BY MARK BAILEY
About thirty years ago, I came across a brief essay titled “Nine Famous Irishmen.” I’d be hard pressed to say exactly where I found it; those were the days before Google, before the Internet really. But somehow, that essay reached the shores of my consciousness and then proceeded to quickly beat a path down to my heart—where it has remained. The essay reads as follows:
In the Young Irish disorders, in Ireland in 1848, the following nine men were captured, tried, and convicted of treason against Her Majesty, the Queen, and were sentenced to death: John Mitchell, Morris Lyene, Pat Donahue, Thomas McGee, Charles Duffy, Thomas Meagher, Richard O’Gorman, Terrence McManus, Michael Ireland.
Before passing sentence, the judge asked if there was anything that anyone wished to say. Meagher, speaking for all, said: “My lord, this is our first offense but not our last. If you will be easy with us this once, we promise, on our word as gentlemen, to try to do better next time. And next time—sure we won’t be fools to get caught.”
Thereupon the indignant judge sentenced them all to be hanged by the neck until dead and drawn and quartered. Passionate protest from all the world forced Queen Victoria to commute the sentence to transportation for life to far wild Australia.
In 1874, word reached the astounded Queen Victoria that the Sir Charles Duffy who had been elected Prime Minister of Australia was the same Charles Duffy who had been transported 25 years before. On the Queen’s demand, the records of the rest of the transported men were revealed and this is what was uncovered:
THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER, Governor of Montana.
TERRENCE MCMANUS, Brigadier General, United States Army.
PATRICK DONAHUE, Brigadier General, United States Army.
RICHARD O’GORMAN, Governor General of Newfoundland.
MORRIS LYENE, Attorney General of Australia, in which office
MICHAEL IRELAND succeeded him.
THOMAS D’ARCY MCGEE, Member of Parliament, Montreal, Minister of Agriculture and President of Council Dominion of Canada.
JOHN MITCHELL, prominent New York politician. This man was the father of John Purroy Mitchell, Mayor of New York, at the outbreak of World War I.
To this day, the author of this essay remains unknown. As does its veracity. Is the story true? Most of it is, and some of it likely is not. Though to me that was never so important. “Nine Famous Irishmen” has persisted, a little nugget of Irish mythology, the very kind of historical gem found on posters, placemats, the backs of pub menus, a sheet of paper left in a drawer to be read over corned beef and cabbage around the dinner table on St. Patrick’s Day.
So ignore the details; push whatever inaccuracies there might be aside. Stories like this persist not because they are necessarily true, but because they speak to a larger truth. And this truth we can probably all agree on: a large number of men, women, and children left Ireland, the country of their birth, and went out into the world to do great things. Whether it was political violence that drove them, whether it was hunger, oppression, or just the dream of a better life, off they went—first in ships, later in planes—into the unknown. This was the Irish Diaspora.
What I found meaningful, what I still find meaningful—why I carried this essay with me, a photocopy in a shoebox of letters carted around for three decades—is the idea that nine young men could have died quite brutal deaths, but instead, they left and went on to lead extraordinary lives, to achieve so much. All the energy, the brightness and daring, in those nine young men, it could so easily have been snuffed out. But that didn’t happen. Instead that energy was released, sent out on a boat across the seas, where it would touch so many lives, light up a new world.
THERE IS NOTHING much any of us can do about the circumstances into which we are born—our parents, our class, our country—but these are the factors that by and large determine our lives, that most often shape who we are and what we are able accomplish. Yet since time immemorial, humans have struggled against this: whether they were forced to flee their homes or left of their own volition, they have chosen to believe in the possibility of a different life, a better future. Roughly fifty thousand years ago, our Afro-Asian ancestors built crude boats and headed across the waters to Australia. About fifteen thousand years ago, foragers in Northern Siberia made their way to Alaska pursuing better game, and then later, once the ice sheets had receded, pressed south further into North America. In a way, the journey of those nine famous Irishmen, along with the millions of other Irish immigrants, mirrors that movement, the movement of mankind itself—the perhaps uniquely human drive that has settled the planet and brought about civilization as we know it.
Certainly, no country in modern history has benefited from this drive more than the United States. Not just because we have been the recipients of so many Irish but because we have been (and still are) the recipients of so many other peoples too—immigrants from elsewhere fleeing hardship, fleeing pain and want. I was born here because my great grandparents, who were Jewish, put their belongings in a bag and boarded a ship. If maybe that sounds easy, it wasn’t. Once here, they became storekeepers, seamstresses, traveling salesmen. My grandfather owned the Westville movie theater in New Haven, Connecticut; my grandmother was a schoolteacher; my other grandparents were lawyers in Knoxville, Tennessee. And I am now a part of that continuum, just as my children—whom I’ve moved out west to California—will be.
THIS BOOK EXISTS for a fairly simple reason. I wanted to share the stories of nine Irish lives. Not the famous Irishmen from the essay above, but nine other men and women who left Ireland and came to America. Spanning generations, from the dawn of our republic to today, their lives paint a particular portrait of our nation’s rise. Through the battles they fought, the cases they argued, the words they wrote, the people they helped, these nine Irish men and women not only became American but also helped make America great.
The essays that follow were written by nine contemporary Irish Americans—journalists, actors, poets, politicians, novelists—themselves all links in the chain connecting past to present. Tom Hayden, activist, politician, and icon of the sixties cultural revolution, writes about his namesake, Thomas Addis Emmet, famed revolutionary leader of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Rosie O’Donnell, mother of five adopted children, chose Margaret Haughery, the Mother of Orphans, who in antebellum New Orleans built four orphanages. Political journalist and historian Terry Golway profiles the labor firebrand Mary “Mother” Jones. Poet and LGBT rights advocate Jill McDonough chronicles the life of transgender Civil War soldier Albert Cashier; celebrated documentary filmmaker Michael Moore looks at celebrated news journalist Samuel S. McClure, founder of McClure’s Magazine; and Mark Shriver, nonprofit executive for Save the Children, writes about Father Edward Flanagan of Boys Town. Renowned Irish-born actor Pierce Brosnan explores the famed silent-era director Rex Ingram, novelist Kathleen Hill examines short story and New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan write about Niall O’Dowd, journalist and legendary founder of the Irish Voice newspaper. It is a wide variety of writers whose voices are as rich and diverse as their subjects.
IN JANUARY 1892, a young woman named Annie Moore arrived in New York City. Irish, she had been born in what was then called Queenstown (now Cobh) in County Cork. She was the first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island. By then, many others—not just Irish, but Chinese, Italian, German, Polish—had already made their way to our shores. Over the next 125 years, many millions more would come. Just as today, Mexicans, Koreans, Syrians turn their eyes toward our country. And if the past is prologue, if this book serves as any evidence, we will be lucky to have them, blessed. This is, after all, the story of how our nation was built—and how it continues to evolve.