James Connolly

Gill's Irish Lives

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Book by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Genres: Ireland

146 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

After being a Cambridge postgraduate, a teacher, a marketing executive and a civil servant, Ruth Dudley Edwards became a full-time writer. A journalist, broadcaster, historian and prize-winning biographer who lives in London, her recent non-fiction includes books about The Economist, the Foreign Office, the Orange Order and Fleet Street. The first of her ten satirical mysteries, Corridors of Death, was short-listed for the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger; two others were nominated for the CWA Last Laugh Award. Her two short stories appeared respectively in The Economist and the Oxford Book of Detective Stories.

Series:
* Robert Amiss Mystery

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about the life Irish labor leader, socialist, and Easter Rising martyr James Connolly. it is a well-written and inspirational account of Connolly's exciting life of sacrifice for the cause of Irish Independence and socialism which I would recommend to anyone interested in Irish history and politics. The recounting of Connolly's heroic role in the Easter Rising is especially moving - since he knew that if he survived the fighting, he would be shot by the British authorities. Connolly was captured, and because he had been wounded in the fighting, was unable to stand when he was shot - instead he was propped up on a box and then shot by the firing squad. The disgrace of executing a wounded man led to the cessation of executions at 15 men shot- before the remaining 97 could be gunned down by British firing squads.

The quotes:

"The material circumstances into which James Connolly was born [in 1868] were appalling.... his parents... were among many Catholic emigrants living the slum life in... the Irish Catholic ghettos of Edinburgh."

"He used his free time as a soldier [in the Royal Scots Regiment of the British Army] to learn about history, politics, economics and socialism."

"Without educational qualifications.... James could compete only for manual work, where his reliability and longstanding teetotalism at least would count in his favor."

"The general public was ignorant about socialism, while the churches, the politicians and most of the press were actively hostile."

"An early contribution [by Connolly] to [the Social Democratic journal 'Justice' triumphantly announced that the [Scottish Socialist Federation] ... had had conspicuous success in gaining public support in Edinburgh - a city "largely composed of snobs, flunkies, mashers, lawyers, students, middle-class pensioners and dividend-hunters. Even the working-class portion of the population seemed to have imbibed the snobbish would-be respectable spirit of their 'betters'. But it [socialism] has won, hands down, and is now becoming respectable.'"

"In 1894, in his capacity as secretary of the Central Edinburgh branch of the [Ind pendent Labor Party] Connolly wrote to [Scottish socialist, politician, and trade unionist] Keir Hardie urging him to make a strong anti-monarchical, anti-capitalist speech at a Dublin meeting, with the object of encouraging growth in the Irish labor movement."

"[Connolly] declared, that Liberals and Conservatives were members of the same party of property."

"[In 1896] The Dublin [Socialist Club] ... ...had ... recruited him to mount a campaign linking Marxist thinking to the Irish situation."

"[In 1896, Connolly] ... founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP)... ...Connolly [wrote and printed] the ISRP manifesto... The party's aims included 'public ownership by the Irish people of the land and instruments of production, distribution and exchange'."

"It called also for the establishment of an Irish republic''and the subsequent conversion of the means of production, distribution and exchange into the common property of society, to be held and controlled by a democratic state in the interest of the entire community'."

"Preceding the details of the manifesto was the [Camille] Desmoulins [a journalist and politician who played an important role in the French Revolution] aphorism "The great appear great because we are on our knees; let us rise' which Connolly had read in the 'Labor Chronicle' two years earlier and which he was to quote frequently during the rest of his life."

"Until the seventeenth century, he argued, when the system was smashed by the English government, a pattern of common ownership of land had existed -- a pattern integral to the Irish way of life."

"According to Connolly's analysis, the English had destroyed this primitive communism, installing their own system of private ownership."

"...the injustice inherent in any form of land ownership 'since it would leave out of account the entire laboring class as well as the dispossessed millions of former tenants who[m] landlord rule had driven into the Irish towns or across the seas'."

"[Connolly's arguments] ...were an impressive start to his work of hibernicising Marxism, as Mao Tse-tung was to sinify it."

