Catholics and Radicals:

...I was once publicly excoriated by an official of the Utility Workers, CIO, for criticizing in The Labor Leader such a provision in that union's constitution...

...The well-to-do will be angered by the words that say that the government should intervene, regulate, and even expropriate (with suitable indemnity) property that is harmful to the life of society" [emphasis in the original...

...Seaton: The New York Cemetery Strike of 1949 was "utterly lost...

...We did oppose union resolutions in support of the Loyalists, holding that the issue did not belong in an American union meeting where it tended to divide rather than unite members...

...Comment: Not true...

...AS FOR the ACTU, Seaton is generous enough to concede that, having dedicated itself to promoting the Catholic program in 1937, it pursued a "progressive" policy for the first year of the existence, but then "abandoned" all progressive pretenses and made anti-Communism its first priority, which took "precedence over the fight for unionism and social justice itself...

...Is that where Seaton picked up these figures...

...He does not consider other judgments of the Soviet Union during the worldwide depression...

...Comment: On several occasions I wrote exactly the opposite in The Labor Leader...

...Comment: Some Actists favored the Loyalists, some Franco, and many, including most of the leaders, took a neutral position, like Commonweal and The Catholic Worker...

...Although Ryan was never an ACTU chaplain, as Seaton indicates, we leaned heavily on him and Pius XI in putting together our own program...

...9. Seaton: The ACTU supported Franco in the Spanish civil war...

...Perhaps his most significant contribution was the Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction in 1919, which James Carey, secretary of the CIO, once described as "a more radical program than that of the CIO...

...Any effort to settle a strike, even though it be on the most victorious terms, disqualifies the settler as a "a partisan and advocate of the workers...

...Continued from page 438) The explanation is fascinating because I was one of the founders of the ACTU, its first executive secretary, for a number of years in the thirties and forties managing editor of its newspaper, and for many more a regular columnist...

...John C. Cort EARLY in the century Werner Som-bart gave us the most memorable explanation of why socialism has not become a major force in the USA...

...No other articles mentioned Communism...

...Later on, Seaton spells out Ryan's wage as "sufficient to meet the needs of an average family for food, clothing, shelter, health care, recreation, social intercourse, religious obligations, education, organizational dues, taxes, insurance, utilities, culture, vacations, tobacco, alcohol, books and magazines as well as savings for accidents, ill health, and old age...

...At one point in the forties they controlled unions with well over one million members in some of the most strategic industries...

...Pius XI once wrote that "Christian socialism" was a contradiction in terms...

...This kind of thing got me so stirred up that I went to the library and got out two of the Ryan books that Seaton cites: Social Reconstruction, which includes the full text of the 1919 Program, and A Better Economic Order, written in 1935, early in the New Deal, which eventually wrote into law most of Ryan's and the bishops' recommendations...

...The Communists during the thirties were in Seaton's view the quintessential radicals...

...Early in his book Seaton singles out Msgr...

...Anti-Communism is no longer as fashionable as it once was...

...3. Seaton: "The Actists reserved their most dire threats of excommunication for 'renegade' Catholics" who supported left-wing leadership...

...We still face the statements of Pius XI: " 'Religious socialism,' 'Christian socialism' are expressions implying a contradiction in terms...

...John A. Ryan as a special target...

...Seaton writes that Monsignor Ryan's "ideas . . . demonstrate that, even at its most liberal, Catholic social doctrine was a consistent adaptation of the church's fundamental conservatism in social and economic matters...

...For example: ' 'In a detailed discussion in The Catholic Encyclopedia Msgr...

...Seaton's thesis is fascinating for more reasons than one...

...Books: THROUGH ROSE-TINTED GLASSES CATHOLICS AND RADICALS THE ASSOCIATION OF CATHOLIC TRADE UNIONISTS AND THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT FROM DEPRESSION TO COLD WAR Douglas Seaton Bucknell University Press, $28.50,269 pp...

...Douglas Seaton also seems to be biased...

...senators and labor journalists alike for its continuing work in behalf of rank-and-file members in unions that were racket-controlled...

...He also improved substantially the wage offer that was on the table at the start of the strike...

...8. Seaton: For ACTU, "violence was absolutely intolerable . . . even in self-defense...

...6. Seaton: "No movement beyond the ranks of the ACTU ever materialized in behalf of the pope's plan" for Industry Councils...

...But stay, one of the editorials criticized a new labor paper on the New York waterfront, favorable to Ryan's leadership, because only five of its articles dealt with non-Communist subjects while ten "assail the various activities of the CP, a slightly lopsided balance for a paper dedicated to 'the rights of the transport worker.' " So the editorial, at least, contains the figures "five" and "ten" - in reference however, to a surfeit of anti-Communist emphasis in another publication...

...Strikes, it seems, should last forever and no effort made to settle them by any trap friend of labor...

