Her experience of Irish America was an important one. A supportive community listened to her, appreciated her courage, and enabled her to return home with renewed determination to play her part in winning freedom for her country.
Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, founder of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, was a leading figure in Irish feminist circles. By 1914 she had twice been imprisoned for her protests at the refusal of the British government to grant the vote to British and Irish women. An outspoken critic of political organizations for their failure to support the feminist cause, she was an unlikely person to be hailed by the old Fenian, John Devoy, as an ambassador for Irish nationalism. However, following her visit to America in the wake of the Easter Rising, Devoy was to write in the Gaelic American, “Mrs. Skeffington has done more real good to the cause of Ireland during her short stay in America than all the Irish orators and writers who have undertaken to enlighten the American people for the past twenty-five years.”
The months spent in America by Hanna during 1917 and 1918 were to see her develop into a political figure of worldwide renown. Despite personal tragedy, her experience of Irish America was an important one. A supportive community listened to her, appreciated her courage and enabled her to return home with renewed determination to play her part in winning freedom for her country.
Hanna and Francis Sheehy Skeffington were close friends of Thomas McDonagh and James Connolly, two of the key organizers of the Rising. Although they had known that armed rebellion was being planned, the couple had different views on the morality of such an undertaking. Francis was a well-known pacifist and although he supported the ideals of the revolutionaries he did not support their methods. He spent the first day of the Rising organizing a citizens’ militia to try to prevent the looting of shops, which he feared would bring discredit upon those ideals. On the second day of the Rising, Hanna and Francis walked together from their home to the center of Dublin. Hanna reported to the General Post Office, the headquarters of the rebels, and carried supplies around to various outposts. Later that day Francis, on his way home, was arrested by a British army officer, and that night, without charge or trial, he was shot dead in Portobello army barracks. As his widow later told the inquiry into the events at Portobello, she was never informed officially of her husband’s arrest, of his murder or of his unauthorized burial. After her personal appeal to Prime Minister Asquith, an inquiry was held. However, the British government refused to make public its conclusions. They would have been too damning, particularly as Britain was struggling in the First World War and anxious to recruit America as an ally. Hanna decided that she had to defy British censorship and tell the world of the murder of her husband. She was still in mourning, but the British refusal to allow her to travel abroad strengthened her determination. “Sometimes it is harder to live for a cause than to die for it. It would be a poor tribute to my husband if grief were to break my spirit. It shall not do so.”
Hanna smuggled herself and her young son Owen to America. They landed in New York just before Christmas. They would stay in America for 18 months, during which time she would speak at over 250 meetings in 21 states. Her first public meeting took place in Carnegie Hall on 6 January, 1917. The hall was filled to capacity with journalists, judges, clergy, labor leaders, suffragists and prominent socialites. The lecture was entitled “British Militarism As I Have Known It,” a searing attack on British actions in Ireland. She said, “I confined myself entirely to facts without personal comment and allowed the Americans to draw their own conclusions; I dealt not only with the story of my husband’s murder but with the North King Street shootings, the death of the boy Coade, of Councillor Richard O’Carroll, the deportations and raids and of the horrors that have become the platitudes and the everyday happenings in a country under military occupation.”
She was determined to tell her story all over the country, but soon realized the enormity of her task. “I was touring not a nation but a continent. San Francisco is in many respects as different from New York as Petrograd is from London and no one can estimate the strength of Irish sentiment in the United States who has not included the West in his observations.” In the propaganda battle being waged between Irish and British, Hanna occupied a pivotal place. From huge auditorium to a college-based women’s club and trade union hall, her political appeal crossed boundaries that few others could reach. The press described her as well-educated, refined and a natural and eloquent speaker. At the conclusion of her speeches she would ask her audience to pledge themselves “to press for Ireland’s claim to be heard at the Peace Conference and her right to complete independence put before a jury of nations.”
British reaction to her effectiveness included constant tailing by agents and sneers in the pro-British press on her naiveté in being used as propaganda by sinister forces. In Buffalo she was almost lured onto the wrong train by a group posing as her reception committee. Just in time, she discovered that the train was destined for the British-controlled territory of Canada. Had she ended there, she would have had no way of preventing immediate deportation to England.
After America entered the war on Britain’s side, the Department of Justice began to take an interest in her presence in the country. The Bureau of Investigation sent agents to infiltrate her meetings and the Military Intelligence section of the War Department also kept her under surveillance. The eventual conclusion was that her lectures were “extremely pro-Irish and anti-British but they do not attack the United States.” Hanna was careful not to cross over the boundaries of what was considered politically acceptable, as various agents acknowledged. “The lady, who is highly educated, delivered a very interesting lecture showing why Ireland should be considered at the peace conference at the end of the war…Her remarks could not be construed in any way as anti-American or anti-ally as she is quite well instructed as to her rights in speech from all appearances.”
