But Billy came; and it was like a Catholic priest striking peace in an
Irish shindy. Not that he preached to them or said or did anything in
particular; but a virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour ones.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

So far I've described boyology as a literary and institutional form of boy work and shown how boyology and the feral tale became virtually indistinguishable in and through particular genres of boys' popular literature as well as character-building organizations. At issue in my next chapter is the harmony of boyology and the feral tale within and beyond psychoanalysis. But first I want to address another important venue of American boy work, one overlooked in histories of character building: Boys Town, now known as Boys and Girls Town. Founded in 1917 by Father Edward Joseph Flanagan, an Irish immigrant priest, to provide safe haven for abandoned and abused boys, Boys Town quickly captured the American imagination, thanks to Flanagan's inventive outreach and especially the success of the 1938 film Boys Town, directed by Norman Taurog.

Boys Town is ideologically more affliated with ministerial child-saving efforts than with middle-class character building.Whereas Brace's Children's Aid Society and other such organizations were administered by Protestants and ministered primarily to Protestant children, Boys Town represents a Catholic tradition of boy work. Even so, Boys Town has always enjoyed a certain remove from the Catholic Church, and many of its programs are comparable to those sponsored by Protestant child care institutions. In fact, Flanagan, supported by the church but operating largely on his own, helped ease the tension between Protestant and Catholic child welfare work. As a result, Boys Town is one of the best-known child care institutions in the nation, and Father Flanagan is perhaps our most famous boy worker. By the 1940s, Flanagan was "internationally recognized as the world's foremost expert on boys' training and youth care" (Boys Town: Memories and Dreams, 11). He remains familiar long after the character builders are forgotten; even the flamboyant Baden-Powell is obscure by comparison.

That a priest should serve as a boy worker isn't surprising, since the priest is already institutionally presented as a "father." Presumably the priest does not need an affliation with boy work institutions (which are generally middle-class and Protestant in orientation). At the same time, as the recent sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have made painfully clear, the priest's authority as a boy worker is shaky at best, since his relationship to children is more paternal or avuncular than professional in the secular, institutional sense of the term. I am not implicating either Father Flanagan or Boys Town in the abuse cases that have proliferated in the last several years. As far as I know, there are no cases pending against the men of Boys Town, and Father Valentine J. Peter, the current director of Boys Town, has written a response to the sex abuse crisis entitled "We Stand with the Children," which emphasizes his commitment to protecting child victims and the truth. I suggest, rather, that the boy work of Boys Town depends on a cult of priestly character that is neither middle-class nor institutional (nor, obviously, Protestant) in form and is thus subject to greater suspicion, or at least a different kind of suspicion, in the current moment of paranoia about child abuse. At the same time, as I show in this chapter, Boys Town is understood as an exemplary child care institution, one from which our ostensibly dissolute society can learn.

Because the priest is already seen as an exceptional figure, expected to be celibate and perhaps less stereotypically masculine, any accusation of improper sexuality (perhaps any sexuality at all) threatens to bring the house down. A scoutmaster accused of improper relations, by contrast, is less likely to be seen as representative of Scouting itself, or as an embodiment of Scouting's virtue or vice. Scouting is a notoriously homophobic institution, precisely because anxieties about, as well as confidence in, the adult-child relationship are central to the enterprise. To that degree, the comparison between Scouting and Catholicism holds, and certainly we've lately seen open criticism of Scouting from gay Scouts and scoutmasters alike. The presence of gays in Scouting is a different issue from accusations of sexual abuse, but I suspect that much of the latter is fueled by a general paranoia about samesex desire. In any case, Scouting is not the church, and even if it collapsed as a social institution, the middle-class project of boy work would likely continue in other guises. More to the immediate point, the scoutmaster's normative masculine character is ensured both by his institutional affliation and by his status as a family man, whereas the priest's authority derives from the church and from his symbolic remove from ordinary family life.

Most priests, of course, are not boy workers in any official sense. Father Flanagan is exceptional among priests as a boy worker, even if he capitalized on his priestly authority to found Boys Town. And to be a successful boy worker, Flanagan had to demonstrate his resemblance to character builders as well as child savers. In both the 1938 film and the only biography of Flanagan, Fulton and Will Oursler's Father Flanagan of Boys Town (1949), Flanagan is thus portrayed as gentle but rugged, in touch with his feminine side but ready to defend Boys Town with his fists as well as his faith. These and other pro-Flanagan vehicles produce a suitably masculine form of sentimentality to legitimate the Boys Town enterprise, akin perhaps to Gibson's muscular "heartology" in Boyology, but less immediately dismissive of feminine interest.

