3

Woodrow Wilson: The Denial of Exile

DESPITE ALL THE ATTENTION DEVOTED to the Rising and the executions in America during the spring of 1916, the White House of Woodrow Wilson assiduously tried to keep its distance from what was happening in Ireland. Other affairs, international and domestic, preoccupied a president then looking ahead to what promised to be a bruising fall re-election campaign. A century later, however, this almost complete lack of engagement remains something of a mystery, if also key to the character of America’s twenty-eighth president. What’s clear is that Wilson’s inability to answer the Irish Question haunted the end of his first term and all of his second. His political motivation to embrace Irish Catholics for their electoral support seemed at war with his personal heritage as an Ulster Protestant and Anglophile. While nationalism and unionism battled openly in Ireland, Wilson tried, in his own way, to juggle both beliefs—but ultimately failed. He personified the age-old, still unresolved tension between these two traditions that was so vital to understanding Ireland and its people who had emigrated from there.

Woodrow Wilson

(Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZC2-6247)

Joyce Kilmer adopted an Irish patrimony and made it central to his identity after Easter 1916. Woodrow Wilson, though, could trace his ancestry directly back to Ireland through both of his father’s parents, each from Ulster: one from County Tyrone and the other from County Down. Wilson, however, viewed his association with an ancestral homeland in an entirely different way from Kilmer’s fictionalized ethnicity. For Wilson, a Scots-Irish lineage proved politically useful as he established himself within the Democratic Party. Yet, as the years passed and burdens grew heavier, how Wilson handled the American Irish and the Irish Question during 1916 subsequently became a microcosm of a presidency increasingly based on idealistic abstractions and entrenched beliefs. In the hundred years since his time in office, Wilson has come to be perceived by the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic as a figure whose grand rhetoric not only did not live up to its promise but also betrayed it.

Try as he might, and try he did, Wilson couldn’t escape the pressure to do something about Ireland. In fact, the Rising delivered to the doorstep of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue what Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower called the “Irish incubus,” a problem of continuing torment that contributed to Wilson’s inability to achieve the new world order he envisioned. Some have argued that had he dealt with the Irish Question more adroitly, he could have accomplished more of his international objectives and the verdict of history on his legacy would be less qualified. His papers, both published and unpublished, as well as contemporary accounts by people who had personal access to Wilson, reveal a figure with distinct public and private personae that are never reconciled. Indeed, many observers of his dealings with the Irish concluded he was duplicitous and never interested in Irish “self-determination,” though it was a key Wilsonian concept. Explaining how that viewpoint evolved requires both looking back at Wilson’s emergence in politics and assessing the evolving role of 1916.

Before entering politics in 1910 at the age of fifty-three as a candidate for governor of New Jersey, Wilson had been a prominent academic, with a lengthy list of scholarly and popular publications, as well as president of Princeton University for nearly a decade. Professorial in demeanor and in need of glasses from an early age, he was self-deprecating about his appearance, even writing a limerick to describe himself:

For beauty I am not a star,

There are others more handsome by far.

But my face I don’t mind it,

For I am behind it,

It’s the people in front that I jar.¹

Physical appearance aside—and his involvement in politics preceded intense concern for a figure’s image; his presidential predecessor, William Howard Taft, weighed well over three hundred pounds—Wilson (who weighed 180) was widely known as what we now call a public intellectual. Articles, books, and lectures spread his views widely on domestic and foreign subjects. He was on the record as favoring home rule in Ireland—in a 1910 campaign speech he had said, “This voice that has been crying in Ireland, this voice for home rule, is a voice which is now supported by the opinion of the world. . . .”² During his White House years (1913–1921) Wilson never wavered from thinking that some form of self-government was necessary for Ireland.

Though shaped by academia rather than the hurly-burly of electoral politics, Wilson recognized the clout Irish Americans exerted at the ballot box, particularly in certain large cities, where Democratic Party organizations had a decidedly Celtic composition. For appearances in front of groups that emphasized Irish heritage, he tried to ingratiate himself with playful remarks about his Irishness and its effects on him. In 1909, while still president of Princeton, he told attendants at the 125th anniversary dinner of the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in New York City about the shaping influence of his “Scotch-Irish” background. “I myself am happy to believe that there runs in my veins a very considerable strain of Irish blood,” he said. “I can’t prove it from documents, but I have internal evidence.” That “internal evidence,” he went on to say, was a “most enjoyable irresponsibility” that asserted control from time to time over his “Scotch conscience.”³ Wilson then made fun of Scotch-Irish “belligerency” before turning to more serious concerns, including the role of the president in U.S. public life—a subject he addressed in his 1908 book, Constitutional Government in the United States. Later, as governor and with an eye to running for president, he opened another speech to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick (this time in Elizabeth, New Jersey) by saying: “All the Irish that is in me arises to greet you. My father’s parents were born in Ireland; born farther north, perhaps, than most of you would approve of. But there was no one with more Irish in him than my father.”⁴

Wilson created both rapport with and distance from his audience. In asserting his Irish background, he also noted that his Ulster ancestors were different from most “Friendly Sons,” with their roots in the more nationalistic-minded and Catholic southern counties. With its strong allegiance to Britain, Ulster is, of course, distinctly different—as was Wilson’s devout Presbyterianism. Wilson was saying that he was—and was not—truly Irish. That seeming contradiction on a personal level would complicate how he judged matters related to Ireland over the next decade.

To win the presidency, Wilson continued to be cagey about using his Irish “blood.” Less than a month before Election Day 1912, he told a campaign rally gathered at the armory of “the Fighting Irish Seventh Regiment” in Chicago, “I have in me a very interesting and troublesome mixture of bloods. I get all my stubbornness from the Scotch [on his mother’s side], and then there is something else that gives me a great deal of trouble, which I attribute to the Irish. At any rate, it makes me love a scrap; and so I knew that if I was to be privileged to speak in this armory, I would be forgiven for speaking in a somewhat militant manner.”⁵

His combative bona fides established, Wilson applauded “the great liberty-loving men and women from every civilized country on the globe,” including “the great Irish people” who have immigrated to the United States. Besides citing the Irish, he mentioned the Polish, Italians, Slavs, and Sicilians by name before engaging in a rousing display of call and response:

what did they come to be free from? What was there that they wanted to get rid of in the countries which they left and hoped to find in the country in which they took refuge and made a new home for themselves? What was it that these militant people came to fight for? Why, they came to fight for a release from arbitrary power of every kind and of every degree. They came to fight against the arbitrary power of governments, the arbitrary control of aristocracy, the arbitrary privilege of classes that did not allow their privileges to be interfered with by the general interests of the people.⁶

Later, Wilson contrasted the promise of American freedom for immigrants with what he saw as the reality of life in 1912 America—after sixteen straight years of Republicans in the White House. “While these people [the new citizens] have escaped the open and avowed tyranny of special classes and of arbitrary governments, they have not escaped in America the private power of privilege and of narrow and exclusive power.”⁷

During his campaign, Wilson made strong appeals to Irish Americans for their political support, using language that would lead them to believe Ireland was a place where “arbitrary power of every kind and of every degree” was being exercised and freedom was worth fighting to achieve. However, after he entered the White House—winning 41.8 percent of the vote to Progressive candidate Theodore Roosevelt’s 27.4 percent, Republican incumbent William Howard Taft’s 23.2 percent, and Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs’s 6 percent—Wilson’s view changed. His “militant manner” often involved fighting with the American Irish, though he tried to avoid the perception of open warfare with such a significant constituency for the Democratic Party.

As president Wilson was principally kept informed about Irish America by his private secretary, Joseph Patrick Tumulty, who served in the capacity that is known today as chief of staff—during both four-year terms. A Roman Catholic with savvy political instincts, Tumulty was responsible for keeping up with the constant flow of messages, the scheduling of meetings, and everything else that occupies a president’s time. Tumulty’s own background proved influential. Never, in his judgment, “a professional Irishman,” Tumulty nonetheless kept Irish American opinion—the spectrum ranged from those who cared little about internal affairs in Ireland to those who were extreme nationalists and republicans—in perspective, helping Wilson to pursue larger goals without jeopardizing support from this vocal and vote-rich community. Having Tumulty in his position and in close proximity to the president was reassuring for Irish Americans. They knew they had access to the White House with Tumulty in such a key post.

One of Wilson’s domestic objectives involved increasing patriotism and nationalistic pride by subordinating the ethnic heritage that so many first- or second-generation immigrants still embraced and celebrated. A little over a year after entering the White House, Wilson delivered a robust plea on behalf of “Americanism” at the unveiling of a statue in Washington to honor Commodore John Barry, a hero of the American Revolution. Saying he had let others talk explicitly about Barry and his accomplishments, Wilson offered what he called “a few inferences from the significance of this occasion,” dilating on patriotism and its importance. In a key passage that combined a tribute to Barry and the broader theme, the president asserted that while John Barry was an Irishman, “his heart crossed the Atlantic with him.” He continued:

This man was not an Irish-American; he was an Irishman who became an American. I venture to say if he voted he voted with regard to the questions as they looked on this side of the water and not on the other side, and that is my infallible test of a genuine American—that when he votes or when he acts or when he fights, his heart and his thought are nowhere but in the center of the emotions and the purposes and the policies of the United States.⁸

According to Wilson, though “ancient affections” deserved to be preserved, they could not prevent the process of becoming “a genuine American.” Divided loyalties within immigrant groups—in this case among the Irish—weakened the spirit of national unity. Interestingly, Wilson’s high-minded argument brought up voting twice, a sign that electoral politics played an explicit role in the patriotic conduct of Americans. Concern for the “hyphenated”—Irish Americans or Italian Americans—and how citizens viewed themselves in relationship to their heritage kept returning as an issue, particularly given that the war had broken out in Europe only a few months after the president spoke at the statue dedication.

Wilson wanted Americans to establish appropriate distance from their immigrant roots, and as fighting grew bloodier and more savage across the Atlantic, he also tried to maintain U.S. neutrality, which he formally proclaimed on August 4, 1914. The war, however, was worryingly immediate for millions of Americans. Ancestral allegiances competed with New World aspirations, and recent immigrants in particular closely followed what was happening on the battlefields and in the trenches, as well as how their adopted country was responding to the spreading conflict.

