Harry Boland, a gregarious Dublin sportsman who had resigned as IRB president to take up a position as the Dáil’s agent in America, responded by organising a well-publicised national lecture tour for de Valera.56 However, a definite solution to the problem of being labelled an outlaw needed to be found. This focused minds upon the press. During the First World War, the New York Times was the only American newspaper that Britain had allowed into Ireland. This prompted Sinn Féin to typify it as the eyes and ears of the British foreign office in America. Certainly, it had long typified Ireland as ‘the spoilt child of the Empire’,57 while also supporting the claim of T.P. O’Connor that Irish nationalism was neither a policy nor a coherent philosophy of self-government, but instead was a mere ‘child of provocation, insult, and want of all faith in English statesmanship or English good faith’.58 De Valera’s response to the closure of the American commission on Ireland in September 1919 was to set up an Irish National Press Bureau in both Washington D.C. and New York City under Katherine Hughes. This was done with funding from Thomas Hughes Kelly and John Castellini, a millionaire food-wholesaler from Cincinnati, Ohio, who usually funded Catholic rather than Irish causes. The official line of the Dáil’s department of foreign affairs, set down by Griffith, was that the struggle for recognition of Irish independence depended entirely on direct communications with other governments: mere propaganda was insufficient, while definitions of Ireland’s case with reference to the rights of other groups within the British Empire should be avoided.59 De Valera himself, however, did not share this belief, having already directed Sean T. O’Kelly in Paris that ‘in addition to using the press you should get into the closest possible contact with the South Africans, Egyptians, Indians, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, etc.’,60 even though the Dáil’s department of foreign affairs, in keeping with its republican aspirations, neither had nor would appoint any representatives to the British dominions. This belief of de Valera’s in the value of Irish propaganda within the British Empire had also been reflected by his response to an attempt to establish a support body for the Dáil in Britain. He recommended that this be done by forming an ‘Irish Self-Determination League’ as a purely propagandistic body that should seek to capitalise upon the fact that the term ‘self-determination’ was now a respectable norm in international discourse, associated with the pursuit of peace as an abstract principle.61
After September 1919, de Valera directed Katherine Hughes and Robert Lindsay Crawford, an Irish-born editor of the Toronto Statesman, to form an Irish Self-Determination League in Canada. This was supposed to work in tandem with the British organisation and to seek to establish a similar body in Australia.62 Hughes would concentrate on this goal. By contrast, Crawford would work primarily with French-Canadian politicians in seeking to mobilise both Canadian and American sympathy for the cause of Irish independence. This initiative was supported by Judge Daniel Cohalan, who was the practical leader of the Friends of Irish Freedom in New York.63 Although somewhat ineffective, a context to Crawford’s initiative was a dynamic of cross-border Canadian–American relations, whereby American-educated Canadian politicians were more inclined to favour a distinctly North American identity as opposed to a traditional British colonial identity for Canada, which nominally had its own department of external affairs since 1909.64
In February 1920, de Valera shocked the Friends of Irish Freedom by suggesting to the Westminster Gazette that Ireland could exist within a protective British military zone in a similar manner to Cuba’s relationship with the United States. The Friends of Irish Freedom not only deemed this idea to be a serious mistake but also saw it as undermining their efforts to get the US Republican Party to interest itself in the cause of Irish independence. In June 1920, Cohalan succeeded in persuading the Republican Party to issue a resolution during its Chicago national convention for selecting its next presidential candidate ‘that the people of Ireland have the right to determine freely, without dictation from outside, their own government institutions and their international relations with other states and peoples’. Although the Democratic Party had already rejected the idea of introducing a pro-Irish resolution in deference to Wilson, de Valera responded to Cohalan’s initiative by denouncing both Cohalan and the Friends of Irish Freedom for not also approaching the Democratic Party national convention. In doing so, de Valera bypassed entirely Cohalan’s carefully cultivated American political networks and prompted the Republican Party, for fear of becoming associated with an internal Irish dispute, to drop the idea of making a pro-Irish resolution altogether. The British ambassador to the United States viewed this development as evidence of ‘the immense influence Irishmen can exert on American politicians, if they proceed wisely, and how ready American politicians are to withdraw themselves from that influence if they find some honourable pretext for doing so’.65
Although the Republican Party rejected the candidate that Cohalan supported for the presidential election, de Valera’s Cuban analogy and practical sabotage of Cohalan’s tactics was the subject of much criticism even from some Catholic bishops within the Friends of Irish Freedom, who accused de Valera of a lack of judgment and a failure to understand his need for American advice on how to handle American politics. Shortly thereafter, upon the arrival in America from London of Daniel Mannix, an Irish-born Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, de Valera decided to retire from public speaking in America. He wrote to Griffith that ‘the greater part of my usefulness here is over’ and that he believed ‘the work which is being done in Ireland towards making the government function as a de facto government is advancing our cause, even here, more than anything that could be done by our friends in this country’.66 Upon de Valera’s arrival in America, he had been made aware by Sir Shane Leslie and his British diplomatic friends in New York that the British government was fully confident that the Vatican was its unbending ally with regards to Ireland. To counteract this trend, de Valera had directed Sean T. O’Kelly to transfer himself from Paris to Rome, where he would eventually succeed in acquiring a papal audience during May 1920. The hardworking O’Kelly, who in the eyes of the Catholic hierarchy was a rather simple-minded or naïve individual, saw this as a triumph for the Irish republican cause, rather than what it actually achieved: a pledge of the Church’s effective neutrality. This was de Valera’s objective, even though this may have had very limited consequences in international relations.67
Writing to the IRB, which under the direction of Michael Collins (who was also the Dáil’s minister for finance) did much to keep the Dáil’s administration alive in an underground fashion, the old Fenian John Devoy emphasised that although ‘the defeat of English intrigues in America is essential to success’, ‘this can only be achieved by Irishmen here working as citizens of the US, guided by men who have intimate knowledge of American affairs’:
Therefore, there should be constant consultation between you and us as to the measures that concern purely American affairs. So that your hopes may not be raised too high as to possibilities, we would remind you that our people here are less than a fifth of the total population, that scarcely more than a tenth of that fifth are directly interested in the Irish cause and that our power to influence public measures that concern Ireland depends largely on our supposed, rather than our actual, strength and on our ability to make combinations with other and friendly sections of the American people, who still require enlightenment on the Irish question.68