Mysteries of My Father [Hardcover]

Thomas Fleming (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2005

A son comes of age in a fiercely political world

"Thomas Fleming gives us an unforgettable story about an immigrant family--his family--as it struggles to find a place in the American century. He shares with us the dreams and heartaches of his parents, and, in the end, he reminds us of the mysterious and forgiving power of love."
--Terry Golway, author of The Irish in America

"A truly moving story of a lifelong duel between father and son, Mysteries of My Father also vibrates with the great good humor that grows out of ward politics, and pulses with the heartfelt drama of a family just getting by. There were some bad times in the Fleming family story, but Tom Fleming prevails to the good times, and the best time is left to the reader. What a wonderful time I had reading this book."
--Dennis Smith, author of the Report from Engine Co. 82 and Report from Ground Zero

"A well-written, fascinating political history."
--Margaret Truman, author of Murder at Union Station

"With a historian's fidelity and a poet's empathy, Tom Fleming has created a textured study of three generations of Irish-Americans, whose clashing spiritual values inform their integration into New Jersey's social and political hierarchy. Mysteries of My Father is an American classic achieved by a master storyteller's talents for exploring the tensions and bonds between a father and his sons. Among the literary wonders of this brisk and moving memoir is the father's emergence as a seminal American character--brusque and pragmatic, yet capable of expected tenderness to his sons."
--Sidney Offit, author of Memoir of the Bookie's Son

"If you care about what it means to be an Irish-American, or about New Jersey political history, or about the relationships between fathers and sons, or about wonderful writing, run--don't walk--out to buy Tom Fleming's Mysteries of My Father."
--Nick Acocella, publisher of Politifax

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

We were always a confessional people, we Irish, but only as long as the listener was a priest in the box or a pal nodding after a night of knocking back pints. We didn't tell every Tom, Dick or Mick our troubles. It wasn't done.Historians and scholars may pull me up short on this, but it seems to me that until recently, perhaps the last 30 years or so, there was a great paucity of memoir in the Irish and Irish-American world. Keep your troubles behind the lace curtain, darling, or the neighbors will be talking. There was Eugene O'Neill, of course, but he was an aberration.It's changing. The Irish-Americans are looking back and getting it down on paper. They're a different breed, the Irish-Americans, not to be confused with the Irish Back Home.You'll discover those differences in Thomas Fleming's majestic new book, Mysteries of My Father, a book in which there are enough plots and themes for a dozen novels. There is the marriage of Fleming's father, Teddy, to his mother, Kitty. They are a classic, almost stereotypical, pair: he the ill-educated tough ward politician aware of his shortcomings, she the gentle, well-educated beauty with social aspirations. You may not have much patience with Kitty. She despises Teddy's political world, especially the man at the top in Jersey City, Frank Hague. She simply doesn't understand that, for many Irish in those days, that was the way you had to go. You helped your own, you found them jobs, you made sure they voted and you rewarded them. You made your way with your fists.No, Kitty didn't understand. She looked along other avenues and saw "the quality" secure in their snobbery. That was the family tragedy, though the tragedy was mostly Teddy's.What an extraordinary man—tough enough, brave enough, smart enough to earn a battlefield commission. Personable enough to make an impression on Frank Hague.The ingredients of this memoir are particularly Irish-American. The setting is Jersey City, then an Irish (American) political powerhouse ruled by Hague. You may think "Ah, yes, the usual Irish political machine," but Fleming dismisses the notion of something well-oiled and running smoothly. What he saw around Frank Hague was essentially a ragtag army of hangers-on and opportunists.Teddy gives lip service to the church, but his faith goes fist deep. He will bow to monsignors and bishops but it's all political. In families like the Flemings, as in most Irish-American families, it is the women who keep the faith alive.Irishness is an ingredient of the book, but not as the Irish Back Home would understand it. There is a reference to the Dolan family (Kitty was a Dolan) and their relationship with the Old Country. "Seldom if ever was Ireland mentioned in the Dolan household as a source of anger and sorrow. To Tom Dolan, the mother country was not even a memory.... Instead, the Dolans felt a subtle discomfort about their Irish Catholic name in mostly Protestant uptown Jersey City."This book is mainly a chronicle of love—repressed, frustrated, lost, finally exploding, as Thomas Fleming leads us skillfully from the first breathless moments between Teddy and Kitty through the deterioration of their marriage to a later time when the son begins to understand his father's volcanic love.Andrew Greeley once wrote of a scholar going to Washington looking for funds to introduce courses on the Irish-American experience. The Washington official said, "No. The Irish don't count anymore."Not on the political scene, perhaps, but watch out for an Irish-American literature that digs deep, a literature with Thomas Fleming as standard bearer. This, for the historian, novelist and playwright, is still, I think, virgin territory. There's gold here. McCourt's Teacher Man, a memoir of this 30 years of teaching in New York City schools, will be published by Scriber in the fall.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Mysteries of My Father is a rich book. Rich in Fleming’s textured description of Jersey City politics. Rich in wonderful personal anecdotes (Frank Hague’s last hurrah on a platform amid the surging, rebellious voters of the Second Ward is the stuff of epic poetry). Rich in sympathetic understanding of Teddy and Kitty and of their tempestuous marriage. Rich in honest evocation of ‘the morally grey world of Hudson County politics.’ And rich in its power to bring alive the once vital, now vanished world of the big-city Irish-American political machine… A moving, masterly, forgiving remembrance." (Commonwealth Magazine)