Despite repeated assertions that the United States would remain neutral, Wilson was often accused of favoring the Allied Powers over the Central Powers. Whether warranted or not, this perception of presidential bias placed Wilson on the side of Great Britain and at odds with Germany. At the time, according to the 1910 population statistics, 8,282,618 people (out of a total of 91,972,266) named Germany as their country of origin, with over 2.5 million born there. In addition, those from Austria-Hungary, another Central Power, numbered 2.7 million. When the more than 4.5 million people of direct Irish background, many with antipathy to Britain, were added, the total was nearly 15.5 million who, to one degree or another, might have some reservations about showing partiality for the Allies. The same census figures showed just over 3.2 million of the U.S. population who named the United Kingdom (without counting Ireland) as their country of origin.⁹

As far as some observers were concerned, Wilson’s familial background, with its Ulster and Scottish heritage, placed him in the British corner and his life before politics reinforced that impression. Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link named Edmund Burke, Walter Bagehot, and Herbert Spencer as important influences on Wilson’s political philosophy.¹⁰ In Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, who worked with Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference before resigning over policy differences, were more explicit: “All his heroes were British: Burke, Bright, Bagehot, Gladstone.”¹¹ Later they wrote: “Four times after ‘breakdowns’ he attempted to overcome his habitual symptoms by visits to the British Isles. His experience in Ireland was confined to a few days of contempt; but Scotland he loved, the English universities moved him to ecstasy and the English Lake District became the home of his heart.”¹² Moreover, Wilson’s admiration for Britain’s parliamentary system was a matter of public record. Some of his academic writing, particularly his early work Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1885), praised the close association between the legislative and executive functions in the House of Commons, with its emphasis on persuasive rhetoric in debating policy.

Notwithstanding his Anglophile attachments (either ancestral or intellectual), Wilson tried to navigate his administration on a neutral course, even as some German Americans and Irish Americans detected a tack toward the British side as the war intensified. The German navy’s U-boat campaign targeting British ships tested Wilson’s approach, particularly when U.S. citizens or goods were in jeopardy. The sternest challenge to his strategy of noninvolvement came with the sinking of the Lusitania, the largest ship in the Cunard fleet, on a return voyage to Britain from New York. Because over a hundred Americans perished, Wilson began to feel both domestic and British pressure to respond aggressively. Former president Theodore Roosevelt left no doubt where he stood after the attack: “It seems inconceivable that we can refrain from taking action in this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.”¹³ Despite the outrage that the American press amplified with massive coverage—Joyce Kilmer’s “The White Ships and the Red” took up a whole page of the New York Times Magazine on May 16—Wilson held his fire and refused immediate comment. In his first public remarks after the ship’s sinking (four days earlier), he made no mention of the Lusitania or the firestorm its sinking had provoked. Instead, as he did so often, he took the higher road, the one leading to principles and ideals: “The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”¹⁴

Ultimately, Wilson sought an apology from Germany and assurance that such attacks wouldn’t occur in the future. The policy of neutrality remained in place while messages shot back and forth between the two governments. The man in the White House listened to his inner voice rather than to the bellicose calls from those outside, the nation’s top politician acting more like the academic of his earlier life. Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States, sized up the president in his memoir, My Three Years in America: “President Wilson, who by inclination and habit is a recluse and a lonely worker, does not like company.”¹⁵

Choosing to keep his own counsel marked not only Wilson’s commitment to neutrality throughout his first term but also his approach to Ireland during his eight years in the White House. The German ambassador’s comment is descriptive without being judgmental. A. Scott Berg quotes, in his biography of Wilson, Oklahoma Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, an early ally of the president who later opposed U.S. involvement in World War I and the proposed League of Nations: “Wilson had no friends, only slaves and enemies.”¹⁶

While the submarine warfare by Germany alienated many Americans, the British actions, including a naval blockade of Germany that restricted the flow of American merchandise, also raised concerns for the Wilson administration. In effect, the president was forced to deal with problems coming from both sides of the war. In each case, the impact on U.S. citizens and interests proved considerable. In a letter dated May 16, 1916, and written just after the last executions of the rebel leaders in Dublin, which he said had caused a “great shock” to American public opinion, Wilson told his adviser and, in the words of the salutation, “My dearest Friend,” Colonel Edward Mandell House, that relations with the British government had reached a “turning point” and “we should get down to hard pan.” He then wrote:

The United States must either make a decided move for peace (upon some basis that promises to be permanent) or, if she postpones that, must insist to the limit upon her rights of trade and upon such freedom of the seas as international law already justifies her in insisting on as against Great Britain, with the same plain speaking and firmness that she has used against Germany. And the choice must be made immediately. Which does Great Britain prefer? She cannot escape both. To do nothing is now, for us, impossible.¹⁷

Wilson’s phrase about “the great shock” revealed his awareness of the Rising and its aftermath, but he did not elaborate. His principal subject is the role the United States might play in bringing the war to an end. As before with the Lusitania, achieving peace was uppermost in his mind, the abiding pursuit. Later, in May, he delivered a speech to the League to Enforce Peace that asserted, without being specific, “every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live” and (as he noted in campaigning during 1912) “small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and powerful nations expect and insist upon.”¹⁸ He went on to propose that his country would be willing to occupy a place on the world stage by noting “that the United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objects and make them secure against violation.”¹⁹ Criticized by Europeans for not addressing the war’s causes and its objects, Wilson positioned himself and his country on the side of peace while advocating an “association of nations” devoted to maintaining global security. This speech contained the seeds of policy proposals that took root and became consequential later in his presidency. With Dublin still reeling after the recent insurrection, the Irish and their kinfolk in America heard encouraging phrases on behalf of individual sovereignty and “small states of the world.” Colonel House brought up the Rising in a letter to Wilson of June 7, 1916, echoing the president’s letter of May 16 that the “execution of the Irish rebels had accentuated opinion against Great Britain.” House also offered his advice that the British government should refrain from releasing a rationale for what they did in Dublin. In a conclusion that in retrospect seems stunning in the magnitude of its misjudgment, he wrote: “Things are soon forgotten these tragic days and the quicker that is forgotten the better.”²⁰

Both Wilson and House used the word opinion in referring to the impact felt in the United States from the punishment the British inflicted on the Rising’s leaders. The extensive press coverage must have had some reverberations in the White House at the same time as the president was making his best effort to be perceived as peacemaker in the European conflict. Renominated in mid-June for a second term at the Democratic Party’s convention in St. Louis, Wilson’s approach going into his campaign combined passive neutrality with a commitment to active peacemaking. As time grew closer to the November election, the compelling slogan someone suggested that the incumbent use—“He kept us out of war”—would reinforce the relationship between Wilson and his policy. However, before Americans cast their ballots, the White House had to take into account the sea change in thinking on the part of a key Democratic voting bloc: the American Irish.

Given the amount of media attention devoted to the Rising, the response of Irish America received a full airing, revealing the depth of the outrage and sympathy for those either directly involved (the dead, wounded, or arrested) or through the loss of property. The anti-British sentiment that grew in the United States after the Rising strengthened Wilson’s hand to maintain neutrality. In addition, the president had serious policy differences with London during 1916 that showed his ability to keep personal preferences about English life distinct from governmental activities. Angered by the publication of a “blacklist” that named eighty-seven American companies involved in trade with the Central Powers, and thus no longer able to transact business with the British, Wilson wrote Colonel House on July 23, 1916, that he was “about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies.” He went on to say that he was “seriously considering asking Congress to authorize me to prohibit loans and restrict exportations to the Allies.” He told House that he and the State Department were “compounding a very sharp note. I may feel obliged to make it as sharp and final as the one to Germany on the submarines.”²¹

Besides the blacklisting, Anglo-American relations were already on rocky footing as a result of a maritime blockade and the searching of letters and parcels carried by neutral ships crossing the Atlantic. Wilson was genuinely at odds with the British at a time before what later became referred to as “the special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States didn’t yet exist. That relationship developed during World War II, over two decades later, and largely because Winston Churchill sought closer cooperation among English-speaking peoples. In 1916 and for a variety of reasons, Wilson sought transatlantic distance.

Given all of the governmental controversies and the stormy reaction to the Rising, the British kept a close eye on activities in America. Perhaps the country’s most valuable source of information and interpretation came from the letters and assessments written by Cecil Spring Rice, who served as Britain’s ambassador in Washington from September 1912 until January 1918. What made these diplomatic dispatches noteworthy was their acuity in analyzing American public opinion and political machinations. Government ministers and others at Whitehall received Spring Rice’s detailed assessments, which read like the work of a veteran reporter, with clockwork regularity. By contrast the U.S. State Department had to request field reports about the Rising from its consuls based in Ireland. The report from Dublin didn’t arrive in Washington until early December 1916, by which point it was of little to no use.²²

Possibly because of his own Anglo-Irish heritage—in one of his poems he wrote, “I am an Irishman, you see, / That is what expresses me”—Spring Rice took a keen interest in what was happening in Ireland and among the American Irish. Well connected on both sides of the Atlantic (he served as Theodore Roosevelt’s best man at his marriage in London in 1886), Spring Rice devoted much of his ambassadorial time to composing his reports for the Foreign Office from Washington, D.C. His reluctance to seek public attention was itself newsworthy. The New York Herald began a Sunday magazine profile on June 25, 1916: “Erin’s sons are renowned for their eloquence rather than for their reticence. Yet the Irishman to whom the British Empire has confided the care of its diplomatic interests in the United States in this the greatest crisis of its existence has earned for himself renown among Americans as the most silent Ambassador ever sent to Washington by any foreign Power.” Though the feature appeared two months after the Rising and at a time when the British were being widely rebuked for the executions, the writer, F. Cunliffe-Owen—perhaps in honor of his subject’s silence—entirely avoids the subject.²³ However, in his own dispatches, Spring Rice kept returning to the U.S. reaction to the events in Ireland, and particularly their impact on Irish Americans. His observations, gleaned from press accounts, personal conversations, and staff reports, provided contemporaneous evidence of American opinion as it evolved over several weeks. On April 28, shortly after the news broke, Spring Rice was both measured and matter-of-fact in describing the U.S. reaction. On the whole, he found public opinion “satisfactory,” continuing: “The press seems to be agreed that the movement is suicidal and in the interests of Germany alone. The attitude of the majority of the Irish is uncertain, but if the movement spreads the effect here will be very serious indeed. All are agreed that it will be dangerous to make Casement a martyr.”²⁴

Just a month later, on May 30, Spring Rice adopted a decidedly different tone and approach, raising warning flags and signaling a no-win situation for the English in dealing with Casement. It was bad enough that the executions had been spread out, as the American public might have excused them had they been done in “hot blood.” As for Casement, who most agree had acted “almost like a madman,” it would be “far better” to make him “ridiculous than a martyr,” in Spring Rice’s judgment. “There is no doubt whatever that the Germans here look forward with great interest to his execution, of which they will take full advantage.”²⁵

