“An Account Of The Manner In Which Young Boys Are Made Into Soldiers”: Na Fianna Éireann and the Making of Irish Masculinity

September 22, 2015July 5, 2016 ajbeatty2014 Baden Powell, Bulmer Hobson, Constance Markievicz, Eamon Martin, Fianna, Fianna Eireann, Irish Nationalism, Liam Mellows, Masculinity, Patrick Pearse

In 1911, the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Irish Freedom newspaper featured an article on the training practices for young recruits used in the Japanese army. The methods used by the Japanese military, Irish Freedom claimed, offered Irish nationalists a useful “Cúntas ar an mhódh ‘na ndéantar saighdiúirí de na buachaillibh óga” [Account of the manner in which young boys are made into soldiers].[1] The article was intended as a commentary on the recently founded Na Fianna Éireann [The Warriors of Ireland]. This militia-style organisation for Irish boys was one of the most important Irish political groupings in the turbulent years around 1916, though they have received far less attention from historians than their adult contemporaries in the Volunteers or Cumann na mBan. Na Fianna Éireann, in their own attempt to turn boys into manly soldiers, displayed a number of anxieties about Irish identity, masculinity and national decline.

Na Fianna was founded in 1909 by Bulmer Hobson and Constance Markievicz. Hobson had already formed an organisation under this name in Belfast in 1902. This earlier Fianna Éireann, dedicated to the promotion of sports and the Irish language, was intended as an alternative to the Catholic Boys’ Brigades that had become a recruiting facility for the British Army.[2] In August 1909, having decamped to Dublin, Hobson chaired a public meeting “to form a national boys’ organisation to be managed by the boys themselves on national non-party lines.” The second Fianna Éireann was the result of this. Shortly afterwards Hobson returned to Belfast and Constance Markievicz assumed responsibility for the organisation. In the years after 1916 its numbers rose to 30,000, the high tide of Fianna membership.[3]

Bulmer Hobson (1883-1969) and Constance Markievicz (1868-1927)

The Fianna were clearly influenced by the British Boy Scouts movement, founded by Robert Baden-Powell in 1908. The Scouts drew on contemporary anxieties about the impact of modern urban lifestyles, something Baden-Powell sought to reverse through healthy and correctly masculine pastimes. Na Fianna Éireann was a product of similar societal fears, and indeed the Fianna, for all their anti-English rhetoric, regularly emulated the Scouts.

Liam Mellows (1892-1922)

Liam Mellows, who graduated from the Fianna to the Volunteers, looked back in 1917 at the arrival of the Boy Scout movement in Ireland and suggested that had they succeeded, Baden-Powell’s organisation would have “completed the attempts made by England” with the help of traitorous “seonini” to make a “happy English child out of the Irish boy.” Thus, Mellows felt, “Some antidote was needed” if the future men of Ireland “were not to be swallowed up in the tide of Anglicisation engulfing the land.”[4] The antidote to the Scouts, of course, was the Fianna, even if the differences between the two were often negligible. The internal structure of the Fianna was remarkably similar to that of the “Baden Powell’s”, their uniforms were also similar and there is evidence that the Fianna competed with the Irish branch of the Scouts for potential recruits.[5]

The Scouts in Britain had emerged during a panic over supposedly inferior military recruits during the Boer War and they sought to promote restorative “good citizenship” among British boys; the full title of Baden Powell’s 1908 handbook was, appropriately enough, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship. The Fianna similarly sought to make clean-living citizens out of Irish boys, whilst also preparing them for future military activities. The 1914 Fianna Handbook urged each member to “make himself strong in mind as well as in body…. [to] think for himself and be self-reliant and strong.” Fianna members were, on the one hand, “pledged to re-establish a free Irish nation, and their first work must be to train themselves to be fit citizens of a free nation”, whilst also learning lessons “of self-sacrifice and service… to obey and to be self-controlled.” They were urged to be good citizens and to never act in such a way that they would bring Ireland into disrepute. More prosaically, a Fianna boy would take regular baths, would always present himself with “clothes brushed and boots polished.” He would not take alcoholic drinks and, “Wishing to grow up strong in body and mind” he “smokes seldom, if at all.”[6] On a basic level, this was not all that different from the ideas of Baden-Powell.

Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (1909)

Notwithstanding their obvious similarities, however, the Fianna did markedly differ from the Boy Scouts in the manner in which their activities served to imagine a liberated postcolonial Ireland. Writing from the perspective of 1959, their former chief of staff, Eamon Martin, spoke of how the Fianna was founded at time “when pride of nationhood was at its lowest ebb in Ireland”. Thus, the “new-born resurgence” of the Fianna stood out even more against this pathetic background.[7] Patrick Pearse similarly feared that “centuries of oppression” had erased Ireland’s military spirit and that the country was on the verge of becoming “a land of contented slaves.” It was in this context that he positioned his call for Irish boys to acquire, via the Fianna, military training and habits of clean living, both of which would be palliatives to national decay.[8] When Constance Markievicz spoke of the Fianna as “an educational organisation”, she went on to elaborate that it was “an organisation that teaches and trains Irish boys to work for Irish independence.” Arguing that the preservation of “national independence and strength and unity” were universal concerns, and that generations of Irishmen had sacrificed themselves for national sovereignty, Markievicz concluded that “it is fitting that Irish boys should be trained to take their place in the national struggle for freedom.”[9]

Fianna Handbook (1913) – “Chivalry dies when Imperialism begins”

