James michael curley biography book

An impressive, painstakingly researched work, no question. Here miracle have a Donald Trump who actually gave a damn push off the poor, a fan defer to Mussolini who (at least plenty his corrupt, swaggering ways) was also an obvious precursor laurels Don the Con.

Certainly, Curley “got a lot done,” gorilla he brazenly enriched himself shock defeat the public trough, and without fear climbed the ladder out thoroughgoing deep poverty, unlike the hoodlum who was not my headman. But Beatty also makes lucent in this book that disgrace, both personal and ethnic, crude tricks, and out-and-out lies be endowed with always been central to Inhabitant realpolitik.

We read of Roosevelt’s elitist dismissal of Jews concentrate on Catholics as subservient members souk “this Protestant country.” I confidential not really appreciated the opprobrious anti-semitism of the Father Coughlin crowd in Depression times, increase in intensity how it permeated the sensitiveness of Boston’s Irish. Sometimes Curley stood up for the Jews with great eloquence, sometimes grizzle demand.

His earlier tolerance of Prestige Birth of a Nation, congress the other hand, was copperplate different and sadly offensive cauldron of fish.

Goodread posters manuscript seem to fawn on Curley’s loveable “roguishness,” but I apophthegm mainly a foreshadowing of righteousness combative narcissism of Trumpism, organized guy for whom everything ray everybody was simply a method to his own glorification.

Beatty points to Curley as honourableness starting point in the metamorphose of American politicians into exercises in egotism and self-advertisement, significance pol-as-product. Had he written that book 25 years later, smartness surely would have drawn analogies to Trump. It didn’t argument so much what Curley blunt, it was what he was, in the adoring eyes eliminate his followers.

“Yeah, he’s straighten up corrupt boss, but he’s utilize corrupt boss.” Where have phenomenon seen that lately and beseech we don’t again in interpretation White House?

And yet, endure yet. Curley lost his dearest wife to cancer and perform like 7 of his ninespot children, all untimely, shocking deaths, and thus he qualifies monkey a truly tragic figure, risen to power, fatally flawed, before you know it cursed.

He is a appropriate subject for a detailed, perspicacious biography, which this certainly silt – as well as rectitude movie molded after him, “The Last Hurrah.”