A Bridge to Justice: The Life of Franklin H. Williams

People tend to view 20th-century civil rights heroes through a “sepia lens,” Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, once said. But those leaders were not “superpeople deposited from some other planet.” They were “ordinary people of extraordinary intellect” and courage who still have the power to show us how to create “a true democracy.” Ifill was speaking at a 2018 Fordham Law School event celebrating the legacy of civil rights attorney and diplomat Franklin H. Williams, LAW ’45.

In A Bridge to Justice, Enid Gort and John M. Caher recount Williams’ “profound impact on the (still unfinished) struggle for equal rights.” Born in New York City in 1917, he attended Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting historically Black university, before enrolling at Fordham Law School in 1941. Service in the segregated U.S. Army interrupted his legal studies and “scarred Williams,” the authors write, but he earned his law degree in 1945 and soon joined the NAACP.

For the next 14 years, he worked on seminal civil liberties cases that overturned racially restrictive housing covenants and school segregation. And he often put his life on the line, once barely escaping a lynch mob in Florida, where he defended three Black youths falsely accused of rape. He went on to help organize the Peace Corps; serve as ambassador to Ghana; lead a nonprofit dedicated to advancing educational opportunity for Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans; and chair a New York state judicial commission, now named in his honor, that works to promote racial and ethnic fairness in the courts. Williams died in 1990, but his life story, the authors write, “is an object lesson for those with the courage and fortitude to … help this nation heal and advance through unity rather than tribalism.”

Cross Bronx: A Writing Life

“The most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories,” Peter Quinn, GSAS ’75, told this magazine in 2017. For more than four decades, the Bronx native has been a remarkably accomplished storyteller—as a novelist, chief speechwriter for New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and witty, humane chronicler of New York City and the Irish American experience. In the past two years, Fordham University Press has reissued four of his novels, including Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which earned Quinn a 1995 American Book Award; and an essay collection, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007). Now comes this delightfully funny and frank memoir of his Catholic upbringing, his enduring affinity for his native borough (“I don’t live in the Bronx anymore, but I’ll never leave”), and the circuitous, consequential path of his writing life. His journey took him from Fordham grad student to chief speechwriter for two New York governors and corporate scribe for “five successive chairmen of the shapeshifting, ever-inflating, now-imploded Time Inc./Time Warner/AOL Time Warner,” a chapter of his memoir he cheekily calls “Killing Time.” He also writes of meeting and courting his wife, Kathy, of the “intense joy and satisfaction of fatherhood,” and of coming to terms with his own emotionally distant father. “Looking back, what I’m struck by most is luck,” he writes. “What I feel most is gratitude.”

South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City

For nearly 40 years, Jill Jonnes has been among the most persistent chroniclers of the Bronx, giving eloquent voice to the citizen activists who have driven its revival. In 1986, when she published the first edition of South Bronx Rising, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment. “Today,” she writes in the third edition of the book, “we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying [Bronx] neighborhoods.”

The revival began with “local activists and the social justice Catholics … mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.” Countless Fordham students, faculty, and alumni have contributed to this movement, helping to establish and sustain groups including the Bronx River Alliance and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. It’s not all roses: The South Bronx remains part of the country’s poorest urban congressional district; the “calamity of COVID” hit communities hard; and gentrification threatens to undo hard-fought progress. But Jonnes provides ample reason to celebrate and continue the work.

“I would’ve thought, well, I’ve conquered literature, so I might as well take on another art form, perhaps interpretive dance. But Peter kept writing,” he said. “Thank God for dance.”

In September, several months after reissuing Banished Children of Eve, which earned Quinn a 1995 American Book Award, Fordham University Press reissued his follow-up: a noir-tinged trilogy of historical mysteries spanning much of the 20th century, all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

“I love Raymond Chandler,” Quinn told this magazine in 2017, but “I always felt that his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne.”

Set in New York and Berlin during the late 1930s, Hour of the Cat (2005) starts with a homicide investigation—the murder of a nurse, an innocent man on death row—but grows to include the eugenics movement and the lead-up to the systematized murder of World War II.

