Father Edward J. Flanagan (1886–1948)
BY MARK K. SHRIVER
“He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother.”
I don’t remember the first time I heard that line. And I don’t remember the first time I saw that image of an older boy carrying a younger boy. But the words were always there in my consciousness, and so too was the image.
I was raised in a large, tight-knit Irish Catholic family in the late 1960s and 1970s, and I know that line was mentioned in our house as much as, if not more so than, Notre Dame football, which was a lot. There were four boys and a girl under our roof. We were proud to be of Irish descent, and somehow those words and that image seemed a part of our story. Family mattered—your brothers and sisters, not to mention aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and so on. But the word family was interpreted in a much broader way, broader than just shared DNA or common ancestry.
To my father and my mother, we were all bound together by a shared humanity. Not just as a family, or even as Irish Americans, but as part of a collective whole that included Italians, Greeks, Germans, Swedes, Jews, Christians, Muslims, blacks, whites, Latinos—you get the idea. This meant people with developmental differences too—the men, women, and children that my mother worked with through the Special Olympics movement. And it meant the poor and disempowered living across America and in countries strung across the globe, with whom my father worked through the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty. We were all responsible for each other—and that was perhaps the principal lesson of my childhood. “He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother”: those words were a call to all of us.
So it is ironic, though not surprising, that however much I heard that refrain throughout my childhood, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I became even vaguely aware of the man who had written the words—Father Edward Flanagan of Boys Town. After all, by then Father Flanagan had been dead for over a quarter century, and though his legacy was still running strong, a great many other ideas and organizations had emerged to address the needs of children. In the shuffle of time and progress, it can be easy to forget the men and women who came first. It shouldn’t be that way, but it often is. And so Father Flanagan, the tall, rangy priest from Ireland who did so much to carve the path, was lost from the telling.
But then life is something of a circle. And in moving forward, it seems you often end up returning to the place where you started. This was true for Father Flanagan. And as for me, I guess I had heeded my parents’ call. I ended up going to work for Save the Children, a nonprofit that, much like Father Flanagan’s Boys Town, is committed to improving the lives of children here in the United States (we are now in 120 other countries too). I joined the organization in 2003, creating early childhood development and school-age literacy programs that serve children and families in some of the poorest and most remote communities in the United States, as well as domestic disaster preparedness and response and recovery programs. Ten years later, to strengthen our ability to effect systemic change, I started Save the Children Action Network, which seeks to build bipartisan will and voter support to ensure that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed. In many ways, it is the same fight that Father Flanagan was waging in what now might seem like ancient history.
But it isn’t history at all. The struggle is very present. I see it every day. “He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother”—these are words worth remembering, just as when I first heard them over fifty years ago. And the man behind the words, the life he led and the great many things he accomplished—he’s worth remembering too.
EDWARD JOSEPH FLANAGAN’S birthplace was a whitewashed limestone farmhouse with a thatched roof, wooden floors, and flagstone fireplaces. Despite its simplicity and modest size, the homestead, located in County Roscommon, bore the impressive name of Leabeg House. It proved to be a comfortable, nurturing home for all fourteen of its inhabitants: John Flanagan, a farmer, his equally hard-working wife, Nora, their eleven children, and John Flanagan’s father, Patrick.
Edward was born on July 13, 1886, the eighth child. He suffered a convulsion when he was only a few weeks old, turning blue in the face. His grandfather Patrick, a large, brawny man respected countywide for his skill as an amateur healer for both livestock and people, wrapped his tiny grandson in a blanket, cuddled him next to his chest, and sat by the large kitchen fireplace for hours, praying. The family—tightly knit and devoutly Catholic—firmly believed that prayer was what saved the infant Edward’s life.
When Edward Flanagan came into the world, he had five older sisters—Mary Jane, Nellie, Kate, Susan, and Delia—as well as two older brothers, Patrick A. and James. He later would have two younger sisters, Nora and Theresa, and a younger brother, Michael. All of his siblings except Mary Jane and Kate eventually would immigrate to the United States.
The Flanagans of Leabeg House were well-off by community standards. John Flanagan oversaw a three-hundred-acre stock farm owned by an absentee landlord. Everyone in the family worked the farm, including Edward, who in a 1942 letter to a friend remembered himself as “the little shepherd boy who took care of the cattle and sheep . . . as I was the delicate member of the family and good for nothing else.”
The largest room in Leabeg House was the kitchen, where a huge teakettle hung above the constantly lit fireplace, ever ready to provide hot tea. It was there that the Flanagans gathered for their daily prayers and sometimes performed small family concerts on the instruments—a piano, an accordion, a violin, and a flute—that were kept in the house. It certainly paints a lovely picture. Edward had a fine baritone voice and enjoyed singing.
He always considered his boyhood home a model for what he later would build at Boys Town—a self-contained community in which everyone worked to address its needs and advance its cause. He wrote, “The old-fashioned home with its fireside companionship, its religious devotion and its closely-knit family ties is my idea of what a home should be.”
In the same 1942 letter in which he described himself as “good for nothing else” but being the family’s shepherd boy, Edward also claimed that he probably had “a poorer brain than most of the other members of the family.” The fact was his family realized early on that he was extremely smart, even scholarly. His older brother Patrick, who soon would begin studying for the priesthood (and thereafter always be known as Father P.A.), recognized his younger brother’s sharp mind and began tutoring him, enabling young Edward to skip three grades in the two-room, forty-student Drimatemple National School.
