1
In 1931 another Wolfe returned to Ireland from his home in America. Richard White Wolfe had emigrated in 1885, two years after John R.’s death. He had been nineteen at the time and in the company of at least a few of his dozen or so siblings, all of them native to the Glen, the family farm in the townland of Cratloe, just a few kilometers east of Listowel, in western County Limerick. His older brother Patrick ended up as a book agent in Philadelphia, where he married a girl from Listowel and eventually moved to the Bronx. The rest of the siblings took the train to Chicago.
There Dick Wolfe went to school and eventually found his calling in politics. He sat on various boards, climbed his way up the social ladder, and in 1927 joined Big Bill Thompson’s mayoral campaign, serving as the candidate’s “orator and wordsmith,” according to one historian. Thompson ran in part on an America First, anti-British platform, aided by Wolfe’s sometimes inflammatory rhetoric. “Capitol hill is influenced by the king of England,” Wolfe wrote in a campaign flyer, “while the plain people are guided by the teachings of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.” He vowed that Thompson would “uphold the Americanism of the fathers.” And indeed the mayor later tried. Once in office again (this was his third, non-consecutive term), he threatened to burn any books in the Chicago Public Library that he perceived to be anti-American, not-100-percent-American, or pro-British.
Wolfe, meanwhile, was appointed commissioner of public works. His four-year tenure was marked by continued efforts to straighten the Chicago River, the establishment of a water-filtration system, and controversies over the conditions of city streets. Complicating these issues was the air of corruption that surrounded the mayor’s office, which many assumed to be on the payroll of the mobster Al Capone. By 1931, the year he left office, Wolfe was a well-known figure and, back in Ireland, something of a celebrity.
Early that year the Kerryman newspaper announced him to be “Chicago’s Greatest Commissioner” and ballyhooed his many achievements in office — all accomplished, one imagines, while brandishing his Limerick brogue the way that Capone’s boys did their Tommy guns. Just the year before, the New York Times had reported how the Italians — silk-suited “union members” — had regularly sent their representatives to Wolfe’s little corner of City Hall. “It has been noticeable to many employees of the office,” the Times wrote, “that when these men call they brush the secretaries aside and rattle on Wolfe’s door until they get in.”
Dick Wolfe embodied the American dream. “When a lad of but [nineteen] years” — the Kerryman again — “he landed on American shores filled with ambition to become a leader of men.” He worked his way through the University of Chicago and lectured on economics at a local arts college. He sold fire insurance, wrote for the Stockyards Daily Sun, and finally took up real estate, through which he made his name and his fortune. He also published a forty-three-page lecture titled, simply, Culture, which featured his own original poetry. And he helped author a bill in the Illinois Senate to make American — as opposed to English — the state’s official language. This was in 1923, on the heels of Britain’s recognition of the Irish Free State, and it was meant to serve as one last what-for to the Union Jack and, especially, its American supporters, “who have never become reconciled to our republican institutions and have ever clung to the tradition of King and Empire.” The bill passed, although in 1969 the legislature substituted “English” for “American.”
A few months before Wolfe arrived back in Limerick, the Cork Examiner printed an excerpt from one of his speeches, about how there are two kinds of Americans: “There is the real, upstanding, red-blooded American, the product of the comingling of the healthy, wholesome, vigorous, ambitious blood of Europe. He is broadminded, tolerant; his vision as wide as his prairies; his ideals as lofty as high mountain peaks.”
The Wolfes fit this definition quite nicely, the Commissioner likely assumed. The problem is that you also have this other kind of American.
“He is the Tory American,” Wolfe said. “… He loves kings, titles and class distinction … He is responsible for most of the religious and racial hatreds which curse America. From historical causes he is in control of much of the money and wealth of America, and therefore controls the agencies of publicity and propaganda, as well as dominates our Governmental institutions and our educational life.”
In a series of addresses on the subject — in Ireland and throughout his subsequent European tour — Wolfe rarely offered anything more specific than what appeared in the Examiner. So who was this so-called Tory American? He controlled the banks, the papers, the radio broadcasters, the schools, and the Congress, and he leveraged this vast power to stoke hatred against those whose blood, like Wolfe’s, ran red and clean.
The Commissioner’s wife, it should be noted, was German. She kept him on schedule, which during that visit home in August of 1931 involved motoring to several appointments from their base at the charming Dunraven Arms Hotel in Adare, County Limerick. In nearby Cappagh they visited Wolfe’s cousin, Father Patrick Woulfe, and then dashed over to Bruff to see Father Pat’s younger brother, Dr. Timothy Woulfe, and Tim’s new wife, Malvena. Also in Bruff they met with another relation, Maurice Woulfe (no. 11), who worked, somewhat awkwardly perhaps, for the National Bank.
