Part 8

In the Burke family, three heroic figures appear in the first chapter of our Revolutionary history—Thomas Burke, the first governor of North Carolina; Adamus Burke, chancellor of South Carolina; and John Daly Burk, historian, patriot and duelist. All three were fighters with pen and sword, who made an indelible mark on the Southern states a century ago. In 1872, when Froude cast some aspersions upon the Irish, it was Father Thomas Burke who took up the cudgels against him. And at the present time we have Burkes enough in the United States to fill a “Burke’s Peerage” of their own. There are two bishops who bear the famous name, at Albany and St. Joseph; one brigadier-general, at Portland, Oregon; one congressman, in South Dakota; a railroad president, at Cleveland; and a judge at Seattle.

As for the Sheas, at least four of them have buffeted their way to the front—Gen. John Shea,[8] who won his laurels in the Revolution; Capt. Daniel Shays, who first fought at Bunker Hill and then stirred up a little side-show rebellion on his own account; George A. Shea, an eminent chief justice of New York; and John Gilmary Shea, the historian of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Footnote 8:

Gen. John Shee.

In the American business world of today, a large proportion of the solid men—the men who stand like pillars under the heavy burdens—are of Irish blood. Most conspicuous of all stands the financier upon whom the mantle of J. Pierpont Morgan seems to have fallen—the man who is not only combining but coördinating American capital—Thomas Fortune Ryan. He is one of the greatest masters of financial statesmanship, who cuts the Gordian knots of finance and ties others of his own.

Equally immovable, in a different field, stands James J. Hill, born in Canada of Ulster parents. What this one man has done for the United States has never yet been fully told. He is the creator of the Northwest—the railway builder who has opened up a territory equal to a couple of Germanys—the steamship builder who has linked America with the markets of the East. He has made wide pathways of commerce from Lake Superior across 1,500 miles of wilderness and 5,000 miles of ocean to the ports of China, Russia and Japan. Ever since he double-earned his first dollar as a Mississippi roustabout, fifty years ago, his life has been a continuous obstacle-race; and there have been few occasions when James J. Hill missed a hurdle.

Two other railway presidents are Samuel Sloan, of New York, who was born when Madison was in the White House; and Richard C. Kerens, of St. Louis. Daniel O’Day[9]—every inch of him Irish—is one of the most important members of the imperial group of financiers who float the flag of Standard Oil. Forty years since, he was a laborer in the oil regions, whose main problem was to find a job; today, as he jokingly says to his friends, his main problem is to find out how to invest his surplus. Another New Yorker of Titanic mold is Alexander E. Orr, who was nineteen years old before he had seen any other country than Ireland. As a president of large commercial bodies, he has few equals. He is a director who directs. For nearly fifty years he has stood under the heaviest responsibilities, and was recently chosen, because of his ability and uprightness, to preside over the immense interests of the New York Life Insurance Company.

Footnote 9:

Recently deceased.

If we speak of great Irish bankers, where is there a large American city without one? In Pittsburg, for instance, where there are a score of banks bulging with steel millions, the dean of the financial fraternity is Thomas Mellon, who, like Alexander E. Orr, was born in Tyrone. In New York there are three, at least, who are too prominent to miss—Thomas M. Mulry, the new president of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, which was wholly Irish in its origin, and which holds a hundred millions in its vaults; Miles M. O’Brien, who was for some time the president of the board of education; and Samuel G. Bayne, who is notable for having organized national banks in seven states. Charles J. Bell is a conspicuous figure in the national capital, as John C. Davis is in Wyoming. And in Chicago John R. Walsh has been a notable banker and capitalist for twenty years. The recent collapse of his financial structure should not obscure the facts of his extraordinary career. To begin as a barefooted newsboy, and to struggle to a place of power in the sixth greatest city in the world, always preferring to fight big enemies rather than little ones—that was Walsh’s record.