As early as the age of eight, Flanagan said that he wanted to become a priest. Maybe he was inspired by his older brother’s example, or perhaps, as family lore would have it, by the prediction of an elderly traveling priest who, upon meeting Edward at their church, noticed the boy’s thoughtful appearance, put his hands on Edward’s head, and said, “Someday Eddie will be a priest.” Certainly, Edward was nothing if not determined. He sought additional tutoring in Latin, Greek, and French from his pastor and, at the age of fifteen, entered a private high school called Summerhill College, located in the Atlantic seacoast town of Sligo, about fifty miles from his home. It was the same school Patrick A. had gone to before entering the seminary.
Edward had never been so far from home, never experienced the strict, harsh, and seemingly uncaring regimentation of an institution such as Summerhill, and never seen sights such as hungry, homeless boys rummaging for food in the garbage behind the houses of Sligo’s wealthy residents. It seems to have had a profound effect on him, as he never forgot the deep loneliness he felt at Summerhill. He buried himself in his studies, graduating in three years with honors in Greek, history, and geography. He also took time to play handball, a sport he loved, and ran track, until an ankle injury ended that. He put his fine baritone voice to use in the Summerhill choir.
In January 1904, the same year Edward received his high school diploma, his older brother Patrick graduated from the Dublin Seminary and became a priest. Because at the time Catholicism was so central to Irish identity and a religious career so highly regarded, there were too many young Catholic priests for the country’s parishes. Many newly minted priests agreed to serve overseas, including Patrick, who was sent to far-off Omaha, Nebraska, to become the founding pastor of the Holy Angels Parish. Although Omaha had a wide variety of immigrant communities, some said the immense Irish population made it simply just another Irish town—“O’Maha” without the apostrophe.
Edward had expected to attend the same Dublin seminary as Patrick, but his journey to becoming a priest would have many more twists and turns. Shortly after he graduated from Summerhill, his sister Nellie—already happily living in New York—returned to Leabeg House for a visit and recommended that the family send Edward to the United States to complete his studies.
Edward’s parents agreed, and late that summer, when Nellie was ready to return to New York, her younger brother accompanied her and Father P.A. aboard the SS Celtic, a ship owned by the famous White Star Line—later owners of the doomed Titanic and equally doomed Lusitania. Thankfully, their crossing proved less eventful. On August 27, 1904, Edward Flanagan—a lanky, six-foot-tall eighteen-year-old with light-colored hair and intense blue eyes under bushy brows—went through the gates at Ellis Island, as had tens of thousands of Irish immigrants before him.
NEWLY ARRIVED IN the United States, Edward stayed with his mother’s relatives in Yonkers, New York, just north of Manhattan. He applied for admission to St. Joseph’s Seminary, also known as Dunwoodie, which was located in Yonkers. He was told that he had to get an undergraduate college degree first, so he enrolled at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland (now known as Mount St. Mary’s University). After Edward graduated with a BA, he again applied for admission to St. Joseph’s. This time he was accepted and officially became a seminarian in the Archdiocese of New York.
Unfortunately, Edward’s long struggle with poor health resumed. He developed double pneumonia and was bedridden for much of his time at St. Joseph’s. One of Flanagan’s teachers, Father Francis Patrick Duffy—who would earn national fame during World War I as the chaplain of the Fighting 69th, the New York–based Irish-immigrant infantry regiment founded in 1849 and noted for its battlefield bravery in every conflict since the Civil War—often visited the sick young man to help him with his courses. Edward’s physicians, though, urged him to drop out of St. Joseph’s. The future Monsignor Aloysius Dineen, who would succeed Duffy as the Fighting 69th’s chaplain, was a classmate of Flanagan’s at St. Joseph’s and recalled that no one at Dunwoodie “would ever have voted Flanagan the one most likely to succeed. I think the majority view would have been that he would wind up as a pastor of some little country parish, where the world would never hear of him.”
Edward left school and made his way to Omaha to join his brother. While he recuperated there, the New York Archdiocese sent him a letter releasing him to the Omaha Diocese. By the late summer, the supervising bishop in Omaha thought Edward’s health had improved enough to send him to the prestigious Gregorian University in Rome. Flanagan arrived in Rome in October 1907, but within a few months, the damp and cold winter had affected his frail lungs. He returned to Omaha just a few months later, determined to rebuild his strength.
In all of this, one can’t help but feel how desperate Edward was to become a priest. But this time, he decided not to rush his recovery and instead became a bookkeeper for the Cudahy Packing Company. Cudahy was then among the largest meat-processing plants in the country. As it turned out, this would prove a critical period in Edward’s life. During his nearly two years at Cudahy, he received excellent business training—a whole different skill set that would come in handy down the road.
In the fall of 1909, his health restored, Edward enrolled at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, where the brisk, clean mountain air proved good for him. His family also believed that Innsbruck’s water changed the color of his hair from blond to dark brown and caused it to begin thinning. Almost three years later, on July 26, 1912, Flanagan was finally ordained a priest at St. Ignatius Church in Innsbruck. The next day, after saying his first mass for his fellow seminarians, Father Edward J. Flanagan began his journey back to the United States. He was twenty-six years old.
