by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator
In honor of Labor Day, when the United States celebrates the achievements of workers and their contributions to the nation, Rare Books and Special Collections highlights sources about Labor Day, labor, and labor organizing held in the Catholic Pamphlets Collection.
During the 1970s Rev. George G. Higgins, a long-time staff member for the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), now known as the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB), published an annual “Labor Day Statement.” Known as the “Labor Priest,” Higgins spent his career supporting workers, their unionization, and calls for economic justice. Higgins worked particularly closely with César Chávez and the United Farm Workers during the 1960s and 1970s. The priest also assisted workers in other parts of the economy who wanted to organize, including health care service workers in Catholic hospitals. In his “Labor Day Statements” across the decade, Higgins expressed hope in the promise of American democracy and in the Catholic Church’s social justice teaching for workers’ to achieve economic justice.
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 41)
In addition to Higgins’ Labor Day tracts, the Catholic Pamphlet Collection holds publications by other “Labor Priests,” a small group of American Catholic clergy who, over the twentieth century, advocated for workers. One of these progressives was Higgins’ mentor, Rev. John A. Ryan. He published a series of pro-union pamphlets in the 1930s and supported the social welfare programs created through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 79)
Of course, not all Catholics agreed with Ryan’s position on labor and the New Deal during the Great Depression; RBSC’s Catholic Pamphlet Collection represents these views also. Father Charles Coughlin’s popular radio campaign against FDR and the New Deal is well known. The priest’s virulent anti-union and anti-communist views appear here in a number of pamphlets.
with David Brann, The Chrysler-C.I.O Industrial Strike
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 21)
The Catholic Pamphlet Collection also holds related, non-Catholic publications as well, like this anti-Congress of Industrial Organizations and anti-communist booklet, Join the C.I.O. and Build a Soviet America from 1937. The CIO was an inter-racial union for primarily unskilled workers that Coughlin and other conservatives believed was a communist front.
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 46)
From Labor Day Statements supporting farm workers in the 1970s to New Deal-era workers’ rights and anti-union fears in the 1930s, the Catholic Pamphlet Collection encourages and enables exploration about and around working people in the United States, and many other topics.