Word: handlins
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Under fire from the panel of Erwin N. Griswold, Dean of the Law School, Jeffrey E. Butler of Oxford University, and Oscar Handlin, professor of History, DuPlessis replied that outsiders are incapable of realizing the uniqueness of South Africa's dilemma...
...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...
...Handlin said this week, "purely opportunistic... The worst part of his effect was that he kept confusing any kind of issue with which he dealt. People influenced by him never got to confront problems even as directly as in New York where, though you had Tammany, the leaders and more important politicians had some conception of the larger issues of politics...
...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...
Lyons concluded in 1936 that, "Curley controls the Commonwealth by means of the smallest and cheapest political heelers that ever shined their trousers in the seats of public office in Massachusetts." In this year's Al Smith and His America, Handlin refers to Curley's "richly deserved prison terms," finds him "the prototype of everything that Smith abominated," a "freebooter." These are understatements; for his original text had "the publishers a little worried and they softened it down some." Harsh as it is, this view may be typical of what Harvard thinks of Curley...