The ISRP was rarely able to pay Connolly his wages, so he would accept a number of speaking arrangements for which he would be remunerated. This was the basis for his invitation to the US, where he embarked upon a nationwide speaking tour on behalf of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). His schedule was gruelling, causing him briefly to go on “strike” unless he was given a day to rest, but he was most certainly in his element. He spoke to thousands of (mainly Irish) immigrants and workers across the country, but distinguished himself from the stump politicians of the Democratic Party who exploited a kind of mawkish sentimentalism to corral the immigrant vote. Connolly had no time for this, insisting he was not there to speak for the Irish people but “only the class to which I was born”. “I could not represent the entire Irish people on account of the antagonistic interests of these classes”, he said, “no more than the wolf could represent the lamb” (Lorcan Collins, James Connolly: 16 Lives, p105).
Connolly returned briefly to Ireland at the conclusion of the tour and then to Scotland for a period. But the ISRP was in dire straits, and Connolly had grown increasingly frustrated with the party’s inability to function in his absence. He decided to make his move to the US more permanent and set off in September 1903. Unable to afford tickets for the whole family, he was initially on his own: the plan was to get settled in the US and save some money that he could send back to Ireland to enable Lillie and the children to join him.
When he arrived in the US Connolly joined the SLP, led by Daniel De Leon, a gruff ex-lawyer with a short temper and a marked intolerance for dissent. De Leon’s SLP had a number of strengths: it was alert to the dangers of reformism, and the party’s commitment to revolutionary politics appealed to Connolly. However, De Leon was a proponent of a particularly mechanical interpretation of Marxism. Socialism was for him reduced to the laws of science that predetermined the fall of capitalism and the inevitable rise of socialism. According to De Leon, the job of a revolutionary was to simply point out the faults in the system.
Connolly was a revolutionary but not in this passive sense. This brought him into continual conflict with De Leon. Their first dispute was about the importance of strikes. The SLP held that the working class could gain nothing from strike action, insisting instead that an “iron law of wages” meant that any increase in pay would be automatically offset by a rise in prices. Connolly knew that this position was both false and highly passive, and would rob the working class of its most powerful weapon. “The theory that a rise in prices always destroys the value of a rise in wages sounds very revolutionary,” he wrote, “but it is not true. And, furthermore, it is no part of our doctrine. If it were, it knocks the feet from under the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance” (James Connolly, Daniel DeLeon, The Connolly-DeLeon Controversy, 1904).
Connolly argued that this orientation left the SLP unable “to take a real live part in the struggles of the workers”, confining it to expounding meaningless slogans and abstract propaganda: “I stated that such theories destroy the fighting power of the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance as a bona fide trade union; or to quote my words literally, made it a mere ward healing club for the SLP… Imagine a trade union which would fight against a reduction of wages, but prevented from fighting for a rise, because taught by its organisers that a rise was no good. What a picnic the employers would have! Every reduction they could enforce would be a permanent one, as our principles would forbid us demanding a rise, it being no benefit” (James Connolly, Daniel DeLeon, The Connolly-DeLeon Controversy).
Connolly wiped the floor with De Leon on the question of wages and strikes. But he was on shakier ground over the question of religion. Connolly believed that the SLP position on religion was too dogmatic, arguing that it created unnecessary barriers between the party and those workers influenced by religion. Certainly, Connolly was correct to call out the SLP over its crude anti-clericalism. After all, as Lenin argued: “unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on Earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven” (V I Lenin, Socialism and Religion, 3 December 1905). Furthermore, Connolly understood that in the atmosphere of anti-Catholicism then being directed at immigrants from an Irish or Italian background, it was important for revolutionaries not only to distinguish themselves from the anti-immigrant demagogues—who attempted to justify their prejudice by pointing to the “foreign” religious practices of ordinary immigrants—but also to fight to win these sections of the working class to the SLP.
In his argument with De Leon, however, Connolly made a number of unnecessary concessions that would have weakened rather than strengthened the revolutionary movement. In particular, he at times underestimated how family structures could be used to strengthen the hierarchical relation that suited capitalism and underpinned women’s oppression. Though shaped by many conservative notions common in his day, Connolly’s position on the oppression of women was still far more advanced than most radicals at the time: “The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave… In its march towards freedom, the working class of Ireland must cheer on the efforts of those women who, feeling on their souls and bodies the fetters of the ages, have arisen to strike them off, and cheer all the louder if in its hatred of thraldom and passion for freedom the women’s army forges ahead of the militant army of Labour” (James Connolly, The Re-Conquest of Ireland, 1915).
Connolly’s experience in the SLP shaped his views on political organisation. Indeed much of the ISRP’s approach to propaganda and trade unionism in Ireland had been modelled on the SLP. However he grew tired of the SLP’s sectarian approach to working class struggle and increasingly began to focus on his trade union activism. He worked for a time as an insurance salesman and in other temporary jobs but it took him some time before he could to save enough to rent a house and send off tickets for Lillie and the children. By the summer of 1904 they were all set to sail and join him.
Connolly looked forward eagerly to being reunited with Lillie and their seven children, but disaster would strike before their arrival. Their first-born daughter, Mona, was anxious with anticipation: “This time tomorrow we will be on the high seas on our way out to Father,” she told her sister Ina. “Will he think I’ve grown big?” Tragically, she would never find out. During a visit to her aunt’s house, on the eve of their departure for the US, Mona was the victim of a horrific accident, in which her apron caught fire, engulfing her in flames. She died the next day of her burns, aged just 13. In death as in life, the effects of poverty follow the poor, and the Connolly family were no different. Mona was buried in an unmarked “paupers’ grave” and the family were unable to attend her funeral due to the cost of missing the boat for the US. There is no telling the grief that Connolly would have felt when he counted six rather than seven children by Lillie’s side when they arrived (see Lorcan Collins, James Connolly: 16 Lives, pp128-132).
And yet he trundled on, through struggles great and small. The “Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the great American socialist labour leader, remembered it a “pathetic sight to see [Connolly] standing, poorly clad, at the door of Cooper Union or some other East Side hall, selling his little paper.” “None of the prosperous professional Irish”, she recalled, “lent him a helping hand at that time.” Not for lack of a philanthropic spirit, of course, did his fellow countrymen ignore him. “Connolly was anathema to them”, said Flynn, “because he was a ‘Socialist’” (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 1979).