James Larkin

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Larkin, James (1876–1947), labour leader. He was born into the Irish working‐class community in Liverpool. Working in the docks, he became a convinced trade unionist and socialist. In 1907 James Sexton, leader of the National Union of Dock Labourers, sent him to Belfast as union organizer. The dockers were unorganized, dispirited, and divided by sectarianism. Larkin, through his fiery eloquence, energy, and organizational ability, soon established a strong union branch. However, to break the union, the employers locked out members, provoking the dockers' and carters' strike, lasting from May to late November 1907. Most of the city's industries were closed. ‘Blacklegs’ were attacked and had to have police protection. Three hundred Royal Irish Constabulary, led by Constable Barrett, mutinied in support of the strikers. Troops shot dead two young people during a riot on the Falls Road. Although supported by the Independent Orange Order, Larkin was subjected to a campaign of sectarianism, designed to divide the workers. Because Sexton justifiably feared that continuing strike pay would bankrupt the union, he settled over Larkin's head, on capitulation terms.

Feeling betrayed and wishing to break free of the English union leadership, Larkin founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU), in 1909. His combination of socialism, republicanism, and trade unionism became known as ‘Larkinism’. Larkin helped persuade the Irish Trade Union Congress to set up a congress‐based Irish Labour Party. In 1914, worn out and depressed by his failure in the Dublin lockout, Larkin headed for the United States, leaving Connolly in charge. In America he spoke at anti‐British meetings on behalf of Irish and German‐American organizations, and was a delegate to the founding convention of the American Communist Party. In a climate of ‘red scare’ hysteria, he was sentenced to three years in prison for ‘criminal anarchy’.

On his release in 1923, Larkin returned to a very different Ireland, with Connolly dead and the Irish Free State enmeshed in the Civil War. ITGWU membership, 5,000 when Larkin left for America, now approached 100,000, largely due to the efforts of Connolly's successor, William O'Brien. O'Brien had no intention of stepping down for Larkin. Following a bitter dispute, Larkin was suspended as general secretary by the union executive. In 1923, he founded the Irish Workers' League which, flying in the face of public opinion, supported the USSR. In 1924, Larkin became founding general secretary of the Workers' Union of Ireland. He attacked the labour leadership for careerism and betraying the original ideals of the movement. They in turn viewed him as a left‐wing loose cannon.

Larkin later joined the Labour Party and he and his son James Jnr. were elected to the Dáil in 1943. However, O'Brien and his supporters, claiming Communist infiltration, took the ITGWU out of both the Labour Party and the Congress. Larkin's opponents accused him, with some justification, of splitting the movement because he could not accept less than complete power. On the other hand, he was largely responsible for making labour a formidable industrial and political force.

Bibliography

Larkin, E. , James Larkin, 1876–1947: Irish Labour Leader (1965)

Peter Collins

Larkin, James (1876–1947). Larkin was the nearest thing to a revolutionary leader that the modern trade union movement has thrown up. He wished, on syndicalist lines, to use trade union power not merely to obtain concessions but as a battering ram to destroy capitalism. Born in Liverpool of Irish parents, he became involved in union activity and went to Ireland to organize the dock workers. His first task was to persuade protestants and catholics to work together. In 1908 he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, supporting it from 1911 in the Irish Worker. In the autumn of 1913 a strike on the Dublin trams led to a long confrontation with the employers and gave Larkin his finest hour. Threatened with arrest, he whipped off a false beard on the balcony of the Imperial hotel, O'Connell Street, to encourage his men. But he alienated British trade union support and the rest was anticlimax. The strike dribbled away with little gained and there were other matters to preoccupy Ireland. Larkin spent the war years in America, where he was gaoled and then deported, and returned a convinced Marxist with an admiration for Bolshevik Russia. His militancy led to expulsion from the union he had founded. Elected to the Dáil in 1927 he was unseated as a bankrupt, but elected again in 1937. A large man, with a powerful voice and powerful emotions, Larkin has been called ‘lion-hearted and erratic’. The Times' obituary remarked that ‘of late he had not been much in the public eye’.

J. A. Cannon

James Larkin 1876–1947, Irish labor leader. The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, which he organized and of which he was secretary, had as its goal the combining of all Irish industrial workers, skilled and unskilled, into one organization. After his activity in the general strike of 1913 he was tried by the British for sedition and jailed briefly. When World War I began, Larkin traveled to the United States to raise funds for the Irish to fight the British. His radical socialist manifestos and close association with the founders of the American Communist party resulted in a conviction (1920) for criminal anarchy. Pardoned in 1923 by the governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, Larkin was deported to Ireland. There he organized (1924) the Workers' Union of Ireland and served in the Dáil Éireann (1937–38, 1943–44), on the Dublin Trades Council, and on the Dublin Corporation.

Bibliography: See biographies by R. M. Fox (1957) and E. J. Larkin (1965).

Larkin, James (1876–1947). Larkin was the nearest thing to a revolutionary leader that the modern trade union movement has thrown up. He wished, on syndicalist lines, to use trade union power not merely to obtain concessions but as a battering ram to destroy capitalism. Born in Liverpool of Irish parents, he went to Ireland to organize the dock workers. His first task was to persuade protestants and catholics to work together. In 1908 he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. In the autumn of 1913 a strike on the Dublin trams led to a long confrontation with the employers and gave Larkin his finest hour. Threatened with arrest, he whipped off a false beard on the balcony of the Imperial hotel, O'Connell Street, to encourage his men. The strike dribbled away with little gained and there were other matters to preoccupy Ireland.