Tag Archives: New York Tribune

When a boatload of reporters steamed to the Easter Rising

Fourteen London-based newspaper correspondents clambered aboard a British naval destroyer at Holyhead, Wales, in the pre-dawn hours of April 27, 1916. They were soon underway for Dublin, where three days earlier Irish separatists seized several buildings and proclaimed a republic. Chief Secretary for Ireland Augustine Birrell and the British Admiralty invited the reporters to make the 67-nautical-mile sprint across the Irish Sea. They hoped to influence coverage of the insurrection cabled to the rest of the world, though Britain also imposed censorship and disseminated propaganda through its own press bureau since it began fighting the First World War two years earlier.

Arthur S. Draper, undated. Library of Congress

Arthur S. Draper, 34, of the New York Tribune was among the group of what today would be called embedded reporters. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to an English father and an American mother, he graduated from New York University in 1905 and soon joined the Tribune. The paper transferred him to London in 1915 to cover the war.[1]1910 U.S. Census, Census Place: Brooklyn Ward 24, Kings, New York; Roll: T624_975; Page: 18B; Enumeration District: 0656; FHL microfilm: 1374988; “Arthur Draper, Literary Editor”, The New … Continue reading

In one of several stories syndicated to U.S. newspapers, Draper recounted the correspondents were cold and shivering after the hastily organized, 300-mile train trip from London to Holyhead.[2]“Fierce Fighting Rages in Fire-Swept Dublin”, by Arthur S. Draper, New York Tribune, April 30, 1916 (Dateline April 29, 1916). Also, “Tales Of ‘The Week Of Dublin’s Nightmare’ ”, by … Continue reading Once aboard the destroyer, ironically named Dove, the correspondents welcomed the ship steward’s offer of hot chocolate.

We crawled through a coal hole aft and dropped into a cabin built to hold four instead of 14 men. Mr. Birrell found a place in the captain’s cabin. If you have never been on a destroyer crossing the Irish Sea you can get some notion of the motion by crawling into a barrel and taking a trip through Hell Gate.[3]Hell Gate is a narrow tidal strait in the East River in New York City. … Fourteen guests taxed (the steward’s) supply of cups and saucers, and we were well away before the first steaming bowl came teetering in from the pantry.

One of the correspondents soon turned “pale about the gills” and lurched for the ladder leading up to the deck. Others quickly followed as the ship “pitched, tossed, rolled, her lower decks awash like a Long Island Sound racer running before a swift breeze,” Draper wrote. “Holding fast to anything within their grasp, 11 regular reporters were swaying and lunging in imminent danger of being swept away.” While the majority lacked sea legs, the man from The Christian Science Monitor “slept peacefully with his head on the edge of a bunk and his feet on top of a bag of posters proclaiming martial law in Ireland.”

In his stories about the insurrection, the Boston newspaper correspondent repeatedly referred to himself as “the representative of The Christian Science Monitor,” with no byline on the reporting. Most of the other journalists aboard the Dove were not Americans but natives of the United Kingdom who worked as stringers for U.S. papers or wire services. They were selected for the journey because of the influence their reporting might have to counter the anticipated anti-British reaction of Irish Americans as the United States remained on the sidelines of the Great War.[4]Eddie Bohan, The 1916 Easter Rising & The American Press Pack, 2017. This 50-page paperback, published independently, contains a short bibliography but does not footnote specific details.

Wilbur S. Forrest of United Press, the 29-year-old, Illinois-born son of physician, was another native of America. His career began at The Peoria (Ill.) Journal Transcript after attending Bradley University in Peoria. He joined the wire service in 1910, working in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., before being sent to Europe as an assistant general manager. In May 1915 Forrest reported from Queenstown (Cobh) on the German torpedo sinking of the Lusitania off the south Irish coast.[5]”Wilbur S. Forrest, 90, Is Dead; Was Herald Tribune Executive”, The New York Times, March 26, 1977. Eleven months later he steamed back to Ireland on the Dove.

HMS Dove. Imperial War Museums

“The little ship shivered in every plate and joint, and pitching like a bronco, it swayed and rolled at decidedly disturbing angles,” Forrest recalled of his ride to the rising.[6]Wilbur Forrest, Behind The Front Page: Stories of Newspaper Stories in the Making. (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company Inc., 1934). See Chapter 4, “Dublin Explodes”, pp 46-65. “The destroyer was running dark. A think, damp mist hung low and obscured the sky. The ship’s high speed added to the darkness was good protection against the German U-boats which roamed the Irish Sea at will.”