Then, two weeks later, and just as Wilson was being nominated for a second term at the Democratic Convention, the ambassador wrote in his dispatch that enmity directed at Britain continued to grow among the American Irish. His sense of alarm was tempered with suggestions to improve the situation, principally by distributing funds to the “sufferers by the revolt” and settling the issue of home rule. But as for the Irish in America, there was nothing to be done. “They have blood in their eyes when they look our way.” While Spring Rice noted that even England’s bitterest enemies did “not wish to take sides with the destroyer of Belgium,” the English cause among the Irish in America was “a lost one.”²⁶

All the passages quoted here come from the second volume of The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring Rice. Many of his unpublished dispatches are in the holdings of the National Archives at Kew, and the ones during this period reinforced or amplified his judgments about the shifting U.S. opinion caused by the Rising and, more significantly, by the executions. He also addressed the possibility that the rebels in Ireland didn’t act alone, noting on May 1: “A question that will be debated exhaustively is how far the movement [in Ireland] originated in this country or received support from American citizens. . . . No one here doubts the complete cooperation of German and Irish societies in this country in a policy of hostility to Great Britain.”²⁷

In a coded telegram dated August 1, Spring Rice reported that he had made an “informal verbal agreement” with Michael Francis Doyle, Casement’s American lawyer, that neither would say anything about Casement’s scheduled hanging two days later. His last sentence refers to Doyle and provokes puzzlement: “He tells me privately that Clan Nagael [sic] want Casement executed.”²⁸ When so many American politicians, journalists, and groups were working to save Casement from the gallows, why Clan na Gael, the most extreme organization devoted to independence for Ireland, welcomed the death sentence seems a mystery. By this time, John Devoy and others could have decided that Casement was too mercurial and too much of a risk to the larger cause. In his biography of Casement, Angus Mitchell speculates that Devoy blamed Casement for betraying secrets about the Rising, though it later seemed possible that it was Devoy’s cables that had been intercepted, tipping off the British command.²⁹ In any case, the Clan had financially supported Casement in Germany and also during his London trial.

Throughout the dispatches Spring Rice prepared, he repeatedly discussed American press coverage of the events in Ireland and the ways the American Irish responded to what was happening there. How sensitive were policymakers in the Foreign Office to the news treatment, with its criticism of British statements and actions? One “American Press Résumé,” assembled on May 25 and printed for the cabinet to consider, covered ten full pages of closely spaced type. “CONFIDENTIAL” appears underlined and in boldface at the top of what is basically a collection of articles from easily available public sources.³⁰ Among Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith’s papers at Oxford during this period are U.S. newspapers with articles and editorials about Casement’s fate. All the concern over the journalistic coverage showed the extent to which London thought American public opinion was taking a turn against the British at a key time for the war being fought in Europe. Neutrality was one thing; hostility could prove more consequential and difficult to overcome in the future.

To survey U.S. thinking and the nation’s mood, Spring Rice looked beyond newspapers and kept an eye trained on the conduct of domestic politics and Wilson’s fortunes. Early in 1916 (January 13), several months before the Rising, he informed Edward Grey, the foreign minister: “The best politicians in the country [the United States] are the Irish, and the professional Irish politician is against us.”³¹ After the firestorm of criticism following the executions, he advocated a strategy of deliberately staying out of the spotlight, writing on July 31 that, with the presidential election on the horizon and Congress in session, and with “the Irish in a particularly pugnacious mood and both sides hungering for the German vote,” it would be a good idea “to lie as quiet as possible and to occupy as little attention as we can.”³²

While the British sought to steer clear of any action that might prompt negative publicity, Wilson and his administration followed a somewhat similar course during the summer and fall of 1916, yet for a different reason. Wilson biographer Ray Stannard Baker quotes Wilson’s remarks delivered early in the campaign: “From this time until the seventh of November it is going to be practically impossible for the present Administration to handle any critical matter concerning our foreign relations, because all foreign statesmen are waiting to see which way the election goes, and in the meantime they know that settlements will be inconclusive.” Baker, a journalist and friend of the president, then directly commented on Wilson’s effort to keep international affairs at bay by observing: “In consonance with this conviction he avoided every possible controversy upon foreign affairs.”³³ The candidate, who tried to make voters aware that he had done whatever possible to avoid getting involved in the war abroad, wanted his electioneering to stay confined to matters within the U.S. borders.

In his speech after being renominated as the Democratic Party candidate, he noted: “I am the candidate of a party, but I am above all things else an American citizen. I neither seek the favour nor fear the displeasure of that small alien element amongst us which puts loyalty to any foreign power before loyalty to the United States.”³⁴ Without raising the concept of hyphenated Americans, Wilson made his point, and he drove it home later in the month. Jeremiah A. O’Leary, president of the American Truth Society and proponent of both Irish independence and the German side in the war, accused the president of “truckling to the British Empire” and jeopardizing Democratic votes in November. Wilson immediately shot back: “Your telegram received. I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not I will ask you to convey this message to them.”³⁵ He was asked about O’Leary’s message and “the hyphenate issue” at a press conference, and his six-sentence reply contained two references to “damn fools.” “A telegram like that is the most silly indiscretion that a man could possibly commit.”³⁶ In the postscript to a letter Colonel House sent to Wilson the next day, he commented, “Your telegram to O’Leary is the best thing so far in the campaign and will do more good than you can realize.”³⁷

Wilson’s presidential pique, which received extensive news coverage, stands in marked contrast to his usual public response to a potentially controversial matter. Though O’Leary never mentioned Ireland or Germany in what he wrote the president, the American Truth Society was well known for being pro-German, and O’Leary was a prominent figure in Irish-American circles. Indeed, among Joseph McGarrity’s papers in the National Library of Ireland is a memorandum McGarrity drafted about 1916. He recalls he was “bound to secrecy” about the Rising “until the newspapers finally got the story.” McGarrity then related how what was happening in Ireland became known in the United States: “Jeremiah A. O’Leary of New York had called some of the New York Newspapers and asked the Editor why he was suppressing the news of a Rebellion now going on in Ireland, and after persistent calling the Editors began to seek for the story… .” McGarrity went on to say that the fighting was “two or three days on before the newspapers in America were in a position to give it to the world, the rest is history.”³⁸

In the months before and after Wilson’s assertive reply to O’Leary, the president had engaged in political bobbing and dodging when Irish-related issues landed on his desk. Actually, a pattern developed that continued throughout the remainder of his first White House term and well into his second—a consistent approach of rhetorical sympathy without policy substance. For public occasions and statements that might be quoted in the press or elsewhere, Wilson maintained an attitude of sincerity and conscientious concern. The American Irish were led to believe the president understood their viewpoint in seeking remedies to their problems and to the larger resolution of Ireland’s future. In private, however, Wilson operated differently. What he said or did showed a deliberate resolve to keep at arm’s length almost every matter explicitly related to Irish-American interests. Indeed, away from the scrutiny of the press and citizenry, he displayed flashes of anger and antipathy that reveal ethnic-group animus of considerable proportion. The man who wanted the world to regard him as a peacemaker wasn’t above maneuvering behind the scenes to allow certain conflicts to fester. As time passed, it became increasingly difficult for him to maintain one stance in public and another in private.

The key person trying to project Wilson’s image of concern vis-à-vis Ireland was Joseph Tumulty, whose fingerprints can be detected on many of the documents that went out from the White House in Wilson’s name. An examination of the Woodrow Wilson Papers in the Library of Congress reveals that the Easter Rising and Roger Casement’s case generated numerous telegrams and letters seeking presidential involvement and help. The day before Pearse’s surrender, Michael Francis Doyle, a Philadelphia attorney with Democratic connections who later represented Casement in London, wired Wilson, requesting a meeting to talk about Casement and “if possible to enlist your interest on his behalf on the grounds of humanity.” On May 2, Wilson wrote to Tumulty rather than to Doyle: “We have no choice in a matter of this sort. It is absolutely necessary to say that I could take no action of any kind regarding it.”³⁹ That direct statement would seem to close every door; however, Tumulty handed off the matter to the State Department and, subsequently, drafted a form response that anyone who contacted the White House about Casement would receive. Its wording made Wilson appear quite different from what the president had written to his secretary. With concern for Casement’s fate growing in Congress and among the public, Tumulty instructed the White House secretarial staff on July 3 to send “the following form reply under his signature”:

The President wishes me to acknowledge receipt your telegram in the case of Sir Roger Casement and requests me to say that he will seek the earliest opportunity to discuss this matter with the Secretary of State. Of course he will give the suggestion you make the consideration which its great importance merits.⁴⁰

Though noncommittal and not specific about “the suggestion” offered, the cordial message reflected an open-minded willingness to deal with Casement’s situation at the highest levels of the administration. It was really all a façade.

When Tumulty gave Wilson a letter Doyle had sent from London about Casement’s trial with the information that “a personal request from the President will save his life,” the president in his reaction of July 20 was even more emphatic than he had been on May 2. The handwritten response reads: “It would be inexcusable for me to touch this. It w’d [would] involve serious international embarrassment.”⁴¹ Wilson’s hands-off approach to intervening on behalf of Casement foreshadows his refusal to introduce Ireland as a subject at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Though he played his Irish card to win political acceptance, he stopped at jocular lip service when faced with a life-or-death decision or a major policy initiative. During his inaugural address as president of Princeton in 1902, Wilson asserted in an often-quoted statement: “We are not put into this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act.”⁴² On Ireland and Irish issues, however, he knew but sat still.

From evidence in Wilson’s papers in the Library of Congress, it becomes clear Tumulty wasn’t alone in attempting to make Wilson look more favorable in Irish eyes. The Knights of St. Patrick in San Francisco sent the president a lengthy telegram on May 17, 1916, proposing that the U.S. government intervene with the British to end secret trials and executions of Irish prisoners. The text of the appeal was published by the San Francisco Chronicle on May 20, and near the beginning, it says that the “request is made on behalf of numberless American citizens whose ancestry, like your own, is Irish.” The concluding paragraph raised a point often made in the United States during the spring of 1916: “The only offense of the Irish revolutionists was the same aspiration for liberty which inspired Washington in the American Revolution.”⁴³ For over a month, the Knights of St. Patrick waited to receive acknowledgment of their telegram, and Senator James D. Phelan of California took up the matter directly with Tumulty. On June 28, after a conversation about the lack of a reply, the senator (who served just one term, from 1915 to 1921) sent the secretary a letter with background about the situation and a proposed response from the president to be forwarded to the Knights of St. Patrick.

