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“A Stern Struggle” Catholic Activism and San Francisco Labor, 1934–1958  William Issel On 24 November 1936, twenty-one-yearold Joseph L. Alioto delivered a prize-winning speech in San Francisco. A future mayor of San Francisco, Alioto would soon graduate from St. Mary’s College and go on to earn a law degree at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C. In an address entitled “The Catholic Internationale,” Alioto warned his audience at the St. Ignatius Council of the Young Men’s Institute: “Communism has attained the position of a universal power [and] stands today as a cancer in the world’s social organism .” Given its international scope and its appeal as a “counterfeit religion,” only a true religion “that is likewise international” would be able “to cut away this cancerous growth.” “There is only one power in the world which answers that description : the Roman Catholic Church. The battle lines . . . are clearly marked: It is to be the Catholic Internationale arrayed against the Communist Internationale; Rome against Moscow; Christ against Anti-Christ.”1 Alioto’s speech was published in The Moraga Quarterly, a St. Mary’s College publication that served as a forum for Catholic intellectual life in northern California. Three years later The Moraga Quarterly published another speech by a young San Franciscan, this one devoted to “the [necessary] preparation for entrance into the field of labor relations” and titled “The Catholic College Graduate and Labor.” The author was John F. (Jack) Henning, a recent St. Mary’s College graduate who later became the head of the California State Federation of Labor as well as Undersecretary of Labor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Henning argued, “The army of the church is today engaged in a stern struggle” and “the need of the Catholic Church for an articulate laity in Labor is too gigantic to question.” He stressed that Catholics in labor relations needed to fight both “American Way” individualism and the “painted panaceas” of “the land of Communism or the land of Fascism.” Henning praised “those who act only as the voice of the membership, the voice of the rank and file, who administer their offices upon the direct rule of the majority of the membership.” He also urged Catholics in the labor movement to avoid red-baiting: “question the motives of those leaders who 154 brand every militant surge of rank and file activity the result of ‘red agitation.’” Catholic workers should endorse genuinely democratic unionism and get involved with the “Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, the Catholic Worker movement , and other similar enterprises which sponsor Catholic labor schools.”2 During the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Jack Henning and scores of militant Catholics in San Francisco mobilized on several fronts to build independent and democratic unions and to defeat both the labor left and the business right. Aided by diocesan priests under the leadership of Archbishops Edward J. Hanna and John J. Mitty and priests of the Jesuit order, unionists worked to shape the city’s labor movement along the lines laid out in the labor encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI. Drawing upon the papal letters, San Francisco activists championed private property as well as the right of workers to dignity and a fair share of business profits. They condemned both laissez-faire capitalism and class conflict. They opposed Communism, to be sure, but anticommunism was not the sole or primary purpose of their work. San Francisco Catholic labor activism expressed first and foremost the conviction that Americans should build a moral economy jointly managed by labor unions, business organizations, and government, the latter representing the interests of the community at large. This San Francisco story can best be understood as part of a larger national history with three overlapping themes: first, the growing power and influence of Catholics in American public life; second, the creation of a coast-to-coast network of Roman Catholic labor relations theorists and union organizers; and, third, the clash of ideologies and the struggle for power that pitted Catholics against Communists . This essay addresses four aspects of the San Francisco story: first, how Archbishops Hanna and Mitty developed political education programs based on the labor encyclicals promoting labor union legitimacy and encouraged cooperation between business and labor; then, how unionists organized a branch of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) to facilitate their “stern struggle” against laissez-faire individualism and left-wing radicalism; third, how the Jesuits established a Catholic labor...

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