James K. McGuire: Boy Mayor and Irish Nationalist

Acknowledgments

xi JMK Acknowledgments When I began to undertake the task of trying to recreate the life and times of my great-uncle, James K. McGuire, I was faced with several formidable problems. The first was that he had been dead for more than eight decades and, other than anecdotal glimpses that were part of family lore, no family members, friends, or contemporaries of his were alive and able to be interviewed. The second was that, unlike many prominent figures of his day, he left behind no papers, diaries, or correspondence as part of his legacy or if he did, they have long since perished. Therefore I was left to learn all that I could from the news accounts of his public life, correspondence from his three terms as mayor, and that which could be obtained from the archives of those who dealt with him. I consider the news accounts of his life and those of his family members during his life in Syracuse to be a particularly valuable historical source since they are contemporaneous accounts of the events that occurred during those periods. I am deeply indebted to the staff of the Local History Section of the Onondaga County Public Library for their assistance in copying the hundreds of news accounts I obtained from their microfiche files. In particular I am grateful to Tom Howard, who copied and read each one for me and who was constantly on the lookout for any news items I might have overlooked. I am indebted to Dennis Conners and the Onondaga Historical Association for the access they provided to their records. I owe a debt of gratitude to John Copanas, Syracuse city clerk, for the unfettered access he gave me to the City Hall Archives and the records and xii | Ac k now l e d g m e n t s correspondence from the McGuire administration. I will always be grateful to Pat Mosely, assistant deputy commissioner of Corrections for Onondaga County, who combed the ancient records from the Onondaga County Penitentiary dealing with James McGuire’s brief periods of incarceration there. I am appreciative of the efforts of my friend Bob Langan, retired from the New York State Unified Court System, who obtained a copy of the court file concerning James K. McGuire’s indictment in New York County from Alan Murphy, the clerk of the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Outside of central New York, I was fortunate to have the help of the Irish American Historical Society, which provided me with access to the correspondence between McGuire and John Devoy and Daniel Cohalan. I am indebted to my friend Congressman James T. Walsh, whose staff provided me with the testimony from the House of Representatives committee inquiry into McGuire’s World War I propaganda. I am also extremely grateful to Seamus Helferty, principal archivist at the University College Dublin’s James Joyce Library, who culled the collections of Éamon de Valera and Harry Boland and provided me with the correspondence involving McGuire that came from the UCD-OFM Partnership. I owe special thanks to Bill and Marge Hamler, who on two occasions retrieved my manuscript from some black hole in the Internet to which I had inadvertently sent it. I was also fortunate to have the advice and counsel of my friend Mike Grogan, an editor at the Syracuse Post-Standard, concerning the content of the biography. Finally, I’d like to thank Jim MacKillop, Irish Studies Series Editor for Syracuse University Press. His enthusiasm for the project and his patience and guidance helped me see it through to conclusion. ...