Celtic Corner - June 2015

CELTIC CORNER:

Eamon de Valera (1882-1975)

        There are different opinions about the impact of Eamon de Valera on Ireland, some quite negative. For example, author Frank McCourt characterized him as a “drag” on Ireland’s progress in the twentieth century. However, one thing about de Valera is indisputable: He dedicated his life to freedom for and betterment of his countrymen, which included his risking his life and spending time in prison. Though there might have been individual acts of other Irish that were greater than anything de Valera ever did, his impact on the country was massive, and he richly deserves the sobriquet “Father of Modern Ireland.” 

          De Valera came, as it were, a long way from Brooklyn, New York, where he was born on October 14, 1882. His given name was Edward, but he changed to the Irish equivalent, Eamon. If he had stresses throughout his adult life, he had stresses when he was young too.

          Eamon’s Irish born mother, Catherine, was not yet married when she emigrated-or fled- from Ireland in the 1870s. At the time, Ireland was experiencing a partial failure of the potato crop, and anyone who had heard about or experienced the Great Famine was not about to endure the same thing again. Arriving in New York, she became a domestic servant, or “Brigid,” as such servants were called, to a French family named Giraud. The well-off Girauds employed for their children a music instructor name Vivion de Valera, who was Spanish, and it wasn’t long before he and Catherine were involved, then married.

          The marriage was haunted by Vivion’s illness. He was advised by his doctors to go to Denver, which he did, but the change didn’t help. In 1885 he died.

          This story has not been confirmed; in fact, Vivion de Valera may have deserted Catherine and Edward. One writer who checked for the marital records of Catherine and Vivion could find none. All his life, Eamon heard the charge that he was illegitimate.

          Following his father’s death, Catherine treated him more like a problem than a loved one. She deposited him in the home of a friend, Catherine Doyle. From that time on, all he remembered of his mother were the occasional visits of a woman dressed in black.

          When he was two years old, his mother sent him to live in Ireland with his grandmother, and it was there that he was later influenced by a Land League priest named Eugene Sheehy, from whom, he said, he learned patriotism.

          Ultimately, Catherine was remarried, to an Englishman named Charles Wheelwright, and settled in Rochester, New York. Her relationship with Eamon was not unfriendly, but he lived in Ireland and she in the United States.

          De Valera excelled in school, being particularly skilled in mathematics, and after a while he won a variety of scholarships and awards. In 1903 he was made a professor of mathematics at Rockwell College, County Tipperary.

          In 1908, he joined the Ard-Charaobh of the Gaelic League, the beginning of what biographer Henry Boylan said was “a lifelong devotion to the Irish.” It was there that he met an instructor four years his senior, Sinead Flanagan, whom he would ultimately marry.

          In the early 1900s, a strong feeling of nationalism had developed in Ireland, and when de Valera attended a public meeting in Dublin in 1913, he was fired up by it. He became a captain in a volunteer force, and plans were made for a rising.

          When the rising-the famous Easter Rising- began on April 24, 1916,

de Valera commanded one of the forces covering the southeastern approaches to the city. When the rising was put down he was arrested, court martialed and sentenced to death. (It has been said that he was saved from execution because of hi American birth, but there is no proof of this. His mother also came back and appealed for his life.) Perhaps the reason he was not executed was that a general revulsion of killings by both British and Irish citizens had developed.

          Following his release in 1917, de Valera began a lifelong career in Irish politics. For his first position, he was appointed president of Sinn Fein, Arthur Griffith having stepped aside.

          For the next fifty years, until his retirement in June 1973, de Valera was intimately involved in Irish politics, his career going from the heights as leader of the country to the depths, when he took part in the civil war triggered by the Treaty of 1921, “the war of the brothers,” and was forced to witness and take part in the deaths of men whom he had fought beside against the British.

          De Valera was a master politician, and one of his greatest feats was keeping Ireland neutral during World War II, when both the Allies and the Axis were pressuring Ireland to join them.

          One action that has been roundly criticized is the economic war he precipitated between Ireland and England, which involved each county’s barring the importation of the other’s products. It caused great hardship. But he was also a man who was three times premier and founder of Fianna Fail (the political party whose name means “armed men of Ireland”) and president of Ireland from 1959 to 1973.

