Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Judge Daniel Cohalan: A Nationalist Crusader Against British Influence in American Life

2015; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2015.0024

1534-5815

Michael Doorley,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Judge Daniel Cohalan:A Nationalist Crusader Against British Influence in American Life Michael Doorley Daniel Cohalan (1865–1946) remains a relatively unknown figure in Irish and Irish-American history, though at the height of his power in 1920, Cohalan exercised considerable influence on Irish events. Cohalan was then leader of the 275,000-strong Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) and was regarded by Irish nationalists (and indeed by the British authorities) as the spokesman for radical Irish nationalism in America. In the correspondence of his political allies, he is commonly referred to as the leader of the “Irish Race” in America.1 Cohalan was a significant figure in American politics as well. During the period 1906–1911, he was “Grand Sachem” of the Tammany Society and chief advisor to boss Charles F. Murphy, one of the most effective machine politicians in New York’s history. Such political connections played a large role in his appointment to the New York Supreme Court in 1913.2 On a national level, Cohalan—in alliance with the progressive Republican senator William Borah—played a key role in the campaign against American involvement in the League of Nations. Cohalan remained prominent in national politics well into the 1930s; at the Democratic convention in 1936, he was one of a group of Democrats who [End Page 113] attempted to prevent the renomination of Franklin Roosevelt.3 Eamon de Valera’s famous remark about Cohalan in 1920, that “Big as the country is, it was not big enough to hold the Judge and myself,” speaks not only to the rivalry between both men but also to the stature of Cohalan during this period.4 Yet today, most accounts of Cohalan’s role in history begin and end with his tempestuous relationship with de Valera, which culminated in a bitter split within the Irish nationalist movement in the United States in 1920.5 Cohalan’s grandfather, John Cohalan, owned a small holding in Courtmacsherry and left for the United States at the height of the Great Famine in 1848. Even before his grandfather’s departure, the Cohalan family already had a connection with the United States. John Cohalan’s wife, Catherine MacCarthy, had died before 1848; she was the daughter of Captain Eugene MacCarthy, who had served in the American Revolution as an aide-de-camp to the Marquis de Lafayette. McCarthy had then returned to Ireland. In innumerable speeches and writings, Cohalan would celebrate the Irish role in the founding of the United States, and in this regard he could, with some justification, draw on his own family history. Indeed, in the introduction to Cohalan’s pamphlet, The Freedom of the Seas (1919), James McGurrin, president-general of the American Irish Historical Society (AIHS), described Cohalan as an “American of Irish blood whose family history here goes back to the battlefields of the revolution.”6 In a 1967 interview, Cohalan’s son Monsignor Florence Cohalan, reported that Daniel’s grandfather left Ireland the “father of four motherless children: three young daughters and a twelve-year old son.”7 That son, Timothy, would become Daniel Cohalan’s father. Terrible stories of the Famine in West Cork became part of Cohalan family folklore, and, as with many immigrants and their descendants, such memories undoubtedly influenced strong Irish nationalist beliefs among the Cohalan family and in Daniel particularly. In a 1919 pamphlet published by the FOIF, The Indictment, Cohalan argued that the British government was responsible for the Famine and having “systematically broken down every effort made to develop its industries,” had used Ireland as “a great dairy farm” for its own economic interests.8 [End Page 114] The Cohalan family first settled in Pierrepont in upstate New York, but by 1849 had moved on to Middletown, Orange County, a growing town in the Hudson Valley. The 1860 census indicates that John Cohalan, aged sixty-five, had not remarried but had established himself as a grocer. Meanwhile his son Timothy, aged twenty-two, had—like countless other Irish migrants—entered the building trade. Later newspaper reports indicate that he went on to establish a thriving glass company.9 Despite their increasing prosperity and involvement in American life, the family remained...