BOOK OF THE DAY: ANNE DOLANreviews De Valera in America: The Rebel President's 1919 Campaignby Dave Hannigan
ON OCTOBER 25th, 1919, Kansas City Courthouse was hearing the case against a woman called Mattie Howard. On trial for her part in a murder, she was found guilty as charged, found God in prison and left the intriguingly titled memoir The Pathway of Mattie Howard (To and From Prison): True Story of the Regeneration of an Ex-convict and Gangster Woman.
Her trial set no new legal precedents, but it was unusual. There was no star witness, but there was a special guest: the man who was claiming to be president of the Irish Republic, Éamon de Valera.
He approached the bench, shook hands with the judge, took to the floor and declared that "in Ireland court trials are more or less of a burlesque".
Few seemed to mind that Mattie Howard's trial was being reduced to a farce for him to make this point. Indeed, she welcomed his intrusion: "Glad to meet you Mister President, you're the first president I ever met. So glad you came."
Much has already been written about the politics of de Valera's visit to the United States from June 1919 to December 1920.
The disputes with Devoy and Cohalan, the break with the Friends of Irish Freedom, are well known.
They are revisited in Dave Hannigan's De Valera in America, but this book is quite different because of Mattie Howard if nothing else.
Hannigan captures the minutiae of those months: the size of the delighted and the angry crowds, what they shouted in enmity and adoration, what songs were sung, even why Thomas Nolan, a 12-year-old from Philadelphia, was chosen to present a floral replica of the Liberty Bell to the Irish visitor. Nolan's mother had once been arrested for hitting Lloyd George - there was meticulous attention to detail when de Valera came to town.
The book has harvested marvellous material from an impressive range of newspapers, from the Los Angeles Timesthat recorded the disquiet of the Lady's Lily Loyal Orange Lodge of Los Angeles at the presence of de Valera in their city, to the Oakland Tribunewhich reported his initiation as "Dressing Bird", Chief of the Chippewa.
Given the range of press coverage, Hannigan underlines how vital the media was throughout the visit, evident in the lengths gone to to gain press attention but also in the power of particular papers to undermine the entire enterprise.
It is the wealth of press material which brings this book to life, which allows the reader to appreciate the scale of de Valera's visit, to understand perhaps why the senior figures of Irish-America were so disgruntled by a man who could fill baseball grounds with enthusiastic crowds.
Hannigan has a clear appreciation for detail, and his book is populated with an interesting, if shadowy, supporting cast.
De Valera in America questions whether all that was spent appearing presidential could be justified when neither Republicans nor Democrats were convinced by his case, asks why he had to stay in the best hotels when Terence MacSwiney was dying on hunger strike in Brixton prison.
There was scope to debate some of these issues further, to go into greater detail on the internal rivalries and the rows de Valera caused, but as an accessible exploration of de Valera's visit to America, this book is certainly an entertaining read.
• De Valera in America: The Rebel President's 1919 CampaignBy Dave Hannigan The O'Brien Press 317pp, €14.99
• Anne Dolan lectures in Irish history at Trinity College Dublin. Her latest book, 'No surrender here!': the civil war papers of Ernie O'Malley, was published by Lilliput Press in 2007