What Phelan wrote on behalf of Wilson—“Pursuant to your suggestion this morning, I offer the enclosed”—made the intended signatory, Wilson, appear not only conscientious in his duties but also sympathetic to the Irish rebels. The letter, submitted on plain white paper and typed identically as the cover note to Tumulty accompanying it, said that concerning Irish prisoners, “it is needless for me to say that I have done everything, so far as representations go, to provide for their humane and just treatment.” The next sentence brought the subject closer to home, though there is no specific mention of any particular case: “Where the fate of an American citizen was involved, I have secured favorable action. . . .” Then, the text assumed a grand Wilsonian tone:

My natural sympathies are with men struggling for freedom, and concerning whose sincerity as patriots, seeking solely the welfare of their country, can not be questioned. In view of the conditions in other lands, Americans should be doubly thankful for the form of Government which has been transmitted to them by their ancestors, won by valor and sacrifice, under which they enjoy self-government.⁴⁴

Any president, of course, receives so many messages and pleas that answering each one is impossible. In this instance, however, what was said in Wilson’s name was strikingly at variance from what we know the president was thinking and writing at the time. The statement, undoubtedly drafted by Phelan or someone on his staff with just a couple minor, handwritten changes by Tumulty, accomplished its immediate goal of replying to an Irish-American organization at a critical time.

On July 11, Robert P. Troy, president of the Knights, responded directly to Wilson (referring twice to “your esteemed letter”) and acknowledged the president’s “friendly suggestion … to the British Government in behalf of clemency for the prisoners who were concerned in the recent Irish uprising.” Troy went on to write: “I have taken the liberty of assuring our members at all times that we could depend upon you to take such action as would be consistent with discretion and established diplomatic precedents.”⁴⁵ The ghosted letter had served its purpose. The Knights of St. Patrick thought they had a dependable ally of Irish ancestry in the White House and said as much. The reply arrived on July 17, and a handwritten notation, presumably by Tumulty, says “copy sent to Sen. Phelan” the next day. Troy’s and the Knights’ trust in Wilson prompted them to contact the White House again a few days later in July. According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 22, 1916), the Knights of St. Patrick, “pioneer Irish organization of the Pacific Coast,” had appealed to Wilson, asking that he use a “friendly suggestion” to the British to seek clemency for Casement.⁴⁶ By that time, of course, Wilson had decided to make no “friendly suggestion” of any kind to help Casement.

Over the years, some historians have taken Wilson at what they thought were his words. After citing the inspiring passage about Wilson’s “natural sympathies are with men struggling for freedom,” Francis Carroll remarked, “It cannot be known how specifically Wilson was referring to Irishmen struggling for freedom or men in general, nor can it be known the extent to which this statement, with its strong pro-Irish implications, was motivated by purely political reasons; certainly it manifests as much warmth for the Irish cause as his statements in his early career.”⁴⁷ To know now that a senator and presidential aide orchestrated the letter between themselves—one wonders if Wilson ever saw it or was even told about it—puts even greater emphasis on its political urgency. More broadly and beyond its immediate usage, the statement suggested that the man in the White House considered the Irish cause, with people “struggling for freedom,” as harmonious with his worldview and worthy of his support.

Like Spring Rice and others in Washington, Tumulty was sensitive to the profound change in Irish-American opinion after the Rising, and he understood as well as anyone else how careful the White House had to act in dealing with it. In communicating with the State Department on June 9 about a possible response to Phelan for the Knights of St. Patrick, Tumulty told Frank L. Polk, counselor at the State Department, “I would like to discuss this matter with you before a reply is made to the Senator. There is so much dynamite in it that we ought to proceed with care.”⁴⁸ The “dynamite” had the potential to detonate domestically and make the “exiled children” think twice about supporting the incumbent Democratic president a few months before the 1916 election. However, as it turned out, there was no explosion. Wilson carried California by fewer than four thousand votes, and in the general election he narrowly defeated Charles Evans Hughes (49.2 percent to 46.1 percent, or 277 Electoral College votes to 254).

From his renomination in June, the president wanted to be perceived as the tireless worker for peace, with strict neutrality his guiding star. Taking sides on Casement would have endangered the White House strategy of maintaining deliberate distance from controversial foreign matters. Although the administration received criticism for delaying the transmission of a Senate resolution requesting clemency for Casement, the White House vigorously denied the charges and worked to make the campaign concentrate on affairs at home. Despite all the attention to European hostilities, America’s highest elected official was content to attend to business in the forty-eight states. Nonetheless, the Rising produced political and policy aftershocks that reverberated during the president’s second term and demanded his attention. Try as he might to command the world stage as a war leader with ethereal plans for the future, Wilson could never seem to disentangle himself from the Irish Question. Yet, given everything happening across the Atlantic, it was only a matter of time before Wilson and his administration were forced to deal more openly with international affairs.

Despite the spirit and practical application of his campaign slogan, Wilson’s hand was forced by events, and he could no longer keep the United States on the sidelines of the war. Germany announced a new and unrestricted submarine offensive on January 31; a month later, a telegram from Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, was revealed, proposing an alliance between his country and Mexico against the United States. Military skirmishes with Mexico had taken place during Wilson’s presidency in 1914, and the prospect of increased conflict, with German provocation, angered Americans. Moreover, with U.S. ships now the targets of U-boat torpedoes, neutrality no longer seemed an option. On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, telling the House of Representatives and the Senate, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Four days later, Congress approved the president’s request by wide margins in both chambers, and the United States was engaged in the European war.

On April 10, as the White House prepared for combat abroad, Wilson wrote on his own typewriter a letter to Secretary of State Robert Lansing suggesting that a “confidential message” be sent to the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page. What Wilson wrote showed a realistic and political concern for Ireland in both its relationship to Britain and its influence within Irish America’s “exiled children.” The president urged Lansing that the message to Page should instruct him to tell Prime Minister Lloyd George that the only thing standing between “an absolutely cordial” relation between the United States and Great Britain was “a satisfactory method of self-government for Ireland.” He went on:

This appeared very strikingly in the recent debates in Congress upon the war resolution and appeared in the speeches of opponents of that resolution who were not themselves Irishmen or representatives of constituencies in which Irish voters were influential, notably several members from the South. If the people of the United States could feel that there was an early prospect of the establishment for Ireland of substantial self-government a very great element of satisfaction and enthusiasm would be added to the cooperation now about to be organized between this country and Great Britain. Convey this information unofficially of course but as having no little significance. Successful action now would absolutely divorce our citizens of Irish birth and sympathy from the German sympathizers here with whom many of them have been inclined to make common cause.

Page now knows the Prime Minister well enough to know how to say these things to him frankly, and if a way could be found now to grant Ireland what she has so often been promised, it would be felt that the real programme of government by the consent of the governed had been adopted everywhere in the anti-Prussian world.⁴⁹

By remarkable coincidence, just three days after Wilson sent his private letter to Lansing, Ambassador Spring Rice wrote the Foreign Office in London, stressing the centrality of Ireland’s fate to Wilson and the United States. The Irish Question remained a thorn in the side of the administration because it served “as a proof that it is not wholly true that the fight is one for the sanctity of engagements or the independence of small nations.” Politics lay at the base of it. “The President is by descent an Orangeman and by education a Presbyterian. But he is the leader of the Democratic Party in which the Irish play a prominent part, and he is bound in every way to give consideration to their demands.”⁵⁰

That the messages of Wilson and Spring Rice came at virtually the same time provides evidence of the place the Irish Question held in both Anglo-American relations and American domestic politics. Given the joint awareness as U.S. involvement in the war began, the expectation for some kind of resolution is clearly on the mind of public officials with memories of what happened in Dublin less than a year before. Though he often preferred back-channel secrecy for such overtures, Wilson consistently supported and pushed for home rule in Ireland. At this critical moment, it would have helped to divide two strong groups of hyphenated citizens in the United States—Irish Americans and German Americans—and given the war effort a boost. In the broader context, it also might have led to a greater sense of self-determination among the Irish. On April 18, Page sent a telegram to the president about the proposal: “I took up this subject in a confidential conversation with the Prime Minister at my house last night. He instantly understood and showed that he already knew the facts that I presented and was glad that the President had instructed me to bring the subject up. He had had the American situation in mind during the whole discussion of home rule and he was doing his best.”⁵¹

Home rule for Ireland kept returning as a subject of debate in the British government, but words never led to implementation. Wilson’s nudge didn’t do the trick in 1917, even when Britain might have been inclined to be receptive. As the war effort was mobilized and fighting in Europe intensified, the American Irish subordinated ancestral considerations to the cause of victory. Solidarity of singular purpose prevailed while the Yanks in the Fighting Sixty-Ninth (like Kilmer) and other divisions served abroad. But the work of the commander-in-chief demanded more than the creation of a united home front. Nonetheless, the issue of home rule for Ireland became a recurring subplot in Anglo-American relations.

On May 12, 1917, the New York World reported, “Persons who are in a position to speak with authority say that the President has gone as far as the proprieties permit in bringing to the realization of the British Foreign Secretary the importance of the Home Rule proposition in this country.”⁵² In June, British Prime Minister Lloyd George announced what was called the “Irish Convention” to address self-government in Ireland. Meeting in Dublin from July 25, 1917, until April 5, 1918, the convention—involving some hundred delegates of widely varying viewpoints (from nationalists to Ulster unionists, though not Sinn Féin)—ended in failure; however, it bought time for Wilson and others. As long as delegates talked and presented proposals, the administration could point to formal proceedings abroad that were trying to address the Irish Question. The president had protection during a critical period in the war when he wanted to project a resolute unity of purpose at home.

