7 Eamon de Valera 7to 1973. An active revolutionary from 1913, he became
president of the Sinn Féin political party in 1918 and
founded the Fianna Fáil Party in 1924. In 1937 he took the
Irish Free State out of the British Commonwealth and
made his country a “sovereign” state, renamed Ireland,
or Éire. His academic attainments also inspired wide
respect; he became chancellor of the National University
of Ireland in 1921.
Born Edward de Valera to a Spanish father and Irish
mother in the United States, he was sent to his mother’s
family in County Limerick, Ireland, when he was two,
after his father’s death. He studied at the local national
school and at Blackrock College, Dublin; he graduated
from the Royal University, Dublin, and became a teacher
of mathematics and an ardent supporter of the Irish lan-
guage revival. In 1913 he joined the Irish Volunteers, which
had been organized to resist opposition to Home Rule for
Ireland. In the anti-British Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916,
he commanded an occupied building and was the last
commander to surrender. Because of his American birth,
he escaped execution by the British but was sentenced to
penal servitude.
Released in 1917 but arrested again and deported to
England in May 1918, de Valera was acclaimed by the Irish
as the chief survivor of the uprising and was elected presi-
dent of the revolutionist Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”) Party,
which won three-quarters of all the Irish constituencies in
December 1918. After a dramatic escape from Lincoln Jail
in February 1919, he went in disguise to the United States,
where he collected funds. He returned to Ireland before
military repression ended with the truce of 1921 and
appointed plenipotentiaries—diplomats with full power
to represent their government—to negotiate in London.
He rejected the treaty that they signed to form the Irish