Matthew Davis Biography of Arthur Griffith During the Late 1800S And

Matthew Davis Biography of Arthur Griffith During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Ireland was experiencing a severe amount of political, cultural, and ethnic turmoil due largely to its own governance and its relationship to Great Britain. Naturally, in such a time of crisis, many public figures shared their own opinions on the situation and tried to convince others to feel the same way. One such figure was Arthur Griffith. As an influential politician and writer, he worked fervently for the Irish nationalist movement. Arthur Griffith was born on March 31, 1871, in Dublin, Ireland. Griffith attended school, but his formal education came to an end before the age of thirteen. He initially worked in a printing shop until he found his way into an organization called the Gaelic League, whose purpose was to promote the use of the original Irish language. In his youth, he also joined the notorious Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was a secret revolutionary organization aiming to establish Ireland as an independent nation. Particularly, this group advocated the use of force and violence to create this republic. In his early years, Griffith was a notable supporter of Roman republican principles. In 1897, Griffith visited South Africa where he spent time with the Boers, a group of Dutch farmers who disliked the British expansionist policies. Due to an offer from his friend William Rooney, Griffith quickly returned to Ireland where the two worked to create a nationalist newspaper called the United Irishman. Despite his numerous responsibilities, Griffith maintained his passion of journalism for many years. He eventually married Maud Sheehan in 1910 and had two kids. Perhaps the most notable contribution that Griffith made to Ireland was the creation of the Sinn Féin political party. The inspiration for these political ideas came almost directly from a revolution in Hungary. Hungary, which was once a part of the Austrian Empire, eventually became a dual kingdom equal in status to Austria, thus leading to the creation of Austria-Hungary. Due to his realist principles and practical nature, Griffith advocated for a similar relationship between Britain and Ireland because it seemed much more feasible than full separation and independence. Interestingly, Griffith did not view himself as a primary leader; instead, he viewed himself as someone who could provide strategies of success to a future leader. The main strategy was abstention, the belief that Ireland should withdraw from British Parliament and establish their own. Another belief central to Griffith’s nationalist mentality was the concept of economic nationalism, which is the principle that nationalism within a political state is paramount to its commercial success. He based these claims off of the work of Friedrich List, a German economist. Griffith argued that individual citizens within a nation should always sacrifice themselves for the common good. Griffith was also a geographical determinist, and he supported the idea that all people living on the Irish island were members of the Irish nation – regardless of their ethnic or cultural background. Griffith also had political and social beliefs that have experienced a great deal of criticism, notably his anti-Semitic opinions in favor of a more nationalist Ireland. He saw the Jews as “unassimilable aliens, corrupted, like the English, by adherence to commercial values rather than improved by the virtues of citizenship” (Maume, 166). Ironically, he was also a Zionist, meaning he favored the creation of an independent Jewish state in Israel. Griffith believed that this event would allow the Jews to essentially become better citizens and simultaneously benefit both the Irish people and Jewish people. With all of the talk of change and revolution, the time came for these ideas to be put into action. The year 1916 marked a key turning point for the Irish nationalist movement: rebels in Dublin captured several crucial locations. However, this victory was short-lived and the rebels were defeated. The result of this Easter Rising led to conflicts between Griffith and Éamon de Valera, who wanted a dual monarch and a pure republic, respectively. Despite attempts to mediate the situation with a compromise, Griffith resigned as the leader of the Sinn Féin party, although his involvement in politics did not come to an end. After the War of Independence, he spent months in London negotiating a treaty in which neither Ireland nor Britain wanted to concede to the other. In 1922, Griffith and de Valera both had enough notoriety and support to become president of the new republic, and Griffith emerged victorious by a very narrow margin. Unfortunately, before he could accomplish much more, Griffith passed away unexpectedly on August 12, 1922, at the age of fifty-one due to a series of hemorrhages in the brain. Arthur Griffith’s impact and legacy would be critical to Irish politics, economics, and nationalist fervor for many years after his death. As a writer, journalist, and politician, he contemplated and instigated changes in a system that he viewed as inefficient and unjust, establishing himself as a critical component of Irish history and the nationalist movement. Sources “Arthur Griffith.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Aug. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Griffith. Maume, Patrick. “Young Ireland, Arthur Griffith, and Republican Ideology: The Question of Continuity.” African Studies Review, Cambridge University Press, 31 Aug. 2017, muse.jhu.edu/article/666942/pdf. Michael Laffan. "Griffith, Arthur Joseph". Dictionary of Irish Biography. (ed.) James McGuire, James Quinn. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2009. (http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a3644) .

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