Although a paternal portrait may be his primary aim, Thomas Fleming's subtitle promises, more broadly, "an Irish-American memoir." For some of us, that's a worrisome vow, portending crapulous fathers who imbibe paychecks, pious wives who berate husbands for same and hordes of children wailing in squalor. True to form, the late-19th-century Jersey City to which Mr. Fleming's grandparents migrated was home to these auld Gaelic clichés. What adds the American to the Irish in this story, though, is its celebration not merely of stumbling and wallowing but of rebelling and ruling.
Following an eminent career as a writer of both history and fiction, Mr. Fleming has gone rummaging in his own family archives to produce Mysteries of My Father, a memoir of his father's fight to emerge from corrupting poverty with some part of his soul unbruised. And quite a scrap it was.
From his earliest (if never exactly tender) years, Teddy Fleming slugged his way out of obligations and into opportunities. One of his earliest bouts involved menacing a schoolmate into serving as his proxy for mandatory weekday Mass so that Teddy could earn money for his family as a newsie in Manhattan, a situation he had to secure and maintain with yet more hand-to-hand persuasion. As he matured, Fleming the elder punched, shoved and occasionally even boxed his way through the ranks of the 312th Regiment in World War I and the Jersey City Democratic organization during the Depression.
The civilizing influence of the author's mother, Kitty Dolan, went a long way toward keeping the Fleming household free from alcohol, domestic violence and lawless grammar. Eventually, though, her Catholic aspirations to Protestant gentility and heavy-handed elocution lessons failed to soothe her brute of a husband. In fact, the rigorous application of her snobbery to his rough patches wore away only the affection from their marriage, leaving bare an estrangement that was -- and continues to be -- a source of anguish for the author.
Teddy Fleming enjoyed many decades as the muscle in Mayor Frank Hague's Jersey City machine but, at the end, his triumphs withered. Following Kitty's "unconscious suicide," in which she ignored obvious warnings of breast cancer until she succumbed to it, Teddy Fleming lost his political puissance and, ultimately, all the strength he once possessed to continue his contest with life.
Teddy's son eventually left Jersey City to traverse the broad atlas of American history in more than a dozen books (e.g., "Liberty! The American Revolution," "Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America" and "The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I"). His talent for capturing the details of social and political history shines through in this memoir, particularly in the passages that give context to Teddy Fleming's rise to leader of the Sixth Ward, chairman of the Board of Chosen Freeholders, judge of the Second Criminal Court and sheriff of Hudson County. On these pages, Mr. Fleming evokes Edmund Morris's portrait of Teddy Roosevelt's political apprenticeship in "Theodore Rex."
Occasionally, though, when the focus constricts to the personal, one wonders whether Mr. Fleming labors under an excess of intimacy with his subject. For while the vigor of his father's escape from poverty is undeniable, its morality is less obvious. Mr. Fleming readily acknowledges the rules and noses that his father bent along the way, but he too easily pardons his father's actions as simply choices made "within the confines of his harsh world."
No doubt Jersey City then was harsh, for many of its citizens. But something ominous lurks behind the landslide victories that Teddy Fleming engineered in his Sixth Ward while other Democrats across the city suffered losses. When the political opposition does at last prevail and begins picking through the remnants of his father's political career, Thomas Fleming dismisses the "marvelous righteousness" of their probes.
Still, the book's home-grown anecdotes are often as charming as they are ethically -- and, at times, ethnically -- precarious. Take, for instance, the time a Tammany boss rewarded Mr. Fleming's grandfather for civic illegalities with an haute meal in Brooklyn. For Dave Fleming, repasts of several courses were unfamiliar and not terribly appetizing. After struggling through soup and salad, he drew the line at lobster. "I drank your hot wather and I aate yer grass. But I'll be damned if I'll aate that bug!"
Perhaps what makes this story Irish-American is not, as Mr. Fleming suggests, the promise of an unhappy ending -- that's what makes it Irish -- but rather the way it culminates in the author himself, a man who has achieved so much success so few generations removed from the famished destitution that first brought his family to this country. (Wall Street Journal , July 20, 2005)