INITIALLY, THE BISHOP of Omaha assigned Father Flanagan to a small, rural parish in O’Neill, Nebraska, largely populated by Irish immigrants (who had named it), but within a year he was transferred to St. Patrick’s parish back in Omaha. There he began what many considered a foolhardy effort to help the huge number of homeless migrant farm workers who were flooding into the city. It is funny, but ideas that we’ve come to think of as visionary often start off as foolhardy. Maybe audaciousness requires you to discount reality. Regardless, this would not be Flanagan’s last such effort.
With the approval of his bishop—but with no financial support from the diocese—Flanagan founded what he called the Workingman’s Hotel in an abandoned two-story, forty-bed hostelry in an unsavory part of town. Decades later, he told biographers, “I was a very rash and enthusiastic young man. I’d never thought much about money before, you know. Now I was to find out it could be mighty important.”
He may have been “rash and enthusiastic,” but he was also clearly an intelligent, driven entrepreneur. He raised funds from a variety of sources, including the St. Vincent de Paul Society, his own family, friends, and local merchants. He also enlisted the farm workers to fix up the old hotel and managed to round up additional cots. All told, his total initial expenses came to $150, and before long, more than one hundred men had moved in. Those who had money paid ten cents for a bed and five cents for a meal, but Flanagan never turned away anyone who needed shelter or food. He manned the front desk, and before long, the Workingman’s Hotel became a refuge for not only migrant farm workers but destitute men of every kind—from alcoholics to drug addicts to the chronically homeless, all were welcome. It was not uncommon for him to cram one thousand men a night into the hotel, including the attic and basement.
When Flanagan made a detailed study of some two thousand of the men who had stayed at his hotel, he found that many had come from broken homes or large families unable to care for them. They had been unloved and abandoned, beginning in their childhoods. As he would later write, after three years of operating the Workingman’s Hotel, he realized he had “put the cart before the horse.” He now wanted to shift his focus to helping youngsters “still in their formative years.”
And so it was that in the fall of 1917, Flanagan began searching for a place he could convert into a home for boys. He was soon introduced to a real estate agent named Catherine Dannehy (who would go on to spend more than twenty-five years working for Boys Town). Dannehy knew of an old, dilapidated two-story redbrick house that she thought would serve the purpose. The monthly rent was ninety dollars, in advance—a large sum for a poor priest. But Flanagan was nothing if not scrappy, and he quickly found an anonymous friend who was willing to loan him the money.
Though he never revealed the name of that friend, it is almost certain that the founding benefactor of Boys Town was a prominent Jewish attorney in Omaha named Henry Monsky. Monsky, who was one of Flanagan’s closest confidants, shared the priest’s interest in caring for poor children—religion was beside the point. Flanagan’s sister Nellie would later say that the money had come from a Jewish friend of her brother’s. In fact, Flanagan himself once let slip that a Jew had been the one to help him found what became Boys Town. In 1937, when Flanagan was talking to the movie studio MGM about a scriptwriter for a potential movie about Boys Town, he told the studio, “Don’t send me any Catholics. Why don’t you get hold of a young Jewish kid? He’ll know what I’m talking about.” When Flanagan got his wish and screenwriter Dore Schary, an Orthodox Jew, was assigned to write the script for Boys Town, he told Schary why he had asked for a Jewish screenwriter. “How do you think I got into this business? How do you think this place was built? Because a Jewish man understood what I was doing and gave me the money.”
As for Monsky, he would later become the international president of B’nai B’rith, as well as the head of the American Jewish Conference and a member of the Boys Town board. He and Flanagan would remain close until Monsky’s death in 1947.
On December 12, 1917, with the borrowed ninety dollars, Flanagan opened Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home at Twenty-fifth and Dodge Streets in Omaha. The first residents were five boys aged eight to ten; three of them were orphans, and two were homeless youngsters paroled to his care by the city’s juvenile court. Flanagan’s staff consisted of two nuns and a novice from the School Sisters of Notre Dame. All the furnishings—aged chairs, tables, cots, and beds—were obtained by Flanagan, who had gone asking door-to-door.
By Christmas Eve, about twenty-five boys were living in the house. Flanagan didn’t have food for a proper Christmas dinner, or even a simple meal, when a large barrel filled with sauerkraut arrived from a local grocer. “I wish it were something else, boys—dear,” said Flanagan, who habitually addressed each child as “dear.” It didn’t matter—the kids gobbled it right up.
Segregated Omaha had a wide variety of immigrant communities, and the cast-off kids from all were welcome. So too were the “tagged boys,” who arrived on foot from far away with a card pinned to their clothes that simply said “Father Flanagan Boys Home, Omaha, Nebraska.” One Omaha politician, outraged that black children lived alongside white ones, complained, “If God had intended people to be all the same, why did he make them of different colors?”
Flanagan had a potent reply: “And could you tell me—what is the color of a soul?”
“I see no disaster threatening us because of any particular race, creed or color,” Flanagan later wrote. “But I do see danger for all in an ideology which discriminates against anyone politically or economically because he or she was born into the ‘wrong’ race, has skin of the ‘wrong’ color, or worships at the ‘wrong’ altar.”