          The list of honors bestowed on de Valera is long, and when he was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery after a state funeral, the greatness of the man could still not diminish a sad and central fact: The ending of partition-for which he had fought so hard for so any years, the central goal of his life- had eluded him.

 

The future is not set,

there is no fate but

what we make for ourselves

 

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - May 2015

CELTIC CORNER:

The Truce- an uneasy peace

        The war ended in a Truce on July 11, 1921. In some respects, the conflict was at a stalemate. Talks that had looked promising the previous year had petered out in December when Lloyd George insisted that the IRA first surrender their arms. Fresh talks, after the Prime Minister had come under pressure from Hebert Henry Asquith and the Liberal opposition the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, resumed in the spring and resulted in the Truce. From the point of view of the British government it appeared as if the IRA’s guerilla campaign would continue indefinitely, with spiraling costs in British casualties and in money. More importantly, the British government was facing severe criticism at home and abroad for the actions of Crown Forces in Ireland. On the other side, IRA leaders and in particular Michael Collins, felt that the IRA, as it was then organized, could not continue indefinitely. It had been hard pressed by the deployment of more regular British soldiers into Ireland and by the lack of arms and ammunition.

          The initial breakthrough that led to the Truce was credited to three people: King George V, General Jan Smuts of South Africa and British Prime Minister David Lloyd Georg. The King, who had made his unhappiness at the behavior of the Black and Tans in Ireland well known to his government, was unhappy at the official speech prepared for him for the opening of the new Parliament of Northern Ireland created through the partition of Ireland. Smuts, a close friend of the King, suggested to him that the opportunity should be used to make an appeal for reconciliation in Ireland. The King asked him to draft his ideas on paper. Smuts prepared this draft and gave copies to the King and to Lloyd Georg. Lloyd George then invited Smuts to attend a British cabinet meeting convened to hold consultations on the interesting proposals Lloyd George had received, without either man informing the Cabinet that Smuts had been their author. Faced with the endorsement of them by Smuts, the King and the Prime Minister, ministers reluctantly agreed to the King’s planned ‘reconciliation in Ireland’ speech.

        The speech, when delivered, had a massive impact. Seizing the momentum Lloyd George then issued an appeal for talks to Eamon de Valera in July 1921, The Irish, (unaware of the extent to which the speech did not fully represent the views of all the British government, but was to a significant degree a ‘peace move’ engineered by the King, Smuts and Lloyd George and reluctantly consented to in cabinet), responded by agreeing to talks. De Valera and Lloyd George ultimately agreed to a truce that was intended to end the fighting and lay the ground for detailed negotiations. These were delayed for some months as the British government insisted that the IRA first decommission its weapons, but this demand was eventually dropped. It was agreed that British troops would remain confined to their barracks. Most IRA officers on the ground interpreted the Truce merely as a temporary respite and continued recruiting and training volunteers. The continuing militancy of many IRA leaders was one of the main factors in the outbreak of the Irish Civil War as they refused to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty that Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith negotiated with the British.

The Treaty

          Ultimately, the peace talks led to the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), which was then triply ratified:-by Dail Eireann in December 1921 (so giving it legal legitimacy under the governmental system of the Irish Republic) by the House of Commons of Southern Ireland in January 1922, so giving it constitutional legitimacy according to British theory of who was the legal government in Ireland), and by both Houses of the British parliament.

          The Treaty allowed Northern Ireland, which had been created by the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, to opt out of the Free State if it wished; it duly did so under the procedures laid down. As agreed, an Irish Boundary Commission was than created to decide on the precise location of the border of the Free State and Northern Ireland. The Irish negotiators understood that the Commission would redraw the border according to local nationalist or unionist majorities. Since the 1920 local elections in Ireland had resulted in outright nationalist majorities in County Fermanagh, County Tyrone, the City of Derry and in many District Electoral Divisions of county Armagh and County Derry (all north and west of the interim border), this might well have left Northern Ireland unviable. However, the Commission chose to leave the border unchanged.

