserves the gratitude of posterity...
...There was always someone else to blame...
...In effect, Curley drew on the three centuries of commercial capital built up in Boston, withdrawing the principal without replenishing the capital...
...Sounding like an earlier version of Mickey Kaus and other contemporary proponents of workfare, he said that he'd "rather spend $10 to keep people working than give $2 in the dole...
...Curley took advantage of O'Connor's novel to embroider his already larger-than-life past...
...Each generation stands on its own strength...
...One set of intolerances," wrote Lyons, "has been replaced by another...
...He never built a machine because state legislation, aimed directly at him, forbade a mayor from succeeding himself...
...Beatty, who writes with a pre-postmodern devotion to narrative and factual accuracy, wants to wrest James Michael Curley from the mythology that has obscured him since he was immortalized as the charming rogue Frank Skeffington in Edwin O'Connor's 1957 novel The Last Hurrah...
...It is The Rascal King, a definitive account of the greatest of Boston's Irish-American political bosses...
...By 1948, according to the Municipal Research Bureau, Boston had 45 percent more city employees than the average of the eight largest cities...
...But, as honest a researcher as he is skillful a stylist, Beatty provides more than enough evidence to undermine his own conclusion...
...Let me say that there are no Irish voters among us...
...The consequence, one contemporary noted, was "a creeping paralysis which [was] slowly destroying Boston as a business center...
...In the late 1930s, Curley's admiration for Mussolini, along with what Beatty calls his "civil authoritarianism," led him into all the excesses that Roosevelt was unjustly accused of...
...T he first generation of prominent Irish politicians were frankly integrationist...
...And he made lawlessness almost lovable, explaining that "I never stole from anyone who couldn't afford it...
...For both groups, oppression helped produce fatherless families and the associated instability, violence, and escape into chemical intoxication so eloquently chronicled by Moynihan...
...To avoid the crushing weight of Curleyism, downtown property owners sometimes chopped off vacant upper stories to reduce confiscatory assessments, and not a single new "office building was constructed in the downtown area between 1927 and 1958...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
