James
Curley the son of Irish immigrants from
County Galway, was born in Boston on 20th
November, 1863. He worked as a salesman for Logan, Johnson & Co
before becoming involved in the real-estate and insurance business.
Curley was active in the Democratic Party
and was a member of the State legislature (1902-03) and the Boston
City Council (1910-11) before being elected to Congress on 4th March,
1911. Curley resigned in 1914 to challange another Irish-American,
John Francis Fitzgerald, for the
post of post of mayor of Boston. He was
mayor until 1918 and again in 1922-1926 and 1930-1934.
Although he was twice sent to prison and was generally believed to
be a corrupt politician, Curley was popular with the large Irish population
in Boston. However, his opponents described
him as the "Irish Mussolini".
Curley was also Governor of Massachusetts (1935-37) and a member of
Congress (1943-47). Curley became mayor of Boston
again in 1945 but was found guilty of corruption while in office and
served five months in prison before being pardoned by President Harry
Truman. He was an unsuccessful in his attempts to be the Democratic
Party candidate for mayor in 1951 and 1955, and with his political
career finished, wrote his autobiography, I'd
Do It Again (1957). James Curley died on 12th November,
1958.
(1)
In his book, The American Mayor, Melvin Holli explained
why Michael Curley was voted the fourth-worst mayor in American history
(1999)
A worst-list
without Boston's "lovable scoundrel" Mayor J. Michael Curley
(1914-17, 1922-25, 1930-33, 1946-49), also known as the "last-hurrah
mayor," would be like corned beef without cabbage on St. Patrick's
Day. Twice jailed, the unstoppable Curley made more political comebacks
than a dying opera diva. A masterful and cynical exploiter of his
own people's poverty, he inflamed the ethnocultural conflict of his
city and turned Boston city politics into a three-ring circus for
half a century. Although, as his biographer Jack Beatty shows, Curley
grossly enriched himself at public expense and lived far beyond the
means of an honest public servant, financial self-aggrandizement was
not really what Curley was about. Curley lived for politics and loved
coming in first, no matter which office or honor he ran for. He undoubtedly
would have resented coming in fourth-worst in a ten-person field,
had he lived to see this expert survey.
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