Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America's Cold War (review)

John Hoerr is the former labor reporter for Business Week who has published other well-received books on labor matters. In Harry, Tom, and Father Rice, Hoerr reveals a personal family connection to labor and the Cold War McCarthy era.

Hoerr's uncle, Harry Davenport, was briefly a southwest Pennsylvania congressman in 1948-1950. In the 1930s he had been radicalized and had briefly joined the Communist Party in 1937-1939. He subsequently became the owner and editor of a shopping news weekly newspaper and a staffer for the local Chamber of Commerce. In 1948 Harry Davenport was elected to Congress as a Democrat from the mill town area around Pittsburgh. He is "Harry."

"Father Rice" is the labor priest (later monsignor) Charles Owen Rice, known for his passionate support of unions, his strident anti-communism in the 1940s and 1950s, his later support for the civil rights movement, and his opposition to the Vietnam War. And "Tom" is Tom Quinn, a welder at a shop represented by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) in the Pittsburgh area who later became a shop steward and eventually a staff member of the union. Quinn refused to play along with the red-baiting when the UE came under attack for "communist domination."

These three characters interacted fatefully in the 1948-1953 period, and Hoerr skillfully structures the story around dramatic turning points. The UE had helped elect Harry Davenport to the U.S. Congress in 1948, and Tom Quinn had accompanied him on nearly all of his campaign stops around the region. Rice had been red-baiting the UE for some time and, in 1949-1950, played a major role that he attempted to hide—plotting with the newly formed IUE to destroy the UE. Davenport got caught in the middle when his 1950 re-election came up.

This review will not spoil the story by revealing the details, but Hoerr gives readers plenty of skullduggery and betrayal. This book is a good read, and it humanizes the events of the McCarthy period in this country. Quinn faced ten years of harassment and threats of jail time, despite never being a Communist or member of the Communist Party.

Of the three title characters, to this reviewer only Quinn ends up looking good. (Full disclosure: I worked in a UE shop and was a member of the UE in the late 1970s.) Davenport was a self-important unlikable man who destroyed himself with drink after losing the 1950 election. Rice looks like a zealot for his cause who, despite later regrets, never took full responsibility for the damage he wrought in his pursuit of "communists."

This is a well written book well worth the reading for anyone interested in the issues and the times it covers.