Centenary of Éamon de Valera’s Visit to Savannah

April 13, 1920 \ April 13, 2020

Decision to Tour America

Having served as a Commandant in the Easter 1916 Rising in Dublin, Éamon de Valera (1882-1975), popularly known as “Dev,” would later hold senior political offices in the self-governing nation that began as the Irish Free State in 1922 and that renamed itself Ireland (or Éire) in 1937. Those offices included Taoiseach (Prime Minster) and — between 1959 and 1973 — Uachtarán (President).

De Valera possessed U.S. citizenship, having been born to an Irish immigrant mother in Manhattan, New York City (almost opposite the present-day Irish Consulate). However, he was brought to Ireland at the age of two to be raised by his grandmother and other relatives in Bruree, County Limerick.

The period between the Easter Rising and the establishment of the Irish Free State was highly eventful in Ireland. The War of Independence (or Anglo-Irish War) occurred from January 1919 to July 1921; and it was followed by the Irish Civil War (June 1922 - May 1923). The former conflict saw the Irish side decide to send de Valera to the United States in an attempt to obtain support from Irish Americans in particular and the U.S. population in general.

The tour presented de Valera as “President of Ireland” because he had been elected president of the self-proclaimed Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, that emerged from the pivotal 1918 general election. That election had delivered an overwhelming victory to the Sinn Féin (“Ourselves”) party .

Raising Funds & Friends

When prosecuting his multi-city, multi-state American tour, De Valera focused especially on raising funds — primarily via the sale of bonds (or Republic of Ireland Bond Certificates) — to support the Irish cause. He also sought to convince President Woodrow Wilson (grandson of Irish immigrants) and the U.S. Government to recognize Ireland as an independent republic.

Returning to Ireland, de Valera could report that the bonds initiative had yielded over $5 million (approximately $55 million in today’s money). However, Wilson remained steadfast in a commitment not to intervene in the Irish question, which he deemed an internal affair of the United Kingdom, whose ally the U.S. had been in the Great War.

Carefully planned, de Valera’s U.S. tour was long and ambitious. As a stowaway on a vessel from Liverpool, de Valera arrived in New York City in June 1919, four months after successfully escaping from an English jail. It was almost Christmas of the following year before he returned to Ireland. In addition to de Valera, key Irish individuals involved in designing and managing the tour were Liam Mellows and Harry Boland, both of whom would perish in 1922, during Ireland’s Civil War.

The tour especially targeted U.S. cities with large Irish-American and Irish-born populations. Its initial engagement was a reception on June 23, 1919, in New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. As to large public addresses by de Valera: the first of the tour occurred at Boston’s Fenway Park on June 29, 1920. The next day’s Boston Globe reported, “Eamon de Valera, President of the Irish Republic, got a reception from at least 50,000 people at Fenway Park … such as no other Irish patriot ever received in Boston. … To say that it was thrilling is putting it mildly — it was electric.”

F.O.I.F.

Not everything about the tour was positive. For example: De Valera found himself increasingly at odds with the exiled Irish Fenian activist John Devoy and the New York State Supreme Court judge Daniel F. Cohalan. The two men led Friends of Irish Freedom (F.O.I.F.), an American organization founded in 1916 “to encourage and assist” the realization of “the National Independence of Ireland.” They wanted F.O.I.F. to have greater control than Dev was prepared to cede over the critical fundraising element of the tour.

During the summer of 1920, the tension with Devoy and Cohalan hurt de Valera’s efforts to persuade the Republican and Democratic party conventions to adopt Irish sovereignty as a central plank of their respective platforms. F.O.I.F. had organized that high-level (if unfruitful) access for de Valera. Indeed, the organization constituted, by far, the chief financial and logistical facilitator of the greater tour, which stretched across the country, incorporating such Western locales as Butte, Montana, and San Francisco, California.

Dev in Savannah & the South

Between April 8 and 29, 1920, the 37-year-old de Valera spoke in 19 Southern cities. The prior month he had successfully prevailed against an effort by Devoy and Cohalan, at a large F.O.I.F. meeting in New York, to oblige him to cut short the tour and return to Ireland. (Irony inheres in the fact that it was Cohalan who had originally advocated paying special attention to the South.) The extent of the Southern territory covered can be appreciated by naming four of the host venues: Norfolk, Virginia; Jacksonville, Florida; Meridian, Mississippi; and New Orleans, Louisiana.