"Thomas Fleming has finally produced his masterpiece." (Irish America)

Inspired by the discovery of a ring once worn by his father during World War I, historian and novelist Fleming (The Officers' Wives) chronicles three generations of his Irish American family in early 20th-century Jersey City, NJ. The narrative alternates between the families of Fleming's father and mother, both of whom had lower-class Irish American beginnings. His father, Teddy, rose to prominence as a sheriff under the reign of corrupt political boss Frank Hague, while his mother, Kitty, raised two sons and remained devoted to her husband, even after their love deteriorated. By uniting these two strands of personal history, Fleming's story transcends traditional memoir and becomes a moving examination of the unique challenges faced by 20th-century Irish Americans as they struggled to integrate into American society. The constant rift between Catholics and Protestants, survival in the midst of crippling poverty, the significance of education, and the deep, persistent bonds of family are key themes here. Recommended for large public and academic collections.—Ben Bruton, Murray, KY (Library Journal, May 1, 2005)

We were always a confessional people, we Irish, but only as long as the listener was a priest in the box or a pal nodding after a night of knocking back pints. We didn't tell every Tom, Dick or Mick our troubles. It wasn't done.
Historians and scholars may pull me up short on this, but it seems to me that until recently, perhaps the last 30 years or so, there was a great paucity of memoir in the Irish and Irish-American world. Keep your troubles behind the lace curtain, darling, or the neighbors will be talking. There was Eugene O'Neill, of course, but he was an aberration.
It's changing. The Irish-Americans are looking back and getting it down on paper. They're a different breed, the Irish-Americans, not to be confused with the Irish Back Home.
You'll discover those differences in Thomas Fleming's majestic new book, Mysteries of My Father, a book in which there are enough plots and themes for a dozen novels. There is the marriage of Fleming's father, Teddy, to his mother, Kitty. They are a classic, almost stereotypical, pair: he the ill-educated tough ward politician aware of his shortcomings, she the gentle, well-educated beauty with social aspirations.
You may not have much patience with Kitty. She despises Teddy's political world, especially the man at the top in Jersey City, Frank Hague. She simply doesn't understand that, for many Irish in those days, that was the way you had to go. You helped your own, you found them jobs, you made sure they voted and you rewarded them. You made your way with your fists.
No, Kitty didn't understand. She looked along other avenues and saw "the quality" secure in their snobbery. That was the family tragedy, though the tragedy was mostly Teddy's.
What an extraordinary man-tough enough, brave enough, smart enough to earn a battlefield commission. Personable enough to make an impression on Frank Hague.
The ingredients of this memoir are particularly Irish-American. The setting is Jersey City, then an Irish (American) political powerhouse ruled by Frank Hague. You may think "Ah, yes, the usual Irish political machine," but Fleming dismisses the notion of something well-oiled and running smoothly. What he saw around Frank Hague was essentially a ragtag army of hangers-on and opportunists.
Teddy gives lip service to the church, but his faith goes fist deep. He will bow to monsignors and bishops but it's all political. In families like the Flemings, as in most Irish-American families, it is the women who keep the faith alive.
Irishness is an ingredient of the book, but not as the Irish Back Home would understand it. There is a reference to the Dolan family (Kitty was a Dolan) and their relationship with the Old Country. "Seldom if ever was Ireland mentioned in the Dolan household as a source of anger and sorrow. To Tom Dolan, the mother country was not even a memory.... Instead, the Dolans felt a subtle discomfort about their Irish Catholic name in mostly Protestant uptown Jersey City."
