Jack White (Irish socialist)

Already, in advance of his return, White had assailed the Ulster Unionists as they organised under Edward Carson to resist a Home Rule parliament in Dublin. He wrote to the Belfast News Letter condemning the refusal of unionist crowds to let the Liberal minister Winston Churchill speak on Home Rule at the Ulster Hall. The failure to grant their opponent a hearing was an exercise in "Popery".[13] Finding that it alone was willing to publish his letter (in its paper the Ulster Guardian), White joined the Ulster Liberal Association.[20] It was with the promise that he would "not be idle on the side of progress and Protestantism". At issue, he argued, was "liberty of reason", and the right "to be represented by self-government or Home Rule in a nation, just as a free reason gives self-control to an individual.[21]

In December 1912, White was invited by the Irish Protestant Home Rule Committee to speak in London on a platform with George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Gwynn M.P. and Arthur Conan Doyle.[13] Addressing the motion against "the stirring up of religious rancour and intolerance in N.E. Ulster", White proposed that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were two stages in the gradual evolution of the "universal human spirit". Both stages have their dangers, but of the two the danger of Protestantism for its laity is the greater:[22]

The man who claims the direction of his own conscience claims to be is own priest, and unless he does all in his own power to prepare the way for others to attain the same liberty, his liberty is but selfish licence, and he is false to the trust of a priest. ... [But the Protestant] mocking the support [of an authoritative Church] upon which [his younger brother still] leans . . . puts every obstacle in the way of his aspirations for further freedom. ... [He says] "I dare not help you to freedom lest you enslave me".

While "no man who is truly free fears for the results to himself of freedom won by others", White allowed that "he may fear the results of it for them". The Protestant Bishop of Down and Connor proposed that "by destroying the power of priests", Home Rule would "produce in Ireland the same irreligion and secularism that the advent of democratic government has produced in other Roman Catholic countries". The flaw in this, the "best argument" against home rule White had ever heard, was that in the continental Catholic countries the democratic movement had to fight the Church allied to the old order, whereas in Ireland, where the Church "can almost said to be one" with the National and Democratic movement, it is not Catholics but Protestants who "exclaim that the forces of Hell are being let loose".[22]

White concluded by asserting, both as a Protestant and as a Home Ruler, that there can be no power, whether human or superhuman, "permanently independent of the consent of those upon whom authority is imposed", and by professing to "hear the spirit of Catholic Ireland crying out to the spirit of liberalism 'Give us some of the freedom you have won and we will give you some of the reverence and beauty you have lost'".[22] His mainly Catholic audience cheered.[13]

In the hope of eliciting the same response from a home audience, and with the "wholehearted support" of the Rev. J. B. Armour[23] of the ULA who similarly claimed home rule as a "Presbyterian principle",[24] in October 1913 White helped organise a "Protestant protest" against "Carsonism" in Ballymoney.[25] On a platform with Sir Roger Casement and Alice Stopford Green, and in the presence of reporters from all the major London and Irish papers, he proposed a Home Rule pledge to match the Carson's Ulster Covenant: "We intend to abide by the just laws of the lawful parliament of Ireland until such time as it may prove itself hostile to democracy, in sure confidence that God will stand by those who stand by the people irrespective of class or Creed."[26]

As a result of the Ballymoney meeting White was invited to Dublin, where he spoke at the Literary and Historical Society in University College Dublin (UCD) alongside John Dillon and Tom Kettle.[1] Neither nationalist politician appreciated being pressed by White to make "a supreme effort" to assuage Protestant fears of Rome Rule —of Catholic clerical domination.[13]

In Ulster, Casement sought, without success, to build upon the Ballymoney meeting.[27] The Times of London was able to conclude that it had represented but a "small pocket of dissident Protestants, the last survivors of the Old Liberals.”[13]

Dublin at the time of the White's UCD meeting was in the midst of the great lockout by employers of workers newly organized by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU). White was incensed by the violence of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. In August 1913, he was himself caught in a baton charge (on Butt Bridge)[28] and was dragged, resisting, to the police station.[29][13] He was also outraged by the intervention of the Catholic Church. With the sanction of Archbishop William Joseph Walsh,[30][31] Hibernian crowds prevented the poorly-nourished children of the locked-out and striking workers leaving the city to be taken into the care of sympathetic, but not necessarily Catholic, families in Liverpool and Belfast.[32] (The children's holiday scheme had been devised by the socialist feminist Dora Montefiore).[33] White offered his services to ITGWU leader James Connolly (James Larkin was then in prison), proposing to drill union men as a workers' defence corps, a "Citizen Army" (and to put £50 toward their shoes).[34][35]

