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Birth of William Joyce, Last Person Executed for Treason in the UK

William Brooke Joyce, an American-born fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during World War II, is born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York, on April 24, 1906. He has the distinction of being the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

Joyce is the eldest of three sons of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and his wife, Gertrude (née Brooke), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, is from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. The Joyces return to Ireland in 1909. William, a precocious child, attends Coláiste Iognáid SJ, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. At the age of fourteen, he abandons Catholicism for Anglicanism, apparently after being told that all non-Catholics, including his mother, would be damned. In adult life he is nominally anglican, though his adherence to Christianity is tenuous.

The Joyces are unionists and teach their children fervent imperialism. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce openly associates with the Black and Tans and acts as a scout for them. An acquaintance claims that his views are so extreme even loyalists dislike him. On December 9, 1921, he flees to England to join the Worcestershire Regiment and is followed to England in 1923 by the rest of the family. When he enlists, he claims to be eighteen, but after he contracts rheumatic fever, his age is discovered, and he is discharged in March 1922. For a time, he studies mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic Institute as a pre-medical student (1922–23), but he leaves of his own accord, with a reputation for laziness and violent political views. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College are more successful. He is a brilliant linguist and mathematician and graduates BA with first-class honours in 1927. He publishes an academic article on philology and considers progressing to an MA. He later falsely claims that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic. In 1932, he enrolls at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D. in educational psychology.

Joyce is disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway and is mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identifies strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier angry anti-liberal from the provinces. His life is marked by repeated episodes of hero worship, followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation. In 1923, he joins the British Fascists, an organisation that has a significant Irish loyalist membership, and in 1924 he allies himself with a militant splinter group, the National Fascists. Most British fascists see themselves as Tory auxiliaries, and they often provide a security presence at conservative meetings. On October 22, 1924, while stewarding a meeting addressed by a Jewish conservative candidate, he has his face slashed and is left with a prominent scar across his right cheek. He joins the Conservative Party in 1928 and is active in the Chelsea constituency until 1930, when he is forced out because of his eccentricities and sexual misbehaviour. On April 30, 1927, he marries Hazel Kathleen Barr. They have two daughters but separate in 1935, largely because of his infidelities, heavy drinking, and temper. The marriage is dissolved in 1937.

In November 1933, Joyce abandons his Ph.D. studies to work for Sir Oswald Mosley‘s British Union of Fascists (BUF). By early 1934 he has become its paid publicity director, traveling throughout Britain to organise meetings. He is a powerful, rabble-rousing speaker, driven by an instinctive awareness that vitriolic verbal abuse gives speaker and audience a sense of power and solidarity. MI5 sees him as a compelling, though deranged, personality. On February 8, 1937, he marries Margaret Cairns White, a BUF activist from Lancashire, with whom he had cohabited since 1936.

Joyce leads a BUF faction that favours a recruitment strategy based on uncompromising ideological assertion. This is challenged by populists who prioritise marches and displays and hold that indoctrination should follow membership. In February 1937, he is BUF candidate for the London County Council in Shoreditch. The party wins 14 percent of the vote. In March 1937, he, along with many full-time BUF staff, are sacked when the BUF cuts expenses. But his dismissal also reflects Mosley’s awareness that his obsessive rhetoric repels “respectable” recruits and that he is no longer a biddable, slavish admirer of “the Leader.” He later falsely claims near-exclusive credit for the BUF’s escalating antisemitism, a view that Mosley eventually finds it convenient to adopt in order to evade his own responsibility.

In April 1937, Joyce founds the National Socialist League, helped by a wealthy patron. He supports himself as a private tutor, refusing to take Jewish pupils. He is active in various antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups such as the Right Club and engages in “peace” campaigns based on the view that British interests lay with Germany against Russia. Political marginalisation intensifies his admiration for Nazi Germany and hero worship of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, he has decided that if war comes, he will go to Germany, though he also considers moving to Ireland. He renews his British passport for one-year terms in August 1938 and August 1939.

On August 26, 1939, Joyce and his wife leave London for Berlin. He is allegedly tipped off about his impending arrest and internment by an MI5 officer, to whom he had supplied information on communists. His siblings, whom he recruited into his fascist organisations, are variously penalised for his activities. At a loose end in Berlin, he is persuaded by a British associate to become a radio announcer with the English-language service of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). He makes his first broadcast on September 6, 1939, and receives a contract in October. He finds in radio an outlet for his forceful style and delight in saying the unsayable, and in the early years of the war takes an exultant pride in recounting Nazi victories. His performances are admired by Joseph Goebbels, whom Joyce, to his regret, never meets. On September 26, 1940, he acquires German citizenship.

The novel experience of hearing the enemy in one’s own living room attracts wide audiences in Britain. Joyce’s practice of naming newly captured prisoners of war in his broadcasts is also a compelling motive for listening. In fact, he tries to recruit British prisoners of war as collaborators. The name “Lord Haw-Haw,” invented by the Daily Express radio critic in September 1939, initially applies to several English-language broadcasters but in time becomes associated with Joyce. He is initially a figure of fun, imitated by comedians, but there are sinister undercurrents of terrifying omnipotence, intensified by his sneering, gloating delivery and his delighted deployment of the “big lie” technique. It is widely believed that British-based fifth columnists supply him with information, that he predicts air raids, and shows minute local knowledge. In time, fear and his growing notoriety feed popular hatred of him in Britain, though his anti-British taunts allegedly win appreciative Irish audiences. He exults that he is daily committing treason and rendering himself liable to the death penalty.

In 1940, Joyce publishes a commissioned self-justifying propaganda work, Twilight over England. His representation of himself echoes that of Hitler in Mein Kampf – the provincial patriot, whose martial sacrifices are betrayed by corrupt elites, learning through poverty the hollowness of bourgeois patriotism and the need to synthesise socialism with nationalism. He shares with his hero a paranoid belief in his own ability to create an alternative reality through language and obstinacy. He dreams of becoming the English Führer.