A year later, the number of children in the Boys Home had grown to at least 150, far too many for the residence. And so Flanagan moved to a much larger building, the abandoned German American clubhouse on South Thirteenth Street. No one wanted the two-story, half-block-long building because of the fierce anti-German sentiment during World War I. Over the next three years some 1,200 boys would live there, only 386 of whom were Catholic.
By 1919, the year Flanagan became a United States citizen, most of his family had settled in New York—and a few had joined him in Omaha. His nephew Patrick was now working alongside him, and his sister Nora would become his lifelong secretary. He would soon be on the move again, this time to Overlook Farm, some ten miles west of the city. The 160-acre site would come to be known as Boys Town and would ultimately expand to encompass 1,300 acres. And when Flanagan’s father died at the age of ninety-four, his mother, who was ten years younger, also moved there to live with him.
AT ABOUT SIX feet one inch in height, with ramrod-straight posture, Father Flanagan seemed tall even when seated. He had a large brow and long jaw, but despite this, his soft eyes, warm smile, and smooth baritone voice conveyed a remarkable tenderness. “When you first met him, you could feel this warmth,” recalled Margaret Takahashi, a Japanese American who encountered Flanagan during World War II. “I’ve never felt that from another human being. He was so full of love that it radiated out of him.” That said, Flanagan could also be tough, and brusque, especially when dealing with juvenile authorities or state officials whose actions frustrated him. “When he spoke to you, his piercing eyes under thick eyebrows, studied you eagle-like,” recalled Father Clifford Stevens, a 1944 graduate of Boys Town who went on to become a priest. “When he laughed, the whole room rocked with his laughter, and when he was angry, he was like a bull.”
Flanagan knew that to raise money for what was to be an entirely self-funded endeavor, he needed to increase the home’s profile. As fate would have it, he turned out to have an uncanny talent for promotion, what one biographer referred to as “the Flanagan Flair.” He launched the Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home Journal, which was sold on street corners by the boys in the home, many of whom had once earned what little money they had as newsboys. There was often an article by Flanagan, explaining in simple, plain English the youngsters’ needs, their achievements, and how he hoped to help them.
Flanagan’s efforts captured the imagination of Louis Bostwick, one of Omaha’s most prominent society photographers. Bostwick donated his time and talent to record every aspect of Boys Town’s activities. Whenever Flanagan needed a photo of his boys attending the home’s school, which was launched in 1920; or playing baseball or football or wrestling; or tending to the animals on its substantial dairy farm; or learning another vocation by working in the printing house or carpentry shop; or playing in their band or singing in their choir; or meeting celebrities who came to visit, Bostwick was there. His photos went not just to local newspapers but all over the country.
According to Boys Town lore, early in their association, Flanagan told Bostwick how he had once encountered an older boy carrying a younger one piggyback, and the boy explained, “He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother.” Bostwick was as moved as Flanagan had been by that simple statement and later had two youngsters reenact the scene and took a picture of it. Although that image—and that declaration—did become the iconic Boys Town’s trademark, the official telling of events is slightly different. In the official version, Father Flanagan saw a picture of two boys in Ideal magazine (one piggybacking the other) with the statement in the photo’s caption. Flanagan was reminded of the earlier Bostwick photograph and only then moved to make it the Boys Town trademark.
In 1922, Flanagan created a children’s circus—grandly promoted as the “World’s Greatest Juvenile Entertainers”—that traveled the countryside in colorfully painted wagons pulled by horses. It lost money, but it certainly made Flanagan’s boys well known. On its inaugural tour, when a restaurateur in South Dakota insisted that the lone black performer in the circus eat in the kitchen and not with the entire group, Flanagan marched the children out, saying, “If we don’t eat with him, we don’t eat.” That night, the owner of the restaurant went to the show and gave the group a check for $500.
Flanagan also quickly recognized the potential power of radio, and by 1926, he had an hour-long program called The Boys’ Period. The program featured the Boys Town Band and later its choir, advice to families and children, and inspirational talks by an upbeat young boy billed as Johnny the Gloom Killer. (Over the years, several different kids filled that role.) Johnny had a nationwide following, and Flanagan somehow arranged for Will Rogers, the former cowboy turned political commentator and the era’s most popular stage, screen, radio, and newspaper celebrity, to accept “election” as president of the Gloom Killer Club. Naturally, Flanagan had Rogers photographed shaking the hand of the young boy then portraying Johnny. Flanagan would also use radio to promote his philosophy and urge clemency for youngsters who he had learned were going to be jailed or executed.
Omaha was a major railroad hub through which many top performers and national figures touring America’s heartland passed. Flanagan “became shrewd, clever and calculating as a fox,” according to one of his protégés. He kept an eye on the local newspapers for any report of a visiting celebrity and then made it his business to corral these figures into visiting Boys Town or at least meeting its residents, if only at the train station. The first such prominent visitor was Éamon de Valera, a leader of the movement for Irish independence and later prime minister of Ireland, who visited Omaha in June 1920 while on a fund-raising tour. He was photographed with Flanagan, several senior Catholic clerics, and a group of barefoot Boys Home residents. It is unclear why the children hadn’t worn shoes—perhaps a not so subtle way of indicating the home’s needs?
