Garrison Nelson - John William McCormack: A Political Biography

John William McCormack

A Political Biography

Garrison Nelson

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Cover: John William McCormack (Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University)

In 1968, I left graduate school at the University of Iowa and was hired by the University of Vermont (UVM) shortly after the birth of my daughter, Shyla. UVM has been my academic home for close to five decades. In September that year, I attended my first national meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC. On Friday of the Labor Day weekend, I went to the U.S. Capitol in hopes of arranging meetings with congressional leaders who were the subjects of my doctoral dissertation. In a surprisingly fortuitous circumstance, Speaker of the U.S. House John W. McCormack was not only in his office but I was granted an hour-long meeting with him. As we sat in his office, I rattled off the names of prominent members with whom he servedCactus Jack Garner, Will Bankhead, Sam Rayburn, and Billy Connery from my hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts, who had been McCormacks closest friend in the state delegation. He was delighted to be asked about these people and as he reminisced, he offered me a cigar. It was a wonderful hour for this 26-year-old new college instructor to enjoy a good smoke with the 76-year-old House Speaker in the U.S. Capitol. This remarkable experience was the inspiration for this particular book as well as for most of my published research on the U.S. Congress.

This book is the first ever full-length biography of John W. McCormack, 18911980, who at the time of his death weeks from his 89th birthday was then the second longest-lived Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. McCormack was one of the very few political leaders who openly resisted a biography written about him even going so far as to repeatedly warn his office staff about preparing a manuscript of their service with him. As Dr. Martin Sweig, his longtime assistant once contended to me, John McCormack was the most secretive man I ever met. Consequently, the search for sources documenting his life and political career had to go well beyond his apparently sanitized congressional papers located at Boston Universitys Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Also presenting a problem was trying to interview McCormacks key constituents, the South Boston Irish, who honored the code most succinctly stated by Martin Lomasney, the political boss of Bostons polyglot West End: Never write what you can speak; never speak what you can nod. During the many months that I lived in South Boston and on my frequent trips to that unique peninsula as well as the Prince Edward Island birthplace of Johns Canadian Scottish father, I learned many McCormack family stories whose sources refused to let me name them in print. Most of the stories were benign but they were too good to leave out of the book and so they are included in spite of many not being fully fact-checked. Without sounding too ominous, there is no one more wholly disdained among the Irish than the informer.