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Reviewed by:
  • ”Go to the Worker”: America’s Labor Apostles
  • Steve Rosswurm
“Go to the Worker”: America’s Labor Apostles. By Kimball Baker. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2010. 276 pp. $30.00.

Kimball Baker’s Go to the Worker successfully recovers the history and tradition of the labor priests (and laity) who, in heeding Leo XIII’s dictum in Rerum Novarum (1891), were central to the church’s support of the organizing and institutionalization of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). In so doing, Baker allows those he interviewed to speak for themselves: Excerpts from their oral histories are interwoven with passages from their writings and tied together with a sprightly narrative. Ten men, seven clerics (Joseph Buckley, Philip Carey, Thomas Darby, John Hayes, George Higgins, Karl Hubble, and Charles Owen Rice) and three lay men (Bert Donlin, John Cort, and Ed Marciniak) have chapters of their own. Four one-page “social action vignettes” round-out the book.

What comes across vividly in this book is a passionate commitment to justice for working people: In the CIO-era, that meant most obviously, if not primarily, those who labored, for example, in the auto plants of Detroit, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, and the packinghouses of Chicago. In city after city, these priests publicly defended union organizing efforts, fended off charges of communism, vigorously responded to Catholic conservatives, established labor schools, and pushed their superiors to support the workers’ cause. The more outspoken of them joined picket lines and spoke at union rallies. Organizing continued after the establishment of the CIO, but the main focus shifted to other areas of trade-union concern. At the local level, there were the well-known battles with communists, while a good deal of heavy lifting in the 1940s and 1950s went on at the national level, particularly in the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Many CIO leaders were Catholic, but Catholic men qua Catholics also played an important role in the labor schools, which continued into the 1950s, and in the [End Page 91] Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, where the New York City and Detroit chapters were prominent.

There are some problems here. Baker never tells us how he chose the men he did. (I, for example, would have replaced Bert Donlin with Harry Read or Paul Weber. Monsignor Joseph H. Donnelly is probably the most important labor priest left out.) Chronological order is not one of the book’s strengths, nor is the source for a specific quote always present. There are minor mistakes of fact here and there.

This is the beginning, not the end, of the telling of this story of pre-Vatican II Catholic laborism: Baker would surely agree. Go to the Worker is an excellent start in the right direction.

Steve Rosswurm
Lake Forest College
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