Among the cattle kings of the West are Timothy Kinney, of Wyoming, and George Russell, of Nevada. Also in Chicago, Milwaukee and Omaha are four brothers who know something about the cattle and beef trade—four brothers whose parents left Kilkenny in the forties because black famine threatened them with starvation; who began their business life with no more chance of fortune than any day laborer in the United States, and who are today numbered among the few masters of the food supply of the world—Michael, Edward A., John and Patrick Cudahy.

Other weighty business men, scattered here and there, are John Flannery, the Savannah cotton king; Thomas F. Walsh, of Washington, who is the president of the Irrigation Congress; John D. Crimmins, the contractor who has added 400 buildings to New York; Patrick F. Murphy, president of the Mark Cross Company and well known in New York as an after-dinner speaker; Edward Malley, who began with a pack on his back and has now a department store in New Haven; Ephraim Dempsie, merchant and public man of Spokane; P. B. Magrane, a well-known merchant in the shoe city of Lynn; and William P. Rend, the coal magnate of Chicago.

Among the great Irish merchants of former days, the most notable was A. T. Stewart, whose New York store was the largest of its kind, either in America or elsewhere. His capital was $3,000 when he began to sell his Belfast laces, and more than forty millions when he died.

In the United States, as well as in Great Britain, many of the most distinguished judges have been of Irish blood. Among the nine justices who sit supreme over all American courts, two are Irish by descent—Judge Edward D. White and Judge Joseph McKenna. As yet, no one has compiled a list of the Irish judges in the various state Supreme Courts; but to take New York as an instance, we find five who are of unusual prominence—Martin J. Keogh, Morgan J. O’Brien, James Fitzgerald, George C. Barrett and Victor J. Dowling. It should also be mentioned that the chief judge in the Philippine Islands—John T. McDonough, formerly of Albany—is Irish born. William J. Hynes, too, a lawyer of whom Chicago is justly proud, began life in County Clare.

To answer fully the question “What have the Irish done for American education?” would need a small book in itself. Was not the late Pres. William Rainey Harper, the father of Chicago University, of Irish descent? This extraordinary man crowded the work of several centuries into less than fifty years, sacrificed his preferences as a student that he might carry the heaviest financial responsibilities, and died poor after having gathered a dozen millions for his university.

Of our Irish born educators, no one outranks William H. Maxwell, who has been for eight years the superintendent of New York’s public schools. Under him are 16,000 teachers and more than half a million children, the most lively and cosmopolitan army of youngsters in the world. Superintendent Maxwell has had to fight for every inch of progress in his development of the New York school system; but like the dogged Ulsterman that he is, he has driven ahead with his far-reaching projects, no matter whether the hue and cry was with him or against him.

“Nothing is too good,” he says, “for the taxpayer’s child.”

Speaking of public schools, it would be a sin of omission at this point not to mention the thousands of young women of Irish birth or parentage who are doing faithful work as schoolteachers in all parts of the United States.

The number of our Irish professors is comparatively small. Some who deserve special mention are Maurice F. Egan, of the Catholic University in Washington; James McMahon, of Cornell; Robert Ellis Thompson, of the Central High School in Philadelphia; and Thomas C. Hall, of the Union Theological Seminary in New York. A Gaelic chair was established in 1896 at the Catholic University by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and is filled at the present time by Prof. Joseph P. Dunn, who is of American birth. To John Tyndall, the notable Irish scientist, the United States owes a double debt, inasmuch as he not only delivered a course of lectures here in 1872, but devoted the proceeds to the cause of scientific research in America.

