“How to Smash the British Empire”: John Forrest Kelly’s Irish World and the Boycott of 1920–21

John Forrest Kelly died on 15 October 1922 at the age of 63 from angina induced, so his friends maintained, by the stresses surrounding the establishment of the Irish Free State. On the Irish World’s front page, Irish patriot Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington interrupted her report from Dublin with this tribute: “Ireland has lost in him one of her best, staunchest, and ablest champions”; his “work for Ireland will never be forgotten.” She was mistaken. Kelly had criticized Daniel F Cohalan, John Devoy, and other Irish-American nationalist leaders for their preoccupation with politicking and their failure to support Dáil Éireann President Eamon de Valera, and these elites were glad that he was gone. Historians have forgotten him too. He pioneered high-voltage electricity transmission, though history recalls Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse, and sometimes William Stanley, Kelly’s partner at what would become General Electric of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Irish-American historiography affords Kelly a sentence here, at best a paragraph there. He receives his due only in the field of political philosophy, where Frank H. Brooks has devoted a few pages to Kelly’s individualist anarchism of the 1880s. Yet Kelly is worth remembering. As this article will argue, he was not only the anonymous author of much of the World’s most politically influential content during the crucial 1919–22 period but also the inspiration behind a nonviolent, anti-British, grassroots movement whose ideology complicates existing interpretations of Irish-American nationalism.¹

Irish Americans advocated policy, organized meetings, publicized lecture tours, solicited funds, raised national consciousness, and promoted the cause of independence principally through their newspapers. Thomas N. Brown, in his foundational study of Irish-American nationalism, noted that ethnic newspapers were “all but a necessity” to the uprooted Irish, for whom a crisis of identity prompted a thirst for “knowledge of Ireland.” Irish Americans could learn about Ireland from pro-Irish dailies like the Boston Globe or New York Herald, but it was the dedicated weeklies upon which they relied—the Gaelic-American (circulation 30,000) and especially the World (circulation 125,000). Kevin Kenny ranks the World as “the leading Irish-American newspaper,” and other scholars agree. James P. Rodechko shows how Patrick Ford, the World’s founding editor (1870–1913), “exerted a strong force” in aligning Irish-American workers behind the social reforms of the Land League era. In the 1880s, at the height of his radicalism, Ford still advocated Christian principles even though he rebuffed Catholicism. Rodechko argues that Ford, like other immigrant leaders, could not divorce social issues from religion. As Catholic social thought changed, so Ford mellowed, aligning his increasingly conservative editorials with the views of the Catholic hierarchy. At his death in 1913, Ford was backing the Home Rule gradualism of John Redmond, leader of the Irish parliamentary party.²

John Patrick Buckley, in his analysis of New York Irish and U.S. foreign policy during the years 1914–21, agrees that the World was “the foremost newspaper among the Irish Americans.” Buckley provides this synopsis of its post-1913 editorship: Robert E. Ford, who took control after his father’s death, could not countenance Redmond’s “fulsome support” of Britain’s war against Germany. So, in an effort to prolong U.S. neutrality, and then, after the declaration of war by Congress, seeking to influence Wilsonian policy at Versailles on the Irish nationalist claim for independence, Robert Ford brought the World into line with Devoy’s Gaelic-American, which meant that both papers represented physical-force republicanism. Austin J. Ford assumed control after his brother Robert died in December 1919, and he lent “strong editorial support” to de Valera, who was in dispute with Devoy and Cohalan “over leadership of the Irish Americans.” Yet, despite noting that there were two different Fords at the helm, Buckley attributes his quotations from World editorials merely to “Ford.” Indeed, Irish-American historiography generally conflates the editorships of the three Fords, implying a continuum during the 1910s and 1920s from Patrick through Robert...