"I didn't even send out a postcard. Yet I got 240,000 votes. That shows how much they love me. I hope they'll love me on Nov. 3." Thus burbled Massachusetts' Governor James Michael Curley following his Democratic nomination for Senator last week. He might also have added that he did not open campaign headquarters until five days before the primary. Well might he boast, because he has few peers in U. S. politics since the death of Louisiana's Long.
Only three years ago "Jim" Curley was a sadly neglected Democrat. In spite of having been for Roosevelt long before Chicago, in spite of making friends with the President's ambitious son James, he had not been rewarded with the job he coveted, Ambassador to Italy. All he had been offered was Minister to Poland, at which he stuck up his Irish nose. In fact the New Deal showed distinct signs of coolness toward the three-times Mayor of Boston. Therefore Mr. Curley decided to show them. In 1934 he campaigned his way into the governorship, and promptly took political possession of the State in his own right instead of that of the New Deal. And when Governor Curley decided to run for the Senate, he did not even bother to put out the Democratic incumbent, Marcus Allen Coolidge. Senator Coolidge was simply dumped by the wayside; the Democratic convention automatically endorsed Mr. Curley. By way of protest to Massachusetts' respectable citizens, the Senator's son-in-law, Mayor Robert E. Greenwood of Fitchburg, ran against the Governor in the primary. The best he could do was a skimpy 104,000 votes.
Thus Governor Curley arrived in Washington last week to accompany President Roosevelt to Harvard's Tercentenary, well knowing that in this election year the New Deal would have to be nice to him. He rode back to Boston on the President's special, addressed the dripping crowd in Harvard Yard (see p. 22), calling attention to the fact that Grover Cleveland honored Harvard's 250th Anniversary, Franklin Roosevelt her 300th. "Naturally both of them Democrats," added the Governor leering at Franklin Roosevelt.
The six-foot, 240-lb., 61-year-old master politician, standing near the President of the U. S. in Harvard Yard, had between him and the U. S. Senate a slim political stripling who. with an umbrella over his damp silk hat, was a mere marshal among Harvard's alumni in the crowd below.
Twelve years ago, when Jim Curley was serving one of his periodic terms as Mayor of Boston, that same stripling, just out of Harvard and a cub reporter for the Boston Transcript, went to City Hall where he heard the Mayor rip into "that old son-of-a-gun," Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Last week the same youngster, grandson of the late great Senator from Massachusetts, had just polled 100,000 more votes than Democrat Curley to win the Republican nomination for the same Senate seat.