She enjoyed her experience of America and praised its modern efficiency. “One may by phone from one room in a New York hotel not only book reservations in the train but may also dispatch one’s trunk from one hotel to another across the Continent and find it waiting in one’s room on arrival.” However, there was too much moving around to make it practical to keep eight-year-old Owen with her, so she enrolled him at “Boyland,” a progressive school in Santa Barbara. The boy blossomed in that happy atmosphere, leaving his mother free to continue her journeying. Her first public meeting in San Francisco, on 14 June 1917, was in a hall owned by the Knights of Columbus. Hundreds were turned away, and every inch of standing room was used to accommodate those who flocked to hear her. Her speech was greeted with repeated ovations as the crowd rose to its feet over and over again, applauding her throughout her address. When some invitations to speak were withdrawn because of political pressures, she remained adamant that she would not be silenced. Speaking at the Dreamland Rink to a crowd of 8,000, she thanked those who had refused to allow her to speak in the San Francisco Civic Centre, for helping to create the success of the meeting she was now addressing. Friends of Irish Freedom, her sponsors, were able to form new branches in the wake of such meetings.
At the end of 1917 Hanna went to Washington, to lobby Congress. John Devoy appointed Seamus O’Sheel to escort her and to report back to him on all her movements. Devoy liked to know what was going on in all sections of the Irish-American community. On her first visit to Capitol Hill the British Ambassador walked past. O’Sheel reported that “Mrs. Skeffington decided to approach him right then…she chatted with Spring-Rice for ten minutes and made appointment for the Embassy at 3 p.m.” Hanna liked her time in Washington. She considered the place “more democratic and kindlier than the Tory Club room of the British House of Commons. Most of all it is an atmosphere more human and more courteous where women are concerned.” Three days later she succeeded in pulling off her greatest coup of all — an interview with President Woodrow Wilson. She was, as she described herself, “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.” Afterwards, she wrote to John Devoy that she “had an interesting chat…The president was personally very courteous and acknowledged smilingly his Irish blood. I asked him to consider our claims as a small nation governed without consent. He took the petitions and seemed interested.”
In Philadelphia she met the industrialist Henry Ford. Ford was in favor of an Irish Republic, and she wrote in triumph to Devoy of their meeting, “I gave him our flag which he put in his coat. We talked in his home for over two hours on Ireland and he asked me a lot about tillage and so forth. He is keen on Ireland’s freedom and says that we’ll surely get our independence and that we’ll never thrive until we do.”
Tom Mooney, a trade unionist of Irish background, was under sentence of death because of a trumped up murder charge, one of many attempts to discredit the Industrial Workers of the World — the “Wobblies.” One of Hanna’s first meetings on her return West was in his support. The San Francisco meeting, sponsored by the Irish World newspaper and organized by the Machinists Union Lodge, declared that Mrs. Skeffington has added “her powerful voice to that of President Wilson” in the bid to secure justice. She now discovered a campaign of organized resistance to her meetings. Opponents attempted to discredit her by implying that she was anti-American as well as anti-British. She was reputed to have refused to stand for “The Star Spangled Banner.” Her response to that charge was humorous but unyielding: “Although I am not a musician myself, I know the difference between the American national anthem and `God Save the Queen.’ I am always proud to stand up for the former but never for the latter.”
At Sacramento the police were ordered to close the meeting if Mrs. Skeffington spoke. She still managed to speak of free speech, the crowd cheering and shouting in her favor. When another meeting was canceled, she declared, “I have not the slightest intention to allow myself to be muzzled” and she and her supporters held their meeting elsewhere. She had spoken for almost an hour before the District Attorney managed to find out where she was, arresting her and the Rev. William Shortt, the chair of the meeting. While the two were in the police station, a telegram of protest was sent to the White House: “…we citizens of San Francisco assembled protest against the arrest of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and assert our sympathy with her in her appeal for the freedom of Ireland.” The case against her was dismissed, but Shortt was summoned before a grand jury hearing on charges of violating the Espionage Act.
The British Ambassador in the United States requested that she be sent home as a “dangerous agitator.” She herself wished to return home, but as illegal immigrants she and Owen could not return until they were issued passports. The British government continued to deny her permission to return, preferring her out of the way, across the Atlantic Ocean. In New York, speaking at Madison Square Garden on the evening of May 4, 1918, every word of her speech and every cheer from the audience was noted by the agent assigned to watch her; a fact of which she was well aware. “I hope the Secret Service men are listening to me and have their pencils sharp.” She told her audience she felt she had spoken so often already in America that she would prefer to leave, to go home to keep Ireland free from conscription and safe for democracy. She was prepared for a fight, if necessary. “We are not going to be driven to that slaughter pen in Flanders at the bidding of a government that is dripping red with the blood of our best countrymen.”
The end of her speech saw the meeting erupt in wild enthusiasm, as the Secret Service agent scrupulously reported: “If conscription is defeated in Ireland it will be defeated by the spirit of Sinn Féin” (wild applause, waving of rebel flag and hats, stamping of feet, etc.).
It was her last big occasion. Eventually, on 27 June 1918, she and her son were permitted to leave the United States. She had left Ireland a widow devastated by personal tragedy. She would return home as a self-proclaimed Sinn Féiner, determined to be part of the struggle to rid Ireland of British rule.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September/October 1998 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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