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From the
_IRISH NATIONAL BUREAU
1051 Munsey Building
Washington, D. C.
RELEASE FOR
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1919
Willard De Lue
Chief, Section of Information
Washington—The following letter
was sent yesterday to Secretary of
the Navy Daniels, by the Irish Na-
tional Bureau.
From: Daniet T. O’Connet, Director, J Irish
National Bureau, Washington,
To: Hus DANIELs,
Jos Secretary of the
Navy, "Washington, D.
Subject: Activities of Admiral William Sow-
den Sims.
The Irish National Bureau feels called
upon once again to address you on the activi-
ties of Admiral William Sowden Sims. It
does not do so from any desire to involve
you in a discussion which is as distasteful to
this Bureau as it must be to you. But we
believe that we would be remiss in our du-
ties as American citizens and unfair to Ad-
miral Sims himself were we to let pass with-
out giving opportunity for explanation, a
situation which may involve not only the fu-
ture of the United States Navy, but of the
very nation itself, its traditions and its pol-
icies. Admiral Sims, through his gratuitous
attack upon the Irish people and upon the
supporters of the Irish Republic in the United
States, has drawn upon himself the spotlight
of publicity; and, by glorifying one of his
notable mistakes of the past, has justified a
careful scrutiny of his more recent acts. The
facts which the Irish National Bureau sets
forth herewith can be verified by you from
information which must be in the hands of
the Navy Intelligence Department; and. per-
haps the Navy Intelligence Department may
be able to explain what we frankly can not—
the strange circumstances by’ which an ad-
miral of the United States Navy has identi-
fied himself with a movement which, in our
estimation, is prejudicial to the best interests
of the Navy and of the nation.
2. The Irish National Bureau respectfully
calls your attention to the movements of Ad-
miral Sims on the 3d day of May, 1919. On
that day you will find he was feted by an
organization which has headquarters in New
York City, but whose origin and whose guid-
ing force is purely English. The spokesman
for that organization publicly applauded Ad-
miral Sims’ pro-English declaration at the
Guildhall in London in 1910, for which the
Admiral at the time was officially rebuked;
the official publication of that organization
acclaimed him as a man “whose glorious in-
discretion made him famous,” and Admiral
Sims himself was led to refer to the inci-
dent with some pride.
3. Now, Mr. Secretary, the organization
with which Admiral Sims thus allowed him-
self to be identified is none other than the
English-Speaking Union, one of the most ac-
tive and one of the most potent organiza-
tions for English propaganda which the
United States has had thrust upon it in re-
cent years. The head of the English-Speak-
ing Union is none other than Arthur J.
Balfour, a cousin to the author of the cove-
nant of the League of Nations, Lord Robert
Cecil; a former First Lord of the English
Admiralty and now Lord President of the
Imperial Council. The chief American or-
ganizer of the English-Speaking Union is
Major George Haven Putnam, who is Eng-
Jish-born, and who received his commission
as organizer while in England.
4. The English-Speaking Union, Mr. Secre-
tary, is avowedly a propaganda organization.
lt makes no pretense of being anything else.
Among its objects is the changing of Ameri-
can history as at present taught in our
schools, so as to make future generations of
our citizens believe that the American Revo-
lution was either a terrible mistake or a bless-
ing received from England, that the War of
1812 was a mere comic opera war, and that
the best way to remedy the damage done in
1776 will be the making of a powerful Anglo-
American compact. These, Mr. Secretary,
are not our opinions. They are the bold
statements emanating from officials of the
English-Speaking Union themselves.
5. The ultimate end of all English propa-
ganda is the establishment of a union, federa-
tion or other combination of Great Britain,
the British dominions and the United States
of America. There are, however, more im-
mediate objects in view, objects which are
of vital concern to you as the head of the
United States Navy, for among them is one
which vitally affects our naval policy and our
naval program, These immediate objects
apparently are: (1) A discouragement
of large-scale naval-construction programs by
this country; (2) the surrender of Atlantic
trade lines to English naval control; and (3)
the placing upon the United States Navy or
upon a combined Canadian-Australian-Ameri-
can fleet the terrible naval burdens and the
terrible problems which the world, and Eng-
land in particular, sees confronting it in the
Pacific. To carry out this program, it is pro-
posed by certain English propagandists that
the fleets of England and the fleets of the
United States BE BROUGHT UNDER
SOME UNIFIED CONTROL.
6. Now, Mr. Secretary, bearing this in
mind—and you, of course, can verify what
we say from the files of your own Intelli-
gence Department—we beg of you to look
back again to this gathering in New York
City on May 3, 1919, in which Admiral Sims
was the central figure. Glance over the
names of those who sat with him at the
head table. Of a total of eighteen, thirteen
were as follows:
(a) Paul D. Cravath, toastmaster, vice
president of the Balfour-headed | English-
Speaking Union of England; who, in intro-
ducing Rear Admiral Sims, said that the
English-Speaking Union was born in London
July 4, 1918, but that Admiral Sims was,
after all, its real founder, because it was
born of his Guildhall speech of 1910.
(b) F. A. McKenzie, editor of Viscount
Northcliffe’s London Times, Weekly Edition,
and an active worker in the United States
last year.
(c) Sinclair Kennedy, of Boston, member
of the Executive Committee of the English-
Speaking Union; author of “The Pan-
Angles,” an open plea for a Pan-Angle Fed-
eration, and a suggestion for a naval cooper-
ative union; active in the work of changing
American history to suit English taste.
(d) Lt. Col. G. G. Woodwark, of the Brit-
ish Army, member of the Advisory Board of
the English-Speaking World, the organ of the
English-Speaking Union; attached to the Brit-
ish Ministry of Information as Director of
War Literature, Books and Pamphlets in the
United States; a member of the British War
Mission to the United States, which was or-
ganized by Lord Northcliffe, chief of Eng-
lish propagandists.
