Thirty-five months after the January 1919 opening of the Irish separatist parliament, and a week before the December 1921 announcement of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the New York-based Survey Graphic published a special issue devoted to Ireland. “Here for the first time in an American national magazine will be presented a complete survey of the Irish situation as it is today, as well as the plans which many of the prominent Irish thinkers have in mind for the Ireland of tomorrow,” the periodical’s business manager, John Kenderdine, wrote to Irish American activist Frank P. Walsh.^[1]Kenderdine to Walsh, Nov. 15, 1921, in Walsh papers, New York Public Library.

Kenderdine offered to discount the magazine’s regular newsstand price of 30 cents per copy by a third to a half, depending on how many extra copies were ordered. He provided Walsh with “rough proofs of the content” subject to final layout and other editorial adjustments.

Walsh, chairman of the American Commission on Irish Independence, replied two days later from his Washington, D.C. office: “I think the idea most timely and the edition a very fine one.” He promised to alert the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, which Eamon de Valera founded a year earlier in a split with the Friends of Irish Freedom. Walsh said he also would notify Irish leaders but told Kenderdine that he had no role in “the distribution of literature of this character.”^[2]Walsh to Kenderdine, Nov. 17, 1921, Walsh papers.

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The cover of the magazine posed the question: “What Would the Irish Do With Ireland?” The answers were supplied over 68 pages by nearly a score of writers and artists in the form of essays, poems, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Each name in this alphabetical list of contributors is linked to their page in the issue:

• AE, (George Russell), lead article on the future of Irish society
• Sir Edward Coey Bigger, M.D., on inadequacies in the healthcare system
• Erskine Childers, on government under Dáil Éireann
• Padraic Colum, on tendencies in Irish art, and a poem, “The Fair Hills of Éire O”
• James E. Douglas, on the Irish White Cross
• Francis Hackett, on Irish literature
• Grace Henry, painting, “Mallranny”
• Paul Henry, painting, “The Potato Digger”
• Robert Mitchell Henry, on the Irish education system
• James Clarence Mangan, poem, “The Woman of The Three Cows”, with two drawings by Jack B. Yeats
• Constance Markievicz, on labor, farm, and industrial disputes
• Power O’Malley, four paintings
• Sir Horace Plunkett, on agricultural cooperation, with several photographs
• Richard Rowley (Richard Valentine Williams), on Ulster’s position
• Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, on equality for women
• Lionel Smith-Gordon, on the economic consequences of Irish freedom
• James Stephens, on Irish arts and letters
• William Butler Yeats, poem, “To Ireland in the Coming Times”, with drawing by Jack B. Yeats
• Savel Zimand, on Patrick “Paddy the Cope” Gallagher, with painting by Power O’Malley and several photographs. (More on Zimand and Gallagher in a future post.)

The Survey was first published in 1909 as a journal for social workers and a broader audience of concerned citizens. Paul Underwood Kellogg, the editor, had spent the previous few years leading a groundbreaking investigation of “life and labor” in the Pittsburgh steel district. The Survey Graphic emerged from a series of reconstruction-themed issues published during and after the First World War. These focused on industrial relations, health, education, international relations, housing, race relations, consumer education, and related fields.^[3]University of Minnesota Archival Collection Guides, Social Welfare History Archives, Survey Associates records, SW0001.

By 1921, the magazine’s influence among progressive thinkers probably surpassed its reported nationwide circulation of about 13,700 copies. But it hardly competed with giants of the day such as Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, with 498,000 circulation, or McClure’s monthly, with 440,000.^[4]N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual & Directory (Philadelphia, N.W. Ayer & Son’s, 1921). A few mainstream newspapers republished some of Survey Graphic’s guest essays on their opinion pages. One editorial endorsement said the Irish issue was “well worth the perusal of every person interested in the Irish cause.^[5]Editorial in The Catholic Bulletin, St. Paul, Minn., Dec. 31, 1921.

In an overly optimistic and ultimately inaccurate editorial, Survey Graphic concluded the answer to the question it posed on the issue’s cover–“What would the Irish do with Ireland?–was that the Irish would give the world a new form of “rural civilization” and fraternity. It continued:

This is one of the most encouraging signs of the times—development of rural communities on a cooperative basis; each community to have so far as possible its own general store for supplies of common need; each community to manufacture what it can do advantageously with a common mill, creamery, bacon factory, electric plant, buying the commodities that can not be supplied at home and selling its products; each community to establish schools, recreation halls and libraries, organize community pageants and games; each community to have its town council where common problems and new plans may be discussed. … The old and the very young nations are struggling in Europe for their rights. England by its bloodless revolution gave to the world a new conception of liberty, France by the great revolution, equality. Ireland has the qualifications to give us something as precious: fraternity.

It did not work work out that way. Political partition and sectarianism were major problems in Ireland for most the twentieth century. Agricultural cooperatives were replaced by corporate agriculture. Ireland retains its beautiful countryside, but most of its people live in urban districts, working in an economy that was unimaginable in 1921.