          A new system of government was created for the Irish Free Sate, though for the first year two governments co-existed: an Aireacht answerable to the Dail and headed by President Griffith, and a Provisional Government nominally answerable to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland and appointed by the Lord Lieutenant. (The complexity of this was even shown in the matter by which Lord FitzAlan ‘appointed’ Collins as head of the Provisional Government. In British theory, they met to allow Collins to ‘Kiss Hands’. In Irish theory they met to allow Collins take the surrender of Dublin Castle). Most of the Irish independence movement’s leaders were willing to accept this compromise, at least for the time being, though many militant Republicans were not. A minority of those involved in the War of Independence, led by resigned president Eamon de Valera, refused to accept the Treaty and started an insurrection against the new Free State government, which it accused of betraying the ideal of the Irish Republic.  

 

Here's to the grey goose
With the golden wing;
A free country
And a Fenian King

 

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - April 2015

CELTIC CORNER

1916-2016

March is always for St. Patrick. April is for the Rising. On Easter Sunday in Newark, a group of men & women commemorate the 1916 Easter Rebellion with a march from Military Park to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Frank & Kathie Darcy are honored to carry the banner in the march. A mass is celebrated in Irish Traditions and the Proclamation is read.

This year we celebrate 99 years. Next year we will have the 100 year celebration of a free 26 county Ireland. We know the heroes, we know the story. We would have no Ireland, let’s not forget that. Woodbridge Irish Remember.

TIME LINE LIST

1916- The rebel leader Patrick Pearse stands under the portico of Dublin’s General Post Office to announce the birth of the Irish Republic.

1916-Eamon deValera comes to prominence as one of the republican leaders in the Easter Rising.

1916-Patrick Pearse and his fellow Irish rebel James Connolly are executed by firing squad.

1919-The Sinn Fein members elected to Westminster establish their own parliament in Dublin, The Dail Eireann (Assembly of Ireland),soon declared illegal by Britain.

1919-The armed supporters of Sinn Fein become the IRA, or Irish Republican Army, in Ireland’s war of independence.

1919-Michael Collins springs deValera from Lincoln gaol, with the help of a duplicate key.

1920-The Government of Ireland Act provides for separate devolved parliaments in southern Ireland and the six counties of Ulster.

1920-The brutal behavior of the British police reinforcements, the Black and Tans, aggravates the violence in Ireland.

1920-The Ira and the British security forces clash during a violent ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Dublin.

1921-The republican party Sinn Fein is unopposed in southern Ireland’s first general election and so wins every available seat in the Dail.

1921-The Sinn Fein members of southern Ireland’s new parliament assemble on their own, under the name Dail Eireann(Assembly of Ireland).

1921-James Craig (later Lord Craigavon) begins a 19 year term as prime minister of the new province of Northern Ireland.

1921-Envoys sent to London by deValera agree independence for southern Ireland as the Irish Free State, with Dominion status.

1921-The Anglo-Irish Treaty, agreed in London, ends the war between the British army and the IRA.

1921-The British parliament ratifies the Anglo-Irish treaty, but deValera repudiates it and resigns as president of the Dail.

1922-In elections to the Dail the pro-treaty faction of Collins and Griffith defeats the opposition, led by deValera.

1922-Bitter war breaks out between faction of the IRA supporting and opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

1922-The Irish Free State takes stringent measures against rebel terrorism, making possession even of a pistol a capital offense.

1922-With the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the 26 counties of southern Ireland formally become the Irish Free State.

1922-William Thomas Cosgrove becomes the first prime minister of the Irish Free State.

1923-De Valera and the IRA lay down their arms, bringing to an end the Irish Civil War.

1923-De Valera and his followers do well in elections to the Dail but decline to take their seats.

1926-Eamon De Valera’s faction, Fianna Fail (Warriors of Ireland), enters mainstream Irish life as a political party.

1927-De Valera and his party, the Fianna Fail, finally take their seats in the Dail.

1931-The Irish government classifies the Irish Republican Army as an illegal organization.

1932-Fianna Fail wins enough seats in the Irish Free State’s election for Eamon deValera to form a government.

1932-De Valera withholds farmers’ annuities from Britain, provoking British tariffs and a trade war.

