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Conquering Omaha: One priest's unique
vision of humanity
In September of 1912, a young man of 26 stepped off a
ship in New York Harbor from Hamburg, Germany. This was not his first
time in New York, in fact, he had been a resident of the city six years
before, as a student for the priesthood at Dunwoodie Seminary in
Yonkers. He had relatives in New York, and as a seminarian, he was
expected to visit the sick poor in the local hospitals and sanitariums.
What he had experienced
there had stuck in his memory for the six years he had been away and
that experience had given him a passion for the poor.
But the years since then
had given him more than a passion for the poor and neglected members of
society; it had sharpened his conviction on how they could be helped and
had moved him to study classical works on the subject: novels,
demographic studies, educational treatises, the insights and words of
masters in the field, both religious and scientific. He had begun to
read the novels of Charles Dickens when he was 12 years old and it was
from Dickens that he first began to glimpse what it meant to be poor and
homeless.
Fr Edward Flanagan, when he
stepped off the ship from Hamburg onto the docks of New York, was a
seasoned veteran of personal suffering and anguish. He had endured a
childhood of frail health and hard work, long hours of intense study and
scholastic achievement, and the crushing disappointment of a complete
physical breakdown when his goal of the priesthood was barely in sight.
He learned a long patience and an unrelenting endurance, holding on by
naked determination when all hope seemed lost. He was able to enter into
a like despair in others, and especially of the young, the untried, the
outcast, the bereft, the wounded and the forgotten.
In his first months as an
assistant pastor at St Patrick's Church in Omaha, he was faced with
victims of a Midwest tornado that devastated the city: families without
homes, destruction everywhere, the center of the city in shambles and
men without means or work; visits to hospitals and to the sick and
bedridden; children to be comforted and old people to be provided for;
then the city filling up with an army of fathers seeking work in
stockyards and packing houses, where most were turned away.
His charity and meager
salary were stretched to the limit, but he became innovative. He
gathered friends and family to help him. He made friendships of civic
leaders and prominent citizens, business men and executives, doctors and
lawyers and neighborhood societies. But this was only a beginning.
It took months for the city
to reclaim the damaged neighborhoods and the loss of life. Whole blocks
had been torn out of the city's structures, commercial centers had to be
rebuilt and neighborhoods reclaimed. It was the first time the young
priest had to face this kind of massive tragedy, this kind of loss of
life, and this upheaval and dislocation of whole neighborhoods and their
families.
Edward Flanagan had come to
the United States as an 18 year old boy, fresh from secondary school in
his native Ireland, where poverty was rampant and families often left
homeless, driven out of their homes by absentee English landlords. He
was born 40 years after the Great Famine of 1845, when thousands of
families were made homeless and had to seek shelter in forest and
woodlands, and thousands more had left the brutal conditions under which
they had to live for America, Canada or Australia. Their chief comfort
were their priests who set up rock altars in forests and fields where
people could gather for prayer and mutual comfort. He knew what was
expected of priests in Ireland and the names of those priestly heroes
were legion. At one time, priests were banished from the country and, if
caught, were imprisoned or killed.
But he had never expected
to be thrown into like family tragedies in free America, although he had
a small taste of it in rural Nebraska, in the small town of O'Neill,
which was his first priestly assignment. The people he served were
immigrants from his homeland, eking out an existence on the Great
Plains. He had come among them with his half-scholarly air, with a bit
of the seminary detachment about him. He had baptized their babies and
buried their dead and married their young folk. Some were prosperous,
many were poor, and the winter's bite drove some to near hunger and
others to a physical wretchedness that saddened him. He had a few books
not worth selling and a few dollars. Their sadness was his.
But there was more to come
in Omaha after the tornado of 1913. The city had scarcely recovered from
the damage and devastation of that massive tragedy, and families were
still suffering from the loss of loved ones and severe economic
distress.
Two years later, in the
summer of 1915, the Midwest was hit by a drought. Migrant workers who
followed the harvest across the country were stranded in Omaha, with no
work, no money, no place to stay and no means of support. Most of them
were hardworking husbands and fathers of families who followed the
harvest west, their whole livelihood dependent upon this seasonal work.
