Word: bostons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Curley's wit raises a question that still divides the faculty of the institution he so enjoyed baiting. Was he the colorful old rogue that he has been made lately, or did he do Boston irreparable harm? In his old age he certainly tried to give credence to the former view. Though he grouched about Joseph Dinneen's biography and Edwin O'Connor's novel, he seemed immensely to enjoy the renewed attention they brought him. He gave the books away with such genial inscriptions as may be found in Lamont's copy of The Purple Shamrock: "To Jack: From...
...these are tributes, they seem hardly so fulsome as those Curley received in the Boston papers last week. "What he was ought not to be overlooked," said Handlin this week. Looking, few members of Harvard's faculty find much that is good...
...most telling criticism is, perhaps, Curley's persistently devisive influence on Boston. "Curley's stock in trade," Handlin wrote in his recently-published Al Smith and His America, "had been the appeal to the narrow clannishness of his group. Unlike Smith he had consistently labored to widen rather than to bridge the differences between the Irish and their fellow citizens...
...fiddle with reforms or constitutions, the ways of doing things. His brief attempt to pack the Massachusetts courts by removing all judges over seventy did not get past the over-seventy members of his Council. More often he took what was given, Ward 17 or Boston society, and moved around in it a little faster than anyone else. Limiting himself to what he could get out of a thing, he made few forays into the more creative spheres of machine building or organized social planning. Like his social security (the ten dollar handouts), his civic improvements were piecemeal affairs where...
While Handlin finds his influence divisive, Schlesinger noted last year in a review of Curley's own book, I'd Do It Again, "his sublime satisfaction in the successful struggle of the Irish community of Boston for political and social influence." It would be no academic feat these days to suggest that the two may be reconciled: that, in the name of all that is most Irish, Curley was urging his fellows to assume in political influence, social prestige and fact, with Curley, mind you, always at their head, a posture indistinguishable from that of the old proper Bostonians...