Irish Identity Politics: The Reinvention of Speaker John W. McCormack of Boston

From his election in 1940 as Majority Leader to his last day as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971, John W. McCormack of Boston occupied the highest rungs of leadership in the Congress. Many biographies and autobiographies cover the lives and public careers of five Speakers, but not one has been devoted to McCormack — not because he was unimportant and irrelevant. He was a very private man who could rearrange the facts of his life to suit his political needs. The story had great resonance in Boston because its Irish gatekeepers — James Michael Curley, John F. Honey Fitz Fitzgerald, Patrick J. P.J. Kennedy, and Martin Lomasney — led lives identical to that of McCormack. They accepted the reinvented history and watched him move rapidly up the city\u27s political ladder. Through a detailed examination of city, state, and federal documents, secular and sacerdotal, in the United States and Canada, a clearer portrait of McCormack emerges

White House Inheritors and Climbers: Presidential Kin, Class, and Performance, 1789–2002

The 2000 presidential election that pitted Republican Texas Governor George W. Bush, the son of a former president against Democratic Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., the son of a former U.S. senator was a dramatic reminder that presidential politics in the United States is not an equal opportunity employer. In this article retrospective assessments of presidential performance are related to social class and kinship connections for the forty-two presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush. Three separate evaluations of presidential performance were used: the 1989 Murray-Blessing Survey; the widely cited 1996 New York Times poll prepared by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; and the 200 Federalist Society one prepared by conservative scholars for the Wall Street Journal. The public’s assessment was based on polling data from various national polling firms, such as the Gallup, Harris, and Zogby oganizations. The performance data was related to presidential kinship data from the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 1989 and 1996 and research on the social class origins of presidents prepared by Professor Edward Pessen. The findings indicate that presidents of upper social class origins scored consistently higher on the performance measures than did presidents of lesser origins. However, the number of presidential kinship connections appears to be unrelated to social class and to presidential performance. For both the historians and the American public, class trumps kin in assessing he quality of presidential performance

Redistricting on Beacon Hill and Political Power on Capitol Hill: Ancient Legacies and Present-Day Perils

This article discusses legislative reapportionment and past efforts to manipulate district lines as far back as the legendary Elbridge Gerry in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it deals with what political history has to tell us about the current furor over House Speaker Thomas Finneran’s proposed congressional redistricting. More than any other state in the Union, the Massachusetts lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives have enjoyed disproportionate power as a result of a bipartisan strategy of incumbency protection dating back to the 1940s. That power may be in jeopardy if Speaker Finneran implements his plans to create a new 5th District in southeastern Massachusetts while merging districts represented by two incumbent Democratic congressmen, Marty Meehan of Lowell and John Tierney of Salem. The speaker broke with a tradition of deference to incumbency and collegial consensus building that normally prevails during the decennial redrawing of district lines and may have risked diminishing Massachusetts’s political power for at least a decade

The Troubled Backstory of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment: The Photo, the Feud, and the Secret Service

The 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy led to a reconsideration of the 1947 Presidential Succession Act, which mandated that the Speaker of the US House of Representatives was next in line to the vice president and the Senate president pro tempore was next in line to the Speaker. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was only fifty-five when he took the oath of office on November 22, 1963, but he had a well-known heart condition that would end his life nine years later. Seated behind Johnson when he met with Congress was the soon-to-be seventy-two-year old House Speaker John W. McCormack (D-MA) and the eighty-six-year-old Senate president pro tempore Carl Hayden (D-AZ). The prospect of either elderly man succeeding to the presidency led Congress to pass the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, enabling it to fill vice presidential vacancies by congressional confirmation of presidential appointments. The amendment also provided for the presidency to be temporarily filled should the president announce his own temporary incapacity or lose the powers of the office if the Cabinet and Congress determined that the president was incapable of carrying out the duties of the office. The president may retain the office but those powers will go to the vice president as “Acting President.” The president may petition Congress to regain the powers and if Congress agrees that “no inability exists,” the powers will be restored. This article explores the backstage drama surrounding the circumstances leading to the passage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment

Energy-Momentum Tensor for the Electromagnetic Field in a Dielectric

The total momentum of a thermodynamically closed system is unique, as is the total energy. Nevertheless, there is continuing confusion concerning the correct form of the momentum and the energy-momentum tensor for an electromagnetic field interacting with a linear dielectric medium. Here we investigate the energy and momentum in a closed system composed of a propagating electromagnetic field and a negligibly reflecting dielectric. The Gordon momentum is easily identified as the total momentum by the fact that it is, by virtue of being invariant in time, conserved. We construct continuity equations for the energy and the Gordon momentum and use the continuity equations to construct an array that has the properties of a traceless, diagonally symmetric energy-momentum tensor. Then the century-old Abraham-Minkowski momentum controversy can be viewed as a consequence of attempting to construct an energy-momentum tensor from continuity equations that contain densities that correspond to nonconserved quantities.Comment: added publication informatio

Senior Recital

List of performers and performances

Sodium boiling incoherence in a 19-pin wire-wrapped bundle

During various flow transients in a sodium-cooled reactor, localized boiling can occur. If this boiling does not result in dryout, significant reactor core damage is not likely. A full-length electrically heated 19-pin bundle was used to determine the extent to which dynamic boiling can be sustained before dryout occurs. Over 30 boiling runs were made with runs at three flow-power conditions culminating in dryout. Continuous boiling for time periods exceeding 20 sec was observed. Preliminary data analysis suggested that thermal inertia of the duct walls, which were backed with thermal insulation, was higher than designed and was contributing to boiling incoherence. Posttest examination confirmed that the insulation annulus had become permeated with sodium, resulting in a significantly increased thermal inertia. Detailed comparisons of experimental results with the results of several different analytical techniques indicate that incoherent boiling caused by bundle thermal inertia was responsible for the long time periods between boiling inception and dryout. This suggests that thermal inertia designed into the reactor core could prevent or delay core damage during various flow-power mismatch transients

Economic Growth and the Harmful Effects of Student Loan Debt on Biomedical Research

Modern theories of economic growth emphasize the role of research and development (R&D) activities in determining a society's standard of living. In some advanced economies, however, higher education costs and the level of indebtedness among graduates have increased dramatically during recent years. Student loans are evident throughout the Western world, particularly in the United States, and within the bio-medical sciences. In this paper the authors develop a basic model of economic growth in order to investi-gate the effects of biomedical graduates indebtedness on the allocation of human re-source in the R&D activities, and thus on the process of economic growth. Using this modified model to understand the consequences of the rising cost in biomedical educa-tion, we derive a 'science-growth curve' (a relation between the share of pure researcher and the economy rate of growth), and we find two possible effects of biomedical stu-dent indebtedness on economic growth: specifically, a composition effect and a productivity effect. First, we outline the Romer's classical growth model, and we apply it to a 'biomedical' knowledge-based economy, and second, the model is developed by factoring the difference between pure and applied biomedical research. The 'biomedical science sector' is one of the key pillars of modern knowledge-based economy. The costs of higher education in biomedical sciences and the graduates level of indebtedness represent, not only a great problem of equality of opportunity, but also a serious threat to future prosperity of the advanced economies