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. 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.

Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons and then to a medical practice in Chicago, gave aid and comfort to anti-Irish Catholic media countrywide. Cronin, an Irish immigrant who had risen from warehouse porter to professor at the St. The shocking murder of the highly respected Dr. 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.

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. Sullivan’s bare-knuckle bout against Jake Kilrain fought in Mississippi for the heavyweight boxing championship. In 1889 Sarah Orne Jewett referred admiringly to “the fierce energy of the Celtic race in America.” The same year, newspapers headlined John L. 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.

Blood Runs Green by Gillian O'Brien