Thomas Maurice Mulry was an American businessman, philanthropist and the first Council President of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, an international organization of Catholic laymen dedicated to helping the poor.
Background
Thomas M. Mulry was born on February 13, 1855, in Greenwich Village, New York, the second child in a family of fourteen of Thomas Mulry and Parthenia Crolius, of whom one became a Sister of Charity and four, members of the Society of Jesus. The father, one of five brothers who came from Roscommon, Ireland, about 1837, had developed into a successful building contractor.
Education
Thomas' schooling at St. Joseph's parochial school and the De La Salle Academy was broken by two temporary removals of the family to a farm at Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, but after returning to New York, while working with his father, to whose business he succeeded, he attended night classes at the Cooper Institute.
Thomas Mulry received the honorary degree of Doctor of Law by the Catholic University of America (1915).
Career
Deeply religious in a practical way, Mulry so sympathized with the poor inhabitants of the cellars and tenements of the congested Village and with the impoverished immigrants landing at Castle Garden that he gave all his spare time to charity and poor relief. This work, he believed, could be best accomplished through the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, with which he became affiliated in 1872.
Mulry was honest, and his business prospered until he became recognized as one of the solid men of the city: a trustee of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank (1901), of which he was elected president in 1906, and a director in a number of real-estate corporations and trust companies. After the insurance scandal, he served on a committee under former President Cleveland which sought to rehabilitate the Mutual Life Insurance Company.
No politician, he held no official positions, although he refused offers of Democratic nominations for controller and mayor (1905) when such nominations would have virtually insured election. Apparently he knew the temptations of office too well.
A delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1915, Mulry defended private charitable institutions against the onslaught of professional philanthropists. It is as a Vincentian that Mulry was nationally known. A member of the Superior Council of New York in 1885, he became its secretary in 1887 and was its president from 1905 to 1915. For some time he had an editorial interest in the St. Vincent de Paul Quarterly. In 1915, he aided in the reorganization of the society on provincial, diocesan, and parochial lines, with a Superior Council in the United States responsible to the Council-General at Paris. He was elected national president in recognition of his character as an "American Ozanam. "
A founder of the National Conference of Catholic Charities (1910), he won the support of the Vincentians for its program of cooperative effort and scientific means of relief and reformation. A frequent speaker and reader of papers at the conventions of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, at meetings of the New York State Charity Conference (of which he was president in 1903), and at the meetings of the City Conference of Charities and Corrections (over which he presided in 1912), he was so direct, earnest, and informative that he won recognition in the field as a sane counselor with solid business acumen. Hence he was named to positions on a number of boards: member of the State Board of Charities; president of the board of managers of Manhattan Hospital for the Insane; chairman of the committee on children of the National Conference of Charities, of which he was president at the Minneapolis meeting in 1907; and vice-president of the White House Conference on the Standards of Child Welfare (1909), which President Roosevelt declared was successful largely because of Mulry's cooperation.
In the field of Catholic charities, Mulry was a patron of the Marquette League for Indian Welfare, a trustee of the Catholic Summer School, founder and president of the Catholic Home Bureau for Dependent Children, and founder of St. Elizabeth's Home for Children, the St. Vincent de Paul Summer Home for Children, St. Elizabeth's Home for Convalescent Women and Girls. He was also a patron of the Ozanam Association for promotion of boys' clubs, a manager of the New York Foundling Asylum, and vice-president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.
His last public appearance was in defense of the State Board of Charities before the Strong Commission of Investigation (1915). Thomas Mulry died the following year on March 10, 1916, and with services in St. Patrick's Cathedral presided over by Cardinal Farley and Bishops Hayes and Shahan, was buried in Calvary Cemetery.
Achievements
Personality
Thomas M. Mulry was scrupulously honest and dependable.
Connections
On October 6, 1880, Thomas M. Mulry married Mary E. Gallagher, a school-teacher. They had several children.