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earlier when he broke with Franklin Roosevelt. One might have trouble justifying this seeming conflict with the Irish revolutionary past in Ireland, but it made sense for those who might have forgotten that past. In so doing they became vulnerable to all sorts of demagoguery about which their grandparents might have laughed. Judge Martin Foran A different and very special kind of Irish American emerged in politics very early in the history of the Irish immigrant. He was the political independent. In Cleveland his prototype was Martin A. Foran, a member of the Cathedral parish, who ran for Congressman and won, and ultimately became a judge in Cleveland. (born in 1844 in Pennsylvania, died in Cleveland in 1921). He remained a faithful member of the Catholic Church and yet sent his children to the public school; he spurned any overtures of the Cleveland bishops to advocate causes peculiarly Catholic and was branded by Bishop Richard Gilmour, who never grasped Foran's theory of separation of Church and State, as a rebel. Foran, more than any other 19th Century Cleveland Irish Catholic, moved freely in the world of the Wasps. He was the first Catholic invited to join the Union Club; he was a charter member of the City Club. But Foran's independence was at the same time both his credential to the non-Catholic community and his burden with at .....
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least some of the Catholic community. His refusal to be dominated by what he considered the arbitrary politics of Bishop Gilmour set him apart from most Irish Catholic politicians who, at least by giving lip service to the bishop, played the game. They thus gained the Catholic vote. The other side of the coin found Foran espousing certain Irish causes without necessarily admitting to the Catholic nature of these causes. This paradox in Foran's life bewildered Gilmour, who regarded all Irish nationalism independent of the directives of the bishops as subversive. The issue between Gilmour and Foran came to a head In 1887 when Foran declared his support of the Single Tax Theory of Henry George. Dr. Edward McGlynn, Pastor of St. Stephen Church in New York, perhaps the most influential Irish priest in the country at the time, espoused the same cause and indeed campaigned for the election of George in the mayoralty election in New York in 1886. McGlynn was first suspended from his priestly functions in 1886 by Archbishop Michael Corrigan, a close friend of Gilmour, for dabbling in politics. In 1887 McGlynn was excommunicated for his part in the George campaign. He founded the short-lived Anti-Poverty Society in New York after George lost the election and was finally reinstated with the Church by the Apostolic Delegate in 1892. There were many Irish who followed McGlynn in New York and whose espousal of the George cause came perhaps as close to a schism as the American Church has seen thus fat. The reason .....
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behind the whole event was the fear of Archbishop Corrigan that the George theory bordered on socialism. This was not the case, really, as the Delegate said in reinstating McGlynn, but in 1891 the conflict did produce Pope Leo XIII's great Encyclical Rerum Novarum, concerned with the rights of the working man. But Gilmour's reaction to Foran was a mirror of Corrigan's reaction to McGlynn, although Gilmour never went as far as Corrigan in sanctioning Foran. Foran harbored his admiration for the cause of Henry George all the rest of his days. In Cleveland, Foran had the opportunity to support one of George's truest disciples, Tom Johnson, when Johnson successfully campaigned for mayor of Cleveland through four terms from 1900 to 1908. It was in the 1900 Johnson campaign that the old political lines which we have noted previously were once and for all broken among the Irish in Cleveland. The divisions remain to this day. Some Irish vote Democrat as they always have, some vote Republican as John Ireland first suggested in 1896, and many, adhering to the concept of a moderate independent which Johnson was, continue to vote for an independent Democrat (sometimes a Republican though less likely). Frank Lausche and Anthony Celebrezze were two such successful mayoral candidates. The point of all of this is that in Cleveland, politics, especially as they involve the Irish, are unique and they are deeply, though often unconsciously, rooted in the past. There has never been a unified Catholic vote along party lines in .....
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Cleveland and surely there has not been a unified Irish vote here since the 1890's. Machine politics never seem to have gotten off the ground in this city. Those who today do superficial research and who stand outside the history of the Irish in Cleveland suspect at times a clergy-led conspiracy in Cleveland Irish Catholic voting patterns. There is no evidence that would bear this out in the Irish community other than that already noted about some parts of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Cleveland's bishops have failed to understand the politics of the city, and of the Irish, and have sought by the use of power to urge the Irish to vote as though they were Americans with a Wasp background. This tactic simply has never worked. On the contrary, if the local bishops urged a course contrary to the three forms of Irish voting patterns already cited, those patterns were usually intensified. In any case, voting patterns among ethnic groups and especially among the Irish in Cleveland are a subject that is yet to be researched. One suspects that such research would be well worth the effort.
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