The 1932 Democratic National Convention
During the 1920s and 1930s, ethnic criminal syndicates rooted among America's large immigration population started infiltrating politics in a number of Caribbean and Central American states. Particularly easy prey were Cuba and Puerto Rico. Curley's criminal associates managed to obtain influence in the latter by importing Puerto Rican cheap labor, thereby doing an end run around America's newly enacted Immigration Restriction Act 1925. With this, Curley's Irish mob associates brought new influence to Curley in Puerto Rico.
Consequently, when Curley was denied by a place in the Massachusetts delegation to the 1932 Democratic National Convention by Governor Joseph B. Ely, Curley engineered his selection as a delegate from Puerto Rico (under the alias of Alcalde Jaime Curleo). Some say his support was instrumental in winning the presidential nomination for Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he broke with Roosevelt after the president refused to appoint him Ambassador to Ireland.
Read more about this topic: James Michael Curley
Famous quotes containing the words democratic, national and/or convention:
“The Democratic Party is like a mule. It has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.”
—Ignatius Donnelly (18311901)
“Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have Gods right to come.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”
—Ezra Pound (18851972)