In The Man Who Never Returned (2010), it’s the mid-1950s, and a retired Dunne is lured by a media mogul into investigating the still-unsolved 1930 disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater.

In Dry Bones (2013), Dunne comes face to face with both the Holocaust, through his involvement with an ill-fated Office of Strategic Services rescue mission in Slovakia in 1945, and the moral murk of Cold War espionage on the eve of the Cuban revolution.

Throughout the trilogy, Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in history at Fordham, deftly turns historical themes into suspenseful, literary fiction. As Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy once said, Quinn “takes history by the throat and makes it confess,” invariably aiming his writing at questions that matter.

The Fintan Dunne trilogy is published under New York ReLit, a Fordham University Press imprint publishing reissues of historical, literary fiction about New York or written by authors from New York.

“The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination,” held from April 27 to 29, drew 375 attendees for panel discussions, workshops and keynote addresses by writers Dana Gioia, Ron Hansen, Mary Gordon, and Alice McDermott. At the heart of the conference, sponsored by Fordham’s Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, were focuses on the works of writers and presenters from New York City and Fordham, and an emphasis on the Ignatian and Catholic imaginations.

The Irish Influence

In a Friday panel, “Irish Incarnations of the Catholic Imagination,” McDermott, Kathleen Hill, Michael O’Siadhail, and Peter Quinn tackled the ways in which the Emerald Isle’s deep ties to Catholicism could be felt in their work.

Quinn highlighted the way that Irish-American Catholics’ attitudes were shaped by their role as scapegoats as recently as the early 20th century. He said his first introduction to Irish Catholic literature came via Elizabeth Cullinan’s House of Gold, (Houghton Mifflin, 1970). The book, which delved deep into the personal stories of East Bronx Irish Catholics, was seen as a betrayal of the tribe in its scorching portrayals.

“My parents were educated people, both college graduates, but their reaction [to the book]was my introduction to the code of silence, the Irish version of Omertà,” he said.

Some of this was understandable; after all, the arrival in New York of one million people—one-eighth of the Irish population—between 1845 and 1855, made the Irish immigrants prime targets, he said.

“Critics debated whether it was Catholicism that made the Irish ignorant and stupid, or it was their stupidity and gullibility that made them Catholic,” said Quinn, noting the anti-Irish sentiment.

But as prime targets of criticism, no other ethic group better understood the gift of faith, said McDermott. While it was said in jest that the Irish could learn about ambition from the Jews, about food from the Italians, and about self-discipline from the Germans, being Irish was still the best, because it was the Irish who had Catholicism right.

“I was told, you might not want an Irish doctor, and certainly not an Irish lawyer, or an Irish chef. You might not even want some Irish guy painting your house, but there was no better priest than an Irish priest,” she said.

“I was taught that ultimately it was best not to identify with your ethnic origins,” she said, “But with the one faith that is willing and able to forgive us all for our many inevitable human failings. It’s a faith that both forgives us and more remarkable still, offers us eternal life despite how annoying we all are.”

On Stage and Screen

The panel “Catholics Writing for the Stage and Screen,” held on Saturday, featured playwright and director Karin Coonrod; screenwriter, playwright, and producer Tom Fontana; and screenwriter and producer Thomas Kelly.

Fontana, who went to a Jesuit high school and later attended a public college, said it was his departure from religious schooling that helped him realize the importance of his faith.

“I had this discipline from the Jesuits, and this wonderful freedom during the sixties,” he said. “I was able to find a place for the two to live together within my soul.”

He said that when he began working in television, his writing was nearly all faith-related. In his HBO drama series, Oz, he used a prison setting to tell stories of redemption and retribution in a place that offered so little of it.

“Our mantra on Oz was: If you could find God in a prison, he must exist,” he said, adding that in his stories he prefers to raise questions of morality rather than to preach.

For Kelly, who said he was raised Catholic but later became agnostic, it was a slow transition back to the appreciation of his faith. After his father’s death, Catholicism began to seep back into his life.

Kelly said he began to realize that all of his main characters were Catholic. On his television series, Blue Bloods, he noted that he focuses on situational morality.

