The 'roguish' school does have adherents on the Harvard faculty. One of them is professor of Government Charles Cherington who said this week, "Governor Curley was very polite to us, and we tried to be polite to him...I don't think he would get a very good recommendation from the Divinity School. But if you regard him as a period piece, he was unique and magnificent. I don't want to pass judgment on him. That's in the hands of our Father."

Other members of the faculty have expressed admiration for Curley's wit. Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Warns against a priggish approach to the man. Mr. Louis Lyons, Curator of the Nieman Fellowships, grants him "talent, and a wonderful voice." To Professor John K. Galbraith, "He was clever and articulate, and had both an audacious sense of humor and a highly developed if somewhat indiscriminate imagination." Professor Oscar Handlin sees in the man "a certain kind of charm, and a lot of blarney."

But if these are tributes, they seem hardly so fulsome as those Curley received in the Boston papers last week. "What he was ought not to be overlooked," said Handlin this week. Looking, few members of Harvard's faculty find much that is good.

The most telling criticism is, perhaps, Curley's persistently devisive influence on Boston. "Curley's stock in trade," Handlin wrote in his recently-published Al Smith and His America, "had been the appeal to the narrow clannishness of his group. Unlike Smith he had consistently labored to widen rather than to bridge the differences between the Irish and their fellow citizens."

Ward boss or Governor, Curley was not a man to fiddle with reforms or constitutions, the ways of doing things. His brief attempt to pack the Massachusetts courts by removing all judges over seventy did not get past the over-seventy members of his Council. More often he took what was given, Ward 17 or Boston society, and moved around in it a little faster than anyone else. Limiting himself to what he could get out of a thing, he made few forays into the more creative spheres of machine building or organized social planning. Like his social security (the ten dollar handouts), his civic improvements were piecemeal affairs where he made sure that the recipient knew about the donor, and where the donor was himself a recipient.

It is for this reason that Curley had constantly to carry on diversionary actions. They were like his planted hecklers and the stickers, "Vote for Curley: a Humble Man," pasted onto the pretentious posters of an opponent. Curley had no extensive scheme, mental or political, with which to becloud events. With him it was a day to day activity. That is why he was so dependent on patronage powers, and his influence faded so quickly when he went to Washington.

He was, as Handlin said this week, "purely opportunistic... The worst part of his effect was that he kept confusing any kind of issue with which he dealt. People influenced by him never got to confront problems even as directly as in New York where, though you had Tammany, the leaders and more important politicians had some conception of the larger issues of politics."

While Handlin finds his influence divisive, Schlesinger noted last year in a review of Curley's own book, I'd Do It Again, "his sublime satisfaction in the successful struggle of the Irish community of Boston for political and social influence." It would be no academic feat these days to suggest that the two may be reconciled: that, in the name of all that is most Irish, Curley was urging his fellows to assume in political influence, social prestige and fact, with Curley, mind you, always at their head, a posture indistinguishable from that of the old proper Bostonians, and perhaps, in time, the Harvardians who amused him.

As satisfying as is the cloud in which this kind of generalization leaves its author, to stress in might be to gloss over what Curleyism meant to Boston. Here perhaps the most articulate of local commentators is Louis Lyons. "Curleyism," he said a week ago, "surrounded Boston like a moat for a generation, putting a chasm between city and suburbs with the most bitter refusal to entertain any cooperation with the city. It was a compound tragedy of Boston that it was saddled with Curleyism in the period of its most severe economic pinch, as capital of the region that saw its major industries, textiles and shoes, sliding away. Newer cities still expanding every decade could absorb the graft and woeful inefficiency of city machine patronage in their burgeoning growth. But Boston was drained..."

Criticizing Curley is nothing new for Lyons, who has also mentioned the divisive, racial character of his appeal that is less prominent now than it was twenty-two years ago. He than wrote in The Nation, "The intolerance of the Irish politician in Boston for any sharing of politician in Boston for any sharing of political power or political liberties can be compared only to that of the early church magistrates of New England. Curley's regime is frankly racial beyond anything known else-where in America."

Lyons concluded in 1936 that, "Curley controls the Commonwealth by means of the smallest and cheapest political heelers that ever shined their trousers in the seats of public office in Massachusetts." In this year's Al Smith and His America, Handlin refers to Curley's "richly deserved prison terms," finds him "the prototype of everything that Smith abominated," a "freebooter." These are understatements; for his original text had "the publishers a little worried and they softened it down some." Harsh as it is, this view may be typical of what Harvard thinks of Curley.

If he could have transported himself to an ideal Boston, Curley would quite possibly have tolerated the Harvardians for sentimental reasons so long as the Irish had the money. But it seems less likely that the Harvard community (insofar as it exists), were it transported to an ideal community (insofar as it could agree on one), would be inclined to accord Curley a similar favor