In Berlin, the Joyces’ marriage comes under increasing strain, marked by drunken rows, domestic violence, and infidelity on both sides, though they retain a fierce mutual fascination. They divorce on August 12, 1941, but remarry on February 11, 1942, while continuing their previous behaviour. As the Axis powers begin to fail, his broadcasts become more defensive, focusing on the Soviet threat. On October 14, 1944, he is awarded the German War Merit Cross, first class. On October 22, he is sworn into the Volkssturm (territorial army) and begins drilling. The Joyces are evacuated from Berlin in March 1945, initially to Apen near the Dutch border and then to Hamburg, where he makes a last, drunken, defiant broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s death. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Sweden, the Joyces hide at Flensburg near the Danish border. On May 28, 1945, he is shot and captured while gathering firewood.

Joyce is brought back to Britain on June 16 after Parliament passed legislation simplifying treason trial procedures. At his September 17-20 trial, he proves his American citizenship, but the court holds that his illegally acquired British passport incurred duties of allegiance. His appeals are rejected by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. His fate is influenced by British public opinion, and possibly by a desire to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. In his death cell he blames the defeat of national socialism on German limitations. He also fantasises that he could have saved Hitler from his incompetent subordinates.

Joyce is hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946. Unlike most of his fellow Nazis, he proclaims to the end his allegiance to national socialism and hatred of Jews. He corresponds cheerfully with Margaret, joking evasively about the death camps and expressing a belief that his spirit will survive, watch over her, and continue his work. To neo-Nazis he becomes a martyr. Even among those to whom his activities had been repellent, a significant body of opinion holds he should not have been condemned on a questionable and innovative technicality. The historian A. J. P. Taylor maintains that Joyce was executed for making a false declaration to obtain a passport, a misdemeanour that normally incurs a £2 fine.

In 1976, Joyce is reinterred in Galway as it is feared that a grave in England might become a fascist shrine. Thomas Kilroy‘s play Double Cross (1986) juxtaposes Joyce and Brendan Bracken as Irishmen who reinvented themselves through fantasies of Britishness. The BBC Sound Archive has recordings of some of Joyce’s broadcasts and transcripts of others, collected during the war as evidence for a future treason trial.

(From: “Joyce, William Brooke (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of James Rosenberger, Irish American Track & Field Athlete

James Maher Rosenberger, Irish American track and field athlete and a member of the Irish American Athletic Club is born in New York City on April 6, 1887.

In 1909, at the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) metropolitan senior championships, held at Travers Island, New York, Rosenberger takes first place in the 100- and 220-yard dash. The following week, he is part of the Irish American Athletic Club’s four-man relay team that breaks the world record for the one-mile relay with a time of 3 minutes, 20 2/5 seconds. The other three men on the record-breaking team are C. S. Cassara, Melvin Sheppard, and William Robbins.

On April 9, 1911, Rosenberger anchors the Irish American Athletic Club 4×440-yard relay team that breaks the world record at Celtic Park, Queens, New York City and sets the first International Amateur Athletic Federation– recognized world record for 4×440-yard or 4×400-meter relay race, in time of 3 minutes and 18.2 seconds. The other members of the world record-setting team are Harry Gissing, Melvin Sheppard and Harry Schaaf.

Rosenberger participates in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm but is eliminated in a 400 metres semifinal. The following year he competes in Australia with the AAU team, and in 1915, he becomes the coach for the Long Island Athletic Club.

Following his retirement from track and field, Rosenberger later works as an auditor and is a track coach at St. John’s University.

Rosenberger dies in Brooklyn, New York, on January 1, 1946. He is buried at Calvary Cemetery, Woodside, Queens, New York.


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Birth of Nuala O’Faolain, Journalist, TV Producer, Teacher & Writer

Nuala O’Faolain, Irish journalist, television producer, book reviewer, teacher and writer, is born in Clontarf, Dublin on March 1, 1940. She becomes well known after the publication of her memoirs Are You Somebody? and Almost There. She also writes a biography of Irish criminal Chicago May and two novels.

O’Faolain is the second eldest of nine children. Her father, known as ‘TerryO’ is a well-known Irish journalist, writing the “Dubliners Diary” social column under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan for the Evening Press. She is educated at University College Dublin (UCD), the University of Hull, and the University of Oxford. She teaches for a time at Morley College in London and works as a television producer for the BBC and Raidió Teilifís Éireann.

O’Faolain describes her early life as growing up in a Catholic country which, in her view, fears sexuality and forbids her even information about her body. In her writings she often discusses her frustration at the sexism and rigidity of roles in Catholic Ireland that expect her to marry and have children, neither of which she does.

O’Faolain becomes internationally well known for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? and Almost There; a novel, My Dream of You; and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May. The first three are all featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her posthumous novel Best Love, Rosie is published in 2009.

O’Faolain’s formative years coincide with the emergence of the women’s movement, and her ability to expose misogyny in all its forms is formidable, forensic and unremitting. However, her feminism stems from a fundamental belief in social justice. Unlike most commentators, who maintain a detached, lofty tone, she places herself at the centre of things, a high-risk strategy that works because of her broad range of erudition, worn lightly, her courage and a truthfulness that sometimes borders on the self-destructive.

O’Faolain is engaged at least once but never marries. In Are You Somebody? she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who publishes her own memoir, Nell. From 2002 until her death, she lives much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. They are registered as domestic partners in 2003.

O’Faolain splits her time between Ireland and New York City. She is diagnosed with metastatic cancer and is interviewed on the Marian Finucane radio show on RTÉ Radio 1 on April 12, 2008, in relation to her terminal illness. She tells Finucane, “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life.”

In a last attempt to grasp as much of life as she can, O’Faolain holidays with family members in Sicily and visits Berlin with a group of friends to hear music and see art. She previously tended to avoid Berlin because, through contact with Jewish friends and lovers, she associated it with the Holocaust. She dies at the Blackrock Hospice, Dublin, on May 9, 2008.

O’Faolain wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985 for her work as the producer of the RTÉ One television programme Plain Tales. In 2006, she wins the Prix Femina étranger, a French literary award, for The Story of Chicago May.

O’Faolain is the subject of a film documentary, Nuala: A Life and Death (2011), directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, and produced and narrated by Marian Finucane. Hugo Hamilton‘s novel Every Single Minute (2014) is based on his experiences when accompanying O’Faolain to Berlin shortly before her death.


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Birth of Margaret Pearse, Politician & Mother of Patrick Pearse

Margaret Pearse (née Brady), Irish politician and mother of Patrick and Willie Pearse, who are both executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, is born in Dublin on February 12, 1857.