1933-Fine Gael is the name given to a new political party in Ireland, formed by the merger of several smaller groups.

1937-De Valera introduces a new constitution, changing the name of the Irish Free State to Eire (Gaelic for Ireland).

1937-De Valera’s new constitution for Eire lays claim to the six counties of northern Ireland.

1940-Lord Craigavon (previously James Craig) dies in office after nineteen years as Northern Ireland’s prime minister.

1943-Basil Brooke begins an unbroken 20 year period in office as Unionist prime minister of Northern Ireland.

1949-Eire is renamed the republic of Ireland and withdraws from the Commonwealth, severing the last link with the British crown.

1949-The British government declares that Northern Ireland will remain British unless the parliament in Stormont decides otherwise.

1957-DeValera takes stringent measures against the IRA and Sinn Fein, detaining activists in an internment camp.

1959-On the retirement of deValera, Sean Lemass succeeds him as leader of Fianna Fail and prime minister of Ireland.

1963-Terence O’Neill succeeds Basil Brooke (Lord Brookeborough) as Northern Ireland’s prime minister.

1965-Terence O’Neil and Sean Lemass, prime ministers of Northern Ireland and Ireland, have two unprecedented meetings.

1968-The first civil rights march in Northern Ireland, in Derry, is halted by the police with batons and water cannon.

1969-The Provisional IRA reintroduces the fight for justice in Northern Ireland after Protestants attack a civil rights march.

1970-The Social Democratic and Labour Party(SDLP) is formed in northern Ireland as a coalition of Catholic nationalist and civil rights campaigners.

1971-Ian Paisley and others in Northern Ireland form the Democratic Unionist Party, as the intransigent wing of Ulster Unionism.

1971-Gerry Adams is imprisoned for suspected IRA links but is released for lack of evidence.

1972-British paratroops open fire on a civil rights march in Derry killing thirteen in what becomes known as Bloody Sunday.

1981-The first of 10 hunger strikers Bobby Sands dies.

1984-Republican activist Gerry Adams is elected president of Sinn Fein.

1990-Mary Robinson is elected president of the republic of Ireland, the first woman to hold the post.

1993-UK and Irish premiers John Major and Albert Reynolds sign the Downing Street Declaration, a strategy for peace in Northern Ireland.

1994-The IRA declares a cease fire in Northern Ireland, a gesture followed a month later by Protestant paramilitaries.

1998-A proposed referendum on Northern Irish issues is accepted by all the relevant political parties in what becomes known as the Good Friday Agreement.

1998-In the referendum to endorse the Good Friday Agreement, the terms are accepted by majorities in both the republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

1998-The Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble becomes First Minister of the newly convened Northern Ireland Assembly.

2003-Ian Paisley’s hard line Democratic Unionist Party wins in elections to the suspended Northern Ireland Assembly.

2005-The Provisional IRA announces a formal end to armed conflict and orders units to dump all their weapons.

2007-Elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly bring the same result as in 2003, with extremist rivals DUP and Sinn Fein the dominant parties.

2007-Long term enemies Ian Paisley (DUP) and Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein) agree to share power in reconvened Northern Ireland Assembly.

2007-Devolved government returns to Northern Ireland with Ian Paisley as first minister and Martin McGuinness as his deputy.

2008-Peter Robinson, elected unopposed as leader of the DUP succeeds Ian Paisley as First Minister of Northern Ireland.

2015-The British government would not allow the Irish to have a St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Scotland.

          Sadly enough, there is still no justice, no freedom, just hatred, prejudice, false imprisonment and a lot of violence. Just imagine your Celtic language is not legal to speak, your Gaelic games are frowned upon, your religious freedom is always in question. Ireland without question is one country, no partition.

