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Last year Colum Kenny, a professor of communications at
Dublin City University, contacted us after finding
Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, our account of John Hogan’s Ozarks
settlement.
We very much appreciated his comment,
“
Your Hogan edition and your book on the
Ozarks are the kind of thing that maintain one's faith in culture and
learning.”
Professor Kenny was
researching and writing a book about the O’Shaughnessy family who had been
parishioners of Father John Joseph Hogan in his north Missouri missionary
days. Of course, we shared our images of
Bishop Hogan for illustrations in his book, An
Irish-American Odyssey: The Remarkable Rise of the O’Shaughnessy Brothers.
Kenny’s book is now out, published by the
University of Missouri Press.
This
exhaustive account
of the lives and careers of these sons of Ireland is a fascinating read.
Naturally we were particularly intrigued by the intersection of the lives of John
Joseph Hogan and those of James O’Shaughnessy and his wife, Catherine
Mulholland, daughter of the railroad contractor, James Mulholland.
On his first exploratory trip to north Missouri, Hogan
recounts (
On the Mission in Missouri, 1857-1868)
his mediation efforts between the construction crews of Mulholland and another
contractor named Murphy in Chapter One.
Through Hogan’s frontier years, he was the O’Shaughnessy’s family
pastor, marrying, baptizing their children and counseling and praying with
them. James and Catherine lived their lives in north Missouri and St. Joseph.
Their sons were educated at Notre Dame and eventually made their professional
careers in Chicago.
Hogan’s descriptions of the people he met and ministered to
paint real life portraits. But until now, we had only Hogan’s accounts. It was tantalizing to wonder what became of
those early settlers, when their and Hogan's paths diverged. It’s not often though that those paths came
back together like this – especially in the histories of ordinary people (who
are not presidents, kings or generals).
Tying the priest and family back together is Professor Kenny’s
grandfather – Kevin J. Kenny, founder of Ireland’s earliest full-service
advertising agency, who met James O’Shaughnessy several times in Dublin in the
1920s. That meeting, the shared professional interests of Kenny and O'Shaughnessy, spurred Professor Kenny into the research leading to this intriguing volume.
AN IRISH-AMERICAN ODYSSEY: The Remarkable Rise of the
O’Shaughnessy Brothers is available on
amazon.com
Below is the review I posted on amazon.
AN IRISH-AMERICAN ODYSSEY: The Remarkable Rise of the
O’Shaughnessy Brothers, Colum Kenny. University of Missouri Press, 2014.
Dublin City University Professor of Communications Colum
Kenny has written an in-depth, remarkably detailed account of the immigration,
assimilation and prospering of a “potato famine” Irish family – the O’Shaughnessy’s
of Newhall, Kiltartan, County Galway.
James Shaughnessy and his brothers, Thomas and John, left the
famine and poverty that was mid nineteenth century Ireland to seek a better
life in the United States. From their east coast landing, they moved west,
eventually settling in north Missouri. There James married, raised a family and
eventually became a small businessman in St. Joseph, Missouri. James and
Catherine had five sons, two of whom gained national and even international
reputations in their chosen professions, and three daughters.
Author Kenny has interwoven the stories of the O’Shaughnessy
sons with a wealth of detail of contemporaneous history, politics, and the social
and cultural landscape in which this family struggled, achieved and made its
mark. Often he goes from the particular
event in the family experience to the larger context of the times – for
example, a description of the family’s farm and holdings in north Missouri is
followed by a discussion of the concentration of most Irish immigrants in
eastern urban settings.
Two of the brothers, Francis and John became respected
Chicago attorneys. James O’Shaughnessy started his career as a journalist – among
other assignments, writing dispatches from Cuba during the Spanish American War
for the Chicago Chronicle – then found
his calling in advertising. He became an influential leader in the advertising
business, founding and guiding the American Association of Advertising Agencies
(known as the 4As) from its inception. James and Francis played important roles
in the founding of Chicago’s Irish Fellowship Club, which figured prominently
in the social and political life of that city for decades.
Thomas O’Shaughnessy was a stained glass artist, inspired by
the Book of Kells and Art Nouveau.
His
masterpiece work is still lauded today: The fifteen stained glass
windows
of Old St. Patrick’s church in Chicago. An Internet search for images of
St. Patrick’s will bring up richly colored pictures of these elegant
fenestrations.
This is also the story of how advertising became an industry
of its own – not the motley assortment of ad hoc practitioners that were the
norm at the turn of the last century. This story of the first real generation
of Mad Men describes a world of advertising much different from the complex
multi-platformed juggernaut we are familiar with today. James O’Shaughnessy’s passionate belief in the
power of advertising to advance civilization reaches what the author describes
as “rhapsodic hyperbole,” prompting Kenny to wonder if he’d kissed the Blarney
Stone.
In 1924 Jim O’Shaughnessy toured Dublin with a delegation of
American ad men who were attending an international advertising conference in
England. They were hosted by the Publicity Club of Ireland. Among those greeting the visitors was Kevin J.
Kenny, grandfather of the author, Professor Kenny, a meeting that in a sense prompted
this project.
In weaving the achievements of the O’Shaughnnessy Brothers
into the intricate fabric of the much larger forces of their times and places,
Colum Kenny has created a fascinating and informative book.