“The individuals in these stories are striving to do good, and some of them are very conflicted about not being able to do good,” he said.

Coonrod, the founder of the Arden Party and Compagnia de’ Colombari, two New York-based theater companies, said she brings her own religious imaginings to a live audience through literary interpretations. She once asked a light designer to create a literal interpretation of the birth of Christ as “the light of the world,” creating a scenario where the actress playing Mary appeared to cradle light. “Is it a baby? Is it a cloth that comes undone? Or is it actually light?” Coonrod asked, noting how theater can stimulate our religious imaginations.

The conference was a follow-up to the first Catholic Imagination conference at the University of Southern California held in spring of 2015.

Angela O’Donnell, conference organizer and associate director of the Curran Center, noted the timeliness of this year’s conference, saying writers were “never so relevant as we are now.”

“In any given culture, writers are the designated truth-tellers, as well as the repository of memory,” she said. “Every era needs its writers to remind people of their core values and hold us to exacting standards of thought and action.”
Angie Chen contributed reporting

But soon enough, blue skies and a bright sun betrayed remnants of a snowstorm that had hit the city just a few days earlier.

Harrison High School Marching Band, a neighbor of Fordham’s Westchester campus, led the Rams up Fifth Avenue. With members of Rose Hill campus’s Fordham Prep following just behind, the contingent created an impressive sea of maroon.

“If you have any bit of Irish in you, it’s a very good day!” said Peter Dolan, GABELLI ’71, ’75.

It was a day for Fordham to be especially proud as, this year, Michael Dowling, GSS ’74, president and chief executive officer of Northwell Health, served as grand marshal.

On the avenue, spectators took note of the size of Fordham’s contingent: “Go Rams!” “FUV!” “A beacon in the Bronx!” and “My friend goes there!” Rochelle Grubb, who said she has no affiliation with the University, led the Rams in a spontaneous cheer anyhow: “Give me an F! Give me an O! Give me an R! … ”

Immigrant Roots

The parade made its way past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where marchers tipped their hats to Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Just beyond the bronze doors, behind a marble edifice that was built by immigrants, lay the tomb of Fordham founder Archbishop John Hughes. Those same immigrants were universally spurned by the nation when they arrived, said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“When Archbishop Hughes came to the United States as an immigrant from Ireland, he had the faith and a burning desire to do well, but he had a deep sense of what it was to be an outsider,” said Father McShane. “He founded Fordham so that the Irish immigrants would break out of that terrible cycle of poverty that they lived in and had to contend with.”

“When the Irish came over, nobody gave them anything,” said Bob O’Kane, FCRH ’70. “We had to make our own way.”

Prior to the parade, nearly 200 alumni and friends gathered for a breakfast at the Yale Club’s Grand Ballroom. The surroundings were a reminder of how far the Irish had come, as was emphasized in a talk given by author Peter Quinn, GSAS ’75.

Toward Diversity

In a humorous start, Quinn said the University’s Bronx Irish Catholic roots were so strong they were known as “BIC for short.” But Fordham’s Irish identity was soon complemented by a generous influx of Italians and others from the borough’s “ethnic Serengeti.” He spoke of a friendly Irish/Italian rivalry in which the Feast of St. Joseph was celebrated by Italians with equal fervor to St. Patrick’s Day, and where Irish-Italian “intermarriages” produced “some of the borough’s best-looking offspring.”

Geralyn Neumann, FCRH ’86, affirmed his description. “When we went, Fordham was pretty diverse. There were a lot of Irish, Italians, and commuters from the Bronx community.”

Quinn said that in Ireland the holiday takes on a more subdued tone than in the United States.

From Struggle to Triumph

“That’s because when we celebrate Ireland’s national saint, we recall an American story of immigrant struggles, survival, and ultimate triumph,” he said. It is a story that began with a British imperial government that “put economic theory above human suffering and produced Europe’s greatest toll of civilian death between the Black Death and the World Wars.”

He said nearly 1 million Irish immigrants passed though New York City’s seaport. Once here, they were greeted with signs of “No Irish need apply” for jobs. The most famous cartoonist of the day, he said, portrayed them as apes.

