02/11/01
Healing Family Matters
This column is an apology that's at least several months late.
In one very important sense, however, it's several years late.
And I owe Douglas Bukowski, a reader with a grasp of history and
the willingness to share it.
Many months ago I wrote in this space of a discovery I had made
about my grandfather - my mother's father - whom I lionized in
life and revere in death, now more than 35 years in the past.
When I was a boy he honored me with a bit of his history, a tin-plate
badge. As a youngster I envisioned my grandfather as someone Chicago
trusted for his civic efforts early last century.
Only after I became a man did I come to believe that the group
issuing him the badge was notoriously anti-Catholic, akin to the
KKK in believing that the pope was a danger to American society.
It was painful to think of him as bigoted and small-minded. He
taught me better than that.
Enter Bukowski. After the column appeared, he wrote saying, "You've
confused your fringe organizations, the APL (American Protective
League) with the APA (American Protective Association). (He) belonged
to (the APL) a wartime vigilante rather than an anti-Catholic
group."
In the late 19th and early 209th centuries, Bukowski wrote, it
was the APA which "worried about the pope and his minions." The
APL aided the civilian effort during World War I.
Bukowski guessed that my grandfather couldn't enlist and the "APL
allowed him to feel he was doing his part." There were, he said,
more than 6,000 APL members in Chicago who rounded up draft-dodgers
and "worried more about Huns and Bolsheviks than Catholics." He
sent along excerpts from "The Web," detailing this.
Later, I uncovered a copy of that book in papers my mother left
me. Sure enough, the badge pictured and my grandfather's are the
same.
The apology goes, of course, to my grandfather's memory for not
having the faith in him as an adult that I had when he raised
me. And to Bukowski for setting me straight. I'm sorry it took
so long for this to reach print.
The lesson here is important, at least for me. I hope it also
will have some value for you. And Catholic bias has long been
a part of our culture. But it was not so pervasive that it captured
the man I admired more than any other.
—Tom Sheridan,
Editor and General Manager
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