De Valera's Irelands (3 page)

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'.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Within this barely concealed heart-cry from him, the son expelled in in­fan­cy from the motherland – call him Ishmael
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– 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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