Margaret Brady is born to Patrick Brady, a coal merchant whose family are from County Meath, and Brigid Brady (née Savage) of Oldtown, Dublin. She is baptised in St. Lawrence O’Toole’s parish. At the time, her parents are living at 1 Clarence Street. She has three known siblings and is educated by the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. She is employed as a stationery shop assistant where she meets her future husband, James Pearse.

In 1877, she marries James Pearse at St. Agatha’s Church, off the North Strand. James is born in Bloomsbury, Middlesex, on December 8, 1839, and later lives in Birmingham. He comes to Ireland to work as a sculptor in the late 1850s with his first wife, Emily Susanna Fox, who dies in 1876. They have four children together. The first three children are Margaret Mary (born on August 4, 1878), Patrick (born on November 10, 1879) and William (born on November 15, 1881). All three children are born while the family lives in 27 Great Brunswick Street. Their youngest child, Mary Brigid, is born on September 29, 1888, by which time the family has moved to Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount. Pearse’s aunt, Margaret Brady, an Irish speaker, is a frequent visitor to the family home and encourages the children’s interest in the Irish language and culture. Her husband dies in 1900. Pearse does not permit her children to play with other children, however, she supports her children in all their aspirations. She has a very strong relationship and consequent effect on her eldest son, Patrick, who founds St. Enda’s School in 1908 and is the headmaster up until the time of his execution. She takes over the responsibility of Housekeeper at the school.

Pearse supports her sons’ political beliefs. After their execution, she wishes to maintain their legacy and becomes involved in political life. She joins Sinn Féin after the Rising and gives support and endorsement to candidates during the 1918 Westminster election. During the 1920 Poor Law Elections for the Rathmines area of Dublin, she stands as a Sinn Féin candidate and is elected on the first count. She is elected to Dáil Éireann as a Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin County constituency at the 1921 Irish elections.

Pearse strongly opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty, as do all the female TDs. She states during the Treaty debate that:

“I rise to support the motion of our President for the rejection of the Treaty. My reasons for doing so are various, but my first reason for doing so I would like to explain here today is my son’s account. It has been said here on several occasions that Patrick Pearse would have accepted this Treaty. I deny it. As his mother I deny it, and on his account, I will not accept it.”

Later she continues in a similar vein:

“Always we had to be on the alert. But even the Black and Tans alone would not frighten me as much as if I accepted this Treaty; because I feel in my heart – and I would not say it only I feel it – that the ghosts of my sons would haunt me.”

Following the ratification of the Treaty Pearse leaves the Dáil with the other anti-Treaty deputies. She is defeated at the 1922 Irish general election. She supports those who oppose the Treaty during the Irish Civil War and continues to be a member of Sinn Féin until 1926. In 1926 she leaves the party conference with Éamon de Valera and becomes a founder member of Fianna Fáil. She never stands for election again.

At the launch of The Irish Press newspaper, Pearse is asked to press the button to start the printers rolling. At many public occasions she states that were her sons alive they too would have joined Fianna Fáil. Accordingly, Patrick Pearse is recognised as the spiritual figurehead of the party to this day.

After Patrick’s death, the responsibility for running the school falls to Pearse and her two daughters. As Patrick Pearse had died without a will, the school is left in a precarious financial position. In May 1924, when she is aged 70, she undertakes a trip to the United States to raise funds for the school, alongside showing support for Éamon de Valera and the Irish Republic. At an event in Brooklyn on May 19, 1924, when referencing the execution of her two sons, she declares herself the “proudest mother in Ireland.” She also states that Michael Collins had attempted to “bribe” her with an offer to subsidise the school, which she refused. During a meeting in Seattle on August 11, 1924, she again discusses her sons and how she believes “the best way to honour their memory was to carry on their work for Ireland.” She raises over $10,000 in donations for the school during the trip. Notwithstanding her fundraising activities, St. Enda’s continues to decline and eventually closes in 1935. Great Brunswick Street, where she and the Pearse family originally lived, is renamed Pearse Street in 1920 by a resolution passed at the Dublin City Council meeting.

Pearse dies on April 22, 1932. She is honoured with a large state funeral and a motion is passed at the meeting of Dublin City Council expressing sympathy with the Pearse family. On April 26, 1932, sizeable crowds pay their respects as her funeral procession makes its way through the streets of Dublin. At the General Post Office (GPO), where Patrick and William fought during the Easter Rising, the funeral cortege pauses for a minute of silence before proceeding to Glasnevin Cemetery. Éamon de Valera gives an oration as she is laid to rest, which praises her inspiring courage, charity and cheerfulness during the years after her son’s death.

After Pearse’s death, her daughter, Mary Margaret, continues to reside at St. Enda’s. She also joins Fianna Fáil, and serves as a TD from 1933 to 1937 and later serves in Seanad Éireann as a Senator from 1938 until her death in 1968. Upon her death, as per her mother’s request, she passes St. Enda’s on to the people of Ireland.


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Birth of Paddy Killoran, Fiddle Player & Bandleader

Patrick J. Killoran, Irish traditional fiddle player, bandleader and recording artist is born on September 21, 1903, in Emlaghgissan (also spelled “Emlagation”), a townland in the civil parish of Emlaghfad near the town of Ballymote, County Sligo. He is regarded, along with James Morrison and Michael Coleman, as one of the finest exponents of the south Sligo fiddle style in the “golden age” of the ethnic recording industry of the 1920s and 1930s.

Killoran’s father Patrick plays the flute and his mother Mary the concertina, but he is also influenced by local fiddle master Philip O’Beirne, who had earlier tutored Michael Coleman. As a teenager, he is a volunteer with the Ballymote-based 3rd Battalion of the south Sligo Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence.

In 1925, Killoran emigrates to New York City, arriving on May 19 on the Cunard liner Scythia. Within a few months, he officially declares his intention to become a citizen of the United States, listing his address as 227 East 126th Street in east Harlem and his occupation as “laborer.” He later lodges with fellow Sligo fiddler James Morrison in a Columbus Avenue apartment on Manhattan‘s Upper West Side. A 1927 newspaper ad for “Morrison’s Orchestra” offers “Irish music by P. Killoran and J. Morrison, celebrated violinists,” giving 507 West 133d Street in west Harlem as the contact address. He soon launches his own career as a soloist and bandleader. A publicity photo of his quartet c. 1928 includes button accordionist D. Casey, tenor banjo player Richard Curran and second fiddler Denis Murphy. By the next year, he is performing on a weekly radio program sponsored by the Pride of Erin Ballrooms, located at the corner of Bedford and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn. He also tries another side occupation as his 1931 naturalization petition lists his occupation as “Music store owner.”

