Early Catholic Labor Champions: Terence Powderly, Archbishop
Gibbons, and Father Edward McGlynn
Maria Messenga
[Reprinted from
GroundSwell, September-October 2007]
The following presentation was made at the July 24,
2007 Council of Georgist Organizations held at the University of
Scranton. The CGO conference was cosponsored by the University of
Scranton, which is a Catholic institution. This article was compiled
from notes and an audio recording by the GroundSwell editor, Nadine
Stoner.
Dan Sullivan, an advisor to the CGO Executive Committee and also
the director of Saving Communities, based in Pittsburgh, PA,
introduced the speaker Maria Mazzenga. Dan also commented that he
had always heard among the Georgists that Archbishop Corrigan went
after Father McGlynn because of Henry George. But Henry George was
also seen as a fellow traveler of Terence Powderly. This whole thing
is much more complicated. The story Georgists have heard is that the
Knights of Labor was a small struggling organization and then they
got hooked up with Henry George and went from 60,000 to 700,000
members. Prior to getting involved with Henry George, Terence
Powderly was mayor of Scranton for three terms, winning on the
Greenback Labor Party ticket. The other big issue of the Progressive
movement was greenback dollars.
There were connections between Powderly and the Molly McGuires
who were accused of violence; the Knights of Labor were accused of
being a front group for the Molly McGuires. The Catholic church
condemned secret organizations generally, and it condemned the
Masons explicitly. Catholics in the Knights of Labor were not
allowed in the church in Canada. Church enforcement is mostly a
moral sanction. There was a big move to get Powderly sanctioned in
Canada and the Knights of Labor condemned in the United States. All
this preceded Henry George's involvement. Also, there was a big
split in the Catholic church. Over there (Europe) they allied
themselves with the aristocracy. In the United States the
aristocracy was Protestant. And the working people who were
agitating against the aristocracy were almost entirely Catholic.
This is the context in which Terence Powderly, Archbishop Gibbons,
Father McGlynn, and Henry George worked.
The Catholic University of America has the definitive collection
of things related to Terence Powderly. I am putting at least one of
Powderlys books on the web, if you go to Saving Communities
and click document library and you will find "Powderly.Terence".
Right now his position on the Molly McGuires is on the web. He also
has a long passage on land, railroads, and telegraphy, and a shorter
passage on money. It is very compatible with what Henry George
wrote. On free trade, Henry George said if we abolish land monopoly,
free trade would work just fine. Powderlys position was well
shut up about free trade, abolish land monopoly, and we will all see
the wisdom of what you have been saying about free trade. And I tend
to agree that George got off on that free trade tangent to his
detriment. He lost the support of Labor and he lost his message. He
had a core message and he diverted from it. And it cost him
politically.
MARIA MAZZENGA is the education outreach director for Catholic
University of Americas Library system. She is a historian, and
has a doctoral degree from Catholic University. She started her
presentation with projecting a cartoon from Puck which was a famous
magazine of the late 19th century. It is captioned benefit concert
for the improvement of the labor condition and it is making fun of
the labor movement. Shown playing musical instruments are Edward
McGlynn, Terence Powderly, and Henry George. The fates of Powderly
and George were very much interconnected. This is so illustrative of
the late 19th century dominant Protestant views. In Italy in 1870,
peoples lands were being taken away, and the Vatican
controlled a lot of territory in Italy. The Papacy felt their
territories were being taken away, and they tended to turn inward.
So a lot of people who were training for the priesthood and involved
in the church then began focusing on ecclesiastical and college
studies and conversations within the church. They couldn't control
the outside and they began to struggle a lot within the church. The
convoluted nature of what Catholics in the Labor movement in the
United States think of Powderly, etc. is tied to that fear of what
outsiders think.
