The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley.

How far will we let our elected leaders go? What are the limits of our tolerance of graft, demagoguery, and other assorted sins? How far do good works, ethnic or socio-economic privation, or extraordinary charisma make up for one's misdeeds?

Though the characters constantly change, these age-old questions are as urgent and difficult today as they were generations ago in the times of Tammany Hall and Teapot Dome. Atlantic Monthly editor Jack Beatty examines them again in the case of James Michael Curley. Curley left an indelible mark on the politics and culture of Boston during a fifty-year political career that saw him elected governor, mayor, congressman, and alderman. Thrice indicted, twice jailed, enshrined in literature and film by Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, and tortured by personal tragedy, Curley had no neutrals standing in judgment of him--for most people he was either the complete hero or the consummate villain.

Oftentimes our judgment of a politician's behavior is compromised by the timing of unflattering disclosures. We tend to overlook indiscretions of incumbent officeholders that would never be tolerated with newcomers. And personal familiarity makes hard judgments even more difficult. It's been that way with Curley and me--my mother worked for twelve years as Curley's maid in his famous (or infamous) mansion on Boston's Jamaicaway, where shamrocks were carved into the shutters as Curley's way of thumbing his nose at Boston Brahmins and others who stood against him.

Like Beatty, I grew up in a household where Curley's name was held in reverence. "For the Irish Americans...he was a political and cultural hero, an axial figure in their annals," writes Beatty. Though the Irish had already become the dominant ethnic group in Boston by the turn of the century, and though other Irish Americans preceded him in political prominence (including John F. Kennedy's maternal grandfather, Mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald), Curley brashly represented for his time what Harold Washington declared to black Chicagoans on the night of his mayoral victory: "It's our turn!"

But unlike other big-city mayors such as Al Smith or Richard Daley, Curley did not build an all-encompassing machine. Instead, this was "the main thread in Curley's public life: doing little things for little people who repaid him in votes and gratitude, who as the years went by and they tasted something of the world's indifference, magnified manifold the value of the little things Curley had done for them." More than a million witnesses to Curley's funeral procession in 1958 testified to this loyalty.

Those not helped by him were aware of other aspects of Curley's life: a spell-binding and unforgettable voice and rhetoric; an uncanny sense of political theater and entertainment; and a deeply tragic and unending string of personal losses that hit him with regularity, including the early deaths of his wife and four of his six children, two on the same day in February 1950.

Though essentially a local figure, Curley also made his mark on the national scene, leading the fight against immigration restrictions in Congress in 1913, and speaking out against growing anti-Semitism in the 1940s. His public works projects at the start of the Great Depression anticipated much of the New Deal. He risked his career by jilting the Al Smith bandwagon in 1932 to back Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became the local hero again with F.D.R.'s victory, and ended up the jilted suitor when allegedly promised federal jobs did not materialize. These associations were also balanced by an out-spoken admiration of Mussolini and an alliance with the fascistic Father Charles Coughlin.

To Beatty, Curley's positive attributes could not outweigh the negative. First and foremost was an unending penchant for graft. The mansion, the array of servants, the vacation homes, the lavish global trips--all were evidence of a man living far beyond the means of modest governmental salaries. "He was not the only politician in American history to have been reelected from jail, but he was surely alone in having twice been in jail while in office, at either end of his career, a parenthesis of disgrace."

Even worse than these transgressions, Beatty faults Curley for adding to the poisoned waters of Massachusetts politics. The enmity between Boston Yankee and Irish began long before Curley, reaching back centuries to their native lands, and locally to the 1840s and the burning of a Catholic convent by rampaging Nativists. But at a time when Irish political strength was nearing its peak, Curley did not attempt to heal the wounds; he opened them wider, exploiting them for his own purposes.

So why did Boston voters buy him for so long? I find the answer in the writings of Vaclav Havel: "They say a nation gets the politicians it deserves. In some senses this is true: politicians are indeed a mirror of their society, and a kind of embodiment of its potential. At the same time--paradoxically--the opposite is also true: society is a mirror of its politicians. It is largely up to the politicians which social forces they choose to liberate and which they choose to suppress, whether they rely on the good in each citizen or on the bad."

The Rascal King is a compelling and rich journey through a hundred years of Boston history, and an in-depth chronicle of the life of a man whose contributions and transgressions were monumental. But in the end, the scales are clearly weighed in the negative for James Michael Curley, at least as far as Beatty is concerned.