
James Michael Curley (20 November 1874-12 November 1958) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-MA 10) from 4 March 1911 to 3 March 1913 (succeeding Joseph F. O'Connell and preceding William Francis Murray), from MA-12 from 4 March 1913 to 4 February 1914 (succeeding John W. Weeks and preceding James A. Gallivan), and from MA-11 from 3 January 1943 to 3 January 1947 (succeeding Thomas A. Flaherty and preceding John F. Kennedy; Mayor of Boston from 1914 to 1918 (succeeding John F. Fitzgerald and preceding Andrew James Peters, 1922 to 1926 (succeeding Peters and preceding Malcolm Nichols), 1930 to 1934 (succeeding Nichols and preceding Frederick Mansfield), and 1946 to 1950 (succeeding John E. Kerrigan and preceding John Hynes); and Governor of Massachusetts from 3 January 1935 to 7 January 1937 (succeeding Joseph B. Ely and preceding Charles F. Hurley).
Biography[]
James Michael Curley was born in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts in 1874 to an Irish immigrant family from County Galway. He campaigned for Democratic candidates from a young age, and he was nicknamed the "Mayor of the Poor" for his crusade against the political machine on behalf of the working-class. He served on the Common Council in 1901, in the State House from 1902 to 1903, on the Board of Aldermen from 1905 to 1909, in the US House of Representatives from 1911 to 1914, as Mayor from 1914 to 1918, from 1922 to 1926, and from 1930 to 1934, as Governor from 1935 to 1937, in the House of Representatives from 1943 to 1947, and as Mayor from 1946 to 1950. Curley was immensely popular among Boston's Irish working-class community, and he enlarged the city hospital, expanded the city's public transit system, funded projects to improve roads and bridges, improved the neighborhoods with beaches, bathhouses, playgrounds, parks, public schools, and libraries, and challenged Boston's Democratic ward bosses and the state's Anglo-Saxon Protestant political establishment. He died in 1958 at the age of 83.