The Pope of Hudson County.

Mysteries of My Father

An Irish-American Memoir

Thomas Fleming 

John Wiley & Sons, $24.95, 341 pp.

Over the past several years, Irish-American writers have produced a bounty of well-written, insightful memoirs. They range across the socio-economic spectrum from Andrew Sheehan's Chasing the Hawk, set amid the upper-middle-class comfort of a wealthy New Jersey suburb, to Dan Barry's Pull Me Up, an account of his lower-middle-class boyhood in Deer Park, Long Island, to Dennis Smith's A Song for Mary, Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls, and Frank McCourt's blockbuster, Angela's Ashes.

The newest addition to this impressive lineup is Thomas Fleming's Mysteries of My Father. As well as a lively, eloquent narrative that reflects the author's skills as a veteran novelist, Mysteries of My Father offers candid and unsparing insight into one of the most renowned yet unexplored areas of the Irish-American experience: the urban political machine.

In fact, as far as I can tell, despite the prevalence of Irish-American political machines in cities as disparate as Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Jersey City, Albany, and New York, home of the mother of all machines, Tammany Hall, Fleming's account is the sole rendering of their workings as told, if not by an insider, then as close as we're ever likely to get: by the son of an insider. (Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, the ruminations of a Tammany sachem, which has been in print continuously for over a century, is a mixed bag of self-justifications, street-level organizing tactics, and entertaining anti-civil-service rants.)

Some time ago, at a panel discussion on judicial corruption sponsored by the New York City bar association, I heard a participant, a law professor, dismiss Irish-American political machines in general and Tammany Hall in particular as "venal collections of hacks, crooks, and hangers-on." ("The Organization" was the term that the members themselves usually preferred.) That summary indictment of the partisan apparatuses that, to one degree or another, controlled many of America's largest cities for extensive periods of their history is, I think, widely shared. While not entirely inaccurate--there was corruption aplenty and hacks and crooks abounded--such a blanket appraisal is wildly, distortingly inadequate.

To measure just how inadequate, I would heartily recommend (and for haughty law professors, require) a close encounter with the protagonist of Tom Fleming's memoir, his father, the leader of Jersey City's Sixth Ward, chairman of the Board of Chosen Freeholders, sheriff of Hudson County, and a soi-disant son of a bitch, Teddy Fleming. In his reconstruction of Teddy Fleming's rise from tough-talking, hard-fisted son of an illiterate Irish immigrant laborer to a top lieutenant and reeve of Frank Hague's all-controlling mayoral rule over Jersey City, Tom Fleming tells a story that should be read, examined, and absorbed by every serious student of American political history and, especially, by the epigones currently in charge of the Democratic Party.

Neither hack nor hanger-on nor crook, Teddy Fleming was a full-time, full-service local politician, a "ward heeler" in the old parlance, who knew his people and precincts the way an Indian scout knew his way through the forest. Rather than merely attempt to measure or approximate the opinions or needs of the grass roots, Teddy lived as a blade himself, albeit an especially strong, iron-sided, crush-resistant one. Though the results of each election--overwhelming victory for the machine--might have looked predictable and easy, producing those results was anything but. "Jesus Christ himself couldn't keep these people happy," a wise and battle-scarred mon-signor told Teddy.

Happiness never had much good press among Irish Americans, at least in their prolonged assimilation into the national mainstream, a process that proceeded far more rapidly in the aftermath of World War II than in the century that had followed the Great Hunger (1845-51). What counted were putting food on the table, keeping a roof overhead, finding some measure of security that wouldn't evaporate with the same horrifying suddenness as it did when the blight obliterated the Irish potato crop. Irish-American politics was about security, not philosophy. Morality wasn't allowed to get in the way of electoral victory. (As one Albany pol famously put it, "Honesty is no substitute for experience.") Success depended on a single virtue: loyalty.

Teddy Fleming's loyalty was two-sided but equivalent. On one side was the boss, Frank Hague, who had to be listened to and obeyed or the game came apart. Occasionally, he could be defied, but Teddy had to choose his moments carefully and brave a barrage of threats and abuse. On the other side, Teddy's loyalty was to the people of the Sixth Ward. Unless they were served and satisfied, the machine ceased to function. It was a political system that Teddy summed up to the voters in simple, unadorned prose: "You are my people. Never forget that. If any of you need help, all you have to do is speak to me. I will do my utmost to serve you."

Never the smooth-running monolith it often appeared to outsiders, the political machine in Jersey City (or in any of the various urban locales that hosted similar organizations) was, Tom Fleming writes, "a churning mix of ambition and resentments and inertia over which leaders presided only by constant effort." That Teddy survived as long as he did and even prospered, maintaining the loyalty of the ethnic melange of voters in the contentious Sixth Ward right up to the end, was a testament to the skills he'd acquired as a boxer, salesman, and veteran of some of the bloodiest fighting endured by American soldiers in World War I. Teddy was a man of no illusions. He knew when to push and when to be patient, and he never violated his credo: he was there to help people through the litany of everyday woes--loss of a job, physical injury, the arrest of a child, a husband's abandonment--that wrecked individuals and families.

Tom Fleming's portraits of his father and the Jersey City machine are rendered in subtle hues. He refuses to find heroes where they aren't or to blot out the good in the interests of creating simple, easy-to-recognize villains. The same is true of his description of his parents' marriage, a tortured, contested union between two people from the polarities of Irish-American life--"shanty" and "lace-curtain." Kitty Dolan, Fleming's mother, was a product of "uptown" Jersey City, a world removed from the hardscrabble Sixth Ward. Though her life with Teddy began in romance, it endured as a long-running bitter argument over the whole tenor and trajectory of Teddy's political and personal life, ending at last in "residual tenderness." At the heart of the struggle were their progeny, two boys Kitty would have loved to see become priests and Teddy was determined to prevent from becoming "mama's boys."

Mysteries of My Father is a rich book. Rich in Fleming's textured description of Jersey City politics. Rich in wonderful political 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.

Teddy would be proud of his son's courage in confronting truths that are never easy to face, if more than a little chagrined at public exposure of family secrets (the bete noire of the lace-curtain Irish). Kitty couldn't but be proud of her son's artistry. The rest of us should be supremely grateful for such a moving, masterly, forgiving remembrance.

Peter Quinn is author of the novels Banished Children of Eve, and, more recently, Hour of the Cat (Overlook).