Indeed, the Fianna Handbook’s talk of re-establishing Ireland as a “free nation” and the task of making Irish boys into “fit citizens for a free nation” points to some deeper concerns not only of Irish degeneration under British rule, but also of the need for individual bodily reform as a precursor for national sovereignty. A “self-reliant and strong” nation of free citizens was the clearly desired goal of this. Mellows had argued that the Fianna was the only organisation in the country producing “real live earnest Irish rebel boys” and in its early years he felt that “A splendid spirit of camaraderie pervaded the movement, which was rapidly becoming a boy’s community, the embryo of the Republic. It was remarkable what a few years had done in forming the character of the members. No longer were they mere boys. They felt men, if not in years, then in strength of purpose.” More overtly, an editorial in an early issue of the Fianna’s self-titled newspaper spoke of Irish youth as being “like a green-stick, you can bend without breaking it. That is why this paper exists, to assist the Fianna in educating and bending, as it were, Ireland’s youth in the right direction.”[10]

Na Fianna were always an avenue for social reform as much as it was a military organisation. Much like the Volunteers, the G.A.A., and even the Gaelic League, they displayed marked anxieties about national decay, about Ireland’s lack of formal political sovereignty and about the effects of British colonialism on Irish men’s virility. When Na Fianna spoke of making men out of boys, they were tapping into deep veins of meaning within nationalist culture and thought.

[1] ‘Saighdiúrí na hÉireann’ [Irish Soldiers]. Irish Freedom, November 1911.

[2] Marnie Hay. Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) 28.

[3] Marnie Hay, ‘The Propaganda of Na Fianna Éireann, 1909-26.’ Mary Shine Thompson, ed., Young Irelands: Studies in Children’s Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011) 49.

[4] NLI 1A 2302, Donnchadh O Seaghdha, ed. Liam Mellows. The Irish Boy Scouts: A History of Na Fianna Eireann, 1909-1916 – Reprinted from the Gaelic American (1917).

[5] NLI 5A 3521, Na Fianna Eireann Historical Documents No. 1: Sean Healy O/C/ Cork, 1916 – Transcript of an interview with Sean Healy of 24^thAugust 1974 by Donnchadh O’Seaghdha.

[6] Fianna Handbook (Dublin: The Central Council of Fianna Eireann, 1924). This is a reprint of the 1913 handbook, with some minor changes made to reflect the post-Civil War political context.

[7] A message from former Chief of Staff Eamon Martin’. In NLI IR 300 P49, Cathal O’Shannon, ed. Souvenir of the Golden Jubilee of Fianna Éireann, 16 August 1959.

[8] ‘To the Boys of Ireland.’ Irish Freedom, February 1914. In the original Irish Freedom article, no author is listed. In the 1959 Souvenir of the Golden Jubilee of Fianna Éireann, however, the author is listed as Pearse, and the content is certainly consistent with his work.

[9] ‘Fianna Handbook’ (1924).

[10] ‘From the Editors’. Fianna [Warriors], Vol. 1, No.5, June 1915.

Margaret Thatcher’s Imaginary Childhood

August 29, 2015November 26, 2015 ajbeatty2014 Alfred Roberts, Britain, Childhood, Conservative, Conservativism, Grantham, Labour, Margaret Thatcher, Middle England, TINA

“Family tradition has it that I was a very quiet baby, which my political opponents might have some difficulty in believing. But I had not been born into a quiet family.”[1]

The Roberts’ Family Green-Grocers, Grantham

Margaret Thatcher’s first memories were of sun, excitement, traffic, “the bustle of Grantham” and a public park in her Lincolnshire market town. Her memoirs are filled with such bucolic visions of middle England, of her family’s grocery store and a pious Methodism. These earliest recollections, foregrounding the public and the social, were cracks in an otherwise carefully constructed façade. In the opening chapters of her first volume of memoirs, Thatcher builds up an image of a childhood already dedicated to the virtues of what she would later term a “property-owning democracy”[3]. She might have been born Margaret Roberts, but Margaret Thatcher, the defender of a privatised politics, always existed. Indeed, as she told an audience in Korea in 1992, she never invented “Thatcherism”, she and her colleagues merely “rediscovered it”. It was a politics of common-sense that had always existed, a product of a timeless England: “The values, ideas and beliefs which I was privileged to be able to put into effect in Britain in the eleven and a half years of my Prime Ministership were rooted in the experience of the past and reinforced by events in my lifetime.”[4] How Thatcher chose to remember her own childhood reveals these political concerns.

Foreshadowing their daughter’s politics, Thatcher’s parents were thrifty savers, committed patriots and, above all, striving entrepreneurs: “I was born into a home which was practical, serious, and intensely religious” and “In my family we were never idle – partly because idleness was a sin, partly because there was so much work to be done, and partly no doubt because we were just that sort of people.” Hers was a childhood of idealised petit-bourgeois values, with the frivolous games of other children replaced, in Roberts/Thatchers’ case, with Right-leaning activities that presaged her later political career; board games based on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and cinema-visits that taught the follies of Communism and revolutions. Grantham is remembered as a place where duty and work formed a seamless whole. It was an allegedly classless society, defined by strongly felt Imperial sentiment and where the proletariat were only the most pro-monarchical element (though Thatcher also shows herself to have been all too aware of the actual existence of class barriers in her childhood). For sure the Labour Party had a presence, but it is presented as one emptied of any politics or serious ideological differences; “Politics was a matter of civic duty and party was of secondary importance. The Labour councillors we knew were respected and friendly and, whatever the battles in the council chamber or at election time, they came to our shop and there was no partisan bitterness.”

Margaret Thatcher, aged 13 – “I already had a logical and indeed somewhat literal mind – perhaps I have not changed much in this regard”

There is a suspiciously selective memory at work here and Thatcher’s pedestrian prose-style masks the complexities of her politico-literary project: she is constructing her own mythology, constructing an idealised vision of her own childhood, and ultimately constructing a vision of an idealised (depoliticised?) middle England.

