On May 22, 1889, workers in the North Shore suburb of Lake View, soon to be annexed to Chicago, responded to complaints about a putrid sewer and discovered the corpse of Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin, dumped there after having been bludgeoned in the head. All that was left on his nude, badly decomposed body was an Agnus Dei medallion, “a Catholic safeguard against harm” (89).

Born in County Cork in 1846, Cronin had grown up mainly in Ontario and worked in the Pennsylvania oil fields and in St. Louis before earning a medical degree from Missouri Medical College and a PhD from St. Louis University. Idealistically devoted to his profession and to his homeland's independence, the bachelor physician settled in Chicago. There, attorney Alexander Sullivan, dictatorial leader of the Clan na Gael—the man later suspected of having instigated the murder—used connections to secure Cronin a post at Cook County Hospital

On the night of May 4, 1889, assailants lured their victim to a rented cottage on the pretext of a medical emergency. In addition to ineffectual efforts to conceal “blood, blood everywhere,” police found a bill for curtains and labels on the furniture: clues that eventually led to some of the conspirators (104). It was inexplicable that Cronin had left his office without his revolver: throughout the spring, enemies had fabricated rumors that Cronin was a British informer. This, along with several attempted assaults and convoluted schemes publicly to discredit him, had persuaded the doctor that rivals in the Clan had marked him for death. Watchful to the point of paranoia, Cronin had even printed a “bizarre” but prescient fictional account of his own murder (66).

Investigation finally centered on Chicago police detective Dan Coughlin, along with several other members of Sullivan's chapter or “camp” of the Clan na Gael, which had succeeded the Fenians as the main Irish revolutionary organization operating from North America. Although briefly jailed, Sullivan escaped indictment, a result—newspapers suggested—of delays and cover-ups in the Chicago Police Department. “Within the Irish community,” O'Brien explains, Sullivan was “the man to go to for police or public works jobs” (95). Despite Sullivan's underwriting of the defense, Coughlin and three others were convicted in December 1889; two alleged conspirators avoided trial when New York's Democratic governor David Hill, in a blatant concession to Irish nationalists in New York City, refused extradition. In 1894, Coughlin won acquittal in a retrial dismissed as “farcical” by editor and humorist Finley Peter Dunne (204). The former detective ran a saloon until fleeing, eventually to Honduras, from a jury-tampering charge.

This vivid book by Gillian O'Brien, a historian of Ireland who teaches in England, will thus confirm most preconceptions that readers of this journal have about the links between Irish machine politics in U.S. cities and Irish nationalist networks reaching across the Atlantic. To some degree, quarrels within the Clan and its aboveground ally, the Irish Land League, surrounded the allegiances and priorities of Irish Americans. Exiles such as Cronin's friend John Devoy accused North American-born “Narrowbacks” such as Sullivan of manipulating nationalist organizations for political gain in Chicago and in U.S. politics. The exiles, many of whom had spent years in British prisons, deplored Sullivan's sponsorship of the ill-fated Dynamite War, a string of bombings that targeted London landmarks such as the House of Parliament and the Tower of London. Cronin's murder followed from his role in a failed Clan trial of Sullivan, who had been accused of embezzling as much as $128,000 in funds intended for the bombing campaign, including support for families of jailed and killed comrades. In theory, Cronin and Devoy, like nearly all Irish radicals, accepted violence, which led the British press to dismiss the murdered doctor as “more sincere as a dynamiter” (188). But Cronin's faction argued fervently that Sullivan's self-aggrandizing bravado brought “hate and suspicion” on Irish residents of England, without bringing Irish self-government any closer (58).

O'Brien traces numerous cultural as well as political and legal dimensions of the Cronin murder. The story invited sensational press coverage, nativist caricatures, and dime novels. In dime museum fashion, the owners of the murder site recouped some of their losses by opening the cottage to “sensational-seeker[s],” who for a second dime could take a chip from the floor, a replica of the bloodstained original that police had carted away (156). O'Brien's account reinforces Sam Mitrani, Rise of the Chicago Police Department and other recent works on class and ethnic struggles surrounding the city's police and judiciary.Footnote ¹ Allegations of dilatory investigation and cover-up prompted the dismissal of nine Chicago police officers, including the captain who had led the Haymarket investigation. For the sake of British and Irish readers, the book might have benefited from fuller explanation of the Irish in U.S. urban politics. Likewise, a fuller account of radical Irish networks in British cities would provide useful background to North American readers.

Also worth more development is Alexander Sullivan's marriage to journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan, who throughout her storied career unabashedly mixed international reporting and pro-Irish agitation. In 1876, Sullivan, then secretary of Chicago's Board of Public Works, shot and killed a school principal who had accused Margaret of an affair with Chicago's mayor. Political influence enabled him to escape a well-founded murder charge. “Closely involved in all her husband's activities, and perhaps more committed to the Irish cause than he was,” Margaret, the author speculates, “probably knew much more about the [Cronin] murder than she admitted” (210). The judicial system's sexism meant that Margaret was never interrogated, perhaps enabling her to avoid revealing the couple's complicity.

By the exposure and discredit it brought Clan na Gael, the murder, Devoy lamented, “did more harm to the Irish cause than any single incident” (191). Among Irish republicans, bitterness lingered for decades. O'Brien's reconstruction of this horrible event joins other recent accounts of Irish activism in North America in evoking an era when trans-Atlantic terrorist networks operated half-openly in U.S. cities, protected by the police, courts, and political establishment.