I recently spent some time in two archives in the US, primarily working in Marquette University in Milwaukee (a city with a long history of strong support for labour organising), where the Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker Papers are held. Given that the project examines the dynamics between religious conversion and labour politics during early to mid-twentieth century, looking into the theory and practices of the Catholic Worker provides a fascinating vantage point. A number of its key members, including co-founder Dorothy Day, and later member, Ammon Hennacy, were both converts to Catholicism and integrated with the concerns of organised labour.
During the 1930s, the Catholic Worker group was poised between support for union organisation in industrial disputes on the one hand, and utopian eschatology, which sought to transcend the limits of wage-related industrial settlements, and envisage other forms of sociability in a post-capitalist world on the other. This latter tendency was informed by ‘personalist’ writers such as Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and Nicolai Berdyaev.
With regards to the former, on labour politics, I encountered a number of important documents, and gathered digital copies of, correspondence with labour union organisers in the American Catholic milieu, such as John Ryan, Francis J. Haas, A. J. Muste, and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), as well as correspondence with leaders of various unions, such as Joseph Curran’s leftist National Maritime Union and the Steel Workers Organisation Committee. With regards to the latter, on personalist thinkers, I gathered a large amount of the unpublished notes on various thinkers (including on Maritain, Berdyaev and Chenu) taken by the co-founder of the movement, Peter Maurin.
Unpacking this dynamic based on these sources will provide a key basis for understanding the transnational component of Catholic labour politics within the twentieth century, and in the short term, will form the basis for an envisaged talk at a workshop in collaboration with Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (Munich) on political languages in the twentieth century to take place in Manchester on 29/30 June 2023 (paper title: ‘Transatlantic Personalism: Unpacking The Intellectual Origins of Catholic Worker Praxis’). Further details of this workshop will be disseminated in the near future.
A core aim of the project is to test the notion that conversion narratives can produce a hermeneutic framework for analysing the nature of twentieth century radical politics. One eye-opening resource for this which I encountered was the documents relating to Ammon Hennacy. In many ways, his life and political engagement captures the volatility of the times: we was raised as a Baptist; he later became embroiled in the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World; during World War I, and resisting the draft, he spent some time in prison and was to be executed, only to be pardoned at the last moment. During this experience, he underwent another conversion, toward a radical pacifist agenda, informed by the Christian anarchist thought of Tolstoy. Later on, in 1952, he converted to Catholicism, and became one of the leading voices of the Catholic Worker movement. Based on the number of unpublished documents written by Hennacy I acquired, including a conversion narrative, God’s Coward (1932), I envisage the first publication of the project to focus on Henncy’s life-narrations as a hermeneutic framework for interrogating conversion as a political mechanism.
I also spent time at the Saint Thomas University archives in Miami, where William D. Miller’s papers are held. Miller was a historian who worked at Marquette University who converted to Catholicism later in his life. After his conversion, he became involved with the Catholic Worker movement, and wrote one of the definitive studies of the group: A Harsh and Dreadful Love (1973). Among the more interesting section of his papers, I discovered a series of unpublished essays which explore the links between Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil within the context of debates on the philosophy of history, where he counterposes Catholic social thought with Marxist and liberal accounts of progress.
