Clan na Gael
The initial decision to create this organization came about after Stephens consulted, through special emissary Joseph Denieffe, with John O'Mahony and Michael Doheny, members of a precursor group called the Emmet Monument Association.
In response to the establishment of the IRB in Dublin, a sister organization was founded in New York City, the Fenian Brotherhood, led by O'Mahony.
This arm of Fenian activity in America produced a surge in radicalism among groups of Irish immigrants, many of whom had recently emigrated from Ireland during and after the Great Hunger.
According to John Devoy in 1924, Jerome J. Collins founded what was then called the Napper Tandy Club in New York on 20 June 1867 – Wolfe Tone's birthday.
Carroll was of Ulster Protestant stock and brought in others to the Clan from the upper middle class such as Simon Barclay Conover, senator from Florida.
[6] The success of the rescue in 1876 resulted in the Clan na Gael replacing for all practical purposes the Fenian Brotherhood as the spokesman of Irish-American nationalism.
[7][8][9] The 1880s saw the solidification, at least within America, of Irish ideological orientations, with most nationalist sentiment finding its home within Clan na Gael, rather than organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
In the late 1880s a financial scandal in the Chicago branch of the Clan led to a successful conspiracy to murder whistle-blower Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin.
In 1891, a moderate offshoot of the Clan na Gael broke away and formed an organization under the name of Irish National Federation of America with T. Emmet as president.
The objective of Clan na Gael was to secure an independent Ireland and to assist the Irish Republican Brotherhood in achieving this aim.
This was followed by an emissary John Kenny, sent on a mission to Berlin to discuss how the German war effort and Irish Nationalism could cooperate.
Roger Casement wrote a petition to the Kaiser asking that freedom for Ireland be included in the declared war aims of the Central Powers.
[11] A controversial pro-German and Irish lecture was given in December 1914 to Clan na Gael on Long Island by the Celtologist Kuno Meyer.
Devoy, along with Roger Casement and Joseph McGarrity, was able to bring together both Irish-American and German support in the years prior to the Easter Rising.
Germany had hoped that by distracting Britain with an Irish uprising they would be able to garner the upper hand in the war and effect a German victory on the Western Front.
Clan na Gael was also involved via McGarrity and Casement in the abortive attempt to raise an "Irish Brigade" to fight against the British.
To punish Woodrow Wilson for his apparent lack of support, the Clan backed Harding in the 1920 United States presidential election.
Devoy and Cohalan refused to accept this but McGarrity disagreed, believing that without IRB support, the Clan was not legitimate, which led to a split.
The organization grew in the 1970s and played a key part in NORAID, which was a prominent source of finance and weapons for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969–1998.
From the beginning, according to John Devoy in the Gaelic American, the secretary of Napper Tandy and later of the Clan na Gael was William James Nicholson.
James Reynolds of Connecticut temporarily held the post from Carroll's resignation until 1881 (there was no convention in 1880) when the Triangle of Sullivan, Feeley and Boland assumed command.
