THE BOSSES

by Alfred Steinberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 1972

This portrait of six Democratic bosses should do especially well in the aftermath of Mike Royko's biography of Mayor Daley. The six are Frank Hague of Jersey City, Ed Crump of Memphis, Gene Talmadge of Georgia, Tom Prendergast of Kansas City, James Curley of Boston, and Huey Long of Louisiana. Unlike Daley, they were given to unruliness in childhood and to personal ostentation and stealing in later life. Unlike Daley, Curley was never a real one-man dictator; unlike Daley, Long posed a genuine Presidential threat. Like Daley, most of the six were given to little-guy populist rhetoric; Long, of course, was the most full-blooded populist, and Steinberg documents his dishonesties and inconsistencies; but Talmadge, too, grew up with Tom Watson as hero and model. Unlike Daley, these bosses were also businessmen with flourishing income from cement contracts, etc. Like Daley, they were all smart: Prendergast was right in a sense to say, ""I am boss. If I was a Republican, they would call me 'leader.' The reason I'm the boss is because of my ability."" Prendergast's abilities, it should be added, comprised machine-gun terror against a reform-fusion opposition. The basic reasons for bossism and its ascendancy in the '20's and '30's are not deeply probed, nor are the differences in machines, nor are their common something-for-everybody motors explicitly analyzed. Steinberg stresses graft and legal looting on the part of the bosses themselves without much examination of the business complexes as a whole. However, he has smoothly put together a survey which, if it necessarily lacks Royko's intense intimacy with a city, offers an enjoyable imitation of the lowdown.

Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION