Introduction

When P.H. Pearse proclaimed ‘The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic’ on Easter Monday 1916, he acknowledged that Ireland of the Rising was ‘supported by her exiled children in America’. What assistance did these “exiled children” provide, and how did people in America react to the Easter Rising? 

This Scholarcast considers these questions by focusing on three individuals central to America’s involvement and response. John Devoy, an exile in New York and keeper of the Fenian flame, raised money for the rebel cause and knew several leaders from their visits to America. Joyce Kilmer, who considered himself Irish (though his actual heritage brought that assertion into question), wrote both journalistic articles and poetry about the Rising and its significance for American readers. Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president in 1916 and candidate for re-election that November, sought to avoid international problems with domestic political implications, deliberately keeping his distance from a matter he considered internal to Great Britain. This Scholarcast probes the Easter Rising’s American connections. 

Robert Schmuhl

Robert Schmuhl is the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Chair in American Studies and Journalism and the Director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy at the University of Notre Dame.He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1980, served as the inaugural Naughton Fellow at University College Dublin in 2000, and returned to UCD in 2009 as the first John Hume Visiting Research Fellow at the Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies.This lecture is adapted from his current book project, 'The "Exiled Children" and Easter 1916: America and Irish Independence', and it was delivered as the Hibernian Lecture, sponsored by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame.