Smyllie's Ireland

Caleb Richardson

Description

As Irish republicans sought to rid the country of British rule and influence in the early 20th century, a clear delineation was made between what was "authentically" Irish and what was considered to be English influence. As a member of the Anglo-Irish elite who inhabited a precarious identity somewhere in between, R. M. Smyllie found himself having to navigate the painful experience of being made to feel an outsider in his own homeland. Smyllie's role as an influential editor of the Irish Times meant he had to confront most of the issues that defined the Irish experience, from Ireland's neutrality during World War II to the fraught cultural claims surrounding the Irish language and literary censorship. In this engaging consideration of a bombastic, outspoken, and conflicted man, Caleb Wood Richardson offers a way of seeing Smyllie as representative of the larger Anglo-Irish experience. Richardson explores Smyllie's experience in a German internment camp in World War I, his foreign correspondence work for the Irish Times at the Paris Peace Conference, and his guiding hand as an advocate for cultural and intellectualism. Smyllie had a direct influence on the careers of writers such as Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice, and his surprising decision to include an Irish-language column in the paper had an enormous impact on the career of novelist Flann O'Brien. Smyllie, like many of his class, felt a strong political connection to England at the same time as he had enduring cultural dedications to Ireland. How Smyllie and his generation navigated the collision of identities and allegiances helped to define what Ireland is today.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Locals

2. West Brits

3. Continentals

4. Patrons5. Liberals

6. Patriots

7. Gaels

8. Anglo-Irish

Conclusion: Smyllie's Ireland

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Irish Times
• Dublín
• Protestantism
• History of Ireland
• Newspaper
• List of Irish uprisings
• Modern history
• Irish literature
• Cold War
• Social history
• Anglo-Irish
• General officer
• Ireland
• Publishing
• Journalist
• 20th century
• Journalism
• Irish
• History of Europe
• English Civil War
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• General
• Train de luxe
• Editors
• The Irish Times
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Musique irlandaise
• Protestantisme
• Europe
• Dublin

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 24 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253041265
• Langue: English

Extrait

SMYLLIE S IRELAND
IRISH CULTURE, MEMORY, AND PLACE
Oona Frawley, Ray Cashman, and Guy Beiner, editors
SMYLLIE S IRELAND
Protestants, Independence, and the Man Who Ran the Irish Times
Caleb Wood Richardson
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Caleb Wood Richardson
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04123-4 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04124-1 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04127-2 (web PDF)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 Locals
2 West Brits
3 Continentals
4 Patrons
5 Liberals
6 Patriots
7 Gaels
8 Anglo-Irish
Conclusion: Smyllie s Ireland

Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
S TUDENTS SOMETIMES ASK ME HOW ANYONE EVER WRITES a book. Here s how, in eight easy steps:
First, choose the right graduate program. Paul Seaver, Paul Robinson, James Sheehan, Richard White, and Jack Rakove were models of scholarly rigor and personal generosity. Peter Stansky provided help, advice, counsel, constructive criticism, and occasionally quiche for the better part of a decade, and the historian I am today is almost entirely his doing. Chad Martin, Amy Robinson, Rodney Koeneke, John Broich, Chris Wilson, Jesse Kauffman, Rachel Nunez, Emily Greble, James Ward, Kevin Carey, James Carolan, Anna Chang, Kris Salata, Joe Sacco, and Dan Maidenberg all helped me maintain some sense of perspective. The Lady Vaizey s hospitality is much appreciated. Thanks are also due to grants from the Stanford History Department and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences as well as to the Fred W. Oakford Graduate Fellowship.
Second, get to know librarians and archivists-the eternally unsung heroes of the scholarly world. The special collections and archival staff at the National Archives and the National Library, Dublin; University College Cork; University College Dublin; the National Archives, Kew; the University of Victoria; the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale; the Hoover Institution; Stanford University Libraries; and the University of New Mexico Libraries all responded to my impertinent requests with good humor and great advice. Acknowledgements are also due to the following for permissions granted: the Irish Times , New Hibernia Review , ire-Ireland , and the Harvard Law Library.
Third, find great people to work with. The faculty and staff of the History Department at the University of New Mexico had me unceremoniously foisted upon them but have never once reminded me of this. One of the greatest pleasures of my professional career is being able to listen to the complaints of colleagues at other institutions whose departments are dysfunctional, disagreeable, or worse. I get to smile and say, quite honestly, that I really have no idea what they re talking about. And I was lucky enough to have not only a great department but also a great set of colleagues outside my department. Trying to build an Irish Studies program from scratch is easy if you have a coconspirator as impressive as Sarah Townsend. Interdisciplinary collaboration is a breeze when you get to work with people such as Maria Szasz and Mary Power. Lori Gallagher has provided a model of generosity and dedication to the field that will never cease to inspire me.
Fourth, get yourself a scholarly network. I found mine in and around the American Conference of Irish Studies and the American Conference for Irish Studies-Western Regional. Brian Conchubhair, Nick Wolf, Anna Teekell, Jim Walsh, Audrey Eyler, Charlotte Headrick, Kathy Heininge, Donna Potts, Traolach O Riordain, Dave Emmons, Myles Dungan, Matt Spangler, Glen Gendzel, Tony Bucher, David Brundage, Nick Harrington, Matt Horton, Brian McCabe, and Camille Harrigan have changed my mind about conferences, and Ian d Alton, Ida Milne, David Lloyd, Jim Rogers, Vera Kreilkamp, and Jim Donnelly have all been extraordinarily supportive of my work at moments when I was not at all sure that it deserved it. Matthew Stibbe was generous in sharing his extensive knowledge of Ruhleben Camp and Colonel William Gibson his unparalleled expertise in the history of Irish golf.
Fifth, find a world-class press. When I first began telling people that I had signed a contract with Indiana University Press, they would sigh and say, Ah, Indiana, as if they were remembering prewar Paris in springtime. It turns out that Indiana s reputation for being a pleasure to work with is understating it considerably. Kate Schramm s patience is apparently endless, and the professionalism and enthusiasm of Jennika Baines-the kind of scholar-editor that most people don t believe exists anymore-is truly a wonder to behold. Thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers of this work in manuscript: your thoughtful comments and suggestions were enormously helpful.
Sixth, associate yourself with good families, and ideally plan ahead so that you re born into one. Denis and Bev Pirio and Stephanie and Steve Parrish have been relentlessly encouraging. My parents, Bill and Carol Richardson, have showered me with affection, support, and healthy snacks for as long as I can remember, and even before. Micah, Catherine, and Desmond have tolerated my absent-mindedness with far more good humor than I have any right to expect.
Seventh, if you re going to have children, be sure to have great ones. Townes and Harrison did everything in their power, at every stage of the process, to distract me from my research and writing, and I can t thank them enough for it.
Eighth, if at all possible, marry Sarah Pirio. Most of what I do, when it comes down to it, is just showing off to try to get her attention, and this book is no exception.
SMYLLIE S IRELAND
INTRODUCTION
W HAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOUR COUNTRY LEAVES you behind?
In the early twentieth century, this was the question faced by hundreds of thousands of southern Irish Protestants, who found themselves transformed into aliens in their own land. The period of the Irish Revolution-the series of events between 1912 and 1923 that included a fight over Home Rule, the Easter Rising and War of Independence, the partition of the island into separate states, and the Civil War-is the most obvious landmark in this story. By the early 1920s, the religious divide between the two polities on the island was as clear as it would be between India and Pakistan decades later, with southern Protestants on the wrong side of the line. There is a good reason that many of the classic histories of southern Protestant influence end on or about December 6, 1921, the day the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed. 1 It seems characteristic of this remarkably undramatic group that they let Michael Collins get to the phrase first, but southern Irish Protestants, too, could have said that they were signing their death warrant with the treaty.
In fact the alienation of southern Protestants had begun much earlier and would last much longer than that period. From Catholic Emancipation to Celtic Tiger, members of this group found themselves on the wrong side of Irish history. Few of its members alive in 1912 could remember a time when they had been anything but a descendancy, and few born that year would live to witness how the Catholics became Protestant at the turn of the twenty-first century. 2 Since the group s peak in the late eighteenth century, when the southern Protestant minority had attained a position of power and influence in Ireland comparable to that once held by Germans in the Baltic or Swedes in Finland, they had been losing ground. The Act of Union eliminated their parliament, Daniel O Connell s successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation diluted their votes, and a rising middle class chipped away at their economic power. By the late nineteenth century, their largest threats came from those they might have assumed to be their friends. The three most serious blows to southern Irish Protestant power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dealt by Charles Stewart Parnell, a Wicklow landlord who led a nearly successful campaign for Irish Home Rule; Gerald Balfour, the chief secretary for Ireland whose attempts to kill Home Rule with kindness nearly killed off Unionist dominance in local government; and George Wyndham, a Conservative member of parliament who sponsored a series of Land Acts that encouraged the breakup of large estates.
As a result, even before the tumultuous period of 1912 to 1923, the position of southern Irish Protestants had begun to weaken. But as a dividing line, the period still matters. Until that point, southern Protestants could still point to Jonathan Swift, Henry Grattan, Parnell, and Theobald Wolfe Tone to make the case that Protestants as well as Catholics deserved a place in Ireland s history. From a cultural perspective, in the 1890s and early 1900s the leading lights of the Celtic Revival seemed to prove that a Protestant could be as Gaelic as anyone else. They may have been a minority, but it was a minority that played an outsize role. But during the revolut