Yankee in de Valera's Ireland

David Gray

Description

David Gray has a divided legacy in Ireland. Born in Buffalo, New York, he was a journalist and playwright before he became a diplomat. He took up the post of US Minister to Ireland in 1940 following appointment by his wife's relation Franklin D. Roosevelt. His memoir of that year, 'Behind the Emerald Curtain', has been published by the Royal Irish Academy for the first time, with insightful annotations and a long introduction by Professor Paul Bew. Politically, Gray was an Anglophile who opposed Irish neutrality and distrusted many aspects of his host country. His belligerence towards Irish people and his fractious relationship with Eamon de Valera make for an energetic narrative. This is important primary source documentation of neutral Ireland during the Second World War. Woven through Gray's personal accounts are diary extracts, letters exchanged with Roosevelt, secret telegrams and press clippings. Written when he was 89, 'Behind the Emerald Curtain' recalls in florid detail with a sharp comic eye the fishing, racing, Hunt balls and luncheons of the diplomatic life, making this a fine literary work in its own right.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Diplomacy
• Memoir
• Ireland
• Stephen Ireland
• Diplomatie (homonymie)

Informations

• Publié par: Royal Irish Academy
• Date de parution: 06 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911479505
• Langue: English

Extrait

* The memoir of David Gray *
A YANKEE IN DE VALERA S IRELAND
EDITED BY PAUL BEW
A yankee in de Valera s Ireland: the memoir of David Gray
First published 2012
by Royal Irish Academy 19 Dawson Street Dublin 2
www.ria.ie
The editor and publisher are grateful to the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, for permission to reproduce the material in this book.
Text copyright 2012 Royal Irish Academy The editor has asserted his moral rights.
ISBN 978-1-908996-05-3 PB ISBN 978-1-911479-49-9 PDF
ISBN 978-1-911479-50-5 epub ISBN 978-1-911479-51-2 mobi
Front cover: Eamon de Valera with David Gray at the US Legation (1 January 1940), photograph by William Vandivert, Getty Images, original has been altered. Reverse of front cover: Irish Press , 20 May 1940, 6. Reverse of back cover: Irish Independent , 15 April 1940, 5. The prelim pages begin on the half title.
The editor and publisher are grateful to the John J. Burns Library at Boston College for permission to reproduce David Gray s memoir Behind the Emerald Curtain , and to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce the biography of David Gray from the Dictionary of Irish biography .
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Fidelma Slattery Copy-editing: Maggie Armstrong Typesetting: Carole Lynch Index: Helen Litton
Contents
I NTRODUCTION David Gray-no cultural relativist
Paul Bew
P REFACE
David Gray
C HAPTER I All sweetness and light
February 4th-March 28th
C HAPTER II That night took ship for Dublin
March 29th-April 3rd
C HAPTER III Pronounced popularly tee shack
April 6th-12th
C HAPTER IV I felt every inch a plenipotentiary
April 15th-18th
C HAPTER V The world was tumbling down
April 18th-28th
C HAPTER VI A sitting duck for the Great Idealist
May 1st-20th
C HAPTER VII The dds and ends of obsolescent armament
May 22nd-31st
C HAPTER VIII These are very tragic times
May 31st-June 8th
C HAPTER IX We would like to see the English nearly bate
June 8th-12th
C HAPTER X I see things which are not for your young ears to hear
June 12th-22nd
C HAPTER XI Northern Ireland without strings
June 24th-July 2nd
C HAPTER XII The Sinn F in Heart was exultant
July 1st-13th
C HAPTER XIII We had no secrets
July 13th-August 14th
C HAPTER XIV New coteries were working
August 15th-31st
Biography of David Gray, Bernadette Whelan
Publisher s Note
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
There can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable man that if Ireland were given complete independence, with its own army and control of its own ports and powers to enter into treaties with foreign nations, whether they were friendly or hostile to us, that would place Britain in a position of such peril that I should hesitate to think what would befall in the event of either the great struggle with Napoleon or the great struggle with Germany.
David Lloyd George 1
In 1993 Tim Pat Coogan said of David Gray s historical memoirs, here published for the first time: Its splenetic tone was such that the reaction from de Valera followers would have eclipsed the reaction to Salman Rushdie s Satanic Verses . 2 But Coogan added that it was nevertheless a valuable historic document . Since 1993 David Gray s reputation has declined somewhat. In 2009 a distinguished Irish historian of intelligence matters, Professor Keith Jeffery, described him as an ineffably ill-informed Hibernophobe . 3 In 2009 also R.M. Douglas, who has-more than any other scholar-sought to insist on the relative strength of pro-Axis sentiment in Ireland, nonetheless portrayed Gray as an obsessive, receiving intelligence information-albeit surprisingly accurate information-by means of spiritualist s ance. 4 In 2010, Professor Tully wrote: Gray was hardly the ideal candidate for the position. His early career was a series of failures . He brought with him no experiences with Ireland, other than a few hunting trips in the 1930s . 5 In 2010 also Maurice Walsh described Gray as petulant ... unhelpful ... unbalanced , authoring alarmist and wildly inaccurate diplomatic reports on Irish security. 6
