Return To Congress
In 1942, however, Curley managed to revive his faltering career by returning to Congress, serving from 1943 to 1947, this time in the 11th district. In defeating his liberal opponent Thomas H. Eliot, a former New Deal attorney with an exemplary voting record on behalf of the Roosevelt administration in the Democratic party primary. Eliot was the son of a Unitarian minister and grandson of Harvard president Charles Eliot and Curley based his campaign on appeals to ethnic, class and religious bigotry against the well to do White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Yankee Eliot. Ultimately, Curley saw an opening in breaking the lock of ethnic politics in the State with the spectre of growing communist influence. In a quote from a campaign speech which has famously entered Boston political lore, Curley raised the specter of Communist leanings in his opponent saying, "There is more Americanism in one half of Jim Curley's ass than in that pink body of Tom Eliot." Thus, despite his long proven corrupting influence and antagonism toward the state's native Yankee population, Curley managed to win over substantial numbers of them, winning the election easily. During the term he compiled a voting record that matched his former opponent's in support of the Roosevelt administration's social agenda.
Read more about this topic: James Michael Curley
Famous quotes containing the words return to, return and/or congress:
“The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon
Began, the return to phantomerei, if not
To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:
One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,
At twelve, as green as ever they would be.
The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“When will the men do something besides extend congratulations? I would rather have President Roosevelt say one word to Congress in favor of amending the Constitution to give women the suffrage than to praise me endlessly!”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)