Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,975

This is the grave of Francis O’Neill.

Born in 1848 in Tralibane, County Cork, Ireland, O’Neill was into Irish fiddling and folk tunes from the time he was a kid. But of course there was no money in that and he followed the masses out of that impoverished place as soon as he could. He got a job on a ship in around 1864 as a cabin boy and did that for the next five years. Once, while working a boat to New York, he met a woman traveling and they fell in love and decided to get married. They moved to Chicago in 1873. In a shocking move, this Irishman became a cop. Who ever heard of that before?

This was Gilded Age Chicago and corruption was rampant. The reputation of the Chicago Police Department was so bad that one of the first movies ever made is How They Rob Men in Chicago, in 1900. It’s about 30 seconds long. It consists of a man walking down a street. A criminal smashes him in the head and takes his walled. Then a cop walks by, sees the man lying there, and takes his watch. End of movie.

I love this so much. What other movie has said so much about a society in 30 seconds?

Well, that was the world which O’Neill operated and thrived. He would be as corrupt as any Gilded Age cop you can imagine, especially as he rose in the department all the way to Chief of Police in 1901. Supposedly, he was on the streets, bummed out, not having any connections to get a good job. But along came an alderman named William Tracey. Seeing a potential patronage option and getting to know the young man, Tracey told the cops to hire O’Neill. See, aldermen got to name their own cops to the force. Maybe not a ton, but a few. It was part of the appropriations process in that corrupted city. O’Neill was one of the two cops Tracey got to bring on board. It was a corrupt society. Quid pro quo might as well been the name of Chicago. But despite the complaints of people such as Jane Addams, who would try to clean up the city, for someone like O’Neill, it was just the way things were done. What else were young Irish immigrants supposed to do if they wanted a decent life for themselves and their families?

There’s an interesting argument I saw in a biography of O’Neill I dug up. It’s this–being an Irish cop wasn’t easy in these early days. There was lots of Irish nationalism and the Irish were heavily involved in strikes. So it was tough because there were so many full families that had come over that you might well be arrested your wife’s relative when busting a strike, which the cops were of course doing all the time. The argument goes that it was a part of a strategy to turn young Irish men from radical politics by making them cops. I have to think about this–it’s not as if the Irish maintained generations of radicalism or anything like that, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see this articulated more directly somewhere at the time.

And to be clear, as police chief, O’Neill was very happy to bust strikes. He was a total corporate hack. He would not only use Black strikebreakers, he would deploy Black deputies to protect them, which led to some mixed feelings in the Black community, since a lot of people were dismayed at dividing everyone in the working class once again by race, but hey, at least it showed some belief that Black people could have positions of responsibility. And to be fair to O’Neill, he did routinely promote Black cops, including promoting the first Black man to the role of a desk sergeant. Whether that makes up for being a union busting scumbag, I will leave up to you to decide. Lest you believe I am understating O’Neill’s strikebreaking, after the Pullman strike in 1894, which he was involved in breaking up, he proposed reorganizing the Chicago Police Department upon military lines, saying that the Army wasn’t as efficient in killing workers as he would have been and so if he combined his leadership with military methods, he could be the best strikebreaker. Nice guy. This was not accepted though and in fact, the newspapers pretty much pilloried his pretensions here so he dropped the idea.

What O’Neill is more known for is becoming an enormously important folklorist of Irish music. When he found some good Irish musicians who had come over, he would offer them jobs as cops so they could have steady financial backing as they plied their real trade of music. Whether these were real jobs or make-work, I don’t know. But that’s how a lot of hiring took place. And O’Neill was probably more concerned about music than running the police department, unless there were striking workers, I mean, them you gotta kill. Now, understand that collecting music was not easy in the early 20th century. The very first records were being produced and those were fragile, rare, and pricey. Otherwise, you had to write about the music, both in terms of publishing sheet music and, in the case of folk music, describe the sound.

O’Neill did what he could here. He commissioned and acquired early wax cylinders. He recruited Irish musicians to come to Chicago. Then he started publishing books on Irish folk music. O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, published in 1903, consisted of over 1,800 traditional Irish tunes. 1907’s The Dance Music of Ireland, consisted of exactly 1,001 Irish songs. In 1913, he published Irish Minstrels and Musicians, which were short biographies of the musicians themselves, undoubtedly full of the kind of blarney that the Irish love, especially those in America. In 1915, he published 400 Tunes Arranged for Piano and Violin, which probably expanded the market for these songs. Then in 1922 came Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, which collected another 365 pieces of music.

O’Neill was able to do all this of course because he was becoming rich off the sweet deals he made as an police officer. Some of this was undoubtedly envelopes of cash and the more base versions of corruption. Plenty of the rest came from sweetheart deals on real estate investments and the type of thing that Gilded Age Chicago specialized in to keep the leaders of the city on your side. Moreover, the rest of the cops had to keep O’Neill happy. They were completely reliant upon him for their jobs. So they did what you do to keep your boss happy. Even when civil service exams started to clean up government a little bit, it was often rumored that O’Neill gave out the answers to the civil service exam to people he wanted to hire.

O’Neill died in 1936, at the age of 87, so he got to live to hear a lot of Irish songs on record.

Frances O’Neill is buried in Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other American folklorists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lyle Saxon is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Esther Shephard is in Rochester, Washington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.