Eamon de Valera's Political Education: The American Tour of 1919-20

With a poet's economy of language, Brendan Kennelly's poem "Points of View" highlights a fact central to any discussion of Ireland's most influential politician of the twentieth century—the inescapable reality that Eamon de Valéra was a deeply controversial figure: A neighbour said De Valéra was / As straight as Christ, / As spiritually strong. / The man in the next house said / 'Twas a great pity / He wasn't crucified as young.¹ To his supporters—people like Kennelly's first neighbor—de Valéra was a political messiah and national savior. To his detractors, like the man in the next house, Ireland would have been better off had the British implemented the death sentence that their military court had imposed on him following the Easter Rising, when de Valéra had reached the symbolically weighted age of thirty-three years.

The controversy surrounding de Valéra owes primarily to the dogmatic republican stand he took during the debate over ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, a stand that de Valéra's pro-Treaty opponents charged was the main cause of the Irish Civil War of 1922–23. Yet, de Valéra was not always so unbending. The political scientist Brian Farrell, for instance, has argued that throughout most of his political career, de Valéra's style of leadership was that of a "charismatic chairman"—one who concentrated on building consensus and managing compromise. Farrell asserts that these political traits belie the common image of de Valéra as a Machiavellian dictator who insisted on having his own way, who could not abide dissent from his doctrinaire positions, and who expected unquestioning obedience from all true Irish nationalists. Farrell attributes this latter image to de Valéra's Treaty stand and the civil war that followed, calling de Valéra's record during that tragic episode "the great single conspicuous failure of his persuasive skills."²

While the overall thrust of Farrell's argument might be accepted, the Treaty debate and its denouement cannot be considered the great single failure of de Valéra's persuasive skills. Political divisions and ruptures were frequent in his long career. In fact, the Treaty split was preceded by another bitter schism only months earlier during de Valéra's fund-raising and propaganda tour of the United States at the time of the Anglo-Irish War, when "the Chief" and his supporters had become involved in a bitter feud with Irish-American leaders of the Friends of Irish Freedom and Clan-na-Gael organizations, especially Judge Daniel F. Cohalan and John Devoy.³

The general contours of both those disputes in de Valéra's career are familiar to most students of twentieth-century Irish political history. However, historians have failed to appreciate adequately the direct connection between the two controversies of the American feud and the Treaty split. On the one hand, the former controversy anticipated the latter ideologically, as the Cohalan-Devoy group accused de Valéra of taking a too-moderate stand on Irish sovereignty, thus requiring de Valéra to defend his role as leader by asserting a hard-line republican position—a position to which he adhered during the Treaty crisis. More significantly, his American experience had a profound impact on de Valéra's view of politics, that led leading him to equate any future challenge to his leadership—whether real or imagined—with an assault on the Irish national interest. Thus, de Valéra's mission to America represented the formative experience of de Valéra's early career and may be considered the centerpiece of his political education. Unfortunately, the lessons de Valéra learned during his education among the Irish Americans had tragic consequences for Ireland.

De Valéra came to play a leadership role in politics...