(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – Chicago is known for its annual St.
Patrick’s Day events, but a scandalous murder within the city’s Irish community snuffed out any celebrations, at least for one year.
Dr. Gillian O’Brien, a reader in modern Irish history at Liverpool John Moores University, notes that the first St. Patrick’s Day gatherings in Chicago were comparatively low-key, although they reflected the pride of city’s Irish-American contingent.
“They have what were referred to primarily as picnics, where there’d be a bit of a parade,” she says in the latest Courier Pigeon podcast. “It’s kind of like a fair. They do have those from the 1840s onwards, and they become much more formalized by the time you get to the 1870s, 1880s, where they’re organized by particular societies.”
During a trip to Chicago, O’Brien learned about a 19th-century crime saga involving Patrick Henry Cronin, a prominent physician who was part of an Irish republican organization, Clan na Gael. Infighting within the group is believed to have led to Cronin’s murder in May 1889, which at first was merely a confounding disappearance.
The subsequent discovery of his body led to revelations about an unsavory conspiracy that reached into Chicago's police department.
“The year after all of this happens, there is no St. Patrick’s Day parade, or no St. Patrick’s Day picnic – or no St. Patrick’s Day anything because the Irish reputation in Chicago is so tarnished by what had happened during the previous year,” O’Brien says.
Her investigation forms the basis of the 2015 true crime book, Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago.
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