Eamon de Valera in America

End of the Peace Conference

In between de Valera’s escape from Lincoln gaol in February 1919 and his election as President of the Dáil in April, his mind had moved in the direction of a journey to the United States. The Versailles conference was coming to the close of its proceedings without having afforded an audience to the republican delegates from Ireland. That window of opportunity to seek the international recognition so cherished by the republican project was closing fast. Article X of the constitution of the League of Nations proposed at Versailles committed participants to guarantee the integrity of existing international borders. This would, of course, have meant that Ireland would have to remain within the United Kingdom. Were the United States Congress to ratify the Treaty that embodied this proposal, it would virtually eliminate any possibility of a diplomatic route to Irish independence.

In order to avert this possibility, in early June de Valera travelled from Liverpool to New York, incognito and in great discomfort, aboard the liner SS Lapland. Partly to avoid giving the British an indication as to his means of travel, and partly owing to the need to recover from the journey, he made no public appearances in the immediate aftermath of his arrival. Instead he opted for a short stay at the home of Joseph McGarrity, a leading republican in Philadelphia. Among other personal journeys at the beginning of this sojourn to the land of his birth, he found time to visit his elderly mother.

The split was partly the result of differing ages, geography and strategies, but perhaps most of all it was about control. By challenging the near monopoly of power within Irish-American circles enjoyed by the Devoy-Cohalan axis, de Valera soon had a bitter fight on his hands. This deflected him from his principal goals for extended periods during his remaining time in America.

This was for the future, however. When de Valera made his first public, and much-hyped, appearance in New York, at the famed Waldorf-Astoria hotel on 23 June 1919, it was, in part, for the purpose of a photo-op with Devoy and Cohalan, among others. The occasion went well and was a favourable starting point for Dev’s first whistle-stop tour. He crammed some 6,000 miles of travel and dozens of speaking engagements into little more than three weeks. The tour undoubtedly raised the profile both of de Valera and the Irish republican cause. The biggest turn-outs, not surprisingly, were in cities such as Boston with large Irish populations.

It was not all plain sailing however. There were occasional incidents en route that demonstrated the scale of opposition faced by a cause in a country with an unpleasant history of anti-Irish, and anti-Catholic, bigotry. Most notably, members of the Ku Klux Klan made unwelcome appearances at several rallies in the American south and made clear their opposition to de Valera’s presence.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, this element of de Valera’s mission was a great success, with the modern equivalent of millions of dollars being raised in support of the republican cause. Part of this money was diverted to possibly the most curious episode during the whole of de Valera’s highly eventful sojourn. A loan from monies raised in the name of the Irish republic was made available to representatives of the nascent Soviet Union, who were in dire need of the type of hard currency that Irish republicans were raising in abundance. The Russian crown jewels, seized by the Bolsheviks from the recently-executed Romanov family, were used as security. The action was justified by the republicans on the grounds that they hoped thereby to secure recognition of the Republic from Russia. This did not happen, as the Bolsheviks preferred instead to deal with Britain. The jewels remained in Irish hands for several decades before being returned to the Soviets, who at the same time repaid the original loan, in 1949.

Such interludes apart, the afore-mentioned personality and policy schism threatened the mission with disaster. The occasion for the public airing of the increasingly bitter exchanges came on foot on a newspaper interview given by de Valera. In it, he suggested that he was not unmindful of British security interests and was open to the possibility that Britain might adopt the same policy towards Ireland as the United States did at that time towards Cuba. The US recognised Cuba’s internal autonomy but refused to allow it to develop foreign alliances that could threaten American interests. Devoy and Cohalan seized on the interview to suggest that de Valera was compromising the republican ideal of total separation from Britain and used it as a metaphorical stick with which to beat the de Valera camp.

The differences between de Valera and Cohalan-Devoy crystallised with de Valera’s creation of a new organisation, the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, as a rival to the FOIF. During the brief time that remained to de Valera in the United States this new organisation could do little by way of concrete action. However, both it and the dispute that gave rise to its foundation had a negative impact on the fortunes of the FOIF, the membership figures for which went into a rapid, ultimately terminal, decline. De Valera was consistently backed throughout the dispute by the Cabinet in Dublin.

De Valera’s return to Ireland in December 1920 came as a relief and release to all concerned. It had not been a happy time for him personally, not the least because he was apart from his young family, or for the cause he served. Nothing of any significance had been achieved in terms of diplomatic support for Irish independence, and most of the substantial amount of money that had been raised remained lodged in American bank account for years as a result of legal disputes. The capacity of the republican movement to split into bitter factions was demonstrated yet again. An even greater, and horribly bloody, split within the same movement was to become a sad reality as a result of the division over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, not much more than a year after de Valera’s return.