The Last Hurrah
by Edwin O’Connor
Little, Brown and Company, 1956
Frank Skeffington is running for mayor again, probably for the last time since he’s even now 72. He has presided over this major eastern seaboard city (never named in the book) for much of his adult life and even spent two terms as governor of the state. Over the years he has built up a number of loyal friends, colleagues and slavish followers. And, as most successful politicians do, he’s created a number of enemies as well. But Skeffington’s greatest enemy is the passage of time. The last hurrah of the title is this election, and in fact O’Connor coined this common phrase that refers to one’s last moment of glory before an ultimate demise.
Skeffington rose to power when politics was the only way out of the slums for an Irish immigrant. He’s taken good care of his people and himself as well. He was the politician who was out in the wards, handing out goodies (jobs, dentures, city construction projects) to people while using public funds. It was the period of ward politics, but ward politics is on its way out. Skeffington himself says that in this election he’s running the last campaign of its kind. He walks among the people giving speeches on street corners and in junior highs. He knows his people, knows what they want, what they need and the difference. But ward politics are dirty and hard-scrabble, and Skeffington has been a willing part of every brawl. Even on the morning of the announcement of his bid for re-election, Skeffington announces the destruction of one of his longtime campaigners to his inner circle.
The story shows the passing of an era that had serious problems. It was a time of fervent prejudices. In fact, not so very unlike today, the first thing the Skeffington team does is trot out the leaders of the various ethnic groups in the city to show their united support for the mayor. But the only thing the members of these groups hold in common is that they all have needs that Skeffington and his like have taken care of for years. Skeffington did loyally take care of his people, but they were his people, and he chose those he cared for by which way they voted. And Skeffington recognizes that it is the very success of this kind of politics that caused it’s destruction for he says of his politicians and sycophants that “their total dependence on favor from above had not left them with any great courage.” Definitely many of the dated behaviors of O’Connor’s time are reflected in this book, particularly racial and ethnic prejudice. There is an unfortunate, if realistic, use of racial epithets that makes the modern reader twinge.
Even so, something is always lost as one era surpasses another. One of Skeffington’s greatest enemies says “he sometimes wondered, when he talked to his sons, whether they who seemed to have overcome so many of the old passionate prejudices of their ancestors had not also managed to overcome some of their old passionate virtues? In these neutral, tolerant times, did anyone really feel deeply about anything?. . . . He contrasted this mild, automatic disgust with the violent shouts and empurpled faces that the name of Skeffington could occasion among his own contemporaries; he concluded that, even here, they swam in the new emotional shallows. In a sense, of course, it was a good thing; but still, he thought, but still . . .” In this new era of tolerance, there is a tolerance even of mediocrity. It’s an era, the beginning of television, when a good looking, polite young man with a picturesque family can win an election even if he’s nothing more than second-rate. O’Connor won the Golden Book Award from Catholic Writer’s Guild in 1957, and Joseph Bottom, in his review of a recent biography of Edwin O’Connor in First Things , speculates that his book was not only a last hurrah for ward politics but also for Catholic culture in the United States.
While not a political thriller by any means (the handwriting is on the wall with the title), The Last Hurrah is still a classic political novel and often has as much to say about our own reaction to politics as Skeffington’s constituency, for as he says “You don’t have to be interested in politics to be interested in the way people tick. And they’re apt to tick a little bit differently in an election; something seems to happen to the average member of the body politic when he’s being persuaded to cast his vote for what I modestly refer to as the indispensable man.” All in all, the story is a great read for, as Skeffington tells his nephew, “a big political campaign, if it’s run right, is one of the greatest shows on earth.” And this last hurrah of a huge personality, a corrupt yet compassionate man, a cultured yet ruthless politician, is indeed great entertainment. The Last Hurrah is available at Doherty Library.
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