The historical record of these reunions, contained in an article published in the Limerick Leader on August 22, suggests that a reporter had come from Kilmallock to follow the Wolfes around and take notes, and that the Commissioner had fully seized the opportunity. He declared himself “happily impressed” by Ireland’s progress, especially in the decades since his last visit, referring “particularly to the now bright and prosperous appearance of rural Ireland.”
“I’m weary of the city life,” began one of Wolfe’s verses in his book Culture. “Its noise and dust and ceaseless strife.”
The Chicago Tribune, a committed enemy of Wolfe and the Thompson administration more generally, had once mocked the Commissioner’s love of language. “Critic of Streets Urges Wolfe to a Life of Poesy,” read the headline of a story calling for his resignation. “Wasted as Official, Alderman Mose Says.”
Father Pat himself was the author of a slim but dense book on Irish names that had garnered both popular and academic praise. In Cappagh he introduced the Commissioner to Canon John Begley, who several years earlier had finished the second of a proposed three-book history of the Diocese of Limerick. Dick Wolfe soon commented to the waiting reporter on “the remarkable intellectual prowess of Canon Begley and observed that his writings, as well as those of Father Woulfe, are very widely read in America” — a claim that was almost certainly untrue — “and added that their works are doing much to make known to the outside world the importance of Irish history civil and ecclesiastical.”
For his part, Canon Begley counted himself blessed that his most recent book, The Diocese of Limerick in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, existed at all. In September of 1926, while he was serving as the parish priest of nearby Dromcollogher, a roll of film had caught fire at the local cinema, blocking the only exit and killing dozens of his parishioners. “A holocaust of a grim and dreadful character, involving the incineration of close to fifty men, women and children, took place on Sunday night,” a newspaper reported. For weeks Canon Begley struggled to sleep, let alone to write. Mercifully, the bishop transferred him to Kilmallock, where in relative peace he had finished volume 2 of his history — only for there to be another fire, this time at the publishing house. It destroyed the book’s plates, leaving so few printed copies he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that not a single one of these oft-mentioned red-blooded Americans had cracked its spine.
In the book’s preface, Canon Begley had gratefully acknowledged his good friend: “I beg to thank in a special manner the Rev. Patrick Woulfe, P.P., Cappagh, for giving me permission to use in this history some very rare and valuable papers in his possession. Father Woulfe also read all the proof sheets, and made valuable suggestions.”
Father Pat was a big man, and broad, with the family’s trademark blue eyes and high forehead. At fifty-nine he was six years his cousin’s junior and still looked powerful, not the least bit stalked by death. And yet in less than two years he would be in the ground. His books and papers, like the ones he had so kindly lent to Canon Begley, were posthumously collected by a house in Cork and auctioned to the highest bidder. More than three hundred lots sold, “Comprising an Important Selection of Works on Ireland’s History, Language, People, Literature, Archaeology, etc.,” an advertisement bragged. Over the years, they became dispersed and eventually forgotten.
Canon Begley hung on for another decade, until he was eighty, but many of his contemporaries died young. Another of the Wolfe cousins, Richard Woulfe of Abbeyfeale, died in 1937 at just fifty-two, and his obituary noted that “many people attributed his death indirectly to the heroic sacrifices which he made in the service of his country” — in other words, his membership in the Irish Republican Army and his life on the run during the War of Independence and the subsequent civil war. (His daughter later said he had cancer.)
Father Pat had seen his share of violence during those years, too. Born, like the Commissioner, in the townland of Cratloe, he studied in Rome and was ordained in County Kildare, but his real education occurred in the workhouse of Limerick city, where he served as chaplain. There the poor came to eat and the old came to die. Misery mixed with laughter, politics, and storytelling, much of it in the Irish language of Father Pat’s youth. He joined the Gaelic League, an organization founded to foster the language, and began to understand how Irish Gaelic might represent something fundamental about the national identity. It was hardly a new insight — “The speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish,” grumbled the English poet Edmund Spenser — but it thrust him into the maelstrom of resistance. In 1914, as the parish curate, he chaired the largest festival in the history of Kilmallock, one attended by armed Irish Volunteers. Two years later he gave a speech extolling Irish patriotism. Then, on May 28, 1920, the war against Britain arrived home when the IRA attacked and burned the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, killing a handful of policemen. Liam Scully, an Irish-speaking Kerryman, was the only republican to go down, and his mates managed to cart him off the street and into a nearby dressing station. Father Pat performed the Last Rites, possibly in Irish.
