If you will listen closely [to crooners' songs] you will discern the basest appeal to sex emotion in the young." He had a cool relationship with his auxiliary bishop Francis Spellman, who later was the Archbishop of New York. O'Connor once said, "Francis epitomizes what happens to a bookkeeper when you teach him how to read." He was also decidedly non-ecumenical. In 1908 he said, "The Puritan has passed. The Catholic remains." He was very influential with the growth of the Catholic Church. He was called by politicians "Number One" and enjoyed them frequently requesting his approval on issues. He was called a "battleship in full array". O'Connell was the first American to be given honorary life membership in the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus. He was referred to "as the foremost citizen of the great and noble State of Massachusetts". O'Connell's nephew James P. O'Connell, who served as chancellor of the archdiocese, had secretly married in 1913. Some of O'Connell's clerical enemies discovered this and reported it to Vatican authorities. The younger O'Connell was removed from office and from his priestly duties in 1920. His marriage lasted until his death in 1948. Little else is known of the relationship between uncle and nephew. In 1915, O'Connell published a collection of letters which, the publication claimed, he wrote between 1876 and 1901. In 1987, James M. O'Toole discovered that O'Connell had written the letters expressly for the 1915 publication. Other scholars who discussed the subject of the letters in 1975 had found the dates on the letters "suspect". In the early 1940s when Frances Sweeney, editor of the "Boston City Reporter", criticized O'Connell for his passivity in the face of rampant antisemitism in Boston, O'Connell summoned Sweeney to his office and threatened her with excommunication. O'Connell died from pneumonia in Brighton, aged 84. He was buried in the crypt of a small chapel he had built on the grounds of St. John's Seminary. In 2004 the Archdiocese sold the property to Boston College and in 2007 announced plans to relocate his remains to Saint Sebastian's School, which O'Connell founded in 1941. After a protracted lawsuit, O'Connell's relatives, who had opposed any disinterment, agreed that his remains be removed to a courtyard of the Seminary. Reinterment took place on July 20, 2011. His 36-year-long tenure was the longest in the history of the Archdiocese of Boston.