...Bishops' Programs and Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno...

...The books also provide excellent grounds for concluding exactly the opposite of what Seaton says about them...

...No Catholic," the editor, Roger Larkin, continued, "can any longer claim that private property and capitalism are one and the same system...

...The longest article praised Harry Bridges's longshore union on the West Coast, "whether it is Communistic or not," because it had obtained better conditions than the racket-ridden union of Joe Ryan, the pious Catholic, on the East Coast...

...This charge, that ACTU's purpose and principal activity was to fight Communism, has become a cliche of the Stalinist guide to American labor history and has even invaded the accounts of others on the non-Stalinist left...

...Douglas Seaton, unlike Neil Betten, does attempt to substantiate the charge...

...Comment: All three assertions are untrue, and the last one is a gross libel...

...7. Seaton: The ACTU supported an AFL unity proposal "for dismemberment of the CIO unions among competing craft unions...

...desperate revolts in the villages were bloodily suppressed by the army and police, and the country sank into chaos, starvation, and misery...

...Could he have really read this issue and not realized that it, and its editorial explicitly, demonstrated exactly the opposite of what he was charging...

...Comment: no evidence is advanced to support this laughable statement...

...Comment: The implications of the last sentence boggle the mind...

...Other explanations have followed...

...Seaton's case for the proposition that Catholicism and socialism are incompatible has proven itself, I would hope, unworthy of serious consideration...

...The claim deserves serious consideration...

...ACTU tended to accept judgments like the latter rather than the former...

...This is Seaton's idea of "near-subsistence...

...From the start his sympathies are with the CP and his antipathies with the Catholics because Catholics are by definition conservatives, that is, "those who generally support the status quo with respect to private property, management prerogatives, and power arrangements in American society...

...Seaton: The ACTU proposed that Communists be forbidden membership in American unions...

...Also a Labor Leader editorial (September 18, 1944) summarizing a September 1, 1944, statement by Pius XII that "condemns as contrary to the rights of man 'capitalism' when it arrogates to itself unlimited right to property without any subordination to the common good...

...Since this activity was probably the most newsworthy and significant thing happening in the American labor movement during those years, the thought occurs that we may have underplayed it...

...For example, Leszek Kolakowski in Main Currents of Marxism: "The mass collectivization of Soviet agriculture [was] probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens . . . Hundreds of thousands, and finally millions of peasants . . . were deported to Siberia or other desolate areas...

...Comment: The evidence for this is one news story in one issue of The Labor Leader in 1949 that reported a decree of the Holy Office in Rome excommunicating Catholic members of the Italian Communist party...

...Not so in the thirties and forties...

...In 1951, however, the Socialist International rewrote the definition of socialism as a pluralist view of society that emphasizes political and religious freedom, repudiates Communism and dictatorship as socialist alternatives, and welcomes a variety of economic options from private ownership of family farms and small-and medium-sized business to cooperatives to worker self-management and co-determination to public ownership...

...Comment: This plan, adapted to American conditions by John Brophy and Phil Murray, president of the CIO, was unanimously approved by every CIO convention between 1941 and 1955, when the CIO merged with the AFL...

...5. Seaton: "The strikes which the [ACTU] progressives had supported, while hard-fought in themselves, had often been terminated through mediation efforts by the ACTU or an affiliated churchman...

...His claim that Catholicism and socialism are incompatible is based on better evidence than he can muster for his charges against the church and ACTU and is therefore believed by more of the Catholic faithful...

...Would it be unkind to label his handiwork five-and-ten scholarship...

...Cardinal Spellman refused to "recognize [the strikers'] reconstituted union or rehire the members of the negotiating committee...

...Ten years later ACTU was on front pages all over the country for the testimony of John McNiff and Norman DeWeaver before the Senate Labor Committee on racketeering in the labor movement and was praised by U.S...

...It appears, for example, in less anti-Cathohc books like Neil Betten's Catholic Activism and the Industrial Worker, except that Betten gives ACTU about eight years of constructive activity before it "mainly fought Communist influence in the labor movement...

...A few years ago Monsignor Ryan and other authorities made a case in Catholic ethics for the sit-down strike when used by men absolutely dependent on their jobs against an employer who could affort to pay a living wage and refused to do so...

...In 1949 we also printed a reproach of a Bridgeport local of the UE (United Electrical Workers) for expelling twenty-seven members for Communist affiliation...

...He must be independently wealthy...

...They were big kids then and by no means averse to picking on little kids...

...No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist...

...The ACTU's solid support of this strike, shared in by all its chaplains, led to the termination of the cardinal's substantial contribution to our budget and proved once again that Seaton's thesis is one gigantic falsehood...

...Continued on page 442) The ACTU & Communism (cont...

...So far, very poor evidence for Sea-ton's charge...

