When James Michael Curley first became mayor of Boston more than a century ago, he got long-handled mops for the women who scrubbed the floors of City Hall and ordered them to stand while they worked, saying a woman should be on her knees only to pray to God.

It’s the sort of thing his admirers seize on.

He also did two stretches in prison and was frequently accused of taking payoffs from contractors.

It’s the sort of thing his critics seize on.

But praise him or shun him, it’s hard to forget him.

And indeed, he must have done some things right, because more than six decades after he died, people who never met him regularly pray at his grave.

On Saturday, Nov. 9, 17 people attended a public Rosary in front of the 12-foot-high gravestone atop the hill behind the chapel at Old Calvary Cemetery in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston that identifies Curley as “Mayor of the Poor.” 

His Honor and His Excellency has gotten this kind of treatment every year since about 2002, around the anniversary of his death, said C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, who organizes the yearly event and led the five Glorious Mysteries for Curley and for the deceased members of the organization.

Curley was famous in his day — and not just in Massachusetts. He inspired a best-selling novel by Edwin O’Connor and a Hollywood movie starring Spencer Tracy (both called The Last Hurrah) during his lifetime.

But how does this local politician who left the scene four years before the start of the Second Vatican Council retain such interest so many years later?

Part of the explanation is Curley’s affiliation with the Catholic Church’s teachings on social justice.

“Before there was the preferential option for the poor,” Doyle told the Register, “there was James Michael Curley.”

 

Who Was He? 

James Michael Curley (1874-1958) was born in Boston to poor Irish immigrants in a low-lying neighborhood plagued by overflowing outhouses. His father died while working on the job as a day laborer when Curley was 10. Curley and his brother helped support the family as adolescents. He left school after ninth grade.

Curley had an uncommonly fine voice, and he learned public speaking through eight years of night classes at the Staley School of the Spoken Word and by studying the speeches of 19th-century politicians. His instructor later called him “the greatest American orator since Daniel Webster.”

At 21, he became the right-hand man of the pastor of St. Patrick’s Church in Roxbury, serving as superintendent of religious education for the parish for five years and helping start another parish, according to a 1930 Boston Post story cited in Jack Beatty’s 1992 biography The Rascal King. 

He served in six elective offices, including mayor of Boston four times, member of the U.S. House of Representatives twice, and governor of Massachusetts once.

As mayor, he was a builder — schools, libraries, parks, sewer extensions, additions to the city hospital, and a locally famous bathhouse at a beach on the harbor; a taxer — to pay for his projects; and a provider for poor people, through government jobs but also from his own pocket, such as (among many such stories) the drunkard who would walk by what is now known as Old City Hall around noon every Saturday for what Curley would call “that money I owe you.” 

Curley gave money to anyone who asked. He cared about anyone in need — “even for people who really didn’t deserve it,” as his son Francis told his biographer.

Curley earned lasting loyalty from his fellow Irish Catholics for standing up for them — either as their righteous defender or as a stoker of ethnic resentments, depending on the observer’s point of view.

He loved stunts, like the time he was running for mayor against a fellow Irish Catholic named John Murphy and sent his own supporters into heavily Catholic South Boston as “Baptists for Murphy.” 

Or the time his fellow Massachusetts Democrats wouldn’t let him be part of the state’s delegation to the party’s 1932 national convention, and he somehow wrangled a seat in the Puerto Rico delegation as “Jaime Miguel Curleo.”

He also knew how to drop a one-liner.

On why Herbert Hoover had to be replaced as president: “If we have another era of Hoover, Gandhi will be the best-dressed man in America.”

Or explaining a collapsed ramp to an overpass: “an injudicious mixture of sand and cement.”

He is also remembered for living beyond his apparent means. He enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, including a mansion, servants and first-class trips to Europe, that seemed far beyond the finances of a full-time public servant. 

 

Why They Like Him

Curley’s admirers either doubt the accusations of corruption against him or think they don’t cancel out the good things he did.

They dismiss his two times behind bars as morally insignificant. Curley’s first stretch came about because he took a federal civil service exam for an Irish immigrant who wanted to become a mailman but couldn’t pass the test and arguably shouldn’t have had to take it — or, in Curley’s later rendition, “who couldn’t spell Constantinople, but who had wonderful feet for a letter carrier.” (When Curley ran for reelection for the city’s board of aldermen, rather than downplay the conviction, he made it his campaign slogan: “He did it for a friend.”) 

