In 1903, with Thomas Sloan, Independent MP for South Belfast, R.Lindsay Crawford co-founded the Independent Orange Order. For Crawford, who became the new order's Grand Master, this, in the first instance, was a protest against co-optation of the established Orange Order by the Ulster Unionist Party and its alignment with the interests of landlords and employers. But he also saw it as an opportunity for Irish Protestants to "reconsider their position as Irish citizens and their attitude towards their Roman Catholic countrymen". His commitment in the Magheramorne Manifesto (1904) to an "extended form of self-government" for Ireland proved too much for Sloan and his supporters, and Crawford was expelled. As a journalist in Canada and the United States Crawford was committed to the cause of Irish self-demination, and in the 1920s served as the Irish trade representative in New York.