Ninth in a series

When he took office as mayor, John Hynes was faced with the prospect of a dying city. He ably performed the many tasks that were required to bring Boston back from the brink, infuse a sense of confidence in city hall, and establish a strong working relationship with the business leaders his predecessor, James Michael Curley, had antagonized. Hynes aggressively moved to implement a slum clearance program, built large public housing projects and city-owned garages, and laid the groundwork for two ambitious downtown projects: the demolition of Scollay Square and its revitalization as a new Government Center, and the reclamation of a derelict rail yard in the Back Bay, to be replaced by an exciting urban development proposed by the Prudential Insurance Company. It was the governmental equivalent of triage: the patient was now stable and on the road to recovery, but its condition remained delicate. Any reversal, however minor, might be fatal. That was the atmosphere in 1959, as Hynes decided to call it quits after two eventful terms as mayor. Boston would now choose a new leader and the stakes were high. In the relay race for the city’s future, would the new mayor grab the sprinter’s baton and finish the race, or would the city be led in a different direction?

Boston in 1959 was ready to embrace modernity. The old ways of politics were giving way to a new generation. Honey Fitz died in 1950; nine years later, his grandson John Kennedy was actively preparing his race for the presidency. Curley shook off his mortal coil in 1958. It was a time for fresh faces. A new generation of political leaders – young men like Kevin White, Ed Brooke, Frank Bellotti, Edward McCormack – was about to emerge as the next wave of political leadership. It was not a time to appear to be a throwback to the past.

That was the burden of the Senate President, a South Boston native who had dropped out of school to support his family when his father died in a work-related accident, a man who worked his way up from poverty and climbed his way up the slippery political ladder to the height of power at the State House. Short, overweight, with slicked-back black hair and a sharp beak of a nose, John E. Powers looked like a political boss straight from central casting. His enemies and some in the media called him “Little Napoleon,” a nod to his physical appearance and his attraction to power. Powers had run for mayor once before, against John Hynes in 1955. Powers likely knew that he would not be able to defeat an incumbent mayor who was generally well regarded by voters, but running for mayor would raise his profile and name recognition and enable him to build a citywide organization. As it turned out, Hynes won by 12,526 votes (124,301 to 111,775), not exactly a landslide. Powers appeared to be the man to beat in 1959.

When Mayor Hynes was sworn in for his second term as mayor, he took time to travel to the Jamaica Plain home of a young World War II veteran who had left a safe seat in the Legislature for a position on the city council. John Collins was at home on inauguration day, recovering from a bout with polio – a bout that came during the election but did not deter him from continuing his race. Newly elected to the city council, Collins brought a swagger and a confidence to his political work, bucking the establishment by coming out early for Hynes in 1949 against Curley and taking on the incumbent state attorney general in an ultimately unsuccessful race in 1954. Collins was a politician who knew no barriers as he made his own determined way through the thicket of Boston politics. No barrier, not even polio, would hold him back.

Few observers in 1959 thought that Powers could be beaten; fewer still thought that Collins would make a run for the job. Collins had moved on from the council and been elected Suffolk County Register of Probate in 1957. Such county positions were considered political gold as they offered six-year terms in patronage-rich, low-profile positions that paid well. Few incumbents were ever defeated, and the positions (this remains true even today) were essentially the electoral equivalent of a lifetime appointment. But Collins was ambitious and he was a Hynes man, determined to raise the Hynes flag in an effort to provide continuity and stability to city hall. John Powers could be excused for underestimating Collins as a chronic candidate without any of the important relationships that translate into political power, but he might have taken a step back to observe that nothing, not polio, not the power of incumbency, not the rigors of frequent elections – nothing deterred this man.

Powers started the campaign with a leg up on all other candidates. He had a substantial campaign account and the public support of a majority of the Boston legislative delegation. He was well known and respected or feared by many who knew that the power of the Senate President was formidable, and that Powers was not shy about using it. Powers had a vision for the city that was his own, but that also followed from what Hynes had begun. He understood the importance of reforming the Assessing Department, bringing a sense of fairness to the ways property was assessed and taxed. He also understood the importance of urban renewal, but he had his own ideas – ideas that were in many ways ahead of the times.

Powers vowed to take down the elevated transit systems in the South End and Charlestown, warning of the danger of building transportation infrastructure that “needlessly destroys existing properties that produce tax revenues to the city.” He had a vision for renewing the old Boston that was neighborhood friendly, one focused more on careful, long-range planning that would position the city for economic growth. Powers was adamant that he would have the resolve to finally grapple with the city’s inequitable property tax system, a system that continued to stifle investment by punishing downtown businesses with illegally disproportionate assessments.

