St. Patrick’s Day Devoy and Larkin: from friends to foes

By Terry Golway

The aging Fenian John Devoy welcomed Irish labor leader James Larkin when he arrived in New York for an organizing drive. After a while, however, these formidable men were at each other’s throats.

Larkin, like other visiting Irishmen from Padraig Pearse to William Butler Yeats, made a point of making contact with Devoy when he arrived in 1914. Devoy was fiercely pro-labor, so Larkin was a natural ally. Devoy even served as a go-between when Larkin wished to meet German diplomats in America who were looking to stir up anti-British sentiment during the early months of World War I.

Devoy, of course, was in touch with the Germans on behalf of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was planning on help from Germany in fomenting what became the Easter Rebellion of 1916. One of Devoy’s contacts at the German consulate in New York, Wolf von Igel, took Larkin to the New York waterfront, where he described the means by which German agents in America wished to sabotage British shipping. Larkin declined Germany’s offer of cash in return for participating in sabotage schemes but agreed to continue to agitate against Britain.

Devoy so trusted Larkin that he allowed him to sit in on meetings of the Clan na Gael executive. The Clan was the IRB’s partner in America, and several Clan leaders, including Devoy, New York Judge Daniel Cohalan, and Philadelphia businessman Joseph McGarrity, were kept fully informed of the IRB’s plans in the months leading to 1916. That Devoy, a secretive and sometimes paranoid operative (and like so many paranoids, he was right — he did have enemies scheming against him), allowed Larkin to audit meetings of the Clan’s top leaders suggests that he trusted the labor leader in a way he didn’t trust many other people.

When Larkin was arrested in 1919, Devoy put up $5,000, part of an inheritance he had received when a younger brother died in New Mexico, to help the labor leader post bail. That good deed did not go unpunished.

The Larkin bail money became caught up in the split within Clan na Gael after Eamon de Valera and Harry Boland essentially dismissed Devoy from his leadership position in Irish America after Devoy continually criticized de Valera’s U.S. tour in 1919 and 1920. The pro-de Valera faction of the Clan tried to seize control of the bail money, which was held in escrow, saying that the Clan already had reimbursed Devoy. Devoy filed a lawsuit in New York to get the money back.

The lawsuit’s particulars, filled with bland legal language that told of a bitter Irish split, included an affidavit stating that one of Devoy’s allies, Patrick Quinlan, had given the $5,000 to another party in order for it to be used for Larkin’s bail. Quinlan is one of the four Irishmen identified in the Bureau of Investigation document as a participant in a plot to kill James Larkin.

At the same time that Devoy was fighting with de Valera, the McGarrity wing of the Clan, and with the courts to get his money back, he was beginning to turn on his old friend James Larkin. It must be remembered that in the years 1919 to 1921 — the very years in which the battle for Irish independence was taking place — Irish America was divided, and each side was more than capable of making the most outrageous accusations about its antagonists.

According to a handwritten memo in John Devoy’s papers in the National Library of Ireland, when Thomas Foran, the president of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union arrived in New York with James Larkin’s son in 1920, Harry Boland told him that the elder Larkin was suspected of being a British agent. According to the memo, Boland introduced Foran to a Clan na Gael man named Alexander I. Rorke who supposedly had letters from the U.S. Department of Justice indicating that the British government wanted Washington to drop its case against Larkin if the labor leader was allowed to leave the country and proceed to South Africa.

In another memo in the Devoy collection, Devoy himself wrote that he, too, met with Rorke, who worked in New York’s criminal court system. Devoy said Rorke showed him the same documents Boland and Foran supposedly saw. "Rorke showed me four or five letters received from the British consulate in New York making inquiries, first as to the nature of the charges against Larkin and the last letter [making] inquiries as to the feasibility of an appeal," Devoy wrote.

Devoy wrote that Judge John Goff, one of the unsung heroes of the Catalpa rescue, who had become a distinguished jurist in New York, also had seen the documents.

Devoy convinced himself that Larkin was either a British agent, or at the very least Larkin was dealing with British authorities in secret. That has never been a light charge to make in Irish nationalist circles; in the extremely tense circumstances of 1919 to 1922, it could very well have been a death sentence. In another extract from his papers, Devoy later wrote that he considered Larkin to be "the damnedest faker outside Hell."

The affidavits in Devoy’s lawsuit over the Larkin bail money show that Quinlan — who, according to the Bureau report, was the man who suggested using cyanide to kill Larkin — certainly was close enough to Devoy that he handled a part of the $5,000 transaction. Devoy, by 1920, believed that his enemies in Irish America sought to discredit him and force him out of the movement to which he had devoted his life. There’s little question that Devoy could be ruthless. He later said that had he been in charge of the Irish army after the Irish Civil War, he would have had de Valera shot.

Would he have put out a contract on Larkin’s life? It would seem unlikely, simply because there is no record of Devoy ordering any such lethal action in his half-century of agitation.

But those were tense, dangerous times on both sides of the Atlantic and the newly uncensored federal documents remind us of the passions of the period. With regard to the alleged plot against Jim Larkin, what Devoy knew, what de Valera knew, indeed if either knew anything at all, remains a mystery.

(Terry Golway is the author of "Irish Rebel," a biography of John Devoy. His new book "For the Cause of Liberty," a history of Irish nationalism, has just been published by Simon & Schuster.)