Richard W. Wolfe (1866–1951)

Richard White Wolfe was born on August 25, 1866, at the Glen, the family farm in the townland of Cratloe, parish of Athea, County Limerick, the son of Richard Edmond “Dicky Ned” Woulfe, a Catholic farmer, and Catherine White Woulfe. Wolfe’s siblings included Edward (b. 1852), Maurice Richard (b. 1853), Honora (b. 1855), Mary (b. 1857), Ellen “Nellie” (b. 1858), Catherine (b. 1860), Patrick Richard (b. 1861), John W. (b. 1864), Catherine (b. 1868), Mary A. (b. 1870), Michael Richard (b. 1870), and Johanna (b. 1873). The first Catherine likely died before reaching maturity. Wolfe’s obituary in the New York Times mentioned that he “was a descendant of Gen. James Wolfe, conqueror of Quebec,” likely referring to stories surrounding Captain George Wolfe.

From about 1873 to 1878 Wolfe attended classes at a school his father founded at the Glen. As an account from Ireland’s National Folklore Project attests, it began as a hedge school but evolved into something slightly more modern. Wolfe then graduated to the Ballagh Townland school and the National School in Athea.

Wolfe immigrated to the United States in 1885. A later passport application indicates that he left Queenstown, County Cork, on May 1, 1885, on a ship owned by the Cunard Steamship Company. The American destination is unclear. Wolfe appears to have been joined by several of his siblings. By 1900, Patrick Wolfe had settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, while other family members, including Richard Wolfe, lived in Chicago.

Richard Wolfe became a naturalized U.S. citizen in Cook County, Illinois, on April 20, 1891. His passport application, dated May 12, 1902, describes him as a real estate broker, five feet, nine inches tall, with a high forehead, blue eyes, a long and drooping nose, a “rather small” mouth, an average chin, brown hair, and fair complexion.

On September 22, 1897, Wolfe married Helen Lenz, a native of Illinois, in Chicago. The couple had one child, Grace (b. 1902).

Early Public Career

Prior to taking public office, Wolfe attended classes at the University of Chicago, lectured on economics at Chicago’s Maclean College of Music, Dramatic and Speech Arts, sold fire insurance, and reported for the Stockyards Daily Sun newspaper. He ended up in real estate, partnering first with E. B. Roy and then with William F. Friedman. He also served as president of the Real Estate Nonpartisan League, which endorsed William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, a Republican, in his run for a second term as mayor of Chicago in 1919. Wolfe served as president of the Cook County Real Estate Board and sat on the city’s original zoning commission. In 1903, he joined the newly formed William Randolph Hearst League, which supported the newspaper publisher, then a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, for president. Hearst, who did not run, was known for his anti-British views. Such views were shared by Wolfe, who later in his career publicly decried the king of England’s undue influence on Capitol Hill.

Wolfe’s antipathy for the king likely was related to his Irish upbringing, and he was active in Irish American affairs in Chicago. He was a member of the Irish Educational Association and, in 1903, was elected treasurer of the Sheridan Club, a fraternal organization of Irish Americans established in 1888 and headquartered in a substantial, three-story building on Michigan Avenue at 41st Street. In 1904, Wolfe was named in a lawsuit against the club initiated by a printing company to which the club owed $310. Wolfe was among a handful of club members in arrears for their dues.

Wolfe also served as secretary of the Irish Freedom Fund, a Chicago organization that advocated for an Irish republic. In 1924, he served as national treasurer of the Progressive Party, a third party formed by Senator Robert M. La Follette, of Wisconsin, as part of his failed bid for president.

During Big Bill Thompson’s run for a third term as mayor, Wolfe served as the candidate’s “orator and wordsmith,” in the words of the historian Gerald Leinwand. Thompson ran in part on an America First, anti-British platform, aided by Wolfe’s sometimes inflammatory rhetoric. “Capitol hill is influenced by the king of England,” Wolfe wrote in a campaign flyer, “while the plain people are guided by the teachings of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.” He vowed that Thompson would “uphold the Americanism of the fathers.” And indeed the mayor later did. Once in office again, he threatened to burn any books in the Chicago Public Library that he perceived to be anti-American, not-100-percent-American, or pro-British.