They drifted into the city by the hundreds and could be seen standing on
street corners or sleeping in alleys, tired and hungry, with desperation
in their faces and no food in their stomachs. Others had been in the
city all winter waiting for the late summer harvests to begin in Kansas.
They would follow the harvest west and north, returning to Omaha with
wages to last them until the next year's harvest. This massive
unemployment was new to the city and the city found itself with few
resources to face this army of unemployed. Young Fr Flanagan watched
this growing crisis, as the rectory door bell rang day and night by
lonely and hungry men.
He pondered and prayed, he
read his Dickens and the published works coming off the presses like
John Spargo's "The Bitter Cry of Children" and Jane Addams' "Twenty
Years at Hull House". His mind was searching for fresh ideas and
innovative models that had worked for others. He decided to plunge into
the deep with no money, no resources, little sympathy for his concerns
and a few members of the newly-founded St Vincent de Paul Society to
help him.
The drought drove him into
the streets. The seminary detachment left him, and as September moved
into October, they saw him on Thirteenth Street and near the barges on
the river. As the despair of the men deepened, his sense of helplessness
became overwhelming and he told his sister, Nellie, and his brother,
Pat, also a priest, that his anguish was almost too much to bear.
His sadness did not lead to
despair, but to action.
He had been a priest
scarcely two years when he was thrown into the orbit of human suffering
and found himself grappling with the problem of human misery. From that
painful summer when he saw "Christ in a man", he became more than a
kind-hearted and good priest that loved everyone: he became a champion
and fighter for the helpless and the poor, and his love made him dream
great things. Out of that dreaming and doing came "Boys Town", "the City
of Little Men", and he became known as "Fr Flanagan of Boys Town".
When he started to put his
vision of the streets into words, it was an echo of convictions he had
formed long ago, as a boy on the fields of Ireland tending sheep and
cattle. He was aware all around him of the despair and helplessness of
poverty and oppression under English rule. His country had been under
the heel of an oppressor for over a thousand years and its passion for
freedom and independence, and for simple civility, would burst into
flame in the Easter Rising of 1916, which saw the thirst for national
freedom reach a feverish pitch, with the leaders of his country executed
like common criminals. He had put all of this into a bundle of
convictions drawn from his Irish heritage and from his wide reading of
master storytellers and moral masters. He had been bred to heroism, as
he explained to a friend, long before he had left Ireland and tasted
freedom in a free country.
"My father would tell me
many stories that were interesting for a child: stories of adventure, or
of the Irish People for independence. It was from him that I learned the
science of life... from the lives of saints, scholars and patriots".
With a novel of Dickens
under his arm and the stirring poetry of Scott and Macauley drumming in
his ears, he acquired an epic sensed that never left him. It burst into
flame when he faced the terror and destruction of a tornado, fathers of
families looking for work and not finding it, men deprived of their
livelihood far away from home.
"I was always interested in
people", he wrote of these eventful days, "and how they lived and was
always interested in trying to help people live better, if they were not
living well. Then, when the opportunity presented itself due to a great
calamity in our city back in 1913, I immediately entered the field of
social service by establishing a home for unfortunate men".
"To help people live
better"
—
a simple explanation of the achievement of a lifetime, for the freshness
and originality with which he faced the poor and homeless, like a page
out of one of Dickens' novels, with characters to match. One of them,
Henry Monsky, whom he met in the corridors of the Douglas County
Courthouse where Monsky was trying to place Jewish homeless boys, became
a fast friend from their first meeting. That friendship sparked Boys
Town and a collaboration that lasted a lifetime. It was the novelty of
Flanagan's thinking and the sheer humanity of his concerns that
attracted Monsky, himself a humanitarian and fighter for justice in his
own right.