His second stretch came about for a conviction in a federal mail-fraud case involving a government-contracts brokerage company that made almost no money for which Curley served as a sort of figurehead. 

Where did Curley get his money? It’s hard to say, because records are lacking. Curley dealt in cash. (“Never open a checking account,” Curley told his son, according to Beatty’s biography.)

Curley’s defenders point out that laws governing public officials were lax at the time. Curley’s claims that he did well selling life insurance early in his career and that he later profited handsomely from a stock tip are plausible, they say, as is the possibility that he accepted gifts from supporters and used campaign donations for personal expenses, both of which were legal at the time. 

They also note that, through a 50-year-plus political career among mostly hostile prosecutors at the county, state and federal levels, no one ever brought Curley to trial on criminal charges that he took bribes, let alone convicted him. They further note that he had no hint of personal scandal — no women, drunkenness or excessive gambling. He had two happy marriages (his first wife died), and he helped raise nine children (seven of whom died before he did). 

Larry Overlan, an adjunct professor who has taught course segments on Curley for years at Suffolk University and Wentworth Institute of Technology, attended the Nov. 9 Rosary and gave a talk about Curley afterward.

He told the Register he doubts the consensus that Curley took bribes.

But what if he did?

“If he did it, he did it, but the good certainly outweighs any evil that he did by a long shot,” Overlan said. 

Doyle, too, doubts the received narrative on Curley.

He also said Curley deserves honor for standing up for Catholic teachings on morals and social justice, which he said contrasts with the public positions of many Catholic politicians today.

“We just saw Curley as an example of someone who was integrally Catholic — someone, in this era of apostasy and betrayal, who was loyal to the Catholic faith and the Catholic community,” Doyle said.

 

Why They Come

For those who attended the Rosary at his grave earlier this month, it’s not necessary to determine Curley’s probity or sanctity to justify praying for him. 

Dana Marrocco told the Register she is impressed by Curley’s approachability and how people down on their luck always knew they could ask him for help. “His door was always open,” she said. 

Her husband Gerry was asked about the less savory aspects of Curley’s reputation.

“Robin Hood,” he replied. 

Then added: “He did so much for the poor. And I think he believed in his faith. Yeah, he was flawed. But he believed in his Catholic faith.” 

Robert Joyce, a lawyer in Newton, Massachusetts, and a longtime board member of the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund, said there’s much to learn from Curley and from the Rosary in his memory. 

“I attend the Curley Rosary annually for two good reasons. The first is that, despite many obstacles being put in his path, James Michael Curley never stopped serving the people of Boston and Massachusetts. His career is a testament to his faith and his pure love for his countrymen,” Joyce said, by email. 

“The second is that the Holy Rosary, too often forgotten or underestimated presently, is a perfect prayer to the Blessed Mother and her Beloved Son,” Joyce said. “Attending the Curley Rosary is a perfect way of expressing gratitude for our past and praying for our future.” 

 

Mayor of Their Hearts

Among past attendees of the Curley Rosary is William Bulger, president of the Massachusetts Senate from 1978 to 1996, who wrote a short biography of him, mostly complimentary, in 2009.

In the book, Bulger calls Curley “a seriously flawed individual” who nevertheless was “not beholden to the powerful” and “fulfilled the urge or something stronger of the ordinary people to be masters of their own fate and community.”

Among the most frequent attendees is Ray Flynn, a former mayor of Boston and a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.

Flynn, 85, who has come to the Curley Rosary for about 15 years, attended the Rosary with his wife Kathy.

He spoke briefly to the gathering afterward.

“This is an extraordinary way to celebrate the life of any politician, but James Michael Curley in particular,” Flynn said.

Flynn said he didn’t come from a political family, but that his grandfather took him to Curley’s funeral in 1958. When he got into politics, Flynn said, he took Curley’s outreach to the poor as a model.

Flynn, who led the city government from 1984 to 1993, was known as the mayor of the neighborhoods. As Doyle noted in his introduction, Flynn has a marine park at Boston Harbor named for him, among other honors. But Flynn said the prayers offered at Curley’s grave every year are more enduring.

“And what better way could you pay tribute and honor and remembrance to the former mayor?” Flynn said. “I mean, you can build buildings reaching the heavens and the sky, you can build harbors and everything you’ve named like that, but just in political people, saying the Rosary is probably the best thing that could ever happen to a person who spent his life serving the public — ‘Mayor of the Poor.’”