Belying her own fond claim that she was “never happier than in children’s company”, there are surprisingly few children mentioned in her childhood memories. Outside of her own siblings, none are mentioned by name (not even “My closest friend”). In their place, though, are the various authority figures of her schooling, who are mentioned by name: Miss Williams, a headmistress fond of imparting housewifely wisdom to her charges, Miss Harding, “a particularly inspiring History teacher”, and Miss Kay, Thatcher’s influential chemistry teacher. The focus on childhood authority-figures is of a piece with a focus on authority and order in her adult life. Indeed, Thatcher’s memory of her teachers – “a genuine sense of vocation” and “highly respected by the whole community” – acts as an implicit counterpoint to her views of public sector workers decades later; grasping, no sense of vocation, and disrespected. Commenting on her own time as Shadow Education spokesperson in the early 1970s, she spelt out her own Conservative vision of a properly disciplined childhood:

“What I rejected from the start was the idea, fashionable among the middle classes as much as among experts, that the best way for a child to learn was by self-discovery. This belief entailed the abandonment of the kind of education my generation had had as mere “learning by rote”. In fact, any worthwhile education involves the teaching of knowledge, memory training, the ability to apply what one has learned and the self-discipline required for all of these. In all the frenzy of theorizing, these truths were forgotten.”

Against any modish notions that childhood could be a time of experimentation, Thatcher describes her childhood in static terms; she was always respectful of proper authority and she always knew the truth of Conservative politics. She talks of the passion for politics she shared from a young age with her father, a green-grocer, preacher and one-time mayor of Grantham. Her father’s trips to the local library, and the books he picked out for her, meant that “I found myself reading books which girls of my age would not generally read”. The inference built up is that she was less a child and more a smaller version of her later adult self. She unabashedly claims that the 1935 general election, when she was a mere ten years, was “the contest in which I cut my teeth politically”.

Margaret Thatcher and her father, Alfred Roberts – “I never remember him as anything other than a staunch Conservative”

Pushing this trope further, she attempts to narrate her father’s political career as a precursor to her own. His own loss of elected office in 1952 being “something not too dissimilar” to Thatcher’s fall in 1990. And as a recurring motif of her memoirs, Thatcher recalls prophetic moments that point to her future: a fortune-teller at a Conservative fête early in her career who promised great things [“you will be great – great as Churchill”]; John Buchan’s political novel The Gap in the Curtain, in the tea-leaves of which Thatcher read her own future. The tone borders on the mystical.

Yet there is a deeper imperative at work here. As the journalist and labour activist Andrew Murray has observed, it is a mistake to think that Britain’s ruling class does not also have its precious folk memories.[5] What Thatcher seems to have been doing with the memories of her childhood, was to construct her own personal folktale. A folktale where she was somehow always a right-wing campaigner, one that could never be dissuaded: “both by instinct and upbringing I was always a “true blue” Conservative. No matter how many left-wing books I read or left-wing commentaries I heard, I never doubted where my political loyalties lay… though of course it would take many years before I came to understand the philosophical background to what I believed, I always knew my mind.” As a child in wartime Britain, she claims to have already known that Nazism and Communism were just two sides of the same collectivist coin. Even after four years at Oxford, her character and her beliefs were unchanged.

The intention in all this was presumably to buttress her politics of T.I.N.A. with a story of unwavering commitment to political “truth”. The actual result is an image of fragile zealousness, of a politician who can admit no faults or second thoughts (indeed, her memoirs are marred by a regular point-scoring against any and all ideological opponents). The result, in other words, is something that ultimately shows up the weaknesses of the folktale of Thatcher.

[1] Margaret Thatcher. The Path to Power (New York: Harper Collins, 1995) 3. All further references are from The Path to Power, unless otherwise noted.

[3] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 22 November 1990, vol. 181 cc. 439-518. This speech was Thatcher’s last as Prime Minister.

[4] “The Principles of Thatcherism”, Speech in Korea, 3 September 1992.

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108302

[5] Morning Star, 19 March, 1984. Quoted in Seumas Milne. The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso, 2004) 6.

“Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen and I could overthrow the entire British monarchy”: Friedrich Engels and the Conditions of the Irish Working Class

August 3, 2015June 6, 2017 ajbeatty2014 Friedrich Engels, History, Immigrants, Ireland, Karl Marx, Marxism, Private Property, Race, Socialism

[Cross-posted from The Irish Story]

In May 1856, an unassuming German industrialist and his common-law Irish wife arrived in Ireland for a tour of the country. Writing to an old friend in London, another ex-patriot German, the wealthy tourist described his trip, from Dublin to Galway and down along the west coast, the landscape, and the people he met along the way. Post-Famine Ireland was an island of ruins, some dating back to the early middle-ages, some more recent: “The land is an utter desert which nobody wants.” The level of policing was intrusive and shocking in “England’s first colony” and “I have never seen so many gendarmes in any country… armed with carbines, bayonets and handcuffs.” Additionally, the locals, “for all their Irish fanaticism”, were being made to feel increasingly unwelcome: “By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation and now, as everyone knows, fulfil the function of supplying England, America, Australia, etc., with prostitutes, casual labourers, pimps, pickpockets, swindlers, beggars and other rabble.” The German industrialist traveller was Friedrich Engels. His common law wife was Mary Burns (older sister of Lizzy Burns, who would later be Engels’ second wife). And his German correspondent in London was, of course, Karl Marx. Indeed, Engels ended his letter with a desire to write a History of Ireland and an admonitory request that his old comrade should visit Ireland: “Concerning the ways and means by which England rules this country – repression and corruption – long before Bonaparte attempted this, I shall write shortly if you won’t come over soon. How about it?”[1]

