“Go to the Worker”: America’s Labor Apostles (review)

Independent historian Kimball Baker has written the best book to date on American Catholic leaders who answered Pope Leo XIII’s appeal to “go to the worker.” There are ten essays and four brief “social action vignettes” covering many of the major figures in Catholic labor history from the 1930s through the postwar era, ending with Monsignor George G. Higgins. Baker has done his homework, reading the Catholic labor press, interviewing most of his subjects, and consulting the best work in labor history. Most of the essays are far more than biographical profiles. They are studies in local labor history informed by awareness of local political and social as well as ecclesiastical history. Best of all, Baker knows his labor history, including the often complicated stories of internal union politics, where Catholic influence was sometimes important and always controversial. Although the focus is on leaders, the local stories communicate clearly the struggles and the courage of the rank and file.

The pope’s appeal was to priests, and Baker includes essays on important clergymen who devoted all or part of their ministry to the labor movement. Here we are reminded of the close connections between pastoral work and labor action when most Catholics were working-class wage earners. He also offers essays on two important lay leaders, John Cort and Ed Marciniak. Baker worries that all his subjects are white males, except for a one-page vignette on pioneer factory inspector Linna Bressette, who served for three decades as an aide to John A. Ryan and Raymond McGowan. Those two pioneers do not get chapters, although their names, and that of Dorothy Day, appear throughout. Most of the stories are about less well-known figures in Chicago, Brooklyn, New York, Pittsburgh, and Boston.

Baker helps readers understand the fight on the ground for union recognition and the importance of Catholic support or indifference. He admires the coalition building where Catholics joined with workers of other faiths and with socialists, even communists, and he carefully explains the need for—but ambiguity of—the divisive battles that freed some unions from communist control. He recalls that church support for labor unions affirmed the goal of improving wages, hours, and working conditions, but also insisted on the need to build labor-management cooperation. Eventually, these leaders thought that industrial America, to achieve justice and ensure democracy, would have to explore new structures similar to the “vocational group” corporatism of Pope Pius XI. Ryan taught them to call the goal “industrial democracy,” and the CIO for a time flirted with “industry councils.” Baker, better than most historians, helps us understand how and why that goal faded after World War II and is now lost to Catholic and American memories.

Academic historians should know that this is serious, well-researched, and clearly presented history, but it is far from neutral. Baker unapologetically favors unions, collective bargaining, and larger reforms to strengthen democracy. He believes, as did the subjects of his book, that the enemy was unbridled capitalism.