That such representation of Flanagan's character is tricky territory becomes clear in the Oursler biography. Published just after Flanagan's sudden death in 1948, Father Flanagan of Boys Town is at once an authorized biography of Flanagan, a history of Boys Town through 1948, and a meta-conversion narrative of the boys who encountered Flanagan personally. The Ourslers champion Flanagan as a modern-day saint, using a heroic mode of language that seems, in the contemporary moment, campy and even accusatory. Chapter titles in book 1 alone, for instance, include "A Shepherd Boy with Bleeding Hands," "Banished from Rome," "One with the Apostles," and my favorite sequence, "A Priest among the Dregs," "A Priest and a Little Boy," and finally "A Priest in Court" (chaps. 12-15). Such a sequence might seem ominous to readers today, but the Ourslers are more concerned with assuring us of Flanagan's manliness (charity being so feminizing) than with warding off accusations of sexual vice.

More specifically, they insist that Flanagan embodied the best of both sexes and that his masculinity was never compromised by his more feminine traits. In their eyes, Flanagan is both gentle nurturer and fierce Christian soldier. Although Flanagan routinely called his boys "dears," the Ourslers insist "there was nothing namby-pamby or weakly insipid in this attitude; he was a man of hard common sense". "A tall figure he made, looming and erect even when seated". Here they describe the first encounter of "Stubby," a prototypical lost boy, with the famous priest:

And Stubby could see and appreciate the power in the pale and rugged face. There was a granite look to him, as if the great brow and long jaw and straight nose had been carved from rock of great strength. And yet, with that visible and unmistakable masculine force and power, there was an almost womanly luster in the soft blue eyes. When necessary, this man could be father and mother both.

The Ourslers also describe the priest's wisdom as intuitive, not grasped by the secular intellectuals or child experts of his day, more akin to the "native wit" of boys—suggesting even an indigenous form of masculine sentimentality, as if Flanagan's work with the "natives" ensures and reflects his own experiences and ideals. Central to the success of Flanagan's boy work is this code of maternal-paternal authority and rugged sentimentality. The 1938 film offers a similar picture of Flanagan, emphasizing his willingness to engage in violent combat on behalf of his cherished boys. By showing Flanagan's fierce devotion to boys, Boys Town affirms what historians have described as a return to paternalism in the diagnosis and treatment of juvenile delinquency in the first two decades of the century. Reform schools had been under serious attack since the late nineteenth century, and in the next several decades the juvenile court took over the parental function of the state (legally sanctioned as parens patriae). Although the juvenile court could still send children to reform schools, its primary function was to educate and rehabilitate delinquents through probation and other paternalistic forms of monitoring. Flanagan started Boys Town literally by going to court and offering to take delinquent boys home with him. Boys Town emphasizes Flanagan's emotional connection with such boys, and the success of his particular program of privatized, paternalistic child care. Whereas Scouting and YMCA programs were seen as supplemental to the home, Boys Town was home itself, at once alternative and traditional (thanks in part to the ambiguity of the "father").

In Flanagan's work we can see the historical tension between the state and the private sphere in child care and social welfare policy. Boys Town has long been praised as an exemplary child care institution precisely to the degree that it is financially independent and self-sustaining. To this day, Boys Town receives no funds from the Catholic Church, nor does it contribute any monies to the church. According to its Web site, public support now accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the operating funds, with 25 to 35 percent coming from various program revenues (including state agency reimbursements, grants, and medical insurance), and the other 30 to 40 percent from Father Flanagan's Trust Fund. No wonder former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appealed in 1994 to Boys Town as a model example of privatized child care, advising Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats to watch Boys Town as evidence. For Gingrich at least, Boys Town represents a patriarchal solution to social malaise that doesn't require the redistribution of wealth or even federal aid—and reinstitutes Father as the central figure of the family. While Gingrich appropriates the film to his own ends, he's not entirely wrong about the cultural and political tendencies of the film and of the institution itself.

Flanagan and the Personal Touch

As a founding father, Flanagan was a complicated character, hardly consistent in his ideas and efforts. To give just a few examples, he was well versed in the period literature on juvenile delinquency (domestic and European) and rejected most of it as too pessimistic. At the same time, he subscribed to a deterministic view of slum life and felt that adult criminals were beyond his reach. He argued against trying children as adults but also had little faith in juvenile courts and reform schools.Well-educated and smart, he was also stubbornly anti-intellectual. He was committed to social justice, and to racial tolerance, declaring Boys Town open to all boys "regardless of creed, color or race." Yet he worked closely with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, an advocate of "Christian vision" in law enforcement (Oursler, 118); Hoover hired many former residents of Boys Town. Flanagan denounced the corrupting influence of media but was quick to use it to his own ends. If he famously held that "there is no such thing as a bad boy," he decried "bad environment, bad training, bad example and bad thinking" (Boys Town: Memories and Dreams, 1).

