by Dermot Keogh
This at once put him in an excellent situation for any future appeal to the USA, although he had to wait almost two years before personally making it. His constant thought of his birthplace, at least in terms of the recognition he sought from his mother there, meant that he thought of the American people at large, not simply a fraction of it. His name prevented his being wrapped up as Irish-American, and if it left him vulnerable to the more racist of them, it gave him a basis on which to appeal to the Americans at large beyond Irish-America’s limits, as indeed Parnell before him had done. (In both cases their divergence from standard Irish-American patterns of ethnicity aided them: Parnell sounded English, to an American ear, de Valera looked Spanish, and interested non-Irish could thus feel more welcome).
De Valera gave an early taste of his remarkable international sense by recognising that in all the nations warring against one another in June 1917, millions among them were doing so ‘in the cause of freedom’.29 This was to stand above the conflict, and to understand it. But it distanced him from the traditional focus of Irish-American revolutionary nationalism, the Clan na Gael and its malevolent Methuselah, John Devoy. Devoy and his friend Judge Daniel F. Cohalan were bitter supporters of Germany in the First World War which made them hopeless conduits through which to appeal to the opinion of the United States, now a belligerent against Germany. Even when the war was over, there was much obvious difference between former supporters of neutrality and former supporters of the wartime enemies of the United States. Wilson could be vindictive: but his prejudice against Judge Cohalan was reasonable.
De Valera’s pursuit of Wilson as saint whence to find inspiration, and stick with which to reprimand the British, produced much citation of Wilson’s ‘no people shall be forced to live under a sovereignty under which it does not desire to live.’30 This linked them to the UK’s associated co-belligerent (Wilson, keeping a free hand – which he would use – declined to be an ‘ally’), but de Valera worked up his Americanisation of the Irish cause so that American observers would see counterparts. He insisted that ‘international recognition for our Irish Republic’ came first, and after it the time when ‘the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own form of government’, republican or not.31 The United States had first similarly decided on independence, secondly and thirdly on forms of government, respectively the Articles of Confederation and the constitution. The referendum was a clearer mechanism than had been open to the revolted colonies in 1777–81 or the independent states in 1787 and beyond, and it had won American popularity in many states throughout the preceding years of the twentieth century.
In May 1918 de Valera drafted an appeal to Wilson against proposed conscription in Ireland. Its opening was, if anything, over-educated:
A century and a half ago, England strove by brute force to crush the nascent American nation because it dared to assert its rights. By brute force today England threatens to crush the people of Ireland if they do not accept the status of helots, suffer themselves to be used at her good pleasure, and, meekly bowing their heads, permit themselves to be quietly exterminated. A century and a half ago, the champions of American liberty appealed to Ireland against England, and asked for a sympathetic judgement. What the verdict was history records.32
This would naturally recall the Gettysburg Address with its similar opening allusion to the Revolutionary Era ‘Four score and seven years ago’: that reflected a life-long admiration for Lincoln on de Valera’s part. He would have a portrait of Lincoln in his immediate surroundings, speak of him with authority as an opponent of partition, identify his role as ‘liberator of a race’ with the Irish struggle ‘for freedom’, applaud his readiness to endure civil war rather than let his country be truncated. It was a bit specious in places (though the identification of Irish and American black struggles was noteworthy, consciously or otherwise harking back to Daniel O’Connell).33 Unfortunately it showed little awareness of Wilson the man, behind Wilson the statesman.
Wilson never forgot, either in racial attitudes, or in historical writing, that in his first decade of existence he had seen Union troops occupying his father’s church in Staunton, Virginia: he might be publicly obliged to be civil about Lincoln, but he identified Lincoln’s cause with repression as black as any de Valera might charge the ‘English’ of 1776 or 1918. (Clemenceau had been an enthusiastic witness of the liberation of the slaves and their attempted grant of equality in Reconstruction, and must have heartily despised the alleged liberalism of Wilson, who denounced equal rights for blacks as public corruption).34 De Valera, a New Yorker however briefly, responded instinctively to Lincoln’s as a sacred name and never shared in the Irish Cult of the Confederacy inaugurated by aged Young Irelanders.35
An American identity could be as geographically variable as an Irish one. But in his use of the Continental Congress’ address to the Irish people in 1775, de Valera had been at his most exquisitely adroit. The Irish people were largely unaware of the Congressional Address prepared for them in 1775, and the Irish parliament after vehement debate had endorsed government policy: the Irish parliament was entirely Protestant but Irish Catholics of the day were more likely to sympathise with the British government than with the American rebels whose leading Irish allies were the noisiest anti-Catholics in the Irish parliament.36 The smoothness of ‘history records’ is delicious. In fact, the language of the Congressional Address, mostly by the plain-spoken John Adams and his demagogic cousin Sam, showed its influence on the vehemence of de Valera’s prose.
