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CHAPTER 1
The Blessed Virgin Made Me a Socialist Historian
An Experiment in Catholic Autobiography and the Historical Understanding of Race and Class
Protestants, it seems to me, tend to have dramatic conversions. They are "born again" and do not look back. Catholics — and though I have been an atheist for many years, I am culturally and psychologically a Catholic — are forever backsliding, de-converting, returning to their previously sinful life. — MICHAEL HARRINGTON, The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography
As Renee Remond has observed, historians are taught "to be on their guard against subjectivity, their own as much as others'. They know from experience the precariousness of recollection, the unreliability of first-person testimony. ... Everyone has an unconscious tendency to introduce a factitious coherence into the path of his [sic] life. They have no reason to think that they have any better chance to avoid the tricks of memory that they have learned to spy out in others." Is there a reason we might be interested in the details of any given historian's life for their own sake?
I have been asked to discuss the relationship between a particular religious background and the historical scholarship I have made my life's work. As Remond suggests, there is a danger here of reading more coherence and intellectual development into one's background than was actually there and, in the process, missing the broader dimensions. For many, it seems, the essence of Catholicism involved guilt, fear, and sexual repression. Many Catholic women locate the essence of their own experiences in the Church's everyday patriarchy. I recognize both the validity of these observations and the diversity of Catholic lives. Mine is a recollection of a particular place and time, shaped by all those influences that I emphasize in analyzing the lives of my historical subjects — class, race, gender, and ethnicity.
Aside from funerals and family celebrations, I have not attended Mass for over three decades. Thus, in considering the Catholic roots of my own historical interests, I am a little surprised to find how positive my recollections are — whether because of or in spite of my distance from the Church. My identity is deeply imbued with Catholicism, which has fundamentally shaped my political perspective and my approach to history. It is the place I came from — my old neighborhood, with my parish at its center; the community, family, and other people who nurtured me; the worldview that shaped my values. At its best, it is a promise that invests human life with the dignity it deserves. Growing up Catholic, Michael Harrington recalled, "meant, above all, that I accepted the idea that life was a trust to be used for a good purpose and accounted for when it was over. ... In this fundamental conception of the meaning of existence I am as Catholic as the day on which I made my first communion." Long after leaving, Harrington continued to find the Church, "in its highest expressions, profound and beautiful. My only problem," he concluded, "was that I did not believe in it." I could not forget my Catholic background if I wished to; it is an important part of who I am. I choose not to forget it.
It has taken a long time for me to realize the degree to which Catholicism has shaped the questions I am interested in as a historian and led me to view them a bit differently from many of my colleagues. Given the secular character of scholarly life, indeed the materialist bias in my own field of working-class history, the delayed recognition is hardly surprising. I want to explore several questions here: How did growing up in an ethnic, blue-collar, inner-city parish and coming to social and political awareness through the Church provide me with many of the concerns and ideas that have remained with me, particularly my interests in race, ethnicity, and class? How have these influences shaped my scholarship on such historical issues? Why have my "Catholic sensibilities" about these issues remained submerged for so long?
Incense and Miracles
My early memories of the Church are mostly sensual. I remember not only the visual images — the flickering red altar lamp in a dark church, ornate religious paintings on the vaulted ceilings, gilded banners with inscriptions in Latin and Slovak, sun streaming through stained glass, and the bloody stations of the cross — but also the sounds and smells, the call and response of the litanies in Latin, the altar bells, the candle wax and incense. All of this I found very attractive. Part of the church's aesthetic attraction probably derived from its juxtaposition with the outside world. My neighborhood was by no means a slum, but it was surrounded by factories and rail yards and filled with two-flats and drab apartment buildings — quite a contrast with the crafted beauty of the sanctuary. When you opened the large doors of the church and stepped inside, you left the clamor, noise, and dirt of the city, and you entered a world of grace and beauty. One aspect of working-class life I understood, then, as a result of growing up Catholic, was simply that amid the squalor and struggle embraced by working-class historians, many of these people also found great joy and beauty in their religious lives.
