Global Lives: Dr William J. Maloney
by Kelly Anne Reynolds
In Dr William J. M. A. Maloney’s own words, he was ‘a nobody in the Irish movement’, but for a nobody the ‘Doc’ proved to be one of the more complex characters of the Irish Revolution. He was beloved by Dr Patrick McCartan and Joseph McGarrity, but loathed by others like Judge Daniel F. Cohalan and John Devoy. A Scottish nerve specialist with no previous ties to Irish nationalism, Dr Maloney’s progression from a disillusioned British Army physician into a full-fledged Irish nationalist happened seemingly overnight. Having traveled throughout Europe for his medical training, he also became a frequent visitor to the Caribbean, and interacted with all walks of people. Primarily known for his ‘fine Italian hand’— seen by various Irish-Americans as both a skill and threat — he was ‘The Doctor’ behind some of the most powerful Irish propaganda in the United States during his time in the Irish movement. His interpretations about how to achieve recognition for an Irish Republic differed from that of others, as did the ways in which he used American progressive ideas to communicate the Irish struggle beyond an Irish-American audience.
Born of Irish descent in Edinburgh on October 16, 1882, the University of Edinburgh alumnus developed a reputation as an exceptional mind after completing his medical degree in 1907. Ahead of the time in his research, he spent the next years continuing his medical training with fellowships in Paris, London, and Munich under some of the world’s leading specialists in psychology, psychiatry, and nervous diseases: e.g. Dr Charles Spearman, Dr Robert Foster Kennedy, Dr Emil Kraepelin and Dr Alois Alzheimer. Maloney was inducted into the Royal Society of Edinburgh and moved to New York in 1911 to be Professor of Nervous Diseases at Fordham University. In January, 1913 he married Margaret McKim, daughter of renowned American architect Charles Follen McKim, in Canada and during their first years of marriage they traveled to Bermuda, England, Scotland, and Ireland. In Ireland, Maloney was in contact with Douglas Hyde, who explained in a letter that he had seen some of the Irish Volunteers gathering, but before the war Maloney’s own views on Ireland are not clear. Although his later writing looks down on Carson and the unionists describing the Ulster crisis as the ‘Carson Rebellion’ and being far from the peaceful assembly they claimed it to be.
While visiting Ireland in 1914, the outbreak of the First World War pushed Dr Maloney to enlist as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps. As a British subject, he believed it a moral obligation and was among those motivated by the ‘iniquity of the German invasion of Belgium.’ Wounded at the Battle of the Marne, and then more seriously at Gallipoli when trying to aide an officer, he earned a promotion and the Military Cross. Maloney returned to New York and soon after traveled to Bermuda with his wife. Maloney did not speak of his injury in his letters, but based on ship-manifests, he clearly understood what was going on with his body due his training as a nerve-specialist. The ship manifests of Maloney’s travel during 1915 through 1917 detail the progression of his recovery, evolving from a general paralysis of lower right extremities to gun shot to sciatic nerve and partial paralysis of a few toes.
His involvement in Irish affairs began after the execution of the Easter Rising leaders, when he travelled to England in July to aid Roger Casement in his appeal. Maloney had connections to Lord Eustace Percy and Sir Shane Leslie in their professional connections to the British foreign office, but remained coy about any previous connections to Roger Casement himself. During this trip Maloney found out that his younger brother had died at the Somme from wounds received at Longueval. On 4 August, the day after Casement’s execution, Maloney got into an altercation with fellow officers at a private club in London over Casement’s execution and resigned from his commission before sailing home on the 5th.
To continue the recovery of paralysis in his right leg (the bullet hitting his sciatic nerve), Maloney and his wife spent seven months (October 1916 – April 1917) in Jamaica. Maloney returned once the United States had entered the war, and from this point on he became increasingly more disillusioned with the British war aims and even returned his Military Cross in anger. He put his effort behind the Irish cause, beginning with critical editorials in the New York Evening Post on the Irish Question and the War, the Balfour Mission, and the Irish Convention. Maloney’s ‘Irish Convention Symposium’ was a series of articles in the Evening Post where he posed questions and published the responses from political leaders, in an attempt to understand the opinions of Irish Americans. This showed the views on the convention varied and were not as supportive as the British propaganda portrayed. Since a group of prominent Irish-American Presbyterians were reportedly going over to aid ‘their Ulster brethren,’ Maloney then suggested that a similar group supporting the nationalist and Sinn Féin perspective should go as well. That group could include prominent figures such as the lawyer Michael J. Ryan, Justice Daniel F. Cohalan, former Senator James O’Gorman, composer Victor Herbert, and the progressive lawyer Bainbridge Colby. Maloney seems to have been seeking some balance between the two opposing sides even as the British and American governments sought to promote moderation in order to decrease support for Irish revolutionaries. Maloney believed that the Irish convention was British ‘camouflage’ and criticised attempts to preemptively blame the native Irish population should the convention fail. Due to his wife’s familial connection to Oswald Garrison Villard, owner of the Evening Post and The Nation, Maloney had unfettered access to publishing his views.
