Journalist William H. Brayden produced in the summer of 1925 what he called “a survey of the newly constructed institutions of the self-governing Irish people.” The country’s violent revolutionary period had ended two years earlier. As Brayden set about his assessment, an intergovernmental commission considered whether to adjust the border that partitioned the six-county Northern Ireland from the 26-county Irish Free State, today’s Republic of Ireland.

Brayden’s reporting appeared in 16 dispatches to the Chicago Daily News^[1]“Ireland No Longer Distressful Country”, June 16; “Tenants In Ireland Now Owners of Land”, June 18; “Irish System Of Law Rules in Free State”, June 20; “Make Irish Schools Fit Needs Of … Continue reading and other US papers that subscribed to its foreign news service. The Chicago daily republished the completed series as a 45-page booklet.^[2]William H. Brayden, The Irish Free State: a survey of the newly constructed institutions of the self-governing Irish people, together with a report on Ulster. [Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1925]

This summer I will explore various aspects of Brayden’s reporting from Ireland, including the Irish Boundary Commission and other political issues. He detailed economic, social, and cultural conditions as he traveled from Dublin to Kilkenny, Cork, Limerick and Belfast. I am working from this digitized copy of Brayden’s booklet, but also reviewed the original Daily News series on microfilm. The Roman numeral section headings in the booklet correspond to the 16 installments in the series. The booklet was lightly edited to remove teases to upcoming subjects and publication notes.

I will collect my posts about Brayden on the site’s American reporting of Irish independence landing page. Reader input is welcomed. Now, let’s begin with a look at Brayden.

William John Henry Brayden (1865-1933)

Brayden was born in Armagh city (County Armagh, Northern Ireland). He worked briefly on the Ulster Gazette and then on the Leinster Leader in Naas, County Kildare, before joining the national Freeman’s Journal in Dublin in 1883. He eventually became the FJ’s editor, and in that role makes a brief appearance in James Joyce’s Ulysses.^[3]See “Brayden, William John Henry” by Felix Larkin, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009.

Brayden was born into a Church of Ireland and unionist family. He converted to Catholicism as a young man and supported Irish home rule. He briefly assisted Dublin Castle, the British administration in Ireland, with anti-Sinn Féin propaganda at the end of the world war.

Brayden began working as a correspondent for the US-based Associated Press and the Chicago Daily News during Ireland’s revolutionary period, 1912-1923. His byline appeared regularly in US newspapers. Notably, he reported the May 1919 arrival of the American Commission on Irish Independence in Dublin.

Edward F. Dunne, former mayor of Chicago, was one of the three Irish American commissioners. Their “oratory of the American pattern outclasse[d] the home product” and made an strong impression on the locals, Brayden reported. None of the Sinn Féin republicans or Irish Parliamentary Party moderates who welcomed the trio could match “the ringing eloquence and the modulated rise and fall of striking appeal which the Americans displayed to the crowds that listened to them spellbound.”^[4]“American Orator Beat Irish Brand”, (Baltimore) Evening Sun, May 15, 1919.

It does not appear that Brayden ever visited the United States, at least according to limited biographical material. He is not profiled in several early twentieth century “who’s who” collections of American journalists. Brayden’s name does not surface in digitized US arriving passenger manifests or passport application lists.

In this regard Brayden is similar to his peer James Mark Tuohy (1857–1923), another Irish-born, former Freeman’s Journal journalist who became a correspondent for the New York World at the turn of the twentieth century. “Although he never set foot in the United States, he was dean of the corps of American newspaper correspondents in London,” the New York Times declared in its obituary of Tuohy. Other Irish-born journalists who covered their country’s revolutionary period spent significant time in the United States, including John Steele (1887-1947) of the Chicago Tribune and Francis Hackett (1883-1962) of the New Republic.

In December 1931, Brayden began writing for the Washington, DC-based National Catholic Welfare Conference News Service. He died two years later, just three days after filing what appears to have been his last story. (“590 Are Registered at Peking Cath. Univ.” The Catholic Transcript, Dec. 14, 1933)

Series opening

The Daily News did not advertise Brayden’s series before its June 16, 1925, debut, unlike the promotional treatments US papers gave to similar work by correspondents sent to Ireland during the revolution. Chicago’s Irish immigrant population had peaked at 74,000 in 1900 and dropped to 57,000 by 1920, tied for third largest with Boston. The US Immigration Act of 1924 further slowed new arrivals, but Chicago retained a robust American Irish Catholic identity.

Brayden’s first story appeared on the front page above the fold; a box of baseball scores and horse racing results to the left, a lurid tale about the shooting deaths of two Chicago gangsters who also were big opera supporters on the right. The single-column headlines declared:

Ireland No Longer
Distressful Country
—

Remarkable Changes Effect-
ed by New Governments
Under Home Rule.
—
Many Signs of Progress

An italicized editor’s note described Brayden as the paper’s “capable and experienced Dublin correspondent.” It said the series would detail “how the people of Ulster (Northern Ireland) and those of the Free State are improving their opportunity to govern themselves.” Brayden’s opening sentence posed this question:  “What is Ireland doing with the home rule that, after long conflict, it has won?”

His series sought to answer this question as it unspooled in Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday installments through July 23. The stories were not accompanied by any photographs, though the Daily News and other papers by then regularly featured black and white images of events and places, including overseas, and “head shots” of individual news makers.

Other papers that subscribed to the foreign news service either published the full series, such as the Buffalo (NY) News, or only select stories. The Kansas City Star described Brayden’s series as “a very illuminating analysis of the many problems which have confronted the new governments, and of the thoroughly practical ways, considering Ireland’s unique adventure, in which these problems are being met and solved.”^[5]“ ‘More Business, Less Politics’ is the Slogan of the Irish Nation”, Kansas City Star, Aug. 10, 1925.

Considering Brayden’s long experience in Irish journalism and the critical post-revolutionary period that he detailed, his 1925 “survey” is worthy of revisiting a century later.