Connolly, James

CONNOLLY, JAMES (1868–1916). Irish labor leader and revolutionary, James Connolly was born in Scotland of Irish parentage. After a short stint in elementary school, he graduated into the ranks of child laborer. He joined the British Army several years later, lying about his age. He served in Ireland and witnessed first hand the often savage occupation during the Land Wars, while trying to keep his distance from overt conflicts with his fellow countrymen. His earliest political thinking revolved around leftwing writers and groups. After deserting, he married Lillie Reynolds in 1890 under an assumed name. They returned to Scotland with a watchful eye for military authorities. He became secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation (SSF) in 1892, running for office in 1895 and becoming a full-time organizer for the SSF, while publishing and writing for the group’s newspaper, The Workers’ Republic.

Connolly rejected the “gradualism” of the Second International and its general indifference to anti-colonial movements, including Irish nationalism. He helped to found a new nationalist movement that shockingly protested Queen Victoria’s appearance in Dublin. In the next few years, he struggled to create a revolutionary socialist party in Scotland. Itself in dire straits, the new party could not support him financially as organizer-editor, and Connolly emigrated to the United States with his family in 1903. He made his way, hired as touring organizer by the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), an avowedly revolutionary organization badly depleted by a split in 1899 and outshone by the rising Socialist Party of Eugene Debs. Connolly almost immediately fell out with SLP leader Daniel De Leon, arguing that Irish workers in the United States were oppressed for the Catholic religion, and that socialist attacks on theism would only distract them from class struggle.

Cut off from SLP funding and struggling for family survival, Connolly settled in Troy, New York and worked as an insurance salesman, using one or the other of his brogues to help sell policies among his countrymen. Several of his daughters toiled in the carting of shirt collars around town, Troy being indelibly associated with that industry. The irate father, witnessing his own daughters so exploited, helped to organize a famous strike of the workers in that field.

Restless, Connolly took an organizing job for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) after the settlement of the Troy strike. In 1907, he joined the Socialist Party and established the first socialist tabloid, The Harp, directed specifically at Irish immigrant workers. Appearing irregularly, it was full of Connolly’s varied writing, current analysis of class conflict, historical comments, and his own sweeping poetry. During this period, he wrote his classic book-length text, Labour in Irish History (1910). An extraordinary work within global socialist writings of the time, Labour projected backward in time a specific Irish nationalist saga, finding its the territory’s economic backwardness and cultural richness a tradition of struggle, a national identity, and a way forward for revolutionary socialists. Much like Lenin or Luxemburg, but on Irish soil, Connolly rejected the “modernization” of capitalist expansion in underdeveloped societies as demoralizing and destructive. Subsequent generations of Irish socialists and communists have poured over Connolly’s book, treating it for generations as the source for discussion and debate.

In his speeches and writings sharply at odds with the conservative Catholic leadership of most Irish American communities, Connolly proclaimed a message of industrial unionism, women’s rights, and Irish consciousness. If most Irish American workers, steeped in parochialism and racial values, could not accept his vision of socialism, Connolly still emerged a widely admired figure for his personal courage and moral vision.

The IWW lost the bulk of its membership in the Recession of 1907-08 and the Connolly family struggled to survive. Irish socialists in his homeland appealed to him to return and promised him a small stipend to organize and to edit their press. With his six children to feed, Connolly returned home in 1910. He helped replicate the IWW in an Irish setting: the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU). The group's early successes put it in the crosshairs of the plutocratic mayor of Dublin, William M. Murphy. Along with Connolly's comrade in arms, "Big" Jim Larkin, they fanned out across England and Scotland, securing funds and provisions and served up on a plate of brotherhood and sisterhood. The increasingly militant stand of the ITGWU led to police suppression, provoking the two Jims to larger aims. The best way to engage a superior armed authority, they reasoned, would be found in a larger, better equipped organization. They formed the Irish Citizen Army with a couple hundred soldiers: not very numerous but symbolically important. With an idealistic body of dedicated activists embracing the “plough and the skies,” emblems of the organization, a defeated transit strike of 1913 could be interpreted as a moral victory. The Irish militants, if defeated, had held their own against the class and national enemy.

Connolly unflinchingly opposed World War I, rejecting the path of so many other European socialists drawn willingly into the conflagration. He famously said, "The Socialists may not understand why I am here, they forget I am an Irishman." Irish Republican and socialist sentiment swirled as turbulently as the Irish Sea, and various groups formed armed organizations. Most of the organizations in the South eventually joined forces, if only briefly, and planned an armed rebellion.

Under the cultural umbrella of the Gaelic League, with its emphasis on Irish political culture, “all things Irish” soon became all things unified to prepare the uprising. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) took the reins of the military side of things, in an agreement with Connolly, thus forming a bond between volunteer soldiers and nationalists of all kinds. Despite personal reservations, Connolly agreed to join with non-socialists in a first step toward national and class liberation. Given his years of military experience in the British Army, Connolly was a natural choice for commander.

The date with Irish destiny was set for Easter, 1916. British intelligence agencies worked successfully to unravel the secrecy of the plans. Operating out of the General Post Office in Dublin, the undermanned and under provisioned irregulars heedlessly took a lottery number with destiny. Some of the greatest figures in all Irish history signed the declaration of freedom. Against overwhelming odds, the revolutionaries endured the assault of the British naval artillery. Connolly finally surrendered the force in order to avoid the total obliteration of the city and its inhabitants by the British invaders. Already dying from his wounds when dragged from his hospital bed, Connolly was tied to a chair and shot, with thirteen other comrades, on May 12, 1916. Anticipating the well known Irish tradition of rallying around the bodies of fallen heroes, the invaders dumped the corpses of the martyrs, without coffins, into a mass grave.

The British did not calculate that Connolly would be more dangerous dead than alive. His violent death inspired legions of posthumous followers and a plethora of inscriptions, statues, and anthologies, but also a considerable legacy of struggle for Irish independence and something like a socialist society. He earned the epitaph of other socialist and other revolutionary martyrs: a victory in defeat.

Connolly’s legacy for the Irish American Left was considerable, especially in the Irish civil war that compelled the British to grant an autonomy finally become independence, if only for the South. Throughout the War for Independence, the Irish Civil War and long after, US supporters secretly organized, sent money and weapons, engaged in numerous conspiracies to assist the homeland rebels, honoring Connolly’s name and legend if rarely acknowledging his socialism.

Never proportionally numerous compared to other ethnic segments of the Left, Irish American Communists formed Connolly Clubs in the 1920s-1940s in various cities. Irish radicals under Michael Quill among others organized transport and maritime workers vital to the CIO. Local St. Patrick’s Day marches in many communities highlighted nationalist claims. Touring Irish and Irish American folksingers perpetually revived the old stories of Irish freedom struggles. The iconography of Connolly returned in the 1970s-1980s, with the new wave of homeland struggles, and daughter Nora Connolly, at an advanced age, toured the United States. Historians and newer Irish immigrants, among others, participated by the thousands during the US response to the centenary events in 2016.

Buhle, Paul. ed. A Full Life: James Connolly, the Irish Rebel, a Graphic Novelette, written and drawn by Tom Keough. Oakland: PM Press, 2016.

McCarthy, Conor, ed. The Revolutionary an Anti-Imperialist Writings of James Connolly, 1893-1916. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Morgan, Austen. James Connolly: A Political Biography. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press/St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Reeve, Carl and Ann Barton Reeve. James Connolly and the United States: The Road to the 1916 Irish Rebellion. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978.

James Connolly Works Archive. Marxists.org Website. https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/index.htm