"...Connolly argued against insurrection without the sanction of the people and urged nationalists to support only a political party seeking democratic support for a republic. He denounced those who promoted physical force, divorced from a common objective, as the only test of advanced nationalism."

"[English-born Irish revolutionary, suffragette and actress Maud Gonne and Connolly] were natural allies, sharing a penchant for the bold move and the flamboyant gesture."

"On Jubilee Day, she and [admirer poet W.B.] Yeats joined a procession led by a workers' band and an ISRP member pushing a cart draped in black flags on which rested a black coffin inscribed "British Empire'."

"[Connolly] ...had .... cooperated with Maud Gonne in the preparation of a manifesto, 'The Rights of Life and the Rights of Property,' which urged the prevention of a repetition of the Great Famine of 1847-48. Tenants should refuse to pay rent or allow the export of food while Irish people went hungry at home."

"...Connolly was deeply moved by the [famine] misery in Kerry, the blame for which, in his [Socialist Labor Party's journal] 'Weekly People' articles, he attributed not so much to foreign government or landlord-ism as to the failure of the system of small farming. What he had seen reinforced the belief... that in modern conditions the small farmer was doomed to economic failure, be he tenant or proprietor."

"In Edinburgh the orthodox socialist view (which [Connolly] shared) was that trade unions shored up the capitalist structure and were a a useless instrument for socialist advance. The third volume of Marx's 'Capital' (published in 1894) argued strongly for worker co-operation which would in time lead, in the post-capitalist state, to worker control of industry."

"A 'literary champion of Irish Democracy', [Connolly's 'Workers' Republic' journal] would advocate 'an Irish Republic, the abolition of landlord-ism, age-slavery, the co-operative organization of industry under Irish representative governing bodies'."

"[Connolly] never shifted his view that the social revolution must come about through the masses and the masses alone."

"The principle of the "Workers' Republic' was to 'unite the workers and to bury in one common grave the religious hatreds, the provincial jealousies, and the mutual distrusts upon which oppression has so long depended for security'."

"The battleground must be cleared 'for the final struggle between the only two parties possessed of a logical reason for existence -- the Conservative party defending the strongholds of monarchy, aristocracy, and capitalism; and the Socialist party storming those stronghold sin the interests of human freedom'."

"In the second half of 1899 he was exercised by the appropriate Irish response to the Boer War -- expressing the virulent anti-imperialism which was to be a crucial factor in his career."

"Connolly was one of the many incensed by the visit to Ireland, in April 1900, of Queen Victoria, sent over in her eighty-first year to try to undo the damage to the recruitment figures."

"Connolly ... played his part with a manifesto declaring monarchy to be "a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history"..."

"[Connolly's] ...distrust of capitalist reforms was expressed thus: 'If the workers ask for the capitalist baker's shop, he will throw the loaves at them to keep them out.'"

"Connolly knew too much of human misery to go all the way with [American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer Daniel] De Leon's condemnation of social reforms, but had gradually accepted most of his views."

"[Connolly:] ...the workers' priority should not be to oppose such [industrial] trusts but to capture the political power necessary to use all productive property for the good of the human race."

"[Connolly] ...was alienated by the United States. Although he granted its greater affluence, he condemned American egotism and the widespread lawbreaking, which he attributed to an excess of individualism."

"In the previous year a licensed bar had been set up on [ISRP] ... premises while Connolly was in Britain, and during his absence in America it had proved highly popular with the members."

"[Connolly] ...was invulnerable in debate, and so [ISRP] resentment at his intellectual tyranny erupted over a relatively trivial matter."

"When he sailed alone for American on 18 September 1903 no socialist came to see him off."

"In later letters America became 'this cursed country'."

"He now accepted the view that industrial unionism was of equal importance with political action in overthrowing capitalism. Indeed, once the revolution had been achieved and the projected "industrial commonwealth' set up, the 'one big union' would direct the party."

"In an attempt to arouse interest in the Italian[-American] socialist community, Connolly taught himself Italian and began translating articles from [Italian-American socialist journal] 'Il Proletario' and publishing them in the [Socialist Labor Party's journal] 'Weekly People' with prefaces of his own."

"Connolly condemned De Leon's failure to make himself dispensable, something which Connolly always believed to be an important job of any leader. It was a fair criticism, though Connolly himself was vulnerable to the same charge."