It is very seldom that an Irishman lacks the gift of speech. Take away our Irish orators and journalists, and this would be a dumb and cheerless country indeed. Here, for instance, is an offhand list of Irish writers of the past and present:

Capt. Mayne Reid, the idol of American boys, and a soldier in our War with Mexico; John Boyle O’Reilly, the editor and poet; FitzJames O’Brien, who wrote the famous short story, “The Diamond Lens”; Ignatius Donnelly, the most versatile and picturesque public man of his generation in Minnesota; Edwin Lawrence Godkin, of the New York _Evening Post_, a fighter in the high realm of national morality; Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_; Patrick Walsh, who was editor of the Augusta _Chronicle_ and represented Georgia in the United States Senate; and Joseph Medill, founder of the Chicago _Tribune_.

Among those still living are James Jeffrey Roche, now in the consular service; Joseph Fitzgerald, author and translator; William M. Laffan, proprietor of the New York _Sun_; George T. Oliver, of the Pittsburg _Gazette_; Eugene M. O’Neill, of the Pittsburg _Dispatch_; John McLeod Keating, who won fame by his fight against yellow fever in the South; and John F. Finerty, the eloquent founder of the Chicago _Citizen_.

Three great publishers of Irish birth have been Mathew Carey, of Philadelphia, the friend of Lafayette; Robert Bonner, founder of the New York _Ledger_; and Patrick Donahoe, founder of the Boston _Pilot_ and _Donahoe’s Magazine_. The name of William Desmond O’Brien, too, deserves to be included in this paragraph. Mr. O’Brien was a wealthy contractor of New York who devoted eighteen years of his life to the preparation of an _Encyclopedia Hibernica_, and who died, broken-hearted, in 1893, with his great project unfinished. Among Irish-American publishers now living, the most notable is P. F. Collier, founder of _Collier’s Weekly_.

This power of expression, which is typical of the Irish race, rises frequently to the heights of art. The Goddess of Liberty, on the dome of the Capitol at Washington, was chiseled by the hands of Thomas Crawford, who was of Irish parentage, and whose son is the well-known novelist, F. Marion Crawford. Many an American city has been enriched by the genius of Augustus St. Gaudens, one of the best beloved and most eminent of American sculptors. The statue upon which St. Gaudens is now working, in his Vermont studio, is a heroic figure of Parnell for the City of Dublin, St. Gaudens’ birthplace. Among the landscape painters, Edward Gay, of New York, has held a place for forty years; and another veteran artist of Irish birth is William Magrath, who painted “On the Ould Sod”—a clever study of Irish character that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

It is to Dublin, also, that we are indebted for Victor Herbert, our popular conductor and composer, and for Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, the famous band master of Civil War times. There have not been so many Irish singers of operatic rank, although the Irishman who cannot sing at all is as rare as a white blackbird. Probably the most notable was Catherine Hayes, who arrived in this country in 1851, married an American husband and settled in California. Among the best-known dramatic stars of Irish birth now upon the stage are Ada Rehan and James O’Neil, and the elder John Drew was a son of Erin. Andrew Mack and Chauncey Olcott are the most popular of those who portray Irish life.

That the Irish have been in politics goes without saying. In most states they have furnished more than their share, both of bosses and of reformers. Richard Croker, the Tammany Hall leader, and Charles O’Conor, who overthrew the Tweed Ring, fairly represent the two contending forces in American political life. So much has been written indiscriminately of Irish bossism that it is nothing but fair to state that some of the present leaders of the “anti-graft” movement are Mayor Dunne, of Chicago; Mayor Fagan, of Jersey City; District Attorney Moran, of Boston; and Hugh McCaffrey, a member of Mayor Weaver’s cabinet, in Philadelphia. The late Patrick A. Collins, congressman, consul-general in London and mayor of Boston, was for years the foremost Irishman in New England.

