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Title: ‘Practical anarchists, we’
Author: Fintan Lane
Date: 2008
Language: en
Topics: Ireland, history, 19th century, anarchist movement
Source: Retrieved on July 20, 2011 from https://web.archive.org/web/20110720061915/https://www.historyireland.com/volumes/volume16/issue2/features/?id=114438
Notes: Published in History Ireland Volume 16 — Issue 2 (Mar/Apr 2008)

Fintan Lane

‘Practical anarchists, we’

When we think of revolutionaries in late nineteenth-century Ireland, we

think of Fenians rather than the anarchist agitators who were then

making their presence felt on the Continent. Irish revolutionary thought

focused on republicanism rather than on class politics—at least until

the twentieth century. This is understandable, as neither Marxism nor

anarchism had many adherents on the island and those socialist

organisations that did exist were typically small and ephemeral.

Likewise, when we visualise late nineteenth-century anarchists, the

image conjured up is of shadowy, hunched men, wearing slouch hats and

carrying round black bombs. This image derives, to some degree, from the

popular memory of a minority anarchist propensity to engage in

‘individual terror’ against the ruling class, but also from a conscious

construction by those opposed to the objectives and collectivist methods

of both anarchists and socialists. From Europe to the United States, the

anarchist was portrayed in words and images as a dangerous agitator,

homicidal terrorist and arch-manipulator of a politically naive working

class.

The arrival of the Socialist League

The emergence of a Dublin branch of the Socialist League in December

1885 marks the beginning of modern organised socialism in Ireland,

though it was immediately preceded by the semi-socialist Dublin

Democratic Association. An unbroken continuity of organisation exists

between this first socialist group and Connolly’s Irish Socialist

Republican Party of 1896. Moreover, the libertarian socialism of the

Socialist League remained influential within Dublin socialist circles

until the arrival of ‘new unionism’ and the subsequent establishment of

branches of the Independent Labour Party in Dublin, Belfast and

Waterford in the mid-1890s.

The Socialist League was formed in Britain in December 1884 as a

breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). The reasons for

the split were complex, but many related to the politics of H. M.

Hyndman, who was determined to maintain his grip on the leadership of

the SDF. Hyndman’s socialism was a dogmatic variant of Marxism; his

cynical view of workers’ political and industrial self-mobilisation was

one issue that irritated many of those who left to form the Socialist

League. For Hyndman, in E. P. Thompson’s words, social reforms ‘were the

carrot for the donkey; and the donkey was the people’. The Socialist

League, in contrast, under the leadership of libertarian Marxists (such

as the poet William Morris and the Austrian exile Andreas Scheu) and

anarchists (such as Joseph Lane), declared its immediate objective to be

social revolution, and saw social reforms as palliatives purveyed by

capitalism, according to Morris, ‘with the intention of ... being a

nullity or a bait to quiet possible revolution’.

From the beginning, the Socialist League saw itself as primarily a

propagandist organisation, which would help to sow the seeds of

revolution in working-class minds. Participation in parliamentary

politics was denounced; the league firmly believed that there was no

electoral road to socialism.

It also declared itself, like the SDF, to be in favour of Irish Home

Rule, and its secretary, John L. Mahon (of Irish extraction), made

efforts to recruit in Ireland. These bore fruit mainly because of the

arrival of an English Socialist Leaguer in Dublin in 1885.

Michael Gabriel, an anarchist, settled in Bayview Avenue off the North

Strand, and in June 1885 began to distribute Socialist League leaflets

and the group’s newspaper, The Commonweal. Gabriel was a 27-year-old

lithographic artist from Middlesex (his father John had also been an

artist), and it is likely that he moved to Dublin to work with the

socialist Fritz Schumann, who operated a small lithographic print

business in the city. Copenhagen-born Schumann (1843–1910) was a

talented lithographic artist and designer; christened Claus Friedrich

Schümann, he was a trade union and socialist activist in Denmark and

England before coming to Ireland, and later was active politically in

the United States. Max Nettlau, the prominent anarchist historian, met

Schumann in Dublin in 1888 and believed him to be an anarchist, though

at that time the demarcation between anarchism and Marxism was not

always clear.

