Word: curleys
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...dress makes him distinctive, too. The story goes that Curley came over to Cambridge at the outset of his career and bought a second-hand rich boy's suit from Max Keezer that he were for years as alderman and mayor. Now, you see him mostly in a cutaway; supposedly he once showed up in a tuxedo to shovel the first clod of earth for a foundation, complaining that he hadn't hat time to change his clothes after a formal luncheon...
Outside of the city of Boston, Curley's success has, been very limited. Beaton twice for governor, in 1924 by Alvin T. Fuller and in 193 8by Leverett Saltonstall, he was in the State House for only one term, 1934-6; and those were the years of Roosevelt's first term when no democrat could lose. In the last year of his governorship, he ran for the Senate against Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and lost even though it was the first time Lodge had ron for political office...
What stopped Curley from being a good governor was his attempt to gain power enough to form a state machine without setting up an efficient organization to do it. He tried to see everyone in the State and pass out jobs to everyone when the jobs just didn't exist; the Brahmins, looking out of their Beacon Hill bay windows were shocked by the long queues of unemployed emanating from the State House doors. That was the kind of thing that worked in City Hall, but couldn't possibly work on such a scale as the State of Massachusetts demanded...
...case of the Commissioner of Agriculture is the best example of his poor judgment; an experienced executive was replaced by a grocery salesman from Fitchburg who got the job for getting Curley in the Grange and for making him an honorary member of the Mashpeo Indian tribe. Payson Smith, such a noted educator that Harvard hired him on the spot, was dismissed as Commissioner of Education in favor of a small-town Superintendent of Schools. Thomas H. Green, to whom Curley himself once referred to as one of "the James brothers" was made head of the Civil Service. Case workers...
Worse than these administrative sins, however, in the light of popularity, were the childish escapades of the governor and his entourage when they drove around the State in their limousines. Twice, policemen in the procession ahead of Curley were killed in crashes; three deaths were caused directly by men in State cars. Mayor Mansfield of Boston dubbed Curley the "Hit and Run Governor." It was in this connection that one of the most famous of the Curly quips came. A reporter suggested that one of Curley's night trips to a disaster scene during the 1936 floods, was a little...