The Irish Sinn Féin Movement and Radical Labor and Feminist Dissent in America, 1916–1921

Abstract

The Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916 produced shockwaves in US labor and radical circles arguably as great as those that emanated from the Russian Revolution of 1917. Yet while Bolshevik agitation in the United States in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, along with its role in fostering a post – World War I “Red Scare,” has been carefully studied, the significance of the Irish Revolution for US labor and radical politics has received relatively little attention. This article uses the records of the Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, among other sources, to suggest that American authorities were profoundly worried about the subversive influence of Irish Sinn Féin revolutionaries on the American labor and women’s suffrage movements. Authorities were right to be worried, for while some Irish and Irish American Sinn Féin advocates were social conservatives, others championed new forms of workers’ and women’s empowerment that fundamentally threatened existing social and political structures.