Dr Maloney advocated for Irish independence through connections with notable liberal and progressive Americans after he tried to convince his British peers to take action. He failed to persuade his friend Lord Eustace Percy, the blockade specialist with the Balfour Mission, to find a quick and fair solution to the Irish Question. This happened at a notorious 3 May British Embassy meeting with his friends Lord Percy and Sir Shane Leslie. Later in September, this meeting would be used by Judge Cohalan as proof of a conspiracy by the American and British governments to silence him with the Von Igel Papers scandal. In doing so he evoked the names of the men at the meeting including Dr Maloney, as Maloney had given him permission to do so.
Although Dr Maloney’s role was often behind the scenes because he did not have titles or leading roles in the organisations and efforts he helped spearhead, he was often a key manager. His efforts ranged from planning and written work to demonstrations with groups like the Irish Progressive League and the League of Oppressed Peoples. Maloney’s medical contributions extended to the Irish cause too, when he acted as a physician to several Irish nationalists during their time in the United States. Maloney became a reliable physician to ailing Irish Revolutionaries like Liam Mellows, Joseph McGarrity, Harry Boland, and even advised Laurence Ginnell via letter while he was in Argentina. From 1918 onward, he worked closely with Dr McCartan and McGarrity becoming the single most prolific contributor to the Irish Press; according to Dr McCartan, Maloney ‘not only wrote articles and editorials, but gathered news for us and helped us in our policy. It was Maloney’s writing on Irish Conscription for the New York Evening Post, the New York Globe, and America that got the attention of both Irish-America and the British Embassy. Maloney approached Irish conscription in a manner that reflected the American situation in relation to conscientious objectors, mainly that conscription was in violation of the rights of the individual. He did not portray the issue as nationalist, but as imperialist: ‘the obsession of these imperialists to impose unity of sacrifice in the empire. They [we]re trying to make conscription a means of imperial consolation.’ He concluded that every ‘Irish Republican is, ipso facto, a conscientious objector to imperial conscription’ as how could they be ‘forced to fight for a liberty which they themselves do not possess.’
Maloney increasingly put the Irish situation in the context of international affairs and global history, as seen in his series ‘The Irish Issue’. His most scathing analysis came in the two articles on the ‘English Aspect’ and the ‘Ulster Aspect’ which contrasted English imperialism with that of Germany. In the ‘Ulster Aspect,’ Maloney criticised home rule because it would have created ‘an Ireland without economic or judicial or political or any other independence, an Ireland more subject to Britain than is Canada or any of Britain’s self-governing dominions.’ As Maloney’s disappointment increased with each British policy blunder in Ireland, so grew his Irish nationalism. It was a risky tactic to compare England to Germany while America was still at war and consumed with anti-German sentiment. Maloney wrote:
The German Imperialist demonstrably had both in Schleswig-Holstein and in Alsace-Lorraine no purpose distinguishable from that which the British Imperialist still has in Ireland, and still makes complex and obscure by the stereotyped plea of religious, national, and imperial rights of British colonists in Ulster…So long as England governs Ireland, the privileged, the parasitic, and the professional Loyalists will exercise their religious, national, and imperial right to administer, on behalf of the Empire, the satrapy of Ireland.
Such direct critique resonated with both Americans and Irish nationalists. Maloney further explained: ‘the negligible number of Irish Loyalists, in a world where the principle of majority rule is the foundation of democracy, is allowed to impose for their Imperial masters an insuperable veto to ‘the government of Ireland by the consent of the governed.’
