Catholics and Industrialization: Background Information

He just didn't like what they were wearing.

St. John's University had negotiated a contract with an athletic shoe company, Nike, to outfit their soccer team. The college received free uniforms and shoes: Nike received free advertising. This is common practice. Almost all major colleges and universities, many small colleges, and even some high school, basketball, football, soccer and other athletic programs have made the same kinds of deals.

But if it is common practice, not everyone thinks such contracts are a "good deal." Many, like Jim Keady, believe that Nike and other shoe companies ruthlessly exploit their workers, paying women and children in Vietnam or other parts of southeast Asia a pittance and working them long hours in crowded factories choked with glue fumes and noisy with the constant clatter of machinery.

So Keady quit the team and joined those in hundreds of protest groups at universities and colleges around the country, like Duke and Notre Dame, which have been pressuring their schools to force Nike to improve workers' pay and occupational conditions.¹

The Shirt on Your Back

The Nike story is not just about "the shoes" or the shoe company workers--it is part of a bigger tale of corporate globalization. Hats and shirts and jeans and rugs and hundreds of the other items with which we surround ourselves are made by cheap labor. Sometimes the cheap labor is within U.S. borders, and sometimes it is found in countries around the world. Sometimes it is young children, and other times mothers or fathers with several young mouths to feed in addition to their own. An estimated one billion workers around the world earn less than a dollar a day and an estimated 250 million children throughout the globe work to support their families. Workers in El Salvador earn about 24 cents for each NBA jersey they produce, which then sell for $140 in the U.S. Nor are sweatshops confined to distant lands only. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich noted in 2001 that in Los Angeles, 61% of cutting and sewing shops didn't pay their workers minimum wage or overtime, and in New York, 65 percent didn't. "In other words," writes Reich, "the vast majority of cutting and sewing shops in America's largest cities are ... sweatshops."²

New Work, New Wealth, New Poverty (Top of Page)

The problem of work, wages, and industry, of course, is not a new one. People have gained little for long hours of toil, have depended on the labor of their children, and have endured hardships in work since the beginning of time. Roughly two centuries ago, however, an industrial revolution transformed first England, then much of Western Europe and the United States, and the world of work seemed to enter a new age. This revolution had its marvels, producing new kinds of products from steam engines to railroad locomotives and light bulbs to chewing gum as well as a new abundance of old products from furniture and clothing to flour and fruit. Yet it also appeared to bring a new concentration of poverty, new imbalances of wealth, and even new kinds of work: endlessly repetitive, monotonous, confined, and creating a despair and fear among many that such changes might never be reversed or reformed.

Some were thrilled by the workings of the new economy and feared throwing its benefits away while trying to fix its problems. They saw the riches and improvements it brought to the lives of millions in new products and abundance. The rags to riches stories became firmly rooted in American folklore by the late nineteenth century. There was Andrew Carnegie, the poor immigrant boy from Scotland that grew wealthy in the American steel industry. John D. Rockefeller, the chief force behind the massive Standard Oil company, made a fortune building oil refineries in the United States. Thomas Fortune Ryan was an orphan that made himself rich through crafty financial investments. These men were also philanthropists, giving large portions of their money to educational institutions, religious organizations, and toward the establishment of libraries. Thomas Fortune Ryan, for example, anonymously gave more than $20 million to Catholic causes, while Carnegie focused his philanthropy on libraries and education.

None of these individuals apologized for their wealth. They argued that with talent and hard work, anyone could improve themselves in the "land of opportunity" that was the United States. Leave the market alone, they counseled, let individuals rise or fall on their own skills and effort: the people who deserve to succeed will; the people who do not will not. Philosophers like Herbert Spencer in England or William Graham Sumner in the United States supported this idea by invoking their conception of Charles Darwin and the naturalist's theories of evolution. Adapting Darwin to social and economic relationships, they argued that the survival of the fittest--and thus its opposite, the extinction of the "unfittest" --was a rule of nature. Sumner once said that if you see a bum lying in the street, then leave him there, for it is better for the human race if he and all the other "unfit" should die off, and quickly.

Others, however, were not convinced that leaving individuals on their own in a free market was the best response to industrialization. They doubted that many people actually rose from rags to riches. Historians have since confirmed those suspicions. Analyzing job statistics from cities as diverse as Boston, Massachusetts; South Bend, Indiana, and Poughkeepsie, New York, historians have found that many immigrant workers did find better jobs over the course of their lifetimes but a majority did not. Some of those who did, moreover--especially among Irish or Italian immigrants--often slid back from their white collar jobs as sales clerks or shopkeepers into the ranks of factory workers over time.

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Between these two great rail strikes were thousands of others, ranging in size and devastation from the Homestead Steelworks Strike of 1892, a bloody, bitter battle fought between company police and thousands of steel workers, to the thirty day walkout of seventy eight bakers in St. Paul to win better wages on the morning of May 1st in 1886. Many of these strikes were spontaneous. Workers did not form unions; they merely banded together for a few days or a few weeks to get what they felt they needed from employers.