“Ireland unfree shall never be at peace”

Padric Pearse

Caisc shona duit

Happy Easter

          
Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - March 2015

CELTIC CORNER:

Saint Patrick's Day Traditions

THE WEARING OF THE GREEN
     The tradition of wearing Shamrock to celebrate Saint Patrick seems to date from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This was a very turbulent time in Irish history. The suppression of the Gaelic way of life by the ruling British invaders resulted in many aspects of the Catholic religion in Ireland being forced underground. Strict laws were enforced which prevented the Catholic population from attending schools so 'hedge-schools' were operated in secret.
     These were schools run outdoors in secluded places (sometimes literally 'under a hedge!). The teaching of religion was also forbidden so it is only to be expected that teachers would use naturally available resources to inform their pupils. Thus the Shamrock plant was used to illustrate the message of the Christian Holy Trinity.
     Saint Patrick was credited with using the Shamrock in such a manner so the wearing of the Shamrock by the oppressed Catholic population became a means of demonstrating their defiance to the ruling British class. It also imbued a sense of kinship among the native Gaelic people, differentiating them from their oppressors.
     Wearing a clump of Shamrock is now a firmly established tradition throughout the world to celebrate not just Saint Patrick but Ireland itself. The Shamrock symbol is widely used by businesses seeking to associate with Ireland and, along with the Harp, is perhaps the single most recognizable symbol of Ireland. It is a shame though that the Shamrock is not a blue plant as the color originally associated with Saint Patrick was blue!
SAINT PATRICK'S DAY PARADE
     Saint Patrick's Day is unique in that it is celebrated worldwide. It is most unusual that a country has such an international celebration and is really evidence of the generational effects of emigration that has afflicted Ireland for centuries. After the 1845 to 1849 Irish Famine emigration soared with as many as a million native Irish leaving their homes in the decades after the famine to settle in places like Boston, New York, Newfoundland, Perth, Sydney and beyond. The US Census Bureau now reports that 34 Million US Citizens claim Irish descent. Most emigrants like to commemorate their heritage and thus the Saint Patrick's Day Parade came into being.
     The earliest record of a Saint Patrick's Day Parade was in the year 1762 when Irish soldiers serving in the British Army held a Parade in New York City. Earlier records suggest that the day was celebrated by the Irish in Ireland as early as the ninth and tenth centuries.
     Again, this was a very difficult time in Irish history with Viking raiders terrorizing the native Gaelic population. It is thus no surprise then that in times of strife the local population would turn to religion and to a commemoration of their own heritage and individuality - a practice that has been repeated by populations of troubled places since the dawn of time. The New York Parade is now the longest running civilian Parade in the world with as many as three Million spectators watching the Parade of over 150,000 participants.
     The first official Parade in Ireland was in 1931. The 1901 law that copper-fastened March 17th as an Irish national holiday was later amended to insist that public houses close down on the day. This restriction was later lifted in the 1970's. In the mid 1990's the Irish Government really started to promote the event when it changed from a single day's Parade into a 5-day festival attracting as many as a million visitors into the country. Parades are now held in just about every major city in the world with the biggest in several US cities reaching epic proportions.
GREENING OF BUILDINGS AND RIVERS
     The use of the color green reached new heights (or plunged new depths!) when in 1962 the city of Chicago decided to dye part of the Chicago River green. Since then the campaign to have just about every possible landmark turned green for the day has taken off in earnest and in recent years has included the Irish Parliament building, the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls and even the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt!
A PINT OF PLAIN
     The Irish association with drinking is well known and not always positive. Fortunately there are plenty of examples of the appropriate use of alcohol and Saint Patrick's Day is one of them. It is a widely held tradition in Ireland that beer or whiskey can be taken on Saint Patrick's Day although native Irish pub-goers can only look on aghast as visitors top the heads of their creamy pint of Guinness with a green Shamrock. Sacrilege! It is estimated that as many as 13 Million pints of Guinness are consumed on Saint Patrick's Day, up from the usual 5.5 Million per day!
DRESSING UP
     The tradition of dressing up in Irish outfits is not just confined to participants in Parades. Jovial creatures of Irish origin the world over use the opportunity of Saint Patrick's Day to dress up as Leprechaun or even as Saint Patrick himself. Kids love to wear the big green, white and orange hats and receive sweets thrown to them by similarly clad operators of the various Parade floats.
THE SAINT PATRICK'S DAY DINNER
     Corned beef and cabbage is as traditional an Irish meal as you will ever find and it is often hauled out for Saint Patrick's Day. Traditional Irish music in the background and a family gathering are other Irish Saint Patrick's Day traditions that have been going on for centuries.