Wilson, however, couldn’t entirely dodge consideration of Ireland’s future, what historian George Dangerfield referred to as “the damnable question.” At a White House ceremony on January 10, 1918, that involved Senator Phelan, Wilson was given a statue of Robert Emmet, the Dublin-born Irish nationalist who led an ill-fated rebellion against the British in 1803. Like the Rising leaders of 1916, he, too, had been executed. In making the presentation, Phelan used the occasion to revisit Ireland’s contemporary situation. While praising the president, Phelan also put Wilson on the spot:

Robert Emmet was a poor potter, and he died for his country. And the men of Irish blood of America, American citizens here represented, think it is most opportune in the history of the world that attention should be called to his sacrifice, and more particularly to the cause in which he made the sacrifice. There should be a good feeling among all nations, especially among those allied in the war—and they have all made professions. In fact, Mr. President, you have been their spokesman in favor of recognizing the national right of a country of homogeneous people to independence and autonomy—certainly autonomy. And we feel that, at this time, while presenting to you the image of an Irish rebel, from our point of view, we are presenting to you the representative of a nation in rebellion against the oppression which has been put upon them for centuries. And I don’t think it is inappropriate here to say, from my knowledge of history, that no greater indignity, no more atrocious acts, have ever been committed against a people as have been committed against the people of Ireland. That is all back in the past. The world up to the beginning of the war had become enlightened, and we are willing to forget the past if we can be the beneficiaries of that enlightenment which you, sir, are endeavoring to preserve and treasure.⁵³

Wilson responded to Phelan by retreating behind the cover of the Irish Convention and with platitudes about Emmet, arguing that what he did “in his time would not be necessary to do in our time.” Nonetheless, “without any partisanship of any kind,” we could all appreciate “the spirit which leads a man to go the full length of sacrifice for the purpose that he holds most dear.”⁵⁴ At a cabinet meeting the following day, however, Wilson unloaded. According to a diary entry by Josephus Daniels, secretary of the navy during both terms, “WW indignant at speech by Phelan, in presenting small bust of Emmett [sic], wishing the President to help Ireland secure its rights. At this time, with England fighting with us, such talk almost treasonable. President said he so mad he could hardly restrain himself.”⁵⁵

The same day as the cabinet meeting, the president had what was termed an “interview” with Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, an Irish nationalist, pacifist, and suffragette. She was the widow of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a prominent journalist who had been gunned down by a British officer during the Rising, even though, as a pacifist, he was not involved in the fighting and had been trying to stop the looting of Dublin businesses. Like other nationalists and republicans (such as Nora Connelly, Liam Mellows, and Diarmuid Lynch), Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington traveled to America after the Rising to rally support for Ireland in an environment sympathetic to the cause for independence. During a year and a half in the United States, she spoke “at over two hundred and fifty public meetings” in (by her count) twenty states, returning to Dublin in June 1918 to write a short but engrossing memoir, Impressions of Sinn Féin in America.

Given her background and allegiances, it seems puzzling that Wilson was willing to see her, though she credited Bainbridge Colby, a prominent lawyer and political figure who later served as Wilson’s last secretary of state, and Joseph Tumulty as intermediaries on her behalf. Her principal objective in meeting Wilson was to deliver a petition from Cumann na mBan, the Irish women’s republican paramilitary organization, and signed by Constance Markievicz, Margaret Pearse (P. H. Pearse’s mother), and others. The document, which somehow reached Sheehy-Skeffington without being stopped by British censors in Ireland, “put forth the claim of Ireland for self-determination, and appealed to President Wilson to include Ireland among the Small Nations for whose freedom America was fighting.”⁵⁶

In her account of the interview, Sheehy-Skeffington took pride in being “the first Irish exile and the first Sinn Féiner to enter the White House, and the first to wear there the badge of the Irish Republic, which I took care to pin in my coat before I went.”⁵⁷ She reported Wilson’s hope that “the Lloyd George Convention then sitting in Ireland” would solve the Irish Question, but she says that two weeks after her interview “it collapsed like a badly-built house of cards.” What was most striking, however, was her profound faith that Wilson would pursue a solution at the post-armistice Peace Conference. Sheehy-Skeffington had several months to reflect on her time with the president and what he might do at the end of hostilities in Europe: “President Wilson is not the type that will lead, pioneer-like, a forlorn hope, or stake all on a desperate enterprise; but, on the other hand, he is one who by tradition (he has Irish blood in his veins) and by temperament, will see the need of self-determination for Ireland as well as for other nations.” Sheehy-Skeffington was confident that Wilson would not be allowed to “turn a deaf ear.”⁵⁸

Sheehy-Skeffington’s faith in Wilson was also reflected in a letter she sent to John Devoy shortly after the meeting. “The president was personally very courteous and acknowledged smilingly his Irish blood,” she wrote. “I asked him to consider our claims as a small nation governed without consent. He took the petition and seemed interested.” Later in the letter Sheehy-Skeffington advised Devoy (his hatred of Wilson notwithstanding) to use editorials in The Gaelic American “to plead for Ireland” and to put pressure on Congress on behalf of the Irish cause.⁵⁹ Generally, her feeling was that Irish Americans were, as she put it in her memoir, “Hot Air Harps” who talked about the situation in Ireland without moving beyond words. To her, Wilson and his rhetoric were more promising. As it turned out, if not a “Hot Air Harp,” Wilson proved something of a “Celtic Chameleon.”

During the same week (on January 8, 1918), Wilson delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress that spelled out the fourteen points he wanted addressed at the end of the war. Ireland was not mentioned, but his fifth point (before specifying proposals for Russia, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, etc.) asserted his view of “[a] free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”⁶⁰ Like his remarks about “every people” and “small states” to the League to Enforce Peace in late May 1916, Wilson’s references to “all colonial claims” and “interests of the populations concerned” could logically apply to the Irish.

A little over a month later, on February 11, 1918, Wilson returned to the Capitol for another speech to a joint session of the House and Senate that both reacted to the German and Austrian responses to Wilson’s points and amplified his thinking about the postwar world. In one section, he focused directly on a concern that independence-minded Irish and Irish Americans considered critical to their cause: “National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.”⁶¹

In the wake of the Rising, growing numbers of Irish people on both sides of the Atlantic certainly thought “self-determination” was more than “a mere phrase.” Wilson, however, harbored a different view. While physical-force nationalists regarded Ireland as a vassal of Britain, a colony under the lion’s paw, Wilson approached Ireland as essentially a domestic concern for the British. For Fenians such as John Devoy, the Irish had suffered from English subjugation since the twelfth century as a result of invasion from across the Irish Sea and by papal fiat. The story of Ireland was the story of English oppression.⁶² Wilson, with his doctorate in history and political science—the only U.S. president thus far who has earned a Ph.D.—could never see Ireland as a separate country unto itself or in the way the narrative had evolved during the past two centuries. To him, it was just one of the many “British isles.”

Moreover, Wilson’s lofty yet imprecise language had the potential of creating false impressions. Writing in his diary on December 30, 1918, more than six weeks after the armistice, Secretary of State Robert Lansing trenchantly observed that the more he thought about the president’s assertion of self-determination “the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the mind of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands.” To Lansing the phrase was “simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.” In the end, in Lansing’s view, it had been a “calamity” that Wilson had ever uttered it.⁶³

Although the Peace Conference at Versailles didn’t formally convene until January 18, 1919, Wilson was already looking ahead, setting down in words definite plans for reshaping the world as he thought it should be. But more than a year before details of the eventual peace treaty were formulated, the president had made one decision that, in terms of the future, would haunt his upcoming months in Paris and the remainder of his time in the White House. In a sentence buried near the end of a multipage “Most Secret” memorandum of February 4, 1918, written by William Wiseman, the head of Britain’s intelligence office in the United States and liaison between the administration and London, Wiseman reported that during a three-hour session with Wilson the president assured him “that as far as he was concerned he would not allow Ireland to be dragged into a Peace Conference.”⁶⁴ In Wilson’s thinking, though he refrained from saying so publicly, the Irish Question remained what it had always been: a domestic matter to be resolved internally by political leaders in the United Kingdom.

The precise extent to which the Easter Rising directly affected Wilson’s approach to Ireland remains unknown. He took note of it in 1916 (though not nearly to the degree that Spring Rice did), but efforts at peacemaking and keeping a tight focus on domestic issues for his reelection campaign took precedence. Two years later, however, the Rising returned as an issue, when the British government provided the United States with a series of decoded messages, showing a direct connection between the German government and individual Americans (namely John Devoy, Daniel F. Cohalan, and Joseph McGarrity) in the planning and financing. On May 19, 1918, Secretary of State Lansing sent Wilson the thirty-two telegrams and letters that revealed the secret relationship with “Sinn Fein agents in this country” (beginning on September 25, 1914, and ending January 18, 1917). Although the documents proved German and American involvement in the Rising, Lansing argued against the U.S. government releasing them, noting: “The Irish situation is very delicate and anything which we might do to aid either side [the British or Sinn Féin] in the controversy would, I fear, involve us in all sorts of difficulties with the Irish in this country. . . . [P]‌ublishing these papers at this time would be construed as a direct assistance to Great Britain in the matter of conscription in Ireland.”⁶⁵ The Irish Conference in Dublin had recently ended without an agreement for self-government. Enacting conscription without first establishing home rule was politically impossible in American eyes.

After the failure of the Irish Conference, Wilson no longer had an excuse to hide behind when the subject of Ireland arose. One of the first overtures to the president came from his ally yet single-issue irritant Senator Phelan, who proposed (on June 29, 1918) “a frank statement of Ireland’s right to autonomous government (without necessarily defining the kind) and the prompt granting of it” as part of a Fourth of July address.⁶⁶ In responding, Wilson fell back on reassuring rhetoric that avoided taking a definite stand. “I realize, of course, the critical importance of the whole Irish question, but I do not think that it would be wise for me in any public utterance to attempt to outline a policy for the British Government with regard to Ireland. It is a matter, of course, of the utmost delicacy, and I must frankly say that I would not know how to handle it without risking very uncomfortable confusions of counsel.”⁶⁷

Privately, Wilson was of course less guarded and Colonel House didn’t refrain from recording conversations between himself and the president.⁶⁸ Though the two ultimately had a falling out in 1919—like Devoy, maintaining friendships or even working relationships proved difficult for Wilson—House enjoyed maximum access to the president in 1918.⁶⁹ In his diary for August 16, 1918, he wrote:

In speaking of the Irish he surprised me by saying that he did not intend to appoint another Irishman to anything; that they were untrustworthy and uncertain. He thought Tumulty was the only one he had come in contact with who was. It is curious that he should pick him as an exception to the rule. Dudley Malone [a Wilson appointee who turned on the president for his lukewarm support of women’s suffrage in his first term] and some others have brought him to this frame of mind and he does the Irish an injustice.⁷⁰

Wilson’s frustration may have derived from the efforts of Phelan and others pushing for assistance on behalf of Ireland. Whatever the motivation, it is telling a president would express a generalization of this kind about an entire “race,” one to which he had politically appealed on ancestral grounds in the past. House was also convinced that Wilson might run for a third term.

I am opposed to a third term in ordinary circumstances but after looking over the different possibilities, I have come to believe that it may be necessary for the President to undertake another four years. The end of the war is drawing too near the end of his term to make it possible for him to properly solve the many problems arising at the Peace Conference, and the after war problems which are certain to need wise solution. There is no one but the President who has the proper background and outlook.⁷¹

Over the years, House had worked with several politicians, helping four to become governor of his native Texas. He knew the breed and the temptations of ambition. With unbounded self-regard in matters pertaining to peacemaking and committed to a new world order made possible with a functioning League of Nations, Wilson hadn’t closed any doors in his mind or with others. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt pondering the possibility of an unprecedented third term in 1940, the incumbent president had unfinished business he thought he alone could accomplish.

