Clemens James France (22 January 1877 – 9 June 1959) was a labor lawyer, third-party election candidate in Washington (1920) and Rhode Island (1948), and social security advocate. A member of the American Committee for Relief in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, France contributed to the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State. As Director of the State Department of Social Welfare of Rhode Island (1936–48), he oversaw the development of a comprehensive social security program. In later years, France contributed to a range of civil liberty causes during the McCarthyist period of the 1950s.
Early life
Clemens James France was born on 22 January 1877 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. He was one of seven children born to Hannah Fletcher James and the Reverend Joseph H. France, a Presbyterian minister. His older brother, Joseph Irwin, was a Republican United States Senator from Maryland from 1917 to 1923. France was educated at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York and Baltimore Law School. In September 1908, France, now married to Annie Lapham, migrated to Seattle, Washington where he built a successful general law practice. On 1 May 1915, the Municipal Corporation of Seattle appointed France attorney for the Port Commission, the body tasked with the development of what was then the largest port on the Pacific Coast.
Seattle, the Municipal League and the Farmer-Labor Party
France was a founding member and later president of the Municipal League of Seattle. The National Municipal League of America identified with Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and sought to challenge monopoly power in business and corruption in politics. The League drew into its all-male membership a wide range of professionals, clergymen, small-business owners, and union leaders. Responding to contemporary robber barons and party patronage, the Municipal League advocated non-partisanship, efficiency, and economy in city government, as well as the public ownership of utilities. To this end, it established committees for health, sanitation, utilities, harbour development, city budgeting, and city planning.
In 1920, France was chosen to run for the US Senate on the Farmer-Labor party ticket. Racial divisions dominated the campaign. While Farmer-Labor candidates took a principled stand against exclusionary anti-Japanese legislation, they lost support to Republicans and Democrats among farming and working-class communities fearful of competition from cheap migrant labour. Though he lost to the incumbent Republican candidate, Wesley Livsey Jones, France polled 99,309 votes, 30,000 more than the better-known Democrat George Cotterill.
The American Committee for Relief in Ireland
France was a prominent member of the Washington branch of the American Committee for Relief in Ireland. He was chosen to lead a small group of philanthropists and social experts tasked with surveying conditions in war-torn Ireland with a view to distributing more than $5 million in relief aid. The American Committee carried out its inspection tour of the war-torn island of Ireland between 12 February and 31 March 1921. They visited some ninety-five villages and towns which had been damaged extensively in the fighting and a further one hundred and fifty which had suffered damage to one degree or another. Some 100,000 men, women and children had been forced into unemployment, homelessness or some form of destitution directly as a result of war-time conditions. The American Committee distributed relief efficaciously and in a non-partisan manner. France's involvement in the Relief Committee and his background in law led to an invitation from Michael Collins, then head of the Provisional Government of Ireland, to participate in the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State.
The 1922 Irish Free State Constitution
France contributed substantially to the making of the 1922 Irish Free State Constitution.
Uniquely among the drafters, he outlined the necessity of an economic foundation for Irish independence. France proposed that the Irish Free State could industrialize its predominantly agricultural economy in an egalitarian manner by ensuring public ownership of natural resources. France advocated constitutional provisions similar to Henry George’s proposals for a land value tax to capture for the state any 'unearned increment' generated by rising property values.