In the present Congress there are dozens of members of Irish descent, but only three of Irish birth—Senator Thomas M. Patterson, of Denver, who has been for thirty years a national figure; Representative Bourke Cockran, who is unequaled in the Celtic flow of his eloquence; and Delegate Bernard S. Rodney, of New Mexico. Senator Thomas Kearns, one of the solid pillars of the state of Utah, was born in Canada of Irish parents; and James D. Phelan, the well-known Californian, was the son of a wealthy Irish merchant of San Francisco. Three other public men of Irish birth are Thomas Taggart, of Indianapolis; William McAdoo, of New York; and ex-Governor James E. Boyd, of Nebraska. And no Irishman will ever allow the fact to be forgotten that James G. Blaine, one of the greatest figures in all American political history, was of Irish descent. His great-grandfather, Ephraim Blaine, bore an honorable part in the Revolutionary struggle, and far back in colonial days the Blaines were among the hardiest pioneers of the Cumberland Valley.

Rising to the religious world, we find many noted Irish names, alike in the Protestant and Catholic churches. There are no fewer than twenty-three bishops and five archbishops in this country who learned their first prayers on Irish soil. This may also be said of Cardinal Gibbons, who was born in the United States, but taken to Ireland in infancy. The five archbishops are John M. Farley, John J. Glennon, John Ireland, John Joseph Keane, and Patrick John Ryan. When was there ever before such a distinguished quintet of Johns?

Like St. Gaudens and Herbert, Dr. William S. Rainsford hails from Dublin. Thirty years ago he entered New York an unknown young curate, and proceeded to establish the foremost institutional church in America, having at the present time more than 5,000 members. Unfortunately, overwork has recently compelled him to resign.

Historically, there have been four Irish churchmen who have wielded a great influence in American affairs—Father Mathew, the apostle of temperance, who persuaded 600,000 Americans to sign the pledge; Archbishop Hughes, of New York, who was sent to England by President Lincoln during the Civil War; Father Ryan, the poet of the South; and the Rev. John Hall, the pulpit orator of New York.

Nothing can be more absurd than to speak of the Irish as newcomers in America. No one but a resurrected mound-builder would be entitled to do that. For the last thousand years or more, wherever there has been any great enterprise on foot, in the thick of things there have always been men with the shamrock in their hearts. The ship that carried Columbus from the known continent to the unknown had a Galway man aboard—so we are told on good authority. And one of the maps which cheered Columbus forward showed a country across the ocean which was called “Great Ireland.” This far western land had been discovered, it was reported, by St. Brendan, an Irish monk, eight or nine centuries before.

There were a few Irish on the _Mayflower_, but the first large body arrived about twenty years later. There were five or six hundred of them—a forlorn and pitiful mob, forcibly transported from their native land. Those were the black days of Cromwell, when $25 was paid for the head of a wolf and $50 for the head of a patriot Irishman. In ten years probably 100,000 were driven out, and many of them came to the American colonies.

The first big Irishman in our colonial history was Gov. Thomas Dongan, who gave New York its earliest charter, and who deserves to be called one of the pioneer champions of popular rights in America. The second was the distinguished philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, who came from Derry to Rhode Island in 1728, lured by a missionary enterprise that failed. All through the eighteenth century came a steady stream of the exiled Irish—men and women who had been toughened in a terrible school, and who were fit and ready for the perils of the American wilderness. Most of them were from the north of Ireland—from little Ulster, that giant-breeding province whose sons have made history in almost every country of the earth. They were the first across the Alleghanies. They settled Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania. Such men as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and Matthew Lyon were their leaders. It was they who colonized Ulster County in New York and Londonderry in New Hampshire. The colonial hero of the Catskills was Timothy Murphy—so wrote Jay Gould in his famous _History of Delaware County_, published fifty years ago.

When the War of Independence began there were Irish on the firing-line everywhere. They had a personal as well as a colonial grievance against Great Britain; and here was a chance, at last, to even up old scores. A writer of those times describes them as “a hardy, brave, hot-headed race; excitable in temper; unrestrainable in passion; invincible in prejudice. They are impatient of restraint, and rebellious against anything that in their eyes bears the resemblance of injustice. They were the readiest of the ready on the battlefields of the Revolution.” These were not parlor virtues, but they were the kind that founded the American republic. “You lost America by the Irish,” declared Lord Mountjoy in the British Parliament.

