Unlikely Rebels (14 page)

In his proclamation of Ireland's independence, Pádraig Pearse was to speak not only on behalf of her ‘dead' generations but also of ‘her exiled children in America'. Like flocks of birds seeking better feeding grounds, they had taken flight to America from the seventeenth century on, each century's quota increasing with the advent of persecutions, famine and dire economic need. It was none of these factors, however, that motivated six of the Gifford family to sail there; being members of the Protestant ruling class, they were fairly sure of a decent livelihood at home. Whatever it was that moved them, there was a distinct dichotomy between the approach of the brothers Liebert, Edward Cecil and Gabriel and that of their sisters, Ada, ‘
John' and Nellie. The first two brothers were absorbed into army and navy careers, while Gabriel quickly blended into the heterogeneous American social and artistic milieux. Not so his sisters. They not only entered Irish-American society, but took part in it and initiated some of its most anti-British activities.

The Irish-American enclave had, for centuries, experienced from the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) the same bitter discrimination as at home. ‘No Irish Need Apply' frequently accompanied advertisements for jobs, but the brute labour required for opening up the vast continent by canal, rail and road needed spade work, and the masters of these huge enterprises were forced to employ both Irish and Chinese workers, as well as the more acceptable Scots and Welsh.

Gradually, the Irish immigrants began to improve their lot, unconsciously forming ghetto-like supportive groups, often under their parish priests. From the very beginning, they saw education and politics as the twin saviours of their degraded status. The hedge schools and the Penal Laws had taught them lessons.

When you list the Irish insurrectionists who visited America you have a
Who's Who
of Irish history: Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians (Devoy, O'Donovan Rossa and John Boyle O'Reilly), the New Departure disciples (Parnell, Davitt and Dillon), Labour personalities (Connolly and Larkin), the Irish Ireland insurrectionists (Casement, Pearse, Plunkett, Griffith, Collins and de Valera). They went in a steady stream, and they received warm welcomes and a great deal of money. Parnell and Dillon were invited to address Congress and were seen off by the Irish-American 69th Infantry Regiment. The American Land League was founded, and by June 1881, 12,000 branches had been formed and £100,000 sent to the Land League in Ireland.
[1]

However, despite the help of Irish-American immigrants, Ada, ‘John' and (later) Nellie Gifford had to contend with two impediments in their American endeavours. One was the fact that the very determined anti-Irish faction was trying, from 1914 on, to lure America into the First World War; the other was the dictatorial, anti-feminist leadership of Clan na Gael, particularly in the person of the old Fenian, John Devoy.

It was ironic that Isabella's three daughters experienced such hostility from the race to which their mother always claimed allegiance. The blessed, socially accepted ones in America embodied not only English emigrants but also their Welsh and Scottish neighbours. It was the natives of the neighbouring island, the fractious Irish, who were the undesirables, along with Blacks, Jews, Hispanics and other reviled peoples. Even more unacceptable to ‘John' and Nellie was the disinterest, and even opposition, of Clan na Gael, which still embraced the old Fenian and IRB mores: armed insurrection to oust Britain forever from Ireland; social matters would then take care of themselves.

No more than Parnell, who treated his sister Anna's very successful solution to evictions with such overt disinterest and even contempt, so John Devoy saw women as wives, mothers and daughters, bakers of bread and laundresses of linen,
not
as shapers of politics nor its institutions. The old independent Gaelic queen from the west of Ireland, Gráinne Ó Mháille, would have given John Devoy nightmares. He had no idea of how, in Ireland, women were contributing to the movement. He had none of the pro-feminism of Griffith, Clarke or Connolly. Even Pearse and de Valera would not have patronised women emissaries as some of the old Clan na Gael leaders did.

The Gifford migration to America might be partly explained by the fact that their maternal ancestors, the Huguenot Bissets, had settled there. There was also the fact that they received family help in migrating: Ada had her passage paid out of Nellie's earnings as a domestic-science instructress, and when Gabriel had flown the maternal coop for America in 1915, his father had given him financial help.
[2]

There is no suggestion anywhere that the Gifford men took any interest in Irish Ireland, either at home or abroad. Neither is there any indication that they had anything to do with the pro-British vigilantes. Gabriel became immersed in earning his artistic livelihood, in wooing and marrying his adored American wife, whom he met in the not unlikely Gifford ambience of amateur dramatics, and, later, in rearing lovingly their only child, Geraldine.

