by Dermot Keogh
De Valera, excluded by his mother from her American home and her second marriage,13 grew up dependent on his Irish relatives, without much status in the neighbourhood. In a famous passage, he declaimed on 6 January 1922, amid the Treaty debate: ‘I was reared in a labourer’s cottage … the first fifteen years of my life that formed my character.’14 An illuminating anecdote with which Pauric Travers begins his dispassionate and briefly comprehensive life of de Valera and shows his subject as the boyhood friend and fellow-folklorist (amateur) of tinkers.15 It certainly increased his credentials to speak for ‘the people of Ireland’. It also left him firmly at the bottom of the social heap.
His upbringing seems to have been increasingly loveless with the emigration of his aunt, the death of his grandmother, and the late courtship of his Uncle Pat. In all of this the USA lay westward, a beacon to so many (especially those who never went there), for him perhaps a paradise, his mother at its centre and himself left like Peri at its closed gate. His recollection of the parish priest of Bruree, whose masses he served, the Rev. Eugene Sheehy, was that the Land League priest had taught him love of country. Sheehy had campaigned in the United States on behalf of Parnell, then imprisoned in Kilmainham. On 1 December 1881 (less than a year before de Valera’s birth) he had thrilled a Chicago reception with: ‘Nothing good – nothing great has ever been purchased without sacrifice. No birth – above all that of freedom – has been without pain’ and: ‘We wish to destroy landlordism only as the stepping-stone to a greater and higher end.’16 America was the most obvious common ground between the two of them, and the most obvious place for that instruction on love of country to begin. It was the apogee of Sheehy’s career: there, he was lionised as the spiritual father of his people; back in Ireland he had been thrown into jail before his departure, and thrown into ecclesiastical recrimination afterwards.
In Blackrock, de Valera was reprimanded for reading Deadwood Dick after hours. He would have heard some fragments of American news. In 1897, for instance, ex-Congressman Joseph McKenna of California, a Catholic, was appointed Attorney-General of the United States by President William McKinley: there was some controversy about it from anti-Catholic agitators who were annoyed at finding McKinley did not share their sentiments, and hence Irish news reports would have picked it up. It was a time of particular sensitivity to supposed job discrimination against Catholics in and out of Ireland; the outcry would have drawn Irish Catholic attention and the President’s fidelity to his word would have strengthened American standing. The Tories were in power and the chances of Catholic appointment to such posts in Ireland had disappeared with the Liberal defeat in 1895.
McKinley sent the Kilkenny-born Archbishop John Ireland of St Paul, Minnesota, to represent the United States in France at a commemoration of Lafayette, and on the return journey Ireland spoke on 9 October 1900 to the boys of Blackrock, where de Valera was now a pupil. As a result of Ireland’s visit, a prize for religious knowledge was instituted, which de Valera won: it was a Douai bible in which he entered what little he knew of his parents’ history. He must thus have been deeply aware of the implication of the American constitutional separation of Church and State, meaning that an archbishop could be chosen as the envoy of a secular state, in contrast to what would obtain in his Catholic-filled but Protestant-ruled island bearing the archbishop’s name. The prize was awarded by the President of Blackrock, the Rev. John T. Murphy, a friend of Archbishop Ireland from his own long pastorate in Pittsburgh. There he had gained experience of the St Vincent de Paul Society and introduced it to Blackrock, de Valera becoming President of the Vincent de Paul Conference.17 The lesson would have been that ethnic and religious groups see to their own welfare (on which many US urban political machine bosses would have heartily agreed, having seen their machines fatten on such principles): it also bred suspicion of state charity or welfare obligations. The philosophy was better suited to a wealthier society with stronger traditions in organised private charity than Irish Catholicism had known. It also bred in de Valera the vocational ideal, the sense of citizenship as obligation more than right, once the state was representative in its government.
If he transmitted such views to the young John Kennedy in 1945, as in the context of national ideals, we might well have an origin for the famous cry in the Kennedy inaugural speech on 20 January 1961: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you! Ask what you can do for your country!’ It fascinated the listening Americans, but it would have been no surprise to constituents of de Valera, and its assumptions had turned Irish emigration into a haemorrhage over the previous ten years. The American antecedents of the Blackrock Vincent de Paul were further affirmed by the prominence in the body of an American schoolboy, John Junker of Philadelphia. De Valera was remembered at Blackrock defending the debate motion: ‘The old monastic form of charity to the poor was preferable to the modern state social services’.18
‘Blackrock was not America but was still a new world’ observed de Valera’s authorised biographer Tom O’Neill, presumably echoing a sentiment from his informant. Sometimes it induced contrary opinions. In the Literary and Debating Society de Valera declared, ‘constitutional monarchy as a form of government’ to be ‘preferable to republicanism’, asserting that ‘constant elections disturbed the nation, and are not conducive to the prosperity of the people’, and that ‘there is no rule so tyrannical as that of them all’. This may have been a passing conviction, or one taken up to defend a motion in need of supporters (a useful mode of practice for a maturing debater). Whatever its origin he lived to revert to the republicanism of the land of his birth. It may also reflect the time that in 1903 he did not avail himself (presuming he had known it) of the usual procedure for a United States aspirant for citizenship, vis. to report to the Dublin consulate, with proof of his American birth or parentage, making oath of, or affirming, allegiance to the USA. Whatever his reasons, they did not include dedication to a future Irish state or to the former Fenian-proclaimed Irish Republic. He would take pride in being a stateless person in the future, limiting his allegiance to the once and future Ireland.
He may very well have been keeping his options open. Once he had followed Thomas MacDonagh into the Easter Rising in 1916, he was anxious not to be seen to hedge his bets. He himself assumed he would be executed when he had surrendered at the end of the week’s fighting, but his wife Sinéad persuaded the US Consul, Edward Adams, to appear at de Valera’s court-martial in recognition of a claim of American citizenship which it was impossible to verify or otherwise. Adams informed the State Department in the fullness of time that he had been responsible for the preservation of de Valera’s life. We do not know when de Valera learned of Sinéad’s action and its result, as officially assumed by US authorities, but he invariably denied that his American birth saved his life. To be the surviving commandant was one thing; to be the commandant who survived by special pleading of individual peculiarities was a very different one. De Valera was ready enough to let his American birth make him more than his contemporaries, born subjects of the British monarch; he was not prepared to let it make him less, the patriot privileged above his pledge.
His insistence on the point was greatly to influence kindly historians.19 He did not want to be caught using the Stars and Stripes as a flag of convenience. Tom Clarke – whose widow had a powerful influence on de Valera – had been shot without making any claim of US citizenship, strong as it would have been. De Valera could not afford to live the imaginary life of an American when faced with that sacred precedent. So, the United States must not be seen to have been the cause of his survival, even though it probably was.20
But he had an American agenda to fulfil, responding to those yearnings from his childhood to be brought back with honour into his mother’s household and affection. His new status as survivor/leader gave him his opportunity. Although he must never seem less than Irish, he could then make the most of his special relationship to Ameri
ca. The Irish expression Cad as tú? (which de Valera would have learned from Sinéad or from the Gaelic League) was rendered by the lexicographer Dinneen ‘whence’ or ‘wherefore’ ‘are you’.21 Dinneen might be pompous and prolix: a people dissecting each other with the brevity of Cad as tú? were not likely to stitch themselves up in legalistic archaism such as ‘whence’ and ‘wherefore’, meaning as they did, ‘from what are you?, out of what are you?’ Yeats would capture it in: ‘Out of Ireland have we come/Great hatred, little room/Maimed us at the start/I carry from my mother’s womb/A fanatic heart’ and Thomas N. Brown (Copernicus of Irish-American studies) would apply it to the Irish-American nationalists.22 But de Valera, austere pedagogue, brought other legacies from his mother. His American origin gave him high hopes of a future that never materialised, high romance as an alternative identity, low reproach as a reminder of his dubious status and questionable name, whence the lustre of his survival must now seek to escape. ‘Whence’ meant ‘Wherefore’.
