| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James J. Connolly. The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 260. $45.00.

Boston, that quintessentially Irish-American city, has contributed more than its share to the lore of urban politics. Yet, as urban historians now recognize, Boston never produced a centralized political machine comparable to those led by Irish-American politicians such as Tammany boss Charles Murphy or Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Boston's James Michael Curley, the "Purple Shamrock" who cast a long, Celtic shadow over the city's landscape, is often, rather inaccurately, styled a boss. Curley, who proudly called himself "the tribal chieftain who led the invading Irish" (p. 194), knew better. 1

James J. Connolly's book is a significant contribution to the new revisionist urban political history, which seeks to transcend the immigrant working-class machine versus old stock-bourgeois reform dichotomy that has been at the center of interpretations of urban politics. In Connolly's view, not some primordial antagonism between Irish regulars and Yankee reformers but the transformative impact of the new political culture ushered in by the Progressive era created the defining patterns of twentieth-century Boston politics, including the failure to build a centralized machine as well as the sharp ethnic (and later racial) cleavages that still persist. . . .

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