This book is mainly a chronicle of love-repressed, frustrated, lost, finally exploding, as Thomas Fleming leads us skillfully from the first breathless moments between Teddy and Kitty through the deterioration of their marriage to a later time when the son begins to understand his father's volcanic love.
Andrew Greeley once wrote of a scholar going to Washington looking for funds to introduce courses o...

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471655155
• ISBN-13: 978-0471655152
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #908,770 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"How do you write a book?" 24 year old Thomas Fleming asked bestselling writer Fulton Oursler in 1951. "Write four pages a day," Oursler said. "Every day except Sunday. Whether you feel like it or not. Inspiration consists of putting the seat of your pants on the chair at your desk." Fleming has followed this advice to good effect. His latest effort, "The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers," is his 50th published book. Twenty three of them have been novels. He is the only writer in the history of the Book of the Month Club to have main selections in fiction and in nonfiction. Many have won prizes. Recently he received the Burack Prize from Boston University for lifetime achievement. In nonfiction he has specialized in the American Revolution. He sees Intimate Lives as a perfect combination of his double talent as a novelist and historian. "Novelists focus on the imtimate side of life. This is the first time anyone has looked at the intimate side of the lives of these famous Americans, with an historian's eyes." Fleming was born in Jersey City, the son of a powerful local politician. He has had a lifetime interest in American politics. He also wrote a history of West Point which the New York Times called "the best...ever written." Military history is another strong interest. He lives in New York with his wife, Alice Fleming, who is a gifted writer of books for young readers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic American Memoir in a League with Hickam and Wolfe, May 23, 2005

By 

David J. Forsmark "Book Reviewer" (Flushing, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mysteries of My Father (Hardcover)

Acclaimed historian Thomas Fleming has written popular histories of the Revolutionary War, several controversial re-examinations of such hallowed 20th century figures as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and best-selling historical novels.

No one, however, could have guessed that his personal history, as told in "Mysteries of My Father," would provide the material for arguably his most gripping and powerful work.

"New Jersey" and "corruption" go together like "hot fudge" and "sundae." The phrase recalls cliched images of fat, cigar-smoking pols raking in the big bucks and stealing from the poor.

Fleming's family memoir takes an inside look at the ultimate political machine run by Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, a boss who had presidents coming to him to curry his favor. But the picture is not quite what the tsk-tsk tone of the stereotypical history book would suggest.

Fleming points out that the old-fashioned political machines often were all that certain poor, ethnic communities had to stand up for them.

Like Homer Hickam's "Rocket Boys" (the basis for the movie "October Sky") and Brian McDonald's "My Father's Gun," this is the story of an important subculture going through the pressure cooker of 20th century changes, told by a narrator who is close enough to the action to take an inside look but enough of a nonparticipant to have the distance required for a proper perspective.