Interest in the Socialist League was slow to develop in Dublin’s radical

milieu. Early in 1885, Samuel Hayes of the Dublin Democratic Association

had distributed Socialist League material advertising The Commonweal,

but the DDA as a body displayed little curiosity about the new

organisation. George King, a former member of the short-lived Dublin

branch of the First International (and probably also of the DDA), did

contact the league in London in July to express his interest, while

Hayes sent a list of former DDA members to H. H. Sparling, who had

replaced Mahon as league secretary, though he struck a decidedly

pessimistic note: ‘Most of the persons mentioned are rather disheartened

as far [as] the propagation of socialism is concerned ... It is

impossible to get the people in this country to think for

themselves—they believe everything they hear both from their political

leaders and clergy.’

Despite such potentially debilitating gloom, Michael Gabriel managed to

form a Dublin branch of the Socialist League at a meeting on 13 December

1885. The first monthly membership report gave membership as ten, which

included some erstwhile members of the DDA. Hayes became branch

secretary, while 35-year-old John A. Ryan, a former Internationalist and

clerk from Great Brunswick Street (Pearse Street), was made treasurer.

Other founding members included Gabriel, King, Schumann, Thomas

Fitzpatrick, John O’Gorman, Auguste Coulon and Arthur Kavanagh. They

hired the Oddfellows Hall in Upper Abbey Street for weekly meetings,

which were held at 8pm each Thursday night.

By December, Gabriel had already made his presence felt at the Saturday

Club, a weekly radical forum, where he argued against returning working

men to parliament: ‘What would be the use of sending labour candidates

to parliament? It would be no use whatever to send them to talk to

capitalists and landlords whose interests were different from theirs. As

working men, they would never get anything by using a vote.’ This

anti-parliamentarianism represented both Gabriel’s anarchism and the

general policy of the Socialist League; William Morris held a similar

opinion. Schumann also made an impact at the Saturday Club when he tried

to defend atheism during a debate on Charles Bradlaugh and was

immediately confronted by the strength of Irish religious beliefs.

(Bradlaugh was a Radical MP excluded from the House of Commons in London

because of his non-belief.) ‘The chairman,’ declared Schumann, ‘has

allowed atheism to be assailed with not a word in support of it

(groans).’ The chairman’s response was swift: ‘This gentleman has said

now that he will defend atheism and I say I won’t hear it! (applause).’

Religious sensibilities proved an enormous impediment for socialist

organisers in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. Nevertheless, the Dublin socialists continued to receive a

good hearing at the Saturday Club, and over the following years they

played a prominent role in the organisation of debates and provided many

speakers. In April 1886 the Dublin Socialist League was instrumental in

bringing William Morris to Dublin, and among his engagements was a

lecture on socialism to a packed meeting of the Saturday Club.

At most, the Socialist League in Dublin had just over twenty members at

its height. It was a minuscule organisation, but this small group was

enough to raise the spectre of socialism in Ireland and its meetings

received some coverage in the press. It hosted a number of public

meetings, and Samuel Hayes estimated an attendance of 60 at the first of

these on 7 January 1886; the Freeman’s Journal carried a long report of

its proceedings. Following a dispute with the Oddfellows Society a week

later, however, the branch had difficulties in finding halls for its

lectures. A meeting was held upstairs in a public house on the corner of

Fownes Street and Wellington Quay (now the Ha’penny Bridge Inn), but the

landlord barred the socialists once he discovered the purpose of the

gathering.

During a general discussion at the first public meeting, Thomas

Fitzpatrick, a young anarchist who was to become an energetic agitator,

accentuated one aspect of Socialist League politics that became a

serious obstacle to growth in the years ahead. ‘The tendency of the

age,’ he said, ‘is towards internationalism, not nationalism. It is

absurd to think that the separation of Ireland from England would alone

benefit the working men of Ireland.’ Fitzpatrick did not completely

dismiss Irish anti-colonialism in this statement—he did use the word

‘alone’ to qualify his remark—and, in fact, it appears that he was a

member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood; in the main, however, these

early socialists equated Home Rule, in particular, with a narrow-minded

nationalism, which they saw as harmful to the interests of the working

class. John O’Gorman (c. 1857–1902), a Kilkenny-born accountant and

member of the Socialist League, summed up this attitude in 1891, when he

contended that Home Rule would entail ‘the rule of the farmer, the

publican, the clergyman and the politicians’. Rather than oppose Home

Rule with an alternative, however, as James Connolly was later to do,

the Socialist Leaguers stood back from the primary political issue of

their day; this negative attitude brought them neither recruits nor

popularity.