Lizzy Burns (1827-1878) and a young Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

In fact, Engels had long had a fascination with the Irish (not least with regards to his two Irish wives). Echoing his observations about Irish migrant labour in his 1856 letter to Marx, his famous 1844 work on The Condition of the Working Class in England features a detailed excursus on the Irish population in Manchester’s “Little Ireland” slum district. Engels described how Irish immigrants, with “nothing to lose at home”, were flocking to cities like Manchester in search of “good pay for strong arms”. At his time of writing, there were 40,000 Irish in Manchester, with similar numbers in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Liverpool. London had 120,000. Yet Engels looked askance at a people who had “grown up almost without civilization” and were now importing their “rough, intemperate, and improvident” ways and “all their brutal habits” into Britain’s already overcrowded cities. The Irish arrived “like cattle” and “insinuate themselves everywhere.” In quasi-ethnographic terms, Engels claimed that “Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises as different from the Saxon physiognomy.” Focusing on “filth and drunkenness” and a “lack of cleanliness… which is the Irishman’s second nature”, Engels moved into a more racialised key, perhaps revealing his own biases along the way.

“Little Ireland”, Manchester, 1849 and today

“The Irishman”, Engels wrote in the singular, “loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill.” Bearing in mind that “Arab” in the nineteenth century referred to Bedouins, rather than any Arabic-speaking person, it is clear where Engels was placing the Irish in a broader racial hierarchy. They were a people with “a southern facile character” and “For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane.” They were too different, and too backward, to ever be properly assimilated into British life: “even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilized, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish.”[2] In many ways, he presented Irish immigrants to industrial Britain as exhibiting what he and Marx would later call “the idiocy of rural life”, a backward people who would soon be submerged by the dynamics of industrial capitalism.[3]

Yet his moralizing tone and his racial determinism could also accommodate a certain envy about Irish political power. Writing in June 1843 for Der Schweizerische Republikaner [The Swiss Republican], Engels eyed up Daniel O’Connell’s famous monster meetings with leftist jealousy:

“The wily old fox gets around from town to town always surrounded by two hundred thousand men, a bodyguard such as no king can boast of. How much could be achieved if a sensible man possessed O’Connell’s popularity, or if O’Connell had a little more sense and a little less egoism and vanity! Two thousand men, and what kind of men! Men who have nothing to lose, two-thirds of them not having a shirt to their backs, they are real proletarians and sansculottes, and moreover Irishmen – wild, headstrong, fanatical Gaels. If one has not seen the Irish, one does not know them. Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen and I could overthrow the entire British monarchy.”[4]

As Engels gained in philosophical sophistication, his use of such overtly racialized language tailed off. His earliest writings on Ireland date from only a few months after his first meeting with Marx; they had met at the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung [Rhinelander Newspaper] in November 1842, shortly after which Engels’ stern father dispatched his troublesome twenty-two year-old son to the family’s cotton mills in Manchester.[5] First by correspondence, later in person, Marx and Engels developed their materialist understanding of history and social change. Increasingly, Engels explained people’s behaviours not in terms of inborn racial tendencies but in terms of material conditions under industrial capitalism. Nonetheless, the Irish continued to occupy a curious status for Engels. They were now the living exemplars of a pre-capitalist social formation, and visiting contemporary Ireland provided a front-row seat to the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.

The Ermen and Engels Mills, adjacent to the Liverpool-Manchester trainline

In the notes for his sadly unfinished History of Ireland – begun around 1870 – Engels traced Irish economic development back to their “ancient origins”. Engels even flirted with self-taught Irish language classes for his study of Irish history, only to admit his frustration with this “philological nonsense” to Marx.[6] It was Ireland’s “obvious… misfortune”, Engels said, to be so geographically close to England, which retarded the country’s trajectory out of feudalism and into capitalism: “the English assisted nature by crushing every seed of Irish industry as soon as it appeared.”[7] Whilst preparing for this work, Engels had come to feel that “communal ownership of land was Anno 1600 still in full force in Ireland.”[8] Pre-capitalist forms of social organisation and property-ownership lingered on in Ireland long after they had disappeared in Britain. In a letter to Marx in early 1870, Engels confessed that “The more I study the subject, the clearer it is to me that Ireland has been stunted in her development by the English invasion and thrown centuries back”.[9]

Marx had similar views. Writing in the New York Daily Tribune in 1853, he placed the restructuring of land-ownership in post-Famine Ireland in a longer history of land enclosures in early modern England and the Highland Clearances in post-1745 Scotland. In his florid journalistic prose, Marx spoke of how “the pauperised inhabitants of Green Erin” were being “swept away by agricultural improvements” and by the “breaking down of the antiquated system of society.”[10]

For Marx, as for Engels, Ireland still displayed traits of feudal property-ownership but was now being violently dragged into capitalist modernity. Yet, this traumatic transformation also held out a revolutionary possibility. In contrast to the “solid, but slow” conservatism of “the Anglo-Saxon Worker”, Irish immigrant labourers had a “revolutionary fire”.[11] Not fully schooled in the rules of private-property, they carried their essentially non-capitalist consciousness to the very heart of capitalist Britain. This was a contradiction that needed to be exploited politically. Just as he had written in Der Schweizerische Republikaner in 1843, Engels continued to feel that the Irish could be the ones to bring down the British state. Marx similarly saw Ireland as the “weakest point”[12] in the British Empire, and looked forward to a social revolution that would be “Ireland’s Revenge” upon England.[13]