Above all, these books tell, at their heart, the universal story of sons struggling to make their way out of their fathers' shadows - very big shadows, in fact, cast by larger-than-life figures.

At the center of "Mysteries" is Thomas "Teddy" Fleming Sr., who fought bravely in the trenches of France during World War I though he had little use for the cause. Irish-Americans at the time had no interest in saving Britain from Germany, and they had legitimate trouble with the argument that Germany was any more expansionist than the country that had occupied the auld sod for centuries.

However, the war would pave the way for two fateful factors of Teddy's life. First, he was away while most young people his age married, and second, his heroic status brought him to the attention of the Irish Democrat political machine that held power in Jersey City.

It was only logical that the city's most eligible bachelor and the most popular single girl would be thrown together by their friends. Kitty Dolan was a pretty socialite who still was available only because her fiance had fallen fatally ill.

What even her friends and family did not realize, however, was that Kitty saw her beau as a ticket out of what she thought of as low Irish life and society.

Like the politicians, Kitty saw the potential in Teddy and how she could use it to her ends. Unlike them, however, Kitty had wholesale changes in mind for her husband, while the political machine gave him a job that perfectly suited his abilities, personality and skills - and immersed him in the life that Kitty so despised.

The war hero and the tragic figure seemed like the perfect couple to the outside world, but there's no loathing like self-loathing, and when Kitty turns it outward, it's breathtaking in its intensity. When their children were old enough to recognize it, they were not merely caught in the crossfire of a contentious marriage, but Kitty also tried to enlist them as combatants.

Fleming presents his parents, warts and all, but also with affection. While showing Kitty as the aggressor, he refuses to take sides, as each person reacted in the exact wrong manner to make amends - perhaps because each was so ill-suited for the other and not prepared to change.

By the time the usually taciturn elder Fleming -?hen a county sheriff and arguably the second-most powerful man in the nation's most effective political machine - tearfully exclaims to his sons, "You're all I have," the reader's heart will be as broken as if it were his own family's trauma.

"Memories of My Father" shows the inside of ethnic politics, such as how genuine grievances become excuses for corruption though the justification of "It's our turn to get ours now." This manifests itself in vote-stealing (the author personally was responsible for keeping his deceased grandmother on the absentee voter roles for years), heavy-handed patronage and outright theft.

Fleming also takes shots at the notion of "hyphenated Americanism," noting that no matter how much reverence is expressed for the Old Country, after a generation, immigrants invariably become so Americanized as to be completely alien to those in the country they left.

This book has enough subplots for at least another couple of hundred pages. If he had chosen to, Fleming could have serialized his and his family's life like the great memoirist Tobias Wolfe. He takes a hard look at the role of the Catholic Church in the Irish immigrant culture of the time, and the author's Navy experiences during the fall of China undoubtedly could have filled more than just one chapter.

"Mysteries of my Father" is a uniquely American memoir and a story as old as Genesis. As Father's Day approaches, this heartfelt, powerful and ultimately loving book is an ideal gift for the reader on your list.
(review run in the Flint Journal, Flint, MI)

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tender Account of a Tough Man's Life, September 19, 2005

By 

Brendan J. Clary (Ellicott City, Md USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mysteries of My Father (Hardcover)

Ernest Hemingway observed that there is nothing more difficult to write about than a man's life. In Mysteries of My Father, novelist and historian Thomas Fleming superbly does just that, as he examines his father Teddy Fleming's entire life in "downtown" Irish-Catholic Jersey City in the first half of twentieth-century America. Soul, verve, wit and heart emerge throughout.


Teddy Fleming, with an eighth grade education and an indomitable will, overcomes the limited opportunities of his impoverished environment by first leading men in World War I combat. There he learns to trust himself while at the same time accepting the role of luck, or fate, in life. Once home, he rises as a ward organizer for legendary political boss Frank "I am the law" Hague, who eventually appoints Teddy as sheriff of Hudson County, New Jersey.