According to Woulfe’s obituary, later that day he celebrated Mass at the workhouse and was forced to pass the barracks in order to get there, “an ordeal few would care to undertake having regard to the temper of the police.” The newspaper reported that “from then to the Truce was a very anxious time” for the priest. In fact, earlier in the war, while in London on church business, his residence had been searched after six Irish republican prisoners had tied up their guard and escaped from a Manchester jail. Following the battle in Kilmallock he was again subjected to a search. This time the presbytery was quietly surrounded by soldiers who entered without warning.
No arrests resulted.
As it happens, Father Pat had been in London to advocate on behalf of seventeen Irish Catholic martyrs who in 1915 had been presented to Rome for possible beatification. Among them was Woulfe’s own relative, Father James Woulfe. An outspoken Dominican preacher, Father James lived in Limerick city when Cromwell’s brother-in-law Henry Ireton laid siege in 1650. At least one history recounts how Woulfe had only recently scotched a treaty with local Anglo-Irish royalists, causing them to abandon the city and abscond with its corn. It was a circumstance the inhabitants came to rue in the face of Ireton’s guns. Within four months, plague and hunger had swept through Limerick’s streets, but Woulfe counseled resistance and, according to one historian, “cautioned the trembling cravens as to what they were about.”
Limerick surrendered anyway.
The standard account of Father Woulfe’s subsequent death appears in The Irish Dominicans of the Seventeenth Century by John O’Heyne. “At length,” he writes, Woulfe
Canon Begley is more laconic. The priest, he writes, “was taken and hanged, together with Father Francis Woulfe, guardian of St Francis.” Was this a brother of Father James? The historians are unsure, although James did have two other brothers, Father Andrew and Captain George Woulfe, both of whom also found themselves trapped in Limerick during Ireton’s siege. Legend claims that George alone managed to escape the city walls. After fleeing all the way to the north of England, he established an illustrious military family that included General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec.
The Catholic historian Myles O’Reilly, writing in 1869, found the connection between Captain George and General James Wolfe to be lamentable, considering the fate of George’s brother James. “It is a strange fact,” he wrote, “and one that we must regret, that England should owe the final conquest of Canada to one [i.e., General James] who should have honored this martyr of his family [i.e., Father James], but who was really intensely English, and rivalled Ireton by his bloody march up the St. Lawrence, butchering priests at their own church doors with as little compunction as Ireton felt for Father James Wolf.”
It’s a complicated story, in other words, this Wolfe family story, especially, perhaps, on the Irish side of the Atlantic. And in the end, adding insult to the gibbet, Pope John Paul II passed over Father James for beatification.
Anyway, Commissioner Wolfe, on his visit home, preferred to focus on the positives of present-day Ireland: “The cessation of the British hold, he says, has benefited the Irish people in material things, but much more so because that grip has ceased to hamper our manly self-respect.”
And it is at this point, one imagines, that Mrs. Wolfe gently urged her husband to wrap things up. To finish the last of their pints. After all, they had promised to meet Father Pat’s brother, Dr. Timothy Woulfe, in Bruff.
2
A violent crossroads during the two wars, Bruff found room for only a few hundred people, all of them rock-jawed midwesterners. Dr. Tim ran the medical dispensary, which served the local poor, while another cousin, Maurice, managed the local branch of the National Bank.
The Limerick Leader’s reporter memorialized only bits of the subsequent conversation, for instance the Commissioner “explaining” to his cousin Dr. Tim “that in the matter of organised relief of the poor we are ahead of America, which has nothing to correspond exactly” with the Bruff Dispensary. In fact, said Dick Wolfe, his bile seeming to rise, this only laid bare “the utter falsehood of English propaganda,” which insisted on portraying the Irish as a race of degenerate drunkards. Perhaps he already knew that Dr. Tim served as executive of the Catholic Total Abstinence Federation of Ireland. “Manly self-respect” was his byword. But then the Commissioner added that it was these same propagandists who falsely “attributed lawlessness to America, and particularly to Chicago,” so discrediting his adopted city and the country he loved so much.
The Bruff Woulfes might have been forgiven had they exchanged a quizzical glance at this moment. Was it the English who attributed lawlessness to America, or the drunks? And had they not read something in the paper about a man named Scarface Capone? Was there really no lawlessness in Chicago?