“But we applied anyway. We changed the country’s politics, transformed its cities, and defied those who claimed America was theirs alone,” he said. “We fought and died for the country’s wars, we insisted on the rights of working people, and we refused to accept the remains from the banquets of the few.”

He said that the Irish eventually shared in the country’s successes, but today “we sometimes turn our back on those [being] denied what we had gained.”

He said that the Irish have proved that becoming American doesn’t mean “abjuring your religion [or] abandoning your heritage,” and asked marchers to to remember that as they passed by the cathedral.

“These are not a faceless hoard of strangers … but the faces of our ancestors, an image of ourselves.”

While the Rams marched up Fifth Avenue, Fordham’s University Church joined institutions worldwide in ringing its bell for one minute in recognition of “Bells of Joy,” an initiative launched by former Irish President Mary McAleese to stand against hatred and fear of our immigrant brothers and sisters.

“I was told that my great-grandfather cobbled the shoes of the Jesuits there,” says Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in Irish history at Fordham in 1975.

Four years later, he left academia to become a speechwriter for New York governors—first for Hugh Carey until 1982, and then for Mario Cuomo. Quinn was a key contributor to several of Cuomo’s most memorable speeches, including his July 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—widely regarded as one of the most powerful of the past four decades.

Quinn left the governor’s office in 1985 to become the chief speechwriter for Time Warner—a transition he made while working on Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which won a 1995 American Book Award.

He followed that with a collection of essays, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007), and a series of historical novels—Hour of the Cat (2005), The Man Who Never Returned (2010), and Dry Bones (2013)—all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

Quinn and his wife, Kathleen, have two adult children, both of whom are Fordham graduates. He recently met with FORDHAM magazine to discuss his family history, his writing, and more.

How much did you know about your ancestors when you were growing up? Did your parents talk much about them?
No. I mean, I heard anecdotes and I always knew I was Irish—our Catholicism was our Irishness. But I think my parents’ generation felt, “We’re moving into America. That is the past. There’s no need to have it beyond St. Patrick’s Day.” You’re very proud of being Irish, but the particulars of it were not of interest. I think in my parents’ case, and their parents’, they pushed their children ahead, you know, and made sure that they went to college. I only knew one grandparent, and they never talked about Ireland. Never. And I think they loved cities—you know, the whole Irish farming experience hadn’t been too great.

Your great-grandfather Michael Manning, how much do you know about what brought him to America?
It was the famine that would have brought him. He would have been one of the 2 million Irish who left in 10 years.

When did you really delve into that history and learn more about what the immigrant experience must’ve been like for him?
Well, that’s how I wound up writing a novel. I was studying for a Ph.D. in Irish history with Maurice O’Connell at Fordham. Then I left the academic world to go into politics, and I used to go to the state library to research speeches. I found this housing report for 1855 that was like a description of Dickensian London. I recognized that this is where my great-grandparents lived, and I had never heard anything about it. So then I began to look into that, the conditions in New York in the 1840s and ’50s. It had an infant mortality rate like the third world. It didn’t have a sewer system. So I realized, in a sense, why they didn’t tell us all this growing up. What was the use in knowing that?

Do you think there is a tendency to romanticize the immigrant experience generations later, and do you see a danger in that?
Oh, yeah, it’s a human tendency. It becomes part of a sentimental path rather than a reliving of the brutal reality that so many people go through.

And I think the danger is that you can lose sympathy with people in poverty and difficult circumstances now, thinking, “We were more noble the way we did it.” You forget the people who didn’t survive, who were victims of a lack of opportunity, poverty. We tidy it up. I always say America loves immigrants, but they have to be here two or three generations before anybody loves them.

People lose sight of the kind of labels and stereotypes that have been attached to new immigrant groups. The Irish, their disease was cholera. People thought they carried it with them. It came from tainted water, but people didn’t want to live around the Irish because they thought it was their disease, and they were judged to be mentally inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It’s like IQ tests, when they were first used at Ellis Island: They felt that Italians and Jews would bring down the national IQ. So you just see these things, and I don’t know how you cure it.

