Snow-wise, it’s been a record-breaking winter here in Baltimore. Two months ago, a 20+ inch blizzard gave me a chance to catch up on the C-Span health care debate and some of the post-midnight procedural votes leading up to the Christmas Eve passage.
Last weekend dumped about another 5 or 6 inches – enough to have a snowed-in Saturday – and a chance to watch Spencer Tracy play Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah, a movie based on the Edwin O’Connor novel of the same title, itself based loosely on the final campaign of former Boston mayor and political boss James Michael Curley.
This weekend brought a blizzard to beat the December blizzard – possibly up to 30 inches, and more snow than I’ve seen in my lifetime. Had a chance to watch Sarah Palin address the Tea Party convention, which wasn’t nearly as interesting as I’d hoped. And… again, I watched The Last Hurrah.
First, a bit of history on Curley. Having never read a book on the man, I defer to two sources here – Wikipedia, and the “George Book of Political Lists.”
I’ll start with George:
Curley had no more than a sixth grade education. He lost his first election, for the Boston common council, in 1898 and his last, a tenth run as mayor, in 1955. In between he served four terms as mayor of Boston, four terms as a U.S. congressman, and one as Governor of Massachusetts. He was convicted in 1903 of taking someone else’s civil service exam and was elected alderman while in prison. In 1946, while mayor, he was convicted of mail fraud. He modeled his machine on Tammany Hall, paying for food, rent, and funerals for poor Irish immigrants and establishing public bathhouses. Curley was called everything from the Irish Mussolini to the Ambassador from South Boston.
Wikipedia sheds a bit more light on that first offense – the civil service exam. Apparently, Curley and an associate took the exams of two men in their districts to help them get jobs with the federal government.
On the second offense: After serving five months in prison for mail fraud in 1947, President Truman (who Wikipedia fails to note was a product of machine politics himself, and may have seen a bit of Tom Pendergast in Curley), gave in to pressure from the Massachusetts delegation and pardoned Curley.
When Curley returned to City Hall (he won his re-election while being investigated for his crime), he was greeted by thousands of well-wishers and a brass band playing “Hail to the Chief.”
My personal favorite fact about that campaign for mayor, his 4th: his campaign slogan was “Curley Gets Things Done.” More on that later.
Couple other pop-culture notes on Curley, courtesy Wikipedia: 1) The Mighty Mighty Bosstones song “Rascal King” was inspired by Curley; 2) The Purple Shamrock bar in Boston was named for one of Curley’s symbols; and 3) every mayor since Curley has had 5-7-6 as the first three numbers on their license plate: James = 5, Michael = 7, Curley = 6.
Off the history lesson and on to the movie synopsis.
The movie takes place in the late 1950s, when Skeffington is running for an unprecedented fifth term as mayor of a New England city. As always, the “swells and bluebloods” are against him, but the people – his people – are firmly behind him. He draws a young challenger, a milquetoast-y, inoffensive, slick politician built for the TV age – Kevin McCluskey. Skeffington senses that politics – which he considers the most popular spectator sport in America – is moving in a new direction, away from his brand of retail politics.
To his nephew Adam, he observes:
It’s my guess that the old-fashioned political campaign in a few years will be as extinct as the dodo. It’ll all be TV and radio, it’ll all be stream-lined and nice and easy. Oh, mind you, I use the TV and the radio sometimes, but I also get out into the wards. I speak in fight arenas, armories, street corners, anywhere I can gather a crowd. I even kiss babies. That’s the way I’ve always done it, and I must say it’s usually paid off. But there’s no use kidding myself about it. It’s on its way out. Just as I am.
In the end, the nondescript, utterly charmless but basically “clean” McCluskey wins, and shortly after, Skeffington dies, taking with him the era of party bosses and charming political rogues. Personally, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for machine politics. Maybe that’s just the nostalgist in me, always fascinated by anything with the whiff of a throwback.
I suppose my fascination with political bosses and big city machines does seem a bit at odds with my love of the old agrarian populists. Now maybe I’m just rationalizing, but it does seem to me like the two groups actually have a lot in common: both were looked down on by “respectable” people, both primarily served the working class – whether famers or laborers, both focused on tangible ends rather than ideology, both groups ruled the Democratic Party in the early years of the 20th century, and both had leaders who made up in charm and charisma what they lacked in education and social status.
But something about this movie – more specifically, something about Frank Skeffington – has really resonated this week. I keep going back to Curley’s slogan (that I wish they’d held over for the fictional portrayal): “Curley Gets Things Done.” When aristocratic bankers turned down a loan to the city for a housing project for the poor, Skeffington broke up one of their meetings, threatened them, and ultimately blackmailed one to get the loan approved. When an undertaker was bilking a poor widow, Skeffington again made a couple of veiled threats, and got the price of the burial knocked down to the bare minimum. With his friends, he was protective and generous; with his enemies, gleefully ruthless.
I’ll stop short of advocating blackmail, but I can’t deny that in a political environment in which a minority can drag their feet and procedurally block any and all progress wanted by the majority, I wouldn’t mind seeing some of those Skeffington tactics employed.* It wouldn’t be so bad if the President spent a little more time rewarding his friends rather than placating his adversaries. In his health care address to the nation last September, he pledged to “call out” anyone who misrepresented what was in his plan. I still haven’t heard him mention anyone by name. Not quite the Skeffington sense of gleeful ruthlessness. Not quite Hubert Humphrey’s “Happy Warrior.”
In some ways, our politics are so much cleaner now. No more stuffing ballot boxes, no more dead voters casting ballots en masse. Street money, trading favors, Congressional deal-making, nepotism, “cronyism,” all the old hallmarks of city machines, draw outrage – phony or sincere – from advocates of good government. But, corporations buying politicians? That’s free speech, don’t ya know?
We’ve cracked down on every little extralegal activity that went toward actually getting things done, and legalized the exact obstacle that makes getting things done next to impossible. Or to put it another way, we’ve found ways to ensure there could never be another Frank Skeffington, but that Kevin McCluskey – backed by all those “swells and bluebloods” – will have a flush campaign war-chest every time.
Oh well… just my thought of the day.
*And okay, I “get” the Baltimore irony of the moment – having just sworn in a new mayor after the indictment and resignation of Sheila Dixon.
*As a fun little post-script, they’re now calling for another 10 – 20 inches of snow tomorrow…
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