Unions, however, played a critical role in the "Great Upheaval" and in strike activity after it. The most important of these during the upheaval was the Knights of Labor. In 1886, at its high point, the Knights claimed nearly 700,000 members. In the 1890s strike activity and union organizing subsided somewhat but by the early twentieth century labor was again on the rise. The American Federation of Labor (AF of L), a federation of craft unions (unions of workers with a particular skill, such as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters) formed in 1886, reached a million members by 1901 and four million by the late 1910s. Two of the major affiliates of the AF of L, the Amalgamated Iron, Steel and Tin Workers and the United Mine Workers, undertook major strikes in the early 1900s; the steelworkers failed, but the miners were successful.

Workers employed other methods besides the strike to try to achieve their aims. Boycotts were popular in the 1880s. Terence Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, preferred the boycott to the strike. Cigar Makers employed a version of the boycott in their union label campaign. Here, the absence of the union label warned consumers away from non-union made goods.

By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries many Americans believed that neither individual initiative through the free market nor labor organization through conflicts and negotiations with company owners and managers would ensure a fair living for most working people. Those people looked to the government and legislation to help raise living standards and improve working conditions. Through much of the nineteenth century the state governments and even the federal government had been tiny and generally avoided intervening in the economy to curb the power of the wealthy or help workers. There was, however, a tradition in American republicanism that emphasized the common good, and working people from as far back as the Revolutionary Era invoked that ideal to justify government help for themselves and protection against the power of the wealthy. Such ideas inspired workingmen's parties in the 1830s and agrarian protests like the Grangers and Greenback Party in the 1870s, and the Populists in the 1890s.

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Examining the Catholic church's role in these efforts, historians have seen it as a conservative force. They point to the church's steadfast antagonism to socialism and communism and to the bishops who opposed union strikes and boycotts or government legislation. In 1886, for example, the Archbishop of New York, Michael Corrigan, took a strong public stand against the noted social reformer, Henry George, a candidate for mayor in the municipal election that year. Archbishop Corrigan also disciplined a popular local priest, Father Edward McGlynn, an open backer of George. In the twentieth century the church became one of the most powerful and outspoken opponents of socialism, a belief system to which many unionists were attracted because of its sensitivity to the position of the worker in the economy.

Catholic Responses to Industrialization (Top of Page)

Rerum Novarum

Leo XIII believed that the root of the problem was the decline of the old trade guilds of medieval origin and the failure of modern government to pay attention to "traditional religious teaching." Inspired by the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aquinas' vision of an organic community knitting rich and poor together in reciprocal relation, Rerum Novarum in some ways looked not forward but back to a medieval golden age. In this sense it was a conservative document, or, conservatives believed that they could read it as such. They took notice of Leo's attack on the Socialists, for "exciting the enmity of the poor towards the rich" and advocating a program that "violates the rights of lawful owners, perverts the functions of the state... throws governments into confusion [and] actually injures the workers themselves." (Top of Page)

Yet if Pope Leo XIII attacked Socialism in Rerum Novarum and gave hope to conservatives, he also assailed unregulated capitalism and encouraged reforms. Workers owed their bosses conscientious work, but "no laws either human or divine, permit them [the owners] for their own profit to oppress the needy and the wretched or to seek gain from another's want." The "principal" duty of an owner is "to give every worker what is justly due him." Leo XIII argued that "free contracts" between workers and owners must always be "an element of natural justice, one greater and more ancient that the free consent of contracting parties, namely that the wage shall not be less than enough to support a worker who is thrifty and upright." Leo contended that "in the case of the worker there are many things which the power of the state should protect... " Leo also gave support, if vaguely and cautiously worded, to the organization of workers. Many interpreted Leo's endorsement of workers' associations as an endorsement of unions.

As American Catholics came to grips with the problems and promise of economic change at the turn of the century, Leo's encyclical would become a powerful influence. Yet, if it inspired Catholic reformers and progressives, its effects would be complicated as conservative Catholics read it and their church's traditions of social thought in their own way. Nor would the encyclical and the church's formal social thought be the sole source of inspiration for Catholics confronting the industrial revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

John A. Ryan (Top of Page)

In 1906, a young priest studying at Catholic University in Washington D.C. would draw on the new methods of American statistical analysis and available data to precisely compute what Leo's "living wage" would actually mean in concrete terms for American workers and their families. The young priest, John A. Ryan, had been born on a Minnesota farm, the son of an Irish immigrant. Raised in radical traditions rooted in the Populist movement of the U.S. plains states and Irish American custom, he would become the foremost Catholic proponent of social and economic reform in American church history and the most prominent Catholic "Progressive" of the Progressive Era. Ryan was a thinker, a philosopher, tightlipped and somewhat abrupt in person but passionate about ideas and the plight of working people. Ryan endorsed labor unions, but he believed strongly that the ultimate responsibility for rectifying the problems of the new industrial society lay with the government. His work on behalf of living wage legislation would earn him the title "Father of the Minimum Wage," and for his strong backing of Franklin Roosevelt he would be called the "Right Reverend New Dealer."