I think if you’re Irish and if you understand your history, if it doesn’t leave you with sympathy for the underdog, I don’t know what would.

You’ve written—both in Banished Children of Eve and in Looking for Jimmy—about the pivotal role Archbishop John Hughes, Fordham’s founder, played in galvanizing “the Irish-American process of reorganization” in the mid-19th century. How would you sum up his contributions?
I always say he was as much an Irish chieftain as a Catholic churchman. He’s the stem of the whole flower, the central figure, or however you want to describe it. He was here when a million Irish came out of Ireland from the famine, essentially skill-less, impoverished, and he was the mainspring of their reorganization. I always say that the Irish experience in America was about reorganizing. They were a mob when they came here. They had no financial resources. They had no education. They had no skills.

The engines of reorganization were the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party (which called itself the “Organization”), and the labor movement. The thing was to know the community was there, and it held together. Things cohered.

How did you go from grad school at Fordham to political speechwriting?
I wrote an article for America magazine in 1979 called “An American Irish St. Patrick’s Day.” I submitted it because, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was fascinated by this Irish-American experience that seemed to me to be going away without having been examined. We never looked at ourselves. Now we were moving to the suburbs. We were losing that thing I was talking about; the coherent thing was falling apart. But where was the record of it? Supposedly the Irish are great writers, but I couldn’t find any novels about the Irish-American experience. One, Elizabeth Cullinan, she wrote a beautiful novel, House of Gold, about the Bronx parish that I grew up in. But I remember everybody was horrified that she wrote it. She was putting out the family laundry. My mother was like, “How could she do that?”

So I wrote the article about this, and a Fordham alumnus read it and gave it to [New York Governor] Hugh Carey, who knew my father and was looking for a speechwriter. Out of the blue, they asked me to write the Fordham Law School commencement speech for him. I’d never written a speech. But I was looking for a job, and I didn’t want to be underemployed, so I wrote the speech. They really liked it and eventually offered me a job. I said I’ll do it for a year and then go back to academics. That was almost 40 years ago.

What did you learn from your experience in Albany?
To work in politics behind the scenes, you learn so much about the dynamics of human interrelationships, how much is based on personal relationships. Merit and hard work are no match for it. You know what was the great motto of the Albany machine? Honesty is no substitute for experience.

At what point did an academic career recede in your rearview mirror?
It receded when I got my second raise. I was making about twice what I’d been making. And then I got married. My wife is from the Bronx. We knew each other 14 years before we got married. That’s what’s known in the west of Ireland as a “whirlwind courtship.” She had moved to Albany for graduate school. She was a rehabilitation counselor. We reunited and got married. Finishing the doctorate would have been taking a big step backward. And some part of me always wanted to be a writer. It was an ambition.

Tell me about the genesis of Banished Children of Eve. I understand you initially thought you were going to write a history of the Irish in New York. Is that right?
I was an ex-academic. I still have a big interest in history. I used to send away for remaindered books. As I began to think about the experience of the famine Irish coming into New York, I realized there was really no central history written of it, this big event. I got one book on the Draft Riots, The Armies of the Streets [by Adrian Cook]. This historian did what no historian had done before. He went down and got the records from the morgue. They used to say a thousand people died in the riots. He could identify a hundred and something people. One of the names was Peter Quinn. My Quinn ancestors weren’t here yet. They didn’t come until 1870, but I was like, “Whoa, who is he?”

The personalization of history struck me. There were no diaries, no records. Nobody wrote. There’s not a scrap of paper in my family of anybody’s experience. So I wanted to write a history, but I began to realize the voices I wanted were not recorded. Then I found out that this songwriter, Stephen Foster, was in New York at the time of the Draft Riots. I went down—I think he committed suicide in the New England Hotel on the Bowery, and I stood in front of it. Every novelist is part psychotic; we hear voices. And standing there, I kind of felt I knew who he was. I had never written fiction, not a lick of it. But I said the only way I reach those voices is in novels.

