The Life and Times of James Connolly

two families of Glasgow socialists who had arrived. Though Mullery had returned to
Dublin, John Lyng remained and Quinlan was always turning up. This group in the Bronx
formed the core of the Irish Socialist Federation, whose green banner bearing the words
Faugh a Ballach was carried at all working-class demonstrations. When there was neither
union nor I.S.F., Connolly would sometimes take a soft drink in a little Irish saloon where
men talked and sang the songs of home. He was desperately poor. His eighteen dollars
a week was paid irregularly. But he had little occasion to go far from home, and enjoyed
a rare spell of settled family life. During this period he completed Labour in Irish History.
Working for the union was arduous. A fresh slump set in during the autumn of 1907.
In three months over seventy banks and financial houses closed their doors. Connolly
could remark that the typical “American institution” was the bread-line. Employers grew
contemptuous of the workers. Crafts became doubly jealous of their privileges.
“Not a day passes, “ Connolly wrote in the Bulletin “without some of its (I.W.W.)
members being fired off jobs as a result of the action of walking delegates of the pure
and simple unions.”
At Brownsville, near Brooklyn, where Connolly had organised plasterers and turners,
the A.F.L. delegates were accompanied by a gang of hoodlums who ejected the I.W.W,
men from the site. It was a commonplace to be informed by an employer that the A.F.L.
men had refused to work with the “Wobblies”.
Generally speaking the rank and file of the craft union had better instincts than their
leaders, and showed what could have been done if dual unionism had been abandoned.
The I.W.W. organised steel-erectors, bronze workers and carpenters into Local 95. For
a time they used A.F.L. halls for their meetings. But the leaders tried to prevent them.
A number of A.F.L. members protested against the refusal of the House-smiths’ Union
to permit such a letting, and as a result Connolly was invited to address the General
Council of that union on the aims of the I.W.W. His case received a hearing but his
members got no accommodation.
Connolly made a bid for the leadership of the Yonkers tramway strike. He thought
its course illustrated the “correct instincts” of the working class when “unhampered”
by “pure-and-simpledom”. The workers had organised of their own initiative and
appointed a negotiating committee which declared that, failing immediate satisfaction
of their demands, no trolley-cars would be running next day. The manager asked a
resumption of work while negotiations proceeded. “You mean while you get scabs, “
they replied. The strike took place and was solid. But the electricians and engineers
continued working. “They took a firm grip on their union cards, “ said Connolly, “and
scabbed it on the men on strike.”
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