There was also a strong emotional bond that is more difficult to describe. American Catholicism in its 1950s high tide was, as Charles Morris noted, "highly formal, even mechanistic ... enshrouded in bewitching mysteries and ritual, combining a remarkable degree of theological rigor and a high degree of abstraction with a practical religion that was intensely personal and emotional." I believed that the spiritual part of my life was much more important than its other dimensions, and I took more interest in it, I think, than most kids. Being a part of the Mass gave me a strong sense of security and belonging as well as a sense of beauty. "For a trembling moment every week," Morris wrote, "or every day if they chose, ordinary people reached out and touched the Divine."
The Church's theological rigor provided what I think of as an active intellectual life — even if, until recently, intellectual historians would not have recognized it as such. Catholic thinking about God and her/his relationship to man was universal in many respects. It provided a unified worldview and explained why things worked as they did, or did not. I came eventually to question the pat answers we memorized from Father McGuire's New Baltimore Catechism No. 2, but at the time I was glad to have them.
On one level, ours was a quintessential "parochial" life, bounded physically by railroad overpasses and factory doors and spiritually by the boundaries of our parish and the teachings of the Church. Most of what gave my early life meaning occurred within a few blocks of my house and my church. This issue of parochialism is important. It helps to explain the social intolerance I noted eventually in my surroundings, and the intellectual intolerance that sometimes characterized the Church as an institution. Yet by the standards of a small parish on the West Side of Chicago, we were also taught to think "globally," a perspective that derived from the Church's universal character and claims. Its "apostolic" history and continuing mission activities took my imagination well beyond my parish and city to other parts of the world. I knew that Catholics in Asia and Africa were quite different from us in many respects, but I also knew that we shared with them that which was most important. Discussions of mission work often sent me to the storeroom in our basement. Here I consulted an old edition of Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, where I could find various maps and descriptions of nations and peoples. A vivid photo diagram lined up the "Races of Mankind" in order of the shapes of their skulls and included photos of a Watusi warrior, a Native American chief in full headdress, a small Chinese guy, and, inexplicably, Benjamin Franklin. Whatever my sources lacked in the way of subtlety with regard to race, the Church's reach did spark my interest in other peoples and cultures. I do not project later scholarly interests back onto these early forays, but in this limited sense at least, the Church introduced me to the broader world.
My first taste for history and politics came through the peculiarly Catholic approach in our texts, which seemed not only to organize the whole narrative around the development of the Church in various parts of the world, but also explained most historical change in terms of famous Catholics. Treasure Chest, a Catholic children's magazine that arrived twice monthly in comic book format, included a series on the discovery of the New World, the Revolutionary War, and the opening of the West, with a special emphasis on Catholic heroes.
My introduction to the Cold War came not from the usual popular culture sources cited now in historical works on the subject (though I did follow events in Life magazine), but from Treasure Chest. Here or in other Catholic children's publications I encountered China and communism through the tragic fates of our missionaries. I admired Tom Dooley long before I ever heard of his classmate Michael Harrington. For us, the problem with the Chinese Revolution was not that it suppressed capitalism — I don't think the term ever came up — but rather that it suppressed Catholicism. An elaborate series, "This Godless Communism," introduced by no less than J. Edgar Hoover, ran throughout the 1961–1962 academic year (in the midstof the Cuban missile crisis). Treasure Chest also graphically laid out what the communist invasion of the United States would look like if we ever let our guard down. I saw Russian tanks rolling down a city street that looked a lot like Michigan Avenue, and the statue of a boy who had denounced his Catholic parents because they persisted in their lives of prayer (as always, it seemed, the Catholics had it the roughest). The new communist regime made mothers go to work in factories and placed their children in communal child-care centers. (I recall confusion on this score. Even without "communist authorities," many of my friends' mothers already worked in factories. It was true, however, that we had no communal day care; immigrant grandparents cared for most of the kids.)
Catholic anomalies surfaced in the midst of all these Cold War fears. Our nuns first welcomed Fidel Castro, and not simply because of his Jesuit education (they were School Sisters of St. Francis, and clearly irritated by what they probably saw as Jesuit chauvinism in many of our texts). They objected to the lurid casino life in Havana, and also to the poverty in which many Cubans lived. Any enthusiasm for Fidel faded, of course, as the stories of Catholic suffering began to filter from Catholics in Florida to Catholics in Chicago, but it was our fellow communicants we worried about, not U.S. investments.