Drawing on memories of his childhood home—that whitewashed farmhouse in County Roscommon where Flanagan and his ten siblings put on their family concerts—Flanagan had a strong belief in the power of music. “I like to think of music as being the language of the soul,” he once wrote, and in time the Boys Town Band was joined by a Boys Town Orchestra and, most prominently, the Boys Town Choir. The Boys Town Band greeted John Philip Sousa, the March King (composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever”), at Omaha’s train station in 1926; three years later, they welcomed band leader Paul Whiteman, dubbed the King of Jazz (and the man who commissioned George Gershwin to write “Rhapsody in Blue”).
New York Yankees Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, fresh from their 1927 World Series triumph, also visited. As a child, Ruth, the son of a Baltimore tavern owner, was considered by his parents to be ungovernable. When he was only seven, they sent him to be raised by the clergy at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic orphanage and reform school in the city. There, Xaverian brother Matthias Boutilier taught him how to play baseball and became his surrogate father.
Ruth told the youngsters that they should never be ashamed of their time at Boys Town. He would visit them several more times over the years, with his last visit near the very end of his life, when he was dying of cancer. Ruth said he simply wished to see Flanagan and his community one more time.
Flanagan believed sports were essential to a boy’s development. Baseball had been the first team created, but the Boys Town football program was particularly successful. In the 1930s, they had one of the country’s leading high school teams, going undefeated in forty games between 1935 and 1940. Huge crowds filled the stadiums at out-of-town games. Flanagan himself was part of the draw, often appearing before the games began to demonstrate his skill at placekicking.
As with every other activity at Boys Town, the football team was integrated. This led to a showdown in 1946 with the Blackstone Hotel in Miami. The Boys Town team, with a 10-and-0 record, was supposed to play the Florida state champions, Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic High School of Miami. The hotel offered to let the Boys Town team stay there for free—provided no black players were on the roster. Flanagan and his coach said they would never leave any of their players behind, including their African American quarterback, Tom Carodine. The hotel backed down, and Boys Town went on to win 46 to 6.
Flanagan also was not shy about finding prominent people where they vacationed and showing up with his boys. In August 1927, the Boys Town Band serenaded President Calvin Coolidge at his vacation retreat in Rapid City, South Dakota. Coolidge apparently liked the concert enough to ask the band to come back the next year. (Flanagan also made sure that two African American members of the band were in the photo with Coolidge, just to emphasize that they were as much members of Boys Town as the white children.)
Not long after the second concert for Coolidge, Flanagan began to impress upon his boys the remarkable rise to the presidency of Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, a poor farm boy orphaned in childhood. In August 1929, a year after Hoover’s election, Flanagan took forty boys to West Branch, Iowa, the president’s humble birthplace, and gave a speech noting that Hoover’s ascent “beckons to America that it must not be inattentive to its unfortunate young. . . . It is a forceful reminder that tucked away in an orphan mind may be the genius to guide the destinies of a great nation.”
Of all the presidents during his time, Flanagan would develop his closest association with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In November 1932, while campaigning for the White House, FDR and his wife, Eleanor, stopped at Boys Town for a tour. Mrs. Roosevelt said it was “one of the most beautiful places” she’d seen while crossing the country, and FDR was equally impressed. After becoming president, Roosevelt would meet with Flanagan a number of times and seek his advice on juvenile issues.
But no matter how crammed his schedule, Flanagan never lost focus on the children in his care. Oscar Flakes, an African American youth who arrived at Boys Town in 1922, recalled that Flanagan “was mother, father, everything to a young boy. He would wrestle with us, run with us, horse-ride with us . . . do anything a youth would care to do . . . shoot marbles with us.”
Flanagan would even spar with some of the boys. Once, when a boy knocked off his eyeglasses, Flanagan’s mother, who was living at Boys Town at the time, shouted, “Come on you big kid, get in the house. Get in the house!” Flanagan dutifully obeyed.
In 1936, Boys Town was incorporated as a village and placed on all of Nebraska’s maps. “Boys Town is not by any stretch of the imagination an orphanage,” Flanagan would write a decade later. “It is a complete community in itself—the smallest incorporated city in the country—with its own first-class post office, its own grade and high school, trade school, print shop, gymnasium, church, movie theatre, swimming pool, farm, infirmary, athletic field, dining hall, and apartments.”
The town also had its own government and held elections for a boy mayor, who then appointed other boys to various town positions. True to form, Flanagan once arranged for one of Boys Town’s newly elected mayors to meet with New York City’s colorful Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in Manhattan and be photographed together at La Guardia’s desk.
Regardless of his far-flung activities, Flanagan’s priestly duties remained central to his being. At Boys Town, he maintained a regular schedule of religious services. Recitation of scriptures, spiritual reading and prayer began at 6:00 a.m., with Flanagan always the first to arrive in the chapel. Similar services were held daily at noon and after the evening meal. Following the morning service, Flanagan met with his staff to discuss the day’s upcoming events, then headed off to other meetings. As Rev. Peter Dunne, a Boys Town school dean, recalled, “He was a whirlwind of activity.”
THROUGHOUT MY OWN career focusing on the needs of children, I have tried to attract sports stars, movie stars, music stars, business leaders, and politicians much like Father Flanagan did, though with much less success. I’ve written articles under my own byline, coauthored opinion pieces with famous people, and regularly posted about Save the Children’s work on Facebook and Twitter—all in an attempt to call attention to children’s needs. I have even produced videos with Hollywood stars for Save the Children’s website and YouTube. Despite all this work—and believe me, while it may seem a little glamorous, it is still work—there are large swaths of Americans I have found very difficult to reach.