Dublin arrival

Finally, as dawn broke “after what seemed a lifetime of misery” aboard the Dove, Draper wrote, the newspaper men got their first look at smoke-shrouded Irish capital. Birrell, who for nine years as chief secretary had loathed making the Irish Sea crossing by regular mail boat,[7]Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2006), pp 24, 188. re-emerged to offer the journalists a quick farewell: “Good luck, gentlemen. I don’t know what will become of all of you,” he shouted as he disembarked to a waiting motor car under heavy guard. The Monitor correspondent added, “it was impossible to avoid retorting, ‘The same to you, sir.’ “[8]”Summary Given Of Short-Lived Rising In Dublin”, The Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 1916.

Draper continued: “We stood there for ten minutes absolutely ignorant of the danger surrounding us. The worst shot in the Irish Republic’s army could not have missed us had he shut his eyes and pulled the trigger with his big toe.” Forrest recalled the scene differently, writing the Dove sprayed a warning of machine-gun fire that briefly silenced the rebel snipers. “Not a shot was being fired when our party disembarked one by one, jumping from the destroyer’s prow to the quay and heading at no slow pace and with zigzag steps toward a British barricade three hundred yards away.”

The reporters dashed for the nearby London and North Western Hotel. They arrived without injury at the red brick, three-story building on the quayside next to the London and North Western Railway Company train station and steam packet terminal. The 19th century building still stands in the city’s Docklands district, about three blocks east of the Samuel Beckett Bridge.

“We watched the bombardment from a window on the third floor of a hotel,” Forrest wrote in one of his contemporary dispatches. “Naval boats, swinging in close to shore, sent shells screaming into the city, bringing the rebel strongholds crashing down with loud roars. … Soldiers were posted in large force along the quays and in the warehouses across the street from our hotel, answering the sharp volleys of the sniping rebels.”[9]”Shells Rout Rebels”, by Wilbur S. Forrest, The Washington Post, April 30, 1916.(Dateline April 29, 1916).

This image appeared on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer on May 2, 1916. The British destroyer with the reporters aboard would have entered the Liffey on the opposite side of the bridge to the right of the Customs House dome.

Uneven predictions

Draper’s analysis of the rising proved prescient about the short-term military outcome, condescending of the “hot-blooded Irish,” enamored with Britain’s weapons of war, and incorrect about the long-term political consequences. He wrote:

Possibly before this dispatch reaches you the Sinn Fein rebellion will be over. It’s life, however short, will be remembered. … It is seldom that reporters can sit in a hotel room and by peeping through drawn blinds see revolutionary history being made … I saw yesterday a British gun not one hundred feet away perform a marvelous feat of marksmanship. Directly opposite, across the (Liffey) river, stands a big distillery occupied by rebel snipers who had the audacity to fly the flag of the Irish republic from its roof. … Ten times (the gun) roared, every shot finding a mark … It was a wonderful exhibition of shooting. Later came the roar of machine guns and rifles telling the final story. Another rebel stronghold gone. …

A systematic search is being made by the military in all the suspected districts. Young Irishmen are very volatile. Their range of emotions is great. From the crest of so-called patriotism they drop quickly to the depths of despair. … They don’t look like martyrs on this chilly gray morning. Just poor, plain Irish lads, huddled together like so many sheep in the stockyards. … Brave they were, without doubt, but they were victims of misguided judgement. They deserve no sympathy. They will get little. …

To me the chief interest is not in the number of deaths or the amount of destruction, both of which are lamentably large, but in the types of men who have thrown away lives for a futile cause. In New York we have many of them. You see them on the bleachers at the Polo Grounds (baseball stadium), at the Socialist meetings in Union Square, at the strikes in West Street, and on the surface lines. …

Whatever following (Sinn Fein) had in civilian ranks has gone forever, as the people are already feeling the pangs of hunger as a result of the food shortage, due to the rebellion. After talks with a few civilians and a brief study of the faces of the frightened, worried, dazed women huddled in the doorways, I judge there is little sympathy of any kind with the rebellion. … The “republic” is shot to pieces. All the spirit of the rebellion is gone.

The rebels surrendered a few days later. Birrell returned to London “on a small destroyer, lately employed in bombarding Liberty Hall,” he recalled 21 years later.[10]Augustine Birrell, Things Past Redress (London: Farber and Farber Limited, 1937). See Chapter 11, “Ireland, 1907-1916”,  pp. 219-220. Whether Birrell returned aboard the Dove or another navy vessel is unclear, but it turned out to be his last Irish Sea crossing as chief secretary. He resigned from the government as soon as he reached London.

