Robert Lindsay Crawford (Lindsay Crawford) (1868–1945) was an Irish Protestant politician and journalist who shifted in his loyalties from Unionism and the Orange Order to the Irish Free State. He was a co-founder of the Independent Orange Order through which he hoped to promote Irish reconciliation and democracy. Later he became a committed Irish nationalist mobilizing support in Canada for Irish self-determination and serving the new Irish state as its trade representative and consul in New York City.
Independent Orangeman
Crawford was born in Tonagh, Lisburn, County Antrim on 1 October 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. The paper, in terms of the wider southern unionist press, was "a lone voice of protest against the Conservative administration".
In 1903, with Thomas Sloan, Independent MP for South Belfast, he co-founded the Independent Orange Order (I.O.O.). 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. In the Irish Protestant (November 1901) Crawford had vowed to oppose "the Divine Right of Toryism" for the wider benefit of "Protestant democracy". In an interview with the Irish Independent (22 July 1905), he proposed that the I.O.O. was "essentially a democratic movement and is a revolt against the feudal system that has so long prevailed in our country". Crawford outlined the new order's democratic manifesto in Orangeism, its history and progress: a plea for first principles (1904).
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.
Anti-clericalist democrat
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. 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".
While not unsympathetic to the tenets of the Gaelic League, Crawford was critical of what he regarded as the impractical romanticism of the Irish-Ireland movement. He suggested that the Gaelic League needed an injection of "Ulsteria", an "industrial awakening on true economic lines: it is wrong when people crave bread to offer them 'language and culture'".
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". The Irish Protestant, January 1904, suggested that "Rome Rule" was being abetted by "official [Party and Government] Unionism" that, in the fond hope of Catholic support, had "effaced Protestantism from its programme". In May 1904, with reference to the reform of local government, the paper declared it "a fundamental principle of Unionism, that government could not be entrusted to the majority in Ireland without prejudice to the civil and religious right of the loyal minority".
Crawford did concede, however, that clericalism was not a problem confined to Catholicism. An Irish Protestant editorial of October 1905 proposed that "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". In a lecture and pamphlet (Irish Grievances and Their Remedy, June 1905) in which he allowed that Irish Protestants had been "frightened" out of their right to Irish citizenship, Crawford argued that this two-sided clericalism robbed Irishmen, Protestant and Catholic alike, of "a true conception of nationality" and "enabled English parties to sit in the market place and buy the Irish vote".