Irish American journalism includes newspapers, magazines, and the newer media, with coverage of the reporters, editors, commentators, producers and other key personnel.
The first Catholic newspaper in the United States was The United States Catholic Miscellany of Charleston, South Carolina. It was founded in 1822 by Bishop John England (1786–1842), who had experience as an editor in Ireland. It was renamed Charleston Catholic Miscellany when South Carolina seceded; it ceased publication in 1861 during the Civil War.[1]
Civil War
John Mitchel (1815–1875), a Protestant fighter for Irish independence who had been imprisoned by the British, escaped, came to the U.S. and became the editor of a leading Confederate newspaper in Richmond during the Civil War.
James McMaster, editor of Freeman's Journal in New York, was a cautious moderate Democrat before the Civil War started. Once the shooting began, he turned strongly against the Lincoln administration, and became an angry leader of the antiwar Copperhead movement.[2]
John Boyle O'Reilly, (1844–1890) was the editor of Boston Pilot.[3][4][5] Other editors included Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825–1868) and James Jeffrey Roche (1847–1908). Roche joined the staff in 1866, and in 1890 became editor and the leading spokesman for Catholic intellectuals in New England. He was an active liberal Democrat who gave support to labor unions. His Pilot was one of the few newspapers to support William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and 1900.[6]
As the political and intellectual center of Irish America, Boston produced numerous journalists for the secular press, especially the tabloids that attracted an Irish readership. By the 1890s the city's major newspaper, the Boston Globe had become a stronghold, with an editorial staff dominated by Irish Catholics.[7]
James McMaster (1820–1886), was editor of Freeman's Journal. The son of a Scots-Irish Presbyterian minister, he converted to Catholicism in 1845 and became a journalist. In 1848 he purchased the Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register. He edited it until his death, giving it a national audience and influence. He quarreled endlessly with other Catholic leaders. As an anti-war Copperhead he was most famous for his arrest in 1861 on treason charges, as his newspaper was suppressed by the federal government for supporting the Confederacy. He was briefly in prison, but allowed to resume publication in 1862.[8][9] He was a strong supporter of parochial schools and the papacy.[10]
Pat Scanlan (1894–1983) was the managing editor (1917–1968) of the Brooklyn Tablet, the official paper of the Brooklyn diocese. He was a leader in the fight against the Ku Klux Klan, and in favor of the work of the National Legion of Decency in minimizing sexuality in Hollywood films.[11] Historian Richard Powers says Scanlan emerged in the 1920s:
as the leading spokesman for an especially pugnacious brand of militant Catholic anti-communism, that of Irish-Americans who, after suffering from 100 years of anti-Catholic prejudice in America, reacted to any criticism of the Church as a bigoted attack on their own hard-won status in American society... He combined a vivid writing style filled with Menckenesque invective, with an unbridled love of controversy. Under Scanlan, the Tablet became the national voice of Irish Catholic anti-communism – and a thorn in the side of New York's Protestants and Jews.[12]
Chicago
James W. Sheahan made the Chicago Times the voice of the Democratic Party in Chicago. It was funded by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who needed a press after the main Chicago papers deserted him in 1854. Sheahan sold the paper after Douglas died in 1861.[13]
Joseph Medill (1823–1899), born to a Scots-Irish family in Canada, was the co-owner and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. A Republican politician, he was elected Mayor of Chicago after the great fire of 1871, which destroyed the entire business district, including the Tribune building.[14]
Margaret Buchanan Sullivan (1847–1903), working for the Democratic newspaper, Chicago Times, was Chicago's best-known reporter in the 1870s and 1880s. She was an activist for woman suffrage and for Irish nationalism, as well as an articulate opponent of anti-Catholicism.[15][16]
James Keeley (1867–1934), a poor Irish Catholic boy in London, emigrated alone in 1883, and worked in numerous newspapers. He was the powerful managing editor of the Chicago Tribune from 1898 to 1914. From 1911 he simultaneously served as founding dean of the school of journalism at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana.[17][18]
Diocesan newspapers
Practically all dioceses distribute weekly newspapers; Irish editors are common.[19] Founded in 1912 by Father John F. Noll, the weekly newspaper Our Sunday Visitor is widely distributed at many parishes as a supplement or in coordination with the local paper., It soon became the most popular Catholic newsweekly. It publishes numerous books and the annual Catholic Almanac.[20] The oldest is the Pittsburgh Catholic, in published continuously since 1844. In Boston the Pilot was purchased by the archdiocese in 1905 and became its official outlet.