In those critical days, while thousands were dilly-dallying, the Irish were hot for action. It was John Sullivan who struck the first blow, four months before the historic skirmish at Lexington, by capturing military stores at Portsmouth. The Sullivan family, of which he was a member, furnished three governors for the young republic. Their mother, in her old age, used to say that she had often worked in the fields carrying the governor of Massachusetts, while the governors of New Hampshire and Vermont tagged at her skirts. The first British warship was captured by an O’Brien; and John Barry became the official father of the American navy by receiving the earliest commission as captain. The first American general to fall was the brilliant Richard Montgomery, whose virtues compelled even Lord North to lament his death. It is an interesting fact, and one of which few are aware, that the three monuments in front of New York’s oldest church—St. Paul’s, on lower Broadway, are in memory of three famous Irishmen—General Montgomery, Thomas Addis Emmet and Dr. William MacNevin, the first scientific chemist of New York.

In 1776 three of the signers were of Irish birth—Matthew Thornton, James Smith and George Taylor. Five others, at least, were of Irish blood—Edward Rutledge, Thomas Lynch, Thomas McKean, George Reed and Charles Carroll of Carrollton. The secretary of the assemblage, who read aloud the Declaration on the birth-morning of our republic, was Charles Thompson, Irish born and the son of an evicted farmer. And one of the first societies to back George Washington with men and money was the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Philadelphia, who raised half a million dollars and swung into line with a cheer. Only one of their members objected, and his name was struck from the society’s rolls. Washington was a frequent guest at their banquets and an honorary member, as President Roosevelt is of the same society in New York.

No history of the Revolution is complete without its Irish chapter. What with the dashing work of the Irish Brigade under Count Dillon; with the exploits of Mad Anthony Wayne and General Moylan, the Murat of the Revolutionary cavalry; and with the powerful aid of Burke and Sheridan in England, King George the Third found himself beset by Irishmen from all quarters. There were whole companies of Irishmen who fought for American independence under their own green flag, as loyal to their adopted country as to the land of their birth.

The most typical Irishman of pioneer times was Andrew Jackson, our seventh president. One secret of his greatness lay in the fact that there were many men of his mold and nationality in every American community. It is a fact that should cause every Irish heart to beat with pride that the first American president who rose from the rank and file, without the prestige of aristocratic birth or the polish of education, was the son of a rack-rented exile from Ulster. It may even be true that he was the first in the world’s history to climb so high, not by force of arms, but by the free choice of a free people.

“Old Hickory,” as his soldiers called him, has had no superiors as a popular leader. None of his enemies, and he made many of them, could question his honesty, his sincerity, his courage. He believed that the duty of a government was to protect the weak, curb the strong, and obey public opinion. During his presidency the United States bounded into industrial greatness and international prestige.

Overlapping Jackson came another typical Irishman, equally great in peace and war—Gen. James Shields. This remarkable man climbed to fame by half a dozen various paths. He was the hero of two wars, a judge of the Illinois Supreme Court, a governor of Oregon, and the only American who has had the honor of representing three states in the United States Senate. Like Jackson, he was gentle and chivalrous in private life, and an incarnate fury on the field of battle. His whole career was one of romantic knight errantry and adventure. He was a wit and a maker of epigrams. One of his happiest replies was on one occasion when he was asked to name his greatest victory.

“My greatest victory,” he answered quickly, “was won on the day when my sweetheart, Mary Carr, said ‘Yes.’”

After the terrible famine caused by the failure of the potato crop in 1845 and the following years, the Irish poured into America in mighty hosts. Since that time more than four millions have arrived here, ready with Celtic buoyancy for the battle of life in a new land, and yet almost heart-broken to leave the green fields of their fathers.

“Is it hard to die, Barney?” asked a friend of a dying Irishman.

“It is,” replied Barney; “but not so hard as it was to leave Ireland.”