“I regard Emma Goldman as one of the most dangerous apostles of anarchy in America,” Captain Francis O’Neill was saying. “She is a persuasive, almost magnetic, talker, and Czolgosz, who admitted having heard her speak, was no doubt influenced and inspired to do something out of the ordinary in order to be regarded as a hero by his fellow anarchists. Seeking the opportunity, he found it, and shocked the world by the assassination of President McKinley.”
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The year was 1902, the place Louisville, Kentucky, the subject “anarchy and anarchists.” The audience was the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and the superintendent of police in Chicago was speaking. O’Neill recalled the Haymarket massacre of 1886, was pleased to report that the three “instigators” of that unhappy event who escaped the gallows and were later pardoned “no longer indulge in incendiary talk,” and informed his peers that “in Chicago we have not above a half dozen of the rabid type of anarchists known as ‘men of action.’”
But O’Neill refused to let the music vanish. Himself a piper, O’Neill seeded the Chicago police force with Irish musicians–in particular a sergeant from County Down adept at transcription–and recorded thousands of Celtic tunes, most of which caught his ear here in Chicago. From 1903 to 1924 he published the best of them in a series of books that include O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, The Dance Music of Ireland, and O’Neill’s Irish Music for Piano or Violin. These books kept Irish music alive until the day when it would return to fashion.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Francis O’Neil photo.