The weekly Brooklyn Tablet became the official newspaper of the diocese of Brooklyn in 1908. Now an archdiocese, Brooklyn has always been independent of the archdiocese of New York.[21]
America is a national weekly magazine published by the Jesuits since 1909. It features news and opinion about Catholicism, and how it relates to American politics and cultural life. Under editor Thomas J. Reese from 1998 to 2005, the magazine published articles and opinion pieces taking positions contrary to official Catholic social teaching on matters such as homosexuality, clerical celibacy, HIV/AIDS, and the roles of women. Reese was forced to resign in May 2005 under orders from conservative theologian Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—the later Pope Benedict XVI—whose Vatican agency had been monitoring America for years.[22]
Shortly after graduating Yale, the young Bill Buckley in 1955 founded the political magazine National Review. It not only provided weekly intellectual substance for the Conservatism in the United States, it defined the standards and central issues of a major political movement that finally triumphed in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Besides Numerous novels, Buckley wrote essays and columns that were widely distributed and hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line (1966–1999) where he became known for his transatlantic accent and sesquipedalian vocabulary.[23] Historian George H. Nash said Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century... For an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure."[24][25]
Charles Coughlin was a highly controversial Roman Catholic priest based near Detroit. He Started broadcasting has sermons to a national audience, turning increasingly to political topics. He was the first political commentator to use radio to reach a mass audience, as up to thirty million listeners tuned to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s. Originally a liberal supporter of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, by 1934 he became a harsh critic of Roosevelt as too friendly to bankers. In 1934 he announced a new political organization called the National Union for Social Justice. He wrote a platform calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights of labor. The membership ran into the millions, but it was not well-organized at the local level. By the late 1930s, Coughlin's program, while still quite popular, focused increasingly on evil bankers and Jews. In 1939 the Roosevelt administration finally forced the cancellation of his radio program and forbade the dissemination through the mail of his newspaper, Social Justice.[26]
Talk radio
Mary Margaret McBride (right) interviews First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
One of the first and most popular of the radio talk show hosts from the 1934 to 1950 was Mary Margaret McBride (1899–1976). From an early career in newspaper and magazine writing she moved to WOR radio in New York in 1934. Her daily woman's-advice show presented a kind and witty grandmother figure with a Missouri-drawl. In 1937, she launched on the national CBS radio network a similar and highly successful show. As Mary Margaret McBride, she interviewed figures well known in the world of arts, entertainment, and politics for 45 minutes, using a style recognized as original to herself. In the 1940s the daily audience for her housewife-oriented program numbered from six to eight million listeners.[27]
Ed Sullivan[28] was one of the most prominent television personalities of the 1950s and 1960s.[29]
Chris Matthews[30] is best known for his nightly hour-long talk show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, which is televised on the cable television channel MSNBC.
↑ Patrick Carey, An Immigrant Bishop: John England's Adaptation of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism (U.S. Catholic Historical Society, 1982)
↑ Kenneth J. Zanca, "The Lion Who Did Not Roar... Yet: The Editorials of James A. McMaster--May 1860 to May 1861." American Catholic Studies (2011) 122#3 pp 1-29.
↑ Francis R. Walsh, "John Boyle O'Reilly, the Boston Pilot, and Irish-American Assimilation, 1870–1890," in Jack Tager and John W. Ifkovic, eds. Massachusetts in the Gilded Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). Pp 148-63 online
↑ Francis G. McManamin, The American Years of John Boyle O'Reilly 1870–1890 (Kessinger, 2006.)
