The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (review)

The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston 1900-1925. By James J. Connolly (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 304 pp. $45.00

For students of urban political history, Connolly has retrieved the rich diversity of progressivism in turn of the century Boston. Rather than attribute progressive reform solely to the political activism of an aroused wasp middle class, Connolly shows that progressive rhetoric provided a "plastic" public language that "became a powerful formula for political action along many social axes" (12).

In late nineteenth-century Boston (as throughout the eastern states), political parties dominated public life. "Ward, party, and faction, not ethnicity or class, were the basic categories of political action" (36). During the 1890s, political activism began to take new forms. Interest-group entrepreneurs acted independently of parties in pursuit of their own agendas. The Boston Central Labor Union, for example, successfully agitated for an eight-hour-day on public works.

An array of self-proclaimed progressive reformers and civic activists soon joined them. There were structural reformers of the familiar sort--businessmen opposed to inefficiency and rising property taxes--organized in the Good Government Association. Upper-class women organized in the Women's Municipal League. Their agenda of "municipal housekeeping" addressed issues of education, social welfare, sanitation, and public health. Suburbs and more central neighborhoods also supported civic activities. Typical of the suburbs, the Jamaica Plain Citizens' Association agitated for a better share of public services and improved mass transportation; the Jamaica Plain Tuesday Club provided a vehicle for middle-class women's social-reform efforts.

Aspiring civic leaders in neighborhoods with predominantly foreign-born populations also campaigned against corruption and fiscal irresponsibility. The emerging style of civic leadership provided a template for Italian, Jewish, and Irish men and women to claim to speak for their communities, often in competition with party leaders. Thus, the [Jewish] Advocate, the [Italian] Gazetta del Massachusetts, and the [Irish] South Boston Gazette all championed reform, for the "people" against the "interests."

Not all of these groups pursued the same agenda. The suburbs wanted more trolley lines and lower taxes; the in-city neighborhoods wanted descriptive representation and social reform. The Citizens' Municipal League advocated structural reform--nonpartisanship and citywide elections--in a charter revision referendum called Plan Two. These changes, the Association claimed, would "place power in the people" and do away with the boss, patronage, corruption, inefficiency, and other municipal evils. Plan Two won in 1909.

In this setting John F. Fitzgerald emerged as the city's leading politician. Fitzgerald campaigned for "Manhood against Money," a brilliant slogan conjuring up the "masculine practicality" of working men against an effete and self-interested moneyed elite. Nor was the ethnic dimension lacking. Fitzgerald attacked the School Committee for its antagonism to Catholic instruction. Fitzgerald's style was inherited by James Michael Curley--and both politicians delivered. Curley masterminded "numerous large-scale social reform measures"--improving Boston City Hospital, building parks, and lowering streetcar fares--in striking contrast to the tightfisted and pro-suburban administration of his Yankee reform predecessor in City Hall.

What should we make of Fitzgerald and Curley? Although he does not draw the comparison, Connolly presents them as politicians much like New York City's Robert Wagner or Chicago's Richard J. Daley. All four men were lifetime Democrats who cleaned up machine politics and adopted reform rhetoric and style. Their public policies, by accommodating the needs of working-class supporters, enabled them to claim honorably to be the servants of the people and be re-elected several times over.

Connolly's refusal to "relegate urban ethnics to the realm of machine politics, in which persuasion did not count and ideology did not matter" distinguishes him from most students of city politics (14). Connolly also charts the decline in participation that followed structural reform, notes the parallel disappearance of structural reformers, and...