We are talking about three people, Terence Powderly, Cardinal
James Gibbons, and Father Edward McGlynn and how they tied up with
Henry George. Powderly, Gibbons, and McGlynn were different kinds of
Catholics. Powderly was a Catholic but he was more of a nominal
Catholic. He was very disenchanted with the Catholic Church by the
end of his life. When you look at his autobiography, called The Path
I Trod (it is in Google.com/books **), he says the church is a great
institution, it does many good things, but many of its practitioners
are evil. And there was lots of support for that in the late 19th
century. He was very critical of the church. But he played a huge
role in reconciling the Knights of Labor with the Catholic Church in
the late 19th century. He is a nominal Catholic but he does respect
the churchs role to influence labor. (** editor's note: you
can also access libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/powderly/resource.html)
Cardinal James Gibbons was emphatically Catholic. He was a
Cardinal after 1886. He was the head of the most influential
archdiocese in the country in Baltimore. He was the father of the
American Catholic Church in the late 19th century. He was
sympathetic to labor. He would play a key role in reconciling the
Knights of Labor and the Catholic Church.
Then we have Father Edward McGlynn who needs little introduction
to Georgists. He has a rocky relationship with the Catholic Church,
is an avid Catholic at first, gets into social theories, gets into
Georgist theories, gets into trouble, is excommunicated, and then is
reinstated by the late 19th century.
Powderly was a child of industrial America. He was in fact born
in Carbondale nearby to Scranton. He was the 11th of 12 children
born to immigrant Irish parents. At the time Carbondale was grimy
and poor and the anthracite industry there was dying and moving
further out toward Scranton. He was scrawny and sickly, not the
typical working class hero that you might envision. He had lost his
hearing in one ear as a result of scarlet fever. He had a variety of
throat and respiratory ailments, so he was sick a lot as a young
man. He was the target of local bullies which may have caused him to
focus more on reading. His mother was an abolitionist; she was
against slavery. He learned a lot of his tolerance and sympathy from
his mother. His father had been a mine worker and then had been a
superintendent of the mines before he became a skilled mechanic.
Terence was charming and a very good debater, but his education was
cut short. At the time the working class tended to go to school to
maybe age 13 and then leave school to go to work to supplement the
family income. That was very common at the time.
So he attended school until he was 13 and then went to work at a
coal, canal, and railroad firm called D & H where he served as a
switch tender, a car examiner, a car repairer, and a brakeman on the
railroads. Despite his bookish nature he really enjoyed this work
tending machines. Eventually he had an apprenticeship as a mechanic
and he came to Scranton where things were booming and he started
working at a locomotive shop. While he had ambitions to be a poet
(he eventually did write non-fiction), he embraced his mechanics
work wholeheartedly. To give you some idea of the change going on
between Carbondale and Scranton in the late 19th century, Carbondale
was declining as a town and Scranton was just growing enormously.
Between 1850 and 1870 Scranton jumped from 1,000 people to 35,000
people, and a lot of this had to do with the arrival of the Scranton
brothers. Colonel Wm. Scranton came to Scranton with his brother and
they established the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company in the 1840s.
What they were doing was building rails for the Erie Railroad and
they eventually built the DLW railroad a decade later in 1850 or so
to provide a rail access between New York City and Scranton. They
made the most of their location and the expansion of the whole
region. The Scranton clan retained dominance in this area for
decades.
Powderly served as a mechanic with a man named James Dickson who
knows Wm. King Scranton, a descendent of the Scranton
family. He asks Wm. King Scranton for a job; Wm. King
Scranton gives him a job. While Powderly is embarking on his career
as a mechanic, the Knights of Labor was formed in 1869 in
Philadelphia by Uriah Stevens, head of the garment cutters. Uriah
Stevens was a member of the Knights of Pythias and of the Free
Masons. They work a lot of the rituals from the Masons into this new
order called the Knights of Labor. This becomes sort of a union
fraternal order at the same time. Uriah Stevens was head of the
Knights of Labor until 1879. He died.
In 1878 Terrance Powderly became mayor of Scranton before he was
30. Then he became the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor.
The union grows immensely under Powderly. Labor is in a terrible
bind; there are strikes going on at the time. Knights of Labor
membership skyrocketed, because these people needed a way to
organize. Under Powderly this union will grow to over 700,000
members. At the time, strikes were not popularly embraced by the
labor movement. They were in the early 20th century, but in the late
19th century, strikes were seen as counterproductive. Mostly what
was embraced was arbitration and boycotts. It was in the midst of
massive strikes in 1877, including the railroad strike, that Knights
of Labor membership skyrocketed. Powderly himself had gone around
saying he was against labor strikes but that was really how his
union grew at the time. It was seen as immoral and socialistic at
the time.
