Did you hear about the wealthy businessman who was obsessed with becoming US president and never tired of praising himself? He had numerous tangles with the courts, boasted of the huge crowds that attended his rallies, and floated the idea of becoming a dictator.
Sounds familiar, indeed, but no, we’re not talking about Donald Trump. Let me introduce you to George Francis Train from Boston. While Ireland is completely blameless when it comes to encouraging Trump to run for the presidency, it did play a part in the decision of George Francis Train to seek that high office. But more about that later. The aptly named Train was also an inveterate traveller and was thought to be the inspiration for Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s book Around the World in Eighty Days.
A man who was clearly not a fan of a catchy book title, he told his story in his memoir: My Life in Many States and Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year. He was a shipping magnate in the mid-1800s, he pioneered tramlines around the world, and he worked with Union Pacific Railroad in the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
He also promoted Irish immigration to the United States. While working in shipping, he noticed that vast areas of California were sparsely populated while his ships were returning from Liverpool with very few passengers. He came up with a relatively cheap prepaid passenger certificate to encourage the Irish to travel and promoted it in the Boston Pilot, a Catholic newspaper.
Gnomes of Donegal - Frank McNally on William Allingham’s peculiar brand of Irishness
‘A feeling of confidence that I might one day be president’ – An Irish Diary on George Francis Train
An Irish Diary on the St Patrick’s Day riots in 19th-century Toronto
An Irish Diary on the ‘different dimension of historic awareness’ unique to Wexford
He forged another Irish connection when he came to Cork in 1860 to plan a tramline for the city. It was built more than a decade later but scrapped after a few years. A great supporter of the Fenian movement, he even wrote a book about the need for Irish independence. In 1868 he was arrested in Cork after police searched his luggage and found speeches promoting the Fenian movement and criticising the British government. He was detained for four nights, and his arrest may have gone unnoticed were it not for the telegram he sent to the editor of the Cork Examiner, telling him all about it.
He had no qualms about being jailed, seeing it as another way to gain publicity. So he wasn’t too upset when he found himself back in an Irish prison – this time in Dublin – a few months later. This case involved a judgment against him for money owed to Ebbw Vale Iron Company. Later reflecting on this, he wrote that much of his work was thought out “while living in the fifteen jails of which I have been a tenant. It was in a jail in Dublin, called the Four Courts’ Marshalsea, that a feeling of confidence that I might one day be president of the United States first came into definite form”.
He carried a business card describing himself as Future President of the United States and he contested the 1872 election as an Independent candidate. His collection of campaign speeches humbly declared itself to be “the most remarkable book of speeches in the world”. Courting the Irish-American vote, he claimed his election bid had the support of a million Fenians – and he even mooted the possibility of buying Ireland and presenting it to the Fenians.
He campaigned for the right of women to vote but was unabashedly racist and declared that giving the vote to black people would drive the white man out of politics. “Woman First, Negro Last” was one of his proud catchphrases.
His populist and often outrageous campaign speeches packed venues, but he failed to make a dent in the numbers when it came to voting. He then announced his plan to become a dictator, but that gained no traction – despite his insistence that America would thrive under his rule.
When Train died in 1904, The New York Times wrote that while he had found business success, his “abnormal egotism” had impaired his usefulness. “His idea of happiness was to pose in the limelight of public notice, and failing to secure the measure of attention he desired by sane and normal actions, he had recourse to wild extravagances of speech and action.”
Yes, it seems that Trump may have dipped into the playbook of Mr Train. So what does that tell us about what the US president might do next? The good news for those growing weary of the turbulence wrought by Trump is that George Francis Train eventually ran out of steam. He drifted into obscurity, living in a cheap lodging house and spending his days on a park bench in New York, talking to the birds and squirrels.
I, for one, could live with that. I can’t speak for the birds or squirrels though.