Wilson had indeed entertained the thought of a potential candidacy for the better part of two years, even up to the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1920, when Ohio Governor James M. Cox was nominated on the forty-fourth ballot. The press kept the prospect in front of the public during this period, and Wilson himself wrote Tumulty from Paris on June 2, 1919, requesting his secretary’s opinion of an editorial in the Springfield Republican about a possible third term. Though Tumulty opposed another campaign, he advised against making a formal statement—and as a result the matter remained open. Indeed, when Wilson decided to make his cross-country speaking tour in September of 1919 to generate support for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, some commentators saw it in political terms—namely the mission of a candidate rallying voters for 1920. Wilson dealt with Ireland and appeals from the American Irish as though he planned to run another race. Yet by this point his avoidance of the Ireland Question had turned a sizable percentage of Irish Americans against the president, his objectives, and his party.

The American Irish were by no means alone. Wilson’s second term was much less successful than his first, when (among other accomplishments) he and Congress reduced tariffs, enacted banking reform, created the Federal Reserve, bolstered anti-trust regulation, and established the Federal Trade Commission. Wilson called the progressive agenda of his first term the “New Freedom,” and it was overwhelmingly oriented to domestic initiatives. After his reelection in 1916, international concerns and crises consumed more of the president’s attention, and the world became a stage he thought he could command. Given the circumstances, his ambition, too, didn’t stop growing.

In retrospect, though, it is remarkable that he seriously contemplated another term after the disastrous results of the 1918 mid-term elections. With the war in Europe in its final days and victory within reach, Wilson composed an open letter, released on October 25, in which he inserted himself directly in the middle of the campaign. Saying it is “no time either for divided counsel or for divided leadership,” he phrased the possibility of the rival party winning in stark personal terms: “The return of a Republican majority to either House of the Congress would, moreover, certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.”⁷² Republicans and many independents accused Wilson of questioning their patriotism, and when the votes were counted, his opponents had won majorities in both the House and the Senate. The president’s attempt to build support for himself and his agenda backfired, making his postwar plans much more difficult to accomplish.

The mid-term elections of 1918 took place on November 5, and the armistice was signed in France just six days later. With the sense of national unity no longer an imperative among immigrants and their offspring, Wilson started to feel pressure from ethnic groups, notably the Irish, for settlement of issues the war had delayed. For instance, the Government of Ireland Act of 1914, which was to become statute on September 18, was suspended because Britain had declared war on Germany a month earlier. The end of hostilities could finally lead to home rule, and the American president could help to make it happen—or so many of his fellow citizens thought. On December 2, 1918, Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, a strong White House supporter who managed the critically important Western portion of the president’s 1916 campaign, wrote a lengthy appeal to Wilson, arguing for “a speedy solution of the question of self-government for Ireland.” Walsh’s letter set the tone for the multitude of messages delivered on paper and in person to the president about the Irish Question. The war had been fought, Wilson had led everyone to believe, to make the world safe for democracy and to gain self-determination for small nations. Now Ireland deserved that kind of Wilsonian attention and emphasis. Walsh even issued a warning for failing to act: “If the Peace Congress dissolves without a reasonably satisfactory settlement there will not be a controversy between this country and Great Britain, however trivial, that will not be fanned into what may some day be a consuming flame.”⁷³

In his response, Wilson (who departed from Washington on December 4 on the first trip to Europe ever taken by a sitting president) made no mention of his earlier decision to keep Ireland out of the Peace Conference.

I appreciate the importance of a proper solution of the Irish question and thank you for the suggestions of your letter of yesterday. Until I get on the other side and find my footing in delicate matters of this sort I cannot forecast with any degree of confidence what influence I can exercise, but you may be sure that I shall keep this important interest in mind and shall use my influence at every opportunity to bring about a just and satisfactory solution.⁷⁴

Wilson wasn’t showing his hand. Adding to the complexity of the situation in Ireland, what the British refer to as the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish call the War of Independence began on January 21, 1919, just three days after the Peace Conference formally opened.

While Wilson was in France, Tumulty stayed in Washington, keeping the president informed on activity in Congress and the domestic press coverage. The Irish Question remained a front-and-center concern, with a House of Representatives resolution urging the United States at the Peace Conference to present the case for “the right to freedom, independence, and self-determination of Ireland.”⁷⁵ However, no matter whether at the White House or abroad, Wilson was not inclined to act, telling Tumulty on January 30, 1919: “I frankly dread the effect on British public opinion with which I am daily dealing here of a Home Rule resolution by the House of Representatives and I am afraid that it would be impossible to explain such a resolution here. … It is not a question of sympathy but of international tactics at a very critical period.”⁷⁶

Wilson always seemed to find a way of not dealing formally with Ireland, though in the past he had been a strong and consistent proponent of home rule. As the Peace Conference progressed, Ireland bedeviled Wilson with such regularity that a weaker figure might have relented and pushed for some kind of resolution to reduce the pressure so he could concentrate on other issues, such as establishing the League of Nations. Wilson, however, didn’t budge. In his mind and despite the ramifications of the Rising, Ireland simply wasn’t a subject for the Peace Conference, and he did whatever he could to ensure that it didn’t receive formal consideration.

Wilson took a three-week break from conference proceedings in late February and early March 1919 to return to the States. Criticism among Republican senators to treaty proposals was already mounting, and the future of Ireland was being debated more openly in Congress and among the general public. Upon his arrival in Boston on February 24, he spoke about “the cause of liberty” in language intended to inspire not only an American audience but also people in other countries with postwar aspirations of self-determination. Near the end of his remarks, Wilson said: “We set this nation up to make men free, and we did not confine our conception and purpose to America, and now we will make men free.” Doing otherwise would diminish the country. “I have fighting blood in me, and it is sometimes a delight to let it have scope, but if it is challenged on this occasion it will be an indulgence. Think of the picture, think of the utter blackness that would fall on the world. America has failed. America made a little essay at generosity and then withdrew.” It was the country’s moral obligation to “set up light to lead men along the paths of liberty.”⁷⁷ After painting a bleak future for a world without U.S. leadership, the president mentioned by name the Polish, Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, and Armenians. He never brought up Ireland. His Boston audience may have thought it was implicit. Didn’t some of his “fighting blood” come from ancestors who had emigrated from Ireland, as he had proudly announced years before when he entered politics?

On March 1, Wilson received strongly worded letters from two close associates about the need to take up Ireland as an issue on his return to Paris, and Tumulty urged the president to meet with a delegation of Irish Americans, noting “Your attitude in this matter is fraught with a great deal of danger both to the Democratic party and to the cause you represent.” The secretary, who made a point of saying that he was “not a professional Irishman,” remained sensitive to domestic politics and to the Wilsonian worldview, concluding that “your refusal to see this delegation will simply strengthen the Sinn Fein movement in this country.”⁷⁸ Though involving relatively few Americans three years before, the Easter Rising was responsible for setting in motion what had become a “movement” in the United States to support independence for Ireland, and Wilson’s closest link to the Irish-American community understood the need to maintain friendly relations with a critical voting and opinion-forming constituency.

Moreover, George Creel, who headed the U.S. Committee on Public Information (the wartime propaganda department of the government), wrote Wilson the same day from his post in Paris, and his letter, like Tumulty’s, offered a warning. To Creel, Ireland posed “one of the most important questions with which you will have to deal.” The Irish in America were going to unite and would be joined by every German American “eager to take advantage of the opportunity to embarrass our relations with Great Britain.” Creel made clear to Wilson that Sinn Féin controlled Ireland “absolutely, with the exception of four counties in Ulster, and in two of these counties it has forty percent of the voting strength.” The old home-rule leaders were gone, and the cry was now for an Irish republic.⁷⁹

Tumulty and Creel weren’t alone in trying to get Wilson to concentrate on the Irish Question, and several other appeals to provide help can be found in the president’s papers. He ultimately consented to meet with the delegation of Irish Americans, as Tumulty wanted, doing so in New York on March 4, the day before his return to France. The New York Times told its readers that Wilson was asked to propose at the Peace Conference that Ireland should determine its future form of government. Wilson balked at expressing any opinion or potential action, according to the account, but the delegates left the twenty-five-minute session thinking the president was “favorable to the Irish cause.”⁸⁰ Interestingly, what newspapers reported about the meeting came from a statement provided by the Irish-American group. Included in the summary are direct quotations attributed to the president. At one point, he tells the committee, “I agree with your argument. Yes. I agree with what you say.” Later, in talking about whether the Irish Question should be addressed in Paris, he was less forthcoming: “when this case comes up I will have to use my best judgment as to how to act.”⁸¹

In public, Wilson continued to convey concern, creating the perception that he was working on the matter. However, away from agenda-driven delegations or argument-making correspondents, the president presented a much different face. The diary of his physician, Dr. Cary T. Grayson, contains a lengthy entry for March 4, offering a more revealing and comprehensive account of the New York meeting than any newspaper coverage. Grayson wrote that Wilson was adamant that Daniel F. Cohalan, a justice on the New York State Supreme Court, brother-in-law of Jeremiah O’Leary, and an opponent of Wilson’s presidential nomination in 1912, be excluded from the delegation. “I will not attend the meeting if Cohalan is there because he is a traitor,” the president is quoted as telling policemen protecting him. Concluding what he wrote about the session, Grayson observed: “The President heard the committee courteously but made no promises. The President said it was a domestic affair for Great Britain and Ireland to settle themselves, and not a matter for outside interference.”⁸² What is not clear from this diary entry is whether Wilson delivered his opinion about not wanting to interfere in “a domestic affair” during the meeting. Given the generally positive and optimistic statement of the delegation, it seems more probable the president said it to Grayson afterward.

As the president and his party set sail on the George Washington, Grayson added a postscript about the previous night. The doctor and Wilson were talking about the meeting, and the discussion turned from the Peace Conference to a wider perspective:

In referring to the Irish meeting last night, at which an effort was made to get the President to promise that he would bring their cause before the Peace Conference, he said that the Irish as a race are very hard to deal with owing to their inconsiderateness, their unreasonable demands and their jealousies. He predicted that owing to the dissatisfaction among the Irish-Americans and the German-Americans with the Democratic administration, unless a decided change was brought about, it might defeat the Democratic party in 1920.⁸³

In the back of his mind, Wilson might have entertained secret hopes about a third term, but he was realistic in contemplating the political repercussions of failing to solve the Irish Question. Moreover, away from the public stage and Irish Americans he wanted to impress, the president wasn’t inclined to raise his own heritage.

