Hogan’s Last Stand – Frank McNally on the strange disappearance of a former Free State general

While the St Valentine's Day Massacre was sealing the notoriety of Chicago 90 years ago this week, the effects of a rather more modest act of violence played out here in Ireland.

The incident had involved the then Army chief of staff, Gen Dan Hogan, and the minister for defence, Desmond FitzGerald, who were having a disagreement over soldiers' pay and conditions.

During this, according to the memoirs of CS “Todd” Andrews, Hogan struck FitzGerald. It was the end of the former’s career.

Soon afterwards, on February 19th, 1929, newspapers reported Hogan’s resignation. The man who, seven years earlier, had raised the Tricolour in Dublin Castle during the formal handover from British rule would have no further part in public life.

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Despite being on the winning side then too, Hogan did not thrive for long in the Free State

Today he is the much lesser known of two Tipperary brothers. His younger sibling Michael was the footballer shot dead in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday 1920, and is now immortalised by the stand in which All-Ireland champions are crowned every year.

Dan Hogan, by contrast, wallows in obscurity, although he has recently achieved at least one posthumous honour unusual for a Tipperary man. In the Four Courts Press series of books The Irish Revolution 1912-1923, he featured in the cover photograph of the one for Co Monaghan, where much of his fighting career was spent.

It’s a dramatic picture, not least for the Thompson sub-machine draped across his lap as he sits in front of Lough Bawn House, former residence of the high sheriff of Monaghan, but by then being used as an IRA training camp.

The Thompson gun would soon become indelibly associated with the city of the aforementioned massacre, as evidenced by several of its nicknames, including the “Chicago typewriter” and the “Chicago piano”.

But in 1922, it lent authority to a young Irish officer, as did everything else about him: the dapper uniform, the silver watch and chain, even his steely gaze at the camera.

He has all the confidence of a new generation rising to power.

As Terence Dooley writes in the book: "There could be no better symbol of the end of the ancien régime than an IRA commander on the front steps of the Big House".

Not much is known about the rest of Hogan's life, except that, 'one night in 1939 he walked out of his family home in New York, never to return'

It was through working for the Great Northern Railway Company that Hogan first went to Ulster.

And when the general manager of the GNRC was kidnapped by anti-Treatyites during the Civil War, Hogan – already a major-general in the new Army – demonstrated his ruthlessness by threatening reprisals against republican prisoners. The hostage was quickly released.

But despite being on the winning side then too, Hogan did not thrive for long in the Free State.

Soon after his military career ended in bitterness, he and his wife emigrated to the US. They were driven to the ship at Cobh by his friend and mentor, Eoin O’Duffy.

After that, not much is known about the rest of Hogan’s life, except that, as Dooley writes, “one night in 1939 he walked out of his family home in New York, never to return”. Subsequent correspondence over his Army pension suggests he went back to Dublin for a brief period. But his last known letter, in 1940, was from Chicago.

He was not the first former Irish revolutionary to visit that city.

Dan Breen, the man who started the War of Independence, went there at the height of prohibition after he lost his Dáil seat, and ran a "speakeasy" for a time before returning home.

Chicago’s reputation for mob violence continued, meanwhile.

Seven years and a day after the 1929 massacre, in what was probably revenge, a certain “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn was himself gunned to death, and a sarcastic Valentine’s Day card left with the body.

He is widely believed to have organised the earlier attack, in which a southside Italian gang wiped out a northside Irish one.

In that context, it should be noted that McGurn’s name was fictional.

He was born Vincenzo Gibaldi, in Sicily, but during an earlier career as a boxer, changed it to take advantage of the higher box-office appeal Irish fighters enjoyed.

It’s tempting to wonder what might have brought a man with the particular abilities of Dan Hogan to Chicago in the early 1940s. Alas, it’s also useless.

That was a relatively quiet period in the city, with no obvious events to feed speculation.

Wisely, being a historian, Terence Dooley doesn’t speculate. He notes only that Hogan’s pension was last cashed in June 1941. All subsequent inquiries came to nothing. As Dooley concludes: “Dan Hogan had simply disappeared.”