Indeed, Engels and Marx were of one mind in their view that Fenianism, a product of this contradiction, could be a revolutionary force on both sides of the Irish Sea:

“What the English do not yet know is that since 1846 the economic content and therefore also the political aim of English domination in Ireland have entered into an entirely new phase, and that precisely because of this, Fenianism is characterised by a socialistic tendency (in a negative sense, directed against the appropriation of the soil) and by being a lower orders movement.”[14]

Which is to say, by Marx and Engels’ lights, Fenians were unconscious socialists. Giving voice to the resentments of dispossessed Irish peasants, they stood in unwitting opposition to the transformation of rural Ireland into a capitalist economy. Not that this detracted from Engels’ perception (at the time of the 1867 trial of the “Manchester Martyrs”) that the leaders of Fenianism were “mostly asses”.[15]

Engels’ later writings, though, were less hopeful for the revolutionary future of Ireland. Visiting Ireland again in September 1869, with Lizzy Burns and Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, he saw some important changes. Dublin was now “unrecognisable”. Trade was at a high level at the port and the city had acquired a newly cosmopolitan air: “On Queenstown Quay I heard a lot of Italian, also Serbian, French and Danish or Norwegian spoken.” All of this portended a regrettable conclusion: “The worst about the Irish is that they become corruptible as soon as they stop being peasants and turn bourgeois. True, that is the case with most peasant nations. But in Ireland it is particularly bad.” [16] It would appear that Ireland had made the leap from feudalism to capitalism before Engels or Marx could finish theorizing the transformation.

Engels, 1891

Indeed, in an 1888 interview with the New Yorker Volkszeitung [New Yorker People’s Newspaper], Engels confessed that “A purely socialist movement cannot be expected in Ireland for a considerable time. People there want first of all to become peasants owning a plot of land, and after they have achieved that mortgages will appear on the scene and they will be ruined once more.”[17] Looking to a bleak future, Engels made the intriguing prophesy that for socialist revolution to take root, Ireland would have to wait for a mortgage-backed financial crisis to ruin the country!

[1] Letter from Engels to Marx, 23 May, 1856. Reprinted in full in L.I. Golman, V.E. Kunina, eds. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971) 83-85

[2] All quotes are taken from the chapter on “Irish Immigration”, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Oxford World Classics, 1999) 101-105

[3] The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 1985) 84

[4] ‘Letters from London’ (1843). In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 33-36

[5] Tristram Hunt. Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Henry Holt, 2009) 63-64

[6] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 19 January, 1870. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 286

[7] Friedrich Engels, ‘History of Ireland’. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 171-209

[8] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 29 November, 1869. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 279-280

[9] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 19 January, 1870. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 286

[10] ‘New York Daily Tribune, 9 February 1853, 22 March, 1853. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 53-58

[11] Karl Marx, ‘Confidential Communications’. Die Neue Zeit, 28 March, 1870. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 160-163

[12] Letter from Karl Marx to Paul and Laura Lafargue, 5 March, 1870. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 290

[13] Karl Marx. ‘Ireland’s Revenge’. Neue Oder-Zeitung, 16 March, 1855. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 74-76

[14] Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 30 November ,1867. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 147

[15] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 29 November, 1867. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 145

[16] Letter from Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 27 September, 1869. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 273-274

[17] 20 September, 1888. In Golman & Kunina, ‘Ireland and the Irish Question’ (1971) 343

Private Property and Adam Ferguson’s Civic Masculinity

July 2, 2015June 20, 2016 ajbeatty2014 1745, Adam Ferguson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Gaelic, Jacobite, Private Property, Scots, Scottish Enlightenment

On the 18 December 1745, at the height of the Second Jacobite Rebellion, the First Highland Regiment, under the command of Lord John Murray, were treated to a sermon by their chaplain. Addressing them in their native Scots Gaelic, their reverend urged them to live up to strong Christian ideals, to protect the Hanoverian state, and to strive to embody a militarised vision of civic British masculinity.

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816)

The chaplain was a young Adam Ferguson, a leading savant of the Scottish Enlightenment, but one whose work has not remained as well known as contemporaries like Adam Smith or David Hume. His sermon was published as a pamphlet the following year with the unwieldy title of A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language to His Majesty’s First Highland Regiment of Foot, Commanded by Lord John Murray, at their Cantonment at Camberwell, on the 18^th Day of December, 1745. Being appointed as a Solemn Fast. By the Reverend Mr. Adam Ferguson, Chaplain to the said Regiment; And Translated by him into English, for the Use of a Lady of Quality in Scotland, at whose Desire it is now published.[1]

In the printed English-language version of the sermon, Ferguson’s social reformist admonishments are built around a recurring Biblical quote: “Be of good Courage, and let us play the Men for our People, and for the Cities of God.” (II Samuel, 10:12). It is not entirely clear, though, what exact terminology Ferguson used in the original Gaelic [or Ersh]. Ferguson was a fluent Scots Gaelic speaker, but had no literacy in the language (when the fraudulent James MacPherson began to show his supposedly ancient Gaelic manuscripts around Edinburgh in the early 1760s, Ferguson was intrigued but later admitted his inability to read them).[2] Even then, there were no proper Scots Gaelic translations of the Bible until as late as 1801. Prior to this, vernacular evangelisers had recourse to a Classical Irish translation, where II Samuel 10:12 reads as follows: Bíodh meisneach mhaith agad, agus foillsighearn sinn féin ar bhfearuibh ar son ar bpobail, agus ar son chairthreach ar Ndé [“Let there be a good courage on you, and we ourselves will exhibit as men for the cause of our community and for the cause of the cities of our God”].[3] The gendered performativity in which Ferguson engaged is less explicit in the original Hebrew of Samuel: chezek u-nitchezek b’ad amanu u-b’ad ari eliahnu [“Be strong and let us both be strong, for the sake of our people and for the sake of the cities of our God”].