His practical training had in fact come from the spiritual arm: Sheehy, who had shown him how nationalism could be an escape from low status and dull poverty; the Christian Brothers, who gave him the necessities of bread-and-butter education; the Holy Ghost Fathers at Blackrock, who showed him the luxury of higher learning with its payoff as a clerical profession in the church or school. This last is fairly crucial. The Holy Ghosts gave de Valera his first serious political training: before he ever learned the science of lay politics, he witnessed the subtler and sometimes more ruthless delicacies of the clerical kind. It could be crude (especially in the hands of the more bovine bishops) but the regular clergy brought it to a fine art, perfected by the rivalries and antipathies honed in day-by-day community encounter.
De Valera’s statement about coming from a labourer’s cottage showed that he knew from the bottom of the social pyramid what discrimination and ostracism could feel like: the labourers perpetually suffered from the contempt of the tenant-farmers and their participation in the Land League struggles on the tenants’ side won little thanks for themselves. But his ‘I have not lived solely among the intellectuals’ was (apart from its tender vanity) a tribute to the Holy Ghosts whose ranks he had sought to join as a priest and whose collegiality he was permitted to enter as a teacher. A boy, cut off from any family ties apart from remote replies from America, had the surrounding clerics with which to fill his mind in place of family feuds, rivalries and consolidations.
Before the Rising he never tried his hand at Sinn Féin politics, or at any involvement, apart from nominal membership, in the more shadowy politics of the IRB. He entered the Easter Rising as a teacher giving a class a drill with new equipment and the prospect of a more experienced rival school to face. His imprisonment taught him a little about the politics of the defeated, inching minute advantages from their victors, but he was hostile to talk of political activity. The Holy Ghosts graduated great men from de Valera’s generation – the O’Rahilly brothers, Pádraic Ó Conaire, the future Cardinal d’Alton (whom de Valera defeated in theology)23 – but, unlike the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits, the Holy Ghosts turned out few secular politicians. When their ugly duckling won swan status, Blackrock proved ready enough to make itself that kind of swan lake. But it was the USA which had to perfect de Valera in secular politics. His lake was the Atlantic, and his American past was shorn of its awkward ambiguities by immersion in an American future.
De Valera had, of course, won two elections and been chosen as head man for Sinn Féin, the Volunteers and Dáil Éireann, but his first election to parliament happened when he had barely come to terms with his own candidacy, and his second was won when he was once more in jail. People had manoeuvred and manipulated, some killing others off, still others killing themselves off, to make him president of organisations of whose origins he had little or no practical experience and whose metamorphoses were shaking its founders to the core. Being a schoolmaster no doubt helped. He was the unquestioned figurehead, and the schoolboys deferentially proceeded with their own self-rule. Masters should not concern themselves with responsibilities undertaken by prefects. One could particularly rely on the head boy, Michael Collins, who got things done such as elections, jailbreaks and meetings.
It was natural of de Valera to think in such terms especially since the politician who most filled his aspirant mind at this point was himself a teacher. Thomas Woodrow Wilson had been professor at Princeton and Eamon de Valera had been professor at Carysfort Training College: that was his official status albeit, as Seán Ó Faoláin would put it, ‘the title professor is a trifle magniloquent in the connection’.24 Then Wilson had become President of Princeton, and then of the United States. His hair-breadth re-election was drama enough to filter through to de Valera in Lewes Jail in November 1916, together with possible adverse British comment since Wilson’s neutrality was seriously resented. That last point enhanced the attractiveness of the exemplar. That the exemplar wanted nothing to do with him was beyond his ken, and beside his point: ‘The fact that Mr de Valera may be an American citizen constitutes no reason for clemency in his case, or for a request by this government for clemency on the part of the British government’ sniffed Assistant Secretary of State Frank L. Polk on 14 July 1916, still unaware that ‘this government’ had, in the person of its consul, done exactly that.25
Wilson was simultaneously inactive in the cause of Roger Casement in face of domestic pressure, and in general wished to beg no favours from governments whose war he intended to arbitrate and whose post-war he wished to dominate. We cannot say how de Valera had regarded previous US Presidents: I leave to others the consideration of his possible links with Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley and Taft. He certainly must have had some sense of Theodore Roosevelt, but to an Irishman in Ireland, Roosevelt would have had a very imperial sound (very different from the figure of gorgeous fun, flamboyance and finesse who transformed the presidency in the United States). Archbishop Ireland would have told him differently, but while he heard Ireland, there is no reason to believe he talked with him. Wilson, self-advertised as the scholar in the White House (though, in fact, a historian of far less originality than Theodore Roosevelt), was the President de Valera had been waiting for. If there was a case to be made for the elected head of government and head of state combined, he must be it.
