The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor

First published: 1956

Type of plot: Political

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: A large New England city

Principal Characters:

• Frank Skeffington, the mayor, a former governor
• Frank Skeffington, Jr., Skeffington’s weak son
• Adam Caulfield, a newspaper cartoonist and Skeffington’s nephew
• Maeve Caulfield, Adam’s wife
• Roger Sugrue, Adam’s father-in-law
• Amos Force, a newspaper publisher and bitter enemy of Skeffington
• Sam Weinberg, and
• John Gorman, Skeffington’s chief advisers
• Ditto Boland, one of Skeffington’s hangers-on
• The Cardinal, a high Catholic church official and old enemy of Skeffington
• Kevin McCluskey, a political neophyte and Skeffington’s mayoral opponent

The Novel

The Last Hurrah is divided into four parts and fourteen chapters. The first three parts relate the tale of Frank Skeffington, former governor of an eastern state and now mayor of a large unidentified city, clearly meant to be Boston, and his campaign for reelection. The fourth section relates the election’s aftermath. Many commentators believe that O’Connor modeled Skeffington on James Michael Curley, several times mayor of Boston, onetime governor of Massachusetts, and the paradigm of the second-generation immigrant politician and big-city political boss. O’Connor’s Skeffington was apparently close enough to the real Curley for the latter to sue for invasion of privacy when The Last Hurrah was turned into a movie of the same name.

The story of what proves to be Frank Skeffington’s last political campaign is told in the third person. Now in his seventies, Skeffington has been mayor long enough to engender considerable popular support among many members of the various ethnic groups that make up the city’s population, not least among his fellow Irish Americans. He has also made many enemies, partly because he represented those first-and second-generation immigrants who displaced the earlier establishment, partly because as a successful politician he had frequently and blatantly rewarded his friends by providing jobs, awarding city contracts, and conducting other marginally legal activities, and partly over personal rivalries and animosities, often long-standing.

To Skeffington, a widower, his only child, Frank Skeffington, Jr., is a failure. Somehow, the latter became a lawyer and, with his father’s support, obtained an adequate position, but in reality he is superficial, lacking in perception as well as ability, preferring nightclubs and dancing to anything more substantial. Rejecting his son, Skeffington instead approaches his nephew, Adam Caulfield, and asks if he would like to observe the impending reelection campaign for mayor. Never close to his uncle before, and knowing his wife, Maeve, influenced by her bigoted father, objects to Skeffington and all his deeds, Adam, who has lost his own parents in an automobile accident, is somewhat reluctant; nevertheless, he agrees, becoming a witness to a passing age in American politics. An old-style political boss, Skeffington has achieved his successes by taking care of the immigrant and working-class voters, primarily through personal contacts. His door is open every morning to anyone who needed a few dollars, a job, help with the law, or whatever was necessary to survive in urban America. His evenings are spent at various ethnic and immigrant social gatherings, at a church, a wake, or a Columbus Day dinner. Politics means organization, down to the ward and precinct levels, and Skeffington’s organization is superb; in the past, that was sufficient. However, Skeffington’s longstanding enemies, notably newspaper publisher Amos Force, are determined defeat him, and have hand-picked a nonentity, Kevin McCluskey, as their candidate of choice. McCluskey seems perfect; he has no record that can be attacked, his family is telegenic, and he is malleable. The only element McCluskey lacks is an equally telegenic dog, so the McCluskey campaign rents an Irish setter for the duration. Until the end, Skeffington and his long-serving advisers assume that victory is theirs, but defeat is total and overwhelming. It is not necessarily caused by overconfidence: rather, the old-style political bosses such as Skeffington have been overtaken by a new generation of voters, products of a new era and of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs who no longer need the Skeffingtons to survive. As these new voters move away from their immigrant roots, Skeffington becomes largely a figure from the past.