Interestingly, a Dublin Metropolitan Police report from the time

describes the membership as ‘mostly foreigners intermixed with low

Fenians’, and the involvement of the latter may go some way towards

explaining the hostility to Home Rule. Ultimately, the anarchists in the

Dublin Socialist League counterposed an abstract internationalism to a

constitutional nationalist ideology that they understood as a political

instrument of a rising Irish bourgeoisie.

Anarchism in Dublin

The socialists’ dislike of the Home Rule movement was partly an

objection to the notion of change through constitutionalism. In January,

Gabriel argued at the Saturday Club that the ‘idea of looking to

parliament, whether Irish or English, to do anything for them was a

mistake’, and that ‘everything depended on the organisation and

co-operation amongst the working class’. Gabriel’s anarchism included a

strong distaste for piecemeal reforms, and even extended to the dubious

assertion that a suggested ‘agitation about rack-renting would not do

them any good at all’, an odd position in a city with severe housing

problems.

Anarchist ideas exerted a real influence on these pioneers of Irish

socialism, but it would be a mistake to assume that all members of the

Dublin Socialist League adhered to anarchism. Some were Marxists and

others, undoubtedly, were ill defined in their socialism. This diversity

was acknowledged and accepted by the members of the branch. ‘Socialism’,

said Gabriel, ‘is capable of a good many interpretations.’ Nevertheless,

his libertarian position was that ‘all the evils were caused by class

government’; he was opposed ‘to a million men ruling one man, or one man

ruling a million. The power of one man to govern another should be swept

away under the socialist system.’

Despite suffering some attention from the police, the league was largely

unmolested at its public meetings, although its March social evening to

celebrate the Paris Commune was, according to Gabriel, ‘a small private

meeting’ because of the fear of its ‘being broken up’ if openly

advertised. Nevertheless, such trepidation was uncommon, and when a man

named Magennis lectured in the Rotunda on the topic of socialist ‘snakes

in the grass’, the league advertised its following meeting under the

same title and specifically invited Magennis to attend. The branch also

raised the profile of socialism in Dublin by its involvement, through

Schumann, in the bottlemakers’ lockout of early 1886, and in April the

lectures by Morris generated some interest in socialist ideas. April

marked a high point for the Socialist League in Ireland, however, and,

as summer approached, the Home Rule issue affected the members’ morale

and activity. April had seen the introduction into the House of Commons

of Gladstone’s doomed 1886 Home Rule Bill, and the rest of the year was

dominated by the controversy and the hopes it generated. The socialists

admitted this to be a problem in May, when Schumann wrote frankly to

London that it was proving ‘extremely difficult just now to get people

to think of anything but Home Rule’. By late 1886 the branch was almost

moribund, but it staggered on until March 1887, when it finally

collapsed.

In October 1886 the Dublin branch clashed with the central council of

the Socialist League in London, and this probably accelerated the demise

of the section. The council had on 17 May expelled Charles Reuss as a

suspected spy for the German police. It was later proven that Reuss was

indeed a spy, after he betrayed Johann Neve, an anarchist wanted in

Germany; in October 1886, however, The Anarchist, a British anarchist

newspaper, devoted almost the whole of its front page to an article

attacking the Socialist League and supporting Reuss. This dispute in

Britain was noted in Dublin, where members of the branch regularly

received copies of The Anarchist. The Dublin socialists contacted London

to express their concern and, following an exchange of correspondence,

they unanimously adopted a motion attacking the council; that they took

the word of The Anarchist over that of their own council points to the

strong influence of anarchism among the Dublin members.

The conflict between the Dublin branch and London was eventually

resolved at a special meeting held in Dublin on 9 November. John

O’Gorman let London know that their letters ‘and assurances considerably

lessened the hostility to the council (practical anarchists, we) that

was displayed at other meetings’, and the matter was dropped.

