Chicago journalist Ruth Russell reported from revolutionary Ireland in 1919, followed by a year of activism for its independence. The post concludes a five-part series: 1) Beginnings 2) Correspondent 3) Activist 4) Witness © 2022 This post was updated in October 2022 to add information about Russell’s 1924 letter to Albert Jay Nock, and other minor edits.  

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Russell slipped from public attention soon after her December 1920 testimony before the American Commission on Condition in Ireland. She began working as a Chicago public high school English teacher and student newspaper adviser.^[1]Ruth Russell’s Chicago Public Schools (CPS) employment record, and 1932 Calumet High School Yearbook, Chicago, Ill. U.S. Yearbooks Name Index, 1890–1979 via MyHeritage.com. She would travel back to Ireland and other parts of Europe a few times over the next 20 years with her younger sister, Cecilia, also a teacher.^[2]Passport and ship passenger records for Ruth and Cecilia Russell, with their identities confirmed by date of birth and Chicago address. 1923 travel itinerary shows “British Isles and France.” … Continue reading

On Jan. 25, 1924, Russell read a four paragraph story on the front page of the Chicago Tribune that she hoped was “a mistake, as usual.” But it wasn’t.^[3]“Radical Weekly, The Freeman, To Quit Business”, The Chicago Tribune, Jan. 25, 1924. The weekly Freeman magazine would fold in March. Russell immediately wrote to Albert Jay Nock, the libertarian author and social critic who had edited the Freeman since its launch in 1920.

“Would the Freeman management permit its subscribers to help out? I can send $100, and there are many readers who, I am sure, could and would give more than an unmoneyed schoolteacher. The paper is too much wanted to stop.”^[4]Ruth Russell to Albert Jay Nock, Jan. 26, 1924, B.W. Huebsch Papers, Library of Congress, Box 23.

The letter is interesting in that Russell makes no reference to her two stories about Ireland that were published in the Freeman in May and September 1920, not quite four years earlier. Her description of herself as an “unmoneyed schoolteacher” also tends to emphasize her departure from journalism, also notoriously poor paying, and temporarily from public attention.

Eleven years after What’s the matter with Ireland?, Ruth published Lake Front, her novel of Chicago’s first 100 years told through three generations of the O’Mara family. The book nods to 19th century Irish nationalism through a character called “the Fenian,” an immigrant veteran of the 1848 Young Irelander Rebellion. “Irishmen must no longer be subject but free, and they must have the chance to be free in their own republic,” he says. “I will hold that every Irishman’s first duty is to Ireland.”^[5]Russell, Lake Front, 173 and 182.

In a review, the Chicago Tribune’s Fanny Butcher identified Russell as “a native Chicagoan, daughter of the late Martin J. Russell,” then dead for 31 years. The reviewer named three newspapers he was associated with in the 19th century, but nothing of his daughter’s work at the Daily News, or her earlier Ireland book.^[6]“Chicago Plays Heroine Role for This Book,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 16, 1931.

Robert Morss Lovett also praised Lake Front. An associate editor of The New Republic and an English professor at the University of Chicago, Russell’s alma mater, he also was a former member of the Commission on Conditions in Ireland. Lovett wrote, “in Lake Front, an outstanding piece of writing, Miss Russell has made excellent use of her great opportunity and a stout bid toward its fulfillment.”^[7]Quote from book publisher Thomas S. Rockwell Co.’s advertisement in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 19, 1931,13.

In an interview with the hometown Hyde Park Herald, Russell described Lake Front as “the book I have always wanted to write.”^[8]“Chicago’s First One Hundred Years Penned and Illustrated by Ruth Russell and Ruth Kellogg,” Hyde Park Herald , Sept. 18, 1931. She dedicated the novel to Cecilia, “whose faith and love created this book.” Ruth was a “guest of honor” at the Friends of American Writers meeting in the Wedgwood room of Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department store.^[9]“Meetings and Lectures”, Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan.  23, 1932. The 1932 yearbook at Calumet High School, where she taught, also noted her novel.^[10]1932 Calumet High School Yearbook, Chicago, Ill. U.S. Yearbooks Name Index, 1890-1979. Via MyHeritage.com.

