Several American commentators have remarked, at various times and in varied contexts, that for an ethnic group so given to politics the Irish in the United States have valued the saloon higher than the newspaper as a forum and arena of influence. It is time to re-examine this suggestion and, possibly, revise it.
Undoubtedly Irish barowners predominate on the US pub scene, especially on the east coast, but the history of the Irish in the US media merits a fresh appraisal to lift it from the scenario described by Alan J. Ward, in his book Ireland and Anglo-American Relations 1899-1921, as one in which "the many Irish-Americans who took the Irish gift with words into journalism" were linked with "the predominantly Irish saloon-keepers, all of whom were closely associated with the political bosses who were mainly Irish and Democrats".
Media dominance
There were many good reasons for Irish dominance in the US media. The practitioners were usually well-educated, politicised and articulate. They entered America with one great advantage over other ethnic groups - they spoke and wrote the English language and readily found positions on America's leading newspapers or founded their own journals. Among the first of such journalists was John Dunlap from Strabane, who printed the US Declaration of Independence and who founded a newspaper in Philadelphia. Another was Matthew Carey, the young Dublin pamphleteer of the 1770s who was helped by Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris before reaching Philadelphia, where he founded the Pennsylvania Herald and acted as its reporter and editor.
When the Irish MP John Francis Maguire wrote in 1867 that "there are not many journals in the United States which are not, to a certain extent, under the control or influence of Irishmen or the sons of Irishmen", he was probably alluding to a long string of Irish or Irish-American journalists such as Henry O'Reilly of Carrickmacross, editor of the Daily Advertiser in New York State; John D. Burke, the United Irishman who became co-editor of the New York Timepiece. Thomas O'Connor, the 1798 veteran who founded The Shamrock and edited the New York Globe; Theodore O'Hara, son of another '98 man, who edited the Louisville Times; William Gilmore Simms, who was editor of the City Gazette in Charleston; Patrick Donahue, the Co Cavan man who founded the Boston Pilot in 1836 (it was later edited by John Boyle O'Reilly); or Michael Walshe, born in Youghal in 1815, who founded The Subterranean, a workingclass paper, in 1843 and who, 100 years before Argentina's Juan Peron, called his Irish followers "the shirtless and unwashed democracy".
Freeman's Journal
The motto of The Subterranean was: "Independent in everything, neutral in nothing". In following this clarion-call, Mike Walshe was jailed twice for libel. More circumspect was a fortnightly Catholic paper, the Freeman's Journal, founded in New York in 1840 and named after the famous Dublin paper by two brothers, James W. and John E. White - nephews, incidentally, of the novelist Gerald Griffin. This paper survived until 1918, when it was banned from the mails several times because of its attacks on America's ally in the first World War, Britain.
Irish-American journalism received a fresh and invigorating injection of talent with a wave of emigration after the abortive 1848 rising in Ireland. These new writers included John Mitchel, founder and editor of The Citizen in New York; John McClenahan, former editor of the Limerick Reporter, who took over editorship of Mitchel's paper in 1855; John Savage, the Dublin revolutionary who was leading editorial writer on the New York Times from 1864 to 1867; J. J. O'Kelly, the Fenian who was a reporter on the New York Herald and covered the Spanish-Cuban war for that paper in 1873; and General Michael Kerwin, a native of Co Wexford, who - after a distinguished career as a Union Army officer - edited the New York Tablet. There was also Patrick Ford, the Galway man who founded the Irish World in 1870 - a paper which for long was the bible of Irish emigrants in the US.
Today the Irish Echo, the Irish People and the Irish Voice, all edited by Irish or Irish-American journalists, carry on the tradition of Irish dominance in the media so ably perpetuated in recent times by people such as Katharine Conway, editor of The Pilot; Robert Lincoln O'Brien, editor of the Boston Herald; Frank Ward O'Malley, special writer for the Saturday Evening Post; and Eugene O'Neill, who was a reporter in New London, Connecticut before winning fame as a playwright.
"Ethnic" papers
A brief appraisal such as this could not attempt to list all the Irish and Irish-American journalists and writers still working in the media. I have not mentioned, for example, the scores of Irish "ethnic" papers and magazines published throughout the United States - and Canada - such as the Toronto Irish News, which is edited by Tiarnan de Freine and his wife Marilyn. Tiarnan has ink in his blood, as he is a son of the noted Irish scholar and writer Sean de Freine, who also contributes to the journal.
The influence of these and many other journalists and the papers on which they worked and are working has been considerable. Interest in Ireland and in the Irish cause was kept alive. The Catholic Church benefited from the efforts of some Catholic journalists. The Democratic Party was also a beneficiary for more than 100 years. Irish journalists continue to wield influence in US government circles - no need to mention Niall O'Dowd of the Irish Voice in this regard. He is but one more in a long line of writing Irish, as opposed to fighting Irish.