The Saga of "Sympathy Jim"

I'D Do IT AGAIN (372 pp.)--James Michael Curley--Prentice-Hall ($4.95).

In The Last Hurrah, Author Edwin O'Connor's thinly disguised 1956 novel-biography of Boston's former perennial mayor, one of the bedside visitors says unctuously: "Knowing what he knows now, if he had it all to do over again, there's not the slightest doubt but that he'd do it all very, very differently." Whereupon the dying politico opens a "challenging eye and croaks: "The hell I would!"

In his autobiography, James Michael Curley, 82, echoes his defiance. His own story is at once a better and a poorer book than O'Connor's--better because Curley's self-portrait is more revealing, human and tragic ; poorer because, whatever else he may be, Curley is not a writer. His suit-caseful of anecdotes, memoranda, unchecked recollection and trivia was turned down by two publishers before Prentice-Hall hired Author John Henry Cutler, a Jack-of-all-writing, to bring some order out of the accumulated memories of a lifetime.

Some lifetime! James Curley was born in a Boston slum to immigrant Irish parents who worked their lives away in a desperate effort to stay even--his father as a day laborer, his mother as a scrub woman. Young James tried in vain to dent the world of business as a newsboy and a drugstore errand boy, earning $2.50 a week "for hours that were short, if you consider eternity."

The Martyr. Politics, he quickly saw, was the only way to escape the treadmill of poverty. Tall, handsome, quick-witted and hardfisted, he had already learned the politician's first rule, "Work harder than anybody else," and he was an eager organizer of picnics, outings, minstrel shows and church suppers. Anyone who was sick or needy in Boston's 17th ward could count on a comforting visit from "Sympathy Jim." He had a big voice that ranged from a resonant roar to a tearful quaver. Over nearly 50 years Curley captured a series of local and state offices, was four times elected to Congress, four times mayor of Boston, once governor of Massachusetts.

In all his campaigns, Curley liked to play the martyr. Whenever the "evil" forces that opposed him proved somnolent, Curley was ready to give them a helping hand. In campaigning for the governorship in 1924, he was opposed by the Ku Klux Klan, and fiery crosses burned on hills when he spoke in rural areas. What his listeners did not know was that Curley's henchmen put up and lit most of the crosses. He sent fake Protestant spokes men to campaign in Roman Catholic neighborhoods for an opponent, and fake Roman Catholic agitators to do the same in Protestant districts.

After he served one of two jail terms (the first for taking a civil-service examination for someone else, the second for using the mails to defraud), Curley turned to advantage what would have ruined most other politicians. He planted hecklers in his audiences to bait him on his prison record, and that gave him a chance to tell the crowd, with emotion-throbbing voice, that he had taken that civil-service exam only for the noble purpose of helping out an unlettered constituent.

Curley is justly proud of his cool, poised platform manner. He chaired meetings with a splendid mixture of dignity, trickery and bogus erudition. Once he presided over a Sunday evening meeting when an opposition member asked for an Australian (i.e., secret) ballot. Recalls Curley: "I pounded my gavel. 'The gentleman.' I said, 'is out of order. It may interest him to know that they don't vote on Sundays in Australia.' "

Proudest Boast. Curley's book is sprayed with political maxims (see box) which, however amoral, surest an expert deeply fascinated by a great art. He scarcely bothers to deny the charges of corruption that soiled virtually his whole career. For the "Goo-Goo" (good government) forces he has sublime contempt: "There were the pitiable, simpering halfwits who went about nudging people in the side, pouring the devil knows what poison in their ears, and the brethren of hamlet and village, who had never seen Curley, gazed upon his countenance on posters that portrayed a baleful-eyed monster glaring out from behind prison bars . . . Nobody who has seen me has ever accused me of being wicked or depraved-looking"--which is fair to the truth, looks only considered.

Curley's proudest boast is that he was always a friend of the poor. The Christmas basket, the $10 loan, the stay of eviction, the city job--all bought him votes, but also made his headquarters a "school, employment agency, court of domestic relations and poor man's 'psychiatric couch.'" He was the voice of the poor, too, railing down the years against the Brahmins of Back Bay, State Street and Harvard. Curley's long memory bears the imprint of the Yankee sign, "No Irish Need Apply," that was so frequent in his youth. Though he had little more than a grammar-school education, self-taught James Curley sprinkled his oratory and conversation with lines from Shakespeare, Cervantes and Voltaire, all seemingly aimed at proving him the peer of any Harvardman.

To Bury All. Curley's private life was scarred by tragedy. His first wife, Mary, died of cancer. Of his nine children, seven died, two of them on the same day from the same cause: cerebral hemorrhage. Today James Michael Curley is beyond the end of his political trail, the last of the city bosses who went down before a combination of social services, prosperity, a more hardheaded electorate. He was soundly beaten in his last three mayoralty bids (the most recent in 1955), and last December narrowly survived an operation for a stomach ulcer. His final ambition: attaining the age of 125 in order to be able "to bury all my enemies."

No one can possibly regret the passing of Curley's kind of politics from the scene, but something cynically wondrous will have gone from the U.S. with a man who could put on the kind of performance Curley once did on a bitter winter night in front of South Boston's St. Augustine's Church. He had left his raccoon coat in his car, and then, as he recalls it, "I ascended the church steps. 'This has been a most unusual campaign,' I said . . . 'It is, therefore, fitting that one of the closing rallies of this campaign be held here in the shadow of this sacred edifice dedicated to the greatest religion the world has ever known. This entire campaign, in fact, as conducted, reminds me of that passage in The Lord's Prayer which reads: Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us . . .'

"As I intoned those words, I saw a bum lifting my coat out of the open car. Lowering my voice. I turned to one of my lieutenants and said, 'Get that son-of-a-bitch who's trying to run off with my coat.' I then continued with the concluding passage of the inspiring prayer, saying, 'and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.'

''The coat was recovered."

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