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Vol. 30:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2002
Catholic Social Reform and the New Deal: The Papers of Monsignor John A. Ryan and Bishop Francis J. Haas
by Joseph M. Turrini
On October 8, 1936, Monsignor John A. Ryan urged millions of listeners to his nationally broadcast radio speech to reject the advice of fellow Catholic cleric Father Charles Coughlin and vote for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the upcoming election. The Democratic National Committee had prodded a reluctant Ryan to step into the fray of national politics because it feared that Catholic voters might be swayed by Coughlin's weekly insistence that FDR was a communist who no longer deserved the support of Catholics. Coughlin, the famous radio priest and demagogue of the 1930s who was on his way to being an ignoble anti-Semite, had recently turned violently against Roosevelt.
Ryan's speech, "Roosevelt Safeguards America," was the most public and prominent moment in his long and illustrious career as a social justice advocate and theorist. Ryan created and nurtured a strain of Catholic progressivism that insisted that Catholic clergy should be active in social reform movements like the labor movement and the New Deal. Indeed, it might well be said that Ryan was the founder of an American tradition of Catholic economic and political progressivism that still inspires Catholics today.
Monsignor John A. Ryan, ca. 1935. Photograph from The Catholic University of America Archives.
The intellectual center of this Catholic social reform tradition was on the campus of The Catholic University of America (CUA), where Ryan taught and served as Director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Council for most of his productive career. The scholarship and activities of a number of CUA faculty and students embodied the social reform philosophy Ryan expressed through his voluminous writings, teaching, and occasional political activism.
Perhaps the most nationally prominent and active Catholic progressive in the Ryan tradition was Bishop Francis J. Haas. A student at CUA in the early 1920s who was profoundly influenced by Ryan, Haas played a pivotal role in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal as a public representative on several Government boards in the 1930s and as one of the busiest and most respected labor arbitrators in the country.
The papers of Monsignor John A. Ryan and Bishop Francis J. Haas are housed at the Department of Archives, Manuscript, and Museum Collections at The Catholic University of America (CUA Archives). A recent National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant provided the CUA Archives with the resources to process the Ryan and Haas Papers. The grant also provided funds to process the papers of Catholic labor leaders Philip Murray and John Brophy, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations Records.
John A. Ryan was the most prolific, well known, and important Catholic social reform advocate and theorist in America between the time of his first published book in 1906, A Living Wage, and his death in 1945. His economic and political philosophies were initially grounded in his experiences as the eldest child in a large Irish-Catholic farm family. Born in Minnesota in 1869, he witnessed firsthand the difficult plight of small farmers and supported the populist movement as a young man.
Ryan entered the St. Paul Seminary in 1892, the year Populist Party Presidential candidate James Weaver amassed just over one million popular votes. Ryan commented angrily in his journal following the Populist Party's defeat that the "time servers and hypocrites are rewarded while honest patriots are the object of mercenary ridicule. When will the eyes of the masses be opened?" Pope Leos XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, provided a solid religious basis and intellectual foundation for a philosophy grounded in Ryan's personal experiences and family background.
Ryan never wavered from his support of an economic system based squarely on the sanctity of private property and capitalism, but one that also distributed wealth and power more equitably. Excessive individual greed, Ryan argued, created a morally and economically unhealthy misdistribution of wealth. These were radical ideas for many in the Catholic Church, and they sometimes led Ryan into confrontations with other clergy. Ryan's support for a Child Labor Amendment in the 1920s, for example, resulted in a dramatic clash with the powerful archbishop of Boston, Cardinal William O'Connell. O'Connell complained about Ryan's support of the Child Labor Amendment to Archbishop Michael Curly, Ryan's superior. O'Connell insisted that Ryan needed to be rebuked and stopped from his "public activities and irresponsible communications."
Although the Child Labor Amendment was not ratified, the idea of child labor legislation, and many of Ryan's other economic remedies for the vagaries of free market capitalism, eventually surfaced within mainstream political thought. In 1919 Ryan wrote the postwar Program of Social Reconstruction, issued by the bishops of the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC). This Bishop's Program, as it came to be called, argued forcefully for increased government activism to create a more just distribution of wealth and power in a reconstructed post-World War I period. Many of the ideas Ryan expressed in the Bishop's Program emerged a decade and a half later during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidential years in New Deal agencies such as the National Recovery Administration and the National Labor Board.
Associate Justices of the Supreme Court Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas (left to right) with Monsignor John A. Ryan (second from the left) at his 70th birthday testimonial dinner, May 25, 1939. Photograph from The Catholic University of America Archives.
Ryan was both personally and politically close to the popular four-term president. In 1937 Ryan became the first Catholic priest to give the invocation at a Presidential inauguration. A genuine friendship and respect appears in the correspondence between the two men. Roosevelt congratulated Ryan and emphasized his tenacity and longevity in social reform struggles in a 1942 letter to Ryan: "But in these troubled times it is reassuring to hear so clear a call to duty and to know that you are still on the firing line. We need more men of your vision and courage." Ryan's political support and personal relationship with Roosevelt garnered him the nickname, "The Right Reverend New Dealer."