Who then was David Gray? It is important to note that he was nearly 70 years old-ten years beyond the usual retirement age in the UK diplomatic service-when he took up his position as US minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary to Ireland in 1940 (twenty years later, Gray was still active enough to be elected vice-president of the Harvard Club in Sarasota). 7 Gray was a well-connected member of the East Coast elite: the son of a Buffalo newspaper proprietor. He graduated from Harvard in 1892-where he acquired his interest in spiritualism-and was admitted to the Bar. Gray pursued a legal career unsuccessfully 8 but achieved more as a journalist-working as an editorial writer in New York.
Gray then had an impressive spell of military service in World War One. He was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and was made a Chevalier of the L gion d honneur and a Chevalier de la Couronne. He was a commandant captain of aviation in the French airforce in France. Gray, however, saw himself, above all, as a literary man rather than a soldier. For example, in 1919 he co-authored the play Smith with William Somerset Maugham; in 1924 he co-authored a play with the playboy playwright Avery Hopwood, The best people , which was filmed in 1925 and again in 1930 as Fast and loose (which starred Carole Lombard and had Preston Sturges as a scriptwriter). The best people ran for almost a year in the London theatre. 9 Two volumes of Gray s short stories, Ensign Russell and Gallops , were in print in the years immediately after his death, published by the Books for Libraries Press in Freeport, New York. Gray incidentally maintained his literary interests even at the height of international crisis in the summer of 1940. On 18 June he offered to read a play of Miche l MacLiamm ir of the Gate Theatre in Dublin. 10 On 25 July he was engaged in a correspondence with Twentieth Century Fox about the script Where stars walk . In the 1930s he went into agribusiness in Florida and liked to tell Irish audiences that he was a farmer. The Dublin appointment was, in effect, his sixth career.
Yet, all these attributes or activities do not explain Gray s appointment as a United States minister plenipotentiary. That appointment, as he liked to say himself, was in part nepotistic. As the historian Stephen Hess has pointed out, President Roosevelt appointed several other relatives to significant positions. 11 Gray s wife was the aunt of Franklin D. Roosevelt s wife, Eleanor; this gave him the edge when the president considered who was the best man to replace another old friend, John Cudahy, as the American representative in Dublin. This family connection has another significance. It meant that Gray had an intimacy with the White House denied to other diplomatic representatives to small neutral countries in the Second World War. It gives his time in Dublin a very special interest. Roosevelt, for example, on 18 May 1940 wrote to Queen Wilhelmina of Holland that she should organise an escape to the USA through Ireland, where the Minister David Gray is my cousin . 12
In the aftermath of the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, a significant part of the US establishment remained isolationist. Indeed, men such as Joseph Kennedy, Roosevelt s minister to Britain, the republican Senate leader Robert Taft and the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh had all said they believed England could not survive and publicly predicted a complete Nazi victory in Europe. Roosevelt did not share this thinking, but in the summer and fall of 1940 he was still manoeuvring between the desire for a more interventionist foreign policy and the difficult context of a reluctant American public and his re- election. Roosevelt told a cheering crowd, which included many Irish- Americans, in isolationist Boston: I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars . 13 Unsurprisingly, some Irish diplomats seem to have accepted the authenticity of this declaration. David Gray, on the other hand, was sufficiently close to the president not to believe it. Roosevelt s rhetoric was not simply hypocritical, but rather was a necessary feature of the odd dialectic between president and people, in which FDR gave assurances he did not mean and they pretended to believe him . 14
David Gray knew Ireland rather well. His literary interests had created connections to the Irish intellectual and artistic worlds. In June 1933 he visited Drishane House in Castletownshend, west Cork, as guest of the celebrated Anglo-Irish writer and fellow spiritualist Edith Somerville. Gray enjoyed the rural Irish lifestyle so much-hunting and fishing, in particular-that he and his wife spent the winter in the country. 15 He started to write a serious and sympathetic book on Ireland.
The appointment of David Gray, a passionate Anglophile , has been seen by Professor Eunan O Halpin as a clear sign that the [Roosevelt] administration had no sympathy for Ireland s position . 16 In fact, Gray was considered to be a friend of Ireland. It is true that G. Hall Roosevelt could write to Gray on 2 July: This is July 2nd. I give you ten days to haul down the Irish flag in Dublin , but a bad joke is just a bad joke. 17 Gray was initially well disposed towards Eamon de Valera. In fact, as we also know from Professor O Halpin s excellent research- a State Department official noted that Gray knows