"[Connolly] ... had come, he said, to conclude that 'as revolutionists the Irish comrades are immeasurably superior to anything I have met in America'."

"[Connolly] ... was slected to address the May Day 1906 demonstation against 'patriotism, anti-immigration, Russian Czarism, American Moyer-Haywood outrages [referencing William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood (February 4, 1869 – May 18, 1928) was a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America, and Charles H. "Charlie" Moyer (1866 – June 2, 1929) was an American labor leader and president of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) from 1902 to 1926, who were put on trial in 1907 for the killing on December 30, 1905, of Frank Steunenberg by an explosion in front of his Caldwell, Idaho, home. A former governor of Idaho, Steunenberg had clashed with the WFM in previous strikes] and craft unionism'..."

"The [IWW and the SLP], when ready, would work together toward the moment when socialism would win control of he state by democratic means. The industrial union, meanwhile, would have built up an industrial republic inside the shell of the political state, ready to set up the true 'workers' republic' -- in which the workers would control their own destinies by electing representatives who would, in turn, elect those who controlled the national government. 'Social Democracy must proceed from the bottom upward, whereas capitalist political society is organized from above downward; Social Democracy will be administered by a committee of experts elected from the industries and professions of the land; capitalist society is governed by representatives elected from districts, and is based upon territorial division."

"By the summer of 1908 the IWW was in deep financial trouble, an appalling economic slump having affected disproportionately those at the bottom of the industrial heap -- whence the IWW drew most of its members."

"There was, he said, absolutely no reason not to be both a Marxist and a Catholic; when the socialist dawn broke, the Catholic Church -- an immensely adaptable institution -- would be quick to accept and work within the established order."

"[Connolly] explained to [Scottish editor of 'The Socialist' J. Carstairs] Matheson how his experience of the [American Socialist Labor Party] had wrought the change: ...our position ... needs the corrective of association with Socialists of a less advanced type."

"In 1908 he had written to Matheson: 'For myself, tho I have usually posed as a Catholic I have not gone to my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left."

"'Labor, Nationality and Religion' was written during Connolly's last months in America in response to a series of Lenten discourses against socialism given in Dublin in 1910 by a Jesuit, Threat Robert Kane."

"[Connolly:] In seems to be unavoidable, but it is entirely regrettable, that clergymen consecrated to the worship of God, and supposed to be patterned after a Redeemer who was the embodiment of service and humility, should in their relation to the laity insist upon service and humility being rendered to them instead of by them."

"He went on to list almost twenty examples of stances by the papacy or the Irtish hierarchy recognized by many respected Catholic laymen, contemporaneously or later, to be wrong, including clerical attacks on the American War of Independence, on the 1798 [Irish] rebellion and on peaceful attempts to have the Act of Union repealed, and papal defense of English conquest and rule of Ireland. The Catholic Church, he argued, had adopted capitalist values completely divorced from the principles upon which it was founded. He quoted, among others, St Gregory the Great ('The earth of which they are born is common to all and therefore the fruit that the earth brings forth belongs without distinction to all'), St Chrysostom ('The rich man is a thief') and St Ambrose ('It is only unjust usurpation that has created the right of private property')."

"Although criticized by secularist socialists as being inconsistent with Marxist theory -- owing more to Catholic than to socialist teachings -- it was a pragmatic and powerful corrective to the prevailing Catholic fear of socialism."

"In his book 'Labor in Irish History' Connolly wrote:] ...in the evolution of civilization the progress of the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must, perforce, keep pace with the progress of the struggle for liberty of the most subject class in that nation, and that the shifting of economic and political forces which accompanies the development of the system of capitalist society leads inevitably to the increasing conservatism of the non-working-class element, and to the revolutionary vigor and power of the working class.'"

"His villains were deep-dyed, his heroes unsullied, his idealization of early Gaelic civilization romantic. But that was typical of the historical writing of the time; what was new and important was the book's application of international thinking to the Irish situation."

"[Connolly:] 'Irish toilers from henceforward will base their fight for freedom not upon the winning or losing the right to talk in an Irish parliament, but upon their progress towards the mastery of those factories, workshops and farms upon which a people's bread and liberties depend.'"