Russell continued teaching another 20 years. She took a few sabbaticals to continue her education at the University of Chicago, including an English course on narration. In January 1954, she “resigned” from the public school system shortly before her 65th birthday, though nothing in the file suggests this was other than a routine retirement.^[11]CPS employment record. Soon after, she moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to join Cecilia, then a romance language teacher at the University of Arkansas.

The two unmarried sisters attended book groups and university functions together, according to newspaper social columns. Cecilia died in 1959 and was buried at the St. Joseph Catholic Church cemetery in Fayetteville. Two years later, Ruth filed her will at the Washington County, Arkansas, courthouse, which provided a $10,000 endowment upon her own death for a university scholarship in her sister’s name.^[12]“Scholarship Honors Late Faculty Member”, Arkansas Alumnus, University of Arkansas/Fayetteville, February 1964, and Last Will and Testament of Ruth Marie Russell, Washington County, Arkansas, … Continue reading The Cecilia Russell Memorial Scholarship to this day provides study abroad funding for students focused on French.

Ruth remained in Fayetteville until August 1963, when she entered the Rosary Hill Convalescent Home, 16 miles southwest of the Hyde Park neighborhood of her youth. She died there Nov. 28, 1963, age 74, of heart disease.^[13]State of Illinois Medical Certificate of Death, Nov. 29, 1963, Cook County (IL) Clerk’s Office, Bureau of Vital Records, Genealogy Records Division. Daily News, Nov. 30, 1963; Chicago Tribune, Nov. … Continue reading Headlines about the assassination and burial of John F. Kennedy, America’s first Irish-American and Catholic president, dominated the last week of her life. Irish President Éamon de Valera, then 81, returned to America for Kennedy’s funeral, 44 years after being interviewed by Russell in Ireland and providing the letter for What’s the matter with Ireland?

In a short news obituary, the Daily News described Russell as a “onetime reporter” for the paper and noted her teaching career. It mentioned Lake Front, her novel, and suggested that she wrote “a number of books on Ireland.”^[14]Daily News, Nov. 30, 1963. I have not found any other references or evidence that Russell wrote about Ireland other than her 1920 book.

Russell’s body was returned to Fayetteville, and buried Dec. 2, 1963, next to her sister, according to the wishes of her will.^[15]Ruth Russell’s “Last Will and Testament”; Illinois Certificate of Death; and Joseph Catholic Church, Fayetteville, AR, burial record. Digitized copy of handwritten burial entry provided March … Continue reading On the headstone, below the centered Russell surname, the bottom left corner was engraved with Cecilia’s first name and dates. The bottom right corner of the headstone, where Ruth’s name and dates would be similarly etched, remained smooth until 2020.^[16]March 2019 photo by Paul A. Warren of Joseph Catholic Church.

See Ruth Russell remembered in stone … 57 years later for an update.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This monograph is the first attempt to detail Ruth Russell’s life. Her Irish reporting and activism have received limited attention from historians, though not in as much detail as this series.^[17]Some mentions of Russell by historians are noted earlier in this work. Maurice Walsh does not name her in his Foreign Correspondents book, but does reference her in his 2015 history, Bitter Freedom: … Continue reading I believe more material about Russell’s life remains to be discovered, as evidenced by the 2022 updates in this series about her activism during the Easter Rising, found in the Beginnings installment, and letter to Albert Jay Nock in this installment. More details of Russell’s journalism and activism are likely to be found in other U.S. and Irish archives, such as the Kathleen O’Brennan papers in Ireland, which contain a hotel receipt showing that Russell and activist Helen Merriam Golden shared a Washington, D.C. hotel room during the April 1920 women’s protest.