In our state of Georgia, de Valera visited and stayed overnight in, first, Savannah, followed by (in order): Atlanta, Macon, and Augusta. In Atlanta, the Governor of Georgia, Hugh Dorsey, received him in a personal capacity. Initially, the target date for the Savannah visit was October or November 1919; however, de Valera’s actual appearance in the Hostess City transpired on Tuesday, April 13, 1920.

Savannah’s oldest extant Irish organization, the Hibernian Society of Savannah, had been founded in 1812, and initially its core membership was of Scots-Irish (or Ulster-Scots) Presbyterian lineage. For the Southern phase of his U.S. fund- and friend-raising endeavor, de Valera strategically included as a fellow-speaker a Presbyterian minister from Ulster, Ireland’s northern province. That man, Dr. J.A.H. Irwin, supported Dev’s ambition of establishing an Irish republic.

Also worth noting is de Valera’s selection of Liam Pedlar as his private secretary for the swing through the South. Just a few years later, in 1924, the Irish Free State would appoint Pedlar military attaché to the U.S. On April 8, 1920, the Atlanta Constitution newspaper indicated that on the prior day “Charles P. Sweeney, the advance man” for de Valera’s Savannah visit had been “warmly greeted” upon his arrival there.

Critical in effecting the Savannah visit were several members of the local chapter of Friends of Irish Freedom. One leading figure was Thomas F. Walsh, a prominent Savannah lawyer. During 1918-1919, he had served as president of the Catholic Laymen’s Association of Georgia, an organization he had helped found in 1916. Its purpose was to counter a campaign to boycott Catholic businesses in the state, advanced by the Georgia politician Tom Watson and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. In 1925, the Hibernian Society of Savannah would elect Walsh its president, a position he would hold until 1928.

In the April 8, 1920, issue of The Home Journal, a publication based in the city of Perry in Houston County, Georgia, we find a notice titled “Savannah People to Hear De Valera.” It demonstrates the importance attached to having Rev. Irwin as part of de Valera’s Southern entourage, and it also invokes F.O.I.F. The full text follows: “Eamon de Valera, provisional president of the republic of Ireland, will address [the] Savannah people on April 13. He will be accompanied to Savannah by Rev. Dr. J.A.H. Irwin, Presbyterian minister of Belfast, Ireland, and Mrs. Irwin will also be in the party. Arrangements for the occasion and the entertainment of the visitors have been made by the local organization of the Friends of the Irish Freedom.”

In anticipation of de Valera’s visit, some of the groundwork done by Walsh and other members of the F.O.I.F.’s Savannah chapter centered on identifying residents in the city considered well-disposed towards Ireland. Official briefing papers supplied to de Valera shone a favorable light on George Solomon, Rabbi at Temple Mickve Israel, Savannah, the third oldest Jewish congregation in the U.S. Born in New York City, Solomon ministered at the Temple from 1902 to 1944. He was always unambiguously proud of the fact that his mother was a native of Ireland, and he would be eulogized as “foremost among Savannahians in the promotion of better relations among religions and races.”

Liam Mellows authored several informational notes for de Valera about Savannah. One of them urged “the Chief” (as Mellows referred to his boss) to pay respects at the monument erected in Madison Square to the memory of Sergeant William Jasper, mortally wounded nearby on October 9, 1779, during the Revolutionary War. Since its unveiling in 1888, the statue (by the famed sculptor John Doyle) has constituted a cultural touchstone for the city’s Irish community, and de Valera placed a wreath at its base. It was just steps away from his Savannah hotel: the DeSoto.

In Savannah on April 13 , 1920, de Valera and Rev. Irwin delivered their addresses at the Chatham Artillery Armory, a Gothic Revival building constructed around 1849 to a design by John Norris, who was also responsible for several other outstanding Savannah edifices, not least the U.S. Customhouse and the Andrew Low and Green-Meldrim mansions. The second-oldest military organization in the U.S., the Chatham Artillery maintained the Armory until 1931, when the expansion of the neighboring Federal Courthouse and post office caused the building’s demise.

Return to Ireland

De Valera ended his US tour on December 11, 1920. A few weeks earlier, he had gone against F.O.I.F. by launching a new, alternative entity: the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic. However, the News Letter issued by the F.O.I.F.’s Washington-based National Bureau of Information on April 14, 1920, offered only good news about the South’s “warmly welcoming President de Valera.” A single-paragraph entry reflected on how — in Savannah and other cities “from the Potomac to the Gulf” — de Valera’s speeches had caused “record-breaking crowds” to become “fired with enthusiasm for the new Ireland.” It concluded, “The whole south has recorded its overwhelming sentiment in favor of Ireland’s legitimate claims to independence.”