Gabriel Piemonte, a popular city councilor, was viewed as perhaps the strongest of the remaining candidates, but when the primary election votes were tallied, it was Collins who took the second position after Powers. It was a shocking result for the political establishment that simply did not see Collins coming. Powers topped the list with 44,043 votes, or about 34 percent of the total, and Collins squeaked past Piemonte with 2,628 votes (28,510 to 25,882). Powers’s vote tally was impressive, but the conventional wisdom was that he was going to prevail by a much larger margin. The primary results therefore had the effect of changing the perception of the race and creating a large measure of enthusiasm for Collins, whose victory came as a surprise.

The general election campaign was hard fought and vituperative. The candidates battled for attention as the eyes of the city and the nation were fixed upon a burgeoning scandal: the accusation that the popular “21” television quiz show was fixed. The quiz show scandal held the nation briefly in its thrall, offering the public the priceless entertainment of a riveting drama. Sensing that corruption might also be a winning theme at the local level, Collins began a sustained effort to label Powers as a potentially corrupt political boss, mincing no words as he declared that the central issue of the campaign was the “unsuitability of my opponent” for the office of mayor. Collins presented himself as an honest, clean-government alternative to Powers, whom he tarred as a creature representing the dark side of the political world.

He was, he said, campaigning against “Power Politics,” offering himself as a political leader in the Hynes tradition. Indeed, Collins was promising something like a third Hynes administration. He spoke about the “need to expedite the urban redevelopment and renewal program which promise so much for the rehabilitation of blighted areas.” He supported a sales tax as a way to increase city revenue, especially if revenues would decline once property assessments were equalized. Supporting any new tax, particularly one that would have a direct impact on voters, was a bold move for any political leader.

Powers largely ignored the attacks, focusing instead on rolling out endorsements by powerful political figures like District Attorney Garrett Byrne and Attorney General Edward McCormack. Powers distributed a 28-page program for the city’s economic revival, demonstrating his understanding of the issues and his command of the substance of governing. He opposed the sales tax, but called for flexing federal highway dollars to transit programs, and underscored his neighborhood-friendly credentials by declaring that “for too long the elevated (transit) structures have cast a dark and depressing shadow over districts begging for development.” He advocated a uniform approach to assessing city property, an important step toward equalizing valuations as required by state law.

The campaign was headed to its conclusion when federal agents raided a bookie joint in East Boston on the Friday before the election. The raid on Sal Bartolo’s Ringside Café in East Boston’s Maverick Square became a last-minute election issue that sent Powers reeling. Collins had already attacked Powers as cozy with certain unsavory elements, calling on the Senate President to explain his vote against the Massachusetts Crime Commission and asking Powers to explain where his “unlimited financial support” was coming from. Now, on the same night of the raid on Bartolo’s bookie den, Collins went public with the accusation that Powers was a personal friend of Bartolo’s. “Powers for Mayor” signs were displayed prominently on Bartolo’s property, a visual that meant nothing but said everything.

Over the coming days, Powers seemed helpless as Collins poured on the attacks. Collins declared that the raid was “sudden and dramatic confirmation of what I have been saying all along . . . in the form of a sensational federal raid on an alleged bookie headquarters operated by one of my opponent’s principal supporters.” Collins argued that, under the circumstances, Powers’s election was a “clear and present danger that looms before the citizens of Boston.” Sal Bartolo was certainly linked to Powers – Powers had hosted a dinner at Bartolo’s restaurant for members of the Senate – but the implication that Powers himself was corrupt was a case of guilt by association. Powers tried to remain on high ground, keeping to the issues and rolling out more endorsements, but the damage had been done.

On Election Day, the headline story in Boston’s newspapers was Charles Van Doren’s admission that he was in fact implicated in the “21 Quiz Show” hoax, an admission that would ruin his reputation and career. Boston voters went to the polls with the pall of corruption surrounding them, and they chose John Collins to lead them into the new decade. The final results were not close: Collins prevailed by over 24,000 votes. The results were a stunning reversal for Powers, who had begun the race as the clear favorite, with significant advantages in money, endorsements and name recognition. He had everything in his favor, but he was unable to persuade the voters that he was the right person to build on the Hynes legacy. The voters wanted assurances that their next mayor would not in any way lead them back to the days of the political boss, and the person who best offered that assurance was John Collins.

John Powers would remain in office as Senate President, and he continued to be a presence in Boston for years to come as the clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, but the election of 1959 diminished him by making clear that he was not a person with upward political mobility. For John Collins, the victory was a crowning achievement, as significant a political upset as the city had ever seen, more meaningful perhaps than Hynes’s defeat of Curley a decade earlier, certainly more consequential than Maurice Tobin’s defeat of Curley in 1937.

Collins’s election was an impressive display of political prowess, but political talent does not always translate into effective governance. The question for Boston was: could he lead the embryonic New Boston with a steady hand? Would his election be the tipping point assuring Boston’s reemergence as a great American city?

Jim Aloisi is a former state secretary of transportation. His most recent book is The Vidal Lecture.