↑ Anthony G. Evans, Fanatic Heart: A Life of John Boyle O'Reilly, 1844–1890 (Northeastern University Press, 1997)
↑ Arthur Mann, Yankee reformers in the urban age: social reform in Boston, 1880–1900 (1954) pp 24-51
↑ Kenneth J. Zanca, "The Lion Who Did Not Roar... Yet: The Editorials of James A. McMaster-May 1860 to May 1861." American Catholic Studies 122#3 (2011): 1-29.
↑ Kenneth J. Zanca, American Catholics and Slavery: 1789–1866. An Anthology of Primary Documents (1996)
↑ Thomas T. McAvoy, "Public Schools vs. Catholic Schools and James McMaster." The Review of Politics 28.#1 (1966): 19-46. in JSTOR
↑ Delaney, Dictionary of American Catholic Biography (1984) p 511
↑ Patricia B. Swan and James B. Swan. "James W. Sheahan: Stephen A. Douglas Supporter and Partisan Chicago Journalist." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (2012) 105#2-3 pp 133-166 in JSTOR
↑ John William Tebbel, An American dynasty: the story of the McCormicks, Medills, and Pattersons (Greenwood, 1968)
↑ Janice Reiff, ed., "Irish" in Encyclopedia of Chicago (2004) p 423
↑ Patrick McNamara... "A Study of the Editorial Policy of the Brooklyn Tablet Under Patrick F. Scanlan, 1917–1968" (M.A. Thesis, St. John's University, 1994).
↑ John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1990).
↑ Donald Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin The Father of Hate Radio (1996).
↑ Susan Ware. It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (New York University Press, 2005). xii + 304 pp. online review Her father was Irish, p. 111.
Baumgartner, Apollinaris W. Catholic Journalism: A study of its development in the United States, 1789–1930 (Columbia University Press, 1931); brief summaries
Byrne, James Patrick, Philip Coleman, and Jason Francis King, eds. Ireland and the Americas: culture, politics, and history: a multidisciplinary encyclopedia (3 vol. ABC-CLIO, 2008)
George Jr, Joseph. "'A Catholic Family Newspaper' Views the Lincoln Administration: John Mullaly's Copperhead Weekly." Civil War History 24.2 (1978): 112-132.
George, Joseph. "Philadelphia's Catholic Herald: The Civil War Years." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1979): 196-221. online
Glazier, Michael, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999)
Hueston Robert Francis. The Catholic Press and Nativism 1840–1869 (New York: Arno Press, 1976; also ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1972. #7226807)
Joyce William Leonard. Editors and Ethnicity: A History of the Irish-American Press 1848–1883 (New York: Arno Press, 1976; also ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1974. #7500727.)
McMahon, Eileen. "The Irish-American Press." in Sally M. Miller, ed., The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (1987) pp: 177-189. online
Reilly, Mary Lonan. A history of the Catholic Press Association, 1911–1968 (Scarecrow Press, 1971)
Rhodes, Leara. The ethnic press: shaping the American dream (Peter Lang, 2010)
Rodechko, James Paul. Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism, 1870–1913 (1979)
Swan, Patricia B. and James B. Swan. "James W. Sheahan: Stephen A. Douglas Supporter and Partisan Chicago Journalist." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (2012) 105#2-3 pp 133–166 in JSTOR
Walsh, Francis R. "The Boston 'Pilot' Reports the Civil War," Historical Journal of Massachusetts (1981) 9#2 pp 5–16.
The Boston Globe, also known locally as the Globe, is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe is the oldest and largest daily newspaper in Boston and tenth-largest newspaper by print circulation in the nation as of 2023.
The Irish Independent is an Irish daily newspaper and online publication which is owned by Independent News & Media (INM), a subsidiary of Mediahuis.
