Jack White (Irish socialist)

James Robert "Jack" White, DSO was an Irish republican and libertarian socialist. After colonial service in the British military, he entered Irish politics in 1913 working with Roger Casement in Ulster to detach fellow Protestants from Unionism as it armed to resist Irish Home Rule, and with James Connolly to defend the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in the great Dublin lock-out. White rallied to the defence of those condemned for the 1916 Easter Rising, but the combination of his socialism and anti-clericalism placed him at odds with the principal currents of Irish republicanism. Until experience of Republican Spain in 1936 convinced him of the anarchist critique of the party-state, he associated with a succession of communist-aligned groups. His last public appearance was in 1945, at an Orange Hall in his home town of Broughshane, County Antrim, where he proposed himself as a "republican socialist" candidate in the upcoming United Kingdom general election.

Early years

Jack White was born on 22 May 1879,at Cleveland, Montague Place, Richmond, Surrey to Amelia Mary White, daughter of Joseph Baly, Anglican Archdeacon of Calcutta, and her husband Captain—later Field Marshal— George White V.C., an Anglo-Irish landowner and distinguished soldier. Keohane.2014.p.10
An only son, he initially followed in his father's footsteps. He boarded at Winchester College and, despite being expelled, won a cadetship to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

British officer and veteran

In 1899, White, commissioned as a lieutenant with the 1st Gordon Highlanders, was shipped out to South Africa for service in the Second Boer War. While his father's command was besieged at Ladysmith, he took part in the Battle of Magersfontein and the relief of Kimberley. Passing into the Orange Free State he saw action at Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, Driefontein, Vet River and Zand River. From May 1900 in the Transvaal, he took part in the engagement at Doornkop, the occupation of Johannesburg and Pretoria and, in August 1900, in the last set-piece battle of the war at Belfast-Bergendal.
For his war service, White was mentioned in despatches, received the Queen's South Africa Medal with five clasps, and was decorated by Lord Kitchener with the Distinguished Service Order.
In 1902 he was appointed aide-de-camp to his father, General Sir George White, now Governor of Gibraltar. In this capacity he met Kaiser William II, and King Edward VII. While at Gibraltar he courted Anna Mercedes Dolores Mosley, a society beauty and devout Roman Catholic. Despite family objections on both sides, and after White had returned from a posting in Peshawar, India to press his suit, they were married in a registry office in 1905.
In 1907, responding to the tedium of Territorial duties in Aberdeen; the brutality of his wartime experience; and the belief that in the wake of Russo-Japanese War that the days of the empire he had served were numbered, White resigned his commission. He relayed his decision to his father, who thought him mad; to H.G. Wells, who, appalled, said he would like to "thrash" White's governesses and schoolmasters; and to Leo Tolstoy, who returned his blessing.

Tolstoyan

Finding himself adrift—teaching English in Bohemia was followed by a succession of farm-labouring jobs in England—White sought to conform to Tolstoy's Sermon-on-the-Mount vision of a simple life. While from the start remaining "clear" of teetotalism, White concluded that attempts to codify the ideas of the great Russian writer were a mistake. In 1911, attracted by the government promise of free farm land, White left for Canada.
After enduring the rigours of a logging camp, he returned to England early in 1912. The Whites moved into a back-to-the-land community, Whiteway, in the Cotswolds, an early breakaway from a Tolstoyan community at Purleigh in Essex. Associated with Francis Sedlak, it prized individual expression and freedom from convention. It was from here that White was recalled to Ireland by the death of his father in June 1912.

Protestant home ruler

"Protestantism and Home Rule"

Already, in advance of his return, White had assailed the Ulster Unionists as they organised under Edward Carson to resist a Home Rule parliament in Dublin. He wrote to the Belfast News Letter condemning the refusal of unionist crowds to let the Liberal minister Winston Churchill speak on Home Rule at the Ulster Hall. The failure to grant their opponent a hearing was an exercise in "Popery". Finding that it alone was willing to publish his letter, White joined the Ulster Liberal Association. It was with the promise that he would "not be idle on the side of progress and Protestantism". At issue, he argued, was "liberty of reason", and the right "to be represented by self-government or Home Rule in a nation, just as a free reason gives self-control to an individual.
In December 1912, White was invited by the Irish Protestant Home Rule Committee to speak in London on a platform with George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Gwynn M.P. and Arthur Conan Doyle. Addressing the motion against "the stirring up of religious rancour and intolerance in N.E. Ulster", White proposed that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were two stages in the gradual evolution of the "universal human spirit". Both stages have their dangers, but of the two the danger of Protestantism for its laity is the greater:

