Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago by Gillian O’Brien (review)

The years from the end of the American Civil War to the turn of the century marked a period when the Irish were finding their cultural footing, with considerable success. In 1889 Sarah Orne Jewett referred admiringly to “the fierce energy of the Celtic race in America.” The same year, newspapers headlined John L. Sullivan’s bare-knuckle bout against Jake Kilrain fought in Mississippi for the heavyweight boxing championship. It was the year of an appalling, sensational homicide in Chicago as well—an incident that revealed some unattractive features of the Irish-American culture of the time.

The murder and the surrounding intrigues exposed, as Gillian O’Brien’s book details, deep animosities in the American Irish nationalist movement and notably in the Chicago Clan na Gael. The shocking murder of the highly respected Dr. Patrick H. Cronin, an Irish immigrant who had risen from warehouse porter to professor at the St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons and then to a medical practice in Chicago, gave aid and comfort to anti-Irish Catholic media countrywide. The Cronin murder captivated the American imagination as the Lizzie Borden case would do a few years later and revived the anti-Irish “rum-Romanism-rebellion” mantra that had begun to fade. Cartoonists of the Thomas Nast stripe, O’Brien notes—who generally favored simian representations of the Irish—were energized, and like-minded editorialists argued with renewed spitefulness that the Irish were bound to infect American politics and government with their violence and corruption.

O’Brien notes that at first Clan na Gael’s stronghold was on the East Coast “where the majority of the Irish in America lived,” but by 1880 the Clan’s center had moved west to Chicago, in part owing to the charismatic Alexander Sullivan. She adds that the East Coast was also where the Fenians had been strongest. This arguably reflects a common misapprehension regarding the geopolitical realities of American Irish nationalism, a tendency to understate its westerness; in 1947, the Fenian historian William D’Arcy noted that Indiana was considered the banner state of Fenianism. The historic funeral of Young Irelander Terence McManus in 1861, which announced the resurgence of republicanism after the Famine, was initiated in San Francisco by the Fenians there—the body packed in lead and transported all the way to Ireland to be paraded into the heart of Dublin for burial at Glasnevin. Although the scholarly, temporizing John O’Mahony was situated in New York, and the Fenian headquarters was there (as was the Clan’s), Chicago was a vital Irish nationalist hub long before the 1880s. The Illinois city had been the center of the militant, direct-action wing of Fenianism right from the end of the war. The Chicago Fenian convention of 1863 redefined the organization’s leadership structure, and the city was the site of the Grand Irish Fair of 1864 as well as the stepping-off point for Buffalo and the Canadian invasion of 1866. Clan na Gael found traction in an already robustly Fenian Chicago that long antedated Sullivan.

The hope had been that the Clan would represent a “re-set” after the disappointing, strife-ridden Fenian years, and for a brief time it appeared the optimistic expectations might be fulfilled as the Clan showed competence in its 1869 Catalpa adventure inspired by John Devoy, who had received letters from Irish prisoners of the British in Australia pleading for rescue from their “living tomb.” A New Bedford whaling ship was gotten up and sailed down under to Fremantle, where it rescued six of the incarcerated Irish republicans from confinement. But the problems that had plagued the Fenian Brotherhood—internal discord and British espionage—carried on into the Clan and radicals, especially in the West, were soon impatient with the Clan’s lack of progress toward its goal of liberating Ireland.

After the Civil War, Irish nationalism in...