Connolly helped in the organisation to which Constance Markievicz contributed her Fianna Éireann nationalist youth, and in November 1913 the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) was born.[36] Although in March 1914 he was again batoned, and charged with assault, White claimed that the appearance of the new force had "put manners on the police".[37]

But by the spring, having failed to persuade the British Trades Union Congress to vote action in support of the Dublin workers, Larkin was urging a return to work,[38] and the ranks were thinning. In May 1914, White resigned, replaced as chairman of the ICA's "Army Council" by Larkin.[1][3] He transferred to the new-formed Irish Volunteers.[39]

Secretary to the ICA Council, Seán O'Casey, described the formation of the nationalist force as "one of the most effective blows" that the ICA had received. Men who might have joined the ICA were now drilling—with the blessing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)—under a command that included employers who had locked out men trying to exercise "the first principles of Trade Unionism".[40] When it became apparent that Connolly was gravitating towards an IRB strategy of cooperation with the Volunteers, O'Casey and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the Vice President, resigned.[41]

Claiming always to have sought "to link the Labour and National Causes as soon as they can be linked", White insisted that the Volunteers were a complimentary force.[42] Later, looking back from beyond the 1916 Easter Rising and War of Independence, he was to regret the move.[13] Better, he suggested, to have "stuck with the Citizen Army", where he had "the clear guidance of international revolutionary principle undercutting and outlasting the conflict of national interests that caused the Great War."[43] He also imagined that had he stayed with the ICA he could have "merged National in Labour ideals instead of leaving the merger to come the other way round".[44]

What White had failed to appreciate, according ICA veteran and trade unionist, Frank Robbins, was that "the socialistic ideals expressed in the constitution of the Irish Citizen Army were not understood by the workers, and where understood were not acceptable".[45]

White was given command of brigades of Volunteers in the northwest: Derry City, Inishowen, and east Tyrone. Many of them were former British soldiers like himself, but White found his authority undermined by the suspicion that as a Protestant he would never lead them into a fight against Orangemen.[46]

Following the declaration of war upon Germany in August 1914, White wrote a memorandum to Lord Kitchener and Sir Ian Hamilton proposing that the Volunteers serve as an Irish home guard. In contrast to John Redmond's call for them to enlist for imperial service, this would have had the Volunteers paid and equipped by the British to remain under their own command at home. But he found his comrades no less suspicious than the government: "I was taken to be recruiting for Britain, whereas I was trying to use Britain to put Ireland into a position to enforce her own claims".[47] White was dismissed from his Volunteer commands.[1]

Able, after an exclusion order, to return to Ireland, White appeared on Sinn Féin platforms in the December 1918 Westminster election campaign. But he had also written to William O'Brien and Thomas Johnson offering to stand as a candidate for Irish Labour. They declined: he was not a member "of good standing" in any labour organisation.[13] In the event, Labour stood aside for Sinn Féin and ran no candidates.[61]

Immediately after the election, in which the republican party triumphed across the south and west of the country, White wrote a pamphlet, The Significance of Sinn Féin: Psychological. Political, and Economic. Defending what he understood as the syndicalist ideals of James Connolly, he argued that while Sinn Féin may have harnessed the powerful emotive appeal of nationhood (of "race"), without the consciousness of class it would never achieve its republic. Contending not just with Britain and its "80,000 troops in Ireland", but also with the "capitalistic" international order intent on maintaining the status quo, the Democratic Programme of Dáil Éireann (which Thomas Johnson had helped draft) would not be realised without drawing together republicanism and socialism.[62]

In 1923 a Labour League organised in Letterkenny asked White to stand for the Dáil "as a candidate in the interests of the Workers' Republic". On this occasion it was White who declined. He cited the Dáil's Oath of Allegiance requiring him to be "faithful to HM King George V". But in the Derry Journal, he was also to declare that, as a "Christian communist", he was "not prepared to go forward as the representative of any class or party, but only of a principle…the voluntary change to communal ownership of the land" and the "gradual withering of the poisoned branches of standing armies, prisons and the workhouse system".[63][61]