We all have our blind spots, of course, but the Commissioner’s tended to be as wide as the prairies and as lofty as high mountain peaks. Only a few months previously, in February of 1931, Commissioner Wolfe and Chicago’s larger-than-life mayor, Big Bill Thompson, had come under investigation for diverting to their own coffers most of the $139,772 raised in a flood-relief campaign. Wolfe, in particular, was fingered as the one to whom the money was entrusted. On February 9, the hated Tribune published images of canceled checks and a bank statement, signed by the Commissioner, all suggesting that relief money had been used for political purposes.
At the same time, the Illinois state’s attorney opened a separate investigation into allegations of corruption in the finances of the river-straightening project. Not long after that, Wolfe was again accused of mishandling finances, with aldermen charging that he had neglected to collect thirty thousand dollars in rent owed by a transit company for space leased at Navy Pier.
In May, after Big Bill failed to win reelection, Wolfe appeared before a grand jury. He denied receiving payoffs from Capone but testified that he and seven others all had attended a midnight meeting in which they each had contributed five thousand dollars toward a forty thousand dollar shortfall in the accounts of an unnamed city employee. The reason for the shortfall was not made clear, and favors paid to those who contributed were assumed.
One supposes that, over tea, the Commissioner neglected to mention his troubles with the state’s attorney, although the Woulfes of Bruff may have noticed that, in spite of his relentless energy, their visitor looked a little tired.
Maurice Woulfe was tired, too. Seven years ago, or what still seemed like yesterday, he had been managing the bank in Baltinglass, County Wicklow, when a couple of men came in about two in the afternoon. One of them poked his head in the office door and asked to use the telephone, but Mr. Woulfe was in the middle of a meeting. “Send a telegram from the post office,” he said, or something to that effect. A little bit later, the other one, the smaller of the two men, knocked at the door again, this time with a shiny black revolver that he soon pointed at the bank manager’s head.
“Hands up,” he barked. And then, confusingly, “Give me your keys.”
Mr. Woulfe would later remember spying the taller of the two men standing guard outside the office door, looking tense and angry, and then he would remember slowly moving his right hand into his coat pocket, as if to retrieve his keys but feeling instead the cold barrel of his automatic. His hand slick with sweat, he released the safety and then, after taking a deep breath, drew the gun.
Back in Bruff, the cousins noisily slurped their tea and made small talk. Based on what later appeared in the Limerick Leader, they seemed to have chatted mostly about family. Dr. Tim, the authority on Woulfe history now that the Commissioner’s father had died, delivered a lecture on the subject of Edmond Woulfe, the Commissioner’s grandfather. “A well-known personality” is how the newspaper described Old Ned, with a load of historical context that likely only summarized what the doctor told his charges. None of this was new to the Commissioner, though, who had been not quite ten when his grandfather died. He’d heard these stories many times, and so, perhaps, his mind began to wander. It had been only about a year and a half since a man had been gunned down in Chicago under circumstances that seemed especially damning for Wolfe.
On March 5, 1930, the state’s attorney had announced the resumption of a probe into City Hall payroll records. Looking for evidence of graft and, in particular, payroll padding, he subpoenaed the appropriate records from the Commissioner’s office and was promised cooperation. When he didn’t receive it, he informed a judge of his intention to confiscate the records from their storage place in a garage on West Harrison Street. Before he could do so, on March 9, gunmen entered the garage and threatened the sixty-two-year-old security guard, Thomas Coughlin.
“The two men, armed with pistols, walked into the garage and pushed their guns into Coughlin’s ribs,” the state’s attorney told the Tribune. “They said, ‘Stick ’em up.’ But they immediately added that it was no ordinary stickup. ‘We’re not after money,’ they said, ‘we’re after records.’ Then one menaced Coughlin with his revolver while the other attacked a desk with a crowbar.”
The state’s attorney observed that the records were, and continued to be, somewhere else in the garage. “About the time they got the safe open there was a honking of automobile horns outside,” he said. “Coughlin got up and tried to open the door. The hoodlums shot him and ran out.”
Did the cousins compare stories? In Baltinglass, Mr. Woulfe had pulled his automatic and aimed it squarely at the taller man, the one standing by his office door. In doing so, he had startled the fellow, who hadn’t taken the bank manager for a cowboy, but he had also startled himself. Because he wasn’t one.