The Knights of Labor was the most powerful labor union of the
1880s in America and it rises against this industrial change. Why
were the Knights special, why did they get so many members? First of
all, they were organized vertically as opposed to exclusively
horizontally. They were organized by trade. They organized across
trades. So you would have coal breakers and coal miners in the coal
industry organizing together. They may be separated in groups but
they would coordinate their activities together. This horizontal
organization tended to be more inclusive than the previous vertical
organization where people would stay more in groups.
This horizontal integration was very important in creating this
new union and creating its power. Also, the Knights of Labor
gathered by invitation skilled and unskilled workers, and you know
how unusual that it is, to be part of one big union. This was also
part of its success at the time. The Knights of Labor included
previously marginalized groups. And this is limited, but they
invited women. Women in larger cities were generally segregated from
men insofar as their assemblies. More remarkably, African Americans
were invited, so you also find African American assemblies of the
Knights of Labor.
Excluded were individuals that the Knights deemed non-producers.
Bankers and lawyers were viewed as exploitative and as not
contributing to the finished material goods. Their constitution said
these people cannot be part of the Knights of Labor because they are
not producing anything. At the time it seemed to make a lot of sense
because we were an industrial economy.
Another thing unfortunately is that Labor excluded Chinese. They
supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 on the grounds that it
would prevent outside competition. That says there were certain
limits on their inclusiveness, and there was this anti-Chinese
sentiment also.
Between 1869 and 1896 there were orders in every state. Every
state had some assembly of the Knights of Labor. There were 15,000
local assemblies. Powderly was elected as Scranton mayor in 1878 by
the Greenback Labor Party and he served three 2-year terms. As mayor
he was into municipally owned gas and water works, and he wanted to
have a cooperative boot and shoe factory. He wanted to structure the
citys tax structure probably along the ideas of Henry George
but the City Council wouldnt let him do any of it. He got very
little passed as far as these progressive reforms go. But he was
really popular both as the mayor and as head of the Knights. He was
so popular there were people that named their babies after him. He
was so popular, that he was practically like a rock star. He was a
celebrity at the time. More substantially, John Coggeshall, a Knight
in Iowa wondered in 1882 in a letter to Powderly how they would get
releif {sic} from the state of slavery to which the
Vanderbilts, Goulds, Garretts, Perkins and other corporation
magnates have reduced us owing to our hitherto isolated and
consequently defenseless condition. This was part of the
language of the Knights of Labor at the time.
The leaders of the Catholic Church have a problem with the
Knights of Labor. The number one concern is socialism. The church
fears socialism for the obvious reasons. In its purist form it is an
anti-religious body of ideas or at least a non-religious body of
ideas. The 19th century saw the birth of socialism, and impoverished
workers everywhere embraced it because it sought to restructure
society. The Knights favored redistribution of wealth. They favored
the 8-hour work day. They favored cooperative work places where
workers made decisions with their employers and the church saw this
as attempting to redistribute income.
The second concern was violence. The church feared labor
violence. The Molly McGuires were about more than just violence. You
will recall just a few years before the rise of the Knights there
were murders conducted by the labor agitators, the Molly McGuires.
They operated in the coal fields and used violence to achieve their
treatment of workers. This turned church leaders off, because
everybody seemed to be a Molly. By the way, Terence Powderly was
referred to as a Molly in many cases, but he was very much afraid of
anarchy and very critical of anarachists. The Molly McGuires were
secret.
Finally the Knights engaged in secrecy. The church takes
personally this engaging in secret behavior. Various church leaders
got hold of copies of the secret ritual booklet and thought they
were engaging in Free Masonry. A lot of the rites were actually
based on Free Mason rites. That was more antagonistic to the church.
The Free Masons had been outlawed in 1734 because they were
antagonistic to the church. So church leaders variously accused the
Knights of Free Masonry and the penalty was if the Knights of Labor
were engaging in this Free Masonry activity, they would not receive
the sacraments. That is how they twisted their arms.