At the Pride of Erin, and later at the Sligo Ballroom at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, Killoran’s “Irish Orchestra” provides music for Irish dancing, while Jack Healy, another Ballymote native, leads a group for “American” dancing. Healy, as a singer and tenor saxophone player, also performs and records with Killoran’s group, the membership of which over the course of the 1930s includes fiddler Paddy Sweeney, another Sligo native, fiddle and clarinet player Paul Ryan, Ryan’s brother Jim on the C Melody saxophone, pianists Eileen O’Shea, Edmund Tucker and Jim McGinn, drummer Mickey Murphy, button accordionists Tommy Flanagan and William McElligott and tenor banjo/tenor guitar player Michael “Whitey” Andrews.

Killoran’s band is variously billed as his “Pride of Erin Orchestra,” “Radio Dance Orchestra,” “Sligo Ballroom Orchestra,” “Lakes of Sligo Orchestra” and “Irish Barn Dance Boys.” The group is a popular choice for county association functions, particularly those of Sligo and Roscommon. In 1932, he leads a band that accompanies Cardinal William Henry O’Connell of Boston to the Eucharistic Congress in Ireland and briefly bills his group as the “Pride of Erin Eucharistic Congress Orchestra.” He regularly performs at Irish beach resorts on the Rockaway peninsula and in East Durham in the Catskill Mountains.

Uniquely among the major New York Irish musicians of the pre-World War II era, Killoran continues his musical career through the 1950s. He issues new recordings, including duets with flute player Mike Flynn and some fiddle-and-viola sides with Paul Ryan, and leads an active dance band. Age and illness eventually force him to retire, and in 1962 he turns over leadership of the band, a fixture at the City Center Ballroom, to button accordionist Joe Madden, father of Cherish the Ladies flute player Joanie Madden.

In 1956, Killoran is a co-founder of the Dublin Recording Company, later better known simply as Dublin Records, which is organized to record new Irish discs in New York.

Killoran is a founding member of the Emerald Irish Musicians Benevolent Society, a group that stages “Night of Shamrocks” concerts to raise money for the benefit of sick and deceased Irish musicians in New York. He is also a member of the Irish Musicians Association of America, and a New York branch of that organization, which later merges with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, is named for him.

In addition to the 1932 trip to the Eucharistic Congress, Killoran returns to Ireland at least twice. In 1949, he plays on a Radio Éireann program hosted by piper and folklorist Séamus Ennis. Some selections from that broadcast are recorded on a private disc and are later released on CD. On a 1960 visit, he visits Sligo and Clare and performs at a concert in County Longford.

Killoran is married twice. His first wife, Anna Gorman, a native of County Roscommon, dies in 1935. His second wife is Betty (Bridget) Hayes, an immigrant from Shanaway West, County Clare, who survives him. He dies in New York City on April 24, 1965.

A “Paddy Killoran Traditional Festival” is celebrated in the third week of June in Ballymote, where a monument in Killoran’s honor is erected in 2012.


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Birth of Jack “Legs” Diamond, Irish American Gangster

Jack “Legs” Diamond, an Irish American gangster in Philadelphia and New York City during the Prohibition era also known as John Nolan and Gentleman Jack, is born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1897, to Sara and John Moran, who emigrated from Ireland to Philadelphia in 1891. A bootlegger and close associate of gambler Arnold Rothstein, he survives a number of attempts on his life between 1916 and 1931, causing him to be known as the “clay pigeon of the underworld.” In 1930, his nemesis Dutch Schultz remarks to his own gang, “Ain’t there nobody that can shoot this guy so he don’t bounce back?”

In 1899, Diamond’s younger brother Eddie is born. He and Eddie both struggle through grade school, and their mother suffers from severe arthritis and other health problems. She passes away on December 24, 1913, following complications brought on by a bacterial infection and a high fever. John Moran then moves his family to Brooklyn, New York.

Diamond soon joins a Manhattan street gang called the Hudson Dusters. His first arrest for burglary occurs when he breaks into a jewelry store on February 4, 1914. He serves in the United States Army in World War I but is convicted and jailed for desertion in 1918 or 1919. He serves two years of a three- to five-year sentence at Leavenworth Military Prison. After being released in 1921, he becomes a hired thug and later personal bodyguard for crime boss Arnold Rothstein.

Diamond is known for leading a rather flamboyant lifestyle. He is an energetic individual, his nickname “Legs” derived either from his being a good dancer or from how fast he could escape his enemies. His wife Alice is never supportive of his life of crime but does not do much to dissuade him from it. He is a womanizer, with his best-known mistress being a showgirl and dancer, Marion “Kiki” Roberts.

In the late 1920s, Prohibition is in force, and the sale of beer and other alcoholic beverages is illegal in the United States. Diamond travels to Europe to acquire beer and narcotics but fails. However, he does obtain liquor, which is dumped overboard in partially full barrels that float to Long Island as ships enter New York Harbor. He pays children a nickel for every barrel they bring to his trucks.

Following the death of Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen, Diamond oversees illegal alcohol sales in downtown Manhattan via the Hotsy Totsy Club, an establishment partly owned by Diamond on Broadway. This work brings him into conflict with Dutch Schultz, who wants to move beyond his base in Harlem. He also runs into trouble with other gangs in the city. On July 14, 1929, he and fellow gang member Charles Entratta shoot three drunken brawlers in the Hotsy Totsy Club. Two of the brawlers, William Cassidy and Simon Walker, are killed, while the survivor, Peter Cassidy, is severely wounded. The club’s bartender, three waiters, and the hat check girl vanish, with one of them being found shot dead in New Jersey. He is not charged but is forced to close the club.