How conscious were you of the fact that as a novelist you were drawing from your work experiences—for example, from the time you worked as a court officer in the Bronx?
At some points I was, absolutely. Dealing with a city, I felt like it was in extremis [as it was during the Civil War]. Being in the South Bronx in the ’70s in a uniform and sitting in a courtroom with 150 people and saying, “Well, you know, these people look poor and strange to me. And this is what my ancestors looked like to the people who were wearing the uniforms at that time.”

I figured it wasn’t just an Irish story I was telling at that point because once you stepped off those boats, you’re no longer Irish. You’re still Irish, but you’re becoming something else. And part of that experience is you have to interact with people you never had to interact with before. You might hate them. But you have to live with them, and some part of you is going to rub off on each other. That dynamic hasn’t changed.

Since 2005, you’ve published a trilogy of historical-mystery novels featuring the Irish-American detective Fintan Dunne. Do you see those books as part of a continuum that began with Banished Children of Eve?
Yes, Fintan Dunne is a descendant of Jimmy Dunne [in Banished Children of Eve], but I don’t know how. He’s a cousin somehow. The idea was that they would be three books that would stand alone, but in a way tell the history of New York from the First World War to the Cold War. And the thread would be this Irish-Catholic guy, Fintan Dunne.

I love Raymond Chandler. I always felt his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne. I knew people that lived in that New York, and the thing about New York is, you never have to look for a story to tell. It’s right there in front of you.

How do you go about conducting research for your novels? When do you know enough’s enough?
I love doing research. Every writer wants excuses not to write, and research is the best excuse to have because you’re still working on the book. What I would try to do is immerse myself to the point where I would feel that I have some sense of that world. Then I would start to write, and if I had to look for other pieces, I would.

When I was researching Banished Children, my wife and daughter were away for the summer at Shelter Island. I would go out on weekends, but every night after work, I’d go to the newspaper division of the New York Public Library. I read all of the newspapers from the Civil War. I remember sitting there, and the air conditioner wasn’t working. It was August. I said, well, now I’ll read all of Harper’s Weekly. Then I realized I can either write this or research it for the rest of my life because the research is quicksand; it’s so interesting.

Did it get harder to stop researching for the Fintan Dunne books because it’s just so much easier to find things these days?
Oh, yeah, it’s unbelievable. I used to keep a list at my desk. I’d write down things to look up. Then at lunch hour—I was working at the Time-Life building—I’d run to the library. Now you just go online. It’s so much easier but not as much fun. It was so much more like detective work before. You were like Fintan Dunne. You were a gumshoe tracking stuff down.

What does it mean to you to be an American of Irish ancestry born in New York? What kind of cultural inheritance do those three things imply?
My father once said to me that the legacy of being Irish is having a sense of humor and rooting for the underdog. And if you’re going to live in New York City, those are two necessary things!

And I think the great thing about being Irish and Catholic in New York is you don’t have to be. Everybody can choose what they want to be. It’s not an identity imposed on you. Tomorrow, I could be an American Buddhist. To me, that makes it so much more valuable, you know, that freedom to be what you want to be that New York confers, I think, as much or more than any place in the world. I can be this. Then I can admit other people’s rights to their choices.

You’ve talked about storytelling as a noble occupation, something that unites us all. Would you elaborate on that?
You grow up, and you think there are serious jobs—accountant, lawyer, business CEO—and then you realize, the most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories. The first thing we did after we sat around campfires was to tell each other stories. It is essentially what it is to be human.

In every human society, one of the most important persons has been the storyteller, the seanachie in Irish. Before the Bible was written, it was spoken. Every religion is organized around a story. Every nation is organized around a story. Every family has its own myth.

Now I think there are bad stories. There are stories that are written or told badly, and then there are stories that are bad, like eugenics. That was a bad story. It was essentially a story that was used against other people to commit mass murder. Stories are very powerful.

One of the things I learned in writing speeches was that a good speech is a good story. And [Ronald] Reagan, one of his powers as president was, he had a story. He had the story of the frontiersman and the lone pioneer. One of the reasons why Cuomo is remembered is he had a story too—family, mom and pop. That’s what people listen to.

Do you ever itch to be back where you were—
To be young with hair? Sure, everybody does.

