1916 (20 page)

For over 200 years North America had been the destination for Irish people struggling with economic, social, religious, and political disabilities at home. Extensive migration from Ulster in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant that a high proportion of people with Irish connections in colonial America and in the early republic. The figures vary greatly, but it is estimated that by 1790 there were over 300,000 people in the United States of Irish descent, and the two decades prior to the war of 1812, including refugees from the troubled rebellions of 1798 and 1803, may have accounted for another 100,000.
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‘Emigration is the great fact of Irish social history from the early nineteenth century,’ Roy Foster has observed, and this was borne out following the War of 1812 when even larger numbers began to move from Ireland to the United States.
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Perhaps as many as 1,000,000 emigrated between 1815 and 1845, and at least 3,000,000 in the Famine years between 1845 and 1870. David Fitzpatrick has pointed out that in 1890 some 39 per cent of those born in Ireland were living abroad, the largest portion of them in the United States.
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By the early twentieth century there were almost 5,000,000 people in the United States either born in Ireland or with Irish parents. By taking third and forth generation Irish-Americans into account, there may have been as many as 20,000,000 or about 21 per cent of the population.
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As the Great War broke out in 1914 the United States had, therefore, an enormous population that had some kind of Irish connection. If even a fraction of their number supported an Irish cause a vast amount of money could be raised and great pressure could be brought to bear in the United States or in Ireland. The Irish-American community was a tool of great potential in the hands of any Irish political movement.

Linkage between Irish nationalist activity and the Irish-American community can be traced to Wolfe Tone’s sojourn in the United States in 1795 and to the organising of the Friends of Ireland Society in 1840 in support of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal movement. The most serious of these connections was the creation by the Young Ireland rebel James Stephens of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1858, to some extent at the prompting and with the financial support of John O’Mahony and Michael Doheny in New York. These men and many of their early followers had been part of the unsuccessful Young Ireland rebellion of 1848. The IRB, and its counterpart in the United States, jointly became known as the Fenian movement. During the course of the early 1860s they both grew into formidable organisations. The IRB may have had as many as 40,000 members, some of whom had been, or still were, soldiers in the British army, while in the United States of the 100,000 to 175,000 men of Irish descent who served in the union army in the Civil War, some 50,000, now with military training, joined the Fenian Brotherhood. Despite these large and, in the American instance, well-financed organisations, personal rivalries between the leaders, divided counsel, and a certain amount of bad luck resulted in neither the Irish nor the American Fenians actually carrying out successful military operations. The British suppression of the Fenian uprising in 1867 led to the arrest and imprisonment of many of the leading figures and the reversion of the organisation to a steadily diminishing secret society. In the United States the fiasco of the several attempted invasions of Canada and the divisions within the leadership led to Clan na Gael superseding the Fenians in the late 1860s. Unlike
the American Fenians, the Clan was a secret society, led largely by former Fenians. However, within twenty years the Clan was also racked by a bitter split and murder scandal that lasted until 1900, considerably reducing its effectiveness.