While this appeared to be a decided anti-Bolshevik position, later that same year White joined James Larkin's the Irish Worker League (IWL), Ireland's Communist International affiliate.[64] In 1926, he broke away with James Connolly's son Roddy, to form the Workers' Party of Ireland.[65] But this too sought recognition from Moscow and when, in deference to the IWL, this was refused, the party dissolved.[66] (Already in 1920, White had funded Roddy Connolly's attendance at the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International, during which he met Lenin).[67]

In 1927, the British Intelligence suspected White of promoting a link between Moscow and the IRA in the form of a Workers Defence Corps.[68] The reports can only have related to discussions, since Roddy Connolly continued to float the idea of a Workers Defence Corps or "new ICA" for the next several years.[69]

In Belfast in 1931, White was pulled from an unemployed "hunger march" organised by the Revolutionary Workers Groups (the Moscow-approved successor to the IWL), beaten and jailed for a month.[46] He was then served with a four-year exclusion order under the 1922 Special Powers Act (Northern Ireland) prohibiting him from residing in any part of Northern Ireland other than in the district of Limavady in the far north-west. In 1932, he was again manhandled, and was injured, when in east Belfast loyalists (the Ulster Protestant League) attacked a RWG protest against cuts in Outdoor Relief.[70]

In March 1933, fired by pastoral warnings against the spread of left-wing ideas, hymn-singing crowds in Dublin attacked the RWG headquarters in Connolly House, the Workers’ College in Eccles Street and the Workers Union of Ireland office in Marlborough Street.[71][72] At this point, a new Irish Citizen Army was finally launched by Connolly and Michael Price, a British Army and IRA veteran.[73] While they urged units to have "harmonious" relations with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), their ranks did not accommodate members of the new Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), a reformulation of RWG under Seán Murray. Harkening back to the syndicalism of the early ITGWU, the ICA continued to advance the idea of One Big Union.[74]

The new ICA, nonetheless, was revived within the context of a broad "anti-imperialist" coalition entered into by the CPI and other left-wing and labour groupings. An initiative of Price and those within the IRA who had joined him in calling for a Workers' Republic, the Republican Congress was formed in April 1934 at a convention in Athlone supported and attended by delegation of northern (and Protestant) trade unionists.[75] White is said to have immediately organised a Dublin branch of the Congress composed solely of ex-British servicemen.[76]

In June 1934, White turned up at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown with a contingent of 200 from the Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast. Together with a further Belfast contingent from Ballymacarrett, they were attacked by IRA men who objected to their "red" ("Break The Connection with Capitalism") banner.[77] The following year the ICA boycotted both the Bodenstown and IRA Easter commemorations arguing that the "all together against the British" sloganeering neglected the struggle against economic injustice.[74]

After various proposals had been made within the Congress to deploy the ICA in the tradition of "physical force" republicanism (including the assassination of a particularly hardened slum landlord), such arms as they had from the IRA were returned.[78] With the ICA, the Congress focussed on organizing tenement rent strikes, mass pickets in support of wage demands, and campaigns for further land reform in support of small farmers and landless labourers.[79] However, by the summer of 1935 both the CPI and the ICA had split over the party-political implications of these efforts, and White had felt unable to follow in either direction.

The CPI influenced members followed a new directive to seek accommodation with de Valera's Fianna Fáil in a "united front" against British imperialism. Meanwhile, Connolly and Price, who had denounced de Valera's system of labour "arbitration and conciliation" as "practical fascism",[74] tried to convince labour unions of the need for a new workers party. When this failed, they urged entry into the Labour parties north and south.[80][81]

White remained with the diminishing rump of the Congress. Walking with them in the annual Easter parade to Glasnevin Cemetery in April 1936, he found himself the target of a right-wing mob. He was hit with an iron cross wrenched from a grave, and was saved from further injury only because a lull induced by the beginning of the Rosary allowed his comrades to spirit him to safety.[80]

In an address to the Roger Casement Sinn Féin Club in Dublin in August 1936, White ventured a minimum programme for republican unity. It demanded "withdrawal of British troops from all Ireland"; an end to the Anglo-Irish trade war and to Ireland's payment of land annuities; repeal of special security legislation north and south (under which republicans were interned); an end to gerrymandering in the north and the reintroduction of proportional representation (abolished by the Unionists in 1925 to squeeze the republican and labour vote); and a joint Irish-British trade-union campaign "against Fascism and War".[56][82] It is a programme that might have placed White within the ranks of a united front, were it not for his uncompromising anti-clericalism.

