Celtic Studies became an important conduit for the post-colonial desire to re-establish cultural connections within the diaspora as a way of gaining a cultural and, therefore, economic, foothold on the world stage.
A World Centre of Celtic Culture
Douglas Hyde had expressed his gratitude for the interest of American academics in ‘everything concerned with us – history, archaeology and language’.148 He corresponded regularly with the American Celticists including Fred Norris Robinson, Arthur L.C. Brown and Roger Sherman Loomis. He also kept an autographed photograph of Theodore Roosevelt, a Celtophile, on the wall in his study.149 In 1930, Eoin MacNeill was invited to tour some American universities by Professor Arthur L.C. Brown, of Northwestern University; Professor J. Peet Cross, of Chicago University and Professor Robert D. Scott, of the University of Nebraska.150 He described these scholars as ‘of the highest reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as authorities on the mediaeval literatures of Northern and Western Europe’.151 During his tour, he visited Harvard, Columbia, New York, Yale, Fordham, Notre Dame, and Northwestern University in Chicago. At that time Harvard and the Catholic University of America were the two institutions at the forefront of the development and promotion of Celtic Studies in the United States. Fred Robinson of Harvard was central to the development of Celtic Studies at Harvard and its increasing importance in the cultural life of North America.152 When he arrived in New York on 2 April 1930 MacNeill was met by detectives and the police as political threats had been made against him.153 His first lecture was on early Celtic institutions and law which was delivered at New York University (NYU) on 2 April 1930. A dinner was hosted in his honour by the American Irish Historical Society of New York and the Law School of New York University. The American Irish Historical Society (AIHS) was founded in 1897 for the purpose of correcting the perception of Ireland’s role in American history.154 By the 1930s this perception was beginning to change. Other speakers at the dinner included Daniel F. Cohalan, who took an active role in the AIHS. Cohalan was the son of an Irish immigrant who left Cork at the height of the Famine in 1847. He had a lot of political influence and was regarded as the ‘leader of the Irish race in America’.155 Prior to his meeting with Eoin MacNeill, Cohalan had met with important cultural and political figures including Douglas Hyde, Patrick Pearse and Roger Casement. He served as President of the Board of Directors of the influential Irish-American newspaper, the Gaelic American from 1903 and was co-founder of the Sinn Féin League of New York with John Devoy in 1907. Cohalan was leader of the Irish-American organisation Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) which was launched a few weeks prior to the 1916 Rising. He supported the Irish Treaty of 1921. MacNeill revealed in his speech in the NYU Law School that ‘he did not believe in impartial national histories’ and that he was ‘willing frankly to admit his inability to write an impartial history of Ireland’.156 This admission gives an insight into his philosophy of history, his nationalist perspective of the past and the expectations of his Irish-American audience.
In 1931 Professor John L. Gerig announced a plan that Harvard and Columbia universities would join together to establish a university in the Scottish Highlands ‘to serve as a world centre of Celtic culture and to preserve the Scottish and Irish dialects from the extinction threatened by the rapid advance of English as a world tongue’.157 Gerig taught Celtic for many years at Columbia University and had been a student of d’Arbois de Jubainville, the famous nineteenth-century French Celticist.158 He wrote to E.J. Gwynn, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, that the plans for the university should ‘emphasise to the Scots and the Irish the role of America in world culture’. E.J. Gwynn replied that ‘The real centre of Celtic studies, ought, of course, to be [….] in Dublin’.159
In the Gaelic American of 27 June 1931 it was reported that Gerig bemoaned the lack of endowments and special chairs for Gaelic studies and the fact that there were ‘no special professors to devote their whole time to the racial heritage of the Gael’.160 For many years the Gaelic American newspaper had highlighted ‘the neglect of Americans of Irish blood in safeguarding their cultural heritage and their backwardness in this respect as compared with other races that make up the cosmopolitan population of America’.161
Gerig’s ‘arresting plea’ for a campaign to stimulate interest in Celtic culture in America was discussed in an article published in the Irish Independent on 6 June 1931. The view was expressed by the author that ‘Ireland was once the centre of learning for Europe. There is no reason why it should not again become the fountain of culture at least for the children of her own race’.162 In the Gaelic American newspaper, 27 June 1931, it was reported that the quality of research work was recognised by leading Irish scholars and colleges, and that this had ‘inspired the hope that America will take the place of Germany in this field of endeavour’. E.J. Gwynn strongly approved of American interest in Celtic Studies. He wrote to Gerig on 10 November 1930 that ‘it is a great satisfaction to know that the decline of Celtic scholarship in France and Germany is being counterbalanced to some extent by the increasing interest shown in the universities of U.S.A’.163 James McGurrin, President-General of the AIHS of New York, in a letter published in The Irish Times, 21 June 1934, acknowledged the fact that the growing interest in things Celtic had produced a large body of research work, ‘and its highest practical expression is seen in the work of the Harvard University Archaeological Mission’.164 After his American tour, Eoin MacNeill suggested that in order to promote a knowledge of Irish national culture, both past and present, special Irish cultural sections in US public libraries and in the libraries of schools, colleges and universities should be set up.165 J.P. Walshe, Secretary at the Department of External Affairs, advised de Valera on 5 October 1937 that ‘the time has come to interest ourselves directly as a Government in what we might call, for want of a better expression, cultural propaganda in the United States’.166 It was his view that it would be money well spent as it would increase the number of tourists. In 1936, a proposal was made to establish in the US an institute similar to the American-Scandinavian Foundation.167
In 1940, a School of Celtic Studies and a School of Theoretical Physics were combined in de Valera’s modernist project – the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. It was de Valera’s ambition that the institute would be a world centre for Celtic Studies and he modelled it on the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. In a Dáil debate on the Institute for Advanced Studies Bill, 1939, de Valera had explained that ‘at the moment we have the leadership of the Celtic nations in so far as we alone of these have a government which can foster, with special interest, the prosecution of such studies’.168 The purpose of the school was to edit and publish material relating to early modern Irish and to produce grammars and dictionaries. De Valera explained what he meant by the term ‘Celtic’:
By ‘Celtic,’ I want it to be clearly understood, we mean more than merely Irish studies. We are thinking of the related Celtic nations and we are anxious to hold our place, as I indicated at the start, as the chief centre for Celtic Studies. There was a time when the centre for Celtic Studies was outside this country but, as time goes on, it is becoming more and more apparent that this country is the natural centre for Celtic studies and we have the men for the work.169
Timothy Linehan of Fine Gael objected to the expenditure on the proposed institute and the abuse of the term ‘Celtic’, stating that ‘you can justify any expenditure of money in this country, you can justify anything in this country by making it Celtic, Gaelic, Irish or national. Anybody who would attack this Bill probably would be attacked all over the country as anti-national and anti-Celtic’.170 The School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies did not include archaeology among its disciplines. It is likely that there were political reasons for this.
Daniel A. Binchy, a scholar of Irish linguistics and early Irish law, and later a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, had been appointed as the first Chairman of the Governing Board of the School of Celtic Studies in 1940. He had served on the Board of the Irish Folklore Commission with Adolf Mahr. Binchy and Mahr had ‘diametrically opposed views on Nazism’.171 These political tensions had affected Binchy’s attendance at meetings of the Board. He had served as an Irish diplomat in Germany between 1929 and 1932 and later wrote articles which were very critical of Hitler and the Nazis.172
