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chapter 2 The World of Work and New Opportunities for Social Action Living Faith, 1939–1945 Continuity in Reform: Youth Activism as a Way of Life Fully politicized by the time of his graduation from the University of Colorado, Clinton Jencks now pondered the next step on the road to radicalism. Having jettisoned any thought of a legal career, he looked for an occupational base for social action in the depths of the Great Depression, still searching for an opportunity that would sustain a determined effort to make a difference in the lives of working people and enrich their experiences by spreading God’s love. The religious impulse and the peace movement remained the primary driving forces in Jencks’s life and were the key motivating factors in his emergence as an ambitious leader in the organizations he headed. As he surveyed the economic landscape, he saw the United States mired in the muck of stagnation and the world steadily marching toward war as fascism rapidly spread its poison. By summer 1939 Nazi Germany had annexed Austria, taken Czechoslovakia , and engaged in a duplicitous diplomacy that would end in the cynical Nazi-Soviet Pact and the German invasion of Poland in September. While a deep concern for international peace bore heavily on his mind, other, more mundane matters also required his attention. Not the least of these was the question of his personal life, including an increasingly important domestic relationship that was soon to reveal a paradoxical aspect of his character with regard to his interaction with the women in his life. After graduation Jencks remained active in the Young Communist League, which was a social as well as political organization that brought him into close contact with like-minded comrades, including a Colorado Springs woman named Hermoine Heidbrink, whom he met in Boulder as a result of their mutual engagement in left-wing social action. Politically compatible, the two Lorence_Palomino.indd 21 2/19/13 12:12 PM dated casually and eventually Jencks proposed marriage. An older, serious, and politically active person, Hermoine moved to St. Louis, where she again became engaged in YCL work. Jencks, determined to win her over, hitchhiked to St. Louis to be closer to his partner, and the couple finally married in August 1939. This was the first, but not the last, instance in which Jencks would be drawn to a strong, independent woman,1 but in this case the ardor of the relationship cooled quickly once he joined Hermoine in political and marital partnership. As we shall see, the marriage was the first in a series of flawed romantic relationships for a man whose working-class feminism was ironically to become a key marker in a brilliant career. A long-standing advocate for the rights of women, Jencks would experience serious problems with many of the women in his own life; this ongoing personal struggle underscores the contradictory features of a very complicated personality. Jencks’s first order of business in St. Louis was the effort to find work. An intensive search soon paid dividends when he landed a job as an accounting clerk at John Deere Plow Company at the less than princely salary of seventyfive dollars per month. Not long after, he switched to a similar clerical position at James and Company, a General Electric distributor. It finally seemed that he was getting his feet on the ground economically, yet in his wider pursuit of human community, the would-be activist remained socially disconnected. Most important to him at this time was success in finding a church home, always a high priority in view of his deep religious faith, and in 1940 he finally settled on the Harlem Place Methodist Church,2 where the racially integrated congregation best met his spiritual and social needs. Engaged from the very beginning in interfaith youth activities, Jencks now found himself in an increasingly comfortable environment as part of a welcoming community that was a good fit for an organizer of a religious bent who was eager to link religious profession with human action. Almost immediately after his arrival in St. Louis, Jencks “got active there” in the city’s Interfaith Youth Council, a YMCA-sponsored interracial ecumenical organization that enabled him to participate in many “community battles for equality, youth opportunities, and anti-fascism.” The council’s predecessor organization, the Communist-sponsored Student Association Citizens Committee , had focused primarily on organizing the unemployed and mobilizing youth workers, though it endorsed the “struggle against war...

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