...I measured the space devoted to anti-Communism or to reporting anti-Communist activity...

...In 1968 he declared that "the libertarian, democratic socialism of the present day has clearly ceased to be" the kind of socialism condemned by Leo XIII and Pius XI.be" the kind of socialism condemned by Leo XIII and Pius XI...

...Other authorities" included Bishop Gallagher of Detroit, Chancellor Hannon of the Pittsburgh diocese, and Father Raymond Miller, a Redemptorist theologian...

...In the labor movement they "draw the line at independent political activity by labor, expropriation or nationalization of property, transfer of management or personnel decisions to labor, class conflict, and the general objectives of the radicals.'' The radicals are for all these things plus "an increasing share of wealth for labor and ultimately socialism as a political, social, and economic system...

...These sentences were written in 1931, when socialism in most countries was an almost exclusively Marxist ideology and placed its primary emphasis on nationalization of all production and distribution...

...OTHER inaccuracies and false statements include the following: 1. Seaton: "Private property was inviolate in Catholic social doctrine...

...When this libel first appeared I picked at random four issues of The Labor Leader, ACTU's national newspaper, which I was editing in the late forties and which was a reasonably accurate reflection of what we were doing and thinking at the time-These issues were published between November 1948 and March 1949, a period that fell within the time of most intense anti-Communist activity in the labor movement, leading up to the expulsion of eleven Stalinist unions from the CIO...

...Father Smith maintained that "every means and every ally had to be used in combatting [Communism...

...Participation in mediation suggested that even the ACTU's progressives tended to regard the organization as an agency of class harmony more than as a partisan and advocate of the workers...

...They are too weak to be taken seriously...

...Of these one was a factual report of some anti-Stalinist activity by the president of the United Auto Workers...

...Contemplating the fact that the American worker then consumed almost three times as much bread and meat, and four times as much sugar, as a German worker, Sombart concluded, "On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie socialistic Utopias of every sort are sent to their doom...

...Comment: The cardinal reversed his previous position and did both...

...In 1939 over 90,000 marched with them in New York City...

...4. Seaton: Father William Smith, S.J., was an ACTU chaplain and his Crown Heights Labor School in Brooklyn was affiliated with ACTU...

...Comment: See the material by Mon-signor Ryan as well as the U.S...

...The records of socialist parties in Western Europe, which have won power in virtually every country of that region at one time or another, have now confirmed that revision to the satisfaction, apparently, of the last four popes, none of whom has reaffirmed the harsh judgment of Pius XI...

...John A. Ryan points out that the church does, however, admit the possibility of justifying...

...A check of that issue reveals two editorials, six letters, and seventeen articles and/or news items...

...It came to 6.4 percent of the total reading matter...

...He says that these industrial unions, organized by John L. Lewis and friends into the CIO, were the main hope of radicalizing the labor movement and that the spearhead of radical element was the Communist party...

...The books confirm the belief of many that Ryan deserves rediscovery by current economists and social historians both in and out of the church...

...In any case I for one have no apologies to offer for opposing them...

...The latest one comes from Douglas Sea-ton's book, Catholics and Radicals...

...This is one of Seaton's more original and inventive false statements...

...This conclusion was shared by Oswald von Nell-Breuning, the German Jesuit who drafted most of Quad-ragesimo Anno...

...I am therefore biased...

...Ryan was, and probably still is, the most impressive economist that the Catholic church has contributed to the American scene...

...Catholic influence," he writes, "was of crucial importance in the consolidation of conservative leadership, policies and practices in the industrial unions that emerged from the upheavals of the 1930s...

...On the conservative side, according to Seaton's script, the core group was the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU...

...In 1942 it was also praised by William Z. Foster, chairman of the Communist party, as "giving labor a real voice in war industry...

...The victory of ACTU over the CP in the years 1937-50 therefore spelled the doom of American radicalism and/or socialism...

...It should therefore come as no surprise that we opposed Stalinist efforts to gain control of American unions and bend them to the service of Soviet foreign policy...

...Today picking on Communists in America is like big kids picking on little kids...

...He cites The Labor Leader, for June 8, 1938, and says that the issue devoted five of its ten articles to anti-Communist activity...

...Ryan's theory of a just, living wage, Seaton claims, "defined a near-subsistence level wage as the just wage...

...the use of force by labor...

...He was also director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference during the twenties , through the forties...

...2. Seaton: "Each new [ACTU] member's faith and morals were inspected by the chaplain...

...In addition "the prestige the Communists derived from the example of the Soviet Union, unaffected as it was by the worldwide depression, was considerable...

...Neither did the strike lead to ACTU's "precipitate decline" as Seaton claims...

...Comment: Totally untrue...

...It thus became virtually indistinguishable from the proposals of John A. Ryan and the Bishops' Program of 1919...