In 1930, Diamond and two henchmen kidnap truck driver Grover Parks in Cairo, New York, demanding to know where he had obtained his load of hard cider. When Parks denies carrying anything, Diamond and his men beat and tortured Parks, eventually letting him go. A few months later, he is charged with the kidnapping of James Duncan. He is sent to Catskill, New York, for his first trial, but is acquitted. However, he is convicted in a federal case on related charges and sentenced to four years in jail. He is tried in December 1931 in Troy, New York, also for kidnapping, and is once again acquitted.

On August 23, 1930, Diamond, under the false name John Nolan, boards the ocean liner SS Belgenland, bound for Europe. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) suspect that he might have left the U.S. aboard RMS Olympic or RMS Baltic, but he is not found on either ship when they reach Europe. The NYPD then sends a wireless telegraph message to the crew of SS Belgenland, who reply that a man similar to Diamond’s description is among the passengers. Diamond spends much of the voyage in the ship’s smoking-room playing poker, with one report claiming that he won thousands of dollars in this game. The SS Belgenland‘s officers, however, refute this, saying his winnings were small.

The NYPD telegraphs police in England, France and Belgium with the warning that Diamond is an undesirable character. When SS Belgenland reaches Plymouth on August 31, Scotland Yard officers tell Diamond he will not be allowed to land in England. He tells reporters that he wants to travel to the French spa town of Vichy for “the cure.” He disembarks in Antwerp on September 1, where Belgian police take him to their headquarters. Eventually, he agrees to voluntarily leave Belgium and is put on a train to Germany. When his train reaches Aachen, German police arrest him. On September 6, the German government decides to deport Diamond. He is driven to Hamburg and put on the cargo ship Hannover for passage to Philadelphia.

On September 23, Hannover arrives in Philadelphia, and Diamond is immediately arrested by the Philadelphia police. At a court hearing that day, the judge says he will release him if he leaves Philadelphia within the hour. Diamond agrees.

On October 24, 1924, Diamond is shot and wounded by shotgun pellets, reportedly after trying to hijack liquor trucks belonging to a rival crime syndicate.

On October 16, 1927, Diamond tries to stop the murder of “Little Augie” Orgen. His brother Eddie is Orgen’s bodyguard, but Diamond substitutes for Eddie that day. As Orgen and he are walking down a street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, three young men approach them and start shooting. Orgen is fatally wounded, and Diamond is shot twice below the heart. He is taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he eventually recovers. Police interview him in the hospital, but he refuses to identify any suspects or help the investigation in any way. Police initially suspect that he is an accomplice and charge him with homicide, but the charge is dropped. The assailants are supposedly hired by Lepke Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, who are seeking to encroach on Orgen’s garment-district labor rackets.

On October 12, 1930, Diamond is shot and wounded at the Hotel Monticello on Manhattan’s West Side. Two men force their way into his room and shoot him five times. Still in his pajamas, he staggers into the hallway and collapses. When asked later by the police commissioner how he managed to walk out of the room, he says he drank two shots of whiskey first. He is rushed to the Polyclinic Hospital, where he eventually recovers. He is discharged from Polyclinic on December 30, 1930.

On April 21, 1931, Diamond is arrested in Catskill on assault charges for the Parks beating in 1930. Two days later, he is released from the county jail on $25,000 bond. Five days later, he is again shot and wounded at the Aratoga Inn, a roadhouse near Cairo. After eating in the dining room with three companions, he is shot three times and collapses by the front door. A local resident drives him to a hospital in Albany, where he eventually recovers. On May 1, while he is still in the hospital, the New York State Police seize over $5,000 worth of illegal beer and alcohol from his hiding places in Cairo and at the Aratoga Inn.

In August 1931, Diamond and Paul Quattrocchi go on trial for bootlegging. The same month, he is convicted and sentenced to four years in state prison. In September 1931, he appeals his conviction.

On December 18, 1931, Diamond’s enemies finally catch up with him. He is staying in a rooming house on Dove Street in Albany while on trial for kidnapping in Troy. On the night of his acquittal, December 17, he and his family and friends visit a restaurant in Albany. At 1:00 a.m., he and mistress, Marion “Kiki” Roberts, entertain themselves at the Rain-Bo Room of the Kenmore Hotel on North Pearl Street.

At 4:30 a.m., Diamond drunkenly goes back to the rooming house and passes out on his bed. Two gunmen enter his room about an hour later. One man holds Diamond down and the other shoots him three times in the back of the head.

There is much speculation as to who is responsible for the murder. Likely candidates include Schultz, the Oley Brothers, the Albany Police Department, and relatives of Red Cassidy, another Irish American gangster at the time. According to author William Kennedy in his book O Albany, Dan O’Connell, who runs the local Democratic political machine, orders Diamond’s execution, which is carried out by the Albany police.

Given the power that the O’Connell machine holds in Albany and its determination to prevent organized crime, other than their own, from threatening their monopoly of vice in the city, some accept this account of the story. For those believing this theory, William Fitzpatrick’s promotion to chief of police is said to be a reward for executing Diamond. In 1945, Chief Fitzpatrick is shot and killed in his own office by John McElveney, an Albany police detective. McElveney is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He is released in 1957 when his sentence is commuted by Governor W. Averell Harriman.

On December 23, 1931, Diamond is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. There is no church service or graveside ceremony. Family and spectators numbering 200 attend the interment. No criminal figures are spotted.

On July 1, 1933, Alice Kenny Diamond, Diamond’s 33-year-old widow, is found shot to death in her Brooklyn apartment. It is speculated that she is shot by Diamond’s enemies to keep her quiet.


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Death of Matilda Tone, Wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone

Matilda Tone, wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone, dies in Georgetown, District of Columbia, on March 18, 1849. She is instrumental in the preservation and publication of Wolfe Tone’s papers.

Tone is born Martha Witherington in Dublin on June 17, 1769. She is the eldest daughter of merchant William Witherington and his wife Catherine (née Fanning). Her father is listed as a woolen draper on Grafton Street, Dublin, from 1768 to 1784, as a wine merchant from 1784 to 1788, and finally as a merchant from 1788 to 1793. It is claimed that he is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and sits on the merchants’ guild on Dublin’s common council from 1777 to 1783. Her mother is a housekeeper to her father after he is widowed.

