The Curley Cult

Before his death in 1958, James Michael Curley brought fire and fury to Massachusetts politics for more than 50 years. He was portrayed as the corrupt, flamboyant mayor in Edwin O'Connor's 1956 novel The Last Hurrah.

Curley grew up shanty-Irish poor and with a hatred of the Yankee establishment. The Brahmins groaned at his political record (elected four times as mayor of Boston, four times as a Congressman, once as Governor of Massachusetts) and at his jail record (two months behind bars in 1904 for taking a civil service examination for an illiterate friend, and five months for mail fraud in 1947 during his fourth term as mayor).

Hardly a model politician. Yet when faculty members of the political-science and urban-studies departments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scheduled a series of six programs on Curley, there was standing room only in a large campus lecture hall. Why? Students seemed to be drawn by the highly personalized politics that Curley symbolized--a far cry from what one participant described as "the lack of charisma, of wit and imagination, and of unpredictability in modern politics." Declared Boston Mayor Kevin White: "Charismatic leadership is hungered for, but at the same time we fear it." Should there be another Curley? "No," said White. "The problems are different, the needs are different."

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