Nonetheless, the dispute would not have encouraged the Dublin members to

maintain the Irish section.

After the Socialist League

It is necessary to understand the politics of the Socialist League

branch before one can fully understand the groups and clubs that

followed and the attitudes held by leading Dublin socialists in the

1890s. Many of the Socialist Leaguers remained politically active over

the following years, and some, such as Arthur Kavanagh, John O’Gorman

and George King, had connections with James Connolly’s ISRP. O’Gorman’s

antipathy to nationalism was probably responsible for his failure to

formally join the ISRP, though he was helpful and spoke at an ISRP Paris

Commune commemoration in 1899. Anarchism, however, had diminished as a

political current in Dublin by the mid-1890s, partly owing to the

departure of activists such as Michael Gabriel. The 1891 British census

indicates that Gabriel had moved back to London by then. Another

Dublin-based anarchist and Socialist League member, the Frenchman

Auguste Coulon, also surfaced in London, where he was exposed in 1892 as

a bomb-maker, advocate of terrorism and agent provocateur for the

police.

Nevertheless, at the end of the 1880s anarchism still had a real

presence in Dublin, in part sustained by solidarity work for the

‘Chicago anarchists’, men convicted, on threadbare evidence, for alleged

involvement in the Haymarket attack of August 1886, when a bomb was

thrown at police in Chicago. Meetings and debates on the issue were

organised, with one event held in October 1887, weeks before four of the

men were executed. Moreover, Thomas Fitzpatrick travelled to Chicago in

August 1888, returning the following year to give a ‘first-hand’ history

of the case at a packed public meeting on 11 November, the second

anniversary of the executions. There were also visits to Dublin by

leading international anarchists, such as Max Nettlau (April 1888) and

the Irish-born Dr John Creaghe (November 1889). Creaghe probably

attended Fitzpatrick’s public meeting; he was present primarily to

participate in a discussion at the Progressist Club on ‘Anarchism versus

Democracy’, a debate that lasted three evenings because of ‘the great

number desirous of speaking’.

One of the most interesting of Ireland’s early socialist organisations

emerged shortly after the demise of the Dublin Socialist League. The

National Labour League mobilised the unemployed during 1887, bringing

thousands onto the streets of Dublin. Speeches made by its leaders were

explicitly revolutionary; the former Land Leaguer J. B. Killen, for

example, told a crowd of some 3,000 at one rally held on Harold’s Cross

Green in March that the land and all the instruments of production

should belong to the community, and that the worker was ‘justified in

using any means whatever in order to get rid of the idle class that

fattened upon his misery’. In October 1887 the league (at a meeting

attended by Gabriel, Fitzpatrick and King) adopted a manifesto to Irish

workers that called on them to rise up against capitalism:

‘All over the civilised world the people are rising up against their

tyrants, the capitalist class. Shall you, men of Ireland, remain behind

in the great struggle that labour is making for its emancipation?’

They met regularly in rooms at 2 Bachelor’s Walk, which housed a

bookshop owned by Michael Hickie, one of the members. Tipperary-born

‘Tricky Mickey’ Hickie, so known because of his astuteness as a

bookseller, was a member of the IRB (though he might have left them by

1887) and in later years was a good friend of the Fenian John O’Leary.

The National Labour League was followed by a variety of socialist clubs

and debating societies and, later, by the Irish Socialist Union, whose

members played a significant role in introducing ‘new unionism’ into

Ireland. These organisations never had large memberships—dozens rather

than hundreds—and social revolutionary politics won few adherents. There

are obvious objective reasons for the organisational frailty of Irish

socialism in the 1880s, but internal factors also played a role—the

abstract propagandist approach of the Socialist League, for example, was

scarcely likely to enthuse many working-class Dubliners. Ultimately, the

dominance of the Irish labour movement by the reformist ideologies of

labourism and labour-nationalism was never seriously threatened, and

anarchism had disappeared from Dublin working-class political life by

the mid-1890s.

Fintan Lane is co-editor of the forthcoming Essays in Irish labour

history: a festschrift for Elizabeth and John W. Boyle (Irish Academic

Press).

Fintan Lane

‘Practical anarchists, we’

The arrival of the Socialist League

Anarchism in Dublin

After the Socialist League

Further reading