Tone receives a good education and maintains an interest in drama and literature throughout her life. Katherine Wilmot visits her in Paris in 1802 and comments on the books she has by French, Italian and English authors. When she is fifteen years old, she gets to know Wolfe Tone through her older brother. He is still a student in Trinity College Dublin, and it is he that renames her Matilda. They marry when she is just sixteen, on July 21, 1785, in St. Ann’s Church, Dublin, honeymooning in Maynooth. Upon their return they live with the Witheringtons, though they are not on good terms, and then with Wolfe Tone’s parents in Bodenstown, County Kildare.

The Tone’s first child, Maria, is born before October 1786. She is followed by a son, Richard, who is named for their neighbour Richard Griffith, who dies in infancy. Tone stays with her husband’s family while he is studying for the bar in London from 1787 to 1788. When he returns, the couple has two more sons: William Theobald Wolfe Tone, born on April 29, 1791, and Francis Rawdon Tone, born on June 23, 1793. Francis is known as Frank and is named after Francis Rawdon-Hastings. William is born in Dublin and Frank is probably born in Bodenstown. By this time, the family has a cottage in Bodenstown which Wolfe Tone had inherited from his uncle Jonathan Tone, which the family jokingly refers to as Château Boue. They live there until May 1795, when they leave for Princeton, New Jersey, due to political reasons.

Tone and her children come back to Europe to join Wolfe Tone in France eighteen months later. The family settles in Paris, at first living with Colonel Henry Shee at Nanterre, later moving to the suburb, Chaillot. She educates her children at home. Very few of her letters survive, but many of her husband’s letters and diaries are addressed or intended for her. From these and her letter to her friend Eliza Fletcher, it is clear she shares her husband’s interest in politics. Following her husband’s death in November 1798, she moves to a small apartment at 51 Rue Saint-Jacques in the Latin Quarter of Paris. This is to be close to her son William, who is attending Lycée Louis-le-Grand. She is awarded a pension of 1,200 francs for herself and 400 for each of her children after the expiration of the Treaty of Amiens on May 1, 1803.

Tone’s daughter Maria dies in April 1803, and then her son Frank dies in 1807, both of tuberculosis. William is displaying symptoms of the disease as well, which prompts her to move to the United States in 1807. From there, they attempt to sort out her husband’s affairs, which had been entrusted to James Reynolds. They retrieve only a few of Wolfe Tone’s pre-1795 diaries, and all of the post-1795 letters and diaries, which they add to the autobiography she already has in her possession. When William enters the Cavalry School at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in November 1810 as a cadet, she moves to be close to him, living at the Hôtel de la Surintendance. By approaching Napoleon in 1811, who knew Wolfe Tone, she ensures that her son receives French citizenship and the privileged status of “élève du gouvernement.” In January 1813, when William begins his service, she returns to Paris to live on the Rue de Lille and later moves to the Latin Quarter.

Following the defeat of Napoleon in June 1815, William is refused entry to Ireland or to visit Britain. This leads to both mother and son returning to the United States. Before she leaves Paris, she marries her old friend Thomas Wilson on August 19, 1816. Wilson is a Scottish businessman and advocate who has taken care of her financial affairs after the death of her husband. The couple visit Scotland, and then move to New York City in 1817, and finally to Georgetown, District of Columbia, around 1820. She lives there until her death and calls herself Matilda Tone-Wilson.

Starting in 1824, The New Monthly Magazine begins the unauthorised publication of extracts from Wolfe Tone’s autobiography. In response, Tone decides to publish all of Wolfe Tone’s papers and writing, including the autobiography, pamphlets and diaries, edited by their son William. What results is two large volumes entitled the Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, published in May 1826. She adds a memoir of her own life in Paris following his death in 1798. The book is a best-seller, and ensures the legacy of Wolfe Tone, as well as being an important contemporary document of both Irish and French revolutionary politics.

William Tone dies in 1828, after which Tone lives more privately. She dies in Georgetown on March 18, 1849. Thomas Wilson predeceases her in 1824. Just two weeks prior to her death she is interviewed by a Young Irelander, Charles Hart. She is initially buried near William Tone at Marbury burying-ground, Georgetown. After that cemetery is sold, she is reinterred in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, on October 31, 1891, by her great-grandchildren. A new monument is dedicated to her, which is later restored in 1996.


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The Execution of William Joyce

William Brooke Joyce, an American-born fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during World War II, is hanged in Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint on January 3, 1946, making him the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

Joyce is born on April 24, 1906, in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of three sons of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and his wife, Gertrude (née Brooke), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, is from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. The Joyces return to Ireland in 1909. William, a precocious child, attends Coláiste Iognáid SJ, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. At the age of fourteen, he abandons Catholicism for Anglicanism, apparently after being told that all non-Catholics, including his mother, would be damned. In adult life he is nominally anglican, though his adherence to Christianity is tenuous.

The Joyces are unionists and teach their children fervent imperialism. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce openly associates with the Black and Tans and acts as a scout for them. An acquaintance claims that his views are so extreme even loyalists dislike him. On December 9, 1921, he flees to England to join the Worcestershire Regiment and is followed to England in 1923 by the rest of the family. When he enlists, he claims to be eighteen, but after he contracts rheumatic fever, his age is discovered, and he is discharged in March 1922. For a time, he studies mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic Institute as a pre-medical student (1922–23), but he leaves of his own accord, with a reputation for laziness and violent political views. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College are more successful. He is a brilliant linguist and mathematician and graduates BA with first-class honours in 1927. He publishes an academic article on philology and considers progressing to an MA. He later falsely claims that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic. In 1932, he enrolls at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D. in educational psychology.

Joyce is disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway and is mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identifies strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier angry anti-liberal from the provinces. His life is marked by repeated episodes of hero worship, followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation. In 1923, he joins the British Fascists, an organisation that has a significant Irish loyalist membership, and in 1924 he allies himself with a militant splinter group, the National Fascists. Most British fascists see themselves as Tory auxiliaries, and they often provide a security presence at conservative meetings. On October 22, 1924, while stewarding a meeting addressed by a Jewish conservative candidate, he has his face slashed and is left with a prominent scar across his right cheek. He joins the Conservative Party in 1928 and is active in the Chelsea constituency until 1930, when he is forced out because of his eccentricities and sexual misbehaviour. On April 30, 1927, he marries Hazel Kathleen Barr. They have two daughters but separate in 1935, largely because of his infidelities, heavy drinking, and temper. The marriage is dissolved in 1937.

