Date: November 2nd, 2025 6:34 PM
Author: beautiful kike
Curley was first elected mayor of Boston in 1914. At the time, Boston was split between its longstanding English-descended elite and a rapidly growing immigrant population dominated by the Irish. Curley leveraged the Irish population’s resentment of the English (which was amply reciprocated) and explicitly modeled his patronage-driven approach after that of New York’s Tammany Hall machine.
Once in office, Curley set about implementing a wide array of policies designed to benefit the Irish at the expense of the English. He increased spending dramatically, but not evenly: Irish neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Southie received significant investment, while English neighborhoods like Beacon Hill were neglected. Curley dispensed low-skilled city jobs to his base at elevated wages (50 percent higher than in similar cities) while cutting the salaries of doctors and other senior employees who were more likely to be English. The city’s property tax was increased to an eye-watering 10.1 percent, but with a twist: property values were assessed by the city at artificially low levels in outer neighborhoods dominated by the Irish and at artificially high levels in central neighborhoods where the English predominated. Curley also engaged in widespread corruption, for which he eventually served five months in prison during his final mayoral term.
The ethnic animus behind these policies was not kept secret:
Curley accused the English of having a temperament inclined toward ‘‘political chicanery and hypocricy,’’ and railed against ‘‘the inhumane numb-skulduggery of the Yankee overlords.’’ ‘‘The day of the Puritan has passed, the Anglo-Saxon is a joke, a newer and better America is here,’’ he said, and ‘‘the New England of the Puritans and the Boston of rum, codfish and slaves are as dead as Julius Caeser.”5
In Curley’s view, the collective sins of the English justified his use of the city government as a weapon against them. The English got the message, leaving for Boston’s suburbs and taking their businesses and investment with them. By 1959, despite the reform efforts of Curley’s successor John Hynes, Boston had lost 13 percent of its population, had the lowest family income of the country’s seven largest metro areas, and fell to a junk bond rating. With little tax base remaining, city infrastructure and services deteriorated alarmingly,6 while lavish spending on salaries and subsidies for residents drove the city deep into debt.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5792775&forum_id=2Elisa#49396181)