With Ada it was different, though she too settled well in America and kept in touch with her family intermittently. An early family story sets her in a neighbourhood in New York where dark-haired, olive-skinned children from southern Italy were fascinated by her golden-red hair. On one occasion they actually staked out her lodgings to see if the colour in this Irish lady's hair would wash out in the rinsing basin.
[3]
Apart from her artistic output – and family opinion placed her artistically very high – Ada had the distinction of being the first self-appointed woman spy engaged in working for the Irish-Ireland movement, a not-altogether-surprising activity for one whose independence of spirit had once expressed itself in the defiant drowning of two childhood hats. This most wayward of Isabella's daughters decided to spy for Irish Ireland and approached on her own initiative the vigilantes – anglophiles whose particular mission was to hinder any sympathy for the Irish-Ireland movement in America.

To appreciate her courage in taking on these men, it must be remembered that Dublin Castle was like a huge spider, spreading its webs not only over Ireland but over Europe and America as well. Claude Dansey, one of their master spies and arguably the most ruthless, saw killing as part of his job.
[4]
There is no doubt that Ada Gifford, in her own amateur spying for the Irish cause, was swimming in shark-infested waters. Her name, religion and accent were her protection. This Protestant lady was no mass-going Bridget Murphy with an Irish brogue, so it was easy enough for her to pass herself off as pro-British and to ingratiate herself into the American Vigilantes, set up by an Englishman named Moffat and comprising English expatriates. When Ada presented herself for membership, she coined a name for a non-existent club to which she alleged she had belonged – the Betsy Ross Club – a very Daughters-of-
America sort of name. On top of that, her own name, religion and accent were enough. She became an accepted member of the American Vigilantes.

A chief ploy of theirs was to insinuate that the Irish were German spies and to send gangs to break up Irish meetings. Ada was able to warn Clan na Gael when its meetings were to be attacked and was successful until her cover was blown when she was spotted in the company of known Mellows adherents and her career as a spy abruptly terminated. In a postcard photograph she sent to her mother at this time, bearing the words ‘Greetings – hoping to hear from you soon', she looks like a young Mata Hari, dressed very stylishly in velvet coat, hat and fur stole and muff, trimmed with a bunch of violets. Was the picture saying, perhaps, ‘Look Mother, your wild one has done well'? Isabella might have had a stroke had she known exactly what her wild one was up to.

When ‘John' arrived in America in June 1914, her sister Ada was there to welcome her. She gave as her reason for going – against the advice of Thomas Clarke – that she wanted to acquire experience of American journalism, but travel was a natural eventuality for someone of her temperament. She did not return to Ireland for eight years, and during her time in America she married an émigré Hungarian lawyer, Arpad Czira, when they were both twenty-seven, and bore him a son in 1917 whom she called Finian, true to her Irish-Ireland sentiments.
[5]

One of her first calls on her arrival in New York was to the offices of the
Gaelic American
, of which Devoy was editor, bearing a letter of introduction and recommendation from his close friend Thomas Clarke. ‘John' was used to the men in the Volunteers accepting women as part of the movement: Inghínidhe na hÉireann, Cumann na mBan, its paper
The Bean
, Countess Markievicz's Fianna, her sister Nellie's part in Larkin's appearance in Sackville Street, Nellie's and Helena Molony's membership of the Citizen Army, Maud Gonne's enthusiasm, Arthur Griffith's acceptance of women's role in journalism, her sister Grace's contributions to
The Irish Review
, Alfie Byrne's willingness to support women's franchise: this was the pro-feminist atmosphere in which ‘John' had matured politically. Instead of this accustomed good fellowship, however, Devoy treated her, in her own words, like ‘a benevolent uncle who, to humour an impetuous child, pretends to ponder solemnly over her foolish chatter'.
[6]
‘John' referred to her articles which had been published at home, in both
Sinn Féin
and
Irish Freedom.
She offered her services to Devoy, on a purely voluntary basis, to promote Irish propaganda in the USA. He offered nothing, and she left his office, which she had entered enthusiastically and with high hopes, deeply disappointed.

