James Larkin: The Great Agitator

[Review by Desmond Greaves of Professor Emmet Larkin’s “James Larkin, 1876-1947, Irish Labour Leader”, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, pp.334, 50/-… Carried in the May 1965 issue of the “Irish Democrat” under the initials “H.M.”, which Greaves occasionally used for reviews]

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This is the attempt of a young American history professor to produce a full- length critical biography of the famous agitator and strike-leader. It is an important publishing event. While R.M. Fox’s short study and Joe Deasy’s pamphlet will remain of value as introductions, nobody will add much to Larkin’s monument now without quarrying here first. This is a book packed with information, well-annotated and presented unpretentiously. Perhaps those well versed in the American scene might guess at the author’s ideological commitment; to others it remains unobtrusive, and he is able to handle issues of sharp contention without the slightest trace of hysteria.

The task he set himself was not an easy one, and to score a partial success is a considerable achievement. He has assembled for American readers the salient facts of Larkin’s career, and if he spends 225 pages on the years 1907-23 and only ten on the last twenty years of Larkin’s life, he illuminates most what his readers will be interested in. The book is a valuable essay for Irish readers also and should be in every library.

This said, it should be made clear that it is not yet the definitive biography of Larkin. In contrast to Connolly, whose political floruit straddles the period of gathering revolution, Larkin lived in two periods. Nobody knows what Connolly would have done had he survived 1916. Unfortunately, everybody knows what Larkin did not do. But the reasons are still obscure. The necessary documents are not yet available. Too many friends and enemies are still alive. The contrast between pre-partition and contemporary history is too apparent, and Professor Larkin would probably not pretend to be adequately equipped to map the course of Irish affairs since 1922. The result is that his historical sense seems suddenly to fail him as he announces that it is unpleasant to tell the story of decline. Yet in the explanation of that decline must lie the key to understanding the recent history and present predicament of the Irish Labour movement, once a world-famous challenger for leadership, now a thing of parochialism and indecision, as Connolly forecast it would become if partition were to take place.

In these circumstances an author’s sight is inevitably distorted, as he tries to bring things at two distances into one focus. Professor Larkin’s academic dispassionateness, while an advantage in dealing with issues like Larkin’s relations with Communism or his differences with William O’Brien, helps less where understanding depends possibly on a special type of commitment to the subject.

The story is a fascinating one. Of Armagh stock, Larkin was born in Liverpool on 21st January 1876. He joined the Independent Labour Party as a youth, but did not come to trade unionism for some years. On joining Sexton’s National Union of Dock Labourers, he brought to it the peculiar “revivalist” fervour of the early socialists, rose rapidly in its councils and was appointed Irish organiser in 1907. By then he had identified himself with the trend known as “syndicalism”.

His first eruption into Irish affairs was in Belfast where he shook the “establishment” to its foundations. The author explains the circumstances in which this was possible. Lindsay Crawford’s Independent Orange Order was at its apogee, and the workers were prepared to apply its doctrine of religious toleration in their own interests. Some of the Order’s leaders feared the consequences of a united working class and defected. The Order collapsed under the combined fire of Unionists and Hibernians, and Lindsay Crawford was forced to emigrate.

Larkin then settled in Dublin. Though brought up in the slums of Liverpool he was appalled by what he met there and commenced a seven years’ agitation in which were re-enacted on Irish soil the struggles of the “new unionism” of two decades before. To his surprise the Union Executive objected to the financial burden. They wanted the organisation of the Irish insofar as it protected the English. But claims to parity they deplored. 

At first they rationed resources, then denied them. Larkin was dismissed and led out the Irish membership to form the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. The authorities obligingly trumped up a charge of malversation on which he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, but released after a protest campaign. He returned undaunted to his task. His energy was exhaustless. Above all he was incorruptible and the workers knew it. The employers knew it too and were determined to break him as soon as opportunity offered. There followed a series of spectacular strikes, in Cork, Wexford, Sligo, Dundalk and above all in Dublin where the gauge was finally thrown down in the summer of 1913.

Professor Larkin’s account of the Great Lockout brings out its main features, the determined mood of the masses, the implacability of the employers, the swing of enlightened opinion to Larkin’s side, and the sour unco-operativeness of the British right-wing leaders. Perhaps he underestimates the degree to which the struggle fired the imagination of the British workers particularly in Wales and the North. This may explain his judgement that Larkin’s demand for industrial action was asking the “impossible”. But he shrewdly observes that Larkin’s campaign in Ireland had led him to embrace the Irish nationalist standpoint, and his achievement was thus the establishment of an Irish nationalist trade union not afraid to demand equality for the Irish workers. This distinct Irish workers’ standpoint the right- wing leaders in Britain could not even imaginatively apprehend. It might be added, no more do their successors today.