Even with all of his connections he was not safe from the American Sedition and Espionage Acts. He was followed for months by various American military intelligence personnel and the British allotted three agents whose sole task was to shadow him. His mail was opened, phones tapped, office raided, and under constant surveillance. His writing was censored and he was threatened with incarceration in November 1918 under the suggestion of the British Embassy. This fact was confirmed by a memo by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1941 describing an incomplete World War I intelligence file on Maloney. In letters with Patrick McCartan, Maloney aggressively criticised the Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and the raids on innocent civilians without proper warrants around the time Maloney had his home raided.
The Sinn Féin election in December 1918 put Maloney at odds with John Devoy and Judge Cohalan, the two leading Irish-Americans who labeled the gallant captain a British spy in private letters and alluded to this in Gaelic American editorials without actually naming Maloney. Maloney’s influence and skill were both a gift and burden, especially when Devoy accused him of ‘pouring poison into the ears of sick or diseased men and making them the unconscious instruments of his treachery’ as the ‘arch Plotter’ to take down Clan na Gael. On the other hand, Maloney, McCartan, and McGarrity believed that the Irish people had already exercised their right to self-determination; therefore, the only essential next steps were to declare the establishment of a Republic and seek recognition from the world. Parties nearly came to blows when a dispute emerged at the 1919 Irish Race Convention in Philadelphia when McGarrity put Maloney on the Committee on Resolutions to propose asking President Wilson to demand admission to the Paris Peace Conference for Irish delegates. The resolution sought to force Wilson to uphold their claim for recognition of the Irish Republic before the assembled nations. This did not go well. Maloney, who had never spoken at an Irish meeting before, was vilified as a British outsider sent to sow dissension.
Dr Maloney in turn collaborated with other nationalist groups like the Friends of Freedom for India to offer his assistance. For example, Sailendranath Ghose, a Hindu nationalist in New York working with Friend of Freedom for India, asked Maloney for introductions to influential Americans to get their moral and financial support, which mirrored what Maloney had done for the Irish. In the aftermath of World War I, Wilson’s cornerstone message of self-determination would haunt the allied nations through the Paris peace conference, and Maloney would not let them forget the small nations. Maloney continued this international coordination through his work with the League of Oppressed Peoples.
With the arrival of Éamon de Valera and Harry Boland, Maloney’s next move was to prevent the formation of the League of Nations through his satirical pamphlets. His most notorious, The Re-Conquest of America (1919), portrayed a classified document found outside the home of British Intelligence Officer Sir William Wiseman. It drew attention to the soft power of British propaganda during the war, but made it appear as if it revealed a secret British plot to reconquer their former American colonies. Maloney’s lesser known pamphlet The Hypocrypha (1920) used humor and creativity to expose the hypocrisy of the war and treaty negotiations by the Allied governments. Maloney did not want to further risk the wrath of the American government, nor implicate his publisher J. E. C. Donnelly (publisher of James Connelly’s Harp), which explains the anonymity and a false publisher’s name, The Statesman Press.
According to Maloney, he initially kept his distance from Boland and de Valera so as to not entangle them in the escalating tensions with Cohalan and Devoy. They eventually brought Maloney into their confidences to assist with the Irish Bond Drive, much to the ire of Devoy. Maloney moved from writing to organising movements. With the support of Cumann na mBan he helped organise their picketing campaign in Washington D.C., by focusing on the power of the visual for propaganda with those iconic photographs of Women and children with signs asking for the United States to take action or for the Red Cross to give aid.
Maloney’s most successful effort, came with the help of American progressives in the formation of the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland (ACCI) and the American Committee for Relief in Ireland (ACRI) in late 1920. Maloney worked with Oswald Garrison Villard to form the ACCI, which featured Muriel and Mary MacSwiney as witnesses to the atrocities in Ireland at the hands of British misrule. Behind the scenes Maloney did most of the heavy lifting through planning and his work on the financial committee. According to his memorandum outlining the commission, ‘the main object to be kept in mind is that [it] is merely a mask to place the Irish case before the tribunal of the civilised world.’ Maloney worked tirelessly to ensure that the foreign press was reporting on the investigative committees and organised publications of the reports with the conclusions from the investigations, transcripts of the witness testimonies, and photographs portraying the devastation. Beyond English speaking nations, the ‘Report of the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland’ was published in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. He understood that these witness testimonials could ignite enough sympathy to fund his next strategy, a relief effort.
