James Michael Curley was an American politician from Boston, Massachusetts.
Background
James Curley was born on November 20, 1874, in Boston, United States, a city whose upper-class Yankee Protestant families despised Irish Catholics socially and discriminated against them politically. His father Michael Curley died in 1884, when James was ten.
Education
James took classes at the local public school. He left school at fifteen, beginning a series of jobs.
Career
Elected to the Common Council in 1900, he then progressed to the Board of Aldermen and the Massachusetts Legislature. His Irish slum constituency elected him in 1911 to the first of four undistinguished terms in Congress. In 1928 he was a firm supporter of Governor Alfred E. Smith for president.
Denied a place in the Massachusetts delegation to the 1932 Democratic convention, Curley managed to be chosen a delegate from Puerto Rico. His support was instrumental in winning the presidential nomination for Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he broke with Roosevelt after the President refused to appoint him ambassador to Ireland.
As governor of Massachusetts in 1935, Curley was criticized for his spending, job trading, and high-speed motorcades across the Commonwealth. In 1936 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the U. S. Senate.
Of his many political posts, Curley best enjoyed being mayor of Boston. He was elected in 1913, 1921, 1929, and 1945. In an age of such figures as Tom Pendergast of Kansas City and Frank Hague of Jersey City, Curley enjoyed his self-described role as political "boss. "
He served two terms in prison: in 1904 for impersonating a friend in a civil service examination, and in 1947 for graft in connection with Federal contracts while serving as a member of Congress.
Curley died on Nov. 12, 1958.
Achievements
Religion
Curley was immensely popular with working-class Roman Catholic Irish Americans in Boston, among whom he grew up and became active in ward politics. His conduct frequently brought him into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy of Boston.
Politics
Curley lacked a political philosophy beyond that of taking care of himself and his own. Politics was a game he took as he found it; his only desire was to win, not to change or reform. He fabricated a Ku Klux Klan scare during his first gubernatorial campaign, and he regularly blackmailed Boston's propertied classes and social elite to subsidize his huge public works projects and padded city payrolls.
He became a leading and at times divisive force in the state's Democratic Party, contesting for power with its White Anglo-Saxon Protestant leadership at the local and state levels, and with Boston's ward bosses.
Personality
Curley formed a hard, unwavering, egocentric determination to succeed. Curley overcame handicaps of birth and poor education, and his political ascendancy was meteoric.
Connections
Curley married twice, first to Mary Emelda Herlihy (1884–1930) in 1906 and then to Gertrude Casey Dennis, widowed mother of two boys, George and Richard. This marriage, on January 7, 1937, was on his last day as governor.
He outlived his first wife Mary Emelda (née Herlihy) and seven of his nine children.