My lifelong interest in ethnicity and race started early, beginning with what I might term an "urban curiosity." My father fueled this with his stories of the city, but so did my own experiences amid the striking diversity that characterized Chicago's neighborhoods. My father (1912–1994) joined the Chicago Police Department during the Great Depression because he needed a job. He was the kind of person social historians need to think more about if they hope to understand American workers — precisely because his life reflects elements of working-class experience often ignored by labor historians. Raised by a fireman and his strong-willed, second-generation Irish wife, he was a good Irish Catholic boy. It seems that my grandparents, whom I remember only dimly, were both class-conscious and devout. Like many union workers in early twentieth-century Chicago, my grandfather wore only union suits and shoes and smoked only union cigarettes. He helped to organize the fire department engineers and claimed that the "bosses" transferred him from one firehouse to another around the city. Intended as punishment, this actually facilitated the organizing. One of my father's earliest memories was sitting with his sister in a double stroller as my grandmother pushed them through city streets, distributing union literature. The union was strong enough to launch an effective strike against the city in the midst of the great 1919 labor upheavals. My grandfather's engineers' strike was one of dozens that erupted, along with a great race riot, in the summer of 1919.
But if strikes and unions were very much a part of my grandparents' lives, the Church was its center. The family started out on the old West Side, just south of Hull House and west of the old Jewish ghetto in Holy Family parish (established in 1857), which historian James Sanders called "the single great Irish Workingman's parish." Father Damen, the original pastor, refused more attractive locations and instead built the city's most impressive Catholic church and its premier men's and women's schools in a "desolate and uninviting locality" amid the shanties of Irish squatters accused of frequent "riots and ructions." The largely poor immigrants responded with lavish support for the church, which became "the undisputed symbol of Catholic confidence and respectability." The neighborhood was close to the Hull House settlement and the old Jewish ghetto. My father attended St. Ignatius, still one of the top Jesuit high schools in the country. Although we had little awareness that these roots placed us near the center of ethnic working-class history in Chicago, what little sense we had of history was tied to Holy Family. Aside from school texts, the only history book I can recall seeing around our house in my childhood was a history of this parish.
Just before World War I, my grandparents moved to an ethnically mixed neighborhood much farther out on the West Side, the neighborhood where my father and all of his children grew up. They joined another huge parish, Our Lady of the Angels (OLA), which was tucked between two more middle-class neighborhoods of second settlement, Humboldt Park and Garfield Park. Until the 1950s, both these neighborhoods contained significant Jewish populations transplanted from the old West Side ghetto. By the time I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, both were changing, the latter quickly emerging as one of the city's largest black ghettoes, the former as its most important Puerto Rican barrio. In North Lawndale, two miles south of our church, the white population dropped from 87,000 in 1950 to 11,000 by 1960 and none of the forty-eight synagogues active in the previous decade still remained in the latter. While Jewish and Protestant congregations "fled," however, my own neighbors assumed the beleaguered parochial mentality John McGreevy has described so well: they dug in to "defend" their parish neighborhoods against "invasion." Ours had long been considered a rough neighborhood. As the ghetto moved closer during the 1960s, however, my neighbors took on an embattled mentality and, some of them, a more militant kind of racism than I had seen earlier in my life.
In the year I was born (1950), West Humboldt Park had a steadily declining population of 39,000, including only twenty-three blacks. Most residents were native-born from immigrant families, with Italians and Poles predominating. Most were wage earners, almost half working in plants scattered throughout the neighborhoods — candy and toy factories, small metalworking shops, electrical manufacturing plants — and others in the skilled trades or lower-level white-collar jobs. My own census tract, about one mile west of OLA, was entirely white but quite mixed ethnically, with large numbers of Poles and Slovaks in our immediate area and greater numbers of Italians to the east, closer to the parish church. Ten years later, small numbers of Puerto Rican families had moved into some parts of West Humboldt Park; otherwise, little had changed. Originally dominated by the Irish, OLA parish was about 60 percent Italian and 30 percent Irish in the late fifties, the remainder largely Polish. By 1965, however, the population of West Garfield Park, directly south of my own neighborhood, was between 65 and 85 percent African American. By 1970, shortly after my family left the neighborhood, West Humboldt Park was over 20 percent nonwhite; by 1980, it was over 85 percent nonwhite. I did not need the census figures to tell me that the neighborhood was changing while I lived there as a teenager; my neighbors were obsessed with the changes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out"
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