For Flanagan, on the other hand, Hollywood came calling. It seems the seed for a movie was planted by a story titled “The Boy Who Shot His Father” published in the then-popular magazine Liberty. The article, by a prolific journalist named Edward Doherty, recounted not only the tale of a fifteen-year-old boy who murdered his father because the man had abandoned his family but other stories of abused and neglected children who found sanctuary in Flanagan’s Boys Town.
A screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer named Eleanore Griffin thought the story on Father Flanagan would make a terrific movie. She went out to Omaha to interview the Irish priest, now over fifty years old. Initially, Flanagan was cool to the idea because he feared MGM would turn the story into another Oliver Twist. But when Dore Schary came onto the project, he convinced Flanagan that a great film could be made. It would next take some persuading to get the internationally renowned movie star and Academy Award–winning actor Spencer Tracy to accept the role of Father Flanagan. Two years earlier, Tracy had won much acclaim portraying a priest in MGM’s 1936 blockbuster San Francisco. Now, despite the rave reviews, Tracy said he didn’t want to play another man “with a collar turned backwards.” He finally relented when his good friend Eddie Mannix, MGM’s powerful general manager and vice president, convinced him to do it.
Flanagan worked closely on the Boys Town script with Griffin and Schary, who won an Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1939 for their work. The story has some basis in fact but is mostly filled with fictional characters. Among them is a tough, streetwise kid named Whitey Marsh, played by then-seventeen-year-old Mickey Rooney, who comes to realize the value of Boys Town, and a small child nicknamed Pee Wee, portrayed by seven-year-old Bobs Watson, who idolizes Rooney’s character and forms an unlikely bond with him that is the sentimental center of the story. (Watson’s signature talent as a child star was his ability to cry buckets of real tears on cue. He had ample opportunity to display it in Boys Town.)
Although well experienced in the ways of publicity, Flanagan agreed to sell the movie rights for a scant $5,000, believing that a successful film would prompt a flood of contributions. Instead, the public who flocked to the theaters assumed Boys Town already had plenty of money. The movie earned MGM more than $2 million. But Boys Town had to spend the full $5,000 it received to fix up the campus after the fifty-eight-member movie crew had left. Flanagan ruefully told a reporter for the New York Times, “Next time I come to Hollywood, I’m going to get myself an agent.”
But Flanagan didn’t have to go to Hollywood, as, once again, Hollywood came to him. Having hit box office gold with Boys Town, MGM naturally wanted to make a sequel. It was to be called The Men of Boys Town, with Tracy again portraying Flanagan. This time, instead of an agent, Flanagan got something better—his old friend, attorney Henry Monsky, who negotiated a $100,000 fee for the movie rights.
Over the course of these productions, Flanagan and Tracy formed a genuine friendship that endured for the rest of Flanagan’s life. When Tracy won the 1939 Academy Award for his portrayal of the priest, he sent the gold statuette to Flanagan with an inscription on it: “To Father Flanagan, Whose Great Human Qualities, Kindly Simplicity and Inspiring Courage Were Strong Enough to Shine Through My Humble Efforts. Spencer Tracy.” It is still on display at Boys Town.
The success of Boys Town did much to inform a vast audience of the guiding principles behind Father Flanagan’s efforts. He had been writing and lecturing about them for decades—and battling against bureaucrats and politicians who ignored or opposed him—but now his name truly was box office gold, and his words, and his philosophy of focusing on the individual boy, carried extra weight.
In a 1940 speech titled “To Cure, Not to Punish” given to the National Conference of Catholic Charities in Chicago, Flanagan summarized his philosophy:
The juvenile court, which a generation ago was greeted with much enthusiasm as a cure-all for juvenile delinquency, has utterly failed. . . .The reformatories the nation over, instead of rehabilitating youth, actually have become schools of crime. . . . It is the duty of each family to provide security, protection, and direction for their children but when the home fails it is necessary for the community to devise ways and means to prevent delinquency. . . .
Further, I would say that each police department should assign a certain number of picked men in plain clothes to work with juveniles exclusively, under the direction of this social service bureau. These men are to visit the homes of these boys from time to time and seek out the causes of their misdeeds and work to an end of helping the boy, instead of carrying a club of punishment over his head. . . .
Of course, it will cost money, but even now thousands of dollars are being squandered in the manner in which we are handling juvenile delinquency through our juvenile courts and reformatory system. There is an old saying, “Crime does not pay,” but the public is finally learning that it pays the crime bill in taxes. I am certain that under such a set-up as I have outlined here, the cost of rehabilitating youth will be greatly decreased.
I have reread these words countless times, and each time they give me goose bumps. They are so prescient and powerful, reflecting the very experience I had working with juvenile delinquents in Baltimore in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The juvenile court system was under-resourced and overwhelmed. The facilities where the kids were sent were called “training schools,” but they were little more than jails. And instead of plainclothes policemen who visited and worked with troubled juveniles “from time to time” with the goal of “helping the boy,” Baltimore hired social workers who too often were able to do little more than push paper because of an overwhelming caseload.
