Irish man tried to turn Texas into a bastion of socialism, Cork conference hears

“It’s Texas, Jim, but not as we know it,” may well sum up the reaction of many attending this year’s Spirit of Mother Jones Festival in Cork when they heard of the attempts by an Irish emigrant to turn the Lone Star state into a bastion of socialism in the early years of the last century.

“Red Tom Hickey – the Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism” by historian Peter Buckingham is the first biography of an enigmatic figure on the American Left who gained the admiration of thousands of downtrodden tenant farmers and the wrath of political elites in the years before the first World War.

Buckingham told the story of Hickey, who was born in Ireland in 1868 and emigrated to the United States in 1892 where he worked as a machinist and joined the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party before befriending his fellow Irish immigrant, Mary Harris, aka Mother Jones.

According to Buckingham, Hickey acted as an enforcer for Socialist Labor Party boss Daniel De Leon in Brooklyn but fell foul of De Leon and was expelled from the party in 1901. He then headed west, obtaining work first as a lumberjack in Washington state and later as a miner in Montana.

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Eventually he settled in Texas around 1907 and quickly immersed himself in the labour movement in what was then the largest state in the US, where he saw an opportunity to use syndicalism or revolutionary trade unionism as an organising tool to try to build a state-wide socialist party.

Buckingham explained that Hickey was the son of a Fenian, and his father’s Fenian philosophy would inform his politics throughout his life, even in Texas where he saw the struggles of tenant farmers for landownership very much through an Irish lens.

According to Buckingham, Hickey became leader of the Texas Socialist Party and as editor of its weekly newspaper, The Rebel, based in Halletsville in Texas, he grew its circulation to more than 22,000 until it became the third-largest socialist paper in the United States.

The Rebel had as its motto, the famed saying of 18th-century French revolutionary, Camille Desmoulins, also frequently used by Hickey’s fellow Irish syndicalists, James Connolly and James Larkin – “The great appear great only because we are on our knees – Let us arise!”

Buckingham said: “Within a few years, Hickey transformed the faction-ridden Socialist Party of America in Texas into a force strong enough to threaten the Republican Party at the ballot box. He gained a large following thanks to a unique rhetoric and militant industrial unionism.”

Hickey became one of the US government’s main targets during the post first World War Red Scare, which effectively crushed the Texas Socialist Party, already hampered at the ballot box by violence, poll taxes and voter suppression.

According to Buckingham, the Democratic Party soon co-opted the more appealing elements of Hickey’s socialism into a diluted reformist format for the Texan voter and by the time Hickey died of throat cancer in 1925, his moment in the spotlight had passed.

Buckingham, who has pieced together his biography of Hickey from archives in Ireland and in the US, spoke about Hickey’s close friendship with his fellow Irish emigrant and union activist, Mother Jones at this year’s Spirit of Mother Jones Festival in Cork.

Among the other events at this year’s Spirit of Mother Jones Festival was a new documentary film, Endurance and Engagement: Cork City Women in the 1920s, which looks at how violence and unrest impacted on ordinary Cork women during the turbulence of the struggle for independence.

The project was researched by Cork historian Anne Twomey of the Shandon History Group, Dr Helene O’Keeffe of UCC School of History and Cork historian Gerry White, and features Cork women prominent in the struggle for freedom such as Eibhlís MacCurtain and the Duggan sisters.

Director Ciara Buckley said: “As a proud Cork woman, I was so happy to collaborate with Cork City Council to produce and direct Engagement and Endurance. These incredible unsung heroines are so inspiring and it’s great to share their stories and help give them the recognition they truly deserve.”

Meanwhile, another documentary from Framework Films and the Shandon Area History Group, Ordinary Women in Extraordinary Times, tells the story of five women – Nora and Sheila Wallace and Mary, Annie and Muriel MacSwiney and the part they played in the struggle for independence.

Anne Twomey says the documentary seeks to explain the vital role played by all five women in the formation of the Irish State as it attempts to answer in some small way the question that was often asked in the early years of the Irish Free State “What did the women do anyway”?

“This documentary provides an account of the lives of these five women and, in particular, the part they played in the Irish revolutionary period, while still carrying on their roles as shopkeepers, teachers, wives and mothers,” says Twomey.

For a further information about this year’s Spirit of Mother Jones Festival, which ran from Thursday, July 28th until Saturday, July 30th, please visit www.motherjonescork.com