Wilbur Forrest in 1915 passport photo.

Afterward

During the first two weeks of May 1916 the British military executed 15 leaders of the rising, prompting an outpouring of sympathy and support that Draper failed to anticipate. Later that summer, insurrectionist Sir Roger Casement, who had been captured at Kerry, was tried for treason in London. “His expression did not change when the Lord Chief Justice arose to declare him guilty of the crime and pronounce the sentence of death,” Forrest recalled in his memoir nearly 20 years later. The reporter’s more detailed description of Casement “must have been too sympathetic,” he concluded, because the British censor declined to pass his story at the time.

A year after the rising, the United States finally joined Britain and the Allies in the Great War. In addition to those reporting of events on the continent, Draper returned to Dublin in July 1917 to cover the opening of the Irish Convention, the British government’s failed effort to resolve the separatist crisis. Draper transferred back to America in 1925 as foreign editor of the newly merged New York Herald Tribune; and the following year he became assistant editor of the paper. Draper left that position in 1933 to become editor-in-chief of the Literary Digest but he resigned two years later. He worked briefly for the U.S. Department of Labor.[11]Draper obituary, N.Y. Times, 1963.

Forrest joined Draper as a member of the Herald Tribune staff in 1918. In 1927, Forrest became the first correspondent to report aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s safe landing in Paris. Through the 1930s he served as a special writer in China, Japan, and Washington. This is also when he authored his memoir, Behind The Front Page, quoted above. Forrest later became an executive at the Herald Tribune and served as head of the Reid Foundation, which provided fellowships to journalists.[12]Forrest obituary, N.Y. Times, 1977.

By coincidence, HarperCollins Publishers this month released, The Turning Tide: A Biography of the Irish Sea by Welshman Jon Gower. The book is described as “a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance” that combines “social and cultural history, nature-writing, travelogue and politics.” I don’t know if the narrative includes the crossing detailed in this post.

References

References
↑1 1910 U.S. Census, Census Place: Brooklyn Ward 24, Kings, New York; Roll: T624_975; Page: 18B; Enumeration District: 0656; FHL microfilm: 1374988; “Arthur Draper, Literary Editor”, The New York Times, Oct. 26, 1963.
↑2 “Fierce Fighting Rages in Fire-Swept Dublin”, by Arthur S. Draper, New York Tribune, April 30, 1916 (Dateline April 29, 1916). Also, “Tales Of ‘The Week Of Dublin’s Nightmare’ ”, by Arthur S. Draper, New York Tribune, June 4, 1916 (Dateline May 5, 1916).
↑3 Hell Gate is a narrow tidal strait in the East River in New York City.
↑4 Eddie Bohan, The 1916 Easter Rising & The American Press Pack, 2017. This 50-page paperback, published independently, contains a short bibliography but does not footnote specific details.
↑5 ”Wilbur S. Forrest, 90, Is Dead; Was Herald Tribune Executive”, The New York Times, March 26, 1977.
↑6 Wilbur Forrest, Behind The Front Page: Stories of Newspaper Stories in the Making. (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company Inc., 1934). See Chapter 4, “Dublin Explodes”, pp 46-65.
↑7 Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2006), pp 24, 188.
↑8 ”Summary Given Of Short-Lived Rising In Dublin”, The Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 1916.
↑9 ”Shells Rout Rebels”, by Wilbur S. Forrest, The Washington Post, April 30, 1916.(Dateline April 29, 1916).
↑10 Augustine Birrell, Things Past Redress (London: Farber and Farber Limited, 1937). See Chapter 11, “Ireland, 1907-1916”,  pp. 219-220.
↑11 Draper obituary, N.Y. Times, 1963.
↑12 Forrest obituary, N.Y. Times, 1977.

Arthur Gleason’s ‘inside’ reporting of post-Rising Ireland

(This post continues my exploration of how American journalists covered the Irish revolution. Visit the project landing page to access earlier work and resources. MH)

The United States’ April 1917 entry into the First World War had two immediate impacts on Ireland: increased scrutiny of Irish American efforts to support the revolution in ally Britain’s backyard, first exposed a year earlier during the Easter Rising; and more American newspaper correspondents based in London to cover the arrival and battlefield engagements of U.S. troops on the continent. In addition to their eastward journeys across the English Channel from Dover to Calais, these reporters also travelled westward across the Irish Sea, usually boarding the overnight mail boats from Holyhead to Dublin.

