I’ve been reviewing the Joseph P. Tumulty papers at the Library of Congress, mostly correspondence from his work as secretary (chief of staff) to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. I also viewed a post-White House folder labeled “Support for Ireland.” Among other items, it contained subscription solicitations for two newspapers: The Irish Statesman and The Irish Press. Details of the former begin below the image. I’ll write a separate post about the latter.

Note the incorporation of the Irish Statesman with the previously established Irish Homestead. Sir Horace Plunkett founded the latter agricultural journal in 1895. Poet and painter George William Russell, known as AE, joined the effort, first as a contributor, later as editor until the Homestead folded in 1918. Plunkett also published an earlier iteration of the Statesman in 1919-1920 as the official organ of his Irish Dominion League, which favored keeping Ireland within the British Empire rather than a separate southern state and partitioned north.

Plunkett remained a director and contributor to the new Statesman, with Russell named as the editor. The weekly’s editorial philosophy considered the Irish in Ireland as one people, regardless of the 1921 partition. The “15th September” referenced in the brochure was the journal’s first issue in 1923. The brochure also boasted the Statesman‘s roster of contributors:

A subscription to the Statesman cost $4 annually, or 10 cents per copy, in America. The journal’s debut received limited attention in the U.S. press. In Wisconsin, a Capital Times editorial praised the its efforts to find “a just balance between the interests of rural and urban communities” to be “worth emulating” in the American Middle West.^[1]”The Irish-Statesman And Our Farmer-Labor Problem”, The Capital Times, Madison, Wisc., Oct. 12, 1923. The 1920 U.S. Census had revealed for the first time that more Americans lived in cities than rural areas. In heartland states like Wisconsin, the fledgling Farmer-Labor Party attempted to make common cause among agricultural and industrial workers who had suffered in the First World War economy.

In Miami, Florida, hardly a hub of Irish America, the Herald praised Russell, insisting his talents ensured the new paper would be “read all over Europe and America,” according to the unbylined op-ed. “It has the same power that any small country paper has anywhere in America, but he has made it the voice of a race and of a chaotically struggling people, which is of tremendous significance.”^[2]No headline, A8 editorial page, The Miami Herald, Oct. 28, 1923.

Back in Ireland, the outlook of the Taum Herald (County Galway) was less optimistic. “Being thoughtful, giving food for reflection, it is not likely we fear, to be too popular in a community where so little serious thinking is being done, and it is because we know and appreciate its good qualities and merits that we dread its ultimate success.”^[3]No headline, page 2, The Taum Herald, Sept. 29, 1923. The Statesman lasted for only seven years.

“The paper bids farewell to its readers’ because—and only because—the people in Ireland who are prepared to back their opinion of its merit with a weekly payment of threepence, are not sufficiently numerous to give reasonable hope of its becoming even approximately self-supporting,” Plunkett wrote when the journal folded April 12, 1930. The weekly “finally succumbed to the apathy of the Irish reading public,” professor of Irish literature Frank Shovlin later concluded.^[4]Frank Shovlin, “The Irish Statesman, 1923-1930” in The Irish Literary Periodical 1923–1958, [Kiribati: Clarendon Press, 2003].

The 1923-1930 run of the Statesman is available at the Library of Congress. The National Library of Ireland holds numerous resources related to the paper, including Edward Doyle Smith’s 1966 Survey And Index of the Statesman, with an extensive discussion about Russell.

NEXT: The Irish Press