The man who claims the direction of his own conscience claims to be his own priest, and unless he does all in his own power to prepare the way for others to attain the same liberty, his liberty is but selfish licence, and he is false to the trust of a priest.... mocking the support upon which leans... puts every obstacle in the way of his aspirations for further freedom.... "I dare not help you to freedom lest you enslave me".

While "no man who is truly free fears for the results to himself of freedom won by others", White allowed that "he may fear the results of it for them". The Protestant Bishop of Down and Connor proposed that "by destroying the power of priests", Home Rule would "produce in Ireland the same irreligion and secularism that the advent of democratic government has produced in other Roman Catholic countries". The flaw in this, the "best argument" against home rule White had ever heard, was that in the continental Catholic countries the democratic movement had to fight the Church allied to the old order, whereas in Ireland, where the Church "can almost said to be one" with the National and Democratic movement, it is not Catholics but Protestants who "exclaim that the forces of Hell are being let loose".
White concluded by asserting, both as a Protestant and as a Home Ruler, that there can be no power, whether human or superhuman, "permanently independent of the consent of those upon whom authority is imposed", and by professing to "hear the spirit of Catholic Ireland crying out to the spirit of liberalism 'Give us some of the freedom you have won and we will give you some of the reverence and beauty you have lost'". His mainly Catholic audience cheered.

Ballymoney protest against Carsonism

In the hope of eliciting the same response from a home audience, and with the "wholehearted support" of the Rev. J. B. Armour of the ULA who similarly claimed home rule as a "Presbyterian principle", in October 1913 White helped organise a "Protestant protest" against "Carsonism" in Ballymoney. On a platform with Sir Roger Casement and Alice Stopford Green, and in the presence of reporters from all the major London and Irish papers, he proposed a Home Rule pledge to match the Carson's Ulster Covenant: "We intend to abide by the just laws of the lawful parliament of Ireland until such time as it may prove itself hostile to democracy, in sure confidence that God will stand by those who stand by the people irrespective of class or Creed."
As a result of the Ballymoney meeting White was invited to Dublin, where he spoke at the Literary and Historical Society in University College Dublin alongside John Dillon and Tom Kettle. Neither nationalist politician appreciated being pressed by White to make "a supreme effort" to assuage Protestant fears of Rome Rule —of Catholic clerical domination.
In Ulster, Casement sought, without success, to build upon the Ballymoney meeting. The Times of London was able to conclude that it had represented but a "small pocket of dissident Protestants, the last survivors of the Old Liberals.”

Labour, and national, volunteer

Irish Citizen Army

Dublin at the time of the White's UCD meeting was in the midst of the great lockout by employers of workers newly organized by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. White was incensed by the violence of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. In August 1913, he was himself caught in a baton charge and was dragged to the police station, with Constance Markievicz "hammering the police on the back" with her fists in an effort to release him.
White was also outraged by the intervention of the Catholic Church. With the sanction of Archbishop William Joseph Walsh, Hibernian crowds prevented the poorly-nourished children of the locked-out and striking workers leaving the city to be taken into the care of sympathetic, but not necessarily Catholic, families in Liverpool and Belfast.. White offered his services to ITGWU leader James Connolly, proposing to drill union men as a workers' defence corps, a "Citizen Army".
Connolly helped in the organisation to which Markievicz contributed her Fianna Éireann nationalist youth, and in November 1913 the Irish Citizen Army was born. Although in March 1914 he was again batoned, and charged with assault, White claimed that the appearance of the new force had "put manners on the police".
But by the spring, having failed to persuade the British Trades Union Congress to vote action in support of the Dublin workers, Larkin was urging a return to work, and the ranks were thinning. In May 1914, White resigned, replaced as chairman of the ICA's "Army Council" by Larkin. He transferred to the new-formed Irish Volunteers.