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John DeMorgan
De Morgan [formerly Morgan], John Francis (1848? – 1926), radical agitator, journalist, dime novel writer, and Tax Receiver was probably born in 1848, almost certainly in Ireland. His parents were James and Lucy Morgan, his father a civil engineer who worked for some time in England. Little is known of his early life, though he claimed he was ‘born on the railway works and for the first twenty years of his life was a railway servant’, as well as having been involved in radical activities in his teenage years. He appears to have spent some of his youth in England, claiming to have studied in London and Cambridge. In 1868 he was employed by a Manchester Temperance Society but left within the year because, it was believed, of pecuniary fraud. During the period of his employment he married Mary Anne Alston at the New Bridge Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester.

Returning to Ireland as John De Morgan he became an itinerant elocution teacher, with strong interests in social, including medical, reform. He settled in Cork as a Professor of Elocution, Oratory and English Literature in 1870. In 1872 he established the Cork branch of the International Working Men’s Association. Three months later, after a full-scale riot at a public meeting called to attack the IWMA, he was sacked from his job. Unable to get work, he moved to England where he embarked on the life of a professional agitator on behalf of various radical causes. With a group of northern radicals he established the National Republican Brotherhood in 1872. By then both the First International and the republican movement were in decline and in 1873 he returned to lecturing and journalism and to relative obscurity.

In 1875 he entered the two radical movements that were to make his national reputation as an agitator. One was the cause of the Tichborne Claimant; the other the rights of people to use urban common land. In the same year, he was appointed manager and editor of the People’s Advocate and National Vindicator of Right and Wrong. Like most of his publishing ventures, it did not last long, and he was subsequently accused of incompetence and fraud. However, his life as an agitator continued to develop. He was to be at his best with a large crowd, preferably in the open, where his undoubted oratorical skills fared well. He first came to national fame when he led major demonstrations against lords of manors who had been selling and leasing urban commons. Working on the principle of direct action, though always warning against violence, he established the Commons Protection League. Over the next four years, he was involved with over a dozen such campaigns around England and was arrested on a number of occasions. The campaigns at Plumstead Common and Selston Common led to him being jailed. From 1876-78 he published De Morgan’s Monthly, which strongly featured these activities.

His interest in the Tichborne movement remained for a number of years. He set up the Tichborne Propaganda Release Union and organized an unsuccessful and notorious march on the House of Commons on behalf of the Claimant. After his second imprisonment in late 1877, he moved increasingly away from London, being elected to the Leeds School Board in 1879. An inveterate establisher of political organizations, he set up the Leeds Political Reform Union which he hoped could provide the basis for a national ‘people’s party’ under the banner of another of his organizations, the People’s Political Union. Always interested in the possibility of standing for Parliament, he attempted unsuccessfully to become a Liberal candidate alongside Gladstone in Leeds. Concurrently, he was the editor of De Morgan’s Weekly, but appears to have been overwhelmed by the difficulties of the professional agitator’s life and suddenly – tired, broke, and despondent - he emigrated to the United States in June 1880. He left behind his wife and children, travelling instead with Mary Elizabeth Schofield.

In New York he was quickly appointed as Editor of House and Home, a weekly radical journal established by a retired entrepreneur and philanthropist, Bradhurst Schieffelin. Schieffelin’s main interest was in the introduction of legislation that would restrict inheritance, and thus make society more egalitarian. He promoted, and possibly funded, a People’s Party in 1881, which was supported by De Morgan and his journal. De Morgan, a Unitarian by background, also allowed his religious beliefs to play a more prominent role and was involved in the Church of Humanity in Brooklyn, which claimed itself as ‘communist’. In 1884, both House and Home and the People’s Party went out of business after a scandal relating to Schieffelin’s bigamous marriage.

For a while, De Morgan, now living on Staten Island, disappeared from the public eye. In 1887, however, he relaunched himself as a writer of dime novels, originally producing Rider Haggard parodies. He became a hugely prolific writer in such popular series as Golden Hours, Brave and Bold, and Boys of Liberty. The stories were mostly for the adolescent market, varying from pseudo science fiction, to colonial and American revolutionary war stories, through to straight adventure tales. He also wrote under a range of pseudonyms, including Frank Sheridan, Captain Luther Barr and Old Salt. It has been claimed that his work had an influence on the development by Edgar Rice Burroughes of the character of Tarzan.

Meanwhile he retained some political interests but they became more localized and generally on the fringes of the two established parties. He retained some independence and remained attracted to the idea of an alternative ‘third party’. He lived all his US life on Staten Island and fought for a free ferry, a World Fair, and the independence of the island from New York, for which he set up a Separation League in 1899.

He stood unsuccessfully for office in New York State on two occasions. !n 1887, he stood for Assemblyman under the banner of Henry George’s United Labor Party, and in 1897, in support of George’s second bid for mayor of New York, as a Jefferson Democrat. By the end of the century, he was a respectable and prominent citizen and joined the Citizen’s Union of New York, a fusion-oriented political party, becoming the Chairman of the Staten Island branch. In 1901 he successfully made a speech to the State legislature in support of the establishment of Silver Lake park on his beloved Staten Island. In the same year he was a supporter of the successful bid of Seth Low for Mayor of New York. His reward was appointment in 1902 as Deputy Tax Receiver for Staten Island, a job he retained for the rest of his life. By this time, he had settled into a very different life.

In the early part of the 20th century, De Morgan moved away from his dime novel career, concentrating instead on freelance journalism of a literary and historical kind, though his stories continued to be published for many years, and have recently been revived. He was the Vestry Clerk at St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Castleton and a trustee of the Staten Island Museum. He also became the President of the Westerleigh Building Savings and Loan Association. He appears to have moved out of politics. He died on May 1st 1926, leaving one daughter, Florence, by his relationship with Mary Schofield. By that time, the members of his English family had died, apparently in reduced circumstances.

In his political life, De Morgan had involved himself across the full range of radical activity and causes. Though flirting with republicanism, labour, and socialism, he saw himself as a ‘Chartist of the old School’ with his radicalism underpinned by his humanistic religious inclinations which he expressed as a ‘communism of the Saviour’. Principally, however, he saw himself as the “The People’s Advocate, Champion and Friend”. In his search for a vehicle to represent those interests he consistently sought a ‘third party’ alternative to existing establishment political parties. This resonated well in his time in the US when the populist movement was briefly in vogue.