Bookbag: Ghosts in the (Boston Municipal) Machine

Supplemental material from Jack Beatty's biography of James Michael Curley, first on the failure of "clean government" platforms:

The cry of reform had elected Andrew Peters. Business priorities now dictated city spending. Whereas Curley had not increased the budget of the paving department—good roads were businesses' chief demand—Peters increased it by 56%. Curley had added an eighty-bed wing to the City Hospital and sharply increased spending for the poor; Peters stopped all hospital expansion and, in the midst of the postwar recession, cut the number of poor receiving aid by a third. Peters opposed the granting of city pensions, broke the union in the city's printing department, and refused wage increases to the poorly paid library employees. And his mulishness in the face of the reasonable demands of the police led to the disaster of the police strike. [Coolidge worshippers take note. —CSB] Nor did his administration write a lustrous chapter in the history of clean government. Personally honest, Peters was too preoccupied with the pursuit of ancestral leisure (sailing, gold) and debauchery (Starr Faithfull) to monitor his appointees, who sold jobs and promotions as if they owned them. His administration gave reform a bad name.

Second, the conservative side of Curley's "welfare" system:

They were citizens, and the benefits they derived were contingent on their political participation. How different are things today. The objects of a niggardly—$60 a month is the food stamp allotment for a single person—bureaucratic pity, our dependent poor are not citizens; they get their benefits by formula, not according to their behavior. They have "rights" to these "entitlements," but no responsibilities.

Lastly, a touching story:

When St. Patrick's was being built, the men of the parish had had to patrol the construction site carrying muskets with fixed bayonets to discourage raids by Protestant mobs. On St. Patrick's fiftieth anniversary, in 1885, a neighborhood paper recalled that "nearly every man of the parish took his night in turn to perform the work of the literal soldier of the cross." Curley would thus have been reminded of the ordeal of his faith and people in Boston every time he entered St. Patrick's.