George’s remarkable popularity among Irish-Americans is used as a lens through which to review the cultural force of ‘Irishness’ as a potent subaltern category. Here, the intersections of class and culture that shaped the distinctive form of Irish-American social radicalism are examined by looking at the enmeshed nationalist, pan-Celticist, anarchist, socialist, agrarian, journalistic, commercial, charitable, and ethno-religious networks that constituted Irish-American associational culture, and the political and poetic discourses they utilised. The political uses and resonances of the American past, and how these mapped on to contemporary political disagreements is examined, particularly the idea of slavery in the politics of land redistribution. The chapter also offers an analysis of the Irish National Land League of America, its support across different regions and among different social groups, and its internal political and ideological tensions. Finally, it considers the use of romantic and poetic imagery in the sustenance of the agrarian political ideals that animated radical agitation and broader conceptions of Irish identity in the United States.

This chapter assesses the political behaviour of Protestant republicans during the revolutionary period, as well as the attitude of the wider Irish advanced nationalist movement towards Protestants. It describes the various means by which some Irish Protestants sought to demonstrate loyalty to the idea of an Irish republic, at a time when the republicanism was adopting a more Catholic nature. It discusses the conscription crisis, which prompted the creation of a specifically Protestant anti-conscription organisation. It analyses the Irish Guild of the Church, the bulk of whose membership had by 1918 come to sympathise with the rebels, and the Irish Guild of Witness, a splinter group, whose members remained loyal to the Crown. The next section deals with the Ulster problem, which forced Protestant republicans to reorient their message in an effort to detach the Protestant working class from unionism, and so avert partition. Finally, it discusses the Protestant Friends of Ireland, an American-based nationalist body, and examines some of the rhetoric Éamon de Valera used about Irish Protestants during his American tour, 1919–1920. Ultimately, this chapter shows that, facing a republican movement that was becoming more Catholic, Protestants were forced to form their own, explicitly Protestant organisations.