February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Curley, who also served for a time as governor of Massachusetts, has been dead since 1958, but he remains very much a part of American folk memory – even if many Americans, including some of the delegates here, don’t realize it. Before the Kennedys and the O’Neills, there was James Michael Curley, who towered over this state?s political system for decades. More famously, he also was the inspiration for a fictional Boston politician named Frank Skeffington, the aging Irish-American pol in Edwin O’Connor’s novel “The Last Hurrah.” The novel, of course, gave birth to the John Ford movie, with Spencer Tracy playing Skeffington. (Carroll O?Connor, another great Irish-American actor, played Skeffington in a later version.)
The statue of Curley is unlike any you?ve seen. He is depicted not as some heroic figure, standing on a pedestal with a garland on his head. He?s shown sitting on a park bench, legs crossed, his right arm stretched out. His face points to the right, and if you sit down next to “him,” as I have, it looks as though “he’s” listening intently to whatever you have to say.
That was the essence of James Michael Curley, who, it must be said, will never be cited for his adherence to strict financial accountability. He was a rascal – a “rascal king,” which is the title of Jack Beatty’s terrific biography of Curley.
He also was a masterful politician who knew how to get things done. This knowledge came to him not from studying political science in one of this city?s famous colleges, but from a lifetime in politics. “Campaigning is my recreation,” he once said, according to Beatty’s book. He somehow managed to balance his rascal act with his support for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who put an end to the career of another charming rogue, New York’s Jimmy Walker.
Truth be told, many of the delegates gathered here this week would be embarrassed by James Michael Curley. Heck, he was considered old school in 1951. And there is little question that he benefited financially from his public positions, and that when he was criticized for his ethics, of lack thereof, he was quick to play the green card, labeling his critics as anti-Irish bigots. “Consequently,” writes biographer Beatty, “his use of public office for private gain had an immunity similar to that enjoyed in recent decades by leading black politicians, in cities as diverse as Long Angeles, Washington and Birmingham — another respect in which Curley appears as a precursor.”
Another such politician, though one who has never gained elected office, is Al Sharpton, a man who lived high off campaign expenses this year and whose campaign finance records are a shambles. But Democrats asked Sharpton to speak at their convention, even as they try their best to run away from the legacy of James Michael Curley, the rascal king.
For all of Curley?s flaws, I still consider him an endearing and colorful character – which, interestingly, is exactly what many African Americans would say about Sharpton and, by the way, what many residents of Newark say about their own rascal king, Sharpe James. And I think the Democratic Party needs to understand James Michael Curley, as a symbol if not as an individual, if they are to beat George W. Bush in the fall.
Curley was an old-fashioned New Deal Democrat who was suspicious of Hoover-style Republican politics. He held these positions not out of convenience, but out of conviction. One of the great unwritten stories of the New Deal and its time is the way in which this new social contract was supported and implemented by Irish-Catholic politicians like James Michael Curley.
Today, cultural issues trump economics in some Democratic Party politics. That’s why another former mayor of Boston, Ray Flynn, seems so alienated from the party of his youth. In any other era, Ray Flynn would be considered a liberal — he is committed to helping the poor, to using government as a check on the excesses of commerce, to supporting labor unions.
But because he is pro-life and opposes gay marriage, Ray Flynn and Democrats like him are written off as hopeless reactionaries and closet Republicans. They are nothing of the kind.
“People call me a John Paul II Democrat,” Flynn told me a couple of weeks ago. “I’m committed to social justice, I’m pro-union, pro-class, pro-poor and pro-life, and I consider myself a patriotic American. The value I represented weren’t just part of the Democratic party platform. They were the values of the Catholic faith, whether on the streets of South Boston or in New York or in Philadelphia.”
Old-school Irish-American politicians like Flynn came to power from the working classes, and they never forgot their roots. They had, and some still have, a manner and a set of values that some Democrats – across the Charles River in Cambridge; on the banks of the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side – don’t understand. “When we became politically active, it was important for us to be faithful to our values, to our religion, our country and our community,” he said. But now, he said, people from working-class backgrounds no longer have time to get involved in politics, leaving civic leadership to what he called “more-upscale, professional people” who often focus on a single issue, often one that has little relevance to old-fashioned Democrats.
Is there still a place for Ray Flynn and people like him in the Democratic Party? Flynn is not sanguine, but he also doesn?t believe the alternative — the Republicans — has any appeal. “I don’t think we’re welcome there,” he said. “The only time they welcome us is on Election Day. The day after the election, they go back to being blue-bloods.”
Democrats talk a great deal about inclusion. This fall, many Irish-Catholic voters will watch to see just how inclusive the party intends to be.