How does this situation come to a head? In Canada in 1884,
Eleazar Taschereau, the Archbishop of Quebec, invoked the ban on
secret societies to condemn the Knights in organizing in Quebec. The
idea became popular and moved south into the United States, and
Bishop James Healy in Portland, Maine published the ban and said he
wouldnt give sacraments to any Knights in his diocese. Various
Catholic leaders get wind of this information and tried to decide,
should we condemn the Knights, too. People started talking about
this whole situation. You are either going to have Catholics joining
the Knights and leaving the church, Catholic workers ignoring the
ban and exiting the church, or they are going to heed the ban and
not join the Knights.
What happens is that James Gibbons of Baltimore takes the
position that if we condemn the Knights we are going to lose the
workers of the church. He is very shrewd in dealing with power and
he attempted to spread this position around and he started talking
to other Catholic leaders. He believes that the church is going to
lose members and revenue so he and several other Catholic leaders do
two things to support their view that Catholics should not be
forbidden to join the Knights of Labor. They convince Terence
Powderly to end the policy of secrecy in the Knights, specifically
the secret oath practiced by the Knights, and Powderly gets that
done. The second thing he does is he writes something called a
Memorial in 1887. A Memorial is a petition to the Pope asking him to
not condemn the Knights of Labor. It is a long piece; there are
pieces of it on our website. And he says essentially this is a huge
mistake. There is no socialism in the Knights of Labor. They are not
doing anything wrong. The workers are tremendously oppressed. He
asks the Pope to say something about this situation and not condemn
it. Rome issued a decision in 1888 and it is not a ringing
endorsement of the Knights of Labor but they dont condemn the
order in the United States. You can join the Knights of Labor and
remain Catholics in good standing. Thanks to Cardinal Gibbons.
Cardinal Gibbons came from a poor family and he supported the
workers.
Powderly read Georges works, he read Progress and Poverty.
In fact, in 1883, he told the Knights of Labor to read George as he
had some good ideas. Knights of Labor reading rooms stocked the
book. So there is a strong relationship between these two men and
the order and George. Also, George was a member of the Knights of
Labor, a member of a local in New York and he joined in 1880. They
were both members of the Irish Land League against the landlordism
in Ireland. This was headed by Michael Davitt and the various other
Irish figures and they would come and try to raise awareness in the
United States of the exploitation of the Irish peasants in Ireland.
Henry George and Terence Powderly were both strong supporters of
getting rid of Irish landlordism, of Irish peasants owning the land.
They had that in common, too.
They had a lot of differences that eventually caused them to grow
apart. George and Powderly began to differ over the Haymarket affair
in 1886. Powderly is against clemency for the people accused of
committing murder and George at least initially was for clemency. Of
course there is all kinds of evidence as to whether the people
accused of this actually did it. This is a terrible moment in the
American labor movement. It raised all kinds of bells to the
American public. These people are anarchists in our country. This
rift between these two men becomes very public. Powderly doesnt
like anarchism and thinks they should be prosecuted to the full
extent of the law. They came out publicly with these positions. They
also differed on their trade basis. I have several letters where
George writes Powderly trying to convince him to abandon his
protectionism. But at least half of the Knights were protectionists,
and this may have been a limited way of maintaining their jobs.
Of course, George was a free trader. I will just give you a
little clip of a letter that George wrote to Powderly in 1889 to
convince him to abandon his protectionism. If you waste your
strength pottering about little trifling go-nowhere matters, without
one clear ringing note on the grand essentials, your day will have
soon passed. But if you throw aside your protectionism and all the
quack remedies that have been the stock in trade of the conventional
labor leaders who have succeeded each other only to disappear, and
plant yourself firmly and unequivocally on the broad platform of
equal rights and equal justice, urging the only practical measures
by which they can be attained, you have before you not merely a
great work in the present, but a high place in the list of those who
have helped onward the cause of freedom.
Powderly got this letter and had his assistant stamp on the top,
no answer required. He did reconcile a bit later but this really was
a serious rift with him. We are starting to have these clear policy
disagreements among these members of the labor movement by the
1880s.