Although politically active at times, Ryan was first and foremost a Catholic economist and intellectual, so it is not surprising that his papers focus heavily on this component of his life. His output of articles, books, commentaries, reviews, and public speeches is impressive and well documented throughout the 42 linear feet that comprise his personal papers. The Ryan Papers also contain extensive correspondence that covers primarily the last 20 years (1925-1945) of his life; subject files that he accumulated and maintained as references for his writings and speeches; teaching notebooks; and a journal he kept as a seminary student in the 1890s. This thin journal is the only available source that provides a glimpse into Ryan as a young, radical Populist Party sympathizer. Finally, the Ryan Papers include a number of audio recordings of speeches and talks. Among the audio recordings is a copy of Ryan's 1936 speech in behalf of Roosevelt.
Monsignor Francis J. Haas' clerical and public life was firmly grounded in the Catholic social reform tradition created and nurtured by Ryan at CUA. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1889, Haas was ordained as a priest in 1913 and worked as a parish priest at Holy Rosary Parish in Milwaukee until he began graduate studies at CUA in 1919.
Ryan and the social reform milieu he helped create at CUA had a deep impact on Haas' intellectual development. The young priest's published dissertation, Shop Collective Bargaining: A Study of Wage Determination in the Men's Garment Industry (1922), examined collective bargaining agreements in the garment industry and foretold his lifetime involvement in labor relations and support of the collective bargaining process.
Haas vigorously championed labor unions as an essential component of a just, democratic society. He maintained in a 1933 speech that "every worker has a duty to himself and to his fellow men to join his union and to be proud of membership . . . Given two men of equal ability, one a union man and the other non-union, unquestionably the union man is the better. He recognizes his obligations to himself, his family, and his country."
Haas gained national prominence as a public servant after returning to CUA as a professor and administrator in the 1930s. He served as a public representative on a number of New Deal agencies, including the National Recovery Administration, the National Labor Board, the first short-lived National Labor Relations Board, and the Works Progress Administration.
But Haas kept busiest as an independent itinerant labor arbitrator and mediator. He flew and rode the train, often at a moment's notice, throughout the country to mediate labor impasses. Private industry, unions, the National Labor Board, the National Mediation Board, and the Mediation and Conciliation Services Department of the U.S. Department of Labor all utilized his keen arbitration services routinely from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s. He arbitrated and mediated well over a thousand labor conflicts.
Haas was directly involved in settling some of the most important, confrontational, and violent labor battles in American history. He arbitrated the Minneapolis truckers' strike in 1934, a conflict that left two strikers dead, and difficult and trying strikes at Allis-Chalmers in Wisconsin in 1939 and 1941. The strikes at Allis-Chalmers pitted the militant left-wing United Automobile Workers Union Local #248 against an equally obstinate management team. The 1941 Allis-Chalmers strike seriously threatened America's wartime production.
Father Francis J. Haas (center) with Minnesota governor Floyd Olson (left) and Federal conciliator E. H. Dunnigan at the conclusion of the Minneapolis truckers' strike, 1934. Photograph courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society and the Minneapolis Tribune.
Haas' public service work extended to civil rights. President Roosevelt named him the first chair of the Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1943. In 1947, 4 years after Haas had been advanced to the episcopacy and transferred to the Diocese of Grand Rapids, President Harry Truman appointed Haas to the President's Committee on Civil Rights. Hass remained the Bishop of Grand Rapids until he died in 1953.
The Francis J. Haas Papers concentrate heavily on his role as a public servant. Two-thirds of the collections's 64 linear feet document his work as an arbitrator and his work on Government agencies. These include the National Recovery Administration, Works Progress Administration, Wisconsin Labor Relations Board, National Labor Board, National Labor Relations Board, Fair Employment Practices Commission, the President's Commission on Civil Rights, and the National Resources Planning Board.
Haas' religious and professional activities are also documented in the collection. The Haas Papers include, for example, a large run of sermons dating back to his earliest days as a priest in the 1910s, and research notes, drafts, and galley proofs for Man and Society, a well-received sociology text written by Haas in 1930 (revised and republished in 1952).
The activist Catholic social reform tradition encouraged by Ryan continues today among many Catholic clerics and lay people. Priests supporting Justice for Janitors campaigns in Los Angeles and a newspaper strike in Detroit, Michigan, in the 1990s carry on the social reform vision to which Ryan and Haas dedicated their lives.
The CUA Archives holds some of the most important collections documenting the social reform impulse in the Catholic Church. The Francis J. Haas Papers and the John A. Ryan Papers are complemented by other collections, such as the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC) Records and the Monsignor George Higgins Papers. Monsignor Higgins is the retired director of the Social Action Department of the NCWC, an organization that Ryan founded in 1920 and headed until his death in 1945.
Higgins' work in the labor movement for the last 50 years represents the continuation of the Catholic social reform impulse at CUA. These Catholic reform sources are supplemented by a strong core of related labor union collections, like the Philip Murray Papers, the John Brophy Papers, and the Terence Powderly Papers, also held at the CUA Archives. The NHPRC grant to process the John A. Ryan Papers, Francis J. Haas Papers, Philip Murray Papers, John Brophy Papers, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations Records has helped the CUA Archives provide increased access to a strong component of its holdings that document the social reform activities of the Catholic Church and organized labor in the United States.
Joseph M. Turrini is Project Archivist, Department of Archives, Manuscripts, and Museum Collections, The Catholic University of America, in Washington, DC.
