Lesser Spotted Comrades: Tom O’Flaherty
Article originally published in Issue 7 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
By Patrick Flynn
Tom O’Flaherty (1891-1936), an Aran Islands native who played a crucial role in the development of the early Trotskyist movement in the United States, was indelibly shaped by his homeplace and the backgrounds of his parents, Mhaidhc Mhicil Ó Flaithearta and Maggie Ganley. His father’s family, descendants of the Ó Flaithbheartaigh family of Connemara, lived in the village of Gort na gCapall on Inis Mór. Both sides of Tom’s family participated in the Land War, the agrarian agitation that gripped rural Ireland from 1879, and his father was a member of the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood. O’Flaherty himself witnessed several violent evictions during his youth.[1]
The family were poor, and O’Flaherty’s childhood in Gort na gCapall was difficult. Maggie had eloped to marry Mhaidhc, but O’Flaherty later wrote of how the fairytale ended then: ‘After that, her life was a tale of hardship and misery’. He was educated locally at Oatquarter National School. The Irish language remained the dominant language on the Aran Islands, partly through the efforts of David O’Callaghan, a Sinn Féin activist and teacher who sought to reverse the Anglicising ethos of the island’s schools. He taught Tom to read both Irish and English, and the humanitarian Roger Casement, later an Easter Rising leader, was so impressed by Tom’s reading of an Irish language column from the Cork Examiner that he offered to fund his second-level studies. Despite this, Tom, unlike his other siblings like his better-known brother Liam, did not receive a scholarship to attend secondary education, reportedly because Fr Farragher, a local priest who later had O’Callaghan dismissed from his post, refused to provide him with a reference due to his father’s participation in Land War militancy.[2]
In 1912 O’Flaherty followed two of his older sisters in emigrating to Boston, where he worked variously as a longshoreman and as a correspondent for the Boston Globe newspaper, before later moving around the north-western United States. His sister Annie was already involved in the labour movement, and his brother Liam, who joined the siblings in the US in 1920, was also involved in socialist politics. Tom also immersed himself in socialist and labour activism, joining the Socialist Party and the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World and helping to set up an American edition of Irish labour leader James Larkin’s Irish Worker newspaper. He headed the Larkin Release Committee, a body which campaigned for the release of Larkin after he was jailed in New York State in 1919 on charges of instigating ‘criminal anarchy’. O’Flaherty was among those the quarrelsome Larkin fell out within the communist movement, and O’Flaherty’s criticisms of Larkin’s tactics within Irish trade unionism aggrieved Larkin to the extent he complained to Comintern leader Grigory Zinoviev about O’Flaherty’s writings regarding him.[3]
Pictured above from left to right: William Dunne, Tom O’Flaherty, and Big Bill Haywood
O’Flaherty was involved in the post-1917 communist movement in the United States from its earliest stages. Joining the Socialist Party's pro-Bolshevik left-wing, he was a founder-member of the Communist Labor Party, before joining the reconstituted Communist Party of America and its public face, the Workers’ Party, from 1921.[4] Throughout this period, he was noted for his involvement in periodicals such as The Toiler, The Daily Worker, The Irish People and The Communist, frequently using the pseudonym Roger Ganley, a nod to his mother’s family. Elected to the Party’s Central Executive Committee, he was among the party leaders arrested in the raid of a secret conference of the party in Bridgman, Michigan, in 1922. Despite this setback, O’Flaherty remained active as a communist speaker and organiser in the United States, travelling across the country from Massachusetts to Montana to address meetings, with Irish-Americans prominent among his audiences.[5] Alongside party leaders James Cannon and William Dunne, O’Flaherty travelled to the Soviet Union in 1925 where he met the exiled leader of the Industrial Workers’ of the World, ‘Big Bill’ Haywood. At Haywood’s suggestion, O’Flaherty became the first editor of the Labor Defender, periodical of the International Labor Defense, which sought to rally its readers behind class-war prisoners such as Sacco and Vanzetti.[6]
Alongside party figures such as Rose Karsner, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman, Tom O’Flaherty was one of the trusted confidantes of James Cannon to whom Cannon initially shared his copy of Trotsky’s Draft Program smuggled out of the Soviet Union. For his support for Trotskyism, O’Flaherty’s popular ‘As we see it’ column in the Daily Worker was axed and he was expelled from the Communist Party. He promptly became involved in the Communist League of America (CLA), the party founded by the Trotskyist expellees, as well as its newspaper, the Militant, in which he declared his ‘unconditional support of the Platform of the Russian opposition’. Despite his affinity with Trotskyism, his time in the CLA was not without disagreement. His willingness to support the Farmer-Labor Party, influenced by his background in agrarian radicalism in Ireland, drew intense criticism from others in the CLA such as Shachtman, who advocated critical support for the Communist Party and accused the Farmer-Labor Party of being petty-bourgeois. O’Flaherty, who spent most of this period editing the Producers’ News, a Farmer-Labor periodical in rural Sheridan County, Montana where communists were influential within the local party, was aggrieved by this. He allowed his CLA membership to lapse, though he later rejoined and resumed his contributions to the Militant. [7] He later recalled ruefully of the period, ‘when I attached some importance to the farmers out west I was jumped on with both feet by those who thought it was the duty of a Communist Party to organise a party dual to itself. Great grief! What a lot of horseshit artists the movement has produced’.[8]