In any case, the quote used in the printed translation, taken from the King James Bible, carries a suggestion of consciously adopted and performative masculinity (“let us play the Men”) and resonates throughout the pamphlet. And an overtly expressed notion of a performative civic masculinity was certainly foregrounded in Ferguson’s political theology, whether his original sermon drew on the King James Vesion or on an impromptu Gaelic translation. For Ferguson, it is “the Duty of every Man to defend his country when in Danger”. The present circumstances, of the 1745 uprising, provided an important moment for inculcating this masculine ideal. Not only did the threat to the Hanoverian order require men “to be active in its Defence”, but the crisis was a useful opportunity for social reform: “It is from this Consideration that at particular Times, but more especially in Times of general Distress, the National Authority is interposed to admonish every Congregation and Society of Men to humble themselves before God in a solemn and open manner, that he may avert his deserved Judgements from us, and bless our Resolutions towards a better Conduct for the future.” The British military, with its discipline and engaged masculinity, was a model for the wider social order favoured by Ferguson.

In the early sections of the pamphlet, the antithesis of this social order, the Jacobites, remain faceless and nameless. Talking of how proper male behaviour will “draw down the Blessing of God upon your Country, and contribute to its Peace and good Order’” he also mentions how such ordered behaviour will protect society from “the Assaults of its [unnamed] Enemies”. Ferguson’s recurring Biblical trope also does important work here, placing the Jacobites on the wrong side of a divinely ordained history. Where the British state is a reborn Israel, the Jacobites become ungodly Moabites or Ammonites; their political objectives thus do not need to be discussed, since they stem from inherent evil and a willful desire for disorder.

As he progresses, however, Ferguson becomes less circumspect about the Jacobites and this allows him to more fully sketch out his own idealised social order. Describing civic society as natural and ordained by God – “Society, under the Regulation of Laws and Government, is the State for which Providence has calculated our natures” – Ferguson presents patriotism as “the most manly virtue” and thus civic society is a natural fraternal order. And it is here that private property enters the argument. Though men have a natural tendency towards living in a society, it is nonetheless the case that “Laws are necessary to secure of Persons and Properties, to protect the Weak and restrain the Violent.” Since the State protects property, it also behoves all citizens/property-owners to fund the cost of the State: “we can no longer hesitate in drawing our Conclusion, that each Member is bound, both on account of his own and the publick Welfare, to maintain that League from which he derives so many blessings” and harmony is a necessary component of this social order.

Having established what the proper social order should be, Ferguson proceeds to identify the contemporary state which best exemplifies this ideal. Unsurprisingly it is the British state fighting the forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Highlands. As well as being a place where “Every man may openly profess his Sentiments”, Britain is also a society built on economic liberty and with the proper defence of private property. It is precisely this divinely ordained early capitalist society that the Pretender and his Catholic followers seek to destroy: “What can we expect in our civil or religious Concerns from a Popish King, but the Subversion of our Liberty, and the intire [sic] Corruption of our Religion… Ignorance and Superstition again resume their Tyranny in these Lands, and we and our Posterity bend to the unnatural Dominion of Priests and Churchmen.” Digging further, Ferguson identifies the ways in which a Catholic king would threaten British men’s masculinity. British men now live “under the best Government”, one that protects the property-ownership that makes them free men. Conversely, under Charlie, they would have a king “who has a Right to command Us, our Persons, and Estates.” Their status as free men, with sovereignty, private land ownership and political subjectivity, would be undermined: “Are we then, by Birth, the Property of a Man? and may we be bought and sold like the Beasts of the Field.” Jacobite rule would move them from being men to the status of degraded slaves.

The short pamphlet contains, in embryo, many of the themes and ideas Ferguson would later develop in his more famous work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767); militarism, a fear of social disorder, a desire for careful social reform. That the Scottish Enlightenment was heavily invested in social reform has long been recognised. What Adam Ferguson’s obscure 1745 sermon shows is how strong a role masculinity and private property could play in this social transformation.

[1] (London: A. Millar, 1746).

[2] Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2008) 247fn59.

[3] An Biobla Naomhtha (London: The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1817). This edition is a reprint of an earlier translation.

Pádraic Ó Conaire, Sinn Féin, and the Workers of Ireland

May 29, 2015November 26, 2015 ajbeatty2014 Aindrias O Cathasaigh, Charles Russell, Gaeilge, Ireland, Irish, Marxism, Nationalism, Padraic O Conaire, Sean T O Ceallaigh, Sinn Fein

There were a number of pamphlets published at the height of the Irish War of Independence that simultaneously point to the marked social strife of this period whilst also promoting a harmonious cross-class vision of an Irish people united in shared pursuit of national liberation. A representative example is the 1921 discussion of The Labour Problem published by the Sinn Féin-allied Cumann Léigheachtaí an Phobhail [Republican Lecture Group]. Though seeking to present an image of aloofness from petty ideological squabbles, the pamphlet’s clerical author, S. O’Ceileachar, did claim that strikes were the product of unions’ “selfish” demands for higher wages. O’Ceileachar also openly stated that “Labour… is like a virulent foreign element in the social system” and “whatever else we are, capitalist or worker or neither, we are all Irishmen interested beyond anything else in the welfare of our common country, and as an Irishman speaking to Irishmen I put it that these industrial conflicts, if continued, will inevitably impair, if not utterly destroy, our common country”.[1]

