The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley 1874-1958.
Beatty, Jack.
Place Published: New York, N.Y.:
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.,
Date Published: 1992.
Description: FIRST EDITION, STATED FIRST PRINTING. 572 pages with index plus 36 pages black and white photos. The book is NEAR FINE with light stain to outside page block. The dust jacket is in NEAR FINE condition with minor shelf and edgewear. NOT price-clipped. Comes with a BRODART archival jacket cover. JMVINTAGE specializes in Books, Magazines and Treasures related to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor....and other curious subjects. The dust jacket reads: "He was the most colorful politician in American history. Twice-jailed scoundrel and the people's champion, builder of hospitals and schools and shameless grafter, pioneer of the New Deal, 'Kingfish of Massachusetts,' spellbinding orator and master of political farce, James Michael Curley was the stuff of legend long before his life became fiction in Edwin O'Connor's classic novel The Last Hurrah. Now, with The Rascal King, Jack Beatty offers a compellingly readable portrait of this American archetype, using biography in the Barbara Tuchman manner as 'the prism of history' to look through Curley's experience to the larger story of his city, his people, and his times. And instructive times they were, for James Michael Curley was a seminal figure in this century's still ongoing battle between two fundamentally different views of the ends of politics: one, the conservative ideal of government as no more than the neutral arbiter of rules and standards; the other, an expansive vision of government as a force attending to human needs. As mayor of Boston, as congressman, as governor of Massachusetts, Curley rose from the Irish slums in a career extending from the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt to the ascendency of JFK. The last of the oldtime political bosses, he was also the first of the modem political entrepreneurs, and his or story is the story of urban, ethnic America, from the mid-nineteenth century when the Celtic flood provoked a Protestant revolt, to the mid-twentieth when the Boston Irish sent one of their own to the White House. It is the saga of what America did to the Irish and of the Irish legacy to America. At its center, The Rascal King reveals a complex, engaging, and maddening man who built parks where there had been wastelands, beaches where there had been swamps, and for himself, a grand house with shamrock shutters constructed gratis by the municipal contractors he regularly squeezed for kickbacks. Curley was a politician whose grand style of living and rococo oratory were a deliberate thumbing of the nose to the understated elegance of the Yankee elite. His style, like his politics, became a form of vicarious fulfillment, carrying with it the hopes and resentments of the immigrant neighborhoods. But if his triumphs were his people's triumphs, his tragedies were theirs as well. A profoundly religious man, Curley had to endure the death not only of his beloved first wife but of seven of his nine children, and the public humiliation, in his seventies, of being sent to federal prison for mail fraud. Filled with plot and pathos, The Rascal King is a narrative of Dickensian proportions, cast with the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Al Smith, FDR, D. W. Griffith, Isadora Duncan, Babe Ruth, as well as the likes of 'Knocko' McCormack and 'Up-Up' Kelly-loyal Curley retainers from the days when politics was a mix of street theater and street brawl. As a compelling study of character, as an anatomy of political corruption, as a saga of immigrant politics and ethnic emergence, The Rascal King is as vivid, as various, and as surprising as Curley himself."
Edition: First editionBinding: Hard Back
Condition: Near Fine in Near Fine dj
ISBN: 0201175991
Book Id: 6059
Price: $12.50