I mean, as a political speechwriter, having the opportunity to help tell a story in that way?
No. I’m really glad I did it. It was a defining experience. It helped me be a writer in ways I can’t describe. But I would never, ever want to do it again. For five minutes, I wouldn’t want to do it again. And I do think you have to be young to do it. It’s physically taxing. And it’s an exercise in anonymity.

Next month, you’ll be participating in a Fordham conference on “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination.” How would you define that term, and do you think of yourself as a Catholic writer?
When I’m writing, I never think about being Catholic. It’s just who I am. I’m not advancing any dogmas.

I have an essay in Looking for Jimmy where I said there are three elements to the Catholic imagination: sin, grace, and mercy. I wrote that years ago, and Pope Francis, the word he uses all the time now is mercy. We don’t want justice. We want justice for other people. We want mercy for ourselves. In politics, there’s not much mercy. It’s always been an in-demand commodity in the world, and it always will be, because it’s such a leap. Mercy is not deserved. It’s freely given, and there’s no rationale for it.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Watch Peter Quinn’s New York, a five-minute video in which Quinn talks about his noir-tinged Fintan Dunne series and the city as muse. “For me,” he begins, “New York City isn’t so much a setting as it is a character. It destroys some people, elevates others. But one thing New York won’t do is leave you alone. It’s always changing.”

While Tammany was corrupt, the organization procured food, jobs and other assistance for new immigrants who were shunned by established society, the panelists said at “Big Apple Politics and Catholic New York: 1845-1945,” the 12th annual Russo Family Lecture.

No one can truly understand the nature of Tammany without viewing it in the context of the Irish Famine of 1845 to 1851, said writer Peter Quinn, author of The Banished Children of Eve (Viking Press, 1994).

“The Famine imprinted the lesson that the first priority of power is getting it and keeping it out of the hands of those who would use it against you,” Quinn said.

The calamity killed as many as 1.5 million Irish and forced the emigration of roughly two million more. It occurred when Ireland was controlled by Great Britain, which withdrew its humanitarian support in the middle of the crisis.

Quinn pointed out that Tammany was built in opposition to the principles of free-market capitalism, which were used by Britain to abdicate its responsibility for the starving Irish.

The Famine immigrants who brought Tammany to power “could not theorize out of existence the people who couldn’t make it on their own, or chalk off their fate to the gods of macroeconomics,” Quinn said. “To them, government was the solution to poverty and powerlessness—not the cause.”

If the organization did so much good, then how has it become synonymous with corrupt American politics when many people and groups from the same era were just as crooked and far less benevolent?

The answer, according to historian Terry Golway, is the positive portrayal of abolitionists and their offspring, progressive social reformers, who set about defeating Tammany in the Gilded Age.

“Many historians ignored the anti-Catholicism of the abolitionist movement because they wanted to portray these people as heroes,” said Golway, author of Irish Rebel, John Devoy and America’s Fight for Irish Freedom (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998). So reformers have been lionized at the expense of machine politics.

Frank Barry tells the audience that Gilded Age social reformers frequently fell victim to their own noble aspirations. Photo by Joseph McLaughlin

“Tammany was courting African Americans at a time when ‘Big P Progressives’ in the South were shutting down African-American avenues to equality,” he said.

Indeed, reformers were not the great defenders of democracy that many believe, said panelist Frank Barry, author of The Scandal of Reform: The Grand Failure of New York’s Political Crusaders and the Death of Nonpartisanship (Rutgers University Press, 2009).

As an example, Barry pointed out that reformers proposed an amendment to the New York state constitution in 1877 that New York City should be run by finance boards consisting solely of landholders.

“That would have disenfranchised roughly half of the city,” he said.

Conversely, Tammany politicians in Albany pushed through sweeping social welfare reforms in the early 20th century that ameliorated a wide swath of society’s ills, Barry said. Those reforms were brought to the entire nation when Franklin Roosevelt incorporated them in the New Deal.

Another reason that Tammany remains largely misunderstood is because its leaders never told their own stories, according to James T. Fisher, Ph.D., professor of theology and American studies at Fordham and author of On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie and the Soul of the Port of New York(Cornell University Press, 2009).

