One of my current projects is reading some of the bestsellers of the 1950s, especially those my parents owned and left around the house. When I was about 6 my father brought home a box of books a co-worker had given him, I think with my mother in mind -- she was more of a reader than he was, especially of fiction. (He was ambitious, though: among the books he got for himself were G. Polya's How to Solve It and John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. I don't think he read them, though.) I remember poking through the box and being disappointed that it contained nothing for kids. But over the years I read some of them. Those copies are long gone, but I've tracked down those whose titles I remember.
Right now I'm going through The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, originally published in 1956. It sold very well and was filmed twice, once with Spencer Tracy and again for television in 1977, starring Carroll O'Connor. It's an interesting story of the last political campaign of Frank Skeffington, an Irish-American machine politician in an unnamed city that resembles Boston. There's general agreement that The Last Hurrah is an accurate depiction of big-city politics in the first half of the twentieth century; one famous Boston pol objected to it at first as a portrait of himself, but when it became popular he claimed he was the model after all.
What I find interesting so far is that although everyone, including Skeffington, stresses that his style of politics is on the way out, partly because of the advent of television, it doesn't seem to have vanished yet. Take these remarks by Skeffington to his nephew, about a prominent local political reporter:
Second, while he did cover politics around here for a number of years, there’s no guarantee that he really understood very much about what he was covering. The fact that he was a newspaperman would suggest that he didn’t. It’s a point of pride with most of our political journalists that they don’t know a great deal about politics; if they did, it would interfere with what I believe they call their ‘objective analyses.’ The finest example of an objective analyst we’ve ever had was a reporter named Mulrooney who used to write a City Hall column. He was so objective that he didn’t know where City Hall was. That was no handicap, however, as he wrote his column for ten years without ever leaving the house; they used to call him ‘Mattress’ Mulrooney because it was believed that he never left his bed, either. Towards the end of his career it was rumored that some informer had smuggled in some valuable information to him: facts about the size of the city, who the officials were, how many parties we had, and what year it was....
I must say the most of our journalists don’t seem to be too strong on facts; no doubt they have an occupational distrust of them.
Anyone who's watched the antics of the political press corps today should find that this description still applies to many of them. So far The Last Hurrah is entertaining; I look forward to the rest of it.
