Robert Alsop Versus Robert Barclay, The Apologist (1873)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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William Henry "Will" Irwin was an American author, writer and journalist, who was associated with the muckrakers. Irwin was the head of the American center of P. E. N. , an international organization of writers.
Background
Irwin was born September 14, 1873 in Oneida, New York, United States, first of the two literary sons of David Smith Irwin and Edith Emily (Greene) Irwin. The family (originally Irvin) came from Irvine's Bay, Ayrshire, Scotland.
In boyhood Will played in the "fairyland of woods" of the New York lake country. Before Will was six, his father, drawn by the silver boom, moved his family to the Leadville, Colorado, area "in surroundings which make the western movies seem tame. " Their mother, the daughter of a painter-poet, sought to infuse her sons "with the idea that art was the really important thing. "
Education
The Irwin boys were remote from educational facilities and on entering public school in Denver, found themselves graded with students several years their junior. When Will finished high school, he enrolled in the new Leland Stanford University, where he was less interested in studying than in campus dramatics, publications and politics, musicals, fencing, and socializing in general. His behavior kept him from graduating in 1898, although his degree was granted a year later.
Knox College conferred the honorary degree of doctor of humane letters in 1940.
Career
William Henry volunteered for the Spanish-American War but was rejected.
Attracted by what he called the "artistic bunch" in San Francisco, he went to work in 1899 as assistant editor of The Wave, a literary weekly. When The Wave went bankrupt, he found work on the San Francisco Chronicle as a reporter in 1901. Successively he was a special writer (1902) and Sunday editor (1902 - 1904). Yet much as he relished the Golden Gate port and friends like Jack London, Irwin turned his eyes east. With many young journalists of the day, he looked to the New York Sun and the editorship of Chester S. Lord.
He arrived in New York in 1904 and was soon at work on the newspaper of his dreams. In 1905 in New Hampshire, Irwin reported the Portsmouth Peace Conference, ending the Russo-Japanese War, in his words, "the most newsless news event that I ever covered". His most remarkable journalistic feat followed the receipt of the news of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, on April 18, 1906. His account interlarded the few bits of fact available with his intimate knowledge of the city. On that day he wrote fourteen columns and for the next week produced no fewer than eight columns a day as details emerged from the stricken city. He ate with one hand while he wrote with the other.
His "The City That Was" was an account of "the gayest, lightest-hearted, most romantic, most pleasure-loving" place. It was, he wrote, "as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. " Published quickly in a small book, "The City That Was" circulated widely throughout the country, bringing national notice to its author. Although his future in daily journalism was assured, Irwin followed the trend of probing reporters into the mass magazine field.
Later in 1906 he joined McClure's magazine as managing editor and undertook a supervisory rather than writing role in the muckraking movement. His work as an editor was not to his liking, and in 1907 he left McClure's to write for Norman Hapgood and Collier's. After a series on the fakery of spirit mediums, he assessed the spread of prohibition through local option. Through his research he soon perceived that a frequent explanation for government's unwillingness or inability to deal with corruption was local newspaper silence.
In 1908 President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University asked Irwin to collect American and European opinions on organizing a school of journalism as proposed by Joseph Pulitzer. Irwin devoted much of 1910 to interviewing editors and publishers and to library research. His fifteen-article series "The Power of the Press, " appeared in Collier's between January and July 1911. In 1969 the articles were reproduced in book form under the title The American Newspaper.
In World War I, Irwin early established himself as among the leading battlefront correspondents. He reported for both American and English publications from the German, Belgian, and British armies in 1914-1915 and for the Saturday Evening Post from the French, Italian, British, and American forces in 1916-1918. His dispatch "The Splendid Story of the Battle of Ypres" (1915) depicted the "filth, mud and cold" of the trenches so vividly that Lord Northcliffe, after publication in English papers, circulated it in pamphlet form. Irwin also undertook two important wartime tasks, as a member (1914 - 1915) of the executive committee of the Commission for Belgian Relief, headed by Herbert Hoover, and as chief of the foreign department of the Creel Committee on Public Information in 1918. A six-month "enlistment" lasted six years.