Now Edward McGlynn enters the picture. He is one of 11 children
born to Peter and Sarah McGlynn. He had a pretty comfortable life
early on. At the age of 13 he went to Rome to study at the Urban
College of Propaganda of the Faith. At the time Propaganda didnt
have the connotations that it has now. He was training to do
missionary work and related activities. He is eloquent, handsome,
and is a brilliant student. He is very young when he got a teaching
post at what is known as the North American College at Rome, which
had been established to train American priests.
Then McGlynn is sent to a parish in New York City in 1860. By
1865 he is the head of the largest parish in New York City, St.
Stevens parish, with 24,000 souls registered. He is very
influential, but right on he becomes controversial. To build a
parish, the advised practice is you build a church and then you
build a parish school connected to it. That was a way to combat
prejudice against Catholicism because in the public schools Catholic
kids often encountered prejudice. It was also a way to consolidate
the power within the church. When McGlynn comes along, he says I was
educated in the public schools. I think we should just send all the
kids to public schools. Lets use the money for charity. And
lets use it for religious instruction. He says this publicly.
It gets in the newspapers, and he starts getting into trouble.
Before George came around and consolidated his relationship with
him, McGlynn is in trouble. He is also into the Irish Land League.
He goes and speaks on behalf of the Irish Land League in the United
States. He was not supposed to do this but he did it anyway. In 1882
he speaks at a very large meeting and he espouses the ideas of Henry
George, and says we should apply Georges ideas in Ireland. And
lets apply his ideas in the United States, too. He says this
publicly, it is published, and Roman officials get very upset and
worried. This caused the Roman official, Cardinal Giovanni Simconi,
to issue a statement to McGlynn's superior, the Archibishop of New
York, Cardinal John McClosky. The note warned the Cardinal that
McGlynn's statements were socialist in character and that he should
therefore be reprimanded and, if necessary, suspended. McClosky goes
and talks to McGlynn and says stop. McGlynn then promised McClosky
he would not make any more public statements on this matter. McGlynn
thinks this promise only lasted until McCloskys death which is
2-3 years later. McClosky dies and Archbishop Michael Corrigan takes
his place, and McGlynn says my promise is ended because McClosky is
dead, and he starts publicly speaking on behalf of George again.
McGlynn starts this public speaking, and this is the situation
when Henry George runs for mayor in 1886 as the United Labor Party
candidate. McGlynn goes on a whirlwind speaking tour. Meanwhile
Archbishop Corrigan who is very conservative and angry, and less
discreet than McClosky was, says you have got to stop doing this.
McGlynn gave the address anyway at a rally of the Labor Party
backing Henry George's candidacy in New York, for which Corrigan
then suspended him from his priestly duties for two weeks. Around
this time Corrigan also released a letter condemning Georges
theories. Now you see this war developing between Corrigan and his
priest and this is all being aired in the press. The letter was sent
also to Cardinal James Gibbons, who is the Dean of the American
Church and he says I am going to have do something about this. I
have got a priest and Archbishop fighting in public. Rome is not
happy. They dont want people to see what is going on within
the church. Gibbons feels as senior member of the hierarchy he needs
to go and do something about this.
The relationship between McGlynn and Corrigan continues to sour.
McGlynn is being more outspoken than ever. Gibbons goes and makes a
visit to New York right before he goes to Rome to get his Cardinals
hat. He meets with McGlynns friend, Fr. Richard Burtsell
because he doesnt want to talk directly to McGlynn, as it
would look like he is violating Corrigans position to
discipline McGlynn. Burtsell says he is really not saying anything
so bad. He is not a socialist. Henry George is not a socialist
either. Gibbons says you are right, let me talk to the Pope when I
go to Rome and see what he says. So he does, and Leo XIII, the Pope
at the time, asks him what is going on in New York. Gibbons says I
am going to tell Edward McGlynn to come and talk to you personally.