“The Tammany bosses weren’t back-slapping storytellers. They were businessmen,” Fisher said. “E.L. Godkin said that there were only three things that Tammany feared—honest work, the penitentiary and biography.

“It’s that code of silence, which was so much a part of second-generation Irish-American culture, that the full biographies of these Tammany bosses and their organization may never be known.”

Joseph McLaughlin

Alumni from several states returned to the Rose Hill campus Saturday, March 31, to participate in Communitas, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ reunion celebration marking it’s 90th anniversary. The daylong celebration drew more than 100 visitors to the campus to hear scholarly lectures, classical music, and a keynote speech by Peter Quinn (GSAS ’75), author of the novel Banished Children of Eve (Viking, 1994), winner of the 1995 American Book Award.

“This spring weekend in the Bronx has been made more glorious by your presence,” Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham University, told GSAS alumni. “You are our icons, our pantheons, those who have done well as scholars. It is a great joy to welcome you home, and we ask you to keep us true to our mission–of educating scholars who will go out into the world and make a difference.”

Quinn, a third-generation New Yorker whose grandparents were born in Ireland, delivered the semi-annual Gannon Lecture on “Writes of Passage: Confessions of a Bronx Irish Scribbler.” Growing up in a “provincial, parochial, prosaic” Irish-Catholic neighborhood in the Bronx, Quinn said that he never felt as if he belonged to the “enterprise of literature.”

“Growing up I didn’t know any [fiction]writers. It seemed to me that writers didn’t so much come from a different place as live on a different planet,” he said.

Communitas celebrated the past 90 years of scholarly achievements by GSAS faculty, students and alumni. GSAS has 19 departments that offer 11 doctoral degrees and 16 master’s degrees. It recently added a master’s degree program in elections and campaign management and has applied to the state to establish a master’s degree program in Latin America and Latino studies.

Nancy Busch, Ph.D., dean of the GSAS, said that applications to the GSAS are at record numbers, up 12 percent in the last year, and that the school’s student selectivity in both the master’s and doctoral programs is on the rise. She also said that the Department of English had a 100 percent placement record for its doctoral students, in full-time teaching positions — a statistic she said is “almost unheard of.”

“We have a remarkable faculty, remarkable students and remarkable candidates in the pipeline coming toward us,” Busch said. “It is because of you [alumni]that we are achieving new heights.”

Quinn said that “luck” led to his start as a professional writer, when he had occasional articles accepted at America while a graduate student in history. Based on his articles, he was offered a speechwriting position in the office of Hugh Carey, then New York state governor.

During his six-year career writing for Carey and, subsequently, for Mario Cuomo, however, Quinn became inspired to find his own voice in the written word. Reflecting on his struggle to make the transition to fiction, Quinn said that a novelist must make a “leap of faith” to believe three things: that he has something to say, that he has the stamina to get it down on paper, and that he believes people have a genuine interest in hearing it.

“These are not small things to believe,” he said. “Writing involves persistence rather than brilliance. I had a [novelist]friend who told me that you start by making the time. That truth penetrated my cast iron Irish cranium; if writing mattered to me as much as I insisted it did, I would have to carve out the space to make writing not something I did when I felt like it, but something I did the same as brushing my teeth.”

He also credited a former Fordham professor, Elizabeth Cullinan, author of the novel, House of Gold (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), with showing him that the raw material of literature can be found anywhere. Her novel about a contemporary Irish American matriarch in the Bronx, takes place on Poplar Street, across from Quinn’s old parish, St. Raymonds. “It was a street I knew, as ordinary as 100 other Bronx streets, now transubstantiated into the stuff of literature. In the hands of a writer, our shared human struggle is as rich and moving on Poplar Street as in the Royal apartments of Elsinor—that was one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned,” he said.

In addition to publishing two novels and a book of essays, Quinn is the author of an Emmy award-winning documentary, McSorley’s New York, and has worked on academy award-nominated films both as a commentator and historical advisor.

– Janet Sassi