United States Foreign Policy and Ireland: From Empire to Independence, 1913-29

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, encouraged in part by the activities and publications of the Royal Irish Academy, there has been a growing interest in the foreign relations of the Irish state in the twentieth century. While particular attention has been devoted to Irish relations with the Commonwealth, the League of Nations, the Vatican and Europe during the inter-war years, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid in the last thirty years to Irish relations with the United States during this period. Bernadette Whelan's study examines in meticulous detail the policies of the United States toward Ireland during the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge and provides a much clearer and insightful understanding than anything written heretofore. President Wilson has often been criticised as being indifferent, if not hostile, to Irish nationalist issues. Whelan, by contrast, finds Wilson to have been well informed and sympathetic to Irish home rule and prepared to urge the British government to make a satisfactory settlement of the Irish question in order to promote greater support in the United States for the Allies during the Great War, although Wilson was not willing to jeopardise Anglo-American relations during the war or the peace conference. President Harding, perhaps through inexperience, supported relief efforts in Ireland during the Irish War for Independence, making statements which appeared to threaten Anglo-American relations. Whelan argues that Harding's Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, distanced the president from his pro-Irish statements, although she notes that many in the Dáil Éireann government were convinced that Harding and his Secretary of State pushed the British toward negotiations in 1921 in a process that was linked to the Washington disarmament conference, which was taking place simultaneously. President Coolidge kept himself quite removed from foreign affairs generally until his second administration. Although diplomatic relations were established with the Irish Free State in 1924, it was not until 1927 that the United States sent a minister to Dublin. Then, as a result of tensions over naval arms limitations issues, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg made an official visit to Ireland, bypassing Britain and using Ireland as a means to signal displeasure over the 1928 Anglo-French cruiser agreement. Whelan shows that in these circumstances Ireland found itself on the international stage.