Returning to Inis Mór in ill health, O’Flaherty caustically surveyed the world communist movement and its failure to prevent the rise of fascism from his vantage point on Gort na gCapall. His views in this period are evident in his correspondence with Abern, whom he told in 1933 that the Comintern was ‘as dead as Saint Anne's shin bone. Russia no longer plays a progressive role in the working-class movement’.[9] The young Irish Free State was strongly Catholic and anti-communist and O’Flaherty found it difficult to gain consistent paid journalistic work on his return, which he attributed to his revolutionary socialist politics.[10] In a July 1933 letter, he referred to ‘the unusually violent campaign against communism’ in Ireland which was hindering his employment prospects; indeed, the headquarters of the Communist Party of Ireland had been burned down by a Catholic mob in Dublin that March.[11][12] He despaired at the reactionary atmosphere in Ireland, instanced by the formation of the Blueshirts and the new Fianna Fáil administration’s deportation to the United States of the Leitrim communist James Gralton, who, like O’Flaherty, had been active in American communism before returning home to the rural west of Ireland.[13][14]
O’Flaherty from 1934 served as an editor and contributor to An t-Éireannach, a socialist and anti-fascist Irish language newspaper aimed at working-class and Gaeltacht audiences.[15] He published several short stories in Irish in the magazine, which he translated and published in two English-language collections, Aranmen All and Cliffmen of the West, and at the time of his death was working on a novel, Red Crom’s Island, which was scathing about the Church’s influence on Irish society.[16] Several other writing projects, such as his planned account of his involvement in the communist movement [17] were cut short by his premature death from heart failure in 1936. His sister Anna, who nursed him in Inis Mór in his final days, told Abern of his continuing interest in American Trotskyism: ‘He lived those last months in New York and Chicago and was continually with you’. The New Militant’s obituary declared that ‘He remained a revolutionist, a Bolshevik, to the end, and all his friends and comrades, who are legion, are glad to honor the memory of a revolutionary stalwart’.[18] Overshadowed by his more famous brother Liam, it is possible that had he lived and returned to the US as he had planned, and been involved in later developments in American Trotskyism such as the discussions with Trotsky on the Transitional Programme and the founding of the Socialist Workers’ Party, he would be better remembered among socialists today. Today, the Liam and Tom O’Flaherty Society, which holds a summer school on the Aran Islands every year, is doing crucial work in bringing neglected writings by both brothers into the public domain.[19]
Notes
1. Genevieve Faherty, ‘Journey of a Revolutionary: Thomas J. O’Flaherty’, (1891-1936), MA in History of Ideas and Culture, NUI Galway, 2011, pp. 6-9.
2. Faherty, ‘Journey of a Revolutionary’, pp. 10-13.
3. Lawrence William White, ‘O’Flaherty, Thomas’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/oflaherty-thomas-a6752, October 2009; Faherty, ‘Journey of a Revolutionary’, pp. 14-17.
4. White, ‘O’Flaherty, Thomas’.
5. Faherty, ‘Journey of a Revolutionary’, pp. 18-23.
6. Labor Defender, August 1926.
7. Faherty, ‘Journey of a Revolutionary’, pp. 24-29. On Shachtman’s criticisms of O’Flaherty and the Farmer-Labor Party see The Militant, November 1930. On Sheridan County and communism see Verlaine Stoner McDonald, The Red Corner: the rise and fall of communism in north-eastern Montana (Helena, Mont, 2010).
8. O’Flaherty-Abern correspondence, John Dwyer papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.
9. O’Flaherty-Abern correspondence, John Dwyer papers.
10. O’Flaherty-Abern correspondence, John Dwyer papers.
11. O’Flaherty-Abern correspondence, John Dwyer papers.
12. Brian Hanley, ‘The Storming of Connolly House’, History Ireland, vol. 7, no. 2, January 1999, pp. 5-7.
13. O’Flaherty-Abern correspondence, John Dwyer papers.
14. Gralton’s story was popularised by Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall.
15. Éamon Ó Ciosáin, An t-Éireannach 1934-1937: Páipéar Sóisialach Gaeltachta (Baile Átha Cliath, 1993).
16. Keelan Harkin, ‘I am of them: Tom O’Flaherty’s socialist fictions and the Irish Free State’, Irish University Review, vol. 50, no. 2, November 2020, pp. 373-387.
17. O’Flaherty-Abern correspondence, John Dwyer papers.
18. New Militant, June 1936.
19. See its social media pages at https://www.facebook.com/OFlahertySociety/ and https://twitter.com/liamoflahsoc