There were of course mistakes in Larkin’s conduct of the struggle. One was the evacuation of the children. Professor Larkin gives the impression that this was prevented by the hostility that was worked up against it. But in fact a number of children were cared for in Liverpool, Belfast and elsewhere. He is also in error in quoting Lansbury as editor of the “Daily Herald”. The editor’s name was Lapworth, whom Lansbury subsequently dismissed with the complaint “too much Dublin” when the right-wing treachery was complete.

Larkin was physically and mentally exhausted by the eight-month struggle. Even the phlegmatic Connolly wrote words of bitter reproof in the “Glasgow Forward”, and therefrom discounted the British movement for all practical purposes. With all respect to Connolly’s opinion, hesitantly adopted by Professor Larkin, the struggle was in terms of strategy neither lost nor drawn, but won. The employers could never repeat their performance. Therefore the way was clear for the enormous spread of trade unionism which took place over the next eight years. The workers of Dublin were henceforth a different race. In them the doctrine of self-reliance had passed its severest test.

That Larkin was somewhat demoralised by his tactical failure there is ample evidence. Recriminations passed. He offered his resignation, then talked of going to America. He was shaken in his self-confidence and needed somebody to urge him to carry on. His chairmanship of the 1914 TUC and Labour Party meeting is said to have had a character entirely its own. But the British leaders could not have it both ways. If they were unprepared to risk their own safety helping the Irish industrially, they could not complain if these looked after themselves politically. The Irish Labour Party was firmly established in 1914 and London abandoned its old hope of reducing it to a tail.

Professor Larkin says curiously little above the Irish Citizen Army, and the attitude of Larkin towards the Irish Volunteers. His admirer Sean O’Casey was strongly antagonistic. The “Irish Worker” carried articles which went to the length of suggesting that the names of those enrolling in the Volunteers would not be safe from the police. It is said that the doors of Croydon Park ­–the ITGWU recreation centre – were only with hesitation opened to dispersing Howth gun-runners. The disturbance at the inaugural meeting was attributed to “Liberty Hall”. The real facts need to be discovered and published. Was Larkin already declaring that the task of national revolution was the work of the proletariat alone?

Professor Larkin does not notice the connection between the tactical defeat of the Dublin workers and the outbreak of war. For some curious reason he equates the imperialist drive to war and the social mobilisation of the workers against it as two aspects of an inexplicable “insidious crescendo of violence”. The failure to implement Larkin’s demand for international solidarity action in the case of Dublin was a logical precedent to the failure to honour the Basle and Stuttgart resolutions for sympathetic action to prevent war. The workers of the West were not blinded by “nationalism”. They were blinded into the acceptance of the principle of national oppression – in relation to Ireland, Germany and the colonial world.

Larkin opposed the war. But did he do so unreservedly and immediately? Influenced possibly by his American activities, Professor Larkin allows little doubt on this matter. A knowledge of the names behind some of the pseudonyms in the “Irish Worker” might throw light on this question. That once he was in America his opposition went the length of leading him to become a “German agent” would certainly require better evidence than police files and an unpublished affidavit sworn and over a decade later. That Von Papen denied relations with Larkin is of course neither here nor there. But many Irish exiles have testified that war-time America was no stranger to a little official forgery. This is not to say Professor Larkin is wrong. But the case he makes requires elaboration before it can be accepted as convincing. There is little doubt that Larkin romanticised himself, and in later life wished to represent himself as much nearer to the counsels of Republicanism than he really was. There is evidence that Clann na Gael thought him foolhardy and a bad conspirator.

The fourth part of Professor Larkin’s study carries the title “Bolshevik”. Up to 1917, however, the word syndicalist still applies. Larkin became a Communist in response to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and under the influence of John Reed. He was one of the founders of the American Communist Party which was established at a time of wild social unrest in the United States. There is little doubt that the old failing of American socialism, extreme ultra- left sectishness, played a part in the decline of American socialism, which had reached its high point in the struggle against the war. But Professor Larkin exonerates the Wilson administration which inaugurated the war of the trusts against American Democracy, a war that was ably denounced in the “Irish World” week by week. The hysteria that was worked up was not exceeded during the days of Senator MacCarthy, and the agent-provocateur and stool- pigeon were in full use. Larkin was given an indefinite sentence of from two to ten years on a flimsy charge of “criminal anarchy” and was not released until 1923.

Larkin’s relations with the Irish exiles in the USA were always uneasy. The dilemma is succinctly explained. “The (Irish Progressive) League was mainly concerned with interesting Socialists in the Irish question and not with making Socialists of the Irish.” Larkin concentrated on the “Connolly Club” with the second function and took up the corresponding line in relation to Irish affairs, namely opposition to the “bourgeois nationalists”.

