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Irish Identity Politics: The Reinvention Of Speaker John W. Mccormack Of Boston, Garrison Nelson
Irish Identity Politics: The Reinvention Of Speaker John W. Mccormack Of Boston, Garrison Nelson
New England Journal of Public Policy
From his election in 1940 as Majority Leader to his last day as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971, John W. McCormack of Boston occupied the highest rungs of leadership in the Congress. Many biographies and autobiographies cover the lives and public careers of five Speakers, but not one has been devoted to McCormack — not because he was unimportant and irrelevant. He was a very private man who could rearrange the facts of his life to suit his political needs. The story had great resonance in Boston because its Irish gatekeepers — James Michael Curley, John …