MASSACHUSETTS: The Last Rites

To have lived a long life, to have left the lot of many of those around you a little bit better than it once was, to have been genuinely loved by a great many people, and to have died in God’s good grace, is no small thing to have happened to any man.

Skeffington’s eulogy—The Last Hurrah

The undertaker dressed James Michael Curley in the morning coat and grey trousers he always affected on high occasions, laced a rosary in his hands, and around his waist tied the knotted white cord of the Third Order of St. Francis. Boston politicians draped City Hall in crape and half-staffed flags; they carried the casket to the Statehouse, where it rested three days with a policemen’s guard around the bier and 100,000 filing past. Whispered one old lady: “If the Good Lord had made a pact with Curley and given him a choice between this here and a little more time on earth, Curley would have taken this.”

Long Life & Grace. Curley would have taken the funeral Mass too, with his own Jesuit son. Father Francis, as celebrant and the Archbishop of Boston in the sanctuary. Packing the pews and spilling into the streets: notables and Knights of Columbus, workingmen and housewives and ward politicians, down to 79-year-old William (“Up Up”) Kelly, who through so many campaigns dashed into rallies shouting: “Up, up, everybody up for the Governor,” and was never fazed until the night he dashed into a deaf-mutes’ rally. But one thing Curley might not have liked. In keeping with diocesan practice, there was no eulogy. James Michael Curley had lived a long life, improved the lot of many, been genuinely loved by many, and presumably he had died in God’s grace. But it was better, looking back over his 60-year political career, to let the gentle shawl of legend disguise the hard shape of history.

“Goo-Goos” and K.K.K. Tenement-born son of an immigrant hod carrier. Curley came to boyhood while the Brahmins ran Boston and the want ads read: “No Irish need apply.” He decided that politics was the quickest vehicle to carry him from shanty to lace curtains, developed two tricks to grease the passage. He haunted public libraries, feasted on Shakespeare, Dumas, Dickens and Thackeray, became a silver-throated orator. And he played skillfully and sometimes shamelessly on the pride and privation of Boston’s Irish poor.

Curley was 25 when the Irish elected him to Boston’s common council. At 27. marshaling more toughs than the opposition and able to steal more ballot boxes, he was boss of Ward 17. At 40, after roasting Brahmin ”Goo-Goos” of the Good Government Association, he was mayor. And at 60. after Curleyites burned enough crosses to provide a background for Cur ley oratory against the K.K.K. and prejudice, big (6 ft.. 200 Ibs.) Jim Curley was elected Governor. In addition, he served four terms in Congress, was jailed twice for fraud, was once ordered to cough up $85,000 owed the city of Boston after his third term as mayor.

New Deal & Healed Scars. Curley was ruthless in office. He played the spoils system, fired underlings who crossed him. courted municipal bankruptcy by lavishing money on hospitals and parks with more emotional spontaneity than fiscal good sense. Once, when Boston’s First National Bank refused to make a city loan, Curley got the funds by threatening to turn on a water main that would flood the bank’s vaults.

In a city of egocentric Irish politicians. Curley never managed to build a machine. The only man he got into office—or wanted to get into office—was Curley, and in 31 campaigns he lost about as many as he won. But Curley had a greatness: he always bounced back. Always, that was, until the New Deal took over the care and feeding of Curley’s balloting poor, until the Boston voter’s political sophistication improved, until Irishmen reached a Brahmin equality that left no social scars for Curley to tear at. Swept out of City Hall in 1949, Curley ran for mayor three times more. For the first time in half a century he finished lower than second.

When Curley was a threat no longer, his enemies became fonder of the courtly old man. Bostonians had always been sorry about his personal misfortunes; Curley’s first wife died of cancer, and seven of his nine children died tragic deaths. And Bostonians felt a tug of gratitude as well. When Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah boomed into a bestseller two years ago and Curley raffishly accepted Frank Skeffington as himself, a dowdy city tasted prominence again.

But cronies knew that as Curley’s political power had withered, his health had been failing too. Fortnight ago a chronic intestinal block sent him to his beloved City Hospital, across Northampton Street from the tenement where he was born. Typically, the old man stole Election-Day headlines by weathering a tense two-hour operation, getting out of bed to walk the hall and flirt with nurses, But then he had a relapse. The hospital issued hourly bulletins, newsmen set up their death watch. Father Francis arrived to give the last rites as his father, at 83, dropped into a final, drug-induced sleep.

There was silence in the room. It was an awed, a dreadful silence, the vacant interval when death itself was yet a moment away. It was a silence which was broken by Maeve’s father . . . “I think we can say this: that knowing what he knows now, if he had it to do all over again, there’s not the slightest doubt but that he’d do it all very, very differently!” . . . The figure on the bed stirred . . . They heard his voice, as taking charge now for the last time he gave his answer: “The hell I would!”

—The Last Hurrah