Commissioner and Controversy

After Thompson’s election in 1927, the mayor appointed Wolfe commissioner of public works. His tenure was marked by continued efforts to straighten the Chicago River in its course from the North Shore Channel to Belmont Street, the establishment of a water-filtration system, and controversies over the conditions of city streets. Complicating these issues was the air of corruption that surrounded the mayor’s office, which many assumed to be on the payroll of the mobster Al Capone.

Wolfe, in particular, was charged by aldermen and taxpayers with paying contractors at “fraudulent prices.” When he responded to mounting pressure to repair potholed streets with a plan for property owners to raise private funds and employ city laborers to make repairs, the Chicago Tribune, an ideological opponent of the mayor, struck back, on July 26, 1928, with the headline: “Repair Streets Yourself, Wolfe Tells Taxpayers.” Calls for Wolfe’s resignation were published the next day. A headline on July 28 read, “Critic of Streets Urges Wolfe to a Life of Poesy,” quoting an alderman who suggested that Wolfe, author of a published lecture titled Culture, ought to “retire and write poetry for a living.”

The New York Times echoed this caricature in an assessment of the city’s government published on May 19, 1929. The story describes Wolfe as “a man of temperament and energy, who is accused of having a greater sympathy for esthetic values than any official in a supposedly hard-boiled administration is entitled to possess.”

In April 1930, the Times reported of Al Capone’s efforts to infiltrate city government. The plumbers’ union, controlled by Capone, regularly sent representatives to Wolfe’s office. “It has been noticeable to many of the employe[e]s of the office,” the Times wrote, “that when these men call they brush the secretaries aside and rattle on Wolfe’s door until they get in.”

A month earlier, a man was murdered under circumstances that seemed especially damning for Wolfe. On March 5, 1930, the Illinois state’s attorney announced the resumption of a probe of city hall payroll records. Looking for evidence of graft and payroll padding, he subpoenaed the appropriate records from Wolfe’s office and was promised cooperation. When he did not receive it, he informed a judge of his intention to confiscate the records from their storage place in a garage on West Harrison Street. Before he could do so, on March 9, two gunmen entered the garage in a failed attempt to abscond with the records, killing a sixty-two-year-old night watchman.

The next day the records were under the protection of a city police detective when a man dressed as a police officer attempted to obtain the records, mentioning the name of Commissioner Wolfe. He even telephoned a person who claimed to be the commissioner, but he, too, failed to get the records. The state’s attorney’s office, meanwhile, linked the owner of the garage, Charles E. Patterson, to Wolfe and found that Patterson had been earning about $4,000 a month from the city for minimal services.

In February 1931, Thompson and Wolfe were both investigated for diverting to their own coffers most of the $139,772 raised in a flood-relief campaign. Wolfe, in particular, was fingered as the one to whom the money was entrusted. On February 9, 1931, the Tribune published images of canceled checks and a bank statement, signed by Wolfe, all suggesting that relief money had been misappropriated. At the same time, the state’s attorney’s office opened a separate investigation into allegations of corruption in the finances of the river-straightening project. Not long after that, Wolfe was again accused of mishandling finances, with aldermen charging that he neglected to collect $30,000 in rent owed by a transit company for space leased at Navy Pier.

Thompson failed to win election to a fourth term in April 1931. In May, Wolfe appeared before a grand jury investigating the city’s books. He denied receiving illicit money from Capone, but did testify that he and seven others, some of whom were outside of government, had all attended a midnight meeting in which they had each contributed $5,000 toward a $40,000 shortfall in the accounts of an unnamed city employee. The reason for the shortfall was not made clear, and favors paid to those who contributed were assumed.

