Saturday, September 23, 1922. Unintended paths.

The Saturday Evening Post went to the stands with a Coles Phillips illustration entitled "The broken heel hop".  The woman in the illustration still looked more cheerful than Muriel MacSwiney, who was photographed in New York City on the same day.

Mrs. Muriel MacSwiney appeared in the photograph with the then Miss Linda Kearns.  Both of them had been involved in a jailbreak that freed Irish prisoners, something that the British tended to suffer with such frequency that it raises real questions about the extent to which they were actually trying to retain them

MacSwinney was the widow of the Lord Mayor of Cork, who had died in a hunger strike.  She was the first woman to be given the Keys (Freedom) of New York.  She never recovered from her husband's death, even becoming estranged from her young daughter, Máire. She remained an activist for the rest of her long life, becoming increasingly left wing as time went on.  In the early 1920s, after this period of time, she left her daughter Máire, in Germany while she traveled Europe, losing custody of her in 1932 to the girl's aunt, who saw the completion of her education in Ireland and Germany.  In the meantime she took up with left-wing French intellectual Pierre Kaan, which produced a second daughter, Alix in 1926.  Kaan died in a German concentration camp during World War Two.

She remained an activist until the end of her life in 1982 at age 90, and ironically died in England, where she had taken up residence near her second daughter Alix.  Máire MacSwiney, went on to marry a significant Irish politician and died in 2012 at age 93.

MacSwiney's life isn't atypical of revolutionaries of the period, who often started off basically in the middle of a movement and then evolved into leftwing movements in general, losing themselves to the movement.  She started off as a Catholic Irish nationalist, which she likely would have remained, had her husband not died of the dubious revolutionary act of self starvation.  From there, she ended up becoming so involved in increasingly left wing causes that she more or less removed herself from the life of her daughter with her husband, and had a second by a left-wing intellectual whom she ultimately did not make a life with.  It's hard to admire her.

Kearns was an Irish nurse and Fianna Fáil politician.  She died at age 62 in 1951.

The C-2 airship completed the first transcontinental airship flight across the United States, landing at Ross Field in Arcadia, California.  The trip had started on September 14.

Allied representatives sent Turkey a proposal to hold a conference to resolve the Chanak Crisis.

Tom Lovelace of the Pittsburgh Pirates made his first, and only, appearance in Major League Baseball, breaking his leg sliding into first base in the ninth inning.  He went back into the minors, where he played until 1932.