IRISH REBEL
Levenson, Samuel
THE MIND OF AN ACTIVIST: JAMES CONNOLLY, by Owen Dudley Edwards. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. 132 pp. £ 1.–. The University of Edinburgh professor who wrote this book considers James...
...The University of Edinburgh professor who wrote this book considers James Connolly (1868-1916) the most remarkable thinker of Ireland's most remarkable period...
...He chided his Socialist comrades for expressing atheistic doctrines for the very practical reason that such expressions turned off the very people whom he was trying to organize and lead...
...The Rising failed to create any patriotic fervor among the Irish, but the execution of its leaders and the imprisonment of hundreds of insurgents started the course of events that led ultimately to the present independent Irish Republic...
...With only three years of formal education, he became a convincing speaker, an editor, historian, pamphleteer, and effective labor organizer...
...Connolly had no trace of religious sensibility in his makeup and, indeed, little interest in the whole subject...
...In January 1916 Connolly came to terms with extremist leaders of the Irish Volunteers (formed as a counterweight to Carson's Ulster Volunteers...
...Dublin: Gill & Macmillan...
...Following in the footsteps of his father and older brother, Connolly became a carter (teamster) for the Edinburgh sanitation department...
...PROFESSOR EDWARDS has done a good job in describing the basic elements of Connolly's thought...
...and on Easter Monday, with Padraic Pearse on one side and Joseph Mary Plunkett on the other, he led a combined army of a thousand men to throw the British out of Ireland...
...He is particularly brilliant in explaining why Connolly participated in a rebellion that was not designed to overthrow capitalism and that was doomed to defeat in any case...
...Babies started to arrive...
...Born in an Irish ghetto in Edinburgh, Connolly grew up burdened by unimpressive stature, bowlegs, a squint, a stammer, and an accent that stamped him as an outsider in Ireland and in every Irish community outside of Scotland...
...At 14 he joined the British Army, and first set foot in Ireland when his regiment was stationed there in 1882...
...When that job petered out, he opened a shoe repair shop that soon failed...
...THE MIND OF AN ACTIVIST: JAMES CONNOLLY, by Owen Dudley Edwards...
...Connolly Ieft school at the age of ten to eke out the family funds by working in a tile plant, bakery, and print shop...
...When his regiment was ordered overseas, shortly before Connolly's seven-year term of enlistment expired, he preferred to desert, marry Lillie Reynolds in a Roman Catholic ceremony, and return to Edinburgh...
...Connolly's conversion to nationalism and class struggle was simplified because the Socialist parties of that era were the only ones willing to accept the doctrine of Irish national liberation...
...At the 1912 meeting of the Irish Trades Union Congress, he proposed the resolution establishing the Irish Labor party, and in 1913 directed the great Dublin strike and lock-out while Larkin was in jail...
...But his chief accomplishment was to write his best pamphlets: Labor in Irish History, which examined revolutionary movements of the past, and Labor, Nationality and Religion, which asserted that the Catholic clergy had "forgotten or ignored the fact that the laity are a part of the Church...
...I only assumed the Catholic pose in order to quiz the raw freethinkers whose ridiculous dogmatism did and does annoy me as much as the dogmatism of the Orthodox...
...Most historians agree...
...In fact, I respect the good Catholic more than the average freethinker...
...In any case, the question would seem to be settled by a paragraph in a letter that Connolly, then almost 40, wrote to a comrade in Scotland: "For myself, though 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...
...These parties not only shared Connolly's discontent with existing conditions but also explained how and why these conditions came about—a matter of importance to a man like Connolly, so inherently clamorous for logi ' BOOKS cation The Harp...
...After returning to Ireland, Connolly became Belfast organizer for the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union founded by Jim Larkin...
...But Edwards's portrait of Connolly as an enlightened liberal Catholic is far from accurate...
...The decision of Socialist parties throughout the world to support their own governments in World War I, and the postponement of Home Rule led Connolly, in rage and bitterness, to concentrate on strengthening the Irish Citizens' Army, established originally to defend the strikers of 1913...
...On the night before he was executed, Connolly did indeed take the last rites but only, one suspects, as a gesture of solidarity with his men...
...In Dublin he fell in love with a Protestant domestic...
...When Larkin, exhausted by internal and external conflicts, went off to America, Connolly remained behind to rebuild the shattered union...
Vol. 19 • September 1972 • No. 4