Had he witnessed something during the war? Or perhaps been the perpetrator himself? Whatever stopped him from firing his weapon, it did not stop the taller man from firing his.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the security guard Coughlin was taken to the nearest hospital, where he later died. The Harrison Street warehouse, meanwhile, was placed under police protection. “In the afternoon,” the paper reported, “a city policeman, who did not give his name and has not been identified, entered the place and demanded the records in the name of Commissioner of Public Works Wolfe.” When the guard refused, “the policeman telephoned to a person he said was Commissioner Wolfe and reported the failure of his mission.”
In Baltinglass, the manager of the National Bank heard the shot but never actually saw the tall man pull the trigger. He was on the floor of his office before he could understand what had happened, a stream of his own blood pooling next to him. He called for help only to see the taller man, revolver in hand, now looming over him, threatening to blow out his brains. The shorter one yelled for the keys again and Mr. Woulfe emptied his pockets. He emptied them of keys and lint and a few coins. Everything, he thought, that was his in the world was now on the floor.
During the Black and Tan days, Dr. Tim had tended the wounds of IRA boys, some shot and spilling blood like his cousin, others just banged up and ill-treated by a life on the run. He had stories to tell, too, one presumed, but the case of the Woulfe family demanded something different.
According to the paper, “Dr. Woulfe explained the conditions which prevailed in Ireland 90 years ago …”
Powerful landlords, tenant agitation, rigged elections.
“However, in 1852 the grandfather of ex-Commissioner Woulfe went forward as a candidate in opposition to the estate agent, and all who have any idea of the conditions of the time will understand the magnitude of that venture and the task that he accomplished in being about the first farmer in Ireland to defeat, which he did, his landlord’s nominee, for a seat on a public board.”
The Woulfes certainly must have nodded at that. Of the myriad stories they had ready to go, this was the sort they best liked to tell. Ould rebels, every last one of them. It ran in their blood. The healthy, wholesome, vigorous blood of the Woulfe family. This, anyway, was the logic of that article in the Limerick Leader. This is what it meant to be a Woulfe.
3
What does the family look like on the Irish side of the Atlantic? It looks like a confusing jumble of blue-eyed, fast-talking, writerly cousins, their histories interweaving in ways that are tangled and intricate and that move quickly between past and present — complete with periodic and sudden outbursts of violence.
It looks, in other words, a lot like it does on the American side.
And in many respects, the Commissioner serves as a bridge connecting these two identities, the American and Irish. He is the über Wolfe, a larger-than-life figure who was descended from the same (we’ll meet his father shortly), an immigrant-made-good who dabbled in poetry, politics, and perhaps even murder. He also trafficked in the worst kind of bigotry.
On his 1931 visit to Ireland, Wolfe complained of the “powerful, ruthless hand and brain of big business” and how it was “practically in control of the money, business and natural resources of America.” And after traveling on to Berlin, he noted how “the international banker and the international profiteer are raising hell with America.” Then and now, of course, the phrase “international banker” was a euphemism for Jew.
In 1936, Wolfe was named national treasurer of the Union Party, a hastily organized third party that unsuccessfully ran North Dakota congressman William Lemke for president against Franklin D. Roosevelt. The party was organized in part by Father Charles Coughlin, a virulently anti-Semitic, anti–New Deal radio personality who, during the campaign, relentlessly attacked Jews and in one speech accused Roosevelt of being caught in “the tentacles of the Baruchs, the Morgans and the Rothschilds.”
In 1939, the Chicago political reporter William H. Stuart authored a hagiographic biography of Wolfe, Share the Profits! The Story of Richard W. Wolfe and His Conclusions. In one chapter, “Manipulation of Money,” Wolfe attacks Jews for their treatment of Jesus Christ, fabricates a Thomas Jefferson quotation on banking, and suggests that Jews conspired to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Wolfe goes on to dismiss Adolf Hitler for his defense of capitalism but urges the United States to steer clear of the war that was imminent in Europe.
When I was growing up, my dad kept hundreds of books down in the basement with his typewriter, everything from Wodehouse to fat histories of Nazi Germany and World War II. But I remember in particular a single, trim, black-covered volume. Its translucent pages were neatly typed and the occasional mistake marked carefully in pen. This was Dad’s master’s thesis, earned in 1970 from Western Illinois University and titled Anti-Semitism in the New Deal Era: The Case of Father Coughlin.
I don’t believe Dad had ever heard of Commissioner Wolfe, but he knew and abhorred Father Coughlin, considering him a stain on the church and a sober warning about the power of hatred and modern propaganda.
How might Dad have reacted, then, to knowing that a member of his own family appears to have been cut from the same cloth? The stories we tell are forever hiding the ones we don’t.