(e) Hon. James M. Beck, a warm advocate
of drawing more closely the bonds which tie
the United States and/England.
(f) Hon. H. Y. Braddon, High Commis-
sioner to the United States from Australia.
(g) Ian Hay Beith,member of the General
Committee of the English organization of the
English-Speaking Union, one of the most not-
able figures in English propaganda work in
the United States; author of “The Oppressed
English,” a book widely circulated in Amer-
ica under direction of the Ministry of In-
formation, which was so notoriously a mass
of falsehood that its circulation was prohib-
ited in England and Ireland.
(A) Lt. Col. Norman G. Thwaites, O.B.E.,
member of the Advisory Board of the Eng-
lish-Speaking World, Assistant Provost Mar-
shal for Great Britain in the United States;
strong advocate of [English propaganda in
the United States; who suggests that Ameri-
can statesmen should be invited to sit in the
House of Commons, especially during de-
bates on international matters, and asks why
British statesmen should not occasionally take
a seat in the Congress of the United States
and even be invited to contribute to the de-
bate on special occasions.
(i) Francis R. Jones, member of the Gen-
eral Committee and of the Executive Com-
mittee of Balfour’s English-Speaking Union
and treasurer of the: English Section.
(Gj) Mr. Frank Dilnot, of the London Daily
Chronicle, a paper whose name is inevitably
bound up with the exposure of the British
Dope Scandal, a story which was suppressed
in the United States through the activities
of the English Department of Information,
of which Lord Beaverbrook was head, and
following which the London Daily Chronicle
changed hands,
(k) Frederick Villiers, English war corre-
spondent.
(1) W. H. Gardiner, active in the affairs of
the English-Speaking Union and of pro-
English propaganda in the United States;-who
declared publicly May 24, 1919, in Philadel-
phia: “On the Atlantic Ocean today, Britain
is supreme, unrivaled and unchallenged. Never
was her naval strength as great, and never
were her mercantile prospects brighter. .
You (Britons) are supreme on the Atlantic
and will remain so. But the merchant fleet
neither of Britain nor of the United States
is supreme on the Pacific, where so much of
our future lies. ... In 1910 in London, Ad.
miral Sims made a great and true proplecy
when he expressed the purely personal opin-
ion that if Britain’s life were ever threatened
she could count on the last man and the last
dollar in the United States. I believe the
same is true as to the safety and well-being
of Britain in the Pacific.”
(m) L. Lyons-Montgomery, of Philadel-
phia, Secretary of the English-Speaking
Union, Recording Secretary of the United
British Societies of Philadelphia and a pro-
lific writer on pro-English subjects.
It was in such company, fairly reeking with
the atmosphere of English propaganda, that
Admiral Sims, on May 3, 1919, chose to speak.
He could have shown no greater indiscre-
tion had he presided at a meeting of welcome
to Lenine and Trotsky, or taken the platform
to argue for Lord Robert Cecil’s League of
Nations, to the adoption of which the Eng-
lish-Speaking Union is committed.
. d now, we beg of you, note what a
Rear Admiral of the United States Navy had
to say at this strange gathering. He said,
among other things:
(a) That merchant sailors are superior to ~
the men of the United States Navy;
(b) That men of the United States Navy
are such land-lovers that they “remain ashore
as long as they can until the Navy Depart-
ment orders them out to sea.” And, in addi-
tion to these complimentary references to the
Navy, he said (N. Y. Times, May 4, 1919):
(c) “AN ENGLISH STATESMAN’S
WORD IS HIS BOND.”
8. It would seem, Mr. Secretary, that Ad-
miral Sims’ “glorious indiscretion” of the
London Guildhall were duplicated in this au-
dacious utterance of May 3, 1919, before
Arthur J. Balfour’s English-Speaking Union.
How long since has the ranking officer of
the United States Navy been either qualified ~
or authorized to place a seal of approval upon
the acts of foreign statesmen? It would seem
to us that this were the duty of our State
Department, not of the Admiral of the Navy.
And employees of the State Department, as
well as the thinking employees of your de-
partment, Mr. Secretary, are sufficiently
versed in diplomacy and sufficiently gifted
with good judgment to avoid such general
characterizations or commendations as that
voiced by Admiral Sims. And this state-
ment that “a British statesman’s word is his
bond” is not only a grave indiscretion, but,
as history shows, it is a serious distortion of
the truth.
9. We have merely outlined to you, Mr.
Secretary, a situation in which a Rear Ad-
miral of the United States Navy has identi-'
fied himself with English propaganda and
English propagandists. We have mentioned
but few names. The ramifications are far-
spread, and it is not unlikely that, through
means at your disposal, they can be traced
into the very bowels of our governmental
system. Couple these things with Admiral
Sims’ subsequent writings upon Irish political
affairs, and the whole presents an ugly pic-
ture; the more so when it is known that the
firm which Admiral Sims selected to handle
his anti-Irish propaganda is presided over by
Mr. Frank N. Doubleday, and that this self-
same Mr. Doubleday is a vice president of
the Balfour-guided, Balfour-sponsored, Eng-_
lish-Speaking Union.
10. The Irish National Bureau is grateful
for your assurance of November 4, 1919, that
Admiral Sims will be very glad to correct
any misstatements he may have made. From
Admiral Sims, however, we have received no
such assurances. May we, therefore, respect-
fully suggest to you that in view of the Ad-
miral’s record of “glorious indiscretions,” it
might be well if the Navy Department under-
takes some sort of supervision of his forth-
coming book on “The Victory at Sea,” with
a view to guarding the Admiral from his
own unthinkingness?
Very truly yours,
(Signed) DANIEL T. O'CONNELL,
Director,