Beyond What’s the matter with Ireland? and her December 1920 testimony to the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland, I have not located any diaries, letters, or interviews with Russell that illuminate her private thoughts about the 1919 reporting trip to Ireland or journalism in general. “I was sent as a correspondent to Ireland and wrote a book about it,” she told the Hyde Park Herald in a 1931 interview about her novel. The story says Russell “gave up newspaper work” and began teaching in 1921.^[18]”Chicago’s First One Hundred Years” Hyde Park Herald , Sept. 18, 1931.

I wonder if her decision to leave newspapers was driven by the limited opportunities available to women at the time, or by harassment from male colleagues or reporting subjects? Was she professionally blacklisted for her short burst of pro-Irish activism, or privately steered away from revolutionary politics and social activism under the threat of scandal or the risk of losing a middle-class inheritance? Or was Russell simply needed at home to care for her widowed mother, whom she lived with for nearly 20 years after her Ireland trip, never marrying?

Describing Russell as a pioneering woman journalist is probably an overstatement. Her undercover reporting from Chicago’s factory floors and Dublin slums appeared more than 30 years after Elizabeth Cochran (Nellie Bly), Nora Marks, and other “stunt girl” reporters began writing first-person accounts about oppressive conditions in workplaces, hospitals, and public institutions. Margaret Sullivan’s book about Ireland’s social, economic, and political troubles under British rule was published in 1881, nearly 40 years before Russell’s trip. As Russell’s book circulated in 1920, Ireland’s revolutionary women published their views in nationalist newspapers, pamphlets, and books on both sides of the Atlantic.

Women reporters like Russell “have been hiding in plain sight” for over a century, Alice Fahs has observed: “They achieved a measure of fame in their own day; enlivened the pages of metropolitan mass-circulation papers that sometimes reached hundreds of thousands of readers; innovated across a variety of new genres, developed styles of newspaper writing that in some cases remains startlingly fresh today; and created a rich set of public conversations within the public spaces of the newspaper.”^[19]Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2.

Maurice Walsh has noted: “The evident reluctance in Irish historiography to take an interest in the work of journalists is puzzling …  When media scholars do get around to writing history they are curiously neglectful of individual journalists.”^[20]Maurice Walsh, The News From Ireland: Foreign Correspondents and the Irish Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008), 6, 8. Also, my conversations with Irish historian Felix Larkin about … Continue reading

This is changing. Groups such as the American Journalism Historians Association and the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland encourage research and widen interest in journalists like Russell. I have benefited from and contributed to that work as a non-academic member of both groups.

Expanding digitization also increases access to the work of early journalists. Many of Russell’s 1919 dispatches are available through online newspaper databases, though not the Daily News. Digital editions of What’s the matter with Ireland?, now out of copyright, are easy to find online.

The Irish republican website An Sionnach Fionn posted the book in 2017. It described Russell’s work as “notable for its intimate and sympathetic style, with no sign of the phonetic ‘stage Irish’ accents and racist caricatures which were so beloved by the press in Britain.”^[21]”Ruth Russell, An American Journalist in Revolutionary Ireland“, An Sionnach Fionn, Jan. 28, 2017. This introduction mistakenly says Russell was a Chicago Herald correspondent at the time … Continue reading

Indeed, Russell’s reporting from the early months of the Irish revolution, especially her focus on women and workers, helped counter prevailing British and American press narratives of a contented Irish peasantry. Her vivid, 400- to 600-word dispatches would be at home on today’s digital news platforms. These vignettes about ordinary Irish lives caught in the crossfire of the revolution’s social and economic strife are valuable, underutilized snapshots of the period.

The lives of these forgotten people are worth weaving into the tapestry of historical consideration, as well as Russell’s encounters with Ireland’s mainstream political and social figures, especially at the centenary of the revolution. This mostly forgotten woman journalist is also worthy of rediscovery and reconsideration.

Ruth M. Russell’s enlarged signature from a 1961 document establishing a scholarship in her sister’s name.