Was General Butler as Bad as All That?

The grassy slopes in front of Boston’s State House boast no monument to Ben Butler, former governor and Civil War general, though another native son and conspicuously unsuccessful general, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, bestrides his horse in front of the east wing. Butler was not given equal statuary space because, it was felt, he was too well remembered in the flesh—and as a thorn in the flesh—to warrant a reminder in bronze.

Massachusetts memories are long: when James M. Curley stormed his way to the governor’s chair in 1934, fifty-two years after Butler, and proceeded to turn the State House and the state upside down, exasperated Republicans proclaimed him “the worst Massachusetts governor since Ben Butler.”