Flanagan was a progressive reformer, and also a priest. Boys could not be saved, he thought, without God, and Boys Town was at once an alternative to, and a reincarnation of, the religious nuclear family. Flanagan took his cue from the repaternalization of child care as promoted through the juvenile court system. The first juvenile court was established in Illinois in 1909, in an effort to transfer parental power to the entire legal system. Timothy Hurley, president of the (Catholic) Chicago Visitation and Aid Society, explained its function thus:

The fundamental idea of the Juvenile Court is so simple it seems anyone ought to understand it. It is, to be perfectly plain, a return to paternalism. It is the acknowledgement by the State of its relationship as the parent to every child within its borders. Civilization for years lost sight of this relationship, and as a consequence the utter demoralization of society was threatened.

In his account of the juvenile court, Robert M. Mennel adds in a footnote that Hurley had good reason to be happy with this system, as it allowed Catholic charities to serve as guardians for Catholic children whom the court placed on probation. Thanks to the juvenile court, young offenders were treated as delinquents rather than criminals, a transformation hailed as progressive at the time.

Central to the juvenile court system were the judge and his support staff of probation officers, usually male. The judge typically emphasized his paternal powers—and the simplicity of his reason and ethics—in dealing with troubled children, particularly boys. Mennel cites the philosophy of Judge Tuthill, the first juvenile court judge: "I talk with the boy, give him a good talk, just as I would my own boy, and find myself as much interested in some of these boys as I would if they were my own". Or as another such judge put it, "It is the personal touch that does it". These judges recommend that the arrangement of the courtroom be altered so that the judge is seated closer to the boy, for easier access: "If I could get close enough to him to put my hand on his head or shoulder, or my arm around him, in nearly every such case I could get his confidence".

The most outspoken advocate of the juvenile court system, and of the personal touch, was Benjamin Barr Lindsey (1870-1943), a circuit court judge in Colorado, whose career Mennel discusses at length. Lindsey challenged the more deterministic perspectives of criminologists and child experts (among them G. Stanley Hall) and, in a letter to Flanagan himself, highlighted the importance of compassionate men in the juvenile court system, writing "So much depends upon personnel"–or, perhaps, upon the personnel touch. Like the character building agencies, the juvenile court system preferred such personnel to the biological father, whom Lindsey characterized as "careless," "unworthy," and even "dangerous". Such distrust of the father also resulted in the parental delinquency laws passed during the first decade of the twentieth century. The laws designed to protect children often stripped away the rights of parents in favor of the allegedly more capable state.

In Taurog's Boys Town, the state is the villain, along with the residual "reform schools" (which presumably include the industrial and vocational schools designed as alternatives to more punitive lockups). Disenchantment with the juvenile court system was widespread by the 1930s; it was attacked as both too conservative and too liberal. Progressive reformers were more interested in combating problems such as poverty and crime than in treating this thing called juvenile delinquency. In any case, there were few social or judicial alternatives to the court system during this period. Social work, for instance, was just being professionalized at this time. Rather than interrogate the concept of delinquency, or the class aspects of unrest, Boys Town reformulates it as a problem misunderstood by the public and best treated by a paternalistic and "simple" Christian program, not by the ineffectual, bureaucratic state. At the same time, the civic structure of Boys Town safeguards it as a properly democratic and American enterprise. In this respect, the film does not misrepresent Flanagan's practices. By emphasizing the goodness of his boys, Flanagan not only appropriated the state's right to father but extended it beyond delinquency. Flanagan began his home with ostensibly delinquent boys and then took in neglected and abused boys.

The transfer of authority from judicial boy worker to priest was relatively painless, even if some judges and probation officers resented Flanagan's interference. Flanagan began his boy work career by pleading on behalf of boy offenders in juvenile court. At the request of Omaha judges, he began serving as an unofficial probation officer, meeting with his boys once a week under a street lamp in front of the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company (away from the hobo-saturated atmosphere of the Workingmen's Hotel). More and more boys were paroled into his care. A turning point came when he was entrusted with seven lads ("gang leaders") arrested for a crime spree in Omaha. The boys were perceived by the public as seriously criminal, and Flanagan's advocacy for them was widely criticized at the time.

According to his biographers, Flanagan promptly took these seven boys out to play baseball. The film misses this opportunity to link baseball, boyhood, and reform and instead collapses the "crime wave" seven with the first five residents of Father Flanagan's Home for Boys, depicting them as docile and misunderstood. The real Flanagan brought his five boys home on December 12, 1917, and though he continued to visit juvenile court, more often than not boys were sent to him, as the Home for Boys became better known and supported.Whatever the film's inaccuracies, the cinematic Flanagan is generous with the personal touch. In scene after scene, the actor caresses the shoulder of a troubled lad, in a quasi-secularized laying on of hands.

The personal touch is precisely what's at issue in the current sex abuse scandal. As is also true for teachers and other child care workers, priests now touch children at their own peril, as virtually any contact might be understood as sexual. To my knowledge, no one has ever questioned Father Flanagan's motives for, or practices of, boy work, thanks to the "historicity" of Flanagan and the sentimental work of the film.