While the physical force movement was struggling to re-organise itself in the 1870s and 1880s the Irish party came gradually under the control of Charles Stewart Parnell. The leadership that Parnell brought to the party at Westminster seemed to promise the implementation of home rule in Ireland through constitutional politics, and Irish-Americans rallied behind Parnell and the prospect of self-government in the form of the American Land League and the American National League. Parnell and various of his lieutenants, including his sister Fanny, travelled to the United States to rouse support for home rule and to raise funds for the party. However, Parnell’s downfall in 1890, his death in 1891, and the failure of the home rule bill in 1893, led to a split in the Irish party and the collapse of the home rule movement. Not until 1900 were the differences patched up and the party reunited under John Redmond. While the more sympathetic Liberals in England were able to form a new government at Westminster in late 1905, it was not until the two general elections in 1910, the second of which (in December) left the Liberals and Conservatives with 272 seats each, that home rule again became a serious political prospect, with the Irish party holding the balance of power with 84 seats. Supported by the United Irish League of America, Redmond and leading members of his party, such as John Dillon and T.P. O’Connor, visited the United States repeatedly, raising thousands of dollars (perhaps as much as $100,000 in 1910 alone, leading to Redmond being labelled the ‘dollar dictator’ by his opponents) with which to fight elections and subsidise members of parliament. As the prospects for home rule rose, so did enthusiasm in America.
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It is difficult to imagine today the degree of support that existed for home rule across the United States. In 1910 President William Howard Taft, and several other American dignitaries, travelled by train to Chicago to attend the St Patrick’s day dinner organised by the Irish Fellowship Club, as a gesture of support for home rule.
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Former President Theodore Roosevelt was the guest of Redmond, T.P. O’Connor, and others in the House of Commons dining room at a reception and lunch in June 1910.
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Judge Martin J. Keogh from New York wrote to Redmond in November of 1910 to assure him that: ‘I have never felt more keenly interested in your work nor have I ever had more genuine admiration for the way you are
conducting it than I have at the present time.’
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When the home rule bill was introduced in April of 1912 some fifteen Irish-American community leaders sent a cable congratulating Redmond on this achievement.
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As
the home rule legislation worked its way through parliament, congratulations and praise poured in to Redmond. ‘You have achieved more than I believed it possible to be done in the lifetime of an Irish Leader in our day, and more than all, you have the race at home and abroad solidly, sincerely, and almost unanimously with you,’ Judge Keogh told Redmond when the bill passed its second reading in 1912.
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When the third reading of the bill was passed, Congressman Goodwin of Arkansas introduced a resolution congratulating ‘the people of Ireland’ on its passage. Having been defeated in the House of Lords the home rule bill was introduced again and passed in the Commons on 9 June 1913. The following day Redmond read to the Commons a letter from Theodore Roosevelt that said that home rule ‘bids fair to establish good will amongst the English-speaking people’.
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If the
passage of the home rule bill under the new rules of the reformed House of Lords seemed to imply the inevitable implementation of the measure, the emergence of militant unionism, particularly in Ulster, supported by the Conservative party in Britain, threatened otherwise and began to change the whole political picture.

Clan na Gael was reunited in 1900 under the leadership of John Devoy. Devoy was described as ‘the greatest of the Fenians’ by Pádraig Pearse, an admirer, and as ‘a sleepless demon’ by Patrick Egan, a critic. Although in his seventies, Devoy was the pivotal figure in the physical force movement before 1916. A former member of the French Foreign Legion, a Fenian recruiter, a supporter of Parnell, and a newspaper reporter and editor, Devoy devoted his whole life to Ireland. However, overshadowed by the likely success of home rule and unsuccessful in mounting any recent physical force operations, the Clan and the IRB faced serious difficulties in the early years of the century. By 1910 membership of the IRB in Ireland and Britain was down to between 1,500 and 2,000 from its high point of about 40,000 members. To make matters worse, these members were largely elderly men who saw the IRB as something of a social club rather than a revolutionary organisation. ‘Nearly ten years J.[ohn] D.[evoy] of struggle and we are reaching what seems to be the end,’ wrote John T. Keating, a Chicago member of the Clan’s revolutionary directory, and he acquiesced in Devoy’s conclusion that ‘another period of mere negative policy … will kill us if too much prolonged’.
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But what to do? Resistance to the Boer War had been ineffectual, opposition to the Anglo-American arbitration treaties had helped to defeat them but had not moved the Irish cause forward, and criticising home rule as a betrayal of Ireland’s right to full independence seemed futile.
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Throughout 1910 and 1911 Devoy and his colleagues speculated on the possibility of an Anglo-German war, but Anglo-German naval tensions had temporarily eased. One practical thing that the Clan leadership in the United States could do was help reinvigorate the IRB by introducing new people to the Irish organisation. A key figure was Thomas J. Clarke, who had been imprisoned in 1883 for revolutionary activities, migrated to the United States where he had worked for Devoy at the
Gaelic American
, and returned to Ireland in 1907 to serve on the Supreme Council of the IRB. Clarke is often regarded as the man who revitalised the IRB, and after a period of some struggle became the main link between the IRB and the Clan. Dr Patrick McCartan of Co. Tyrone, a friend and protégé of Joseph McGarrity, and Diarmuid Lynch, who had taught Irish language and dancing in New York, were recommended to the IRB by the Clan leaders. Young Irishmen and IRB members, such as Bulmer Hobson, Denis McCullough, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, and Pádraig Pearse, were encouraged and supported by Clarke as well as by the Clan when they visited the United States.