Arthur H. Gleason, date unknown

Arthur H. Gleason was among the first American journalists to assess post-Rising Irish nationalism within the British Empire. Born in 1878 in Newark, N.J., he graduated from Yale University in 1901 and joined the New York Tribune as a reporter. For 10 years from 1903 Gleason worked as a writer and editor at Cosmopolitan, Country Life in America, and Collier’s Weekly magazines. At the outbreak of the war in 1914, he joined the Red Cross and served with the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps in Belgium. Gleason was briefly captured by the Germans, but managed to escape and report his observations of the front lines, including several popular books about the war, notably Golden Lads, co-written with his wife.[1]“Arthur Gleason papers, 1863-1931”, MSS18382, Library of Congress, and multiple newspaper obituaries.

Gleason rejoined the Tribune in 1916 as a European correspondent as U.S. entry into the war became inevitable. Arthur Draper, another of the paper’s London correspondents, had covered the Rising in Dublin. He was “an outspoken proponent of including interpretation in foreign news reports,” rather than the just-the-facts presentation of the wire services.[2]Gerald L. Fetner (2017) Modern Foreign Correspondents after World War I: The New York Evening Post‘s David Lawrence and Simeon Strunsky, American Journalism, 34:3, pp. 313-332. Gleason wrote a series of articles for the Tribune‘s op-ed pages that aimed to educate readers about war conditions in Great Britain. He also produced articles on the same topic for Century Magazine. This work was collected nearly word-for-word as the book Inside the British Isles, published in spring 1917.

BRIEF VISIT

Gleason made what he described as a “brief visit” to Ireland, apparently before the end of 1916, to detail nationalist restiveness. “Sane opinion in Ireland is well aware that in any solution Ireland remains inside the federation of the British commonwealth,” he wrote, “but the status toward which the intelligent Irish work is that of a self-governing nation, like the free colonies.”[3]Arthur Gleason, Inside The British Isle (New York: The Century Co., 1917), p. 173.

Gleason’s analysis focused more on economic, market, and labor conditions than politics. He reported:

The real Irish question is poverty. … The slums of Irish cities are among the worst in Europe. … Many of the farms are too small for economic working, and what there is of them is not good enough soil. Much of the best tillage remains in the hands of landlords and is used for grazing instead of the production of crops. The hope of Ireland lies in trade unionism, education, and cooperation. Ireland’s real problem is to increase production and distribute prosperity.[4]Ibid, pp. 206-209, and “Poverty: The Real Irish Question”, New York Tribune, April 11, 1917.

Gleason viewed wealthy Irish Americans as an important source of this hope. At the time of his visit, he “found Ireland stimulated” by the news that Henry Ford proposed building a tractor factory in Cork city, near the industrialist’s ancestral homeland. The reporter continued:

If the very rumor (of Ford’s plant) has given cheer to an underpaid population, how much new hope will flow in if Irish Americans whose hearts bleed for Ireland will invest some of their money in Irish agriculture and industry. A few million dollars invested where the heart is will relieve a pressure on Ireland, which today is resulting in bad housing, undernourishment, overwork and an undue proportion of pauperism. The real Irish question is not solved by political wrangling and chronically jangled nerves inside the island, nor by hot temper at long distance. The Irish Americans who have planted the tradition of Ireland’s wrongs inside the United States are two generations out of date. … American money is not needed for nationalist propaganda. It is needed for agricultural and industrial development. Our rich Irish Americans can do an immense service to Ireland. They can aid to set her free. But not by parliamentary debates, speech-making campaigns, and pitiful abortive rebellions. They can set her free by standing security for land improvement, better housing, the purchase of machinery and fertilizer plants.

Gleason interviewed and quoted English social and economic academics such as Graham Wallas, Sir Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, and Sir George G. Butler. He also discussed matters with Irish nationalist writers and journalists James Stephens and George William Russell, known by the pseudonym AE, and he quoted Ulster leader Sir Edward Carson. Gleason did not meet or mention Sinn Féin leaders Arthur Griffith, Eamon de Valera, and Michael Collins, who were incarcerated by the British at the time.