While Gibbons is in Rome, he learns that there's a movement to
put the writings of Henry George on the church's Index of Prohibited
Books. Gibbons realizes that putting George's works on the Index
would be foolish, not because he necessarily agrees with George, but
because he believes it would not be useful and would attract
negative public attention to the church. It is going to look like
the Pope is violating the American ideals of free speech, and it is
probably going to get more people reading Henry George's book. He
knows also there will probably be backlash against the Catholics if
the Pope does this because there is a lot of anti-Papal sentiment in
America.
Gibbons prepares a Memorial, a petition against prohibiting
George's works, for the Pope. He argues essentially that many of
George's ideas originated with Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill
and that the world would judge the Pope harshly for condemning the
works of "a humble American artisan" rather than the
writings of his masters. Secondly, Gibbons notes that George's
theories differed from socialism and communism, stating that where
communism abolishes private property, George supports absolute
ownership of all of the fruits of one's labors, and only in the
matter of land did George advocate limited ownership, and even here
he didn't teach that the actual proprietors should be dispossessed,
but that a change in the system of taxation should be put in place
so that taxes should come from the land only and not from the fruits
of industry. Finally, he said that in the US, such ideas wouldn't
get anywhere anyway, and the movement would die out eventually as
Congress would never enact the single tax idea. He urged the Pope to
issue a statement, an encyclical, on private property.
The Pope read the Petition and does condemn George's work and
puts it on the Index, but he doesn't publish that. So it doesn't get
the kind of attention Gibbons thought it might.
Meanwhile the situation with McGlynn grows worse. In 1887 he is
asked to head the Anti-Poverty Society created by Henry George. As
head of the Anti-Poverty Society, McGlynn gives his famous speech The
Cross of a New Crusade," which promoted the single tax theory
and better conditions for workers.
It is here that Terence Powderly enters the picture. McGlynn gave
his speech and is getting really popular. He wants to spread the
word about the Anti-Poverty Society and asks Terence Powderly for
the mailing list of the Journal of United Labor. This is the
publication of the Knights of Labor. Terence Powderly thinks, I am
already in trouble with the Catholic Church, and if I give him this
list, I am going to be in even more trouble. The hierarchy is going
to get mad at me, and then they might condemn the Knights of Labor.
So Powderly tells McGlynn the Knights of Labor constitution won't
allow it, and I am not giving it to you. McGlynn then goes and
publicly denounces Powderly and the Knights of Labor, and there is a
huge uproar in the press between McGlynn and Powderly.
McGlynn keeps giving his speeches, and he was ordered to stop
giving these speeches for George and his theories in 40 days or he
would be excommunicated. He keeps giving his speeches and on July 3,
1887, he is excommunicated. Corrigan fears that he might be
reinstated back into the church if McGlynn goes and makes his case,
so he passes information about McGlynns appearance activities
and promiscuity -- which may have been fabricated. He sends this to
Rome and the excommunication is affirmed. Corrigan actually made
membership in the George's Anti-Poverty Society a sin. If you join
the Anti-Poverty Society you will not receive the sacraments. In
1889 Anti-Poverty Society member Teresa Kelly of New York died and
was refused burial for being a member.
When 1892 rolled around, the excommunication is sticking, but
McGlynn doesnt care. He is going around and talking anyway.
Pope Leo XIII has just released Rerum Novarum, which is influenced
by both the Knights of Labor and Henry Georges work. An
emissary from Rome, Archbishop Francesco Sartolli was sent to the US
to reconcile McGlynn. Sartolli asked McGlynn to compose a document
outlining his ideas on political and economic theory, and McGlynn
does this. Satolli pronounces that the document has nothing
objectionable. McGlynn is also asked to express his support for
Rerum Novarum, and shortly after he is reinstated into the church at
the Catholic University in DC. In 1893 he goes to Rome and sees Leo
XIII.
Archbishop Corrigan is not happy about any of this. McGlynn is
moved to a parish in Newburgh, NY, where he continues to speak for
labor, and on the single tax theory. McGlynn gave his last great
speech at the funeral of Henry George in 1897, saying "there
was a man sent from God and his name was Henry George." Edward
McGlynn died in 1900. Gibbons is gone by 1921. Powderly is gone by
1924. It is really the end of an era when these men pass on. And it
is the AFL-CIO after that.