Richard Lee Strout: A Young American Reporter In Revolutionary Ireland

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Richard Lee Strout (1898–1990) had a successful career as a journalist, working for more than six decades as correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, while also being for four decades a columnist at The New Republic under the byline “TRB from Washington.” His earlier career included reporting from Ireland during its war of independence against Britain from 1919 to 1921. He visited Ireland at the peak of that war, in November 1920, and his articles on it appeared principally in the New York Globe during January and February 1921 and in an issue of The Open Road, a “magazine for young men” published in Boston, in May/June 1921. The present article highlights his reports from Ireland, placing his visit in the context of others by American journalists and in the context of his later career. Noting that “Strout’s Law” was “Sell every piece three times,” the article examines in particular a certain story that Strout filed in a number of forms about his meeting with a lord mayor of Cork city. The article argues that such variations illustrate the need to cross-check not only the work of different journalists on the same topic but also reports filed by the same individual at different widow, times.