In December 1920, Maloney proposed a global relief enterprise (the ACRI) which would generate diverse support due to ongoing American global involvement in post- First World War relief. Maloney was one of the second wave of American liberal progressives who involved themselves in nationalist movements, political activism, civil liberties, the rights of small nations, and relief work abroad. He viewed everything he did from its publicity potential, no matter what cause he was promoting, including ACCI and ACRI. This was part of a larger plan by Maloney to de-racialise and secularise Irish independence which was generally seen as Catholic in American public opinion. By tying the Irish situation to the destruction of Europe, Maloney aimed to gain empathy from those recovering nations and to demonstrate the destructive nature of British misrule in Ireland. His goal was to utilise the ACCI witness statements to benefit ACRI fundraising efforts for relief and he single-handedly wrote out the organisational plans for use in the United States and in Ireland. Maloney also pushed key figures, including a reluctant Éamon de Valera and a generous Joseph McGarrity, to back him.
The ACRI’s relief was highly successful, raising approximately $5 million and often working through a sister organisation in Ireland, the Irish White Cross. The formation of the Irish White Cross was part of Maloney’s original organisation scheme, and he used his Quaker connections to initiate that effort through James Douglas. Maloney’s efforts legitimised the relief movement when the British Authorities at every step tried to dismantle or discredit them. His powerful reports and propaganda demonstrated to the public the real need for relief in Ireland. The relief helped stabilise Ireland’s population and rebuild home and business that had been destroyed in reprisal attacks. In Belfast a street that had been burned down in the 1920 Pogrom was rebuilt with the funds and renamed ‘Amcomri’ as an abbreviation for the American Committee for Relief in Ireland. While not overtly created to further the cause for recognition of an Irish Republic, the American Committee for Relief in Ireland (ACRI) was a strategic milestone to that end for Dr William J. M. A. Maloney. At a time when Irish America was ideologically split, ACRI tried to remain independent of factionalism on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although Maloney initially supported the Irish Free State, he sought in vain to prevent internecine conflict from further escalating in 1922. His efforts were stalled once his wife fell ill while travelling to Ireland in July 1922. After the death of his dear friend Harry Boland in what he called ‘fratricide’, Maloney stepped back into his professional role as a physician and did not involve himself further in the raw ideological split in Irish politics. Any involvement with Ireland from that point on was through research for his book The Forged Casement Diaries. Maloney spent the rest of his life travelling between Newport, Edinburgh, New York, Canada, and the Caribbean. He died in Edinburgh in 1952 and was buried in New Jersey with his wife. Without any children, his only legacy was his extensive set of Irish historical papers at the New York Public Library.
Maloney was moving between various distinct worlds within American society, Irish-America and that of the American reforming elite, and was connecting with a global world as well. It may be that his adherence to, or understanding of, American progressivism allowed him to be such a strong propagandist and advocate for the Irish cause. He wrote in a way that was not overtly radical, but still challenged the status quo. The body of work he left behind is historically based and still comes across as logical, theoretical, and concise. He was able to recruit more people to the Irish cause, even though some viewed outsiders as dangerous, especially in the Irish American context, his allegiance was repeatedly questioned, as were his motivations. Due to his connections and expansion into the humanitarian realm, Maloney was able to make the Irish case resonate in such a way that it was more than just an ethno-racial problem. He reflects people who did a lot of good without necessarily being a leader in, or someone who took up arms for, Ireland. His writings helped to foreground the Irish situation in American and global circles. Despite British citizenship and wartime service, the ideological migration Maloney made — first into someone who was an ardent critic of the Anglo-American approach to the Irish Question, then as an ardent Irish nationalist — he demonstrates that not every story follows a predictable arc. Behind his political progression and social fluidity was a search for what he felt was the fair and right solution. As he challenged the status quo, he took greater risks in spite of the possible repercussions from the British, the Americans, and the Irish. He wasn’t reckless but he also did not stay silent — as some in America did — because he knew his background gave him an advantage that others did not have. Maloney was right in saying that ‘the Irish people do not acquiesce.’
Kelly Anne Reynolds has a BA in history from Fordham University and recently completed her MA in Irish and Irish-American Studies at New York University. Her ongoing research focuses on Dr Maloney and the connection of American progressives with the Irish through organisations like the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland, the American Committee for Relief in Ireland, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