In June, Wolfe was charged with another misdeed, this time conspiring to commit fraud on a civil service examination in order to fill a city position with a favored employee. None of the accusations against Wolfe led to a criminal conviction, and the taint of unethical behavior that dogged him in office was not mentioned in obituaries that later appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times.

Later Years

Wolfe had always supported an isolationist, America First politics that was skeptical, especially, of British imperialism. In 1931, when he had finished his term as commissioner, he began speaking for himself on these issues, focusing on the role of money in international relations. Many of the tropes he employed had long been used to attack Jews. Wolfe directed his ire at what he called the “Tory American.” In a 1931 speech he elaborated: “He loves kings, titles and class distinction […] He is responsible for most of the religious and racial hatreds which curse America. From historical causes he is in control of much of the money and wealth in America, and therefore controls the agencies of publicity and propaganda, as well as dominates our Governmental institutions and our educational life.”

On a visit to Ireland in the summer of 1931, he said, “It is the powerful, ruthless hand and brain of big business. It is now practically in control of the money, business and natural resources of America.” And after traveling on to Berlin, he complained about how “the international banker and the international profiteer are raising hell with America.”

In 1936, Wolfe was named national treasurer of the Union Party, a hastily organized third party that unsuccessfully ran North Dakota congressman William Lemke for president against Franklin D. Roosevelt. The party was organized in part by Fr. Charles Coughlin, a virulently anti-Semitic, anti–New Deal radio personality who, during the campaign, said that a vote for Roosevelt was a vote for “the Communists, the Socialists, the Russian lovers, the Mexican lovers, the kick-me-downers.”

In 1939, a well-known political reporter for the Hearst-owned Chicago Evening American, William H. Stuart, authored a hagiographic biography of Wolfe, Share the Profits! The Story of Richard W. Wolfe and His Conclusions. In one chapter, “Manipulation of Money,” Wolfe attacks the Jews for their treatment of Jesus Christ, fabricates a Thomas Jefferson quotation on banking, and suggests that Jews conspired to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Wolfe dismisses Adolf Hitler for his defense of capitalism but urges the United States to steer clear of the war that was imminent in Europe.

Wolfe died on March 29, 1951, at South Chicago Community Hospital. His wife died on January 8, 1961. They are buried together at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Alsip, Cook County, Illinois. Wolfe Playground Park, on 108th Street on the city’s south side, is named for him.

Top of the page: New Wacker Drive, along Chicago River, undated postcard

Selected Sources

“Chicago Commissioner; West Limerick Man’s Views on the U.S.A.,” The Cork Examiner, March 2, 1931.

“Commissioner Woulfe of Chicago,” The Kerry Reporter, December 21, 1929.

“Commissioner Woulfe’s Views on Ireland and America; Corrective Ideas of Chicago,” The Liberator (Tralee, Co. Kerry), June 20, 1931.

“How America Is Hit by the International Banker,” Limerick Leader, October 10, 1931.

J. D. H. [James Daniel Harnett], “Remarkable Career of a West Limerick Emigrant,” The Kerry News, March 4, 1940.

“Named by Union Party,” The New York Times, July 12, 1936.

Naturalization Card, April 20, 1891.

“Notable Career of West Limerick Emigrant,” Limerick Leader, April 3, 1940.

“The New Ireland; Impressions of Changes; Views of Ex-Commissioner Woulfe,” Limerick Leader, August 22, 1931.

“‘Political Racket’ Is Laid to Capone,” The New York Times, April 29, 1930.

Registration of Birth, August 25, 1866.

“Richard W. Wolfe,” The New York Times, March 31, 1951.

“R. W. Wolfe, 84, Dies; Ex-Head of Public Works,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 31, 1951.

William H. Stuart, “The Home Land,” in Share the Profits! The Story of Richard W. Wolfe and His Conclusions (1939).

Richard W. Wolfe, Ireland’s Case: An American and International Problem (Chicago: Irish Freedom Fund, ca. 1921).