And if he was disingenuous on Irish history, he was apposite on British and American. He pointed out that the parliament of 1918 which had passed the Conscription Act ‘has long outrun its course and has long ceased to be representative of public opinion’, a cunning allusion to its prolongation for the duration of the war, in contrast to the US constitutional rule of a house election every two years, war (even civil war) or no war. Similarly he delicately suggested that any disagreement as to Irish unity (such as might be articulated by Wilson’s ethnic group, the Ulster Protestants of Scots descent) could be likened to nay-sayers to the birth of the United States:
We are, and always have been, united with more than that unity which was never challenged in the case of the new American commonwealth of the United States, despite the presence among its own people, and in every state, of active and coherent bodies of ‘tories’ and ‘loyalists’, estimated by modern historians as not less than a third of the whole population of the thirteen original states.
It grasped its nettles with enthusiasm. It not only showed that de Valera knew how to play an American card, but that he knew how to be the American card.
But this was still the schoolman at work. The practical laboratory closed around him when he set foot in the United States at the end of May 1919. From Lincoln Jail he had written to his mother with almost American infant copybook enthusiasm at the war’s end:
If America holds to the principles enunciated by her President during the war she will have a noble place in the history of nations – her sons will have every reason to be proud of their motherland. These principles too are the basis of true statecraft – a firm basis that will bear the stress of time – but will the President be able to get them accepted by others whose entry into the war was on motives less unselfish … What an achievement should he succeed in getting established a common law for nations – resting on the will of nations – making national duels as rare as duels between individual persons are at present: if that be truly his aim, may God steady his hand. To me it seemed that a complete victory for either side would have made it impossible almost.37
Within this barely concealed heart-cry from him, the son expelled in infancy from the motherland – call him Ishmael38 – sees salvation if the motherland – and the mother – prove true. It was the keynote statement of his future internationalism. He would show himself one of the great men of the League of Nations, one of those who would have made
it work had the great powers not undercut the organisation and themselves at the same time. He based this now on the Fourteen Points, and by the time of his arrival in the USA was questioning the League now proposed at Versailles. But in the battle for Versailles Treaty ratification that followed in the USA and in which de Valera took some part (enlisted among the anti-Treatyites), he differed from his associates most of whom wanted the League dead and done for, while he sought a League true to Woodrow Wilson, with whom in prison and at brief liberty in Ireland, he had sought to identify. It was not the least of Woodrow Wilson’s misfortunes that he created amongst his opponents such passionate Wilsonians.
As a role model Woodrow Wilson was dangerous, and the more de Valera learned about him the more dangerous he became. His reduction of colleagues to blind subordination, his utter refusal to tolerate disagreement, were lethal to himself and what he stood for. His errors in making and selling the Versailles Treaty haunted de Valera when confronted with the UK–Ireland one. Wilson weakened his bargaining position by going to Versailles, instead of remaining at home and pronouncing on the results. The USA had not been an ally, but an ‘associated power’: it was also a power in good financial standing where the Allies were bankrupt. De Valera had no such trump card as that: but he remained behind in October 1921, almost certainly to avoid Wilson’s mistake. Lacking the clear directives of the United States’ constitution as to how treaties would be ratified or rejected by the Senate, Dáil Éireann could only work by simple majority with no ultimate room for manoeuvre, while de Valera was evidently thinking of himself as a Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, hovering with reservations somewhere between irreconcilable anti- and pro-Treatyites.
De Valera was equally caught between the argument that An Dáil was a democratically-elected assembly expressing the popular will, versus that the Republic attested by the blood of some very unrepresentative martyrs of 1916 took precedence. Wilson had even compounded his situation by refusal to compromise, asking how could they reject this Treaty and ‘break the heart of the world’: rich rhetoric, but impossibilist. De Valera had not wanted a polarisation but events drove him towards it, and the Wilsonian precedent left him to play it out. And when polarised, de Valera became as intransigent about his Treaty as Wilson was about his, so much so that reconciliation between himself and his former friends and more recent opponents would never be possible.
This was natural to Wilson, a Calvinist by birth and conviction, ready to divide the world into good and evil. It was alien to de Valera’s nature. He made the opponent of his first election his attorney-general in 1936. He had an old-fashioned, grievance-ridden, chip-on-the-shoulder history peddled (or piddled) for voter purposes in the Irish Press, but when confronted with professional historians he showed himself the good teacher wanting the latest materials, and backed them. In place of the vote-gathering legend of the Great genocidal Famine, he commissioned a study utilising modern techniques and committed as far as possible to objectivity, welcomed it warmly on appearance and hoped for a successor volume on Fenianism.39 He invited one of its contributors, Thomas P. O’Neill, to become his authorised biographer, regardless of O’Neill’s upbringing having been pro-Treaty, Fine Gael and Blueshirt: O’Neill had impressively defended the Famine record of the Tory prime minister Sir Robert Peel. De Valera wanted reconciliation but was trapped in an intransigence not his own. His psychological insecurity drove him back to his pitiless model.40
De Valera was the more ready to depend on the inspiration of Wilson, because Wilson had saved him from much. A world at war had despaired of democracy and the military ideal was asserted as superior on all sides of the global conflict. De Valera had felt a little of that in the months before the Easter Rising and afterwards, and he heard enough of it from former insurgents: Democracy, some of them would say, was English hypocrisy. Dermot Keogh, in his masterly Twentieth Century Ireland: Nation and State, brings home at the outset how close both sides on the Treaty split came to annexation by would-be military dictators.41 De Valera’s own collapse into something close to a nervous breakdown when faced by defeat on the Treaty made matters worse: he did not cause the Civil War, he did too little to prevent it.
