Mr. Curley, the Famed Underdog

“It’s just a political move. I’m being persecuted.”

The mellifluous voice was familiar. The 225-lb. body, superbly carried, the pouched eyes, the air of expensive splendor were familiar too. Most familiar of all was the role. Massachusetts’ former Governor and present Democratic National Committeeman, Boston’s three-time Mayor, Congressman James Michael Curley has again been indicted, is again the underdog.

This time Curley wriggled under the hottest spotlight he has yet faced—indictment by a Federal grand jury. The charge: Curley and five other men (including Donald Wakefield Smith, a former member of NLRB) used the mails to mulct suckers through a war-contracts racket called Engineers Group, Inc. The company claimed an ability to wangle equally fat contracts for new clients.Fees as high as $9,000 were accepted. Actually, the Government charges: Engineers Group has no advisory board, no contracts, no legal ability to get contracts.

For scandal-scarred Jim Curley this is indictment No. 3. At the age of 29, while a Boston alderman, Curley was sentenced to 60 days for taking a letter carrier’s examination under another man’s name. After he had thrice been Mayor of Boston, the State Supreme Court ordered him to pay back to the city treasury, at therate of $500 a week, $42,629 which he had been found guilty of accepting as graft. But Curley, oozing martyrdom, turned both cases into political assets. Campaigning from jail, he touched many an Irish heart by telling how he perjured himself on the civil service exam in order to get a job for a destitute friend with a wife and four children. On the second occasion, he let Boston know that he was selling the family silver. Promptly John M. Sullivan, boss of Boston’s Teamsters (A.F. of L.), announced that the union would arrange a giant testimonial dinner to pay off all the debts, public & private, of its great & good friend. The Boston papers told how Curley, rising to speak his thanks, was overcome in emotion.

Hurrying to Washington to meet the latest indictment, America’s most successful underdog missed no cue. Now, after a lifetime of oppression in Massachusetts, he was being crucified in Washington. Explained Curley, his ruddy, liverish face messianic: “I have . . . refused to be a rubber stamp while serving as a member of Congress. . . . Indictments, threats or pressure of any character shall not deter me from doing what in my judgment is best for the American people.”