Mobilizing World Opinion Against the Government: How the Irish Did It and Won

The Anglo-Irish war of 1919-1921 was an international historical landmark: the first successful revolution against British rule and the beginning of the end of the Empire. But the Irish revolutionaries did not win their struggle on the battlefield -- their key victory was in mobilizing public opinion in Britain and the rest of the world. Journalists and writers flocked to Ireland, where the increasingly brutal conflict was seen as the crucible for settling some of the key issues of the new world order emerging from the ruins of the First World War. On trial was the British Empire’s claim to be the champion of civilization and the principle of self-determination proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson.  But the little-told story of how British and American correspondents presented the Irish struggle to the rest of the world has remarkable parallels with Vietnam and Iraq. The coverage of Ireland marked the beginning of an era when a major power could lose control of perceptions of a small war. And the adversarial reporting by British correspondents in Ireland was inspired by a widespread view that journalism had failed in its duty during the First World War. 

In his preface to Michael Massing’s pamphlet on the American press and Iraq, Now They Tell Us, Orville Schell asks “what had happened to the press’s vaunted role as skeptical ‘watchdog’ over government power?" This was the same question that gained currency in Britain and the United States in 1919. The First World War had been a ‘total’ war, a conflict where the whole population was mobilized in an enormous collective effort to fight and sustain the fight. The lament of the Viennese satirist, Karl Krauss that the journalists “implant in us the courage in the face of death which we need in order to rush off into battle” was not far off the mark.  From 1914 to 1918 the mainstream press in Britain was co-opted for the war effort. Newspaper proprietors acquiesced in the system of censorship and their journalists followed suit. The correspondents who tried to report independently from northern France in the early days of the war were arrested and expelled. Soon afterwards official war correspondents were sanctioned to send the news back to London. They were carefully escorted to the front and the dispatches they wrote in the lavishly appointed villas well behind the lines were only sent out after being scrutinized and passed by military censors; they could hardly be said to have witnessed the war in any real sense.

Henry Wood Nevinson, a famous correspondent of the day, contrasted the life of a war correspondent at the turn of the century with this new dispensation.  During the Boer war “a correspondent with the British army had to look after his own supplies and transport and the task, as a rule, occupied about half his working time.”  But as an officially accredited correspondent in France fifteen years later “the Staff motor appeared at the door exactly at the appointed time; a friendly Staff officer accompanied me to whatever part of the line or advance I wished to visit…food appeared, falling like manna from heaven without any stir; servants appeared when required, like slaves in the ‘Arabian Nights.’” The effect on the journalists’ copy was equally dramatic: a parade of heroic scenes in which the war was portrayed like a football match at Eton, a style which nauseated the men in the trenches. Typically, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the despatch from Nevinson’s esteemed colleague, Philip Gibbs, managed to omit mentioning that twenty-thousand British soldiers were killed.

The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, appreciated how such grotesque tact on the part of the press helped the country to go on. Over breakfast at Downing Street in December 1917 he acknowledged to C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, how the combination of co-option and censorship had kept the true horror of the war hidden from the public. “If people really knew [what was going on in the trenches] the war would be stopped tomorrow,” Lloyd George admitted. “But of course they don’t and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship would not pass the truth.”

But in the years after the war this stunning success of news management and propaganda was viewed with growing distrust. Norman Angell was one of many critics who argued that the deceptions of war spilled over into peacetime; that the newspapers had been corrupted and that the press had become “perhaps the worst of all the menaces to modern democracy.”  H.G. Wells summed up a widespread view when he wrote in 1921 that “there has been a considerable increase of deliberate lying in the British press since 1914, and a marked loss of journalistic self-respect….”   The eagerness with which the press had collaborated with the censorship exposed reporters like Gibbs to vilification in the skeptical recriminations that followed. Another famous correspondent of the time, Hamilton Fyfe, believed that the failures of the press during the war caused it “to be jeered at and distrusted, created around it an atmosphere of suspicion.” 

This was the context in which British correspondents began to cover the campaign to defeat the Irish revolutionaries in 1920. After the effective collapse of the local police force in the face of guerrilla tactics, the British government recruited ex-soldiers and officers to wage a war of reprisals against the IRA.  The British correspondents came to focus almost exclusively on the behavior of these paramilitaries – to the exclusion of the IRA’s ambushes and assassinations – relentlessly describing the random shootings of civilians, flogging of Sinn Fein sympathizers, the burning of creameries and the looting of shops.   International press coverage spread the notoriety of the war of reprisals in Ireland around the globe; descriptions of a British freikorps who self-consciously modeled themselves on the gunslingers of the Wild West were little aid to the image that the British government was trying to project to the world after its self-proclaimed victory over German barbarism.  After a visit to the United States Henry Wood Nevinson wrote that it was “a terrible thing to feel ashamed of the country one loves.  It is like coming home and finding one’s mother drunk upon the floor.”

In Ireland the British correspondents found an arena in which they could re-assert themselves their reputations restore the myth of the watchdog press, so badly tarnished during the Great War. Their quest was assisted by a series of  dramatic political debates about colonial warfare, liberal guilt and revolutionary propaganda which made the war in Ireland the template for battles over public opinion in the rest of the twentieth century.