Most accounts of White's experience of Spain, including that of the only book-length study of his life, Leo Keohane's Captain Jack White: Imperialism, Anarchism & the Irish Citizen Army (2014),[88] rely on the reminiscences of Albert Meltzer. Melzer first met White in 1937, after his return, when he was campaigning in support of Spanish anarchists in London.[89]

In his introduction to a 1980 reprint of White's pamphlet The Meaning of Anarchism (1937),[90] Melzer wrote that White "went to Spain to train and lead the largely Old IRA column in the Connolly section of the International Brigade". According to this account, while White had never accepted the Communist party, in Spain he became thoroughly disillusioned with its leadership and embraced what he now saw as "the alternative": the anarchism of the CNT-FAI and the "irresponsibles" who refused the compromises the libertarian movement had made in support of the Popular Front government.[91]

British Foreign Office and intelligence reports paint a somewhat different picture. At age 57 White entered Spain in October 1936 not as a military trainer but as the administrator for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee. Given the role the CPGB played in setting up the aid committee,[92] it may have been supposition, but they also identify him as having been a Communist party member.[87] In either case, it is clear that once in Spain White fell in with the anarchists of the FAI-CNT.

In a 1936 article, "First Spanish Impressions", White highlights the "revolutionary honour and revolutionary order" among the Catalan workers ("unable to grasp the self-respect of the workers now they are so largely in control", on his first day Barcelona he made the mistake of offering a waiter a tip).[93]

Witness months earlier than George Orwell to the social revolution that broke out in north-east Spain after the attempted military coup of July 1936, White came to same conclusion the British POUMist reached in his Homage to Catalonia (1938).[94] Consolidating the revolution was a pre-condition to winning the war against fascism, not, as Communists insisted, something that had to be delayed or even reversed until victory was won.[93] Again, like Orwell, he felt able to report "from the inside" on the lengths to which Communist went to "sabotage" everything they were unable to control, and, indeed, to see an "affinity between fascist and communist principles". In his view:[95]

[This affinity between Fascism and Communism] was only modified by the superior power of the latter to obtain the assent of the mind to its own mechanical enslavement. In ruthlessness to heretics, in glorification of hide bound scholasticism supplying ready-made arguments whose repetition is the only safeguard from Inquisition, in docile obedience to higher priests and slavish support of their changes of policy however unprincipled, Communism is [by comparison] a mature and sophisticated philosophy.

In The Meaning of Anarchism, written in the wake of the move by the communists in May 1937 against both the anarchists and independent marxists (POUM), and the subsequent street fighting in Barcelona, White quipped that the anarchists were the more "faithful Marxists": "Did not Marx say, 'The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves?'" But to the "element of fatalism" to which Marx's emphasis on "ripening external conditions" gives rise, White contrasted "the unconditioned spontaneity of Anarchism".[96]

Anarchism does not wait. It acts in the individual and in small groups to build up social forms, which shall be, as near as possible, embryos of the fully developed Anarchist society." [...] This voluntarism, scorning to calculate consequences and creative of new mass conditions, is the essence of Anarchism with its distrust of majorities and "l'illusion majoritaire" and its respect of spiritual quality rather than numerical quantity.

White was also to argue that the Spanish anarchists represented a working class more alert than in Ireland—where the central role in the Easter Rising of the "international socialist" James Connolly is "conveniently forgotten"—to the "clerico-fascist menace". Every time the republican movement in Ireland moved toward socialism the "thunder of condemnation and excommunication" from the Roman Catholic Church would cause it to scurry back.[97]

Just returned from Spain, in January 1937 White took the stage with the famous Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman[98] at a meeting chaired by the novelist, Ethel Mannin to establish the CNT-FAI London Bureau.[99] His speech was published[100] in Vernon Richards's bimonthly Spain and the World, produced by the anarchist Freedom Press.[101] In a second contribution to the journal in March 1937, White professed to "hate all labels", but declared that if he had to have one, "christian anarchist" would be the "nearest fit".[102]

For White, the Gospels "read with any intelligence" spoke to a spirituality of "perfect freedom" wholly at odds with the orthodox insistence on "obedience to the external authority". It embraced the right of the individual "to experiment and judge for himself, above all in those realms of faith and morals where his own soul must find its own unique path". From this standpoint, he suggested, he could have "foretold the association of the Roman Catholic Church with Fascism, not only in Spain, but everywhere else, on philosophical grounds, because that Church and Fascism have the same fundamental philosophy of subordinating individual freedom to the totality of Church and State".[102]