At first glance, the 1919 work Should the Workers of Ireland Support Sinn Fein? might appear to be cut of the same cloth, its title the kind of purely rhetorical question that should be answered with a resounding “Yes”. In actual fact, it is something far more idiosyncratic. Couched in Orthodox Marxist language, this anonymously written pamphlet trenchantly critiques the politics and class interests of Irish nationalism, and astutely places Irish economic and social development in some broader historical contexts.[2]

The author, a pseudonymous “Charles Russell”, promises to “dissect and lay bare” the “real nature” of Sinn Féin, which lays covered by a “mystical atmosphere”. This is a situation exacerbated by the fact that, in the modern world, “workers are rendered docile and submissive by venal intellectuals and subsidised newspapers.” Thus, because of this miasma, Irish people have failed to see Sinn Féin for what they really are: “The “Sinn Fein” system of society is the most complex, subtle, and contradictory. It is but the new name for developed capitalism in Ireland, using Nationality and the Irish language as a cloak to reach its goal.” While Sinn Féin might baulk at any collaboration with “English capitalism”, “Russell” points out that they are “quite prepared to accept in its stead German and American capitalism.” He also takes issue with the very idea of freedom espoused by the party. Employing a Marxist base-superstructure argument, “Russell” states that:

“People’s views are, in the main, the product of their particular social environment – they see the world from the point of view of the class into which they are born and with which their interests are bound up. Consequently the members of the small commercial firm (the germ of the large industrial concern) burn with injustice and struggle to break the bonds that interfere with the expansion of their business. They bawl at the tops of their voices for freedom, like their brothers of the 18^th century in France, but bye and bye we shall see that the freedom they desire (also like that of their French brethren) is commercial freedom – the liberty to exploit nature and the worker to the fullest extent possible.”

In other words, Sinn Fein’s revolution will be a bourgeois revolution. Instead of supporting this, “We, who are working men, should concern ourselves with the bands that bind us to the wheel of capital – that doom us for ever to the toil and sweat of slavery.” “Russell” sums up his critique of Sinn Féin’s capitalist nationalism thusly: “The continuance of the private property system is the central idea in the movement, and so long as private property remains the miseries that necessarily flow therefrom will remain also and continue to afflict the workers under the Irish Republic” and “So long as private property is the order of the day it matters little to the propertyless Irish worker (the vast mass of the population) who rules Ireland.”

“Russell” couches his critiques of Sinn Féin in standard Marxist terms: workers create wealth socially, but profits are held privately; unemployment is caused by overproduction; rationally organised production exists within a system of market anarchy; capitalist production requires peace but creates war. Sinn Féin are thus doomed to fail because capitalism is doomed to fail, as it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

While the language could be polemical, a common trait in contemporary socialist literature, there was also a clear intelligence at work here. The various problems identified by this pamphlet – the critique of official intellectuals and the role they play in maintaining dominant ideologies, the analysis of nationalism’s universalizing discourse and how that elides the competing social interests in favour of a harmonious vision of cross-class (but in actuality, bourgeois) harmony, the selectively defined notion of freedom that prevails in capitalist societies – all of these are familiar questions in twentieth- and twenty-first century academic writing.

Nonetheless, it also seems that “Russell” recognised how contentious this anti-nationalist critique of Sinn Féin could be in 1919; the author proceeds to claim that, in fact, it is Sinn Féin who are the truly anti-national force. Their proposed system of land tenure is “entirely foreign to Gaelic ideals as well being, from its very nature, opposed to a real virile National life.” It is telling that it as at this point that the pamphlet draws on familiarly national language of virility and the rebuilding of a pre-Norman Gaelic Ireland. He proposes a communal system of land ownership that, “Russell” claims, is the same as that which existed in the clan-system of Gaelic Ireland. Capitalist private property is thus presented as an insidious Anglo-Norman importation: “The whole Island was replanted in the good old English landlord and tenant style. The system was universally established from North to South, from East to West. The land that was communally owned by the Gaelic Clansmen became the fee-simple estate of Protestant, Catholic and Puritan landlord” and “the old Gaelic land system never again made its appearance in Ireland.”

The argument was clearly developed in a careful and judicious manner, making it doubly frustrating that the pamphlet’s pseudonymous author, “Charles Russell”, remains unknown. When the Cork Workers’ Club, a short-lived schism from the British and Irish Communist Organisation, reissued this pamphlet as part of a historical document series in 1977, they could do little but say that “Russell” was a self-described “wage slave of Ireland”[3] – which tells us little other than that this orthodox Marxist saw himself in correctly orthodox terms!

What could be Ó Ceallaigh’s signature on the 1919 pamphlet and what is definitely his signature on a 1932 government memo

A possible clue as to the author’s identity, though, can be found on the front cover of the National Library of Ireland’s copy of this pamphlet. As well as what appears to be the signature of future president Sean T. Ó Ceallaigh, scrawled across the middle of the cover, there is a name and address: “P O Conaire, 56 Mary Street”. It is tempting to think that this is the well-known writer and language activist Pádraic Ó Conaire. The National Library do not keep records of when or how they acquire pamphlets like this, but this would suggest that both Ó Ceallaigh and Ó Conaire owned this specific copy of the pamphlet.

“P O Conaire 56 Mary St”

Pádraic Ó Conaire lived a famously nomadic life, regularly moving between Galway, Dublin and London, though he does seem to have been in Ireland in 1919, when this pamphlet was published. There is a Mary Street in Galway but no number fifty-six. Dublin does have a 56 Mary Street, on the north side of the Liffey, and according to the 1911 census it was divided into what appear to be a series of flats. Apart from these speculative associations, though, there are also some good textual reasons to think that Pádraic Ó Conaire might actually have been “Charles Russell”.