Flanagan was clearly not in favor of the state supplanting the role of the family, but he was a hard-nosed realist who understood that sometimes the family needed help. And his realism recognized the reluctance of the electorate to invest in rehabilitating troubled youth, so he made an economic argument: pay now or pay a lot more later.
When he spoke these words, he was still running Boys Town. To speak up against the power structure and prod people to do something they don’t want to do takes guts, especially when the victims of the situation are overwhelmingly poor and powerless. And it takes special courage to do that while trying to raise funds for your own work from the very people you are prodding. It is much easier to complain privately, while still seeking both the private and public resources to do one’s work. I often hear colleagues say words to that effect: “Do the best you can, but don’t rock the boat.” “The system will eat you up, and then you won’t be able to help any kids.” Or countless times, “You can’t push rich people too hard to change their lifestyle, or they’re not going to help you at all.” Clearly, Father Flanagan thought otherwise.
WHEN THE JAPANESE attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the news had a personal impact on Father Flanagan: four Boys Town alumni were serving in the military there, two of whom were killed—George Thompson, on the USS Oklahoma, and Donald Monroe, on the USS Arizona. Just six months earlier, Monroe had written to Flanagan that the movie Boys Town had been shown on the ship. “Everyone enjoyed it,” Monroe wrote. “All the boys on the ship ask me was Boys Town just like in the picture? I told them that was you up and down.” Monroe was an African American cook on the Arizona; his body remains entombed on the sunken battleship, now a national monument in Pearl Harbor.
Ultimately, at least eight hundred former Boys Town residents served in the military during the war, fighting in practically every major theater of combat, and some forty of them gave their lives. Flanagan mourned them all. To the mother of a Boys Town alumnus who died on Bataan, he wrote, “[W]hile perhaps you may think that, after all, these boys are not as close to me as they would be to a natural father, still, let me assure you, my dear Mrs. Clark, they are very close and I feel the loss of each and every one very deeply.”
Though Flanagan was named national chaplain of the American War Dads Association and instituted a military training program for the youngsters at Boys Town, he did not hesitate to again stand up to injustice, this time on behalf of the Japanese. He was greatly upset by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 forcing some 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of them United States citizens, to evacuate their homes and be relocated to one of ten internment camps located in remote areas of Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.
As his own countermeasure, Flanagan offered jobs and housing to any Japanese families who wished to come to Boys Town. It is estimated that about three hundred Japanese Americans managed to get there between 1943 and the end of the war, with Flanagan often paying for their transportation. When one of the Japanese Americans was hired as a psychologist in the Boys Town welfare department but found his efforts to buy a house nearby blocked by racial prejudice, Flanagan enlisted Monsky’s law firm to take on the case. They won.
Shortly after the end of the war, Flanagan expressed his belief in racial equality in a letter to a Jesuit priest in Detroit: “Who am I that I should think that Christ, when he died on Calvary, died only for the Catholics living on millionaire row and white Catholics at that. My understanding of Catholic doctrine is that Christ died for the Negroes, for the Mexicans, for the Germans and for the Japanese, and for all of these other nationalities.”
Despite their differences, Flanagan and Franklin Roosevelt remained friends. In August 1944, just two months after D-day, Flanagan wrote to FDR about the necessity of planning to help homeless European children once the fighting ended.
If these children are neglected, they will constitute a very serious problem in the immediate future and in the years to come. During adolescence, and before they reach maturity, they will be easy prey to temptation and crime, and to infection from the various noxious isms. . . . If, however, they are properly cared for, trained and educated in the true traditions of their respective countries, and if they are given Christian care and love, they will become the most able leaders in the peaceful rehabilitation of their countries.
Roosevelt responded promptly, saying the issues Flanagan had raised were a major concern and that “I am sure that in developing any such plans . . . [we] will wish the benefit of your experience.”
Before turning his attention to postwar continental Europe and Asia, however, Father Flanagan decided to fulfill a long-standing wish to return to Ireland. He wanted to see the members of his family who remained there, but he also had unspoken reasons for making the trip. He had heard about the horrific conditions in Ireland’s industrial schools for youths and reform schools, known as Borstals, and intended to see them for himself.
What he found appalled him. During a monthlong trip in the summer of 1946, he visited a number of such schools and was sickened to find that severe physical punishment and what amounted to slave labor were inflicted routinely on the children. In one Belfast school, he found youngsters under the age of eleven making shoes in a windowless basement room lit by a single lightbulb. He also received a detailed report on a boy who had been brutally whipped at a school in County Limerick. Flanagan spoke out forcefully while in Ireland, calling the industrial schools “a disgrace to the nation” and the Borstal system “a scandal, un-Christlike and wrong.”
Irish authorities were infuriated. The minister of justice, Gerry Boland, said on the floor of the Irish Parliament that Flanagan had used “offensive and intemperate language” to challenge “conditions about which he has no first-hand knowledge.” James Dillon, another political leader, said, “Monsignor Flanagan turned up in this country and went galumphing around . . . got his photograph taken a great many times and made a variety of speeches to tell us what a wonderful man he was and of the marvels he had achieved in the United States. He then went back to America and published a series of falsehoods and slanders.”
In public, Flanagan would only say that he realized his remarks had made Irish officials “rather uncomfortable,” adding that “avoiding facts and appealing to clichés and individual prejudices is as futile as trying to settle a dispute by seeing who can shout the loudest. Little is gained unless argument leads to inquiry.”