In November 1933, Joyce abandons his Ph.D. studies to work for Sir Oswald Mosley‘s British Union of Fascists (BUF). By early 1934 he has become its paid publicity director, traveling throughout Britain to organise meetings. He is a powerful, rabble-rousing speaker, driven by an instinctive awareness that vitriolic verbal abuse gives speaker and audience a sense of power and solidarity. MI5 sees him as a compelling, though deranged, personality. On February 8, 1937, he marries Margaret Cairns White, a BUF activist from Lancashire, with whom he had cohabited since 1936.

Joyce leads a BUF faction that favours a recruitment strategy based on uncompromising ideological assertion. This is challenged by populists who prioritise marches and displays and hold that indoctrination should follow membership. In February 1937, he is BUF candidate for the London County Council in Shoreditch. The party wins 14 per cent of the vote. In March 1937, he, along with many full-time BUF staff, are sacked when the BUF cuts expenses. But his dismissal also reflects Mosley’s awareness that his obsessive rhetoric repels “respectable” recruits and that he is no longer a biddable, slavish admirer of “the Leader.” He later falsely claims near-exclusive credit for the BUF’s escalating antisemitism, a view that Mosley eventually finds it convenient to adopt in order to evade his own responsibility.

In April 1937, Joyce founds the National Socialist League, helped by a wealthy patron. He supports himself as a private tutor, refusing to take Jewish pupils. He is active in various antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups such as the Right Club and engages in “peace” campaigns based on the view that British interests lay with Germany against Russia. Political marginalisation intensifies his admiration for Nazi Germany and hero worship of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, he has decided that if war comes, he will go to Germany, though he also considers moving to Ireland. He renews his British passport for one-year terms in August 1938 and August 1939.

On August 26, 1939, Joyce and his wife leave London for Berlin. He is allegedly tipped off about his impending arrest and internment by an MI5 officer, to whom he had supplied information on communists. His siblings, whom he recruited into his fascist organisations, are variously penalised for his activities. At a loose end in Berlin, he is persuaded by a British associate to become a radio announcer with the English-language service of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). He makes his first broadcast on September 6, 1939, and receives a contract in October. He finds in radio an outlet for his forceful style and delight in saying the unsayable, and in the early years of the war takes an exultant pride in recounting Nazi victories. His performances are admired by Joseph Goebbels, whom Joyce, to his regret, never meets. On September 26, 1940, he acquires German citizenship.

The novel experience of hearing the enemy in one’s own living room attracts wide audiences in Britain. Joyce’s practice of naming newly captured prisoners of war in his broadcasts is also a compelling motive for listening. In fact, he tries to recruit British prisoners of war as collaborators. The name “Lord Haw-Haw,” invented by the Daily Express radio critic in September 1939, initially applies to several English-language broadcasters but in time becomes associated with Joyce. He is initially a figure of fun, imitated by comedians, but there are sinister undercurrents of terrifying omnipotence, intensified by his sneering, gloating delivery and his delighted deployment of the “big lie” technique. It is widely believed that British-based fifth columnists supply him with information, that he predicts air raids, and shows minute local knowledge. In time, fear and his growing notoriety feed popular hatred of him in Britain, though his anti-British taunts allegedly win appreciative Irish audiences. He exults that he is daily committing treason and rendering himself liable to the death penalty.

In 1940, Joyce publishes a commissioned self-justifying propaganda work, Twilight over England. His representation of himself echoes that of Hitler in Mein Kampf – the provincial patriot, whose martial sacrifices are betrayed by corrupt elites, learning through poverty the hollowness of bourgeois patriotism and the need to synthesise socialism with nationalism. He shares with his hero a paranoid belief in his own ability to create an alternative reality through language and obstinacy. He dreams of becoming the English Führer.

In Berlin, the Joyces’ marriage comes under increasing strain, marked by drunken rows, domestic violence, and infidelity on both sides, though they retain a fierce mutual fascination. They divorce on August 12, 1941, but remarry on February 11, 1942, while continuing their previous behaviour. As the Axis powers begin to fail, his broadcasts become more defensive, focusing on the Soviet threat. On October 14, 1944, he is awarded the German War Merit Cross, first class. On October 22, he is sworn into the Volkssturm (territorial army) and begins drilling. The Joyces are evacuated from Berlin in March 1945, initially to Apen near the Dutch border and then to Hamburg, where he makes a last, drunken, defiant broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s death. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Sweden, the Joyces hide at Flensburg near the Danish border. On May 28, 1945, he is shot and captured while gathering firewood.

Joyce is brought back to Britain on June 16 after Parliament passed legislation simplifying treason trial procedures. At his September 17-20 trial, he proves his American citizenship, but the court holds that his illegally acquired British passport incurred duties of allegiance. His appeals are rejected by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. His fate is influenced by British public opinion, and possibly by a desire to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. In his death cell he blames the defeat of national socialism on German limitations. He also fantasises that he could have saved Hitler from his incompetent subordinates.

Joyce is hanged at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946. Unlike most of his fellow Nazis, he proclaims to the end his allegiance to national socialism and hatred of Jews. He corresponds cheerfully with Margaret, joking evasively about the death camps and expressing a belief that his spirit will survive, watch over her, and continue his work. To neo-Nazis he becomes a martyr. Even among those to whom his activities had been repellent, a significant body of opinion holds he should not have been condemned on a questionable and innovative technicality. The historian A. J. P. Taylor maintains that Joyce was executed for making a false declaration to obtain a passport, a misdemeanour that normally incurs a £2 fine.

In 1976, Joyce is reinterred in Galway as it is feared that a grave in England might become a fascist shrine. Thomas Kilroy‘s play Double Cross (1986) juxtaposes Joyce and Brendan Bracken as Irishmen who reinvented themselves through fantasies of Britishness. The BBC Sound Archive has recordings of some of Joyce’s broadcasts and transcripts of others, collected during the war as evidence for a future treason trial.

(From: “Joyce, William Brooke (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of J. P. Donleavy, American Irish Novelist & Playwright

James Patrick Donleavy, American Irish novelist, short story writer and playwright, is born to Irish immigrants Margaret and Patrick Donleavy in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on April 23, 1926. His best-known work is the novel The Ginger Man, which is initially banned for obscenity.

