Word: curleys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though his personal following was immense, Curley lacked what might usually be called an organization. "One reason," Professor John K. Galbraith wrote recently, "is that a leader must also be loyal to his organization, and where his own interests were involved Curley was never a man of divided loyalties." But, though he was not much interested in electing anybody to public office besides himself, Curley often managed...
Neither the personal nor the local character of his following was sufficient to distinguish Curley from the other big-city bosses. Frank Hague controlled Hudson County, mostly Jersey City; Tammany had the city across the river; in Chicago Boss Kelly ran Cook County, and Ware had Philadelphia. But, as Louis Lyons points out, none had an organization that reached far outside his city...
What lifted Curley out of the barren pattern set by most other bosses was his wit. Much of it was of a local variety. In 1921 campaigning for Mayor against John R. Murphy, a good Irish Catholic, Curley dressed up a few of his camp followers as priests and sent them across Charlestown and elsewhere bruiting it about that John R. Murphy had renounced his Catholic Faith, joined a Masonic Order, had been observed attending Back Bay's Trinity Church, and intended to divorce his good wife in order to marry a sixteen-year-old girl. As the campaign...
...resourcefulness was not limited, however, to a single theme, nor to rostrum repartee. It lent itself to schemes of a sometimes highly elaborate variety. During Curley's first (and successful) campaign for Congress in 1910, his opponent William J. McNary elaborated on the theme of his own integrity to eventually tedious lengths. Forthwith, Curley summoned one of his indigent acquaintances, suited him up in Grecian-like robes, put a lantern in his hand, and set this Diogenes out upon the streets of South Boston. His inability to find the honest man McNary was attended by sufficient cameramen and reporters...
...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...