Robert Lindsay Crawford

Crawford was born in Tonagh, Lisburn, Co. Antrim, in 1868, son of James Crawford, who recorded his profession as "scripture reader", and Matilda Crawford (née Hastings). Educated privately, he worked for a time in business before becoming, in 1901, the founding editor in Dublin of the evangelical Irish Protestant.[1]

In 1903, with Thomas Sloan, Independent MP for South Belfast, he co-founded the Independent Orange Order (IOO). It was a protest against co-optation of the established Orange Order (from which Crawford had been expelled) by the Ulster Unionist Party and its alignment with the interests of landlords and employers.[2][3] He outlined the new order's democratic manifesto in Orangeism, its history and progress: a plea for first principles (1904).[1]

His attempts, as Grand Master, to promote the Independent order as "strongly Protestant, strongly democratic" and "strongly Irish", and his call in the Magheramorne Manifesto (1904) on Irish Protestants to "reconsider their position as Irish citizens and their attitude towards their Roman Catholic countrymen" led to a break with Sloan and the Order's more determined unionist and sectarian membership.[3]

In the south, Crawford found allies in the Reverend James Owen Hannay (better known as the novelist George A. Birmingham) and his personal network of Irish Irelanders.[4] These included Gaelic League President Douglas Hyde and the principal ideologue of the emergent Sinn Féin movement, United Irishman editor Arthur Griffith. Hannay likened the IOO to the Gaelic League, finding them both "profoundly democratic in spirit" and independent of "the rich and the patronage of the great".[5]

When, in a lecture Crawford suggested that, as unionists feared, Home Rule might lead to Rome Rule, the United Irishman accused Crawford of "seeing the Pope in every bush". Hannay defended him. Much as they both craved "the union of the two Irish democracies", they were not going their eyes, or allow their Catholic "fellow countrymen", to "a priestly tyranny". Crawford did make clear that he did not see clericalism as a problem confined to Catholicism.[4] An Irish Protestant editorial of October 1905 declared: "Protestant Democracy in Ulster is struggling towards the light of national liberty against the combined forces of clericalism and plutocracy" with evidence of "intolerant dominion" of the former "to be found in Protestant Ulster equally with Roman Catholic Munster".[6]

In the Magheramorne Manifesto,[7] Crawford suggested that "the chief obstacle to the spread of democratic principles and to the supremacy of the people in national affairs" in Ireland, was the clerical control of education.[8][4] For his later critics, this position confirmed the "essential emptiness" of Crawford's vision of a reconciled and reformed Ireland. To ask the "Catholic masses of the south to withdraw their support from the political entente worked out between the Irish party and their Church on education" was to ask the impossible. Protestants could not demand the abandonment of Irish Catholic religious and cultural tradition as the price of their adherence to the national cause.[9]

Crawford's call for "the national control of state-paid" education was (in the spirit of Thomas Davis) "sympathetically regarded by a prominent section of Gaelic revival activists" as well as by the IRB veteran Michael Davitt. But among nationalists it remained a decidedly minority, even fringe, demand. Crawford and Hannay's own Church rejected reform. The Church of Ireland Gazette dubbed Crawford "the solitary champion of secularism in the Synod.[4]

When in 1906 he had exhausted his capital and credit, Crawford had to sell Irish Protestant to men opposed to his increasingly national and pro-labour outlook. One of his last contributions to the paper (June 9, 1906) was an obituary for Michael Davitt that revealed Crawford's growing distance from majority unionist opinion. It called Davitt "the great apostle of democracy", citing his defence of Jews in the face of the Limerick boycott, his alliance with the Labour Party and his support of a system of state education. Against unionist criticism of the Land League, he describes Davitt and his Fenian allies as "waging a war" that was "legally ... indefensible", but morally not only "justifiable but a sacred duty".

In the 1906 parliamentary election Crawford unsuccessfully contested Mid Armagh as a Liberal. He then became editor of the  Ulster Guardian, organ of the Ulster Liberal Association.

Before the end of 1907 Crawford had received two letters from the owners of the Liberal paper. The first sanctioned him for his zealous reporting of labour issues. Crawford had actively supported the syndicalist James Larkin in the April to August Belfast dock strike and lockout, taking part in his public meetings.[10] Crawford encouraged workers to stand firm for the sake not only of organised labour, but also of "the unity of all Irishmen".[3] The second enjoined him from celebrating the United Irishmen (the likes of William Drennan and Thomas Russell) and the 1798 Rebellion as an example of progressive Protestantism.[10]

Crawford was defiant. The issue of 29 February 1908 contained reports of the parliamentary debate on the Sweated Industries Bill and a lecture on infant mortality in Ireland. It also reported Crawford’s Independent Orange Lodge lecture "One hundred years of Irish history", in which he referred to sweating in the Belfast linen trade, and said that "the linen merchants of Ulster … were now the last buttress of toryism and Castle ascendancy in Ireland". In the same issue, Crawford explained that he himself "was not a socialist, nor did he believe in the accepted theory of socialism … But the socialistic theory was preferable to the economic heresy of the linen trusts and monopolists".[11]

Ultimately it was on the grounds of his nationalism that in May 1908 Crawford was dismissed: the owners of the Ulster Guardian "would not allow the paper to be used directly or indirectly in support of devolution or Home Rule".[12]

From 1910 to 1918 Crawford lived in Canada working on the Toronto Globe. He reported on, and from, Ireland, but after the Easter Rising of 1916 his support for Irish self-determination placed him at odds with the Globe's liberal unionism. In 1918 he became the founding editor of the Statesman, in which he ran articles that mirrored his commitments to the Protestant Friends of Irish Freedom in New York and to the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Canada and Newfoundland (SDIL).[1][13]

Introduced as "a stout-hearted son of Ulster", in April 1920 Crawford appeared on a Clan-na-Gael platform in New York City with Éamon de Valera in commemoration of the 1916 Rising. Working closely with de Valera loyalist Katherine Hughes, he was named the SDIL's national president at the League's Ottawa Convention in October. In November he began a speaking tour of the Canadian provinces, encountering strong local Orange Order opposition. In Fredericton, New Brunswick, the audience drowned his words with "God Save the King"; in Moncton Crawford was attacked upon leaving the venue, and, according to the Orange Order’s press organ, the Sentinel, forced to kiss the Union Jack;” in Newfoundland Catholic Archbishop, Edward Roche, cautioned the SDIL against sparking a sectarian war; and in Vancouver B. C., on the Canadian west coast, Crawford's public appearance was banned after his first riotous reception.[14][15]

From 1922 Crawford lived in New York City, serving first as trade commissioner and consul for the new the Irish Free State and then, from 1933, as secretary of the American National Foreign Trade Council.[15]

Crawford died in New York City on 3 June 1945 aged 76. He left a widow, the former Edith Church; a son Desmond L Crawford who, one month from the end of the War in Europe, was serving as a First Lieutenant with the U.S. Army in Italy, and two daughters, Miss Morna E. Crawford, in Italy with the American Red Cross, and Mrs Doris Crampton of Dublin.[15]