Colum Kenny on writing An Irish-American Odyssey

Every emigrant is a story. And when so many Irish families have emigrant relatives it is a wonder that more of their tales have not been told.

So why the O’Shaughnessys? One of their first-generation American sons met my grandfather in Dublin in the 1920s. And the more I found out about him and his seven siblings, the more they seemed to me to reflect the many faces and fortunes of the Irish abroad.

One was a sportsman, first captain of the official “Fighting Irish” basketball team at Notre Dame. He had a sister who died in childbirth. One was a fine artist whose decoration of old St Pat’s church in Chicago deserves to be appreciated in the same breath as Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary at Vence or Cocteau’s chapel at Fréjus. Another sister was a farmer’s wife.

James O'Shaughnessy was the best-known member of the family. A star reporter at the Chicago Tribune, he covered the last "Indian" war before going on to become what TIME called "the best in the business of advertising" -and was later made first CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. By 1930 he was business manager of Liberty magazine, competitor to the Saturday Evening Post.

Yet he was said to be an Irish-speaker, a linguistic remnant of his father's youth in south Co Galway before the Great Famine. His grandparents' landlord was William Gregory, later husband of the much younger Lady Augusta Gregory. James found himself reviewing for the Chicago Tribune in 1912 her Abbey Theatre's controversial US tour of Synge's Playboy of the Western World. I reproduce in the book his dismissive review and some sketches of the players from the Chicago Tribune.

I wanted to write a book that people would read, one both tracing the kind of adventures that emigrants have when they go to live in another country and exploring how their children get on.

That is how An Irish-American Odyssey: the Remarkable Rise of the O'Shaughnessy Brothers was born. I did not want to falsify the facts. Life is seldom a bed of roses, and not every emigrant has a rags-to-riches story.

The O’Shaughnessys knew tough times. Unlike most of the Irish in America the O’Shaughnessy who left Kiltartan settled in a rural area. The married life of the emigrant O’Shaughnessy from Kiltartan was blighted by civil war and its atrocities, living as he and his wife did not far from Jesse James and other wild men in Missouri.

Later his sons all moved to Chicago and the story of their integration there is the story of America in the first half of the twentieth century.

The brothers were centrally involved in founding the Irish Fellowship Club, which itself was instrumental in bringing an Irish prime minister to North America for the first time. The story of WT Cosgrave’s journey, including a train wreck from which he emerged to wade through snow and pray over the dead, is so striking that I devoted a whole chapter to it.

A third sister became a nun. These three women led quiet and unobtrusive lives as did so many women then by choice or circumstance, and so one finds few records of their experiences and thoughts. Hence, by necessity, the book’s gender-specific title.

My research took me among other places from archives in Raleigh, North Carolina, to fancy offices in a Manhattan skyscraper, where the American Association of Advertising Agencies invited me to address its executives about their first CEO.

Good stories just kept turning up. A haunting of the family in Missouri, for which a local Limerick-born bishop who attended the first Vatican Council vouched; Irish virgins brought to Chicago to live in a two-thirds size replica of Blarney Castle; an artistic collaborator driven mad partly by the complexity of Thomas “Gus” O’Shaughnessy’s designs; a war correspondent who seized blood-stained trophies during the Spanish-American war and proudly brought them home.

Then there were the two lawyer brothers, one of whom represented the alleged Irish Presbyterian victim in a notorious “white slavery case”, and the other of whom was singled out by Notre Dame University for special honour and glory.

I have used their stories to explore more persistent underlying themes that shaped the Irish-American experience. These include tensions between earlier Protestant migrants and the later Catholic hordes who fled famine, as well as economic factors that both helped and hindered integration. I note too the considerable contribution of the Irish to US media.

Deciding to write a book is one thing. Finding a US publisher quite another. People point out that up to 40 million US citizens claim Irish descent, and if even 1 or 2 per cent of those bought one’s book it would make any author happy. But that constituency is so diverse and diffuse that the marketing of an Irish “product” in the USA is not guaranteed to be even noticed.

I wanted the story of the O’Shaughnessys to be available to the descendants of so many who had gone to America in hard times, and to those who are still going there. But the market for books in that country of 316 million people is highly competitive and under threat from new media. A number of academic publishers have closed or contracted in recent years, or become much more commercial.

Biography sells more easily if about famous people, but my story of the O’Shaughnessys was deliberately the tale of a quite ordinary family – even if some of its members had moments in the sun. I took an unknown family to use it to explore general questions about emigration and integration. I did not want to belie the challenging reality for most migrants.

One academic publisher that recently escaped liquidation, following a vigorous campaign to save it by those who value its long contribution to intellectual life, was the University of Missouri Press. That publisher is now on the look-out for fresh ideas, and enthusiastically embraced my proposal.

As someone who in the 1980swas recruited by DCU (then the NIHE) to help set up Ireland’s first masters programme in journalism I am particularly pleased to be associated with the University of Missouri, as that institution conferred the very first journalism degrees in the world.

I hope that my book incidentally helps the so-called “illegal” Irish who are currently in the United States. I am not convinced that President Obama’s recent efforts can go very far to provide a secure future for them.

An Irish-American Odyssey: the Remarkable Rise of the O'Shaughnessy Brothers should serve to remind people of the enormous contribution that so many immigrants in general, and Irish immigrants in particular, make to their host countries.