by Mark Bailey
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 happe
n 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.
THE DIRECTOR
Rex Ingram (1893–1950)
BY PIERCE BROSNAN
I write this from my home in Los Angeles—Malibu, more specifically. I’ve spent the morning painting. I like to paint every morning when I’m home, as I am now—enjoying a bit of down time before I leave in a few weeks for a film in Italy. I can hear my wife, Keely, downstairs. She’s probably reading the New York Times, the print version, which we just can’t seem to shake.
I close my eyes and try to imagine this city of Los Angeles roughly eighty years ago—this would be in 1936—and a scene found over the hill from here, on the southern edge of the San Fernando Valley in what was then the sleepy little suburb of Studio City.
On a tree-lined street, in an ordinary house, a forty-three-year-old man is walking around his property. He’s handsome—Irish American, with a strong nose and high forehead, his short black hair combed back. The man steps into his studio, just as I’m in mine, and dips his hands into a bucket of clay. He begins to sculpt a mythical creature—a satyr of sorts. His wife keeps her own company inside.
Watching him, it would be hard to guess that just a few years earlier this man—Rex Ingram—was Hollywood’s hottest director. He was responsible for some of the silent film era’s biggest commercial and critical hits, with his wife and creative partner, Alice Terry, as their star. Bringing an artist’s sensibility to what was a new directing style, he lit up movie marquees and popular magazines across the country, launching silver-screen stars like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and making himself and his movie executives wildly wealthy along the way. But here he is, alone in his studio.
I suppose—you go up, you come down.
From my window, I stare out at a wide expanse of blue ocean. Ireland feels a long way away. It’s not easy getting here; this I know. Certainly, ending up as he did in Los Angeles, it had been a long journey for Rex. There were incredible highs and some lows too, and at least four remarkable films to show for it, but overall, it was a long journey indeed.
REGINALD INGRAM MONTGOMERY HITCHCOCK—later to be known as Rex Ingram—was born in Dublin in 1893. I myself was born only an hour’s drive north in Navan, County Meath, more than half a century later. Navan was then a little rural town on the banks of the River Boyne and worlds apart from the city. Not that any of this matters much: I realize Rex is the star of this story, and even though we are both Irish, both in the business of film, and both artists independent of that work (for Rex, in sculpting, and me, painting)—I’m only supporting.
The Hitchcock family was middle-class Protestant. Living there in the Dublin neighborhood of Rathmines, they represented what’s known as the Ascendancy, a privileged class of Protestants carrying the British flag, as it were, among us Catholics. His mum, Kathleen, was culturally refined, demure, and warm. His father, Francis, stern and demanding, was a divinity scholar at Trinity College preparing for a career in the Church.
When Rex was three, his brother, Francis, was born. Two years later, his father got a job as a curate and the family moved to the countryside in Tipperary. Now this was rural for sure—and young Rex and Frank, as his brother was called, took to the outdoors, riding horses and trampling over hill and stream. You could do this then in Ireland. In fact, this was one’s childhood when I was a boy.
Myself, I was an only child. My father left us when I was an infant. (In fact, I only met him once in my life, when I was thirty-one years old and shooting Remington Steele.) My mother then went to England to make a better life for us both. If she had not had the courage to do that, I wouldn’t be the man I am today. But it came with the price of loneliness and separation. My grandparents took care of me.
I too was raised in that pastoral Ireland. I lived across the river from town, and I remember great access to the forest and woods. Grandfather had built our house on the banks of the Boyne. He was a gentle man by the name of Philip. Together we would walk hand in hand up the dirt road on a summer’s evening, the sunlight dappling through the over-canopied trees. He would every now and then stop and look for the “little people.” He loved to show me where they lived. Yes, they were real to me as a boy—part of what I call Irish dreamtime. We had a plot of land my grandparents would let out to a family of tinkers, as we called Irish travelers then—old Ma Crutchie was their matriarch. The family had a painted wagon and a couple of horses, and old Ma would fix our pots and pans and sharpen knives. Her two boys taught me how to make bows and arrows, and off I went into the woods each day. This was the late 1950s, so one can only imagine the country life for Rex some fifty years earlier. A young boy with a great deal of dreamtime—and you wonder what filled his head.
In 1903, when Rex was ten, his father was again promoted, now to rector, and the family moved to Kinnitty, a postcard-perfect town in the central part of the country with more green hills to explore, and an abundance of castles and mansions to spin romance around. Living with a rector, naturally there was a lot of religion in the home. But Francis also encouraged the arts—readings and performances of Shakespeare and the classics—while Kathleen played piano. It
was a good deal more than I got. Young Rex would sit sketching and doodling for hours, developing skills that would figure in the notoriously detailed storyboards he created for his films years later. These delicious details, by the way, and many others, come courtesy of the wonderful biographer Ruth Barton, whose masterful Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen, is considered the last word in all things Rex.
As a boy I too loved sketching, from very early on. Acting came much later. My first performances, when I think on it, were really at St. Mary’s church. It was there I made my first communion and, in some ways, my first public appearance—as an altar boy serving mass. Certainly, there were the Christian brothers in their black soutanes of holiness and despair. They could be cruel. But to serve communion was a joy for me. My grandmother would plaster my hair down with Brylcreem, the radio playing Chuck Berry in the background, and down the road I would go, over the bridge and up into town. Mass on a Sunday morning dressed in my red cassock, white shirt, and white plimsolls, the smell of the incense in the church, along with the sound of the choir, would fill me with the greatest of comfort. Those days as a boy have stayed with me.
Rex’s experiences with the Protestant church were no doubt also profound. Despite what seems a pleasant enough home life, Francis was intense and demanding—and apparently he and his eldest never much got along. In 1905, when he was twelve, Rex’s parents sent him to St. Columba’s College, a boarding school just outside Dublin. This is often how it goes in Ireland. Life in the countryside was isolated, sheltered—adults kept everything from you. If somebody was having a baby, they’d spell it out. Rosie’s having a B-A-B-Y. But you were king of the mountain with fields to roam. And then it was off to a traditional private school and hardly enough room to breathe.