Indeed IRB representatives were brought over from Ireland regularly to attend the annual meeting of Clan na Gael, during which time they learned about the American organisations and were strengthened in their desire to make the IRB more active. The Clan also provided funds for the Supreme Council of the IRB, between £600 and £1,000 per year although sometimes more.
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James Connolly also spent eight years in the United States where, among other things, he edited an Irish-American labour paper called
The Harp
. Connolly was not a member of the Clan nor did he become a member of the IRB until January 1916, after he had founded the Irish Citizen Army, but while in the United States he did form an important friendship with John Devoy, which was to stand him in good stead with IRB figures like Tom Clarke.
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Less officially, the Clan, and particularly Clan leaders such as John Devoy and Judge Daniel F. Cohalan in New York and Joseph McGarrity in Philadelphia, gave support to the Irish-Ireland organisations that sent representatives to the United States to raise money. The Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, Sinn Féin, the Abbey theatre, Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, and several other organisations all sought to create an Ireland that was culturally distinct from that of England. In the early years of the
twentieth century these groups were largely overshadowed by the Irish party and the mainstream of Dublin culture. To the degree to which they represented an alternative they had the support of Clan members in the United States. The list of these counter-culture people from Ireland who toured the United States is impressive, and included Douglas Hyde, William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, John MacBride, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Thomas Ashe, Bulmer Hobson, Pearse, and Roger Casement amongst others. Most of these people corresponded with Devoy at some time, and many had their arrangements facilitated by Joseph McGarrity, Judge Cohalan or Cohalan’s friend, the Standard Oil lawyer and patron of the arts, John Quinn. In fact, Devoy grumbled to Cohalan that: ‘The time of our men is constantly taken up with raising money for the [Gaelic] League, to the neglect of our own work,’ but the complaint could also be made about other Irish-Ireland organisations.
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Although support and enthusiasm for home rule would continue for several years more, the beginnings of serious unionist resistance, and ultimately the outbreak of the Great War, fundamentally changed the Irish situation, in America as well as at home. The defiance of the unionists had two immediate results. The first was the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which inspired the subsequent creation of the Irish Volunteers. The second was the opening of talks about the exclusion of Ulster from a self-governing southern Ireland, which provoked violent anger from extreme nationalists and growing disaffection among the home rulers in America.

The signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912, together with the assurance of support from Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of the Tories, signalled the refusal of unionists to accept home rule for Ireland, then working its way through parliament. More dramatic defiance came in January 1913, when the unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, organised the UVF. While many questioned the seriousness of this threat, the rhetoric of defiance, if not rebellion, remained very strong. The illegal importation of German guns into the port of Larne in April of 1914, together with the apparent refusal of elements of the British army in the Curragh camp a month earlier to obey any possible orders to undertake operations in Ulster, demonstrated that the British government was prepared to countenance private armies within the realm. At the instigation of Professor Eoin MacNeill, of University College Dublin, the idea was mooted, and a meeting was held in the Dublin Rotunda on 23 November 1914, to organise the Irish Volunteers. Although MacNeill became the commander in chief of the
Volunteers, members of the IRB held dominant positions in the organisation. Even so, the Clan was unsure how to react. Devoy’s
Gaelic American
came out in favour of the Volunteers on 3 January 1914, but by spring, while the Volunteers were organising throughout the country, there had still not been much material response from America. The O’Rahilly wrote to Devoy from Dublin on 6 April and lamented: ‘If the sincere Irish in America will not help us in this situation they will have neglected the greatest opportunity in a century.’
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By May Clan leaders were urging Devoy that the Volunteers should be supported, and a disgruntled member from Philadelphia wrote to Devoy’s assistant, James Reidy, reporting that the Clan members at a recent meeting agreed that, in view of the inaction thus far, the Irish-American Club should be sold and the proceeds sent ‘to the men who are willing to do something that will redound to the credit of Irish nationalists throughout the universe’.
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In early June the Clan sent out a circular to camps across the United States reporting that a meeting of Clan leaders in New York had endorsed the Irish Volunteers and created the Irish National Volunteer Fund committee, headed by Joseph McGarrity, Denis A. Spellessy, and Patrick J. Griffin, ‘to aid the people of Ireland to organise, arm, and equip a permanent National Army of Defence for the protection of their rights and liberties and to maintain the Territorial Integrity of Ireland’.
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They urged that Clan members give their support, and by mid-June McGarrity was able to send £1,000 to MacNeill to buy weapons and thousands more were promised.