Donleavy grows up in the Bronx. His father is a firefighter, and his mother comes from a wealthy background. He has a sister, Mary Rita, and a younger brother. He declares himself to be an atheist at the age of fourteen. He receives his education at various schools in the United States, then serves in the United States Navy during World War II. After the war ends, he moves to Ireland and becomes an Irish citizen. In 1946 he begins studying bacteriology at Trinity College Dublin but leaves in 1949 before taking a degree.

Donleavy’s first published work is a short story entitled A Party on Saturday Afternoon, which appears in the Dublin literary periodical Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art in 1950. He gains critical acclaim with his first novel, The Ginger Man (1955), which is one of the Modern Library 100 best novels. The novel, of which his friend and fellow writer Brendan Behan is the first person to read the completed manuscript, is banned in Ireland and the United States by reason of obscenity. The lead character, Sebastian Dangerfield, is in part based on Trinity College companion Gainor Crist, an American Navy veteran also studying at Trinity College on the G.I. Bill, whom Donleavy once describes in an interview as a “saint,” though of a Rabelaisian kind.

Correctly or incorrectly, Donleavy’s initial works are sometimes grouped with the kitchen sink artists as well as the “angry young men.” Another novel, A Fairy Tale of New York, provides the title of the song “Fairytale of New York.”

In March 2007, Donleavy is the castaway on BBC Radio 4‘s Desert Island Discs.

In 2015, Donleavy is the recipient of the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards. In 2016, Trinity College Dublin awards him with an honorary doctorate.

In 1946, Donleavy marries Valerie Heron. The couple has two children: Philip (born in 1951) and Karen (born in 1955). They divorce in 1969, and he remarries in 1970 to Mary Wilson Price. That union ends in divorce in 1989. In 2011, it is reported that he had not fathered his two children with Price. A DNA test in the early 1990s confirms that Rebecca is the daughter of brewing scion Kieran Guinness, and Rory is the son of Kieran’s older brother Finn, whom Price marries after her divorce from Donleavy. “My interest is only to look after the welfare of the child,” Donleavy tells The Times, “and after a certain stage, you can’t worry about their parentage.”

Donleavy lives at Levington Park, a country house on 200 acres directly on Lough Owel, near Mullingar, County Westmeath, from 1972. Throughout much of his life, he is known as Mike by close friends, though the origins of this nickname are unclear.

Donleavy dies in Mullingar at the age of 91 on September 11, 2017.


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Birth of Patrick Ford, Irish American Journalist & Land Reformer

Patrick Ford, Irish American journalist, Georgist land reformer and fund-raiser for Irish causes, is born in Galway, County Galway, on April 12, 1837.

Ford is the son of Edward Ford (1805-1880) and Anne Ford (1815-1893). He emigrates with his parents to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1845, never returning to Ireland. Although he devotes his life to Irish causes, he writes in The Irish World in 1886 that “I might as well have been born in Boston. I know nothing of England. I brought nothing with me from Ireland—nothing tangible to make me what I am. I had consciously at least, only what I found and grew up with in here.”

Ford is educated in Boston’s public schools and the Latin school of the parish of St. Mary in the North End. He leaves school at the age of thirteen and two years later is working as a printer’s devil for William Lloyd Garrison‘s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. He begins writing for Boston newspapers in 1855 and by 1861 is editor and publisher of the Boston Tribune, also known as the Boston Sunday Tribune or Boston Sunday Times. He is an abolitionist and pro-union.

During the American Civil War, Ford serves in the Union Army with his father and brother. He serves in the 9th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and sees action in the Northern Virginia campaign, including the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862.

After the Civil War, Ford spends four years in Charleston, South Carolina, editing the South Carolina Leader which promotes the welfare of newly freed slaves. He later edits the Irish American Charleston Gazette. He settles in New York City in 1870 and founds the populist The Irish World, which promotes Irish and Catholic interests and becomes the principal newspaper of Irish America. It promises “more reading material than any other paper in America” and outsells John Boyle O’Reilly‘s Boston Pilot. In 1878, he re-titles his newspaper The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator. During the early 1880s, he promotes the writings of land reformer Henry George in his paper.

The American economic depression of 1873 convinces Ford that the Irish rural poor and the American urban poor share the same plight. He believes that the Homestead Act of 1862 is exploited by big business, especially the railroads, and by speculators who leave the poor without access to the western land meant for settlement. He calls for land reform with the belief that land monopoly is the cause of poverty and that a single tax based on land valuation is the solution. In the mid–1870s he leaves the Democratic Party. Critical of Tammany corruption and attracted to the fiscal policies of the Greenback Party, he is a member of the party’s New York State central committee as early as 1876 and backs the Greenback presidential candidates Peter Cooper and James B. Weaver in 1876 and 1880. Even the Greenbacks fail to offer the land reforms envisaged by Ford, so he forms the short-lived National Cooperative Democracy Party in 1879.

In 1880, Ford begins to solicit donations through The Irish World to support Land League activities in Ireland. Funds received are tabulated weekly under the heading “Land League Fund.” Between January and September 1881 alone, more than $100,000 is collected in donations. British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone later states that without the funds from The Irish World, “there would have been no agitation in Ireland.”

In the 1884 and 1888 elections, Ford turns to the Republican Party, encouraging Irish American voters to abandon their traditional loyalty to the Democrats for the Republican candidate James G. Blaine, whom he promotes in The Irish World as supportive of labour and of Ireland. The Republican patronage of the financially troubled The Irish World is a factor in the endorsement, but he believes Blaine’s promise to introduce high trade tariffs will protect American labour interests.

After the Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1891, Ford supports the Parnellite faction of John Redmond and endorses the terms of the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912.

Ford dies on September 23, 1913, at his home at 350 Clermont Street, Brooklyn. After an impressive funeral, he is buried in Brooklyn’s Holy Cross Cemetery.

In 1863, Ford marries Odele McDonald, who predeceases him. They have eleven children, three daughters and eight sons. At the time of his death, his son Patrick is managing editor of The Irish World, and his brother Augustine is business manager and publisher. He appears to have destroyed his personal papers. The files of The Irish World are the best record of his life and work.