In a private letter to a friend, however, he wrote, “We have punished the Nazis for their sins against society. . . . I wonder what God’s judgment will be with reference to those who hold the deposit of faith and who fail in their God-given stewardship of little children?” A year later, he wrote sadly, “I don’t seem to be able to understand the psychology of the Irish mind.”
For an Irish-born priest who spent the first eighteen years of his life there, those are damning words. It is hard to know exactly why Flanagan felt so different in his thinking. Perhaps our memory of home is always partly fictionalized. Maybe Flanagan had chosen to remember only the positive aspects of his birthplace—the big, loving family in the whitewashed farmhouse—and had cast aside the memories of homeless boys rummaging for food in Sligo.
For its part, the Irish government ignored Flanagan’s charges. It was not until a major public investigation in 1970 finally revealed the terrible conditions in these schools, including malnutrition, child labor, and physical and sexual abuse, that corrective actions began. It took another exposé, a three-part 1999 television documentary and the book that followed, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools, by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan—which recounted the details of Flanagan’s trip and accusations—to finally move the Irish Parliament to offer an official apology for the decades of mistreatment to which it had turned a blind eye.
Flanagan had intended to return yet again to Ireland, but that trip was postponed by a request from General Douglas MacArthur. The general, then essentially ruling Japan as head of the U.S.’s occupying forces, wanted Flanagan to go there and also to Korea to examine the conditions of war orphans and other destitute children and offer recommendations on how to help.
Beginning on April 24, 1947, Flanagan spent an exhausting sixty days touring sixteen Japanese and South Korean cities, visiting devastated areas and orphanages and even wandering through the cold and dark underground railways of Japan, where homeless children found shelter. He discovered sweatshops masquerading as “homes” for children as young as eight who worked long hours, six days a week, to make products, for which they received little pay.
Returning to the United States in late June, he quickly completed a detailed report, “Children of Defeat,” and on July 7 delivered it personally to President Harry Truman in the White House. In it, he “heartily recommended” creation of a foster home system in Japan, with the help of U.S. occupation forces, since the Japanese had little experience dealing with the problem of homeless children. He also suggested tough regulations to eliminate the “orphanages” that in reality were child labor rackets.
Truman was so impressed with Flanagan’s report that a few months later he asked him to undertake a similar fact-finding tour of Austria and Germany. Although exhausted, Flanagan felt he could not turn down a personal request from the president of the United States. He made arrangements to leave for Europe on March 5, 1948.
On the day before he left, Flanagan sat down with two of his friends, the writers Will and Fulton Oursler, for another long interview about his work. “We asked him . . . an indiscreet question, but one that had to have an answer, although how urgently we could not suspect,” the Ourslers wrote in their biography of Flanagan. “What would happen when he passed on? Was there someone so passionately devoted to children that the work would be carried on?”
“ ‘God will send,’ was his answer. ‘We have already started an endowment fund. Someday in the far, far future that may make us self-supporting. Anyway, the work will continue, you see, whether I am there or not, because it’s God’s work, not mine.’ ”
Arriving in Vienna on March 11, Flanagan spent the next two months traveling thousands of miles through Central Europe. He estimated that in Vienna alone, some forty thousand children were homeless and in terrible shape physically and emotionally. He made a prescient proposal for the creation of day care centers in which the children of single mothers could stay while their lone parent worked.
He returned to Berlin on May 14, held a number of meetings, learned that an estimated ten thousand homeless children were in the city, and finally went to bed. In the early morning hours of May 15, he knocked on the door of his nephew, Patrick Norton, who was there working with him. “Pat,” he said, “I have a pain in my chest. Please get a doctor right away.” He died of a massive heart attack only a few hours later.
MUCH AS FATHER Flanagan predicted, the work of Boys Town continued. In 1972, the Boys Town National Research Hospital for the study and treatment of hearing and speech disorders was started. The endowment fund he began is still going strong today, and his successors have expanded Boys Town’s reach to communities in more than half a dozen states, serving an estimated eighty thousand children and families a year. And Boys Town also now operates a 24/7 national suicide hotline to provide counseling to hundreds of thousands of callers a year in more than one hundred languages.
At the time of Flanagan’s death, one of the most eloquent eulogies came from Rabbi Edgar Magin of Los Angeles, who wrote of Flanagan’s love of children in the Boys Town Times: “He reached out his arms, took them to his bosom. He counseled with them. Some were black. Some were white. There were Jews, Catholics, and an infinite variety of Protestants, and those who called themselves by no name and knew no God because they had never been taught there was a God until they met Father Flanagan.”
On May 21, 1948, Flanagan was buried in a crypt at Boys Town. He had been brought home. Not to the whitewashed farmhouse in Ireland, but to the home he had created—the shelter he had given to thousands and thousands of boys. It didn’t matter who the boys were or where they came from—they were his brothers. And he was laid to rest among them.
Two weeks later, President Truman traveled there to place a wreath on his grave. Upon the news of Father Flanagan’s death, the president had issued a public statement: “American youth and youth everywhere have lost an ever faithful friend in the untimely death of Father Flanagan. His unshaken confidence in the love of God and in even the least of God’s children found eloquent expression in the declaration that there is no such thing as a bad boy.”
Amen.