However,
The New York Sun
, whose editor was a woman, printed ‘
John's' submitted articles, and she began to feel more confident that she would be able to earn her living and help Ireland in the ways she had promised her friends at home. After England had declared war on Germany, in August 1914, the arrival of two of those friends, Padraic Colum and his wife Mary, meant that things began to look up for ‘
John'. The Colums were popular and well known in American literary circles, and ‘
John' was soon meeting distinguished writers and artists, many of them with an interest in Ireland. Three chief topics of interest emerged: the vicious spread of anti-Irish slander from such groups as the American Vigilantes, the case against conscription for both Ireland and America in the First World War and, of course, the great surge towards Irish independence. Colum was parodying
Burke's Peerage
one evening, in an assumed upper-class English accent, when a deceived American, taking Colum for a member of the House of Lords, spoke rapturously of King Arthur and his Knights. Colum debunked his adulation so effectively that, to use ‘
John's' description: ‘You could hear coronets rattling to the ground as he revealed how this commoner had got his title as a reward for political jobbery, that one for paying a royal prince's gambling debts, and others for their dark deeds in the British colonies.'
[7]

But all this was merely a prelude to her drive to fulfil her promise to her friends at home: that she would collect funds for them and that she would start an American branch of Cumann na mBan. Clan na Gael, not surprisingly, excluded women from membership, though the AOH at least had a ladies' auxiliary committee.

One evening, ‘John' attended a lecture hosted by the Gaelic League and given by Teresa Brayton who had written the well-known song ‘The Old Bog Road' during a visit to Ireland and who was giving her views on what she had seen and heard. Roused by something Teresa Brayton had said, ‘John' Gifford rose and made a brief, impromptu speech on the Irish Volunteers, followed in the same vein by other members of the audience, including the brother of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who would later die for Ireland on hunger strike. The chairman of the meeting called a halt, on the grounds that the Gaelic League was cultural and apolitical, the non-militant ideology approved of by Douglas Hyde. However, after the meeting, Gertrude Kelly, a member of the audience, invited ‘John' to address a meeting in the McAlpine Hotel on the Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan. ‘John' agreed but almost committed a gaffe on this, the first occasion on which she addressed a public meeting in the USA. Roundly castigating the AOH in Ireland for its support of Redmond during the Volunteer split, she became aware that the chairperson was frantically nudging her. Unaware that the bulk of her audience were members of the Ladies' Auxiliary Committee of the AOH, the day was saved when the Chair diplomatically pointed out that the
Irish
AOH, to which Miss Gifford had referred, was, of course, a very different body from its American counterpart. This distinction was greeted with loud applause and cheers.

The president of this Ladies' Auxiliary AOH, Mary MacWhorter, invited ‘John' to address their convention on the Irish situation. She agreed and won over that body, heart and purse, when she spoke to them glowingly of a familiar subject, the Irish Volunteers. This body of Irish-American women worked very hard for Ireland and the impending War of Independence, and, following that address by ‘John' Gifford, the first American branch of Cumann na mBan was founded, followed soon after by a second. Who wanted John Devoy when they could have Mary MacWhorter and ‘John' Gifford?
[8]

Then Devoy began to interfere in the affairs of the New York Cumann na mBan and even labelled as spies those who disagreed with him. He seemed to see himself as a sort of Irish leader
in absentia
and certainly as leader of all Irish Americans. In an effort to make money for a Volunteer arms fund, ‘John' took it upon herself to write to the author Seumas McManus, asking him for a signed copy of one of his books for an ‘arms' raffle. He obliged with six copies of his own books and those of his deceased wife, Eithne Carbery. For this most fruitful try, Devoy rebuked ‘John', because she had not asked permission to write to McManus.