The compassion and
educational theories of Fr Edward Flanagan began to take the world by
storm, even from these early days, as the concept of Boys Town began to
form in his mind. He plumbed the theories and experiments that crossed
his path and became a severe critic of systems and laws and solutions
that were not in keeping with his high regard for human being and his
deep reverence for human worth. His stirring call for compassion and
genuine brotherly love was a lone voice in a society ravaged by war, by
a sense of racial superiority and by institutional solutions immune to
deeply human problems and intense personal suffering. What was unique
was the intellectual and religious roots to his words and achievements,
and the audacity with which he made the absence of God part of the
problem.
There was an aura of
adventure to his thinking, and he pondered the lives of the great men
and women who had shaped their times with a touch of genius. His gift
for making friends was renowned and the walls of his office were covered
with photos and mementos of his wide circle of friends. Framed pictures
of all sizes were hung casually and carelessly in an amazing abundance
all over the walls. Some were of Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig standing with
Fr Flanagan. Some were of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford with a greeting
scrawled across the shiny paper. Some were cartoons or news clippings,
One showed Skippy kicking the dust and saying: "It's a time like this
that a fella needs a heart-to-heart talk with Fr Flanagan". There was a
whole series of Joe Palooka comic strips, and in a special place of
prominence on one of the walls, autographed photos of Spencer Tracy,
Mickey Rooney and Bobs Watson, stars of the movie, "Boys Town". He was
proud of these many friendships, and contrary to many religious persons
impression of Hollywood, when he returned from a visit there, he praised
the hard work and dedication of those in the movie industry.
He found very early that he
was matching wits with principled and unprincipled occupiers of power
judges, state officials, governors, juvenile authorities, many merely
bureaucratic managers or occupants of office shaped by political
pressures and the demands of the electorate. What he brought to the
social problems he faced, especially those of the juvenile justice
system, was a sense of realism that stripped the problem to its naked
reality, often to the astonishment of those who listened. It was not
merely the sincerity of the man's motives that won the day, but the
breadth of his knowledge and the appeal to a wealth of concrete facts.
There was something
Lincolnesque about his debating skills, as he piled brutal fact upon
brutal fact, drawing conclusions from a mass of data that could not be
denied, leaving his hearers to draw their own inescapable conclusions.
As soon as he entered it,
he realized that the youth problem was a high stakes game, with lives at
risk and the future of thousands of youth in the balance. His words came
sharp and decisive, and he knew the critical importance of his public
forum and the power of words. He could write well and with rare insight
and literary grace, as his account of his first visit to Hollywood, "I
Meet Myself" graphically shows. There is a lucidity and clarity of
meaning in his well-turned phrases and in the descriptive analysis of
his work. He was a master of his craft and relished a piece of
well-fashioned prose.
The fate and suffering of
the poor and disadvantaged, from his experience as a young seminarian
in the tuberculosis wards and city hospitals of New York city, was
central to Fr Flanagan's social thinking, and the fate of such people
was always on his mind. He met them, in literary form in the writings of
Charles Dickens, and briefly in person in the poorer sections of Sligo,
in Ireland, in his secondary school days, as he wandered the city and
saw the poor in hovels and ragged boys in the streets. More than once,
he agonized over his inability to help them.
When he began his work for
boys, it was the insensitivity of juvenile authorities and their
inability to see the harm that was done by poverty, homelessness and
neglect, that stirred him into action, then fired his mind as he put pen
to paper. He was grateful for Dickens' description of poverty in
England, and he was able to conjure up images of the poor and destitute
that silenced his critics, as he would bite into their faces, not
lifeless statistics, but human beings in dire need.
But it all began on Easter
morning in 1913, when a tornado struck the city of Omaha, with families
and whole neighborhoods in extreme distress. He was out with his friend,
the mortician, Leo Hoffman, with a wagon, picking up bodies of the dead
and making arrangements for their decent burial. He had been a priest
for less than a year, but there was something bottled inside of him that
came to the surface and spurred him into action. From that day, the city
of Omaha became not only his parish and his arena of action, it became a
center for a social experiment that would almost identify the city. Boys
Town was still in the future, but the seeds were laid in the genius and
compassion of this man who "saw Christ in a man", and turned the whole
world upside-down to carry on his own unique vision of humanity.
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