New York, 1919. The lights of Broadway are back on. With victory in Europe, and influenza on the wane, a new generation was leading the metropolis of the world into the Jazz Age. America was still trying to define itself; the eighteenth amendment had been passed, the country was going dry; anarchist bombings, organised labour and bitter strikes fuelled a Red Scare; the Ku Klux Klan had become a political force and interracial violence was rife during the Red Summer. The ‘President’ of the self-declared Irish Republic, Eamon de Valera, joined representatives from other new European nation states seeking recognition and funding. Back in the ‘home country’, Michael Collins was raising funds in open defiance of the Dublin Castle authorities. Without American recognition and funding the young Irish Government was sure to fail against the might of the British Empire.