But with whatever want of forgiveness for his opponents, he slowly worked his way back into democracy. For democracy was American, not merely British, and indeed much superior in the USA to what Britain had on offer. As a good American, de Valera identified democracy with motherhood. Equally, he had first come to know Wilson as a thinker during the days of American neutrality, much abused by the British press. That Wilson had been prepared to withstand such abuse for so long would give de Valera reassurance in the Second World War. That icy Wilsonian rhetoric, supreme in its righteousness, was not de Valera’s style, but the conviction of justice amid the moralistic propaganda of critics he could and did articulate. The genuineness young Kennedy reported in the commitment to neutrality was reaffirmed by the most recent, and perhaps most objective, of de Valera’s biographers, Pauric Travers:
There is no question but that de Valera saw neutrality in terms of principle rather than opportunism. His success in maintaining neutrality was only possible because the people of the Irish state were similarly persuaded.42
The persuading of the Irish people raises another and less admirable American legacy: the Irish Press. De Valera deserves credit as the saviour of Ireland from fascism, if anyone does. In part he may have done so by containing political Catholicism which elsewhere in Europe facilitated a slide or a capitulation to totalitarianism. The varying fates of Spain, Portugal, Austria, France and Belgium are all instructive in this regard. One strength he had in state-building arose from his American experience, where his half-brother, whose friendship he had cultivated by correspondence long before they met, could inform him frankly as a priest how the American system of Church and State worked. We have no record of what was said in such talks during de Valera’s long visit to America in 1919–20, but it is doubtful if Father Thomas Wheelwright differed from his brethren in holy orders.
People did not say so publicly, but the Roman Catholic Church was hopelessly if silently split on the issue as between the USA and the rest of the world. The Roman Catholic Church had suffered some degree of persecution in colonial America, above all in Maryland when it passed from the hands of its Catholic founders. The advent of the American Revolution offered what Catholics united with the new USA found an admirable solution. The separation of Church and State under the First Amendment to the constitution meant that nobody could persecute anyone else. The former Jesuit and future Bishop of Baltimore who advised the revolutionaries on Catholic questions, John Carroll, saw states under Catholic auspices as a potential danger to the Church: such states had persuaded the papacy to suppress the Jesuits. The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States had been on that basis of separation, and the wealth contributed by American Catholicism to the Church across the world meant that it behoved Rome to walk warily in its criticisms of its most generous daughter. (This still applies today: Cardinal Ratzinger feels himself entitled to rebuke the makers of the European constitution for its secular character, but is very careful to say nothing of the kind respecting the 200-odd year old American variety. The Vatican is in no hurry to take the vow of poverty).
De Valera’s constitution of 1937 followed a secular instrument created by London and Dublin in 1922. Historians have ably charted the pressures upon him and on twentieth century Irish politicians in general from advocates of confessional statism in Ireland, Dermot Keogh and Finín O’Driscoll are surveying Irish political Catholicism for a volume of European scope and hence comparative data.43 They show a courteous patriarch, now thanking a self-appointed Catholic ideological lobbyist for the gift of a book which he deemed to be useful but whose author had hoped he would make prescriptive, now establishing a commission to investigate the possibilities of vocational organisation. Those sittings were
protracted by its argumentative personnel and the report was ultimately set aside with ministerial contempt. De Valera in fact contained political Catholicism, partly by producing a constitution which opened with salutations to the Blessed Trinity and recognised the special position of the Roman Catholic Church as the majority religion (a feat well within the power of any individual of adequate vision), but which conceded little beyond existing usages such as the ban on divorce. De Valera listed several faiths also recognised by the state, including the Friends (non-Trinitarian) and the Jewish congregations (non-Christian), regardless of the Preamble. As Joseph Lee remarked, the recognition of the Jews is one bright moment in the bleak panorama of Europe in the 1930s.44
It was in fact a variation on the United States’ separation of Church and State, but in a specifically positive fashion, one where de Valera could both protect the vulnerable and distance the clericalists. He would have liked Vatican endorsement which, having failed to make Roman Catholicism the state religion, he did not get: but that price he had no intention of paying. It kept at bay also the most sinister threat, one posed, for instance, by Professor Michael Tierney, seeking an Irish version of Mussolini’s doctrines integrated with papal encyclicals.45 De Valera was prepared if necessary to alienate bishops who sought to pressurise in favour of confessional or corporate states, and he made much of his friendship with his Jewish devotee, Robert Briscoe, TD, deliberately sacrificing any potential electoral gains from sectarian displays. This was not necessarily an American social legacy – Irish-American relations with Jewish-Americans could be very nasty, as the Kennedys knew and some of their associates showed. But it did adhere to American constitutional faith, which probably deserves the credit for de Valera’s courageous and honourable stance. Daniel O’Connell had certainly been a crusader for Jewish emancipation after Catholic, but the physical force tradition in Irish nationalism which had produced de Valera showed no such ecumenism.46