A Marxist Catholic in Cold War America: Grace Holmes Carlson and the Catholic Left Reconsidered

Examining the life of Grace Holmes Carlson (1906–1992), particularly during the years after she returned to the Catholic Church in 1952, invites a reconsideration of the American Catholic Left during the Cold War. Although she left the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party behind in 1952, Carlson found ways to reconcile her Marxism with her Catholic faith and activism. Unlike well-known figures of the Catholic Left, like Dorothy Day, Carlson did not embrace personalism, nor did she believe in individual acts of witness as resistance as did Fathers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan. Carlson’s story reveals the diversity of the American Catholic Left and provides a heretofore largely unheard voice in that movement: that of an Old Left critique articulated in the Vatican II and Cold War eras that speaks to the presence in the United States of a synthesis represented more familiarly in Britain by the Catholic Marxists of the Slant movement.