“Oh, the foolish Irish,” Woodrow Wilson remarked at the end of his presidency, “Would to God they might have all have gone back home” (279). Wilson was lamenting the role Irish Americans played in helping to undermine the adoption of the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, and the frustration he voiced points to the harsh conflicts over U.S. policy as it affected Ireland.

This is but one of the insights provided by Bernadette Whelan's important new book about the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Ireland. It is really a story of complex triangular relations that also includes the United Kingdom as well as the role of domestic politics. Whelan is no stranger to the subject of relations between Ireland and the United States, and she has written previously about Ireland's connections with the Marshall Plan and NATO.

For years Ireland's role in the Western European relationship with the United States was overlooked, but a new generation of historians is beginning to ferret out the important details. The America-Ireland relationship deserves thorough study because the triangular relationship that includes Britain often reveals valuable insights about each nation and its relationship with the wider world. Further, the America-Ireland relationship allows historians to study the role and impact of a large and powerful ethnic group, the Irish Americans, on U.S. foreign policy.

In this study, Whelan steps back to an earlier period when the real foundation for Irish American relations was established. This long and detailed book traces the great disappointments the Irish and Irish Americans had with the Wilson administration and how, unexpectedly, progress was made, however haltingly, during the Harding administration, leading, finally, to the decision by President Calvin Coolidge to grant Ireland full diplomatic recognition.

Because Ireland lacked ambassadorial status in the 1920s, Whelan has mined the archives of the consulates to provide a wealth of data. The consuls were a varied lot, some too busy with the minutiae of their jobs to undertake real, substantial reporting that would have aided American policy makers. During the extraordinary events of Easter 1916, for example, the Dublin consul officers failed to make any report—for months. The U.S. State Department was without an independent view on the streets of Ireland's capital. By comparison, in 1915, when the Lusitania and Arabic ocean liners were sunk by German submarines, consular staff at Queenstown, in county Cork, located near where survivors were brought ashore, provided ample and detailed information. Whelan's careful work on the consular staffs provides a wealth of knowledge about how the wheels of diplomacy worked or, in some cases, did not work.

In any study of American policy toward Ireland the role of Irish Americans must be interwoven into the story, and this is a great strength of Whelan's narrative. Her recognition of the role of Irish Americans in contributing to the Senate's defeat of the Versailles treaty is an important contribution. Irish Americans had great expectations for Wilson and were greatly disappointed when they realized that Wilson's hostility to their interests.

Harding won election with over 60 percent of the vote, a margin of victory accorded, at least in part, to Irish American support. But in contrast to its hopes for Wilson, the Irish American community expected little from Harding. In the meantime, the situation had begun to change in Ireland. After the Anglo-Irish War, a treaty dividing Ireland was reached that separated six of the northern counties of Ulster from the rest of Ireland. Soon after that, the Irish Civil War broke out between those who supported the treaty and those who didn’t. Now, Harding not only had to determine how to deal with the Irish Free State but also had to realize he no longer faced a single Irish faction pushing for one idea. Harding's decision to aid the Irish relief campaign on humanitarian grounds was interpreted in many circles as great support for the Irish Free State. Harding also chose to bring into open discussion with the British ambassador the question of the status of Ireland. He did this, however, for several reasons, most of them not directly connected to the Irish American lobby. Nevertheless, this extraordinary action was interpreted on all sides as support for the Irish republicans and sparked anti-British agitation. Harding and his secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, then adopted for the remainder of the Harding presidency a more cautious policy.

A number of pressures brought about the American decision to accept a representative of the Irish Free State in Washington, DC. Britain asked for the recognition, in part, because it would work against the nontreaties and also because it would aid in stabilizing the Irish government. Also, as Whelan describes, the American government had already made some preliminary moves toward recognition, such as reorganization of the consular districts and the 1924 legislation increasing the number of immigrants from the Free State by cutting into the allotment of legal immigrants from Britain. Further, Secretary of State Hughes saw an independent Irish vote in the League of Nations and on the World Court as an asset for democratic issues.

The coming of the Calvin Coolidge administration opened the door for more normal relations between the United States and the Irish Free State. In October 1924, Timothy Smiddy was accepted as the Irish Free State's first minister to the United States. Through persistence and diplomatic skill, Smiddy broke down skepticism and outdated attitudes as the American government became accustomed to dealing with the Irish Free State directly, without the British as intermediaries. Driving American policy, in part, was a desire to see the Cosgrave government (made up of those who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921) succeed against the nontreaty-ites (represented by Eamon de Valera and his supporters). While the political situation in Ireland continued to roil, Whelan explains, the Irish question had largely become a nonissue by 1929, because most Americans by then supported the Irish Free State. Whelan concludes with some very friendly meetings between the Irish diplomatic delegation and President Herbert Hoover. “It had been a long road but US-Irish diplomatic relations were regular and normal,” Whelan observes.

This study explains the complex issues involving the United States, Ireland, and Britain in the 1920s in a meticulous way. I hope that Whelan is not yet done with the topic; a good review of the events of the 1930s, as Ireland moved toward even greater independence from Britain, is an important part of the story begun in this book. Also, a good corrective is needed for the tendency in American foreign relations for Anglophiles to pass their politics off as being “realistic” while critics of the Anglo-American relationship are often dismissed as “unrealistic” and caught up in their emotional identifications. This is in spite of the fact that much Anglophilia is itself rooted in romanticism. In any case, historians will find Whelan's work a very useful volume in terms of both domestic and international politics and a fine contribution to the field of Atlantic studies.