White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
Curley was immensely popular with his fellow working-class Roman Catholic Irish Americans. During the Great Depression, he enlarged Boston City Hospital, expanded the city's public transit system, funded projects to improve roads and bridges, and improved the neighborhoods with beaches and bathhouses, playgrounds and parks, public schools and libraries, all the while collecting graft and raising taxes. He was a leading and at times divisive force in the Massachusetts Democratic Party, challenging Boston's ward bosses and the party's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant leadership at the local and state level.