An even more informative account of Wilson’s reaction to the New York meeting can be found in My Diary at the Conference of Paris by David Hunter Miller, who served as a legal adviser to the U.S. Commission at the Peace Conference. Miller recounts talking with Wilson in Paris about the treaty then being drafted. What Miller recorded shows the president without his mask of feigned sincerity and seems similar to his private reaction several months earlier when he received the statue of Emmet: “He then spoke of the Irish question and said that he had been made very angry by a delegation of the Irish who had visited him while in the United States and had asked him to promise to ask the Peace Conference to make Ireland independent.” According to Miller, Wilson said he would explain matters to Prime Minister Lloyd George, and if the prime minister wanted nothing done about Ireland, then “he would do nothing.” Miller wrote that Wilson was aware that if he did not raise the issue of Irish self-determination, the Irish would start

a campaign against the League on this ground, and that this would raise a racial and religious question which would have far-reaching consequences. Of course, he said, it would be overwhelmingly defeated by the Irish and would insure the success of the League, and that his first impulse had been, from his fighting blood getting up, that he had wanted to tell them (the Irish) to go to hell, but he realized that while that might give some personal satisfaction it would not be the act of wisdom or the act of a statesman.⁸⁴

Wilson found it impossible to elude pleadings on behalf of the Irish at the Peace Conference. He even attempted humor as a way to handle the situation, quipping to Lloyd George, “I gave you the solution of that question if you had only followed it out, namely, give them Home Rule and reserve the moving-picture rights.”⁸⁵ The president’s attempt to be droll by referring to the potential for slapstick from the Irish having local governmental control didn’t amuse Lloyd George. Writing in his Memoirs of the Peace Conference, Lloyd George commented: “Wilson had no humour and his wit was synthetic.”⁸⁶

While the former prime minister tried to be fair in assessing his American counterpart at the Peace Conference, the portrait he drew was mostly unflattering. Early in his rendering of Wilson, Lloyd George complained, “Whilst we were dealing every day with ghastly realities on land and sea, some of them visible to our own eyes and audible to our ears, he was soaring in clouds of serene rhetoric.”⁸⁷ Later descriptions were equally as revealing—“He was the most extraordinary compound I have ever encountered of the noble visionary, the implacable and unscrupulous partisan, the exalted idealist and the man of rather petty personal rancours.”⁸⁸ Lloyd George went so far as to call Wilson’s participation at the Peace Conference “a mistake,” mainly because “he was not of a trustful disposition. That was his most disabling weakness—his pervasive suspiciousness. He believed in mankind but distrusted all men.”⁸⁹ Impolitic in the extreme, the allies could also be rivals.

Endless rounds of meetings with international delegations filled Wilson’s time in Paris. However, the Irish Question continued to come up in negotiations with the British, and beginning in mid-April of 1919, representatives of the American Irish arrived in France to push the president and those around him for formal consideration at the Peace Conference. Called the American Commission on Irish Independence and appointed during the Third Irish Race Convention in February 1919, the three prominent, politically connected figures had as their objective U.S. approval for leaders of Dáil Éireann, including its president and survivor of the Rising, Éamon de Valera, to make the case for self-government. The Dáil was established in January 1919 as, in effect, the revolutionary parliament in Ireland after Sinn Féin won 73 of the 101 seats in the 1918 election. Refusing to participate in the House of Commons at Westminster, these nationalists formed their own assembly in Dublin, despite British opposition, and had sent Sean T. O’Kelly to Paris in hopes of making an appeal to the president, which never occurred. The commission, led by Francis Patrick Walsh, met with Wilson shortly after arriving—and that session was about the only time the trio didn’t prompt critical reactions from the president or others participating in the conference.

The commissioners, including Edward F. Dunne, the former Democratic governor of Illinois, had hurt their cause with the American delegation during a side trip to Ireland, where (in Colonel House’s opinion) they “made incendiary speeches” advocating an Irish republic. Press coverage of what they said circulated in Ireland and Britain, putting both the British and Americans on the defensive at the Peace Conference. Although they kept hounding the president and his inner circle to schedule time for a consideration of Ireland, the requests went unheeded. In his diary (for May 21), Ray Stannard Baker noted: “The Irish-Americans … are back here from revolutionary Ireland & like every group of restless agitators came first to our office. They get everybody they come into contact with into hot water. They have written a letter to the Colonel [House] in which they try to involve both him & the President in the squabble.”⁹⁰

The commission pursued recognition for Ireland with relentless energy. For Wilson, absorbed in nuances of the treaty and his dream of a League of Nations, distraction from his larger purpose was irritating, if not exasperating. On May 29, Baker visited the president at his residence in Paris, and they talked about postwar boundaries in Austria and support of the League among “oppressed minorities in the world.” In his diary for that day, Baker notes: “All the minorities except the Irish,” said the president. “Yes,” I said, “the Irish seem very unhappy. Walsh & Dunne are in my office every day with a new letter or manifesto.” The president responded, almost savagely, “I don’t know how long I shall be able to resist telling them what I think of their miserable mischief-making… . They can see nothing except their own small interest.”⁹¹

Throughout its time abroad, the Irish-American contingent got deeper and deeper under Wilson’s skin. Just two days after his outburst about the League, Baker, again in his diary, recorded that the president talked about the “mischief makers” and how he might try to neutralize their impact back in the United States. “I have one weapon I can use against them—one terrible weapon, which I shall not use unless I am driven to it,” he said, “unless it appears that the Irish movement has forgotten to be American in its interest in a foreign controversy.” He paused, and then said, “I have only to warn our people of the attempt of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to dominate our public opinion, & there is no doubt about what America will do.”⁹² Even raising religion as a potential “weapon” revealed the near desperation of Wilson’s thinking. All the nationalist lobbying and agitation backed the frustrated president into a corner, compounding a domestic problem at the very moment that he was preoccupied with what shape the world might take after the conference.

Back at the White House, Tumulty took a more dispassionate view, worrying that not addressing Ireland could weaken U.S. support for the League of Nations. Yet even that threat did not push Wilson to search anew for some way to act. On June 8, the president responded at length to his secretary: “The American Committee of Irishmen have made it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to render the assistance we were diligently trying to render in the matter of bringing the Irish aspirations to the attention of the Peace Congress.” Wilson was convinced that by going to Ireland and in the process inflaming English opinion, the committee had undermined its cause. He said, “I made an effort yesterday in this matter which shows, I am afraid, the utter futility of future efforts. I am distressed that the American committee should have acted with such extreme indiscretion and lack of sense, and can at the moment see nothing further to do.”⁹³

Two days after criticizing the “American Committee,” Wilson did schedule a meeting with Walsh and Dunne. In his diary, Dr. Grayson provides a detailed account, noting that Walsh informed American journalists in Paris that he might seek the impeachment of Wilson if the president didn’t allow representatives from the rebel government of Ireland to speak at the Peace Conference. After listening to Walsh state his case, Wilson, as might be expected, absolved himself of blame, arguing that their trip to Ireland and own “speeches in advocacy of the Irish Republic aroused the ire of the British government and made extremely difficult, if not impossible, the matter of securing any concessions your way.”⁹⁴

Walsh responded that the commission sought for Ireland “a republican form of government” similar to the one in the United States, which fought for its independence from England, and he then “read extracts from the President’s speeches, in which the latter had pled for self-government and freedom for oppressed peoples.” Wilson reacted to hearing his own words quoted back to him by trying to correct and change the perception he seemed to have conveyed:

“You do not mean to have me think, Mr. Walsh, that you as an American construed this speech as referring directly to Ireland,” inquired the President. “I certainly did think so,” declared Walsh; “in fact, Sir, when I read your speech at the outset of the war I made an address in Kansas City in which I declared that what you said actually fitted in with what was happening in Ireland.” “Yet,” continued the President, “you must have known as everyone else knew that what I said at that time referred distinctly and decidedly to the problems affecting the nations that were involved in the war, and especially the smaller nations that had been the victims of the Central Powers.”

According to Grayson’s report of the meeting, “Walsh insisted that he had believed, and still believed, that the president had voiced an appeal for justice to all nations, Ireland included.”⁹⁵

Near the end of the meeting, Wilson retreated to the strategy of having these potential opponents feel sorry for him because the burdens of his office made all that he would like to accomplish impossible. “I wish that I could make plain to you all that I feel. You cannot realize how difficult has been the task that has been set for me to do and how it has hurt me inside to realize that I have not been able to carry through to completion the entire program which I outlined.”⁹⁶ Grayson continued to describe the scene and Wilson’s self-defense, building to the observation that the president’s “wonderful command of the English language was never so emphasized as it was in this conference with two men, who were plainly hostile to him upon their arrival, and yet whose animosity had been disarmed by the frank, free and open manner in which the President explained the terrible difficulties of the great task that had confronted him over here.”⁹⁷

This account showed Wilson directly dealing with a problem that threatened the outcome of the treaty and America’s involvement in the League of Nations. The Easter Rising unleashed forces in Ireland that, in his mind, weren’t relevant at the Peace Conference. Internal strife of this kind didn’t qualify for consideration. Others had interpreted his rhetoric differently. The former academic’s abstract language created misunderstanding not only among Irish Americans but also among the Irish themselves. In fact, in late 1918 and before the December election that Sinn Féin dominated, the Irish Parliamentary Party circulated a leaflet, “Ireland’s Appeal to President Wilson,” that relied on statements from Wilson’s speeches as the bases for “Free Self-Determination.” Published by the United Irish League in Dublin, the pamphlet (available at the National Library of Ireland) emphasized, in Wilson’s phrase, “the right of small nations,” and ends in language that is both strong and definite: “We appeal to you, sir, because in every hour of our history our race has stood by the flag of your nation, and your nation has never refused us its aid, its sympathy, and its accord with our national aspirations.”⁹⁸ The moderate, constitutional party of John Redmond and John Dillon drew hope from Wilson’s speeches—just as the Sinn Féin–oriented American Irish did. In a very real way, Wilson’s own words came back to haunt him. Yet what sounded so hopeful to others meant something quite different to the speaker himself.

As one scholar has put it, Wilson “was at home in phrases, abstractions, ideas, not in raw reality.”⁹⁹ To a certain extent, this judgment of the mature Wilson, who was immersed in international affairs, echoes what Arthur S. Link wrote concerning the years before 1902, when Wilson assumed the presidency of Princeton. Link states:

Wilson’s political thought during this period was of course chiefly derived from historical study and theoretical speculation. The student will look in vain among his speeches or writings for any indication that Wilson understood even faintly the workings of the political machine, the activities of the ward heeler, or the multifarious ramifications of everyday political practice.¹⁰⁰

Visionary and idealist, Wilson saw the world, near and far, through the eyes of an academic—with an academic’s bookish and restricted myopia. For all his intelligence and international concern, Wilson could be blind to the nuance of “raw reality”—notably the tangled issues the Irish Question posed for the Irish, the British, and Irish Americans.