PRESS ASSESMENT

Gleason spoke with Dublin-born Lord Northcliffe, a powerful press baron of London’s Fleet Street. The reporter devoted one of his Tribune op-eds and a chapter of his book to a comparison of the British, Irish, and American press. He wrote:

I think the little independent spirited Irish weeklies are admirable. They sass the censor and the Lord Lieutenant and the (Dublin) Castle. I met some of the editors—poor men and honest, editing and writing papers in which they believe. They seem to me worth all the sleek, timid New York crowd put together. … A man believes something hard, and, being Irish, he has the knack of statement, so he publishes a paper.[5]Inside, p. 263, and “A Batch of Papers”, New York Tribune, May 10, 1917.

New York Tribune headline of Gleason’s May 10, 1917, piece on the press.

Privately, Gleason shared drafts of his Irish reporting with key sources for their approval before publication, a common practice at the time but anathema to most modern journalists. His regular correspondents included Butler and Lord Eustace Percy, a British diplomat.

“Butler has handed me your article on Ireland: neither of us feel quite comfortable about making ourselves responsible for it to the extent of giving it special facilities for transmission to America as it stands at present,” Percy wrote to Gleason, then living in Hove, Sussex, on the English Channel coastline 65 miles south of London. “My criticism of your article is not that it is hostile to this country (though I think that is the net effect of it) but that it is not really calculated to enlighten America. … You are carrying coals to Newscastle in writing for America sentimental impressionism about great political problems.”[6]Percy to Gleason, Dec. 28, 1916, Arthur Gleason papers.

Gleason replied two days later.[7]Gleason to Percy, Dec. 30, 1916, Arthur Gleason papers. He agreed to make some “modifications” to the content and withdraw other passages from his Tribune and Century dispatches; but not from the book, which he argued provided fuller context of the relationship between the two islands. “I want the article to be passed,” Gleason wrote, an acknowledgement of the realities of war-time censorship in Britain, which would soon to be duplicated in America. “I think you will agree I have met you seven eighths of the way.”

Gleason bristled at Percy’s charge of sentimental impressionism. “That which is excellent in Belgium and Serbia does not become ‘sentimental’ or selfish in Poland or Ireland. It merely remains the same principal for which French and English (and soon Americas) are fighting—the right of self-government.”

MISSING CONTENT

Gleason’s reporting from Ireland was subject to further editing. Soon after the publication of Inside The British Isles, he wrote to Douglas Z. Doty, editor at the Century publishing company, to complain that “heavy hunks” of content totaling 16 pages had been cut from the manuscript. “Everything that explains the state of mind, everything that voices the young men, has disappeared,” Gleason complained. “Poems, quotations, the statement of a young rebel to me, all have disappeared.”[8]Gleason to Doty, June 4, 1917, Arthur Gleason papers.

Praise for Gleason’s book came from papers within the British Isles. Belfast Newsletter, April 1, 1918.

He questioned whether the missing material resulted from “editorial exigency” in New York or censorship by the British Foreign Office, which he claimed had approved the manuscript. The missing material, according to Gleason, included quotes from several Irish political leaders, among them Helena Malony, a 1916 Easter Rising participant and member of Cumann na mBan, the Irish republican women’s paramilitary organization. Malony’s feminism and labor activism were especially relevant to Gleason’s broader social and economic interests.

Also missing from the book, Gleason wrote, were his analysis of the Dublin rebellion; a tribute to the Gaelic League and similar Irish organizations; a poem written by executed Rising leader Pádraic Pearse; and references to The White Headed Boy, a 1916 comedy drama by Irish playwright Lennox Robinson.

Nevertheless, Inside the British Isles won praise on both sides of the Atlantic. “It is welcome as a contribution to the discussion which is not merely of interest to Ireland, but to thousands of Irish well-wishers and sympathizers in this country,” said one American review.[9]”The Irish Problem”, Buffalo (N.Y.) News, Aug. 27, 1917. An advertisement in the Irish press (image) collected several favorable reviews.

SCUTTLED INVESTIGATION

Gleason returned to America as Irish separatists launched a guerilla war against the British military and police in Ireland. He continued to work on labor and economic issues through the New York-based Bureau of Industrial Research and with social reformer Paul Underwood Kellogg. They co-authored British Labor and the War in 1919. But Gleason’s insights about Ireland were called upon again in late 1920.

Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the weekly liberal journal the Nation, organized the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland on behalf of pro-Irish interests. He invited dozens of U.S. senators, state governors, big city mayors, college presidents and professors, religious leaders, newspaper editors, and other prominent citizens to form and oversee the eight-member panel of inquiry, which was not affiliated with the U.S. government. Villard and his supporters also intended to send a five-member investigative team to Ireland, including Gleason.