May the Love and Protection

Saint Patrick can give

Be yours in abundance

As long as you live

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - February 2015

CELTIC CORNER

Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants

          Woodrow Wilson was a bespectacled, ascetic looking man who resembled a schoolteacher. Indeed, for a good part of his life, he was one. He knew how to exploit opportunity. At one point during his presidency, he had sheep graze on the South Lawn of the White House, selling their wool to raise money for charity.

          Both of Wilson’s paternal grandparents came from the Strabane area of County Antrim. He was raised by stern father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister and theologian, and a mother who was the daughter of minister in England. Both were of Scotch Irish lineage.

          He was born on December 28, 1856 in Staunton, Virginia but a year later his family moved to Augusta, Georgia.

          He graduated from the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton, in 1879 and received a Ph.D. in government and history in 1886 from Johns Hopkins University.

          He held a variety of academic positions in the years following graduation, including a fifteen year stint at Princeton, which was capped by his being appointed university president in 1902, apparently fatigued by academic life, he entered politics, accepting the Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey in 1910.

          His political beliefs were described by the word “progressivism,” and he had a number of goals: to eliminate political corruption, to institute antitrust legislation and to restructure the election system by using direct primaries. At the time, the last proposal would not have been advantageous for his party and was a courageous move on his part.

          He won the election handily and America began to take notice of him. Two years later in 1912 Wilson started a run for the presidential nomination. His chief opponent for the Democratic nomination was Champ Clark, speaker of the House of Representatives.

          It was a grueling nomination fight, requiring forty six ballots, but Wilson eventually prevailed.

          As it turned out the election campaign was a cakewalk by comparison. The Republican Party was split between William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt (who was running as an Independent) and Wilson overwhelmed them both.

          Once in office, Wilson helped establish the Clayton Act, an amendment to the Sherman Antitrust Act, which strengthened labor’s ability to strike, established the Federal Reserve Board to help control the currency and instituted the income tax.

          As dominant as he was in domestic matters, Wilson was even more influential in foreign one. (He was the first president to leave the United States while president) During his presidency, the United States became involved in the affairs of a number of countries. Wilson always had a justification for these acts, which is where some historians question his sincerity. Perhaps he was so imbued with righteous indignation that he never realized he could be morally wrong.

          The event in which Wilson’s lack of moral insight had the biggest impact was World War I

When war broke out between France and Great Britain and Germany, Wilson was at first neutral. In fact, in 1916 he conducted a successful reelection campaign based on the slogan “He kept us out of the war.”

          In fact, he was hardly neutral. He put the not insignificant industrial might of the United States at the disposal of France and Britain. And he became outraged at the torpedoing of ships with Americans on board. He became more warlike in this pronouncements but swathed them in high toned rhetoric such as “establishing a peace that will win the approval of mankind” and “an equality of right.”

          On April 2, 1917 Wilson delivered a speech to Congress with the oft quoted line “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Finally America was in it and surely a crucial partner for the Allies.

          Following the war, Wilson was one of the important architects of the League of Nations, which essentially detailed the rules by which nations would deal with one another. When the League of Nations’ charter was examined by Congress, the Senate thought it compromised the United States’ sovereign rights and wanted to make changes Wilson found abhorrent. In a cruel twist of fate, Wilson found himself making a whistle stop tour across the country urging Americans to pressure their representatives not to support it.

          It was while he was on this jaunt in Pueblo, Colorado that Wilson suffered a stroke that left him temporarily unable to speak. From that time on, his wife, Edith, virtually took over in what was described by cynics as the “petticoat presidency.”

          His last words to Edith were “Edith, I’m a broken machine, but I’m ready.” The day he spoke them was February 3, 1924. He proved to be more popular in death than life.

 

Happy Valentines Day

Lá Fhéile Vailintín sona duit

           

                  

Frank Darcy

 

Celtic Corner - January 2015

CELTIC CORNER

Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants

          Legend has it that auto baron Henry Ford had a unique way of firing people. An employee would leave on a Friday and return on Monday to find his office cleaned out and a notice that he was no longer employed by the company.