"Although [ the Socialist Party of Ireland's manifesto] ... made reference to the need for the Irish working class to 'organize itself industrially and politically with the end in view of gaining control and mastery of the entire resources of the country', it was primarily concerned that socialists gain political ground by supporting 'every honest attempt on the part of organized Labor to obtain representation through independent working-class candidates pledged to a progressive policy of social reform'."

"[Connolly's] ...deep commitment to the women's suffrage movement, for which he campaigned throughout his life."

"In June 1911, [Irish republican, socialist and trade union leader James] Larkin launched the hugely successful "Irish worker'... Where Connolly had dealt in ideas, Larkin voiced specific grievances and delighted his readers by singling out bad employers by name."

"...Connolly spoke in Dublin as part of the campaign of protest against the forthcoming visit to Ireland of the new King, George V... Amid its political arguments it called on fellow-workers to 'stand by the dignity of your class. All these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy, all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors, all these are but the signs of disease in any social state.'"

"During [the second half of 1911] ...workers in a wide range of industries in towns all over Ireland staged so many strikes that the employers began to unite against them in a national organization."

"...female mill workers...had come out in protest against restrictive rules which forbade them, among other things, to sing, talk, laugh or bring sweets into the mill."

"Connolly demanded the abolition of the rules and a pay rise and held a series of meetings to encourage solidarity."

"He tried to increase membership in the textile trade [union] ... by issuing an appeal entitled 'Linen Slaves in Belfast,' urging the workers to organize..."

"The party was to work towards an 'industrial commonwealth' based on common ownership of land and instruments of production, distribution and exchange, and with complete social and political equality for women."

"The party, formed as 'the political weapon of the Irish working class' was to be open to all men and women 'irrespective of their past political affiliations'."

"[Connolly:] 'Syndicalism is simply the discovery that the workers are strongest at the point of production, that they have no force available but economic force, and that by linking the revolutionary movement with the daily fight of the workshop, mill, shipyard and factory the necessary economic force can be organized."

"The establishment of this machinery, from which the Irish Labor Party later sprang, was one of the most practical of Connolly's achievements."

"The common people of Ireland, he argued -- Catholic and Protestant -- had been robbed of their land and their civil rights; social injustice was responsible for an appalling degree of poverty and deprivation (the death rate of the Dublin poor was higher than Calcutta)."

"[Connolly's 'The reconquest of Ireland'] ...stressed the sufferings of Protestant workers at the hands of capitalists, and of Nonconformists under religious persecution, for Connolly was responding to the sectarianism which surrounded him..."

"But the groundswell of opinion was against him, and he had nothing to offer the Protestants but an invitation to join in the labor movement of the Irish nation, admitting that the vast mass of Protestants, duped as they were by capitalism and imperialism, were unlikely recruits. Home Rule would come, though, with or without their goodwill."

"Even after so long in Belfast, Connolly had not perceived the depth of fear and suspicion in Ulster Protestants."

"[Connolly:] Our fight is a fight not only against the bosses, but against the political and religious bigotry which destroys all feeling of loyalty to a trade-union."

"Connolly arrived in Dublin on Friday 29 August [1913] in time to participate in an evening public meeting, where Larkin (out on bail) burned a proclamation banning a demonstration to be held in Sackville Street on the following Sunday with the words "people make Kings and people can unmake them.'"

"On Saturday he and a colleague were arrested, as was Larkin at the Sunday meeting, which was followed by riots in which 400 people were injured..."

[David Allan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a fan of the Revisionist school.

[Anne-marie Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Dudley Edwards has the gift possessed by few historians of balancing intelligent and in-depth research with a clear and simple writing style. She renders even the more complex aspects of Connolly's life - his evolving views of socialism, his conflicts with personalities in the trade union movement in Ireland and abroad - completely intelligible to her reader. This biography is more than just a short introduction to the life of a leader of the 1916 Rising, but a comprehensive overview of the thoughts and action of a key figure in 20th century Irish history.

[Ciara · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fascinating story of a fascinating man and the time he was in. James Connolly was highly intelligent, motivated man with a searing every day practicality about him. Impossible not to admire him.