Other members of the proposed delegation included:

  • Major Oliver P. Newman, a journalist, sociologist, former Washington, D.C. commissioner and U.S. Army veteran of the Great War;
  • Rev. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, socialist political candidate, and publisher of the World Tomorrow;
  • James H. Mauer, a progressive labor leader and president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor; and
  • Robert Morse Lovett, dean of the University of Chicago.

For several weeks in November and December 1920 the New York Tribune, Gleason’s former employer, and other American newspapers published conflicting reports about whether the group would, or would not, be issued passports to visit Ireland; based on the approval or objections of the U.S. or British governments. The dispute continued as the commission, which included Newman, Thomas, and Mauer, opened public hearings on conditions in Ireland at a Washington hotel.

Privately, Gleason was skeptical of the investigative delegation to which he was publicly named. “Unless the strongest kind of commission is sent to England and Ireland, it will be better to send none at all,” he wrote to Villard. “To send a half dozen unknown or slightly known persons will injure the cause of good-will you have at heart. The work will be discredited, or treated with indifference and irony.”[10]Gleason to Villard, Nov. 24, 1920, in Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, 1872-1949 (MS Am 1323), Harvard University, Box 37, Irish Commission, 1920-1921.

Gleason subsequently complained there were too many socialists in the proposed group, with “no bishop, no judge, no ‘big’ business man. So idealistic a commission will not avail.”[11]Ibid. “Since writing the above…” handwritten on same letter.

The proposed delegation was scuttled by the time the commission concluded its hearings in January 1921. A month later another group of American investigators travelled to Ireland as part of an overlapping effort called the American Committee for Relief in Ireland. This group’s account of distress in Ireland was released within days of the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland report based on the Washington hearing testimony. Pro-Irish supporters cheered the two narratives critical of British rule; the British government condemned both reports as exaggerations and fabrications; and U.S. officials mostly tried to remain neutral and outside the fray.[12]See my earlier posts American investigators visit Ireland, February 1921, and American visitors describe ‘Distress in Ireland,’ April 1921.

EARLY DEATH

Though unstated in his letter to Villard, Gleason’s reluctance to join the proposed Irish delegation also might have been based on his skepticism of Irish American political meddling in the conflict, though he encouraged economic investment, as noted above. In his 1917 book, Gleason wrote:

The irreconcilable Irish in America had seemed to me a set of men “scrapping” volubly for the sake of words and dissension.  … (It is) the bitterness of Roman Catholic pulpits in Boston and Chicago, the railings of mass meetings in New York, the irresponsible perorations of Irish-American politicians that chiefly threatens the future of Ireland. … (Progressive British people) cannot and will not accept from America the last and worst doctrine of reaction.[13]Inside, pp. 173, 191.

It does not appear that Gleason wrote more about Ireland after 1917. The island was partitioned in 1921 as the war with Britain ended and devolved into the year-long Irish civil war. The revolutionary period that began at Easter 1916 ended in May 1923.

Gleason died of meningitis on Dec. 30, 1923, two weeks after his 45th birthday. He is buried in Washington, D.C.

References

References
↑1 “Arthur Gleason papers, 1863-1931”, MSS18382, Library of Congress, and multiple newspaper obituaries.
↑2 Gerald L. Fetner (2017) Modern Foreign Correspondents after World War I: The New York Evening Post‘s David Lawrence and Simeon Strunsky, American Journalism, 34:3, pp. 313-332.
↑3 Arthur Gleason, Inside The British Isle (New York: The Century Co., 1917), p. 173.
↑4 Ibid, pp. 206-209, and “Poverty: The Real Irish Question”, New York Tribune, April 11, 1917.
↑5 Inside, p. 263, and “A Batch of Papers”, New York Tribune, May 10, 1917.
↑6 Percy to Gleason, Dec. 28, 1916, Arthur Gleason papers.
↑7 Gleason to Percy, Dec. 30, 1916, Arthur Gleason papers.
↑8 Gleason to Doty, June 4, 1917, Arthur Gleason papers.
↑9 ”The Irish Problem”, Buffalo (N.Y.) News, Aug. 27, 1917.
↑10 Gleason to Villard, Nov. 24, 1920, in Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, 1872-1949 (MS Am 1323), Harvard University, Box 37, Irish Commission, 1920-1921.
↑11 Ibid. “Since writing the above…” handwritten on same letter.
↑12 See my earlier posts American investigators visit Ireland, February 1921, and American visitors describe ‘Distress in Ireland,’ April 1921.
↑13 Inside, pp. 173, 191.