Church and State in the City: Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco by William Issel (review)
- Church and State in the City: Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco by William Issel
In the nexus between historical memory and popular culture, some cities' reputations have fared better than others. While Pittsburgh symbolizes the rusting iron city, people who hate Texas consider Austin the state's cool city. As historian Bill Issel observes in Church and State in the City, San Francisco, in the popular mind, represents either a liberated bastion of unfettered personal freedom or "a decidedly un-American carnival of secular humanism . . ." (1). Both views, Issel writes, ignore the role Catholic reformers have played in shaping San Francisco's economic and social policies. Sometimes Catholic reformers feuded with business leaders and communists, and sometimes they have cooperated. Occasions (actual and metaphorical) have arisen in which San Francisco Catholics have clashed with each other: Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi meet "Dirty" Harry Francis Callahan.
By the late nineteenth century, San Francisco's Irish Catholic Democrats, like their counterparts in Boston and New York, had achieved political power at the municipal level. On the East Coast, Irish politicians monopolized municipal jobs, refusing to share with Italian Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans. Philadelphia had a particularly noxious history. Republican Protestants built a political machine after the 1870s uniting the city's aggrieved minorities against Irish Democrats for several decades. Philadelphia's Irish Catholic clergy also engendered ill will. Through the 1920s and 1930s Cardinal Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia ridiculed Italian Catholics as "pagans." In turn, they burned him in effigy.
San Francisco's Irish Catholics as less exclusive than their East Coast cousins would vote for Jews and Protestants as well as their own, but they had no desire to embrace Asians. James Phelan, elected mayor in 1897, personified the San Francisco-style of Catholic politician. A banker and civic booster, Jesuit-educated Phelan mediated disputes between labor and management. At the same time he supported restrictions on Asian immigration. [End Page 119]
Catholic priests such as Peter Yorke advised the Irish head of the teamsters union and championed Pope Leo XIII's 1891 reform encyclical, Rerum Novarum ("On the Condition of Labor"). Archbishop Patrick Riordan backed Yorke, rebuking anti-union businessmen, Protestant and Catholic, who demanded in 1901 that he silence Yorke. San Francisco's ethnic Italians never burned Riordan in effigy. Then again, Riordan felt no compulsion to denigrate the faithful, even if their expressive folk customs were a world away from the austere Irish brand of Catholicism.
San Francisco by the first decades of the twentieth century had become the second most-populated city in the West as well as the eleventh largest nationally. Its economy, however, looked more like the aging port cities of the East Coast than the booming industrial centers of the Midwest or Texas. Food distribution, finance, and shipping drove San Francisco's economic engine, not steel, auto, or oil refining. The day was still far off when Leland Stanford's prune orchards would yield computer chips.
The era of global depression fueled communist and fascist movements. From Rome, Pope Pius XI in 1931 issued the encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno ("On Reconstruction of the Social Order"), to guide Catholics toward religious-based political reform and away from extremism. Not everyone warmly greeted the pronouncement. Boston's Irish Catholic hierarchy forbade priests from teaching this encyclical, regarding it as an incitement to labor strife and a threat to the Irish political machine. New York's Irish Catholic clergy and lay leaders were no more enthusiastic.
In America's industrial heartland, however, numerous clergy and laity embraced the reform encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI. Pittsburgh Bishop Hugh Boyle championed union recognition through his leadership position in the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Philip Murray, founder of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers of America and later president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), kept the reform encyclicals at his desk for consultation. San Francisco Archbishop Edward J. Hanna and his coadjutor and ultimate successor, John J. Mitty, emulated their heartland counterparts.
As Issel...