          Three things are known for certain about Henry Ford: He revolutionized the automobile worldwide; he brought into being something called the production line, which revolutionized industry; and he changed the way America lived. Before Ford, there was the horse and buggy. After Ford, there was the motorcar.

          Members of the Ford family started to come from County Cork to Dearborn, Michigan in 1832. William, Henry’s father and a host of uncles and aunts arrived in the area in the 1840’s, driven from Ireland by the potato famine.

          Michigan was a good place to emigrate to. At the time, anyone could buy an acre of land for the munificent sum of ten shillings, about $1.20 in American money. The immigrants bought every square inch of soil they could afford and then set about farming it. At harvest time, the produce was sold in Detroit, which was not so far away that it couldn’t be reached by horse drawn carts.

Henry, born two years before the Civil War ended, worked on his family’s land. But when he was sixteen, he took a part time job at a machine shop, where he could exercise his interest in inventing and how mechanical things work.

          He then went to work for the Detroit Edison Company and by the time he was thirty had worked his way up to being chief and was responsible for that city’s electricity.

          The job allowed him a lot of free time. While he had to be on call twenty four hours a day, circumstances rarely required his presence. He was able to bury himself in his shop where in 1893 he constructed a gasoline engine that was an improvement over those that then existed. Three years later he invented an ungainly, spidery looking thing with four wheels that was part bicycle, part car. He called it the “quadricycle” or “horseless carriage”.

          Over the next few years, he improved the horseless carriage and in 1903 he felt he had developed a marketable car. With just $28,000 Ford incorporated the Henry Ford Company.

          His company was a success (he publicized it by racing his cars; he himself drove a “999” to a world record, covering a mile in 39.4 seconds) and was almost immediately pounced on by the Licensed Auto Manufacturers, who said he couldn’t use the gasoline engine, which they claimed had been patented in 1895. Ford disagreed, saying his engine was different from the original. They went to court and in 1909 Ford lost. But in 1911 he won an appeal.

          In 1908 Ford told the world that he would build a car for the masses and he did. The Model T sold more than fifteen million vehicles and Ford captured half the world market.

          At the core of his success was not just the car, which was well made, but the value consumers’ received for their money. In 1908 the Model T cost $950, but because of Ford’s innovations on the production line and because of his willingness to pay his workers double what other auto manufacturers did and thus encourage them to greater productivity, in 1927 he was able to produce a Model T that sold for less than $300.

          To get supplies for his cars, Ford bought the producers-the mines, forest, glassworks, rubber plantations of the raw materials needed, as well as ships and trains to transport the materials. His cash flow was so great that he could finance these purchases himself.

          While Ford had a passion for building cars and other mechanical items, he had a deep interest in other activities as well. One was country dancing, which he remembered fondly form his youth. In fact he had met his wife, Clara (whom he married in 1888), at a square dance. In 1900 he set about to bring country dancing back into public consciousness.

          He also brought it back into the consciousness of his employees whether they liked it or not. Here, his dictatorial side showed. He made learning square dancing mandatory for his executives actually curtaining off a large area in one of

the laboratories to serve as a dance studio.

          He also had members of his company research county dancing thoroughly to make sure the steps were correct and he ultimately wrote a book on the subject entitle Good Morning-After a Sleep of Twenty Years, Old Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford. Ultimately, Ford would push and support country dancing to the point where it became part of the curricula of many colleges.

          Though Ford’s car and production line achievement helped eliminate the old ways things were done and the way people lived, he never lost a liking of things from yesteryear. To help preserve those traditions, he built Greenfield Village near Detroit, which sought to reproduce things the way they had been when he was a boy.

          And his admiration for Thomas Alva Edison (he once wrote in one of his notebooks, “God needed Edison”) was reflected in his Greenfield Village duplication of the Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratories where Edison had invented so much. Ford had worked for Edison and regarded him as his mentor. Early on, when he had been working on the gasoline engine, Edison had encouraged him to continue rather than get involved with steam or some other fuel system.

          In the 1930s the fortunes of the Ford Motor company declined. The successor to the Model T, the Model A, did not sell as well and across the 1930s the graph line showing the company’s sales continued downward. But when World War II came along and with it the demand for thousands of new vehicles, Ford rebounded.

