All Politics is Local - 1 November 2002

When I first arrived in this country if there was one thing I knew little about - and cared less - it was government and politics.

The previous year I'd been teaching school in Germany where a child with a swollen belly dropping on the streets from starvation was a common sight.

Being young and, I now realise, hideously callous, I came to think of these misfortunes as an irritation of normal life - as a baby thinks of its diapers, its nappies.

When I sailed into New York the next year, the United States - which was then in the very pit of the Depression - looked, by comparison, like the lively, prosperous America of the Rodgers, Hart, Gershwin brothers musicals.

After New York city I settled down in the university town of Newhaven, Connecticut, and it wasn't long before I came to see that there was something very wrong and sad about the body politic.

Even a young student couldn't go out in the evening without being solicited over and over by men in very proper business suits - could have been shop salesmen, company directors - and what they begged for now was "Please, a dime."

However, I learned to thank my lucky stars - I was on what in those times was a very generous fellowship.

I did my bit by way of dispersing dimes and quarters to men twice, three times my age - and having no political conscience I got used to living in a society where one family in three or four had nothing coming in.

The second year I moved from Yale up the coast into Massachusetts, to the town of Cambridge, which houses Harvard University and lies across the river from the proud city of Boston.

And it was there that I had my very odd introduction to American politics.

The winter of 1933/4 was one of the toughest in New Englanders' memory.

Boston was pounded by snow storms that recalled, to people in their 60s, the dreadful blizzard of 1888.

After the blockbuster the snow was so dense that it took days to plough through it, like Moses, and build immense snow banks to the right and to the left, so that the streets turned into trenches.

The strange thing, after a time, was the colour of the snow banks - at first grey but eventually black. Black? From dirt.

Photographs of Boston's trenched streets and the black snow banks appeared in out-of-town papers.

Why did the - I believe it was called the sanitation department - why didn't it do something about it?

Because, it was reported, that the department had decided on a slow down as a protest against the city's treatment of the mayor - a famous, genial and effective Irish politician who was, however, in jail.

"How can you run a city from this place?" he asked.

"Quite right," responded several unions and many thousands of good Boston Democrats and uncountable poor citizens, to whom he'd shown special care.

The city politics of Boston are, and have been for over a century and a half, the special province and art of the Irish.

Why, in the state capital that bred the most patrician of the colonial families - the Saltenstalls, the Adamses, the Lowells, the Cabots?

The first folk jingle I ever heard when I went to Harvard was the one celebrating Boston, "the land of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots and Cabots speak only to God".

And well into my time the Boston patricians, or "Brahmins" as Oliver Wendell Holmes called them, almost automatically went on representing the state of Massachusetts in the Senate of the United States.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was the distinguished and brilliant senator who spotted all the holes in the First World War peace treaty and the League of Nations charter and persuaded the Senate to excuse American membership.

But to jump to 1952, what an unforgettable night it was, when Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the grandson of the great one, was beaten in election for the United States Senate by the great grandson of a starving Irish farmer who'd fled from the 1840s famine and eventually became a pub keeper in Boston.

This brash young Irishman had felled the Brahmins, he was suddenly the Frank Sinatra of the Democratic Party - also known as John F Kennedy.

But I haven't answered the question I asked. How did Boston politics in the mid-19th century suddenly get taken over by the immigrant Irish?

The answer - for once to a political question - is very simple: 1838 saw the first transatlantic voyage by steamship.

The British government was so impressed by this feat that it didn't have to look far to find the man, the company, it was seeking to carry transatlantic mail from Liverpool to Boston.

This steamship pioneer, one Samuel Cunard, was the man and in 1840 he launched four ships to inaugurate the first regular transatlantic service.

Within a year or two the infamous potato blight struck Ireland and in a population of eight and a half million, one million starved to death.

A million and a half emigrated in a rush to America. Sam Cunard's blessed steamships were the only way to go and suddenly added to thousands of pieces of mail, one and a half million escaping Irish.

They landed, of course, at Boston and most of them stayed there.

Ergo: whatever the ethnic character of the rest of the state - old Yankees mixed with French Canadians and immigrant Italians - Boston remains the fount of the art of Massachusetts politics.

Why? A former long-time speaker of the House of Representatives, a jowly, affable, ruddily-nosed old Irishman, Tip O'Neill, once told me.

"Because," he said, "all politics is local."

"We don't talk about our constituency, we try to find Mary Byrne a job, smooth the palm of a cop who made a wrongful arrest, take old Mrs McCarthy and her sister to the polls, get young Paddy off the bottle and into a job."

Plus, he didn't say, what a famous New York city politician called "honest graft".

Honest graft, it now says in the books, is no longer permissible - as we used to say, is zat so?

The man who invented the term was describing money made or favours granted as a result of political power but without doing anything strictly illegal.

I doubt there's a democracy, forget dictatorships, where having or having had political power does not often lead, without comment, to an affluent company job.

Have you ever heard of a retired admiral who became an employee of a steamship line?

A former ambassador who was elected chairman of the board of a bank?

Whatever you call this process it's surely a universal form of, say, nepotism will have to do.

Anyway Boston and by extension the state of Massachusetts is still famous for steering its votes in a national election to the Democratic party and it will do so again next Tuesday - when, may I remind you, there is a national election - what we call an off-year election, not presidential.

But every two years, as now, the entire House of Representatives, is to be elected and one third of the Senate, since a senator's term is six years.

Before you lean over and switch off let me say that the election is what I'm talking about but I'll relieve you at once by saying that while double-dome commentators will tell you that the issues are the economy, the war, education, free prescription drugs for old people, privatising social security, gun control and further abstractions, the late Tip O'Neill was right and will always be right in saying "all politics is local."

Typical of hundreds of places next Tuesday is a town in Maryland which is fighting the election one great cause: to keep out the sale of alcohol.

They never recognised the abolition of prohibition 70 years ago and they don't mean to.

What most congressmen are really labouring over, working for, is to be re-elected, to see that the count goes their way. And they pick a popular local issue as the best way to do it.

Which brings me, with relish, to a very typical election story.

A close friend of mine, a political journalist of the first chop, was one time lecturing in Texas where it happened his grandfather had been born.

And it turned out that the chairman who introduced my friend knew more about his grandfather than he did.

"Our speaker's grandfather," he said, "was a law and order sheriff and an adamant Democrat.

"Indeed, although he died in 1904, such was his attachment to the Democrats that he voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1948."

Now, in that election in 1948 for US senator, Lyndon Johnson won by 87 votes in a tally of hundreds of thousands.

On the day of the election, the polls showed a terrifyingly tight race and Mr Johnson called in an influential Mexican American.

He told the man: "If I can get 200 more votes I'll win."

The man subsequently testified that late on polling day he saw to it that 200 votes were handed in to a polling station - miraculously in alphabetical order, including the name of the grandfather who'd been dead for 44 years.

The election was legally contested but it was certified.

Lyndon Johnson was elected senator and ever thereafter was known as "Landslide Johnson".

As a suitable tailpiece to this charming story I ought to add that years later, when President Johnson sent a delegation of political scholars off to Saigon to see that its 1967 election was honestly conducted, "Yes indeed", the delegation reported.

There was one wry delegate from Boston. He added that the South Vietnamese election was "every bit as scrupulous as an election in Massachusetts".

"There was," wrote my friend, "a large, eloquent silence in greater Boston when these words were uttered."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.