When William Cardinal O'Connell gave this address in early 1920, the country had just ended a year of turbulent employer-employee relations. Historians report that approximately 20 percent of all workers had gone on strike at some point during that year. Violence and fear of violence heightened tensions in the country; Fannie Sellins, a labor organizer who patterned herself after Mother Jones, had been killed by guards during a steel workers strike; Americans were scared that Russia's so-called workers' revolution would spread to the United States, and a growing fear of radicalism and Socialism were making more people suspicious of unions and social reform..

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