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A St. Patrick’s Mass on Irish Republican Struggle and a Legendary Troublemaker
By Andrew S.
The typical Bostonian understands St. Patty’s Day as a flurry of green clovers, the smell of ale, and the stench of whatever is left the next morning. But over a century ago, a different saint incited a commitment to faith in radical trade unionism and socialist struggle. James Larkin landed on the shores of New York City after a memorable act of furious labor organizing in Belfast and Dublin, unaware of the impact his New World Tour would bring to American labor. Hoping to be one of the Four Horseman sending American capital to a long-anticipated doom, Big Jim Larkin’s stateside legacy marks an undeniable contribution to the struggle of early American socialism. For St. Patty’s Day, we ask you to sit for a brief mass on this Saint of Struggle: Big Jim.
The Belfast Strike of 1907
England was not the easiest place to grow up Irish. James Larkin was born to Irish migrants from occupied Ulster in the slums of Liverpool on January 21, 1876, then forced to give up formal education to look for work as a teenager. Any other detail is debated; various biographers and journalists toss around myths about his birth that never seem to add up with Larkin’s own claims. Despite the background of poverty, or maybe because of its hardship, the Larkins constituted a political household forged in the fires of labor and Irish republicanism.
Anti-Irish sentiment burned hot in England. Irish workers faced everything from spontaneous ambushes at the end of the school day to legislative bills punishing the Irish on accounts of “drunkenness”. Jim Larkin emerged from this era seething with outrage after witnessing the oppressive conditions birthed from the evils of British capitalism. Larkin joined the troublemaking wing of labor before the term was popularized. After waging vicious quarrels during odd jobs for English bosses, surviving bouts of regular unemployment, Larkin sailed for Ulster at the beginning of 1907. He leaped from the frying pan of Liverpool to the fire of Belfast. There, Jim Larkin cut his teeth as a radical unionist during his involvement in the Dockers’ and Carters’ Strike of 1907.
Belfast labor was divided between the Protestant and Catholic working classes. Protestant workers enjoyed more spoils than their Catholic counterparts while craft sectionalism drove many Protestant unionists to conservative politics. Under the auspices of the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL), Larkin aimed to unite Belfast’s 1500 carters and 3,100 dockworkers, one thousand of whom were already card-carrying members. His efforts were remarkable. Within three months, every carter was unionized and a total of 2,900 dock laborers had joined the union – over 93% of the workforce.
The union, proud of its results, asked for voluntary recognition from the ten companies employing dockworkers in Belfast. Only three refused – Lancashire and Yorkshire, London, and North Western and Midland. They were the biggest and most powerful companies on the dock. 160 dockworkers, mostly Protestant, initiated a strike with Larkin at the helm. Within a month, the strike exploded exponentially as 8,000 workers joined Larkin’s uproarious meetings.
Despite Big Jim’s efforts, the strike ended in ruin. Local industrialists hailed troops from the seat of English colonial rule at Dublin Castle to shut down the strike. The NUDL’s secretary believed it necessary to chase a settlement. After vicious fights with scabs, Larkin criticized the settlement and dockworkers rioted across the city in August, with some millworkers sacrificing their lives in the capitalist violence that ensued. The carters, whom Larkin had persuaded to organize a sympathetic strike, agreed to a contract and pulled out – leaving dockworkers stranded and isolated. Larkin changed his position in the wake of the spontaneous combustion of the violence and its horrible ends. Yet, while some viewed the strike as a catastrophic loss, one thing was certain: the Larkinism was a hefty threat to the ruling class in Ireland and Britain.
The ITGWU and The Dublin Lockout of 1913
After defeats in Belfast in 1907 and Cork in 1908, Larkin was still more motivated to pave social change through radical trade unionism. In 1909, Larkin formed the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). Two years later, as he turned to the pen, he founded the The Irish Worker and Peoples’ Advocate (colloquially shortened to the Irish Worker) covering strikes, protests, and workers’ opinions. ITGWU and the Irish Workers’ League agreed to print the paper. Within weeks of initial print, over twenty thousand copies were being sold per weekly edition. James Connolly, the legendary Irish socialist, was working in 1912 as Belfast organizer for ITGWU, a year before his large Role in the Lockout.