          Ford was a tough man, but the great sadness in his life, the one thing he could never put behind him, was the death of his son Edsel of cancer in 1943. It is said the heart went out of him not only for business but for life itself. Two years after this, he handed the reins (or steering wheel) of the company to his grandson Henry II.

          He died four years after Edsel and gave his shares of the company to the Ford Foundation, instantly making it a leading philanthropic organization.

         

Athbhliain faoi mhaise dhuit! = Happy New Year!

Pronounce it something like: /ah-vleen fwee vosh-ah ghwitch

 

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - December 2014

CELTIC CORNER

Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants

        By the time he was fourteen, Andrew Jackson, the man whose face adorns the U.S. twenty dollar bill, was an orphan.

        During the Revolutionary War, Jackson’s two brothers, who lived with Jackson and his mother at the Waxshaw settlement in South Carolina, were killed by British soldiers (Jackson himself was seriously wounded for defying a soldier and was taken prisoner). A short while later his mother an immigrant from County Antrim in Ireland, contracted cholera and died. His father had died a year after he had arrived in America in 1765.

Jackson could be described in one word: tough. As an adult, he engaged in a number of wars, and he was so tough that his troops dubbed him “Old Hickory” after the hardwood.

        In 1784 he went to Salisbury, South Carolina, and, with a legal career in mind, apprenticed himself to a law firm. In 1787 he passed the bar; then he headed west to Nashville. He was able to buy a planation and raise horses, but marauding Indians were very much a problem in the area. Jackson fought them effectively, garnering a well-deserved reputation. In 1802 he married Rachel Donelson Robards.

        Jackson was six feet one inch tall, a thin man, with reddish brown hair and a quick temper, which led him to a number of duels. His most famous, a duel over horses, occurred with a man named Charles Dickinson. Dickinson fired first, thinking with horror that he had missed because Jackson just stood there and fired back and Dickinson was mortally wounded. However, Dickinson had hit Jackson. But Jackson had worn a large, heavy coat that had caused Dickinson to misaim: The coat was so oversized that the bullet hit Jackson below the heart. He recovered from the wound after a few weeks.

        During the War of 1812 Jackson became famous for his military prowess. In 1818 President James Monroe appointed him to deal with Indians in Florida, which he did by torching Pensacola and summarily hanging two Englishmen he thought were conspiring with the Indians, and that caused an international incident.

        Gradually, he emerged as a presidential candidate. He ran in 1824 against John Quincy Adams and lost because of what he characterized as a “corrupt bargain” among various people. But in 1828 he won.

        During his two terms, Jackson increased the power of the presidency. He used the “spoils system” appointing his own political cronies to office and organizing counties into branches of the Democratic Party so they could deliver the vote more effectively. He also made good use of the presidential veto. He used it a dozen times, more than all other previous presidents combined.

        He also put the “pocket veto” to good use: If a bill came to his desk fewer than ten days before Congress adjourned, the law permitted him to put the bill “into his pocket” and turn it down without giving Congress a reason why. For example, Jackson was opposed to restructuring of the Bank of the United Sates and used the pocket veto to defeat relevant legislation. Jacksonian scholar Robert Remini wrote that Jackson created a gain in Presidential power that did not abate until the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

        In foreign affairs, Jackson also achieved much. He revived trade with England, exempting English goods from the harsh tariff of 1828 (the so called Tariff of Abominations. He also used his influence to help reopen trade with the British held West Indies. He also succeeded in getting payments for France for the “spoliation” attacks on American ships during the Napoleonic Wars earlier in the century.

        One great domestic triumph was the annexation of Texas. Though Jackson wanted to annex it, he did nothing while in office because he feared that the unresolved slavery question could cause problems for the election chances of his handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren. After Van Buren was elected, Jackson supported annexation, which took place in 1845, the year he died.

        Jackson liked to give parties, and he was a man of the people- everyone was welcome. At his last party as president, he had a fourteen hundred pound cheese brought in the White House and it was eaten in two hours. The White House smelled of the cheese for weeks.

  

Nollaig shona duit

Merry Christmas

Frank Darcy