next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

— e. e. cummings

“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

Edmund FitzGerald Flynn, Agincourt’s half-term mayor¹

When Ed Flynn announced his candidacy for mayor of Agincourt in late summer 1894, the country was deep in the Panic of the year before, a depression born of too much silver and too few markets for American crops. Urban unemployment was growing but the situation in rural areas (where unemployment figures are unreliable) was just as dire. Ed’s campaign took a protectionist spin — “America First” his banners proclaimed — protesting that his business acumen would reverse these trends and regain Agincourt’s greatness — though as a relatively recent arrival he would have known little about us. Ed must have found the Cliff’s Notes of Agincourt History, dropping a few strategic names into conversations and thereby gaining the trust of the business community’s Whiggish kind.

Flynn’s opponent was incumbent mayor Gordon Thursby, whose “day job” managing the Home Loan Association connected him with banking and insurance, contractors and material suppliers. Thursby’s wife Nadine taught school at Charles Darwin Elementary and the family attended Asbury Methodist Episcopal church, where Gordon superintended the Sunday school. His bases were covered — or so he thought.

Flynn’s arrival less that a year before ought to have disadvantaged his quest for public service, but he was a Mason, attended St Joe’s, and took rooms at the Hazzard House, where he and his young wife Amity Burroughs Flynn entertained in high style. Cassius Miller had to import expensive Nicaraguan cigars (which Ed passed around like business cards) and his tab at the Hazzard’s Tap Room seemed bottomless. Rumor hinted a monthly check from an unknown source kept his schooner afloat and on course.

But it was the realm of ideas which differentiated them, not so much wheat from chaff as fat from lean. Thursby saw first hand the stress and outright suffering that economic panics can bring: choices between delinquent payments or missed meals; school tuition or a second job. He proposed belt-tightening strategies, fiscal responsibility. At Asbury, Pastor Quinn had impressed on him the Social Gospel of Gladden and Rauschenbusch as something more than abstraction.

Flynn, on the other hand, appealed to the protectionists in the community by preaching trickle-down economics of a sort: we’ll all benefit, he claimed, when those nearer the top of the food chain have feasted. Ed’s schemes were painted with a wide brush (in the firm grasp of another hand), leaving details, the actual implementation, to Leona Helmsley’s “little people.”

The Saturday before Election Day, Flynn held a rally out at Gnostic Grove, an affair “for the whole family” with fried chicken, potato salad, and “pink wobbly jellies that seem to excite all the men” (a line, I think, from Beatrice Lillie). “If Ed Flynn is evidence for the efficacy of his policies,” his guests reasoned, “then he’s got my vote!” And it worked: Thursby’s belt-tightening versus Flynn’s dreamscape was no contest: Edmund FitzGerald Flynn became Agincourt’s thirteenth mayor by a margin of forty-two votes.

POSTSCRIPT: Mayor Flynn’s administration began to unravel within six months of the election, about the time his “remittence” checks arrived with less regularity from an Eastern bank. Then one evening as he held forth at the monthly meeting of the Commercial Club* — whose members were among his most fervent supporters — the good mayor rose to offer a toast, clutched his chest and died, face forward in a plate of sauerbraten. It took eight of them to carry him down three flights of stairs, and Hemphill-Folsom had to special order a roomier coffin: even in death, Ed was larger than life.

Mrs Flynn’s reaction upon hearing the news is unrecorded.

¹ Charles Haddon Spurgeon (19 June 1834–31 January 1892). Quite by accident I chose a photo from the internet, unidentified, because the subject reeked of pomposity; 19th century photos of upper-class men have a tendency to look that way. Long after the fact, someone looking at this entry recognized the photo as British Baptist clergyman Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Sorry, Chuck, we’re keeping you.

*The Commercial Club met in the banquet room on the fourth floor at Hansa House. One wonders how two dozen portly plutocrats managed all those stairs, let along getting one of their own back down.

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