Grandeur That Was Boston Lost in Slums, Apathetic Suburbs, Brahmin Inertia as Leaders Wrangle Over Bribes in City Hall

A Boston newspaperman from way back, Louis M. Lyons, curator of Harvard's Foundation, released a cool headed analysis last week of Boston's politics its prejudices and its traditions--upon a city whose newspapers were seething with tales of bare-faced bribery and graft. When James S. Coffee stood up before a license hearing in the Council and affirmed, "Sure I'll take a buck," the probe was on. Before it was over, citizens knew that Coffee would take three thousand bucks and that he was not alone. Peculiar to Boston, Lyons points out in Vanguard Press' anthology, "Our Fair City," is the fact that nothing will be done about it.

Political corruption has a long and unsavory history across the Charles River. It dates back to the days of John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, who just after the turn of the century managed to capture the mayor's office for the Democrats in the face of a Republican legislature. The Republicans began legislating powers out of the mayor's hands and into its own patronage grab bag, with the result that an authority has been so divided it was impossible to fix the blame for the Cocoanut Grove disaster in 1942 and Hub bureaucracy has been left hopelessly confused and uneconomically corrupted.

Curley Acts as Mayor

For the past three decades, the dominant figure in the scene has been James Michael Curley--he never leaves out the Michael. By statute, he may not succeed himself, but for the most part he has allowed Republicans to fill in the gaps so that no rival strong-man can appear in the majority party. The recent judgment against him by the Federal courts has not dampened the ardor of his adherents or his strength at the polls. When Curley returned from the courts, he was hailed as a hero and the man of the people by Bostonians. One of the first functions he addressed was a dinner in honor of a judge, sponsored by the Archbishop and attended by the Governor. He had just finished paying his installments on the $32,000 the city made him give back after one of his terms as mayor.

Today the forces of good government are driving for revision of the City's charter and a change to a city manager form of government. in Massachusetts, any city but Boston has the option of choosing "plan E" after Petitions have put it on the ballot. Headed by the League of Women Voters, civic groups across the Charles are trying to push through the legislature a bill that would give Boston the same right. In spite of a defeat last year in the legislature, the President of the League holds high hopes for her bill this year. She points out that before the legal red tape of petition and referendum can be brushed aside three years will have clapsed. Curley's term as mayor will have expired, so that Plan E cannot be damned in Boston by Placing an anti-Curley label on it.

Democratic bosses point to the Beacon Street homes of the reformers and ask their followers whether they want any help from the "silk stockings" in running their lives. The League points out of its Beacon Street windows across the Common to some of the worst slums in New England and asks what they are doing there. In 1940, the Housing Authority found that one third of Boston's dwellings had no heat but stoves. The survey classed one fifth of the homes substandard and reported that half of these had no running water, private baths, or toilets. "And this condition," Lyons adds, "had changed only by further deterioration by 1946."

Graft and patronage have been a part of Boston since before the time of Curley, and partisans of good government are afraid they will stay on after the 71-year old boss retires from the municipal whirl. Of payroll padding, the Finance Commission reported in 1945 "that the identity of some subordinates is unknown even to their immediate superiors." With great eclat, Curley has discharged groups of officials in a burst of economy only to fill the vacancies in the succeeding weeks with his henchmen and not a few of his family.

In his essay Lyons discloses an annual $1 million overcharge by garbage collectors. A hardy little band of contractors has gained control of all the convenient disposal dumps and eliminated competition in the bidding. When only one bidder has a place for disposal, there can be only one effective bid, Lyons points out.

The voters know what is going on in City Hall, but the peculiar makeup of the electorate forestalls any large scale action or indignation. The great middle class, always the backbone of reform movements, has deserted the city for the cleaner suburbs with attractive school systems and play space for its children. Left behind to vote in the metropolis is the Beacon Street Brahmin class, snowed under, as Lyons puts it, by the clannishness of the low income groups.

Attacks on James Michael Curley, Lyons has found out in the past week, are taken as a personal affront by the Irish Catholie nucleus of his strength. The cold welcome they received on arrival in Boston from the Emerald Isle has knit them into a tight political and sociological unit. Reformers are dismayed to find that this mass of voters feels its security rises and falls with the fortunes of its champion.

James Michael Has Lecture Appeal

Curley is an orator with power in his voice reminiscent of William Jennings Bryan. After one of his court convictions, he shouted to a lecture hall jammed with adorers. "That isn't James Michael Curley they have lying in the gutter. It is you ... and you ... and you." As his finger pointed almost accusingly at faces before him, even the disinterested could feel the impact of the psychology that keeps his graft and corruption almost above criticism.

With the Brahmin class firmly dug in in the mud of its conservatism without the impetus of Puritan vitality, with the righteous middle class living in suburbs "the bedrooms of Boston" --outside the municipal limits where they have neither votes nor interest in reform, and with the working class content in its slums. Boston lacks the seed of initiative to overcome its inertia. In other cities a Joseph Pulitzer or a Mark Eldridge has crusaded through the newspapers and found something dynamic in the community to complement its editorials. In Boston, how ever, the press takes its lead from the community, and Boston must rest in its circle torpor.