The author weaves family history with the shared experience of early Irish-Americans who struggle for security against Protestant domination. This rich document speaks of fathers and sons, urban politics in the Tammany Hall era, the education of a historian, the imperative of finding a vocation, the power and influence of the Catholic Church, the pressures of poverty in the days of "Help Wanted---No Irish Need Apply" signs, and most directly, the dissolution of the marriage between the author's mother and father.


The first half of the book, which predates the author's birth, introduces many extended family relatives. The time you spend getting to know everyone is a modest chore as the son deliberately assembles his father's portrait. As we move toward the author's first person perceptions in the second half of the account, though, the book begins to sprint.


We watch as Teddy courts and marries refined schoolteacher Kitty Dolan, who detests her husband's immersion in lowbrow political chicanery and the Hague machine's reciprocal hold on Teddy's identity. Kitty's frustrated desire to transform her husband from a "thick mick" into someone more upright and discerning informs her estrangement from him. She hardens her resentment with efforts to alienate father from son, and the author labors to find the cause of his mother's sorrow. Teddy Fleming, the man, is much more than the simple hack Kitty sees him to be, but the author never judges either parent. He accepts the love they can give.


Thomas Fleming is an elegant writer with a raconteur's facility for storytelling, tempered by a historian's devotion to accuracy. The author tells it like it is, to the extent he can, given his involvement in the events. The writer's willingness to confront his parents' disconnections all but verifies this commitment. He takes us to dark places but thankfully never loses a sense of humor along the way.


Lively tales of Teddy's varying roles as a Hague functionary and family patriarch are aplenty. Amid the systemic graft, massive corruption, and revolving cast of rogues, decency lies in Teddy's delivery of jobs for the needy and votes for the boss. Teddy Fleming, hardly a paragon of good government, is not without honor. He lives modestly and obeys his conscience so as to look proudly at "the guy in the glass"---his reflection---every day. Teddy's abetting of odiousness is secondary to his ethic of self-reliance. He is, at all times, true to himself.


This dignity makes Teddy's drift from Kitty all the more crushing. His rise in the Hague organization corresponds to an increasing distance from her, and a free fall ensues.


Thomas Fleming yearns to excavate his father's ways in the unforgiving political, cultural and economic landscape of Irish-Catholic Jersey City. To his son, Teddy Fleming's outward adherence to an iron code of loyalty, nerve and force conceals an inscrutable inner life which the author aches to know. The author's empathy and unforced voice are just right for this journey to find his father's spirit.


In this tender account of a tough man's whole life, Thomas Fleming reminds us that to love is to risk pain but also to know the fullness of being.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mysteries of my Grandfather, September 28, 2005

By 

Peter F. Daly (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mysteries of My Father (Hardcover)

This is an excellent book that mixes the talents of a good story teller with that of an historian. While the title has "An Irish-American Memoir" in it, it is certainly far more universal than that. It shows how people have to adapt to the world they live in not the one they wished they lived in, and how someones outward appearance can be quite different than the real inner person. This books works at several levels: the inner workings of marriages, parents and their children, making it in America as a newcomer or child of a newcomer, politics, and history. It's accuracy makes me realize how far we have come in 70 years but it also reminds me that for many of us our success and happiness traces back to some pretty tough, not highly educated, ward bosses like Teddy Fleming who cleared the way probably never fully realizing how much their day to day hard work would slowly change the world's major superpower to a more pluralistic and democractic country--even if some of their methods might shock our modern sensibilities.
I recognized the authenticity of this boook immmediately. My grandfather was also, for a while, part of the Frank Hague machine but as county engineer. He eventually left to be county engineer for Bergen County because he refused to approve a sewer project that Hague wanted to give to a friend of Hague's who my grandfather felt was not qualified to do the job properly. With a degree in engineering it was much easier for my grandfather to pick and choose where he worked.
Overall, a very enjoyable book at many levels.