If Will Irwin was not writing, he seemingly was searching for a subject. His first book was a collection of writings from his college days, Stanford Stories (1900), with C. K. Field. In 1903 he tried fantasy and coauthored with Gelett Burgess The Reign of Queen Isyl and The Picaroons. The next year he produced a book of verse, The Hamadryads. The popular interest in his description of the stricken San Francisco led him in 1908 to issue Old Chinatown.
During World War I, he produced books of his experiences as well as newspaper and magazine articles. In Men, Women and War (1915) he portrayed the women of France as courageously bearing the brunt of the struggle, often in situations as adverse as those of their men at the front. His Reporter at Armageddon (1918), consisting of letters recounting life among the Allied troops, was described by the Review of Reviews as "a model for all reporters in vividness of description" (October 1918).
Although he avoided partisan politics, Irwin did not shun political matters. In 1912 he developed a tract for the political times entitled Why Edison Is a Progressive, and in 1929 his Herbert Hoover: A Reminiscent Biography was published. It recalled not only "our most eminent senior" at Stanford University, but also provided Irwin's explanation of the "secret force" of Hoover in public affairs, and the author's firsthand observation of Hoover at his relief work in Belgium in World War I.
In the first postwar decade, Irwin also wrote a novel of the mining camps of the 1870's, Youth Rides West (1925), the chronicle of a tenderfoot from Harvard, notable for its "footnotes to frontier history"; and a biography of Adolph Zukor, the moving picture magnate, The House That Shadows Built (1929) which was also an account of the film industry to that time.
One of his most serious works was How Red is America? (1927). In answering the question he divided the radical forces into communists, socialists, anarchists, and still lesser groups. Academic critics were not impressed by Irwin's Propaganda and the News (1936) found merit in the recital of "methods and ruses employed by successful publicity men, " while the Christian Science Monitor (January 28, 1936) said the work "may be regarded as one of the more important volumes on the modern press, including radio, and its relation to the public. "
His entertaining autobiography, The Making of a Reporter (1942), was welcomed as a "fluent, lucid and sensible narrative" describing many of the high points in American journalism between the 1890's and Hoover's administration. With Thomas M. Johnson he wrote in 1943 What You Should Know About Spies and Saboteurs, in effect, a manual on espionage and counterespionage and a revelation of how spies get information and transmit it, illustrated with specific examples. In 1946 he edited Letters to Kermit by Theodore Roosevelt. He also wrote two plays: The Thirteenth Chair (1916), with Bayard Veiler; and The Lute Song (1930), with Sidney Howard.
The Irwins lived in New York City and spent summers in Scituate, Massachussets. He died of a cerebral occlusion in St. Vincent's Hospital, Manhattan, in his seventy-fifth year.
Achievements
William Henry Irwin was known for the articles, some in the muckraking style until the outbreak of World War I. He also was one of the first American correspondents in the World War I. In all, he was one of several correspondents who represented American magazines in Europe, was chief of the foreign department of George Creel's Committee on Public Information in 1918. During and after the war Irwin wrote 17 more books, including a biography of Herbert Hoover; a history of Paramount Pictures and its founder, Adolph Zukor, The House That Shadows Built (1928); and his autobiography, The Making of a Reporter (1942). He also wrote two plays and continued magazine writing.
France decorated Irwin with the Legion of Honor, Belgium with the King Albert Medal, and Sweden with the commemorative medal of the Olympic Games.
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Politics
Nominally a Republican, he supported President Wilson so vigorously on the League of Nations issue that he broke with George H. Lorimer, publisher of the Saturday Evening Post.
Personality
William Henry was qenial, warm, companionable.
Quotes from others about the person
One of the most qualified of press critics, Oswald Garrison Villard, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature (November 14, 1942), credited Irwin with "that sure judgment of men, women and affairs which made him for so long one of the most valued and distinguished of our popular journalists. "
Psychical researcher Hereward Carrington described Irwin as a well-known "exposer of fraudulent mediums. "
Connections
Irwin was married twice: on January 1, 1901, to Harriet Hyde of San Francisco, by whom he had a son, William Hyde Irwin; and on February 1, 1916, to Inez Haynes Gillmore (1873 - 1970), a successful novelist and short-story writer. His second wife, like her husband, held the presidency (1931 - 1933) of the Authors' League of America.