The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists, writers, and photographers in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who claimed to expose corruption and wrongdoing in established institutions, often through sensationalist publications. The modern term generally references investigative journalism or watchdog journalism; investigative journalists in the US are occasionally called "muckrakers" informally.
Orestes Augustus Brownson was an American intellectual and activist, preacher, labor organizer, and writer; a noted Catholic convert.
John Boyle O'Reilly was an Irish poet, journalist, author and activist. As a youth in Ireland, he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenians, for which he was transported to Western Australia. After escaping to the United States, he became a prominent spokesperson for the Irish diaspora community and culture through his editorship of the Boston newspaper The Pilot, in addition to his personal writings and lecture tours.
The history of American newspapers begins in the early 18th century with the publication of the first colonial newspapers. American newspapers began as modest affairs—a sideline for printers. They became a political force in the campaign for American independence. Following independence the first amendment to U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press. The Postal Service Act of 1792 provided substantial subsidies: Newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny and beyond for 1.5 cents, when first class postage ranged from six cents to a quarter.
The Irish community is one of New York City's major and important ethnic groups, and has been a significant proportion of the city's population since the waves of immigration in the late 19th century.
Leo Brent Bozell Jr. was an American conservative activist and Catholic writer, and former United States Merchant Mariner. He was a conservative Catholic, and a strong supporter of the anti-abortion movement. In 1966, he co-founded the Catholic magazine Triumph, which published for a decade until its dissolution in 1976.
Journalism in the United States began humbly and became a political force in the campaign for American independence. Following independence, the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The American press grew rapidly following the American Revolution. The press became a key support element to the country's political parties, but also for organized religious institutions.
The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855 and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothings, or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.
Maurice Francis Egan was an American writer and diplomat. He was a prolific writer and had a long and successful career as a Catholic journalist, literary critic, and novelist. He was a professor of English at two universities, and served as United States Minister in Copenhagen.
John Rensselaer Chamberlain was an American journalist, business and economic historian, syndicated columnist, and literary critic who was dubbed "one of America's most trusted book reviewers" by the libertarian magazine The Freeman.
Bernard O'Reilly was an Irish-born prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. Known for his service during the 1832 cholera outbreak in New York, he later served as bishop of the Diocese of Hartford in Connecticut from 1850 until his death in 1856.
The Pilot is the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston and claims the title of "America's Oldest Catholic Newspaper", having been in continuous publication since its first issue on September 5, 1829. Although the first Catholic newspaper in the United States, The United States Catholic Miscellany of Charleston, South Carolina, was founded seven years earlier in 1822, it ceased publication in 1861.
Warren James Hinckle III was an American political journalist based in San Francisco. Hinckle is remembered for his tenure as editor of Ramparts magazine, turning a sleepy publication aimed at a liberal Roman Catholic audience into a major galvanizing force of American radicalism during the Vietnam War era. He also helped create Gonzo journalism by first pairing Hunter S. Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman.
The New York Freeman (1849–1918) was an American Catholic weekly newspaper in New York City.
James McMaster was a 19th-century American Roman Catholic newspaper editor and activist known for his conservative political views and ultramontane religious values. McMaster was a "states rights" Democrat, "...ever intemperate and always arch-conservative."
Redpath's Illustrated Weekly was a newspaper based out of New York City in the 1880s that was dedicated to the interests of the Irish.
Katherine Eleanor Conway was an American journalist, editor, and poet. A devout Catholic, she supported women's education but opposed suffrage. Hailing from the U.S. state of New York, Conway worked on various newspapers, including The Pilot, where she served as associate editor (1890-1905) and editor in chief/managing editor (1905-1908), "the first and only woman to hold that position, despite never receiving credit on the masthead". She organized the first Catholic reading circle in Boston, serving as its president, and as well as presiding officer of the New England Woman's Press Association. Conway was an active member of the Boston Authors' Club, and a reader of original essays on religious and intellectual topics before prominent literary and social clubs. In 1907, she received the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame.
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