Eamon de Valera unveils the famous statue of Ó Conaire, Galway, 1935

Aside from the Irish language prose for which he is usually known today, Ó Conaire was an avowed socialist; that this fact that has been smoothed over in favour of the far less contentious image of a hard-drinking bard, would surely confirm the views of “Charles Russell” (whoever he actually was).

In Cummanachas Céard San Am Ata le Theacht [Trade Unionism in the Future], a 1919 essay later republished by the British and Irish Communist Organisation as a part of a pamphlet on Marxachas-Lenineachas [Marxism-Leninism][4], Ó Conaire not only openly avowed his radical politics but did so in terms remarkably similar to those of “Charles Russell”. Like “Russell”, Ó Conaire’s political analysis was couched in a much longer historical frame: capitalism would eventually fall just as Constantinople once fell to “an Túrcach borb” [the terrible Turk]. Ó Conaire’s predictions were also familiarly Marxist: “go bhfuil lucht oibre an domhain, lucht soláthruighthe gach maoine, ag teacht i réim” [that the working class of the world, the class that produces all wealth, is coming into power].

Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh’s recent biography, Réabhlóid Phádraic Uí Chonaire [Pádraic Ó Conaire’s Revolution] goes a long way to rediscovering this forgotten aspect of his career. And in a companion volume, An tAthrú Mór: Scríbhinní Sósialacha le Pádraic Ó Conaire [The Great Transformation: The Socialist Writings of Pádraic Ó Conaire], Ó Cathasaigh has compiled a extensive amount of Ó Conaire’s political prose, the bulk of which were originally published in well-known newspapers like The Freeman’s Journal or more obscure periodicals like An Branar [The Fertile Land]. Intriguingly, his socialist writings clustered around 1918-19, contemporaneous with Should The Workers of Ireland Support Sinn Féin?, and like “Charles Russell”, Ó Conaire’s short political essays showed a strong interest in developments in continental Europe [see, for example, his April 1919 piece on Drochobair san Ungáir, The Terrible Work in Hungary] and an intriguingly similar sensitivity to broader historical structures.

In any case, whether or not Ó Conaire was “Charles Russell”, one interesting aspect of his political writings definitely remains: the manner in which his Marxist writings were also an attempt to redefine the Irish language. JJ Lee once said that “The preoccupation of “Irish-Irelanders” with legitimising their aspirations by invoking alleged precedents from the celtic mists have misled some observers into portraying them as simple reactionaries. In fact, far from prisoners of the past, the modernisers created the past in their image of the future.”[5] The Gaelic Revival should perhaps be more accurately called “The Gaelic Invention”, as Irish language writers sought to recreate modernity within a Gaelic idiom. Ó Conaire also seems to have been working in this mode, as he sought to create a modernised and socialist Irish language. His political prose is peppered with familiar Marxist slogans, albeit in Irish, as if he was trying to fuse Marxism and Gaelic League-ism. He talks of the need for aon chumann mór amhain [one big union] and says that this is one of socialism’s rosgcatha [an archaic term meaning battle-cries, here seemingly re-purposed to mean something akin to slogans]. With one eye on contemporary events in Russia, he spoke of the soon approaching “an t-Athrrach Mór” [the Great Transformation] that would be “an t-Atharrach tionnsgalach agus economic is mó dar thainic ariamh” [“the greatest industrial and economic transformation ever”]. Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh’s edited collection corrects many of these anachronisms and replaces them with standardised spellings. Where Ó Conaire might have spoken of an t-Atharrach economic [The Economic Transformation], for instance, Ó Cathasaigh makes the subtle shift to an t-Athrach eacnamaíoch. Yet, as genuinely helpful as this might be to contemporary Irish language readers, it also means that something of historical interest is lost in the process. We miss out on how Ó Conaire was not just writing in the Irish language, he was perhaps also trying to create an Irish socialist language. What might appear to be anachronisms, could actually be rough-and-ready building blocks.

[1] Military Archives, BMH CD 250/4/16, S. O’Ceileachar, D.D. The Labour Problem (1921)

[2] “Charles Russell”. Should the Workers of Ireland Support Sinn Fein? (Dublin: W.H. West, 1918)

[3] Historical Reprints, No. 11, Sinn Féin & Socialism (Cork: Cork Workers’ Club, 1977). My thanks to Benjamin Lee Stone, the Curator for American and British History, Stanford University Libraries, for his help in tracking down a copy of this pamphlet.

[4] Marxachas-Lenineachas (Belfast: Cumann Comharsheilbhe na hÉireann, 1968]

[5] J.J. Lee. The Modernisation of Irish Society (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1973) 141.

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April 27, 2015November 26, 2015 ajbeatty2014

I am a historian and teacher from Ireland. I have taught history at the University of Chicago and am currently an adjunct professor at Wayne State University (Detroit). I have a BA in History and Political Science from Trinity College Dublin, an MA in Modern Jewish History from the University of Chicago, and recently finished my PhD in International History, also at the University of Chicago. My research focuses on Irish and British History, Jewish and Israeli History, Masculinity, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Capitalism.I have presented my work at conferences in the USA and Canada, Ireland and Britain, and Israel.

My PhD, The Life That God Desires: Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884-1938, won the Adele Dalsimer Prize for Distinguished Dissertations of the American Conference for Irish Studies. I am now revising the manuscript for publication with Palgrave-Macmillan, as part of their Gender and Sexualities in History series.

My work has also appeared in Jacobin and The Irish Story.

Contact me at ajbeatty [at] tcd.ie

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