Each of Big Jim’s organizing projects was crucial to the Dublin Lockout of 1913. Dublin’s economic scene was marked by poverty. Housing conditions were heinous as thousands of cities lived in tiny tenements, women were packed into infamous laundries, and the contraction of tuberculosis among workers was a whopping fifty percent. William Murphy, Ireland’s most renowned capitalist, was friendly with most unions except for Larkin’s radical ITGWU as he insisted on crushing the union to bits throughout the city. On August 26, 1913, members of the ITGWU went on strike. Within twenty-four hours, the police responded with violent skirmishes. Four days later, James Connolly declared class war on behalf of Irish trade unionists in The Irish Worker founded by Big Jim.
Larkin was at his physical limit. Stressed, strained from tensions within the union, and health flailing, Larkin was thrown in jail by police officers who ambushed him on his return home during the evening of the very first day of the general strike. Upon his release from jail in mid-September, Larkin immediately set sail for Manchester to call attention to the situation from British trade unions and organize a sympathetic strike. His persistent verbal attacks on the British labor aristocracy left him unpopular with some labor leaders he tried to sway to the persuasion of ITGWU’s cause. His efforts halted on October 26 when English rulers put him on trial for sedition.
Upon his early release on November 9, Larkin traveled around the working class havens of South Wales and northern England and convinced some thirty thousand workers to strike in solidarity with ITGWU workers across the Irish Sea. The effort sparked international news amongst socialist figures; Big Bill Haywood, in Paris at the time and a future comrade in arms, raised funds for the strike in Ireland. Even Lenin wrote about the class war rising in Dublin, calling out Larkin’s efforts by name. Nonetheless, the Dublin Lockout ended in January 1914 with a crushing loss for the Dublin working classLarkin. Irish workers returned to work after five months of strikes, British trade union leaders aired their grievances around Larkin’s persistent ad hominem attacks on them, ITGWU ejected him from his responsibilities to the union, and his loved ones grew distant. Dejected, Larkin took up an offer from ‘Big Bill’ Haywood: a New World speaking tour.
Big Jim’s Years in the United States
Big Jim showed up in the United States with bravado and a rally at Madison Square Garden of 15,000 workers. Now a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Big Jim’s arrival was welcomed by some American socialists and deeply distrusted by others. The Socialist Party of America (SPA)’s right wing punished him for his syndicalism to slow his tour, but he persisted right until he joined the Western Federation of Miners organizing in Butte, Montana.
The Easter Rising struck Ireland when Big Jim was in the United States. Since he had begun resettling his family in Chicago, Larkin missed the escalations leading up to 1916 back in Ireland and craved what he believed was his rightful place in the Irish resistance. His fury didn’t stop him from continuing labor organizing in the United States. Larkin became a proponent of an uprising in the United States after Jack Reed returned from Russia with the details of the unlikely Bolshevik success against warmongering rulers in Russia. Larkin supported the Communist Labor Party that split from the SPA in the exodus of ten thousand members that eventually grew to the fifty-thousand strong that constituted the Communist Party, USA.
Larkin’s departure from the United States was as bitter as his arrival. Broke, hounded by a Red Scare, Larkin left in 1923 for Ireland. His impact was ambiguous and promises of socialist victory in the United States unmet.
A Final Prayer
From 1923 onward, Big Jim was trapped by his own egocentrism. The positive qualities that Larkin honed as an organizer – defiant, ruthless, and blunt – would run dry in contrast to his crippling insecurity. Upon arriving back in Ireland, Larkin denounced the ITGWU to split the union for status. That signaled the decline in his organizing career.
Despite his shortcomings, his grandeur, his unadulterated fury, and the bridges he burned to serve his ego, Jim Larkin remains a towering and mystifying figure in the lineage of organizing. Who has heard of such a man who could organize thousands of men in a matter of months, or even thirty thousand Welsh and Liverpool workers hundreds of miles away to strike out of pure solidarity? Hater of theory, lover of literature, Catholic nationalist, and Christian devotee, Jim Larkin was one of our best missionaries for socialist struggle. His righteous anger to never bend in the face of brutal exploitation raised millions of organizers in waiting to their feet – taking control of their lives and futures.
Let us embody his spirit this St. Patrick’s Day.
Andrew S is a member of Boston DSA.
References
Emmet O’Connor, Big Jim Larkin
Emmet Larkin, Jim Larkin
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