The final section details Skeffington’s final hurrah. The evening after his electoral defeat, Skeffington suffers a heart attack. His final days are spent in remembering his past, seeing his close supporters for the last time, and keeping up their spirits by telling them that he is planning to run for governor once again. In the absence and incompetence of the junior Skeffington, Adam serves as the surrogate son, and the relation between the two becomes closer than ever. Adam’s wife, Maeve, appears at Skeffington’s death bed along with her father, who comments sneeringly that he is confident that if Skeffington had it to do over again, he would do it differently. From his bed Skeffington replies, “The hell I would!” His last words are addressed to Adam: “ See you around,’ he whispered.” After the funeral, which brings together many of Skeffington’s admirers and not a few of his opponents, Adam makes a last pilgrimage to Skeffington’s home, and there in his mind’s eye he can see the long lines of supplicants which daily formed outside his uncle’s door.

The Characters

In The Last Hurrah, Edwin O’Connor creates characters who are recognizable archetypes of big-city ethnic politics. Frank Skeffington is the last in a long line of urban bosses such as New York’s William Marcy “Boss” Tweed. Although the author denied using Boston’s Joseph Michael Curley as his inspiration for Skeffington, others, and Curley, thought differently. Skeffington is more than merely a stock character. He and his campaign for reelection are not only the story of The Last Hurrah but also a recessional for a changing America. Skeffington is portrayed as a corrupt opportunist, manipulating the needs of various immigrant groups in order to achieve and maintain political power. Yet he also represents a sense of nostalgia for a time that is passing into history and memory, and Skeffington himself exhibits increasingly nostalgic feelings in his relationship with Adam. There is much humor in the novel, which leavens the nostalgic elements, but Skeffington himself is not a figure of fun. Rather, with his sure confidence in imminent victory followed by overwhelming defeat, Skeffington is almost a figure from Greek tragedy.

Adam Caulfield is the other crucial character. In addition to his role as Skeffington’s relation, he also serves as the objective observer, and although the narrative is in the third person, it is most often through Adam’s eyes that Skeffington, both the person and the politician, is viewed. In comparison to Skeffington and his major opponents, Adam represents a younger and more apolitical generation, and he is more of an outsider than a political participant. However, Adam’s involvement with his uncle’s campaign also results in increasing admiration for the old man, and by the time of Skeffington’s final illness and death, Adam has come to feel a deep love and respect for him.

The rest of the characters are more two-dimensional. Ditto Boland is the stock political hanger-on, the comic relief, while John Gorman and Sam Weinberg, the former Irish and the latter Jewish, are, with their ethnic connections, Skeffington’s two chief advisers. Amos Force and others represent the old Anglo political establishment that has frequently succumbed to Skeffington’s machine in past decades; Maeve and her father, Roger Sugrue, are predictable figures, as is Frank, Jr., the weak son, dwarfed by the accomplishments and personality of his powerful father. Still, if at times superficial and predictable, the characters are sufficiently developed to carry Skeffington’s story to its denouement.

Critical Context

O’Connor wrote several other acclaimed novels, but none achieved the popularity of The Last Hurrah, in part because of his magnificent creation of Frank Skeffington and in part because it became a popular movie starring Spencer Tracy. He wrote about a vanishing America during the time of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear obliteration, the possibility of a third world war, and the anticommunist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy, another Irish American politician. Readers were not only captivated by the accurate historical portrayal of the urban boss in fiction but also comforted and reassured by the nostalgia of recognition that O’Connor brought to his story.

There have been relatively few satisfactory political novels in American fiction that have endured much beyond their initial publication. Henry Adam’s Democracy (1880) satirically pilloried the politics of the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century, Robert Penn Warren wrote fictionally of Louisiana’s Huey Long, the Kingfish, in All the King’s Men (1946), and Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent (1959) was highly praised as a knowledgeable novel of Washington politics. The Last Hurrah well deserves its place in that select company.

Bibliography

Blotner, Joseph. The American Political Novel, 1900-1960. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. The author analyzes The Last Hurrah in the context of a chapter on “The Boss” in American politics.

Milne, Gordon. The American Political Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. Includes an extensive commentary about O’Connor’s novel in a chapter that also discusses All the King’s Men and Advise and Consent.

Rank, Hugh. Edwin O’Connor. Boston: Twayne, 1974. The only full length study of O’Connor and his writings. Includes a long and satisfactory discussion of The Last Hurrah.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Introduction to The Best and the Last of Edwin O’Connor, by Edwin O’Connor. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. One of America’s most eminent political historians comments insightfully on O’Connor and his novels.