Larkin’s friends in Europe knew that he was returning to an Ireland totally transformed by revolution. There were efforts to induce him to visit Moscow on his way home. William Gallacher met him at Southampton and warned him of the danger of too precipitate action. Professor Larkin does not give this period the detailed examination he gives the earlier one, and as a consequence many questions are left unresolved. He believes that “a successful revolution had degenerated into a tragic civil war,” and this misunderstanding vitiates his thinking. What happened was that the revolution never completely resolved the dual power of 1919-21 in its own favour and did not encompass the whole country. This situation was the starting point for counter-revolution. It did not destroy all the gains of the revolution. Its form was the establishment of the “Irish Free State” and “Northern Ireland”. It was enforceable only through civil war. The degeneration of the Labour movement arose from its acceptance of the counter-revolution, which left it powerless against the wage-cutting onslaught of the employers. How resist the effect while applauding the cause? 

Professor Larkin has accepted his namesake’s reading of the situation. According to Larkin the national struggle now seemed an irrelevancy to be pushed into the background while resistance to the employers was organised as it had been in 1913. He was an avowed Communist, but he never fully embraced Marxism. He could not see how social trends were expressed in individual behaviour. When in Moscow shortly after his return to Europe he gave one of the committees of the Comintern his impressions of the USA. Asked to characterise Gompers he replied, “a lily-livered rat”. Somebody else was a “yellow dog”. Successively the leaders of American Labour were categorised in like terms. When Zinoviev asked him to account for this mass treachery in social terms he was at a loss. Similarly in 1923 he saw in O’Brien and Foran not men of limited intelligence faced with a problem beyond their powers of resolution, but more “yellow dogs”, and did not even attempt to define the problem, still less to resolve it himself.

One must dissent from Professor Larkin’s conclusion that what Ireland now wanted were men who could “consolidate” a revolution rather than “perpetuate” it. What Ireland needed were men who could regroup the national forces and see the road to recovering what was lost and resuming the revolutionary advance. The timid and confused “consolidators” were not the men. But neither was Larkin. The task devolved, more or less by default, on De Valera, and all know how modest was the pace and how limited the distance traversed.

As has been indicated, this is a useful and thought-provoking book. It tells of a period little known after 1916 and readjusts the balance from the widely held view that Irish Labour history ended with Connolly. The last chapter is however the least satisfactory. For Larkin ended “not with a bang, but a whimper”. By 1934 he had dissociated himself from Communism. A year or two later he was conducting a witch-hunt against anti-fascists in his Union, and preparing the way for its conversion into the tame respectable thing it is today. This is a regrettable or merciful, according to your point of view. But it does not make for dramatic narrative. It is not merely, however, that his subject has let the biographer down. It is that recent events demand a method other than that of academic detachment. And how can that be reasonably demanded of Professor Larkin?

The author is to be complimented on producing a most important contribution to Irish national history. What a pity however, he cannot be complimented on his literary style. On page after page there are solecisms and crudities which spoil the reader’s pleasure just when he is feeling most interested. One can thole American illogicalities like “protesting a label” (A man can protest guilt or innocence or some proposition, but his label must form an indirect object) and even stomach Kingstown for Dun Laoire. But it is unnerving to learn of a conference which wants to “definite” relations “between” four categories of persons. Could they not be simply defined? And what of such careless constructions as “the problem was that unemployment in 1912 was still serious, though the problem had much improved in Britain”? There is something terpsichorean in “the kind of intellectual coherence” given to syndicalism by George Sorel “in harmony with the new twist given to philosophy by Henri Bergson”, but one has the feeling that this is simply a “dance of the names”. In a “new twist” to the English language we are told what Larkin “counciled” the canal men, after which a “hitch” developed. The American left-wing socialists could “focus” but not “crystalise” and this reviewer is still trying to envisage the action they achieved before allowing his imagination to play on their subsequent failure. Then there are irritating tropes like “hyphenated Americans” and in the introduction a word of thanks to a gentleman who read the manuscript and whose “editorial comments on almost every page has saved me from much grief and the reader from much pain”. More careful proof-reading would have helped. But it is hard to avoid the impression that Professor Larkin did too little thinking over the real meaning of the words and sentences he wrote, thus losing precision quite often, and syntax itself once or twice. 

There are also one or two errors in general history. For example, De Valera was never President of the Irish Republic “now virtually established”. He was concerned with the recognition of the Republic actually established. The first belonged to the Fenians. And the reference to “jingoism” is strictly speaking anachronistic. But these blemishes should not detract the reader from tackling a valuable book. It does not require a translation into English, and the material presented is worth the occasional “pain” inflicted by the style. The printing and production are of the publishers’ usual high standard.

H.M.