In 1919 Father Ryan wrote what became known as the Bishops' Program for Social Reconstruction. Endorsed by bishops involved in the National Catholic War Council and based on Rerum Novarum, this program explicitly advocated legislation to regulate child labor, establish minimum wages, and provide national health insurance.

William Cardinal O'Connell (Top of Page)

Not all bishops supported the programs advocated by Ryan, however. One who did not was William Cardinal O'Connell, Archbishop of Boston from 1906 to 1944. O'Connell had been born into an immigrant factory worker's family in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1859, so he knew firsthand the plight of working people. He was only the third cardinal in the history of the United States, and by the 1910s, one of the most influential men of the American Catholic Church. He was concerned about the church's place in America, and like many church leaders of his generation worried about a powerful state intruding into a moral sphere where the church alone should rule. O'Connell also objected to the government's attempts to assume responsibilities that more appropriately belonged to families--to parents over their children, for example. Unlike Ryan, then, O'Connell was suspicious of the government, doubted that it could do much good for the poor and workers through legislation, and indeed, feared that its interference would make the lives of working families much worse.

In 1924 he clashed with John Ryan over adding an amendment to the Constitution permitting the federal government to ban child labor. O'Connell believed that the child labor amendment would take control of children away from their parents, handing it over to legislators and a "centralized bureaucracy" thereby weakening the family, the fundamental core unit of moral life.

Mother Jones (Top of Page)

Mary Harris, "Mother" Jones differed altogether from Ryan and O'Connell. She was a radical, self-proclaimed and universally acknowledged by friend and foe alike. Born in Ireland probably in 1836, she taught in parochial schools in Michigan briefly before marrying George Jones and settling down in Memphis, Tennessee with him and their three children. After a yellow fever epidemic killed her husband and all of their children in late 1860, she worked as a milliner (hat maker) and drifted into the labor movement. It was not until 1900, when she was in her mid-sixties, however, that Mother Jones became an official organizer for the United Mine Workers and finally came into her own as a labor leader. She looked grandmotherly with her white hair, wire-rimmed glasses and old-fashioned lacy dresses. She spoke of her "boys," the miners or her "girls," the brewery or textile workers. Yet she swore like a sailor and stood up fearlessly to police, sheriffs, and company officials who tried to intimidate her. In the first two decades of the twentieth century she organized miners in the coal fields of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Colorado, women brewery workers in Milwaukee, and child textile workers in Philadelphia. She was arrested, tried, and imprisoned in several states.

The Attorney General of West Virginia called her "The most dangerous woman in America." Jones was suspicious of the government like O'Connell, then, but for very different reasons. She believed that the government would always act on behalf of the rich, and nearly always punish workers who fought for better conditions. She put more faith in union strikes and boycotts, for she thought that workers could help themselves only through their own efforts. Ryan and O'Connell explicitly drew on church teachings to justify their positions on economic issues. Jones, born and raised a Catholic, and even a teacher in a Catholic school, grew skeptical of organized religion over her lifetime. Nevertheless, she did not seem to lose her faith in Christ and drew heavily on biblical lessons and imagery to inspire her "boys" the union workers and offer them a vision of a happier future.

This website surveys documents related to the work of John A. Ryan, William O'Connell, and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones in its attempt to convey the variety of responses among Catholics to industrialization in the United States.

Catholics continue to respond to conditions caused by industrialization. As noted in the beginning of this introduction, however, the perception of injustice caused by industrialization has become worldwide in scope. James Keady, along with labor activist Leslie Kretzu, sought to dramatize conditions among impoverished and underpaid Nike workers by living in a Nike factory workers' town in Indonesia for one month on $1.25 a day, a typical wage paid to Nike's subcontracted workers at the time. The living wasn't easy, and the experience fueled the founding of Educating for Justice, an international nonprofit organization that educates high school and college students on issues of global injustice. Educating for Justice website: http://educatingforjustice.org/history.htm.

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In addition to sources cited in the endnotes, the following were consulted in compiling this introduction:

Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones, The Most Dangerous Woman in America(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).

James O'Toole, Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859-1944 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley, eds., The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997), especially entries on Mother Jones, by Joseph Quinn, William Cardinal O'Connell by James O'Toole, and John Augustine Ryan by Jeffrey M. Burns.

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¹On Jim Keady and Nike, http://www.nikewages.org/sju.html

²On sweatshops in general see Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshops/; Robert B. Reich, "American Sweatshops," The American Prospect Online, January 18, 2001.

³Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy, Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 198-212.

⁴James Hennesey, American Catholics, A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 188.