The Force of Faith: an Introduction to the Labor and Religion Special Issue

The Force of Faith: An Introduction to the Labor and Religion Special Issue

Joseph A. McCartin

Without question, the vision and values of North American workers were influenced over time by their varied religious commitments; their movements and organizations were often profoundly affected by their relationships to religious institu- tions and traditions. While freethinking and atheist views have always characterized a portion of workers and labor activists, such views have never been as broadly shared as religious beliefs and affiliations. Indeed, labor history is replete with examples of religious influence: nineteenth-century shoemakers named their union after the mar- tyred St. Crispin, patron of cobblers, while the Knights of Labor referred to itself as a Holy order; early-twentieth-century immigrants in the needle trades were steeped in the traditions of the Jewish Labor Bund—Sidney Hillman was scarcely the only garment union leader to have acquired skills of analysis and argumentation in rab- binical studies; Depression-era Catholic labor activists cited Quadragesimo Anno and other papal encyclicals to defend organizing campaigns; black tobacco strikers sang a gospel hymn called “We Shall Overcome” on their picket lines after World War II, transforming it into the world’s most powerful protest song; and Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers marched under banners bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yet, despite abundant evidence suggesting the importance of religious influence to the lives, work, and struggles of North American workers, labor and working-class historians have barely begun to probe and illuminate this rich history. This special issue of Labor takes one small but significant step toward redressing this scholarly neglect. In his influential book Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), the sociologist of religion Will Herberg (a onetime radical and labor educator with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) famously described the pervasive influence of “the three great American ‘faiths.’ ” But whereas Herberg saw these religions as buttresses of an American consensus, the three historical articles we have gathered for this volume take a different view. Although each article addresses one aspect of Herberg’s religious triad, these studies do not share his conclusion that American

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/6/1/1/438660/LABOR6.1c_McCartin.2.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 2 6:1 LABOR religions embraced an “American Way of Life” that was “individualistic, dynamic, and pragmatic.” Rather, our essayists suggest the ways in which religion served as a resource for those who would challenge the powerful, envisioning a way of life based on solidarity, tradition, and faith.1 Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf of West Virginia University, each of whom has done path-breaking work before on religion and labor, here combine their considerable talents to recover a forgotten dimension of the ill-fated campaign to organize the South after the Second World War. In “Sanctifying the Southern Organizing Campaign: Protestant Activists in the CIO’s Operation Dixie,” the Fones-Wolfs describe the role played by ministers like Rev. C. J. Bradner of Dan- ville, Virginia, in building a coalition of southern trade union supporters against difficult odds. As the Fones-Wolfs show, the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, the religiously inspired radicals of the Highlander Folk School, CIO organizers like Helen Lewis, who came up through the Baptist Student Union, African American ministers like William Holmes Borders, and the theology students of Alva Taylor at Vanderbilt made up a small but sturdy band of prophetic Christians who ral- lied to the cause of unionism in the 1940s. The Fones-Wolfs argue that the ulti- mate failure of Operation Dixie was rooted in part in the inability of these religious activists and their northern religious and labor allies to grasp the changes that were remaking southern Protestantism in the 1940s, changes that further marginalized modernism and the social gospel in favor of fundamentalism and dispensational premillennialism. Annie Polland, chief historian at the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side and author of a 2005 Columbia University dissertation called “ ‘The Sacredness of the Family’: New York’s Immigrant Jews and Their Religion, 1890 –1930,” explores the often conflict-laden intersection of work time and sacred time in the lives of Jewish immigrants. In “Working for the Sabbath: Sabbath in the Jewish Immigrant Neighborhoods of New York,” Polland examines patterns of resistance, negotiation, and accommodation among Jews who were forced to work on the Sabbath. Some resisted Sabbath desecration through organizations such as the Sabbath Support Society; some atoned for Sabbath work with tsedaka, offering a portion of their wages to a shul; and others invoked the concept of pikuakh nefesh (the notion that one might break the Sabbath in order to save a life) to justify work that would put food on their family’s table. No matter how observant Jews approached the issue, Polland shows, respect for the Sabbath and its rituals stirred deep feelings and engendered inescapable conflicts among men and women alike. Laura Murphy of Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, New York, offers a revealing exploration of the influence of Catholic living wage doctrine on one of the crucial legislative accomplishments of the Depression era. In “An ‘Indestruc- tible Right’: John Ryan and the Catholic Origins of the U.S. Living Wage Movement,

1. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 278, 92.

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1906–1938,” Murphy examines the enormous influence of Msgr. Ryan, known in his time as the “Right Reverend New Dealer,” culminating in the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a national minimum wage. Expanding upon aspects of her 2005 Binghamton University dissertation, Murphy demonstrates that Ryan stood at the nexus of Catholicism and social reform in the early twentieth century. Although his thinking was grounded in the theology of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, Ryan was also influenced by non-Catholics including Henry George, Richard T. Ely, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb and counted Flor- ence Kelley and the women of the National Consumers League among his strongest allies. It was Ryan and his protégés, Fr. Edwin V. O’Hara and Caroline Gleason, who helped pass the nation’s first enforceable minimum wage law in Oregon in 1913, Murphy argues, a victory that ultimately pointed the way for New Deal legislation. In “Building the Interfaith Worker Justice Movement: Kim Bobo’s Story,” I offer a brief biography and an interview with the most influential labor-religion coalition builder working in the United States today. A native of Cincinnati who was raised in the Church of Christ, Bobo became an activist as an undergraduate at Barnard College in the 1970s. She went on to become an organizer for Bread for the World and an organizing trainer for the Midwest Academy in Chicago before founding Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) in 1996. In the years since, she has built this labor-religion coalition into a formidable force. IWJ has organized support for immigrant poultry workers in Morganton, North Carolina, striking Tyson’s workers in Cordyon, Indiana, the industrial launderers of Cintas, and migrant farm workers in Florida. It has lobbied for a higher minimum wage and fought to expose the wage theft that regularly victimizes day laborers. IWJ has also recruited a new generation of labor activists among the nation’s clergy through the “Seminary Summer” program it launched in 2000. Today Bobo’s network spans not only Herberg’s “three great American ‘faiths’” but Muslims and members of other faiths. In this interview, she draws lessons from her experience and explains her vision for the future of labor- religion organizing and coalition building. Finally, in an insightful review essay, Lynne Marks of the University of Victo- ria, Canada, introduces another triad for our consideration: the intersection of class, gender, and lived religion. In “Challenging Binaries: Working-Class Women and Lived Religion in English Canada and the United States,” Marks surveys a range of recent works that limn this intersection. Yet Marks provides more than a review of the literature; she also offers a powerful argument for the necessity of incorporating religion as a category of analysis in the study of working-class women. Only when we do so, Marks argues, will we “fully come to see and understand the creativity, the complexity, and the limitations within which working-class women have actually lived their lives.” Of course, no single volume can compensate for the long-standing neglect of workers’ religious history by labor and working-class historians. The essays in this small collection scarcely scratch the surface of the complex history of labor and religion in North America, nor do they claim to probe the significance for workers

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/6/1/1/438660/LABOR6.1c_McCartin.2.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 4 6:1 LABOR of recent religious trends: the growth of faiths outside of Herberg’s triad or the rise of forms of spirituality unconnected with formal religious denominations or doctrines. Yet our hope is that these contributions suggest to a new generation of scholars, students, and activists the rich range of stories that have yet to be uncovered both in our past and our present. Whether we seek to better understand the history of working people or to help them organize for justice in the face of a relentlessly disempowering global economy, it is crucial that we grasp the enormous influence that religion has played and continues to play in their lives.

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