American Experience

James Michael Curley dominated Boston’s politics for almost half a century. To his adoring Irish constituents, he was Boston politics, the last of the big city bosses. With rhetorical flair, old-fashioned patronage and sheer personal will, Curley clawed his way up from poverty to four terms as mayor, four terms as congressman, one as alderman and one as governor. When the city investigated him for corruption, which it did with some regularity, it served only to enshrine Curley as “mayor of the poor.” In 1903, Curley ran a campaign from jail and won; almost fifty years later he interrupted a mayoral term to do time at a federal penitentiary, only to be welcomed back to office as a hero.

He overpowered opponents with his charisma and intelligence, and if that didn’t work, he smeared them. His brand of politics required enemies, and where there were none, he conjured them. He is said to have once paid the Ku Klux Klan $3,000 to burn crosses at his political rallies.

At the turn of the century, Irish were among the poorest immigrants living in America. Yankee prejudice remained very strong against the Irish (“No Irish Need Apply”). Curley’s colorful, combative style seized the imagination of this community because he dared to thumb his nose at the Yankee establishment. Curley’s life is a window onto the ethnic, religious and class tensions in American urban life, and how they could be exploited for political ends.