Mayor, born in Fordham, New York, USA. The grandson of the ardent Irish nationalist, John Mitchel, he was a lawyer who came to prominence as a special investigator of New York City officials (1906). Running as a fusion candidate, he won the New York mayoralty in 1913, the youngest mayor in the city's history. He introduced a number of much-needed civic reforms, including a programme of tax relief, but he was brought down in the 1917 election by the perception that he was undemocratic, along with allegations of scandal. He died in an aeroplane accident while training for the Aviation Corps in World War 1.
John Mitchel (November 3, 1815 – March 20, 1875) was an Irish nationalist activist and political journalist, and also became a public voice for the pro-slavery viewpoint in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s before ending up elected to the British House of Commons, only to be disqualified because he was a convicted felon.
Mitchel was born in Camnish, near Dungiven, County Londonderry, a son of John Mitchel, a radical Presbyterian minister with strong Unitarian sympathies, and his wife Mary Haslet.
Deportation and the Jail Journal
Mitchel's radicalism was too extreme for the newspaper and led to the prosecution of the paper's editor, Charles Gavan Duffy, for seditious libel. In 1848 Mitchel set up his own newspaper, the United Irishman, where he called for rebellion against British rule in Ireland and criticised British mismanagement of the Irish Potato Famine. It was during this period he wrote his famed Jail Journal, in which he expressed his hatred of Britain and his more radical brand of nationalism than generally had little mass appeal in mid-nineteenth century Ireland, where constitutional nationalists such as Daniel O'Connell, Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell dominated, with more radical nationalists advocating violence relegated to launching the occasional unsuccessful rebellion on the sidelines e.g., the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 and the Fenian Rising (1867).
Pro-slavery campaigner in the United States
Mitchel escaped from the colony in 1853 and established the radical Irish nationalist newspaper The Citizen in New York, as an expression of radical Irish-American anti-British opinion. Mitchel, a critic of international capitalism, which he blamed for the Great Hunger, saw the Southern states' economies with their reliance on slavery, as offering an alternative form of economic and social organisation to the form of international capitalism he despised. Mitchel resigned from the paper and toured as a spokesman for the south, founding a new paper, the Southern Citizen as a mouthpiece for the cause of slavery.
With the ending of slavery and the victory for the Union side in the American Civil War, Mitchel returned to agitation on the issue of Ireland. He founded his third American newspaper, the Irish Citizen but contrary to the expections of radical Irish-Americans Mitchel declined to support the radical Irish revolutionary group, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, nor as moderates hoped, with the cause of Irish home rule, instead using the paper to publish what purported to be a continuation of his Jail Journal but was in reality a further expression of his pro-slavery views.
Elected an MP
Mitchel returned to Ireland where in 1875 he was elected in a by-election to be an MP in the British parliament representing the Tipperary constituency.
Mitchel remains a famed figure in Irish history for his involvement in radical nationalist agitation, and in particular for his Jail Journal. McCormack (ed) The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Blackwell) ISBN 0-631-22817-9 John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps) (Glasgow, 1876) John Mitchel, Jail Journal (Dublin, M.H.
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