Back at the White House, Tumulty gauged the growing hostility in the United States as a result of the avoidance of the Ireland Question at the Peace Conference. Republicans and even some Democrats were voicing opposition to the treaty, but Wilson refused to tamp down the resistance by taking a stand. On June 18, Tumulty sent a one-line telegram to the president: “Just a word for Ireland would help a great deal.”¹⁰¹ Nine days later at a press conference in Paris, Wilson was asked about Ireland, and his response encompassed seventeen words without much meaning: “The Irish question takes new shape every day. I am a good deal at sea about it.”¹⁰² The same day, June 27, he sent Tumulty a telegram that referred to “the Irish question,” how it might be resolved, along with the domestic politics related to it:

I firmly believe that when the League of Nations is once organized it will afford a forum not now available for bringing the opinion of the world and of the United States in particular to bear on just such problems [as Ireland]. The Republicans will commit another great blunder if they make use of the Irish agitation and will endanger the lining up of the whole country along religious lines. That would be a calamity which would not be compensated for by the defeat of the Republicans.¹⁰³

History proved him wrong on every count.

Shortly after Wilson’s second term ended, Tumulty published a memoir in which he devoted an entire chapter to Ireland, beginning it with an assessment that contrasted how the president was perceived by those following what he did from the outside versus the view of others in close proximity to the Oval Office. “To one standing on the side-lines in the capital of the nation and witnessing the play of the ardent passions of the people of the Irish race,” it seemed as if Wilson was “woefully unmindful” of their dreams to be free of British domination. “But to those, like myself, who were on the inside of affairs, it was evident that in every proper and legitimate way the American President was cautiously searching for efficient means to advance the cause of self-government in Ireland and to bring about a definite and satisfactory solution of this complicated problem.”¹⁰⁴

Tumulty’s staunch defense of Wilson included an anecdote about the president’s reaction to Edward Carson, when the Ulster Unionist leader in Westminster threatened to refuse recognition of home rule. Quoting Carson’s statement that “I do not care two pence whether this is treason or not,” Tumulty reported Wilson as stating, “He ought to be hanged for treason.” If Prime Minister Asquith didn’t call Carson’s bluff, “the contagion of unrest and rebellion in Ireland will spread until only a major operation will save the Empire.” Then there is the invocation of another president of Northern Irish heritage. “A little of the firmness and courage of Andrew Jackson would force a settlement of the Irish question right now,” Tumulty quoted Wilson as saying.¹⁰⁵

Wilson never went beyond the viewpoint that home rule was the answer to Britain’s problem with Ireland. The faithful secretary parroted his boss’s pronouncements about “a delicate diplomatic situation” that made it impossible “to espouse the cause of Ireland” and forced the president “to move quietly and by informal conferences.” To be sure, Wilson comprehended the complexities involved, but there’s no evidence that he pushed for a genuine resolution. Near the end of his memoir-cum-brief, Tumulty even argued that “Ireland has never had a truer friend than Woodrow Wilson.”¹⁰⁶ However, the evidence seems to indicate that Wilson was largely indifferent to Irish self-determination.¹⁰⁷

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, and Wilson arrived back in America on July 8 to a hero’s welcome: a ticker-tape parade in New York City and a cheering throng, estimated at 100,000, at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. Two days later, the president addressed Congress. His campaign to ratify the treaty and gain support for the League of Nations had begun in earnest. The effort, of course, would lead to Wilson’s decision to make a physically demanding cross-country speaking tour in September. Three weeks into it, he became ill in Colorado, and Dr. Grayson urged an immediate return to Washington. Then, on October 2, the president suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage that, in effect, rendered it impossible for him to appear in public or conduct the day-to-day duties of the president. The Senate rejected the treaty, which Wilson would not allow to be changed, on November 19, 1919, and then for a second time four months later, on March 19, 1920. The United States, therefore, never joined the League of Nations. The president, who championed “peace without victory” before his nation entered the European hostilities, had achieved peace but without the treaty victory he so fervently desired.

The Senate Republican crucial to shattering Wilson’s postwar dreams was Henry Cabot Lodge from Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee after the 1918 elections flipped congressional control to the GOP. Killing the Treaty of Versailles and preventing participation in the League of Nations pitted Lodge against Wilson. At one point on the Senate floor, Lodge said, “I have loved but one flag and I cannot share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a league.”¹⁰⁸ No longer to be taken for granted by Democrats, the American Irish played a critical role in the campaign against the treaty. The Friends of Irish Freedom circulated over a million pamphlets and sponsored newspaper advertising in opposition to Wilson in places where he spoke on behalf of the League.¹⁰⁹

So much had changed in a relatively brief time. English writer H. G. Wells described how the world viewed Wilson during his participation at Versailles: “He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah. Millions believed him as the bringer of untold blessings; thousands would gladly have died for him.” A few sentences later, however, Wells offered a more considered (and less considerate) judgment from more extended scrutiny: “The essential Wilson, the world was soon to learn, was vain and theatrical, with no depth of thought and no wide generosity. So far from standing for all mankind, he stood indeed only for the Democratic Party in the United States—and for himself.”¹¹⁰ The president, who previously emphasized the value of working with Congress (even meeting members in the President’s Room of the Capitol), decided to go directly to the people when his party lost the majority in both chambers. Though creative and flexible in trying to generate support, Wilson was unwilling to modify the treaty’s substance. By not bending to alternative approaches, the president could show little except extensive press coverage after six intense months of performing on the world stage.

Wilson’s decline, both physically and politically, is a story that has been told often since his death on February 3, 1924, in Washington, D.C.¹¹¹ Doubts about Democrats occupying the nation’s highest office lingered, and Republican presidential candidates were elected three straight times—in 1920, 1924, and 1928. Incredibly, even in his weakened and frail state, Wilson entertained ideas of running for the White House in both 1920 and 1924.¹¹² What is less well known, however, is Wilson’s own interpretation of who was responsible in dashing his dreams for a world that he had worked so hard to shape. Included in one volume of the president’s published papers is a letter from William Edward Dodd about a meeting the University of Chicago historian and future ambassador to Germany had with Wilson in early 1921, just before leaving the White House and shortly after the formal announcement in late 1920 that Wilson was the recipient of the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize. Dodd, a friend and Wilson biographer (and fellow Virginian), remarked at the beginning “the President is sure a broken man.” As Dodd went on, it becomes clear that the president’s physical frailty was one aspect of a larger human collapse, intellectually and emotionally. Long-cherished goals were now reduced to the psychic rubble of noble but failed intentions. A brooding bitterness made this clearly fragile figure seek consolation in assigning fault to others, both individuals and groups. Wilson identified Lloyd George as “the real cause of the defeat,” and the president’s thinking is preoccupied by one abiding concern: “Wilson can not talk ten minutes without reverting to Paris. That word means the summation of a life struggle to him. There he had the world for his parish; there he says the world abandoned him.”¹¹³

In continuing to describe the session, Dodd reported the president’s “insistence the Irish had wrecked his whole programme for adoption of the work at Paris.” Gone was any attempt to cushion personal opinion with diplomatic language: “ ‘Oh, the foolish Irish,’ ” he would say. “ ‘Would to God they might all have gone back home.’ ”¹¹⁴ Wilson’s consolation, according to Dodd, was a sense of fellowship with a former British prime minister, who had his own problems with Ireland: “Wilson reverted to Gladstone, whom he has always considered a sort of political saint to himself. Gladstone he said was right in most he tried to do. You know how perfectly the Irish trouble defeated Gladstone in his life-work. . . . Wilson is another Gladstone and he feels it.”¹¹⁵

Especially during the postwar phase of his second term, Wilson had refused to concentrate on the Irish Question, even though it seemed to dog him—from America to Europe and back again twice. Despite the leadership he tried to exert on the world stage and the radical changes within Ireland after the Easter Rising and the executions, Wilson kept dodging in public while fuming and fulminating in private. Finally, over time, public opinion in the United States and elsewhere crystallized: Wilson was not inclined to do anything of lasting consequence for Ireland. Though he blamed the American Irish for the failure to ratify the treaty and involve the United States in the League of Nations, they, in turn, blamed him for abandoning Ireland at a critical juncture. From either perspective, the centrality of the Irish issue was undeniable, leading to another not insignificant question: How could a president, seriously contemplating a third term, be so obstinately close-minded in addressing an important political constituency’s dominant concern?

As the American Commission for Irish Independence tried, without success, to place Ireland on the agenda of the Peace Conference, Colonel House jotted in his diary a comment that might help explain both the pre-presidential Wilson and the figure who occupied the White House for eight years. “One of the great defects of the President’s character is his prejudice and self-will,” House observed.¹¹⁶ The consummate idealist, global peacemaker, and champion of democracy was unable to overcome his own unwillingness to bring the fate of Ireland to the world’s attention at a turning point in history, when the effort could have proved decisive for what he also wanted to achieve at home. Assessing Wilson, especially as a war leader, Winston Churchill wrote, “He did not truly divine the instinct of the American people.”¹¹⁷ When it came to Ireland, Wilson was equally unable to recognize a cause with the potential of advancing his ambitious international agenda.

As a politician, Wilson no doubt wanted to have it both ways—maintaining an image of concern without doing anything concrete. In this case, the sensible politics of taking steps to satisfy the longing of millions of Irish Americans could have translated into support for the broader governmental and global program he longed to accomplish. As years passed, he seemed to deny his divided sense of exile. Though he had worked as a candidate and later to project the perception that his own Irishness could bridge nationalist and unionist thinking, the reality of his own inaction came to define him. This inaction could have derived from his Ulster ancestry or his deeply held conviction that hyphenated Americanism had no place in U.S. public affairs. Whatever the case, the Irish Question was an issue that demanded a definite policy stand, but the president decided to do nothing.

On June 11, 1919, the day when Wilson met Walsh and Dunne in Paris, Éamon de Valera arrived in New York for an eighteen-month stay to build support and to raise money for an Irish republic. A Rising leader now engaged in politics, de Valera embarked on a speaking tour that, in contrast to Wilson’s, rallied Irish America, engendering hope for an independent Ireland. Denied a hearing in Paris, de Valera brought the revolutionary spirit of 1916 to the republic of his birth, a place he considered vital to the new nation he was struggling to help establish across the Atlantic.