Mr Ryle Dwyer deserves our gratitude for so thoroughly highlighting de Valera’s becoming ‘more Wilsonian than Wilson’.26 It fell far short of idolatry. De Valera’s view of Wilson was in some respects akin to Collins’ of de Valera: that of school prefect or junior master (not widely separated categories in de Valera’s experience) who might be both amused and, from time to time, irritated, by the peculiarities of a headmaster but who believes the headmaster’s system is the right one, even when the headmaster seems to depart from it. That the parallel should be there so mathematically – de Valera:Wilson = Collins:de Valera – is simple enough. Having thus conceived his relationship to Wilson, de Valera then sought to act out Wilson’s role as he saw it. Collins, who (as Lincoln Steffens said of Theodore Roosevelt) thought with his hips, slid into his role instinctively. Both men realised one another on levels they conceded to nobody else. Thus the Pact Election made sense to both of them, while bewildering and angering so many others. The thesis of de Valera’s jealousy of Collins as his primary motivation says more about its perpetrators than about its subject. Of course Collins would not expect the headmaster to know much about rough work in the scrum or orchard-robbing after school hours, and indeed would feel the headmaster ought not to know it or act as though he did. Neither ever quite realised how much the other had grown up.
De Valera’s Wilson fixation brought results good and bad, short and long term. In some ways, it was highly beneficial from the start. De Valera had nothing to do with the overtures to Germany involving Casement, Plunkett and, more indirectly, Clarke and MacDermott, or with Pearse’s vague notions that the
Republic might be set aside for a Princedom under Germany’s Joachim. He took the earliest possible opportunity of setting himself up as independent before the world. During the East Clare by-election campaign of June-July 1917 he read the third paragraph of the Easter Rising Proclamation (that in which the Republic is in fact proclaimed) and endorsed it with a ringing assertion of his allegiance to the ‘spirit’ of ‘that government’. But in so doing he avoided any endorsement of that government’s ‘gallant allies in Europe’, as the German, Austrian and Turkish empires are termed elsewhere in the same document:
… you men of Clare can assert it by your votes in the face of a world where millions are arrayed in the cause of freedom. I want you to declare it to Germany, to England, to Austria and to Turkey, to France, to Russia and to America what Ireland’s claim is – absolute independence. We want Ireland a sovereign state, not a province in slavery.27
This was a declaration of independence from Germany as well as from Britain (or ‘England’ as he unthinkingly termed it, slavishly following English custom). America’s triumphal place at the end salutes its normal status for Irish nationalists since Parnell appealed to it in 1880 as arbiter, although there was a touch of de Valera’s own declaration of independence. He had got out of jail without official United States’ intervention, and he probably did not know that he had got in with it. But it meant that he echoed the earlier Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776 in whose inheritance he had been born, holding the rest of the world enemies in war, in peace friends.28 It allowed for future tactical or strategic alliances, but no dependence such as Plunkett had sought and Pearse anticipated. In so doing he cut free from any existing IRB or Clan na Gael ties with Germany and the central powers, who had shown small justification for their maintenance. It meant an American focus, both in terms of Wilson’s public statements, and with a view to Ireland’s benefit from the peace settlement: failing that, it meant future appeal to America where Ireland was strong, as opposed to Germany, where it was merely (in every sense of the word) a convenience. As election victor, as surviving commandant, and as the bearer of a European name, he could take the leadership in world (if not always in domestic) policy.
